krispyfi

It's surprising to me that you would need to wait 30 minutes for a bus. Are you in a very rural area? Was it outside of normal commute hours? Or is your city's public transportation network wildly underfunded?

I wouldn't celebrate the end of the war on drugs just yet. Even if psychedelic medicines are approved, bifurcated scheduling means that rich white people using psychedelics in clinics would be respectable medical users, but the same exact molecule used on the street by poor brown people would still be schedule 1 and used to justify continued persecution. Tails they win, heads we lose.

Methamphetamine can be synthesized from the ephedra plant, and a total synthesis of LSD exists.

"drugs or alcohol"

I usually encounter this framing from alcohol drinkers who are trying to be self-righteously judgemental about users of other drugs without getting hit by their own boomerang, so seeing it used for what is essentially the opposite opinion (i.e., that alcohol is worse than other drugs) is quite refreshing.

I still disagree with it, though. Alcohol is clearly a drug.

You are describing the world as it exists, while I'm saying that we should have a better one.

So if you really want to nab someone but you don't care what the charge is, you can threaten them with a 4th Amendment-violating search, which induces them to destroy evidence. Pretty neat trick. IANAL, but I don't think it's controversial to say that people who treat the Bill of Rights like an obstacle to be hacked around probably shouldn't be in positions of power.

User takes a large dose and dies -> "they should have used as directed"

User takes a large dose and gets high -> "why does big pharma condone drug abuse???"

2020 was famously a period where the pandemic and the opioid crisis were causing death and despair all over the country, but somehow that became the excuse for backpedaling on decriminalization in Oregon before there could have even been effects to study, not to mention before there was time to study those effects. They even recriminalized drugs that have never been associated with overdose or addiction, like psychedelics. Basically, they did the bare minimum necessary to be able to say "we tried it and it didn't work" with a straight face. Don't fall for it.

You have it precisely backwards. Culture belonging to the people is the default, natural state, and copyright is an unnatural legal fiction that should only be tolerated insofar at it produces a net positive in terms of promotion of the arts and sciences. Unfortunately, the whole intellectual property concept has been co-opted by big business for rent-seeking. I don't think the Konami execs are at a board meeting saying, "we can't fund another Metal Gear sequel because it will just become public domain in 20 years."

In the US, it is the responsibility of copyright holders to protect their IP through tort litigation. Japan is so captured by industry that they will put people in prison for what should be a civil matter. I'm sure it's just a coincidence that it's mostly the IP of large corporations that is protected by criminal law. It's as if the police were to volunteer to be personal bodyguards for rich people. It's understandable, though: Japanese popular media is a core part of their "Cool Japan" soft power foreign policy strategy.

Cyclist in Tokyo here. Maybe I wouldn't need to go on the sidewalk so much if they didn't let cars treat the bicycle lane like roadside parking. Enforce that before enforcing some stupid green ticket. We need dedicated bicycle lanes partitioned from the car lanes like I've seen in Australia.

Also blocked connecting from Japan. Fuck cloudflare.