Some argue that THC in cannabis actually works similarly because when herbivores regularly ingest it, they become lethargic and lazy, causing them struggle to survive in the world. Kinda like my roommate.
Ibotenic acid, muscarine, psilocybin, amanitin, muscimol, THC, caffeine - these all natural pesticides target bugs primarily. Which are the biggest threat. Sort of funny how it also affects people though
But cannabis the needs heat to convert, it’s more likely it evolved with Human influence considering the years of overlapping land races tied to our trade routes
I have a hypothesis that taking cannabis (and especially CBD) out of our food chain may be contributing to the increase¹ in prevalence of chronic pain.
The farm bill makes 'hemp' anything with below 0.3% THC legal. For this reason, we have a LOT of testing on the THC content of cannabis, since it is required to sell and manufacture. As it turns out, naturally cannabis quite commonly has >0.3% THC even before heating or activation of THCa.
Any human-like animal with our receptors eating a large amount would get high as fuck, cooked or not. A ruminant eating pounds of the stuff raw, would not be that different from a human consuming an ounce of baked pot.
your last sentence reminds me of my dorm roommate in college. very standard stoner who was constantly blazing and years later i've never known a lazier dude.
>Those gigantic clinical trials (some of the largest RCTs ever conducted) didn't detect this issue because of its extreme rarity.
You assume good faith on their part. These studies are run by the same companies that stand to make billions based off the study outcomes. For example we know now when a toddler died in the Moderna covid RTC of cardiac arrest after vaccination they reportedly covered it up and didn't report it.
This all is starting to sound a lot like what happened with vioxx. Where an increase in heart problems was detected in RTC but covered up. Vioxx would go on to cause an estimated 50000 deaths from heart attack.
> These studies are run by the same companies that stand to make billions based off the study outcomes
No they're not. Studies are run by a distributed network of large, medium, and small businesses who are independently following the "recipe" designed by the pharma company.
Then this data is submitted back to the pharma company and collated into a report that is given to the FDA.
It is effectively impossible to systematically get a couple hundred or couple thousand independent trial sites to misreport safety data.
It is possible that the pharma company could manipulate data during collation, but unsurprisingly there is a vast infrastructure to detect this and gargantuan penalties for when they're discovered.
> For example we know now when a toddler died in the Moderna covid RTC of cardiac arrest after vaccination they reportedly covered it up and didn't report it.
This is literally not true. You can find the death reported in the exact regulatory filing exactly when and where it should have been reported. What happened is that a Substack author found it and has made it seem like it was not reported.
Re Vioxx comparison:
Sure we should always be vigilant for another Vioxx. The way we do that is through fair and levelheaded analysis of the data we have available. Right now, that analysis lands very clearly on the side of vaccines. At the scale of vaccine rollout, we would not need to squint to see signal of a major problem.
We are fine operating under highly regulated censorship laws, as American companies operating under India's IT Acts has show.
We are against the DSA because it is a de facto non-trade barrier to American services exports becuase of it's tax implications.
And it's doesn't matter that Trump is in office - a Harris administration would have played hardball against the EU as well, as was seen with the Biden admin perusing lawfare and lobbying to make an example out of Canada for their attempt at a digital services tax.
It's the same reason the Obama admin lobbied hard for the TPP to not include a digital services tax and harmonize with American IP law.
Russia, China, Brazil, India -- all have similar censorship systems but Americans don't find it as troubling because those countries aren't part of the same shared cultural identity known as "The West".
Americans simply aren't qualified to talk on matters of censorship or surveillance, period. Post-Patriot Act, you are a slave to the NSA with zero legal or technical recourse that would afford you privacy.
Be careful throwing legislative stones from glass houses.
Nope. It's because we don't have to pay a digital service tax in any of those countries (except in Russia, where American companies no longer operate due to sanctions considerations). And it's always been about DST [0][1].
No one in the policy space who is able to reach a position to affect power gives a s### about ideology unless it is a deeply personal issue for that person, and for most policymakers (who are overwhelmingly non-technical in my experience), digital free speech absolutism just isn't something they care about at a personal level.
> Nope. It's because we don't have to pay a digital service tax in any of those countries (except in Russia, where American companies no longer operate due to sanctions considerations). And it's always been about DST [0][1].
