promethea.incorporated

chroniclesofrettek:

nezumiko:

kgfibrostuff:

The CDC can suck my ass

For friends not in the spoonie community, this is about the CDC’s recent guidelines that attempt to combat drug addiction in America by severely restricting access to opioid medications for ALL patients except for terminal cancer patients.

Without opioid pain medications, I would have had to quit working and go on disability nine years before I did.

Without opioid pain medications I would have been housebound and dependent on caregivers for another 10 years after that.

Without opioid pain medications I will be less active, more sedentary, and more sick.

The CDC says opioids don’t work for chronic pain; they’re wrong. They don’t work for some chronic pain. They don’t cure chronic pain. But they make life liveable for millions of chronic pain patients. Estimates of chronic pain sufferers in America range from a low of 39 million to a high of 110 million. That low-water mark excluded people with intermittent chronic pain, like endometriosis or migraine, as well as omitting people with neurogenic pain. Most reasonable guesses put the number at 70–80 million.

The cure for drug abuse and addiction has nothing to do with restricting pain patients’ access to medication, or forcing them to give up what quality of life they have managed to attain through having their pain managed with medication.

It’s not about labeling pain patients as addicts for taking medication to which they can build a physical dependence. (By that definition, every time I go on prednisone and have to taper off it, I’m a prednisone addict!)

It’s not about calling a patient in chronic pain asking their doctor for relief a drug-seeker.

The cure lies in combating the issues that lead to drug abuse, like poverty and an economy that sees the rich getting richer while the poor and middle class fall further and further behind. It lies in giving hope to people in hopeless situations. Not taking hope away from several million more.

Chronic Pain is the worst thing, on par with depression. When my foot was in chronic pain I was literally making plans to cut it off so I wouldn’t hurt anymore. Give people in Chronic Pain what they need. Fuck the drug war. 

(via wirehead-wannabe)

1 month ago · tagged #the best heuristic for oppressed people since sharp stick time #drugs cw · 7,834 notes · source: kgfibrostuff · .permalink

Pure Caffeine Powder Is Killing Young People — And Now Lawmakers Are Cracking Down

wirehead-wannabe:

nostalgebraist:

tentativelyassembled:

jbeshir:

voximperatoris:

michaelblume:

dragon-in-a-fez:

mic-26-1074425974-yahoopartner:

A deadly powdered drug is catching the attention of U.S. lawmakers, and it isn’t heroin or cocaine.

It’s pure caffeine powder.

A single teaspoon of pure caffeine powder is equal to around 28 cups of coffee, and “very small amounts may cause accidental overdose,” according to the Food and Drug Administration. Overdose symptoms “can include rapid or dangerously erratic heartbeat, seizures and death.“ 

The powder is sold in bulk bags over the internet, and it’s nearly impossible to measure out safe doses using everyday kitchen tools. “Volume measures, such as teaspoons, are not precise enough to calculate how many milligrams of caffeine are in the serving size,” according to the FDA.

Senators want to ban it: In a letter sent to the FDA on Tuesday, Democratic senators campaigned for a federal ban on the sale of pure caffeine powder, the Hill reported. The senators reportedly said the FDA has been a “bitter disappointment” in dealing with the dangerous product.

The lawmakers’ concern stems from two overdose deaths from pure caffeine powder in 2014. 

The first was Logan Stiner, a high school senior who died after using caffeine powder to boost his energy — but misjudged the dosage, according to the New York Times. The second was James Wade Sweatt, a 24-year-old recent college graduate who reportedly died after consuming a blended drink containing caffeine powder. 

What the FDA has done so far: In a statement following Stiner and Sweatt’s deaths, the FDA recommended that people avoid pure caffeine powder. And in 2015, the agency sent “warning letters” to five distributors of the powder, “because these products are dangerous and present a significant or unreasonable risk of illness or injury to consumers,” according to a statement. 

But it hasn’t been enough, the senators argued. 

“It is disturbing that despite two unintended and untimely deaths associated with powdered caffeine, the FDA has done little to regulate these products or adequately enforce the standards in place to protect Americans,” their letter read, according to the Hill.

“These products do not provide a way to measure a safe dosage per FDA recommendations, and are sold in quantities that could easily kill hundreds of individuals if ingested incorrectly,” the letter also stated.

Caffeine kills in other ways, too: We’re talking about energy drinks, like Rockstar and Red Bull. A November study found that consuming just one energy drink causes a significant spike in blood pressure — a risk factor for stroke and heart attacks, Mic reported at the time. 

