There's a lot more to entheogens than just "dissociatives and deliriants".

I'm not familiar with the wikipedia entry on hallucinogens, but I suggest you find other sources if that's all you found there.

Funny you should bring up e-cigs. It's been an ongoing discussion at my house. I've always enjoyed tobacco, but never was a heavy smoker (no more than about 1/2 pack of cigarettes or maybe a few pipe-fulls per day, but not both). I'm also a martial arts teacher, so I've always struggled with the damage I know the smoke to be doing to my lungs and the enjoyment of the nicotine (I just can't enjoy snuff or chaw). I got a few of the N'joy e-cigs and just used one of those for a few days and I found myself with a strange headache. Maybe it was just my body adjusting to being without some of the tobacco additives or something, but as soon as I smoked a regular cigarette, the headache went away. My wife and daughter are much more amenable to the e-cigs, because they don't make me and my clothes smell like an ashtray so I don't have to go outside to enjoy an e-cig. I usually restrict my tobacco use to when I'm walking the dog.

Anyway, I didn't mean to dump all this unrequested info on you, but you mentioned "vaping" and I'm new to the practice and it happens to be an issue for me.

Doesn't your bold key work?

These porn-surfing execs are just taking a more "hands-on" approach to management and want to make sure they have a firm grasp on their critical infrastructure.

It gives new meaning to The Peter Principle.

Everyone seems to be missing his question. He isn't asking "how do I talk to people, because garsh, I'm awkward". He''s asking:

How do you keep colleagues abreast of your work without having exponentially many needless conversations?

Yeah! Stop going to work to get work done, you fucking millennial slacker! Work is for sharing a wallet full of baby photos and bitching about your spouse and forming alliances so someone will cover you when you leave half way through work every third day to deal with your children!

But as long as i get my min 4 hours sleep i am fine.

I hope you're under 35. A 4 hour minimum is way too little, IMO.

Get some sleep, friend. It makes your life better.

True, but like other delivery methods, the ones who get the funding and assistance of youtube and YouTube "networks" are the mouth-breathing shit-shows and if the others want to make a living from their hard work, they're going to feel compelled to dumb themselves down, too.

I can see you are unfamiliar with YouTube. The videos you describe sound absolutely pleasant and worthwhile, compared to the actual YouTube content.

Go watch YouTube's biggest star with the largest channel -- PewDiePie. More than 15,000,000 subscribers. Obnoxious, screeching, loud, inane Swede who calls his fans "bros" and the collective the "bro army" and pulls in something like $6,000,000 USD

This looks to be one of his most recent videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqpECat4whU

This is his *own* compilation of some of his "funniest" moments: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRyPjRrjS34

Basically, his "thing" is talking like he's mentally retarded, screaming at the top of his lungs for 80% of the video, and using "rape" as a nearly constant element of "comedy" (he even wrote a song called "It's Raping Time" on one of his videos).

Then there is the girl who is a millionaire from doing "makeup tutorials" and the girls who do "my haul" videos that are ridiculously popular and earn a ton of money (these are videos where they go to the mall, do some shopping, come home, and show you what they bought).

Here's another guy who is in the top 10 or 20 of all Youtube "stars" and also earns millions of dollars for it "Smosh": http://youtu.be/yFGBjXqwzbw

Here's another dude who makes something like $5,000,000 -- and all he does is show other people's videos while commenting over them: http://youtu.be/MS8Dbvv5qss

AnnoyingOrange makes millions, too. It's an orange with a talking mouth superimposed over it. It's the most idiotic "humor" ever. It makes Larry The Cable Guy look legitimate: http://youtu.be/EDKjywzRidI

This "Tobuscus" guy makes a couple million dollars and is in the top 10-20: http://youtu.be/omGX5bleG8g

Jenna Marbles is somewhere around #3 and makes around $5,000,000: http://youtu.be/FCichOcSqz0

This Joey Graceffa guy just wanders around blabbering non-stop while recording it and does something like $200k: http://youtu.be/HH74qrfbuP0

Access to an endless library of Netflix content for $8/mo, but bandwidth will cost you $10/gig. Enjoy!

Exactly. I can get access to more music than I'll ever care about for $5 with RDIO, and a ridiculous amount of content for $8 with Netflix. It isn't all-encompassing, but for $13 in total, it's hard to beat. And $5 for access to all the music is a hell of a lot better than the time you'd spend acquiring music from alternative sources. Same for the television shows and movie content, for that matter. When you make enough stuff available in an easy enough and accessible enough way for cheap enough, it no longer becomes beneficial for someone to skirt methods requiring payment. Go back to charging people $30 for one movie and it all goes out the window again.

I wonder how much of the "ending up in the hospital" part of drug abuse comes from the way society demonizes intoxicants. If you think of the really destructive drugs, like meth or crack, you'll find that most people start out going for these substances because there aren't better substances available to them. There's a lot of data showing that someone can use heroin daily and still be a productive, safe member of society. The problems come from forcing them into back alleys to buy their drug and keeping clean needles away from them.

As I said, I don't use intoxicants. But when you scratch the surface of the drug problem, you find all sorts of paradoxical thinking and misunderstanding. And it's all wrapped up in moralism to make it all even more complicated.

As you say, preventive measures are the best, but demonization of addicts and addiction and intoxicants generally (except alcohol) is standing in the way of us taking a sensible approach to prevention. People have been getting intoxicated on something or other for as long as people have been around. I'm sure Neanderthals got intoxicated. There are better solutions to the ones who become a problem than locking them up in jail, because incarceration is more expensive than just giving them their drugs and a safe place to do them.

You're hitting some unrelated topics. "Binge drinking" is not addiction. It's stupid behavior. I'm not sure I want society to prevent stupid behavior by putting strictures on substances that most people use without being stupid about it.

Escaping reality never makes people stronger.

Hold on a minute. I'm pretty sure you're making a big assumption there. What is "stronger"? Do you mean, "better able to work for a living"? Or do you mean, "more likely to have successful family lives"? Or do you mean, "conforming to societal norms". There are simply too many unknowns in the term "reality" and the term "strong".

And this "reality" you speak of... Are you sure you know what it is? You have a construct inside your mind that you call "reality", but it's only as real as the consensus. I could make a case that spending time reading Slashdot is "escaping reality", or that being involved in religion is "escaping reality". I could also say that what great authors do is "escape reality", yet you probably shouldn't say that makes them less "strong", or that religion makes people less strong, because there is a very good argument that's not true. Is going to work at your cubicle farm every day strong? Or is taking an axe into the wilderness and living off the land "strong"?

I think we should, for the purposes of this discussion, stick to the term "intoxication" rather than "escaping reality", because "reality" can be too slippery of a term (and so can "strong").

There are MMORPG players so into it they forget to eat, and actually die.

You say that as if it were a bad thing.

If you click a few levels through the story, you'll find that the data comes from Sandvine, whose customers are the big telecoms. Considering the battle over net neutrality, I'd say that Sandvine is not a neutral source in this discussion.

I'd like to see data from some other sources on "Netflix and Youtube are half of all Internet traffic".