Then your government should pass BEPS Pillar 1, so that this doesn't happen. You can't have your cake and eat it.
The deal was that BEPS would replace the digital services taxes, and lots of countries implemented it on the basis. However the US has not implemented this (for whatever reason), which means DSTs are back on the table.
From a geo-political standpoint I'd expect to see them pretty soon, especially if the US abandons Ukraine.
Comparing Brazil and India to Russia and China is just retarded.
Also India is more liberal than western Europe in a lot of ways.
For example, French laicite means no display of religious symbols publicly, while India allows a wide variety of religious symbols, having some of the largest mosques, churches and temples in the world
Moreover, in India people openly criticize other religions, while England jails people for such things. This idea that Europe is liberal and no one else is just myopicism
European hubris makes them believe that they are uniquely liberal. European countries can hardly deal with a small number of other cultures.
I honestly don't see anything particularly strange about it. The only thing I can see that would actually impact any of the businesses is the requirement to provide a complaints procedure.
Note that I worked in one of the major targets of this law (Meta) for many years and I don't see anything there that amounts to a trade barrier to US service exports.
Can you help me understand the concerns here?
Like, to my mind, the DMA is a much bigger deal but US peeps are way more upset about the DSA.
And like, the US runs the Banking Secrecy Act and weaponises the dollar system on a completely regular basis, so I'm honestly flabbergasted that they object to other companies enforcing their laws extra-territorally.
> And it's doesn't matter that Trump is in office - a Harris administration would have played hardball against the EU as well, as was seen with the Biden admin perusing lawfare and lobbying to make an example out of Canada for their attempt at a digital services tax.
Yeah this I agree with.
But unfortunately, because most tech/pharma company profits are booked where the IP is located and this is easy to move, digital services taxes are going to happen over the next decade. I understand why the US government doesn't like this, but it's either that or actual trade barriers to these companies. (And I say this as a citizen of a country that benefits massively from these shenanigans).
Car depend infrastructure is amazing to families. A mom can take her children to the grocery store in a car in relative safety without worrying about mentally ill homeless people on the subway.
Why would you need to get on the subway to go to the grocery store? When I lived in Paris I was within a five minute walk to at least three general grocery stores plus various speciality shops. Always plenty of parents all around. This is not uncommon in properly designed non-car dependent cities. Not to mention deliveries are just that much easier and all without a car.
Surely the priority should be to help those with mental issues and those without homes? It's bizarre to want to live in a society that prioritises car use so that people don't have to see those discarded by the same society.
It's pure facts. I used to live in a city where me and my wife were terrorized by homeless people on the light rail. Now we live far away from public transportation and no longer have to worry about the safety of ourselves or our children and our neighbors are fantastic people.
Car dependency and castle doctrine is essential in a low trust society with a legal system that puts violent offenders right back on the street.
Moving in a private vehicle is statistically the most dangerous activity an otherwise healthy young person routinely participates in. Your family is almost certainly at higher risk of death and serious injury now because you based this decision on your perception of safety rather than evaluating the reality of it. Speaking of "pure facts."
Right, except it wasn't, like objectively. Like factually. As in its not up to your opinion.
Driving is more dangerous, and it's not even close. For example, in NYC you're over 100x more likely to die in a car on the roads above the subway than on the subway.
Back when CRISPER was the new hot thing in science people talked about engineering invasive species to have gene drives such that they could only produce male offspring. Eventually there would be no females and the population would disappear.
Doesn't look like it ever got of the ground though.
Some interesting comparisons I found between Wikipedia and grok. These are the intro paragraphs.
