Forty years... forty... years... I wonder if there was something *new *that our liberal democracy started forty years ago, where the focus shifted towards expanding economic growth at all costs.

New and different but still liberal. Neo maybe.

It is an unfortunate thumbnail.

How do you even make 20,000 amendments to an 18 page document? Did they change every word individually?

It's complex, and subjective, and maybe a bit sad, but here's my best shot at describing my decision.

Cannabis enhances most forms of passive entertainment and makes menial tasks less dull, which is great, but that also makes it habit forming. It tends to affect you in one of two ways, depending on your body chemistry and the strain you're using. You're either going to be comfortably immobile, or pleasantly flighty, in either case it becomes difficult to focus on complex tasks or plan ahead and makes your problems feel distant.

This combination of effects, in my experience, creates a feedback loop. The habit of smoking to enjoy tasks you wouldn't otherwise combined with a decrease in drive to perform complex tasks that are both harder to do and less likely to be thought of when stoned and a distance from your troubles, results in more time spent blissfully drifting through life.

That's not necessarily a bad thing. I had clearly enjoyed it for years. But it became difficult to do much of anything. I was stuck in this loop that I didn't even see. I lost friends during COVID (not to the disease, they're still alive just not my friends) and I allowed my life to shrink so much... My circle of friends, my chosen activities and the locations I physically inhabited all became limited and static during and after. It was a slow process, and I can't blame it all on cannabis, but smoking weed dulled the pain as I slowly became less and less of myself. When I smoke weed I am less apt to focus on my ills and if I can't focus on them, I can't change them.

Being stoned left me more apt to just chill out and let my life continue rolling along the same dissatisfying course. Imagine a snowball rolling downhill, but instead of picking up snow as it goes, it leaves it behind. Shrinking and shrinking, until it stops. Momentum no longer able to carry it along.

This diminishing of myself was leaving me more and more depressed. Months would pass where I only left my apartment to walk my dog or buy groceries. I lost interest in the activities I enjoyed. I lost interest in my partner. I lost interest in my self, because why would I be interested in someone who was nothing and did nothing. I was on the edge of losing myself, to myself. I spent more time imagining my own death than imagining a life I wanted to live.

I took a hard look at how I spent my days, and saw that one thing took the place of all of those others that I used to love. I was spending my days stoned and alone and unhappy. Don't get me wrong, I don't think an addiction to weed pushed anything out of my life - I wasn't seeking weed at anything's expense and I never started until after working hours so I kept a semblance of a life - it just filled the holes all those people, places, activities and things I lost left behind and made it much harder to recognize the decline of my well-being.

So I cut down, and started calling my family more. Then I did some research. I looked at the physiological effects of cannabis - the way THC interacts with your endogenous cannabinoid receptors, which are in every part of your body from your brain and your eyes to your gut and your gonads, and it floods them with a molecule thousands of times more potent than they would otherwise have. It disrupts the neurological feedback system that your brain uses to reinforce synaptic routes. It overrides your guidance system, not through dopamine release causing seeking behavior like most drugs, but by effectively telling you to just relax by making everything you do feel equally as rewarding as anything else.

I was starting to feel better after just cutting down and reaching out, so I looked at what I got from THC and what I wanted from my life, and I decided to leave it behind entirely.

The version of Neuralink we can afford will be ad supported.

And the rest overestimate how much they know.

Anarchism is when disc golf.

This article poses a Yes or No question in its headline, then takes 1500 words to answer it with "Maybe, sort of by some metrics, but not in any way that matters. I don't know only time will tell."

It includes Millennials in its statistics about Gen Z by referencing "under 30's" (the youngest Millennials are currently 28) and includes a comparison of Gen Z to both "middle aged" people and Millennials, which overlap, the oldest Millennials are 43. So it's comparing young millennials to middling millennials and saying they're actually more like old millennials.

I wish I hadn't read it. My bad though, I should have known. Articles that generalize people into categories as broad as generations are always poorly written.

It can do wonders. I have a (semi) quarterly ritual - one I'll be partaking in soon to coincide with the Vernal Equinox - of taking a large dose of psilocybin and diving into my own psyche for an afternoon. Its hard to explain the way it helps to change thought patterns.

With the right set going in you can really see the harmful ruts you've fallen into, recognize their manifestations and reroute. My last trip, during the winter solstice, snapped me out of a depressive episode I'd been battling for a year. It helped me see that I'd been spending my time and effort trying to live a life I'd long since stopped being excited for, for reasons unrelated to my depression, and it helped me feel empathy towards myself, so I could move forward on a new path, at peace.

It wouldn't have happened had I not been working on getting myself out of that rut for weeks prior through art, self reflection and seeking support, but it truly came to fruition after breaking down the barriers of my mind, destroying my ego for an afternoon, travelling through time and space and coming out the other side renewed.

Trying to get out on a technicality.

I was on that Jury, we were instructed repeatedly on avoiding bias when looking at the proceedings - keep our perceptions of their guilt out of it, only consider what is in evidence, don't let your emotional response sway you.

I wound up taken off the jury before the verdict (me, two other jurors, and the jury officer tested positive for COVID at the start of the final week of the trial) but everyone else got that same spiel and likely more when it came time for deliberation. It's rich to say "the jury just didn't understand what they were supposed to do!" as a defense here. We did. That's why the Bilodeaus were only found guilty on one count of murder and three counts of manslaughter - prosecution started off seeking second degree murder for all four counts. They both received light sentences for causing the deaths of two innocent men because the rule of law demanded it.

I came to the comments for an explanation because I completely missed the age labels, so thank you.

"The dog... was shot and killed during an 'Interaction'" is such an outlandishly vague way to describe the situation and leaves all details up to the imagination. It doesn't even say if that interaction was with their suspect. A suspect who "is injured" but like, did they injure the guy or did they injure themselves? Did they get shot too? Did the dog try to attack them and was shot by the suspect? Did the dog run at them, and a cop shot at the same time, killing the dog instead of maiming the suspect?

Cops always use passive language so it sounds like all this violence was already there when they showed up.