LSD has no such traditions. Its just a chemical to get you high.

LSD is a special case because it's very new. There hasn't been enough time to develop traditions around its use. That's not true for other, very similar drugs. These drugs have long traditions of usage outside the west. That includes peyote, psychedelic mushrooms, Ayahuasca, and ibogaine, to name just a few.

Typically these drugs are taken in group settings with an experienced person or group of people to guide the experience. It's really completely contrary to our current medical system where the patient is given a drug and sent on their way. Medical practitioners have sometimes used them in a one-on-one setting, which can probably work as well, but still represents an inherent clash with the medical establishment, and is quite contrary to how the traditional cultures where these drugs were first used have used them.

I'd totally agree with you that none of these drugs should be available at the corner 7-11. These drugs aren't compatible with our consumer driven culture. They're all very powerful drugs that invoke a profound experience on the user and need to be respected. But also our medical establishment really isn't suited to their use either. So what's to be done?

Umm.. no. It's no surprise to everyone that countries spy on one another. It's a big surprise to most that the US government is spying on everyone in the world, including its citizens.

In this case the wife is played by the American people, Not Russia.

He said he didn't have the documents with him to steal, and destroyed them after he gave them to the journalists. Now.. he could be lying of course but...

Snowden is a sharp guy. He knows that having those documents with him would make him a really, really good target to just be killed by the US CIA, or be kidnapped by whatever they're calling the KGB these days. Remember the US is the country that waterboarded people, and said it wasn't torture.

Now... whether he's given some form of assistance to Russia is a different matter. We all know he's willing to act as a political puppet for Putin, throwing him some softball questions to deny the Russians aren't spying on it's citizens. "Yes Mr. Putin sir, oh greatest leader of Russia Sir! You certainly aren't spying on YOUR citizens like those dirty, dirty Americans are, right sir?"

The sad thing is- Snowden's actions will probably hurt us abroad and not do a thing to stop the fascist and creepy internal spying on U.S. citizens.

You might be right. But the thing about Snowden's actions are that it put the burden on the American people, and the government to do something. If they don't, so be it, but he's giving us the chance to. If he didn't, most Americans would still be living in silent bliss about the spying going on.

Now, as far as who hurt who, I'd say the US government is FAR more responsible for hurting it's own relationships by doing the spying in the first place.

    It's sort of like cheating on your wife, then getting mad at a mutual friend when the mutual friend tells your wife. Then end of your marriage isn't really the fault of your friend, and it's not your friends problem if you don't learn anything from it and become a better person.

Are you kidding me?

Russia would be tough, but Snowden only wound up in Russia after he was left with no other options. So if he kept a low profile, he'd never have wound up in Russia.

If you think the US doesn't have the power to take it's own citizens from many, many countries in the world and just make them disappear, you're living in a delusion, The US has a golden ticket that the lawyers have been ever-expanding their justification to do anything. It's called the Authorization_for_Use_of_Military_Force_Against_Terrorists, and it's been used to justify killing and targeting people that have no connection to the Sept 11 attacks. You think they wouldn't try use it to legally justify kidnapping Snowden?

And if they couldn't do that, you think they wouldn't use a CIA operative to kidnap him, or get some other group to do it? Countries are mean motherfuckers. You're under the misapprehension that countries actions are ruled by laws. They aren't, they're ruled by politics and what they can get away with. The OP is right. If Snowden hadn't put up a big profile rather quickly, the US govt would have found him and hung him out to dry in one way or another. (And I'm certain Ed Snowden is under no illusion this would have happened, and likely was a major reason he DID come forward).

You've missed a very, very big loophole. The US government decides NOT to prosecute him. Banks commit massive fraud and destroy our economy in 2008.. and... nobody gets prosecuted. That was most certainly a political decision to prosecute or not. It happens all the time. It's really quite business as usual.

What I'd like to see is the Obama administration simply say they were wrong to spy on Americans and vacuum up masses amounts of intelligence without a warrant, then stop doing that crap and pass a law that says they can't. Then refuse to prosecute Snowden for any wrongdoing.