Grokipedia:
The Biden–Ukraine controversy pertains to allegations that U.S. Vice President Joe Biden conditioned $1 billion in loan guarantees on the Ukrainian government's dismissal of Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin in March 2016, purportedly to obstruct an ongoing investigation into Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian energy firm where Biden's son, Robert Hunter Biden, served as a board member receiving substantial compensation since May 2014.[1][2] Shokin, whose office had pursued corruption charges against Burisma's founder Mykola Zlochevsky—including probes into illicit asset acquisition and bribery—publicly stated that his removal derailed these efforts, coinciding with Hunter Biden's role amid the company's efforts to mitigate regulatory pressures.[2][3]
Wikipedia:
The Biden–Ukraine conspiracy theory is a series of false allegations that Joe Biden, while he was vice president of the United States, improperly withheld a loan guarantee and took a bribe to pressure Ukraine into firing prosecutor general Viktor Shokin to prevent a corruption investigation of Ukrainian gas company Burisma and to protect his son Hunter Biden, who was on the Burisma board.[1] As part of efforts by Donald Trump[2] and his campaign in the Trump–Ukraine scandal, which led to Trump's first impeachment, these falsehoods were spread in an attempt to damage Joe Biden's reputation and chances during the 2020 presidential campaign, and later in an effort to impeach him.[3]
Grokipedia:
Gamergate was a grassroots online movement that emerged in August 2014, primarily focused on exposing conflicts of interest and lack of transparency in video game journalism, initiated by a blog post detailing the romantic involvement of indie developer Zoë Quinn with journalists who covered her work without disclosure.[1] The controversy began when Eron Gjoni, Quinn's ex-boyfriend, published "The Zoe Post," accusing her of infidelity with multiple individuals, including Kotaku journalist Nathan Grayson, whose article on Quinn's game Depression Quest omitted any mention of their prior personal contact.[2] This revelation highlighted broader patterns of undisclosed relationships and coordinated industry practices, such as private mailing lists among journalists, fueling demands for ethical reforms like mandatory disclosure policies.
Wikipedia:
Gamergate or GamerGate (GG)[1] was a loosely organized misogynistic online harassment campaign motivated by a right-wing backlash against feminism, diversity, and progressivism in video game culture.[2][3][4] It was conducted using the hashtag "#Gamergate" primarily in 2014 and 2015.[a] Gamergate targeted women in the video game industry, most notably feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian and video game developers Zoë Quinn and Brianna Wu.[b]
The Grokipedia article on Gamergate claims that Gjoni "revealed" that Quinn was sleeping with reviewers for good reviews, but he himself later admitted he had zero evidence for that and claimed it was a typo that made people believe he was accusing Quinn of it. Why is being outright wrong a good thing?
Apparently Grokipedia give you the option to highlight that section of the text and click "this is wrong" and it will update the text or tell you why not. I don't have a account but someone should try and report back what it does.
Is the DPRK a democracy? They claim they are, so should a wiki blindly report that they are?
Likewise, it's absurd to claim Gamergate was about "ethics in game journalism", even a cursory look at what the movement actually did makes it very clear that was never the focus.
It's not biased to look at what happened and report that people didn't do what they claimed to be doing.
Does it? I mean the quoted text doesn't really make much mention beyond the word "allegations" that there isn't any evidence of wrongdoing on Joe Biden's part. In fact, it's written as if there is still some question of validity. Grok is a rhetorical device that tries to paint right-wing reaction to woke stuff as an honest concern for journalistic integrity. If it were really being honest, why is it so often just a blatant point by point contradiction of whatever the wikipedia article says in all these culture war matters?
There is also no direct evidence that smoking causes lung cancer. There are no randomized controlled trials to establishing smoking is the cause. Nor could we ever feasibly run one. All we know is there is very strongly correlation.
You've overlooked animal studies. There are numerous direct studies with animals exposed to cigarette smoke or even taught to smoke that have shown more than just correlation.
You've also overlooked that we can see what chemicals smoking exposes lung cells to, and we can expose cultured lung cells in the lab to those chemicals and see that they are carcinogenic.
When I look for the group "most likely to call Elon out on his (copious, regular) 'actual lies'", "EU politicians" isn't the group I go to.
> But they all staid 100% silent on this.
Speaking of "actual lies", this is one.
> Firing back on X, the [European] commissioner [for Internal Market Thierry Breton] denied the existence of a secret deal and said no such bargain had been made with any other platforms:
> Be our guest @elonmusk
> There has never been — and will never be — any “secret deal”. With anyone.
> The DSA provides X (and any large platform) with the possibility to offer commitments to settle a case.
> To be extra clear: it’s YOUR team who asked the Commission to explain the process for settlement and to clarify our concerns.
> We did it in line with established regulatory procedures. Up to you to decide whether to offer commitments or not. That is how rule of law procedures work.
So I'm inclined to believe Elon lied, as he does with painful monotony. Especially when, oh yeah, when Elon and X were asked to respond to this... they didn't.
