Speaking as someone with a company in the arts based in berlin:
Sister comments get excited about population growth, gentrification, rising rent prices, and everyone's favorite c-word. Those are all real things that are happening in berlin, that are favorite bogeymen to complain about at parties. None of them apply here.
Rising rents are much more of a residential problem. Prime commercial rents are also rising, but at 1.1%/yr... and non-prime/specialty commercial like the subway arches in Hansaviertel are generally stable or declining since COVID.
The museum cites loss of premises as a factor. The Deutsche bahn leases the subway arches typically on 5 or 10 year terms. Since they moved in 2016 it sounds like DB is declining to renew the contract and they are facing another move.
But the really big elephant in the room is a lack of funding. The museum has always been proudly privately funded and volunteer operated. But that still exposes them to indirect effects from public funding cuts, and berlin cut 13% of its culture funding in 2024. Private donations are down 6% year over year, and what there is has seen significant diversion to political and Ukraine support efforts. Similar impacts happen in volunteer time, but we're all waiting on the 5-yearly survey from 2024 to be released to get real data.
Fixed costs are often the killer for museums, and the buchstaben museum blamed these in particular. Heating and electricity, and general climate maintenance in nonstandard spaces like the subway arches is always expensive, and museums are relatively energy intensive to begin with. Wholesale electricity costs jumped 5-7x in 2021-22. They've since come back down to a more modest 30-40% increase, but that's still a huge problem for a small, privately funded institution like this. Especially coupled with public funding loss, reduced private donations, and staring down a move.
Bear in mind, German non profits can't create endowments like American ones can. Most categories can't even roll budget from one year to the next!
Hope this helps you understand why so many privately funded cultural institutions are dying in Germany and Berlin right now.
Is there any political momentum to deal with this, for example allowing at least some level of endowments? I respect the purity of the ideal, but it sounds like it is backfiring right now.
The German tax laws for charities around having to spend donations in “a timely fashion“ are being loosened, but it’s really more a question of proper tax advice. It is a common myth in volunteer-run organizations than you cannot create long-term financial stability. You just have to lay out a plan and argue for it.
More of a problem is dependency on public funding or any kind of grant, where typically there are limitations on what you can use that grant money for, and “saving for the future“ is not one of them.
Why do you choose the CD era as your comparison point? Why not cassettes, or the LP decades? The industry has changed a lot and choosing a different baseline is illuminating to any discussion of "fair" compensation.
What hasn't changed is the fact that vertically integrated distribution-and-promotion with large market share has all the leverage, all the information, and all the legislative influence. In any time period where that exists, the same result plays out through different media.
That is to say, in terms of negotiating power, free market economics, and political influence the artist is not just strongly disadvantaged, but artificially so. It's not a David and Goliath, it's more like David and the Death Star.
When Roger Fischer, Adam Smith, and Jack Abramoff would all agree that one side probably needs some extra support, it's a good bet that "fair" lies so far on the other side of the scale that we don't have to worry about precision or philosophy of "fairness" to make a big improvement.
Because CD has not been superseded by any other physical media? Nobody sells music on an USB stick or on a microSD card. If I go to buy music, it will be always CD.
Right, and the same argument applies: "But a USB/MicroSD format would carry more bits in a smaller space than CDs, and be less fragile, it's just a more convenient physical format for music!"
But a) there is no mass market for any physical format any more. It's driven by nostalgia. And b) There's more nostalgia for Vinyl than for CDs simply because they were the main medium for much longer. Of course CDs are less fragile and bulky than Vinyl, just like SD cards are less fragile and bulky than CDs, and streaming on existing devices is even more convenient. But that's not the driving factor. It's all fun until someone leaves their Vinyl record collection in a hot car for a few hours.
I think microSD cards are a bit to small to be convenient. They easily get lost or broken. USB has a nice form factor for storing and transport but the UX for the player is worse, as the stick doesn't vanish in the player like a CD or a microSD card. I think the best UX, would be an SD card the size of a bank card, that can be put in a slot, but the marginal difference to a CD is really low.
