If you take any ancient or not so ancient civilization or kingdom, all the wealth including land and people's lives belonged to king/imperator which was appointed by god or something like that.

Isn't is exactly the same with the system we have now?

The question we have to ask is about 99% of population of peasants who work 8h a day same as they did in Mesopotamia. Do they have a living standard, healthcare, possibility to have social bonds, possibility to retire. Basically all the things to have a life.

If peasants are able to have all this, I really don't care if some King of ours has 20 trillion or 50 bazillion. In money or in gold.

Peasants worked ~14 hours a day, and they had no healthcare or ability to retire. The reason you work 8 hours a day, have health care, and the ability to retire is because the 19th and 20th centuries saw an unprecedented transfer of wealth and power from the rich to everyone else, which manifested in labor laws, pensions, etc. Unless you can prove otherwise, the default assumption needs to be that consolidation of wealth will lead to all those privileges being erased.

> Unless you can prove otherwise, the default assumption needs to be that consolidation of wealth will lead to all those privileges being erased.

And the trend has already started. The latest budget big will make healthcare inaccessible to mire Americans.

This is very close to saying you wouldn't be against slavery. A slave could be given a decent quality of life. Does that mean slavery is acceptable? A person with 50 bazillion will be able to make you a slave if he wants to.

Doesn't then a person with half a trillion have that ability? At what point does the ability start?

Slaves are free to think that slavery isn't acceptable. Always have been.

Oh, sure, you aren't a slave. You can't be bought and sold like property. But try going a few months without a paycheck and tell me how that goes. And if you happened to get lucky at some point and escaped wage slavery - you have to be cognizant of the fact that most didn't, and never will, by design.

Modern wage slavery vs whatever they had in Mesopotamia is just details of the perks that the owners decide to hand out.

The question is why we have to work 8h a day to begin with. Or why we don't earn more.

If productivity goes up, something has to give. We either work less or we earn more.

If productivity goes up and we work the same amount of time for the same amount of money (and let's not kid ourselves, if anything we'll end up working more time for less money), the social contract has been broken.

I don't care how rich some outlier becomes, so long as it isn't at the sacrifice of our own self-actualisation. But that is exactly what is (and has been since the 70s) occurring. That trend is unlikely to reverse and it won't lead anywhere good.

We don't live in those times anymore. Just because something was a certain way for most of history doesn't mean anything about how we should shape our future.

So the past was shitty too? You don't care? Okay, well some of us do.

Wealth grants power. Opinions from money matter gain greater reach and traction, and these very quickly turn into influence and power. The current US administration clearly shows how wielding power for your own ends gives you money. It's a toxic cycle that rewards grift instead of work.

You don't care, but this is a serious problem for society because it's a negative aspiration. Don't be good, don't try hard, just be rich or die a peasant.

But the peasants have limited appetites for gruel and work when all they see is grift and abuse. They revolted until old money stopped stopped demanding fealty. Will the new masters learn before we peasants eat the rich?

Preach, brother! Because the ultra-rich surely weren't taking over the world under the previous administration!

This has been happening for a very long time. The current administration is just worse and/or more blatant about it than previous ones.

So I agree with your sarcasm and I also agree with the parent comment that the current admin is doing a better job "clearly showing" how this works to everyone.

You say blatant, I say transparent. In terms of scale there is no difference, but the honesty is refreshing.

The only problem is it's causing people to focus on the wrong thing (us vs them, D vs R) instead of the oligarchs who continue to line their pockets (and by the way do not get re-elected every 4 years).

I want a 4h day now.

I had to go back to the page to check that it actually uses pixel font. To each its own I guess. For me the font was barely noticeable.

It is like discussing zombie apocalypse. People who are invested in bunkers will hardly understand those who are just choosing death over living in those bunkers for a month longer.

Anecdotal story. Once I stumbled into Korean restaurant in China Town in NYC. I just ordered something like lunch. I was alone. They kept bringing plates after plates of various dishes. I was ashamed to leave so much food. Paid like 11 dollars but it was in ~2015.

