I'm a sober alcoholic. Been clean now almost six years. In the AA community we are told to be anonymous, hence the name. And as such as part of AA, I understand that need, it makes some sense in that context. But as individuals, I think we are missing a fantastic opportunity to help others by not being more open to our challenges and recovery. When I first got clean, it was helped in no small part by knowing friends that had also gotten sober.

I've always appreciated celebrities that spoke to their challenges, not in an overly egocentric way, but just being transparent. Matthew Perry is a good example of this. I thought similarly of Carrie Fisher that she was publicly open to her mental health struggles. I can't say I pay a lot of attention to celebrities, but I always cheer when I hear of someone getting clean. Speaking from experience, it is challenging, and we earn sobriety 24 hours at a time.

Matthew, good luck in whatever comes next.

Amen brother (see what I did there?). I purchase our fleet of office printers. I will never purchase a HP printer until they make available basic drivers, which they don't. Every printer company has some ridiculous enormous set of "drivers" that wants to butter my toast and name my children. HP's installs like seven different applications and services, it takes like ten minutes to uninstall there's so much crap that it installs. Just to print a document. And Brother, like all of them, has their version of this too, but they also offer just the basic drivers if you want to go that route. HP does not. I once was talking to an HP rep who was trying to sell me on their printers, and I made this argument, to which he said that vanilla HP drivers aren't even available to HP sales and techs, it's like they don't exist.

All of which is mind-numbing, but also makes decision making much easier, no thanks, I'll stick to working with a company that doesn't assume to know what I want more than I do.

Christmas last year I bought a Galaxy Z Flip 3. Full disclosure, the fold aspect as just cool new tech was part of my reason to buy. I'm usually not much of an early adopter, and I tend to be fairly fiscally conservative, I'm not the kind who buys the newest thing-of-the-week. But something about having a foldable phone again really appealed to me. I miss the old school small phones from the early 00's.

When I walked out of the Verizon store with my Flip and $1000 less in the bank, I honestly thought I'd let myself get suckered. And I was sort of okay with that.

I've come to really like it. Per the points of discussion, I want to respond to as someone invested already in this:
*** Pixel phones suck. Agreed. I had two of them on Google Fi back in the day, and they were both awful, buggy as hell. Fool me once, and all that, never again.
*** The fold aspect has a service lifetime. That's correct. I think it is rated to 200,000 folds which is not a lot. I fold it and unfold it a lot during the day. This could be a concern, time will tell.
*** Whether folding phones are more delicate or not. I can't tell you what's going on inside the thing, for all I know it is slowly weakening. But externally, because it has no exposed screen when it is folded, it feels more secure. Unlike a modern phone that kind of is waiting to be get broken, this thing folds into a little hockey puck that seems like it could take more punishment.
*** Lastly, I just like the way the folded aspect feels in my pocket. The mini-tablet computers that we all carry around with us just don't feel great in my pocket, and this thing feels more like a wallet, which does feel better for me. And I can get it into and out of my pocket faster. Are these deal-makers or breakers? Nope. But I do think they have some value.

You are correct, alcohol is a drug obviously. Other than the pot when I was young, and the ayahuasca we are speaking of, I haven't done drugs other than alcohol and caffeine. I've been effectively straight edge for the last five years.

I've posted this before. I've attended 5 ayahuasca ceremonies, three in Colorado and two in Peru.

I'm not much of a "psychonaut", but smoked some pot when I was younger, and that's about all the drugs I've done. I tried mushrooms once. But in my late 30's I was in a pretty dark place in my life. I was undiagnosed ASD and an alcoholic in denial. Life had taken a dark turn, so I quit my job and moved to CO in 2015 to be the GM of a pot farm. I still didn't smoke the stuff, but I was ready for a big life change.

It was there that I discovered Ayahuasca. And after the 5 ceremonies, all over a period of 6 months in 2015, I realized two important things:

1) Alcohol was killing me.
2) There was something different about me, not wrong, just different.

I quite alcohol cold turkey after the ceremonies, and while I did eventually relapse or "go back out" as we say, I eventually got clean. I've been sober for five years now. And simultaneously I got diagnosed as ASD, which explained a lot, and let me see myself in a more positive light.

Without the Aya ceremonies, it is very possible that I would be dead now. They were the initial impetus to changing my life from a dark path back to the light.

But for the record, there does tend to be puking and pooping involved for many of us. Inside the experience, we think of this as negative energy made physical, so that our body can release it.