The FDA has also investigated a number of deaths in recent years linked to Monster and 5-Hour Energy shots.

“I bet a lot of people don’t realize how much caffeine they’re getting,“ Dr. Nieca Goldberg, a cardiologist and director of the Joan H. Tisch Center for Women’s Health at NYU Langone Medical Center, said at the time.

*two people under the age of 25 die of doing something ridiculous*

“lawmakers cracking down on new drug of choice for youths”

“I bet a lot of people don’t realize how much caffeine they’re getting,“

Wow, I guess what we’d better do is crack down on the one mechanism of caffeine distribution where you do know exactly how much you’re getting.

It’s an uncalled-for meddling proposal, I’m the first to agree.

But taking caffeine powder is honestly a pretty dumb way to do it. I can think of any good reason to choose it over pills, and you’re much more likely to take the wrong dose by mistake.

And I say this with a large bottle of caffeine pills right in front of me on my desk. People have an irrational aversion to caffeine pills because they’re more obviously drugs—even though you can go into any coffeeshop and get more caffeine than is in a normal pill.

I think the main use I’d have for powder would be in making things that aren’t caffeinated be caffeinated. This *does* entail some sizeable risk of a dosing error if you’re not careful, and caffeine is not very forgiving, but it’s also probably pretty neat to be able to have an arbitrary power of caffeination. Caffeinated ice cream? Done. Caffeinated chocolate dessert? Done. Caffeinated scrambled eggs? No one can stop you. It’d be a cooking ingredient.

The ban idea is silly. It’s already buried away on the Internet where you need to know you’re looking for it to find it, it isn’t like there’s pouches of it in supermarkets convincing foolish people in a hurry to grab it and accidentally take 20 coffees at once, and that deals with about 99% of any problem.

Even from a consequentialist viewpoint, they need a remaining problem they’re solving first and the candidate they propose isn’t much of one.

Completely agree that banning seems an overwrought reaction to the situation, but I’m going to second the recommendation to just use pills b/c it’s a lot easier to get the dosage right. If you want powder, you can always grind the pills yourself, my roommate used to and it seemed pretty easy.

Yeah I’m kind of confused – what is caffeine powder doing for anyone except occasionally killing people?

I am wary of the cooking ingredient idea – at best it’d be a largely frivolous/novelty-value seasoning which is lethal if you swallow a tablespoon of it, which seems like pushing “high risk, low return” to comedic levels

Still seems like at most this calls for a big warning label or restrictions that only allow it in “would have been banned stores” or something.

Sell standardized 3-10% (not sure which concentration would be optimal) caffeine powder in regular shops for safer dosing by unskilled people, reserve pure powder to the same stores selling pure heroin. Seems ridiculously obvious to me.

2 months ago · tagged #drugs cw · 93 notes · source: mic.com · .permalink

2centjubilee:

I think I have thoroughly disproved the null hypothesis as to why my exercise was more difficult.  I actually let myself slack off for not multiple days but multiple weeks (the horror!) due to trying to extend my caffeine withdrawal further to reset my tolerance closer to “zero.”  Today, I started exercising again.  And I had commenced taking stimulants

On the balance exercise, I was as good as I had been at the top of my form, roughly, which wasn’t stellar, but… it wasn’t bad.  So the cause wasn’t food, or lack of practice…

It was the drugs.

My experience as well.

Most interestingly, ADHD meds turned my reaction to fatigue completely around. Previously even slight exertions of effort were like “I know I “””could””” do it if I just “””tried properly”””; it’s not a question of muscles but a question of willpower; but I can’t try properly and I know that a lot of people think I’m a shitty person because of it and scorn me and I’m going to cry”, whereas now I still might start that way (but not as badly as before) but after a few hours it’s turned upside down and I’m completely non-ironically endorsing corny fitness motivational slogans like “PAIN IS JUST WEAKNESS LEAVING THE BODY” (very much something I had not expected to ever find myself doing) so that at the end of a long bike trek my thoughts are basically a looping of one of those sites collecting the most over-the-top ones to make fun of them, except that I’m mocking the mockers by wearing it with pride.

I was not lazy or weak-willed like people tend to assume by default, just stimulant-deficient. Vices and virtues don’t exist. There is only chemistry (and electromagnetism), and those who don’t have the knowledge or opportunity to use it.

2 months ago · tagged #drugs cw #gfy cops i've got a prescription #clockwork people · 12 notes · source: 2centjubilee · .permalink

socialjusticemunchkin:

ilzolende:

In “ridiculous overregulation”:

SF requires a license for fortune-telling, removing curses, and so on. (See Article 17.1 of the San Francisco Police Code.

