Well, on one hand, two minutes is unacceptably slow, but on the other hand, why would anyone ever shutdown their computer so often that this matters?

I’m a daily, many times per day, user of cannabis to manage anxiety and RA pain and I agree 100%

Cannabis has been by far the cheapest solution for my pain (it being recreationally legal in my state makes it cheaper than the traditional western medicine route). Cannabis has also been the source of much of my ails, often slashing my motivation or affording me a boredom enhancer just good enough to keep me from my hobbies. Cannabis is rough on the throat and lungs, and it’s smoke (due to the nature of incomplete combustion of hydrocarbons) likely contains a large number of carcinogens and possible mutagens. Cannabis not having potential for addiction does not free it from having habit forming potential, especially in populations prone to substance abuse (such as neurodivergent folks), and as such it should be treated like, and respected as any other kind altering substance.

The legality of a product does not inform it’s health risk nor benefits, and a product being “better” than another product does not inform it’s being “good”

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No, the democrats will embrace transphobia the next election cycle so as to unsuccessfully court the right and alienate the left (a strategy which netted them a solid 1 out of the past three elections, which is 1 more than Jill Stein). This cycle they went after undocumented immigrants.

But many of them didn’t listen, so now we’re all screwed. Hopefully not permanently, but it’s looking grim.

Too many people forget that at the end of the day, if we’re willing to do what it takes, the U.S. is still a democracy and votes are what choose our leaders. Lots of problems and lots of obstacles, but the people saying that voting doesn’t matter are lying to themselves if not to everyone else.

It’s a lie that only benefits the people who don’t want us to vote. If they put that much effort into the lie, it proves that voting matters enough for them to try to stop it.

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I agree, here in Germany they made some kind of voting available for 16 yr old, everyone was like “yeah this is good” I disagreed and got bashed on. (PS: I’m also a teen, and can’t vote yet, I agree it should be higher.)

In general, I think making the right to vote conditional on some sort of intellectual test (which raising the voting age is, in some sense) suffers from at least three problems:

Firstly, my preference for democracy does not just stem from efficacy, but also from a moral angle. People should have a say in how their lives are run, even if they don’t satisfy someone’s criterion for intellectual eligibility.

Secondly, even from an efficacy angle there’s problems with it, and we have historical examples of this. Literacy tests have been used around the globe to effectively bar minorities from voting. E.g. black people in the United States, and indigenous peoples in Latin America. As a result, the needs of those populations were ignored, which I would consider a failure in efficacy.

And finally, literacy is highly subjective. Maybe today the government comes up with a test that you agree with (age 26 and up), but maybe a future government adjusts the test to a point where you disagree (only after retirement, after you’ve lived to see most aspects of life, and are therefore most fit to intelligently cast your vote).

Does this mean I believe in extending suffrage to five year olds? No. I believe there’s a balance to strike, and it’s not a black and white issue. But as the history of literacy tests shows, this is an area to tread incredibly carefully, and I get why people were so quick to downvote you.

That’s an interesting way of thinking about that. Huh. Sone of my favorite bands too. So if we lived under a peaceful just administration then what? Constant peaceful melodies. Do we need a machine to rage against for great music.?? You may be onto something

I guess, if you declare that as good music. which is really subjective. but meh.

Which is funny because Rage broke up when W Bush got elected.

I get your point, but for me, I don’t take anything here on the internet serious. so down votes for me, express I posted something, and several people disliked it. To me, this is funny. I just wanted to hear what aponions others had, which they were hated for…

This was probably all in the phrasing or maybe people just don’t understand the reality of the situation?

I worked for several years doing mobile therapy that included a significant amount of homeless outreach and crisis management. Everyone deserves to be housed, bottom line, but what it takes for that to happen is a complex situation

There’s the “xxx,xxx amount of homeless but xx,xxx,xxx amount of empty homes in america” statistic that people throw around. I forget the exact numbers but I’m pretty sure thats the scale, if not the take away is that you could literally give each homeless person a free house and still have millions of empty houses. But this would not solve homelessness, at least in the current system. The overwhelming majority would be back on the street fairly quickly. Even if you eliminate the need for mortgage there’s still the need for property taxation; if you eliminate that then communities start to get real shitty. Even if you eliminate that there’s still utility and food costs. Even if you eliminate that there’s still maintenance and not actively destroying the place.

Institutionalization isn’t necessarily the answer although in extreme cases it can be. We had supported rehabilitation programs that were pretty successful, basically apartments with staff that would keep tabs on you, help you budget, do resumes, help you get to drs appointments, make sure you took medications (but didn’t force you to unless there was a court order/probation situation and even then it wasn’t like a “force” situation although there was inherent coercion as not taking meds would be reported to po/court), apply for section 8, etc. you would stay there for a year or two and then move to a more independent placement once supports were in place.

There were also longer term programs for people who genuinely struggled and just couldn’t get that step down to work. These were similar but had less focus on connecting to services and were more akin to nursing homes with more psychiatric care

But then there were also more intensive residential programs we referred to for people with more serious mental illness or addiction issues

The issue, of course, was funding. We had like 32 beds in the short term and 11 in the long term. Funding was like 50% state funding, 20% grants, 30% donations and fundraising and the budgets were tight. Meanwhile the town probably had 30-50 actively homeless at any given point on top of whoever wasn’t in the program and another 50-100 with insecure housing. Even the intense programs, which generally had more secure state funding, still had an overall lack of beds and would have very long wait lists. Sad stuff.

That was about a decade ago now, I feel like it has to be worse now post Covid and trump. I can only imagine what the next 4 years will do to their funding

It’s almost as of there are archetypes for patients in hospitals due to common, middle of the bell curve occurrences of comorbidities. Example: diabetic dialysis patient with anemia and 1-2 amputations above/below the knee due to pernicious vascularization complications. No, that’s not your family member, that is a common scenario given the convergence of certain conditions.

Should medical professionals be indiscriminate here? Treat everyone like a dialysis patient? No. That sounds ridiculous because it is. People are wild and varied within every context including homelessness.

Here’s an archetype situation seen among the homeless population. A pernicious issue with lower extremity circulation occurs (due to diabetes, frostbite, infection left untreated) such that patient can no longer walk after receiving medical care (often amputation). Patient is also homeless and can’t just be discharged to street due to inability to walk. Patient needs to be placed, on Medicaid, in a nursing home. Patient is on the sexual predator list and thus no nursing home will allow them in their facility. Patient sits in hospital room taking up space, not receiving medical care because they no longer need any, waiting, for months. That hospital room is now a hotel room with medical professionals supplying room service.

Go to the sex offender registry and do a 3 mile radius search of your own address. Good odds you’ll find some, and more than you think you should. No address, then how do these guys get registered by their location?

It’s not as daily scenario, but a memorable one that happens every 3-6mos like clockwork. And those are just the homeless sex offenders coming in for medical treatment that cannot then just be discharged back to street.

People are not the same and should not be treated as such. You are not wrong there. Destroying children shouldn’t receive the same consideration for an apartment as someone living in their car due to a bit of bad luck.