The law works like this ALL the time. I'm no fool and I sure as hell realize this isn't going to happen anytime soon. But wait a few years for current guys to get out of office, and someone else to get in (likely a Democrat wanting to distinguish themselves from the past, or one of those extrodinarily rare beed of non-crazy Republicans who also are wiling to stand up to their crazy party every so often). Then it might, just might happen. But not for perhaps 5-10 years.

Ahh.. the one upsmanship of sexism. What fun!

It reminds me of an old joke. During WWII a high ranking Soviet official walks out of a meeting with Stalin, obviously upset, muttering under his breath "Mustached asshole!". The secretary overhears him, and goes in and tells Stalin he just heard the official mutter "Mustached asshole!". Stalin calls in the official and asks him "Comrade, Who were you referring to when you said "Mustached asshole"? The official without hesitation says "I was referring to Hitler of course!". Stalin thanks him and calls the secretary in, asking her "And who did YOU think he was referring to, comrade?"

I think you're sort of missing the point. Sexism is sexism. You're still dividing the world up into sexes and saying one persons sexism is better or worse or not as important than someone else's sexism. Uhh.. also a form of sexism.

Isn't not discriminating on the basis of sex simply not discriminating on the basis of sex? You're kind of saying "Well fuck you and the discrimination you face because mine (or womens) is FAR worse". That's counter-productive. If you're against discrimination, you're against it, no matter who's being discriminated against.

  We need a lot less angry testosterone driven assholes.

This is just another form is sexism. I'm really tired of this bullshit about the "testerone driven male". As if all aggression is male and derived from masculine hormones. Can we please stop this bullshit? Men and women are different, it's true. But is one form of being an asshole any better or worse than another? Is asshole diversity somehow "good"?

The pendulum of sexism is drifting towards males, and there seems to be a distinct anti-male form of sexism in the world now. It's exemplified by this statement about "testosterone driven", as if men are simply slaves to hormones. It's just as sexist as women being accused of the same thing. (I think we're all familiar with the women controlled by their fluctuating hormones meme). Reversing it and putting the same thing on all men is just as sexist. So please stop this stereotype.

>80% of NBA players are black, 70% of NFL players are black. Is anyone asking them for more "diversity"? Yeah I thought not.

Maybe it's because there's around 500 NBA players, and around 1700 NFL players. For comparison, Google has 50,000 employees.

So if you're concerned about people having equal access to high paying jobs, who are you going to go after, the NBA or NFL, with a combined 2000 jobs, or Google, with 50,000?

It's not about "fairness" in each industry or "diversity" (that's really just marketing in our current culture), it's about different groups of people having access to well paying jobs.

Now, I'll be the first to tell you I don't think Google is racist, and there's MANY different reasons for the racial disparity. But trying to paint this as a numbers game where each industry has to have balance is really missing the point here. I'm actually totally against things like affirmative action. I don't think you can solve racial inequality through a socially acceptable form of racism.

It's true, but it's also just part of the way the world works. It's not just Silicon Valley. The big difference there is that Smart People have far more of a chance of first succeeding because software is "hard", and requires smart people in the first place to do anything useful.

1. By definition, most of the population is not-so-smart. (Please note, this does NOT mean smart people are better than everyone else, just smarter)

2. It takes smart people, and often times a particular kind of smart person to distinguish the smart people from the not-so-smart, but overly confident people.

3. People are heavily biased towards confident people. Confidence everyone can recognize. (as evidenced by the rise of Sara Palin, who has no business being confident, but yet was/is beloved by a certain segment of the populace).

4. There's an inverse relationship between skill and confidence. The more skillful people become, the less confident they are. (Primarly because they realize how much they really don't know).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...

So given the above, it's a natural tendency as a company grows that it'll start to get filled with people who aren't quite as smart as the founders. It's really inevitable at a certain point of growth because you'll just need more people, and a larger percentage of them will be not-so-smart. They'll start promoting the confident, but less skilled people because of point 2 and 3. This will create a feedback loop (less smart promotes even less smart people), and eventually the company is filled with morons who coast on the success of others. (i.e. Microsoft).

