Hey! Vsauce, Michael here. Did you know I can kick your ass? But what does it mean to kick? And what is an ass? Turns out, kicking means fucking and ass means your mom.

Technoserfdom

20 if I showered, 3 if I didn’t

USA, self employed so 0 hours PTO but also don’t have to deal with an HR department to take time off.

My first thoughts of Al-Sharaa was that he was serious about reform from the Assad regime. I realized I haven’t followed up much on how things are going though, so if y’all wanna correct me go for it.

Excuse you, Tom Lehrer is far from a neocon.

I may also be biased because I grew up in Seattle so I learned English by watching Frasier. I got bullied a lot.

It does make you dumber, and so does alcohol. As we all know, the only drug that makes you smarter is huffing glue pantsless on a unicycle.

Saw a dude like that in Portland once. He had it all figured out.

Weed is addictive and has physical withdrawal symptoms.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7146100/

We need to treat weed like we do alcohol. It’s not the devil but it isn’t a saint either.

It’s sad to see a lot of the misinformation here that says there are no downsides to weed. In fact, weed has a ton of downsides that need to be considered in how marijuana is handled in a society.

If you are a visual/ audio learner, here’s a well researched video on the downsides of weed, from a source that acknowledges their staffs personal biases lean towards legalization.

Kurzgesagt, "We Have to Talk About Weed

Basically, we need to recognize that due to having criminalized weed for so long, we are only now getting the research into the negative effects of weed, but as it’s coming out we are seeing how weed is not all sunshine and rainbows.

THC potency has increased dramatically since the 60s, and that has led to increased risks of paranoia, psychosis, and panic attacks. It also increases the risk of Cannabinoid Hypermesis Syndrome, where ingesting weed will make you vomit, nauseous, and have horrible abdominal pain.

My roommate just got this and she is not having fun. Her doctor told her this may be a 6 month T-break, but it’s also possible this is permanent, and best to avoid weed altogether.

I also am sad to see “weed is not addictive” being thrown around. Cannabis Use Disorder (weed addiction) is very real and a quick look up says 10% of users become addicted. Personally I consider myself stuck on a habit since I can control my use to keeping it after 8pm, but I still have trouble not getting high daily. I have a friend who is now 100 days sober, but when he had a relapse last year, it ruined his life.

That’s not to say it’s bad, I have another friend who needs weed to help him get through the day with his PTSD. We just need to recognize one person’s medicine is another person’s poison.

Most all of the major issues with weed tend to show up with people who began smoking in adolescence. I think a reason I’m somewhat I’m control and my other friend is not is that I started smoking at 22 in college, and he started at 16. I imagine if I waited until I was 25 I’d have no problem making it a weekend thing.

That said

My experience and the pain many have dealing with the health issues associated to weed are no where near comparable to the damage that criminalized weed has had on marginalized communities as weed has historically been used to target and oppress minorities by our US government. I also agree to the points that having a black market is FAR worse than having legal weed that needs regulation.

Personally I’m pro-legalization, but I think we need to be careful at how we are messaging weed to the youths and handling the negative consequences, as the myths of weed just being an innocent plant are super harmful.

Idk if you’re a nerd, but Brian Klass is a contemporary political scientist who actually challenges this, and yet still affirms a determinist lense. His latest book is on his chaos theory that I think can be helpful navigating our current world.

Here’s his big think interview if you’re interested!

One way to think of this is that we can’t predict the future with what we know of the past because the “rules” are constantly changing. One example is an academic paper that was written that said middle eastern dictatorships were especially stable in comparison to others, but then a year later the Arab Spring occurs. His take is that the author wasn’t wrong- based on all the information of the past it made sense that these dictatorships were not going away anytime soon, but what happened was the world changed making those assumptions moot.

So the idea that European democracies are inherently stable isn’t necessarily a given, and as our world is drastically changing, our tools to gauge the health of a democracy are becoming less and less relevant.

Man, how low do you think Trump III’s approval rating will be?

Jesse Wells has a line that gets me every time:

“Time is not a mirror/ it’s some distorted view/ of the way you thought you was/ and what you thought they thought of you”

A) mental health would absolutely improve so I’d have more energy for

B) producing more shows and putting on more events. Personally I don’t want to retire because I want to create a career where if I did retire I’d just do what I was doing anyway. I’m kinda doing that now but I have more BS and stress to deal with.

At the end of the day it all comes down to the role of the dice.

It’s not a contest. Look at the contouring, elegant. Look at the polish, shining as bright as Versailles. The tong length has the perfection of a Swiss watch.

Then the functionality- the flared handle provides the user with the comfort usually reserved for oil barons in hospice. The longer tongs serve as an homage to the engineers who brought humanity to the moon.

Every other fork is merely a blight on the earth in comparison to this Adonis of cutlerian perfection.

I mean I’ve been told this is the year to fudge on your taxes since the IRS is fucked so I mean maybe there’s some silver lining. Frankly Elon isn’t as bad as- hold on someone’s knocking on my door, I’ll be back in a bit.

Welcome to American politics, when the 2028 election begins in 2024 and the 2028 primary began in 2020.

I’m so tired.

Sadly I think he’s going to be a martyr like Alexi Navalny. The 1% is patient, and they know they can distract us and grind us down. We can raise hell for a moment, but they know our weakness is our stomaches.

[NSFW]

My hope is that more “quiet Democrats” get primary’d. Usually they would say “don’t primary me, you’ll risk losing us to the Republican candidate in the general and we have a moderate agenda that’s the lesser evil”.

Right now they don’t have an agenda at all, no rudder, no direction. This is the time to primary tf out of the old Dems.