Adrenaline is the drug, ain't it ... And gambling is just one way to leverage it.
However once you realize that gambling is not the drug, and merely something that triggers your body to create a rush... Then can you really call it a drug? At least any more then any other of those activities?
Eg Skydiving and basically any other extreme sports.
And once you're there, you should really realize that it's not worth the sacrifice.
This is a societal issue and should not be addressed with legislation.
The only thing that can be safely regulated are things like disallowing marketing.
How do we determine at what point something is “too addictive” to be allowed?
There are many people who can gamble responsibly and enjoy it. I love playing poker, and play in a tournament every few years. Lots of people are compulsive gamblers, though, and lose it all.
Do I have to give up my hobby because some people can’t handle it?
What about drinking? I enjoy a happy hour once a month or so, and have a couple of drinks when I do. Others drink 10+ drinks a month. Do we ban it because of the people who can’t stop? (We know how well that works)
I am not saying we do nothing, but I don’t think it is as easy as “just pass legislation”
We know how full 100% alcohol prohibition in 1920's worked in the USA, but what's missing is that it doesn't have to be a full 100% for it to benefit society. Laws restricting sales, like no selling alcohol past a certain hour, or on Sundays, still exist on the books in many places, and while I can't speak to how well they actually work, given that we'd just stock up on Saturdays anyway, there's also no Al Capone levels of violence in places with those restrictions. So let's not say "we know how that goes" hinting at 1920's prohibition, which was over a century ago now, and just leave it at that.
For a counter example, I like driving fast. Really fast. Should I be banned from doing that because other people can't handle that responsibly? Society has looked at that and decided that, yes, no one should be allowed to do that on public streets. So I keep that behavior to the race track and sign an extra liability waiver in order to do so.
Why should gambling or alcohol be treated different from that?
> Society has looked at that and decided that, yes, no one should be allowed to do that on public streets. So I keep that behavior to the race track and sign an extra liability waiver in order to do so.
So can I still drink and gamble in private if I sign a waiver?
Sorry, but alcohol prohibition did not work and was instrumental in fueling the rise of organized crime (does that ring any bells?).
I happen to believe the War on Drugs (prohibition v2) is an even bigger mistake than the first one, which also ignores why it came to be: v1 prohibition enforcers needed something to do and there was a growing problems with an "uppity" segment of society that needed to be put in its place. The history of it is horrifying; and the current implementation of it is horrifying as well.
So legalize it all. Regulate the advertisement/promotion/access/purity, etc. It's going to happen one way or another and pushing it into the shadows only makes it worse.
So let the gambling happen but keep it on a short leash.
I was playing fast and loose with the word, but you know what I meant.
I'm all for individuals to choose their own paths and mistakes and don't want a true nanny state, so I'd be ok with banning advertising of those services, as well as independent audits to ensure that they are not letting minors in.
There is a fentanyl vaccine approaching human trials, but I don't believe its mechanism works close enough to the reward center. Maybe gene therapy is a long term fix as it relates to the reward center dysfunction, to be determined.
Specifically the part where a variant of this protein seems directly implicated in the specific self upregulation that leads to changes in the brains reward pathways that seem to directly cause the sort of "Drug seeking" and other addiction seeking behaviors that are so harmful in addiction.
I especially love the part where we tried inhibiting this protein expression with simple chemicals administered orally in rats and it significantly improved their addictions, and we did that in 2015, and we have not touched it since
Gosh, wouldn't it just be the best if we had spent $4 trillion on bioscience instead of GPUs? I feel like we understand circuits pretty well by comparison.
That's crazy that the whole reward system might just come down to one protein and how long you crave another reward is literally just the time until that protein decays.
while i suspect youre right, this cannot be concluded with the information we have as of today.
eg its also possible that theyre either close to AGI (or even beyond it) - and its just too expensive to run at scale, making it a novelty from the perspective of profitability for the near to medium future.
you could argue that they could still do it for some positions -- but even that depends on just how expensive this theoretical model is.
I'm German and it'd say it's plausible for median.
Switzerland basically still has a middle class, that's why their wages are where they're.
While my wage has significant improved over the last years, statistics show that wages have been stagnating for 20 years and inequality keeps rising.
Obviously a lot less pronounced then in the USA, but still significantly more then in eg Switzerland.