I don't know anything about the data. But I literally just purchased a record player that my soon to be 14 year old daughter requested for her birthday. She doesn't have and has never requested a CD player.
Where can I buy music on a Blu-ray DVD? They are simply more expensive, while nobody needs the extra space for music data. At least where I live music is only sold on CD. There are new vinyl disks being produced for a retro market, but a player for these needs significantly more space then a Compact Disc. In addition to buying a new player I would also be bound to only play music at home. Every car has a CD tray, my laptop has one, I have several players at home.
The format and equipment exists, it's called "blu ray audio"
The fact that it's not in widespread use is my point exactly: the mass market isn't there any more.
> Every car has a CD tray,
I think that will go the way of a headphone jack on a iPhone. Cars have bluetooth.
> my laptop has one,
CD players on laptops literally have gone the way of a headphone jack on a iPhone. They're rare to non-existent on new models.
> I have several players at home.
So do I - they're in a box somewhere.
You're not refuting my point at all - there's not successor to CDs, not because it's a perfect, modern medium for physical music. But just because there is no longer a mass market for music on any physical media.
> The fact that it's not in widespread use is my point exactly: the mass market isn't there any more.
Their might not be a mass market for neither, but these are not available in the same scale at all. You maybe can find blu ray audio somewhere on the internet, but I've never seen them, while the the music store has hundreds of CDs and every street musician and band sells CDs.
I honestly do not know what the selling point of a Blu-ray disk is. The form factor is exactly the same and nobody needs the capacity. The capacity of a DVD is already too large, why should anyone use a Blue-ray disk? Neither want the musicians produce and sell more than some hours of music, nor do consumers need music for days without interruption. There simply is no kind of music which takes more than a few hours.
So the only difference is that the disk is more expensive and the player is likely incompatible, so hardly a benefit.
Not sure if you noticed that your sources disagree with your thesis, with the limited exception that theres no convincing evidence that seratonin is the single causal factor for depression, which myth was heavily promoted by the relevant pharma companies.
Your articles also say that:
- depression medication does appear to be effective in some cases regardless, indicating some other neurochemical mechanism at work.
- the existence of a "neurochemical imbalance myth" underpinning psychology as a whole is, itself, a myth.
- the idea that this mythical myth about neurochemical imbalance has been debunked, is also a myth.
- that the psychological scientific consensus has, since the first peer-reviewed mention of the word "neurochemical" in the 60s, quite consistently been aligned with the 1978 synthesis statement by the then president of the APA:
> "Psychiatric disorders result from the complex interaction of physical, psycho-logical, and social factors and treatment may be directed toward any or all three of these areas."
Your second article is particularly clear in explaining all this.
"Furthermore, the SSRIs were accorded a rock-star status as effective antidepressants that they did not deserve. Most troubling from the standpoint of misleading the general public, pharmaceutical companies heavily promoted the “chemical imbalance” trope in their direct-to-consumer advertising."
There second article admits the overuse of the term while trying to defend psychiatry for never officially adopting it, but everyone who's been on them knows that's exactly what they were told about their effectiveness, so whether the trope originated with the pharmaceutical companies (my assertion) or not, they were still way over prescribed and there's no statistically significant evidence they actually work when controlling for confounders, as the first meta analysis clearly demonstrates.
That's a hell of a journey! Congratulations on the accomplishment and thank you for sharing.
Like many other biological systems, neurological wiring is multidimensional and not a natural fit into our arbitrary culturally defined abstractions, or even language. And the dimensions themselves are multifaceted expressions of multiple genes and environmental factors. I am happy to hear stories like yours, of people who can ultimately achieve "normal" functional parity without medication.
Have you considered if that would have been possible without the journey? Had you, on day 1, cancelled that first therapist appointment and decided to grit your teeth and "try" instead, could you have "accepted discomfort" on your own? Or is it possible that the methylphenidate created supportive conditions that improved your chances?