It shall be unlawful for any person to advertise or offer or engage in the activity, enterprise, profession, trade, or undertaking of fortunetelling with the object of gain, benefit or advantage, whether direct or indirect, without a valid permit issued by the San Francisco Police Department. Gain, benefit or advantage includes but is not limited to economic remuneration of any kind, including authorization to use credit issued to another, use of another’s property or assets, loans, or the provision of tangible items.

Opponents of corporate personhood may appreciate that “Persons as used in Sections 1300 to 1321 shall mean an individual. Corporations and other legal entities shall not be entitled to a fortunetelling permit.”

Unfortunately, all would-be for-profit fortune-tellers must disclose their “full true name” to get a license, which may be a problem for all you mages out there.

If you’re wondering what fortune-telling is:

(a) Fortunetelling shall mean the telling of fortunes, forecasting of futures, or reading the past, by means of any occult, psychic power, faculty, force, clairvoyance, cartomancy, psychometry, phrenology, spirits, tea leaves, tarot cards, scrying, coins, sticks, dice, sand, coffee grounds, crystal gazing or other such reading, or through mediumship, seership, prophecy, augury, astrology, palmistry, necromancy, mindreading, telepathy or other craft, art, science, talisman, charm, potion, magnetism, magnetized article or substance, or by any such similar thing or act. It shall also include effecting spells, charms, or incantations, or placing, or removing curses or advising the taking or administering of what are commonly called love powders or potions in order, for example, to get or recover property, stop bad luck, give good luck, put bad luck on a person or animal, stop or injure the business or health of a person or shorten a person’s life, obtain success in business, enterprise, speculation and games of chance, win the affection of a person, make one person marry or divorce another, induce a person to make or alter a will, tell where money or other property is hidden, make a person to dispose of property in favor of another, or other such similar activity.

(b) Fortunetelling shall also include pretending to perform these actions.

(h/t Lowering the Bar)

original post

That’s probably related to mystic-religious scams where the con artist identifies a sufficiently vulnerable person and fucks with their mind and offers to remove the curse of “having any money or mental health at all”. Which is pretty clearly blatant fraud and thus my libertarian instincts aren’t as excessively offended by this as they would be if something without such a track record of massively harmful anti-consumer activities was regulated in the same way.

It’s still obscenely ridiculous but I can’t immediately think of an obviously better alternative for achieving the intended goal of making “that asshole who stole $200,000 and ran” identifiable, and “promethea can’t instantly invent a better way of doing it” a pretty damn high bar for any actually existing regulation.

The purpose of this legislation is to regulate fortunetellers, psychics, and other similar businesses so that the City and County of San Francisco can efficiently and thoroughly investigate fraud and deception, protect the public by preventing people who have been charged with deceptive practices from having easy access to persons who may be vulnerable to fraud or confidence games, to ensure that consumers are provided with information regarding services, rates, and complaint procedures

Of course, it’s also a barrier to entry which artificially hurts poor people, but fortune-telling isn’t the same kind of a legitimate business as hair-braiding, drug-dealing or sex work, and the criteria are basically “we want to know who you are in case you start scamming people because a lot of you guys are going to start scamming people” instead of “pay an imperial fuckton of money to favored special interests for lessons completely unrelated to your job” so, as far as goverment regulations go, this is fucking excellent and comparatively non-burdensome. And there’s a case to be made that fortune-telling basically in itself involves misrepresenting the nature of the service sold, or at least belongs in the general category of things that should be in Banned Product Stores. When If I were to become the dictator, this wouldn’t be the first regulation I abolish. Not saying I’d keep it, just saying that it wouldn’t be the first one on the chopping block.

For example, there is Article 32A which defines poker, 11 for miniature golf alone, 9 regulates what water may legally be used for (how about just making people pay for the water they use), 24 regulates street artists and I can’t even tell which parts of it are repealed or not, 40 mandates employers to be like “drugs are bad mmmkay” to their workers, there’s some weird ad hoc patch of rent control from the 70′s, and every other article seems to include something in the vein of:

• Sex work is banned.
  
• Not calling it sex work is not enough to make in un-banned.
• Sneaky ways of trying to do sex work are still banned.
• That clever hack you just thought of? It’s called sex work, we know of it, and it’s banned.
• Seriously, why is it so hard for you guys to accept that consenting adults won’t be allowed to make a honest living this way? It’s fucking banned.
• This may be San Francisco but our government is still a bunch of prudes who will only allow exchange of sexual favors for material favors to occur within marriage.
• Showing tits between 2:00 and 6:00 is regulated unless the person showing them is a “he”. Not showing tits counts as showing tits if we can’t tell the difference easily enough.
• We have no idea people other than “he” or “she” exist.