A LOT of content these days is saved on the web. I type a lot of things on the web now, and lose quite a bit because often times there's no save feature at all, just post. At any time I could want to reference another browser window, have the browser crash, or accidentally close the window and lose everything I'm typing. That happens a lot, and I doubt I'm the only one.

In fact, with the web I lose a LOT more than I ever did 20 years ago, since the save features are rare, and auto-save is non-existent. I find myself using desktop apps less and less. Why would I open up Word for instance? The last time I used a word processor was editing my resume. Even that's a little anachronistic, but there's currently not a good alternative.

And no, I'm not even "the younger generation". But the point being, the web hasn't caught up to the desktop at all in terms of not losing content.

I found his post to question conventional wisdom, but it's certainly not "un-educated". You seem to be responding to someone else's post, or someone else's opinion. Being "an old guy", perhaps you're simply making the same response that's won you praise over your entire life. i.e. "women have had to fight for rights and were actively discriminated against". That seems to be your entire response. While what you say is true, the conversation has shifted among generations now, so perhaps you need to make note of that.

I really think you need to go back and re-read what the OP said (especially if your response is it's simply "un-educated"). He's simply questioning whether the the gains women have gotten came through second wave feminism or through other means. I think there's a lot of truth to that. A lot of women went to work because of economic need, not because of ideology. Economically having half the work force idle isn't advantageous. Essentially a lot of women got jobs because the family needed the money, not because they read "the second sex", or because Gloria Steinhem existed. You can disagree if you like, and that's fine, but having a different opinion on where change comes isn't un-educated.

Nowhere did the OP make any claims that banks wouldn't give out loans, or that women weren't discriminated against. That's an argument I think you've been making for years, and people of your generation have fought you on. The OP is younger than you, and comes from a very different background and likely takes very different opinions than people of your generation. So taking him to task and putting him in the place of a member of your generation kind of misses the point, and the point that the OP was trying to make.

I think you're onto something about up/down votes. Reddit has a system where you can sort by "controversial" but that in itself is a problem since it's just a pain in the butt to have to sort through two different systems of moderating.

The one system I REALLY dislike is the only positive system of upvotes. The most obvious problem is there's little means to correct information that turns out to be innaccurate.

Say someone posts something that initially looks extremely promissing and gets highly rated. Someone else posts a rebuttal that completely destroys the argument, and only create miss-information. But yet that initial high rating is very hard to get rid of, since there's no negative feedback.

The other problem is that with no negative feedback, it's hard to filter out the utter dreck and crap. If everything starts at 0, and can never go lower than 0, how do you get rid of the spam, nonsense, offtopic shit, poor posts, etc? That needs to get lowered down to a level below the fresh posts, otherwise it's just hard to wade through all the dreck to find something to boost.

I've never thought it was supposed to promote one kind of behavior or another. Upvote/Downvote is a means to improve signal/noise ratio, and make it possible for tens of thousands of people to communicate. It's a form of moderating, and frankly that's how it's always been. That's how slashdot was designed, and why we call it moderating, not "social conditioning". It works relatively well for what it's supposed to and certainly better than nothing at all (though I prefer reddits moderation system where there's not a limit of 5 to a post, and everyone can moderate all the time). I've never heard anyone express the idea it's a form of conditioning.

To me the idea that receiving attention (no matter if it's good or bad) is encouraging behavior, while being ignored discourages behavior isn't all that surprising. We're social creatures that evolved in groups of 150. Being "cast out" of the group is the ultimate in shame. People have used ignoring others as a form of punishment for a LONG time. Hell, that's what a kill list was for way back in the 90s on Usenet. That's exactly what the Amish do via shunning when they want to control peoples behaviour. It's the same with other social species like dogs as well. If your dog bites you for instance, the best thing to do is to ignore it for several days. Don't look at it, act like the dog doesn't exist. When it's time to feed the dog, have someone else from outside your house feed the dog. Dogs DO NOT want to be outside the pack. If you punish the dog, you're really just engaging it and playing a dominance game. If you simply ignore it and make the dog think it's no longer in the pack... it'll get the message. Being outside the pack= death. The same is true in human interaction as well.