All purely anecdotal to my own experience. Clearly it isn't a silver bullet, but I do believe that Aya and other "plant medicines" do have a place in the discussion.

I want to offer a counter-narrative to this story. I work for a SMB regional food manufacturing company. We are a high volume, low profit business. Everything we do is weighed based on the bottom line because our profit margins are incredibly narrow. Profit is MUCH less than 1%. For the last three years since Covid started, our profit is in the neighborhood of 0.20%. Let me clarify that because I don't want anyone to misunderstand: for every dollar of revenue that comes in, shareholders earn 0.2 pennies on it. This isn't uncommon in our industry, we live and die by pennies on the dollar.

We tend to employee a lot of first and second generation immigrants. Our staff are great people, hard working, and they deserve to be rewarded. We take care of them as best we can, we've long time offered near-guaranteed 40 hour weeks, medical, dental, 401k, things that cannot be assumed in our industry. More than half of our staff have been with us for longer than 10 years.

But we do not have the profit on the books to be able to raise wages much. it just isn't there. We aren't a tech firm that can command 20% profit margins.

It's easy to point the finger at service industries and manufacturing and say that we are all crooks that don't treat our staff well. But if we want to stay in business, we have to do so because that is what our industry demands. And to that point, it is what the consumer demands. The only way this will change is if the industry as a whole changes, and that will only happen once consumers are willing to pay higher prices. Until that happens, arguing that industry is all crooks is just ivory-tower window dressing.

I have a few personal private GH projects, but they are small little dumb things I don't want the rest of the world to see. No real concern if somehow it got compromised. But even I did some diligence before using a private GH repo...

That a large corp would simply hold their very proprietary code in a GH repo behind a thin veneer of "private"... Color me naïve, but that is sort of nuts.

Or trans or bipolar or autistic or prone to addiction? Because there may be genetic markers that show increased likelihood for those things. But when we live in a society that lacks all the edge cases, our ability to evolve and do good things diminishes. Having no one in those camps might be less messy, but there's a lot of people who may by some standard have an "illness" that have done a lot of good for the world. Alan Turing comes to mind quickly, but there's countless others.

Admins who don't automate, even though they have hundreds of VMs?

Suddenly I'm feeling much better about myself and my value. Thank you.

Being elected Secretary General of the Female Tech Agency sounds intriguing, but what does the Female Tech Agency do?

I recognize that I'm being difficult, but that was the first thing I thought of when I read the headline.

I work in food manufacturing. We have to be aware of various religious law like halal and kosher, make business decisions based on specific consumer groups. I'm not a religious scholar by any means, I'm actually fairly agnostic. But from what I know ethanol is haram, which is to say 'forbidden' by most Islamic interpretations. I believe Islam isn't the only religion concerned with it, also some schism Christian groups and Eastern religions.

I'd be curious whether this would be interpreted as enough to make the food haram, or otherwise forbidden.

Similar story, I had been knocking on the door of alcoholism for a long time. And then in 2015 I participated in an ayahuasca ceremony, which was so profound and life changing, that I easily quit cold turkey immediately after. That time I went 8 months sober before relapsing. A few years later I got into the AA program, which ultimately has kept me clean for almost five years now. But I really believe that it was the ayahuasca experience that first opened my eyes that there was an alternative to just being a drunk, that I didn't have to spiral down.

The interesting thing here too is that one of founders of AA, Bill W, was on the record of saying that psychedelics could help we alcoholics. This has been somewhat swept under the rug, both inside and outside of AA. Bill believed that psychedelics could provide the spiritual experience that many of us lack, which is how (according to AA) we got in trouble in the first place. That we hadn't found a 'higher power' that we could believe in, so we came to believe that we as individuals were infallible. And when we were inevitably proved incorrect, we turned to the bottle to cope.

Point of all that is that this old news. Bill W himself claimed we should consider using psychedelics for our spiritual recovery.

I'd rather be a janitor again than have to deal with a "facial conveyance strategist" and their kin. I refuse to have a LinkedIn profile (or another social media), and I'm willing to accept whatever consequences I get for that decision.

Long time lurker, created an account just for this. If these were out-of-print technical or historic documents, I could understand. But looking at the list, some of these are modern widely accessible novels by authors like John Grisham and James Corey. To what benefit of their goals would they have done this? Seems like a lot of liability exposure to take on for no reason. I really like the Internet Archive, but this seems like a stupid decision on their part.