The difference is even bigger if you look at current valuation of chf, it's almost $140k or 120k€
Though you should keep in mind that Germany has a pretty strong social security system. Not a benefit if you're a working adult, but it explains some of the difference
> Though you should keep in mind that Germany has a pretty strong social security system. Not a benefit if you're a working adult, but it explains some of the difference
Germany has so many billionaires that literally every minor region has their own local billionaire and locals feel proudly represented by him/her. Yet the "strong social security system" is almost fully financed by employed people paying over 40% cut from their monthly payslip.
If you add the Mehrwertsteuer you'll pay on all bought goods you're paying significantly over 50%.
And if you're unmarried over 60%, because clearly fuck them as far as German society is concerned.
And that's on top of what I was referencing: eg a lot of the social security payments are split across employees and employer. The employer part is essentially hidden in the wage, but the employer is still required to pay them - and for the employer, it obviously doesn't matter whom he needs to pay this to...
It's almost if the government wanted to hide just how much they're actually taking from the payslip, because if you add THAT as well, you end up significantly over 60%, approaching the 70%.
And all that to never actually get anything back from the system, at least if you're millennial or younger. But we've clearly gone off track here ༎ຶ ‿ ༎ຶ
> Designing in a group can be very difficult, and doing it well is a skill set that most people don't naturally have
Not only is it a skill every participant needs to have, they also all need to have a similar amount of competence and knowledge about the domain as well as the current implementation, otherwise it's mostly pointless ime.
But if all ven diagram circles overlap ... It is nice.
I can count the times this materialized (in my professional life) on one hand. So I'm generally more towards the "make a prototype, then explain it to the others. Either it's the baseline for the discussion or the illuminating event that clears up wherever this approach works with that team.
“I haven’t brushed my teeth, but I don’t have a cavity - so I’m good”.
Don’t get me wrong, my “fun” car (an old, beat up Jeep) is going on 2 years with the same oil (I barely drive it), but I known I need to change it soon.
Oil degrade with oxygen. Every time you drive that car, the oil are being re-oxygenated and continuing to degrade (along with being exposed to combustion byproducts).
Also, the type of wear you get often isn’t noticeable until it becomes catastrophic. In my case, a 30 year old car that’s already on its last legs “catastrophic” is more like “time to finally drag it to the scrap yard”.
Motor oil is a wear product with a lifespan. It will become saturated with microscopic particles of metal and end up with lower lubricity. You are just slowly grinding away all the metal off the moving parts. Eventually the tolerances will fail, usually a rod bearing, leading to self-destruction of the motor.
You can find these stories in the mechanics subreddits, typically it's some Toyota came into the shop dying at around 60k miles with the factory oil turned to sludge.
Oil is a consumable with both a use lifespan and a time lifespan. So it needs to be changed at the lesser of either of those intervals. Same with tires, which a lot of people don't realize.
I think this dissonance is because people currently equate the engineering with profit optimization, as were already pretty deep into the capitalism "endgame".
But in the first phase of industrialization, the quality went up - exactly because we suddenly had specific measurements and tolerances.
The markets however did what they do best: optimize for profit. And the public markets preferred cheap over quality... At least in the consumer space. Objectively quality has significantly improved across the board with every decade. Just not in consumer goods, because of their consistent spending habits
So in my mind a craftsman is something akin to an artist.
Whereas an engineer provides solutions.
A craftsman differs from an artist in exactly this: an artist produces beauty while a craftsman produces an artifact that serves its purpose beautifully and robustly. The two can be combined, of course.
There is no atmosphere to speak of, so only if directly exposed. Hence that's a solvable issue.
The whole thing is incredibly expensive though, while it may be doable with current technology, the amount of money they'd have to set aside may be a hard sell for the miniscule potential of this research - at least from the lens of 2026... So the original position of the article makes sense, it may become functionally impossible, even if technically possible
You make the CSS and branding into a thing that folks are "discouraged" from distributing. That's most of the WP plugin and theme ecosystem, or was when I retired from it.
However once you realize that gambling is not the drug, and merely something that triggers your body to create a rush... Then can you really call it a drug? At least any more then any other of those activities?
Eg Skydiving and basically any other extreme sports.
And once you're there, you should really realize that it's not worth the sacrifice.
This is a societal issue and should not be addressed with legislation.
The only thing that can be safely regulated are things like disallowing marketing.
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