And of course sleeping in cars is prohibited because in a city where rents are as high as the mean citizen, even with cannabis georg not counted because he’s an outlier, the last thing it needs is poor people having affordable places to sleep in that are not the streets. Also, MINORS ARE SUBJECTED TO A CURFEW AND MAY NOT BUY OR POSSESS THICK SHARPIES WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS POLICE STATE BULLSHIT

(still better than Finland tho)

(via socialjusticemunchkin)

3 months ago · tagged #bitching about the country of birth #drugs cw #ageism cw #regulation cw · 57 notes · source: ilzolende · .permalink

ilzolende:

In “ridiculous overregulation”:

SF requires a license for fortune-telling, removing curses, and so on. (See Article 17.1 of the San Francisco Police Code.

It shall be unlawful for any person to advertise or offer or engage in the activity, enterprise, profession, trade, or undertaking of fortunetelling with the object of gain, benefit or advantage, whether direct or indirect, without a valid permit issued by the San Francisco Police Department. Gain, benefit or advantage includes but is not limited to economic remuneration of any kind, including authorization to use credit issued to another, use of another’s property or assets, loans, or the provision of tangible items.

Opponents of corporate personhood may appreciate that “Persons as used in Sections 1300 to 1321 shall mean an individual. Corporations and other legal entities shall not be entitled to a fortunetelling permit.”

Unfortunately, all would-be for-profit fortune-tellers must disclose their “full true name” to get a license, which may be a problem for all you mages out there.

If you’re wondering what fortune-telling is:

(a) Fortunetelling shall mean the telling of fortunes, forecasting of futures, or reading the past, by means of any occult, psychic power, faculty, force, clairvoyance, cartomancy, psychometry, phrenology, spirits, tea leaves, tarot cards, scrying, coins, sticks, dice, sand, coffee grounds, crystal gazing or other such reading, or through mediumship, seership, prophecy, augury, astrology, palmistry, necromancy, mindreading, telepathy or other craft, art, science, talisman, charm, potion, magnetism, magnetized article or substance, or by any such similar thing or act. It shall also include effecting spells, charms, or incantations, or placing, or removing curses or advising the taking or administering of what are commonly called love powders or potions in order, for example, to get or recover property, stop bad luck, give good luck, put bad luck on a person or animal, stop or injure the business or health of a person or shorten a person’s life, obtain success in business, enterprise, speculation and games of chance, win the affection of a person, make one person marry or divorce another, induce a person to make or alter a will, tell where money or other property is hidden, make a person to dispose of property in favor of another, or other such similar activity.

(b) Fortunetelling shall also include pretending to perform these actions.

(h/t Lowering the Bar)

original post

That’s probably related to mystic-religious scams where the con artist identifies a sufficiently vulnerable person and fucks with their mind and offers to remove the curse of “having any money or mental health at all”. Which is pretty clearly blatant fraud and thus my libertarian instincts aren’t as excessively offended by this as they would be if something without such a track record of massively harmful anti-consumer activities was regulated in the same way.

It’s still obscenely ridiculous but I can’t immediately think of an obviously better alternative for achieving the intended goal of making “that asshole who stole $200,000 and ran” identifiable, and “promethea can’t instantly invent a better way of doing it” a pretty damn high bar for any actually existing regulation.

The purpose of this legislation is to regulate fortunetellers, psychics, and other similar businesses so that the City and County of San Francisco can efficiently and thoroughly investigate fraud and deception, protect the public by preventing people who have been charged with deceptive practices from having easy access to persons who may be vulnerable to fraud or confidence games, to ensure that consumers are provided with information regarding services, rates, and complaint procedures

Of course, it’s also a barrier to entry which artificially hurts poor people, but fortune-telling isn’t the same kind of a legitimate business as hair-braiding, drug-dealing or sex work, and the criteria are basically “we want to know who you are in case you start scamming people because a lot of you guys are going to start scamming people” instead of “pay an imperial fuckton of money to favored special interests for lessons completely unrelated to your job” so, as far as goverment regulations go, this is fucking excellent and comparatively non-burdensome. And there’s a case to be made that fortune-telling basically in itself involves misrepresenting the nature of the service sold, or at least belongs in the general category of things that should be in Banned Product Stores. When If I were to become the dictator, this wouldn’t be the first regulation I abolish. Not saying I’d keep it, just saying that it wouldn’t be the first one on the chopping block.

