Homeless for nine months and about to be officially destitute tomorrow. At least I’ve had a vehicle to have shelter and live in a warm area.
Combo of Homelessness and poverty is a cycle that is quite difficult to get out of. I took on programming work from nice folks while still homeless, which absolutely backfired. Lack of a normal safe routine and attempting to work from public when under such stress can be an effort in futility. Thus couldn’t work and couldn’t get back on my feet. It’s a vicious cycle
The other consequences are deteriorated mental state from isolation, paranoia, and depressive symptoms all of which serve to make digging out of any hole seemingly impossible.
Constant never ending stress, concerns about basic survival, concerns about physical safety change your mentality. Idgaf attitude prevails, to the point where crime including violence seem less unjustified.
I could go on, and obviously this is just an anectode
Dosage is the critical factor for any drug and everyone is absolutely unique (and, more so, in unique life circumstances at a given point) as it pertains to mind altering substances and the actual outcome of their lives. Set and setting matter. If you’re depressed and doing nothing but getting stoned, you’re using weed to keep yourself busy. It offers potential for “wasting” away, by staying stoned.
Marijuana is commonly abused and does ruin lives. Washed up marijuana addicts are common, yielding lost potential for the addict and a loss for society. The unproductive stoner has long been an American cliche, but true. (file_id.diz)
Meth, on the other hand, leaves little room for responsible recreational use. I’d be shocked if more than 1% of people who’ve ever tried meth would call themselves “responsible casual users”.
We don’t have point of reference outside of Wall-e to presume a robot is conscious in any way. However a living organism like a plant may experience being.
Consciousness described as a physical process is different than explaining how you, visarga, are able to experience reality. Understanding how that idea of internal experience, of being, could relate to a plant, seems the revelation here.
Your viewpoint is both provincial and biased, and, ironically, not wrong in ways that conflict with your moral assertions.
SV has a disgusting mafia in place protecting itself and “friends”. And there’s reason to believe in widespread cooperation between major SV players and govt. All of that is most successful if people don’t find out about it.
So much power has accumulated in SV in recent years that it is trivial to turn the absolute power/corruption speech back on itself.
Did I tell you what people with high level SV connections and connections to Peter Thiel did/said to me? No? There’s other shit going on. Big groups of talent inevitably have bad actors.
Discussed here recently, there’s a path from public to private sector that does serve the need to retain talent, to some degree.
Also, to say they are mostly corrupt or incompetent seems possibly too much of a broad stroke that is based on anecdotes. I don’t believe Snowden, for instance, ever suggested either of those are true — did he?
Finally, if this is your assessment, your standard may be unusually high. Maybe your peers, many not quite as good as you, are actually quite skilled? Just a hunch, could be wrong.
Any objective source for your claims? If your basis is the attitude for such agencies here on hacker news, it’s understandable why you might believe those to be true, but they aren’t.