Read one book. Dostoyevsky's ‘Crime and Punishment’, concentrating on all of the various ways he portrays righteousness.
He helps you see what's right in front of you, namely that people do wrong things not because they are evil or bad, but because they are weak.
Once you understand people as inherently weak, that they do stupid shit because they are essentially helpless, not because they're bad or evil or cruel, it becomes so much easier to forgive.
Mental toughness is all about forgiving and forgetting, and you learn to forgive only by accepting that people are weak, that people are essentially incapable of doing what's right.
Here one of my favorite quotes from the book:
“She is so unhappy! Ah, how unhappy! She believes there must be righteousness everywhere. She expects it. She doesn't see that it's impossible for people to be righteous and she is angry at it.”
It's a bit higher than that. 150 mg for anti-smoking (as Xyban), 300 mg for severe depression or Bipolar 1 (as Wellbutrin) is not uncommon, but with all the others (esp. the Adderall and the mood stabilizer) and coffee to chase, yeah, that would wake up a mummified corpse.
That shrink should have his license pulled.
(That said, Buproprion is a miracle drug. As far as antidepressants go, it's in class all by itself.)
> As far as antidepressants go, [buproprion is] in class all by itself.
I'd like to emphasize that this is literally a true statement. It's what's called an atypical antidepressant [0] because it doesn't act in a way similar to other antidepressants.
No, they make pills that are 150 mg. I was on 300 mg of daily Welbutrin XL for several years, though more often I was on 150 mg. I also took about 20 mg of Prozac, which seemed to have a smoothing effect. My only side effects on the stronger dosages was an acid stomach, and I could mitigate that by eating half a bagel or muffin in the morning.
I remember asking my psychiatrist about the dosage because it seemed high to me. He told me that up to 450 mg was the recommended maximum, and that he did have a few patients who had been on stronger doses. I believe he said he knew of one patient on 750 mg, though he may have said 600 mg.
Just based on my personal experience, psychiatric drugs are highly variable. I did very well under Welbutrin, while even the smallest dosages of Effexor had me waking up with constant nightmares and a non-euphoric, altogether unpleasant "buzzed" feeling not unlike a hangover without the headache. I also know people who swear by Effexor.
Edit: Today I almost entirely mitigate my depression with natural light therapy.
This is tectonic. If it's purely WFC, I'm really amazed and excited. It's not the novelty, it's the perfection of each. They remind me of the Laurentian library by Michelangelo.
A future-tense corollary: “What if it turns out not to be open source?”
As someone who works in crypto-currency, the enduring mystery over who invented bitcoin bothers me a lot.
The going belief is in a still-anonymous fairy godfather, Satoshi Nakamoto, who gave unto the world his/her/their foundational idea, or intellectual property, and said go forth and multiply.
Just one problem: What if Nakamoto invented his/her/their technology at a company or academic institution? That institution c/would claw back the intellectual property. Where there is intellectual property, there are patent lawyers; and where there are patent lawyers, there are licensing fees! See Oracle v. Google over Sun Microsystems' Java.
What if the reason he/she/it maintains anonymity is because to reveal himself is to reveal where he worked when he invented bitcoin? That employer would be the true owner of the IP, and open-source bitcoin would go private. The foundational idea that's launched a thousand startups, supposedly open-source, turns out to be anything but open-source. That would suck.
I wager that, at some point in the future, bitcoin will be private property owned by a corporation or academic institution.
You can't retroactively patent something after its design has already been released to the general public, can you? Imagine trying to patent a car engine today, if it were a similar situation: the operation would be total nonsense. The derivative works existed before you claimed control; you can't just go and say they now owe you money for it
At best I would imagine that nakamoto could get sued for releasing IP that wasn't his to release, and they might be able to lay claim over the bitcoin name and codebase for future updates... but they can't do anything about all the existing forks and derivatives. They already exist!
And as I understood it, the Oracle v Google case was based on the fact that Oracle was already licensing java for mobile devices, and android basically wrote a new not-java, which is all fine and well, but Oracle was claiming that not just the implementation but also the API fell under their licensing operation. That is, licensing was already part of the story, it was just a question of whether it applied to Google's usage.
Bitcoin is not that situation: no licensing story currently exists. If it were taken into closed source, it wouldn't be much different from forking the code and making a proprietary version of it, and licensing that out. But the codebase that already exists, in the open, and includes a whole lot of code that is by no means property of sakamoto's institution, can't just be removed from the internet
Also, can you even patent a network protocol? Because the client itself doesn't hold much value, especially not for the derivative works. It's the protocol that's key
ofc I'm not a lawyer, I don't know squat about the topic, but intuitively it seems nonsensical. Imagine doing that operation intentionally: releasing a design so you could retroactively patent and force licenses after worldwide adoption. It'd be dumb as hell
That makes a lot of sense. I can see a case if his/her/their intention was to deceive for whatever reason, like personal gain.
The creative solution to the “double spend” problem is the valuable piece. The other pieces, cryptographic hashing and proof-of-work have been around for some time. Algorithms make up the largest pool of software patents.
If it went private (it's actually patent pending once publically released; even if CC licensed, the license is null re: invalid ownership), an owner could do what MasterCard and Visa do: percentage of transaction, etc. I bet they could even make a case for ownership of his 1+ million coins ($6.4 billion USD).
The technology is already out of the bag, though, it's not going back in.
If I read your link correctly, retroactivity, at least by what your article is addressing, is an ability held by the federal government, and only the government. And moreover, its about updating the rules and validity of the patent.
Im not sure its relevancy to retroactive creation of patents in this context. I agree it was interesting though.
It couldn't be patented since it's been public knowledge for a while:
"In order for an invention to be patentable it must be new as defined in the patent law, which provides that an invention cannot be patented if: the claimed invention was patented, described in a printed publication, or in public use, on sale, or otherwise available to the public before the effective filing date of the claimed invention” or . . ."[1]
But it was new, it wasn't previously described in print, and it wasn't available to the public...
...oh, before the effective filing date. There's the rub.
But couldn't the case could be made that all of those conditions applied at the time Satoshi released it; and, had the rightful owner known of its existence, would have applied?
I just think the anonymity is really interesting. Why be anonymous? I don't think it's open-source altruism like the mythology suggests. I think it's greed. If he'd developed it for someone else or while working for someone else or on/with (their) prior art, that's a damn good reason to hide. So is (at present) the $6.4 billion USD value of his 980,000 bitcoins.
He helps you see what's right in front of you, namely that people do wrong things not because they are evil or bad, but because they are weak.
Once you understand people as inherently weak, that they do stupid shit because they are essentially helpless, not because they're bad or evil or cruel, it becomes so much easier to forgive.
Mental toughness is all about forgiving and forgetting, and you learn to forgive only by accepting that people are weak, that people are essentially incapable of doing what's right.
Here one of my favorite quotes from the book:
“She is so unhappy! Ah, how unhappy! She believes there must be righteousness everywhere. She expects it. She doesn't see that it's impossible for people to be righteous and she is angry at it.”