Counter-anecdote: I was diagnosed sixish months ago, prescribed medication about 3 months ago. The meds don't have the same high of alcohol or weed, but there's definitely an occasional deep sense of calm and wellness - one that's hard not to want, being my chronically depressed self. Definitely enough to set off my "never abuse this, it will end badly" mental alarm
Otherwise though, it checks all the usual boxes - way easier to sit still and be quiet, way easier to do the thing I intended to do when I sat down to do it, way easier to get in and out of focus. Also improved my sleep schedule a surprising amount - between it and melatonin, I've moved from 6am-3pm to ~12am-8:30am, which is wildly outside any of the expectations I've seen set for pharmaceutical remedies, and puts me firmly in 'able to hold a normal adult job without killing yourself through sleep deprevation' territory.
Honestly almost annoying it has such a positive effect since the practical difference between that and addiction are pretty minimal on a short-term basis. I'm deeply uncomfortable with the idea of having to go without it or something filling the same brain-holes for a long period of time precisely because I'm basically worthless without it, in a way I didn't really come to appreciate until after starting medication.
I don't think your last point is a good thing. It sounds like the problem with Academia is the source and requirements of the funding, rather than the work itself.
I'd much rather academia had ample enough funding where people could work on what they wanted and what they felt was useful without the need to appeal to large businesses or metaphorically knife-fight for grants.
The academic/business split is weird. In business, you're much more likely to be unknowingly treading on known ground, but the visibility of lessons learned is, in most cases, incredibly narrow. I've worked on compilers blindly implementing features I know other competitors have worked on but can't cheat off of, and I've worked on systems programming issues that probably pushed at the state of the art, but whose lessons wouldn't go outside my team in any case.
In academia, though, there's a whole host of obstacles to doing anything useful and interesting that have nothing to do with "the problem at hand". So while you can be more confident in the relative novelty of what you're doing, as well as the broad applicability of said work (since the whole point is publishing) the scope of things you actually can work on is incredibly limited until late in your career.
I blame religion. Not all religion, not every religious person, and not exclusively, but looking back - there was a strong emphasis that "we're all awful people really at our core, and the only reason anyone is half decent to anyone is because they don't want to burn in hellfire" in my religious teachings (protestant Wesleyan, primarily).
I bought into that for a long time. Then I dropped religion, and realized I didn't really want to be an awful person, just as a rule of thumb. It wasn't too much of a jump to realize most people weren't awful most of the time, and it's only a handful that, for whatever reason, didn't get the memo. Even if many people manage to convince themselves otherwise.
This is an article written by an angry user whose usecase isn't well supported.
Like, it's a valid gripe I guess, assuming you think music storage and streaming should be perpetually free even if you didn't buy any of it on the platform, but it just doesn't apply to 90% of the userbase - who do license their music through a monthly subscription rather than buying it outright.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not exactly excited about the shutdown of Google Music - but it's hard to take this author seriously.
This doesn't need to happen, but this is the logical conclusion when we ensure most of the housing market is controlled by landlords rather than owned directly by the people living there. Also, when you turn housing into an investment vehicle. Also, remove any and all public housing alternatives. Also fail to build enough housing to create competition in the housing market. Also demolish housing stock serving poorer residents. Also fail to provide the transportation network to make transit from the suburbs cheap and easy. Also concentrate a bunch of upper-middle-class people in an area suffering from all of the above problems.
But then you have to store the entire before & after locally? That's the entire point of using a hash for change detection.