Come back and try KTown on 32nd. (Get off the ground floors.)

$20 will buy a good meal. $40, decadence. (Avant alcohol.)

But the network is not working!

Crashed Chrome tab on Windows instantly but Firefox is fine. It shows loading but pressing Ctrl + U even shows the very start of that fake HTML.

As far as I know antidepressants and even pain killers are the most susceptible to placebo effect.

Agreed. If I saw an SSRI with those curves I would doubt the efficacy of it. But this might be why I am not in charge of clinical trials. Just a layman taking pot shots.

Is it possible to have a placebo group when doing a study on psilocybin? Would participants in the placebo not notice the lack of psychedelic effects?

EDIT: In the original link it says the placebo group received a much lower dose, so that seems to be one way of doing it.

One way is using niacin in high doses, also known as vitamin B3, as an active placebo to induce a sensation of heat and cause the skin to flush red, which is a typical reaction to tryptamines.

The rest is a regular placebo. It can be a really strong thing when you are feeling hot.

I suppose different trials do it in various ways, for hers there was a placebo group that was given a strong antihistamine. Participants in the trial were allowed to opt in for the real dosing day once the trial concluded. I suppose this was to entice people to join, as otherwise it was basically 50/50 if you would get the trial treatment you were looking for. Post trial dosing was obviously omitted from the results.

Then again what if showing some funky hallucinogenic images/movies would have the same effect on some people? We surely know that people can go crazy (so have psychological effects) in cults and similar settings. What if intense visual/sonic/etc stimulation, visual distortions etc. together with messaging like "it will change your life and cure your anxieties" is the key in this therapy?

> intense visual/sonic/etc stimulation, visual distortions etc. together with messaging like "it will change your life and cure your anxieties" is the key in this therapy?

I sincerely hope this is not at all how any of this works. That sounds like a recipe for paranoia.

That's not so much a placebo as a head to head test of different effects? I think you'd do it in a new study entirely

That isn't how these studies are being done... because yeah, it'd probably confound the results.

sounds like in that case you’re not testing the efficacy of high versus sober, you’re testing heroic dosing versus micro dosing.

There are also studies that test against placebo. There have been lots and lots of trials on these things with different designs that make different cost/benefit tradeoffs.

A difficult one with psychedelics is as-mentioned: people can easily "break the blind". But if you want to eliminate that problem you can instead do a micro vs macro dose, in which case you're measuring a slightly different thing.

There was a placebo group that were given basically a very strong antihistamine which induced some drowsiness.

This particular trial, however, allowed participants who were in the placebo group to later opt in for the real dosing - obviously with those results omitted from the trial.

Looks like some kind of a gatekeeping ritual to rationalize why upper management salaries are in millions. I think we can also see in other industries too.

You hire hundreds of interns and entry level workers to let them fight in the bloodbath for 100h a week. Pay peanuts. Let them do all the work.

The ones who survive get a bit bigger salaries. Those who still persist in upper level bloodbaths are upgraded into millionaires. And paying them millions looks acceptable as it is so hard to reach the top.

While you clearly could share all those millions between entry level and paid internships, don't have 100h weeks and have a healthy industry.

I feel conflicted about this. On one hand canvas being client side will always lead to cat and mouse game where fraudsters can always generate required "answer". On the other hand innocent users will always be fingerprinted by ad networks and similar.

The purpose is important, if my fingerprint is used to detect fraud (eg my browser has just tried 100 other credit cards), I'm less bothered than if cloudflare are reading my fingerprint then blocking me viewing a web page for no good reason.

Castle.io's customers seem to include marketing platforms, and their listed use-cases include preventing account sharing and alt accounts. Can understand why a company would want to be able to uniquely identify users, but also from a user/privacy perspective it's something I'd very much like my browser/extensions to block.

Detecting account sharing is a tricky business. It's pretty easy to detect if one account is using two different machines. But it's quite hard to unambiguously say it's one person using both machines or two different people each using one machine each.