I ask because there is a body of well reproduced research demonstrating not only that ADHD patients have specific genetic and neurobiological differences from neurotypicals in areas associated with executive function, but that long term ADHD medication use can permanently bring the neurological differences into line with neurotypical controls. Something like 20% of medicated childhood ADHD patients can ultimately stop medication without losing points in functional testing or the associated brain structures. It's a lower percentage in adults and less well studied, but still exists. It's a big difference from the results of every non-chemical intervention we've studied, which have single digit efficacy percentages if they beat P at all.
I'm interested in your feelings about this because ADHD is by far the most-studied psychological disorder in the world, and ADHD medications as a group are not only equally well studied, but also the most successful and least harmful of any psychiatric drug. There are more safety and efficacy studies for ADHD medication than for ibuprofen.
So... if you feel your recovery was not helped by the neurogenetic compensations provided by methylphenidate, you should know that you are flying so far in the face of some of the best-validated medical science, that you imply invalidity of pharmaceutical or medical science as a whole.
... which is fine of course - it's your body and brain! But I bet it would help readers to know how you think this aligns with the science, or maybe what you think of medical science altogether. Questions like "Do you take ibuprofen?" And "Do you vaccinate?" Become relevant.
Yes I have and it was just as difficult post medication as it was pre. Ironically, while on the SNRI my ADHD was "worse" due to the sheer apathy I felt about literally everything, so I was prescribed to help me "focus" and be "motivated".
You're leaving out the part about being "well studied" paired with your conclusions is almost exclusively in American and Western European populations, things are significantly less clear in other populations and cultures.
You are overselling ADHD meds by quite a bit. There is plenty of data in literature that quite a bit of people will not respond positively to meds. So if they work for you that's great. But lightly shaming someone by implying they might be anti medicine is super uncool and as an ADHD person you really should know better. Lets not invalidate each other just because experiences are not exactly the same.
Love it. Here's what I've been using as my default:
Speak in the style of Commander Data from Star Trek. Ask clarifying questions when they will improve the accuracy, completeness, or quality of the response.
Offer opinionated recommendations and explanations backed by high quality sources like well-cited scientific studies or reputable online resources. Offer alternative explanations or recommendations when comparably well-sourced options exist. Always cite your information sources. Always include links for more information.
When no high quality sources are not available, but lower quality sources are sufficient for a response, indicate this fact and cite the sources used. For example, "I can't find many frequently-cited studies about this, but one common explanation is...". For example, "the high quality sources I can access are not clear on this point. Web forums suggest...".
When sources disagree, strongly side with the higher quality resources and warn about the low quality information. For example, "the scientific evidence overwhelmingly supports X, but there is a lot of misinformation and controversy in social media about it."
I will definitely incorporate some of your prompt, though. One thing that annoyed me at first, was that with my prompt the LLM will sometimes address me as "Commander." But now I love it.
Presumably the LLM reads your accidental double negative ("when no high quality sources are not available") and interprets it as what you obviously meant to say...
Particularly interesting is that when they split the dataset by sex, the transitions were present and at a similar magnitude in both sexes. We make much in western culture of the (peri-)menopausal change in women. I read this as an indicator that at least significant parts of the transition in this age range for men - acknowledged for a long time now - are just as big as menopause.
I don't remember noticing that the last time this study came around, but then again, I am in my mid 40s. :)
> I read this as an indicator that at least significant parts of the transition in this age range for men - acknowledged for a long time now - are just as big as menopause
Sorry but your post as strong #notallmen vibes. The article itself mentions that part of those changes might just be explained by lifestyle changes at 40s. I quote:
> It's possible some of these changes could be tied to lifestyle or behavioral factors that cluster at these age groups, rather than being driven by biological factors, Snyder said.
Changes in women metabolism due to menopause are pretty known and proved, and men don't experience it. I'm a mid-40s male as well.
There is more than one way to stop being the leading economic and military stabilizing force in the world. The "table flip" doctrine is not generally considered to be among the top candidates for "responsible and stable" transfer of power.