For example, there is Article 32A which defines poker, 11 for miniature golf alone, 9 regulates what water may legally be used for (how about just making people pay for the water they use), 24 regulates street artists and I can’t even tell which parts of it are repealed or not, 40 mandates employers to be like “drugs are bad mmmkay” to their workers, there’s some weird ad hoc patch of rent control from the 70′s, and every other article seems to include something in the vein of:

• Sex work is banned.
  
• Not calling it sex work is not enough to make in un-banned.
• Sneaky ways of trying to do sex work are still banned.
• That clever hack you just thought of? It’s called sex work, we know of it, and it’s banned.
• Seriously, why is it so hard for you guys to accept that consenting adults won’t be allowed to make a honest living this way? It’s fucking banned.
• This may be San Francisco but our government is still a bunch of prudes who will only allow exchange of sexual favors for material favors to occur within marriage.
• Showing tits between 2:00 and 6:00 is regulated unless the person showing them is a “he”. Not showing tits counts as showing tits if we can’t tell the difference easily enough.
• We have no idea people other than “he” or “she” exist.

And of course sleeping in cars is prohibited because in a city where rents are as high as the mean citizen, even with cannabis georg not counted because he’s an outlier, the last thing it needs is poor people having affordable places to sleep in that are not the streets. Also, MINORS ARE SUBJECTED TO A CURFEW AND MAY NOT BUY OR POSSESS THICK SHARPIES WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS POLICE STATE BULLSHIT

3 months ago · tagged #vulgar libertarianism #the best heuristic for oppressed people since sharp stick time #drugs cw #regulation cw #ageism cw · 57 notes · source: ilzolende · .permalink

‘laziness’

endecision:

theunitofcaring:

I’m a lazy person.

What I mean by this is that I do not do my homework; I miss deadlines at work because I’d rather play games than do the work; I have projects I’m excited about but instead of starting them I scroll aimlessly through tumblr. I have occasionally failed to turn in important assignments because I didn’t do them because I didn’t feel like it.

My whole life I’ve thought of this like a personality trait. I can’t do things unless they’re interesting because I’m lazy. I tend to get in trouble with jobs and at school because I’m lazy. I hated the personality trait, I wanted to change it, I aspired rather desperately to be a hard-working person and caused myself a great deal of pain trying to imitate one, but I was still thinking of it as some sort of fundamental tendency, some sort of fact about me.

Keep reading

This post reminds me of how, from the inside, sleep paralysis feels exactly like “I’m too lazy to move and I could if I tried harder”. And then I wake up and it’s like, no, I was literally paralyzed.

Yes. So much to both of these. I call the general insight behind it “clockwork people”; instead of magical free-will machines people are essentially deterministic patterns that are only able to respond in certain ways. Thus, it’s useless to assign blame and praise for the fictions of vice and virtue and things are simply about understanding and using the patterns to achieve the desired outcomes. I may still get emotionally-angry at something and have a low-level desire to assign blame but that’s just another manifestation of the same pattern and nothing more. It results in a weird mix of tranquility and frustration at the understanding that one’s options in any situation are limited and even the options one can select from those are limited by the same things, and thus it’s kind-of-like-okay to achieve suboptimal outcomes as a result but simultaneously it’s like “imagine if you could somehow unlock ‘free will’ for yourself; it would be like an IRL godmode or at least noclip and the only thing that’s keeping such superhuman powers out of reach are just the bounds of flesh and bone and the laws governing neurons and it’s so close but so far away”.

Then there’s the unending hunger for agency, the things that bring one closer to this impossible dream and there’s something quite exquisite in the pain of loss when one knows that something that does it is a Dangerous Forbidden Technique because it has exponentially increasing downsides or limited use in any specific amount of time and thus the powers are right there, and one can taste the apotheosis every now and then but most of the time it’s just that much out of reach.

TL;DR: “We’re all puppets, but I can see the strings.”

(Then Doctor Manhattan was promptly ruined by something trivially ridiculous because Moore isn’t intelligent enough to consistently and credibly model someone on that level. Intelligence, upwards and outwards of oneself seems like a pretty hard limit, and trying to pass as that from below/beside may seem believable to ones on one’s own, but is transparently cargo-cultish to ones on the other level. In fact, exactly like awareness of sleep paralysis functions. There are no coincidences.)

3 months ago · tagged #drugs cw #user's guide to interacting with a promethea #clockwork people · 491 notes · source: theunitofcaring · .permalink