> With this in mind, smoking should be commenced at as young an age as is reasonably possible. Children who have not yet developed a pincer grasp might require modified cigarette holders, safety lighters or both. These points are moot at this time, because such initiatives are not possible in many countries because of existing legislation putting age restrictions on the purchase of cigarettes.
> They expanded the search to include other Germanic relatives, such as Icelandic and older forms of German, to shed light on Old English.
Interesting, is this 17th century German fandom the basis of Tolkien's work? His Middle Earth was so fleshed out, I guess it would make sense.
> By 1720 intellectual interest in England had turned to Druidry, Celtic heritage, Stonehenge, and the imaginary world of Phoenician Druids bringing the Abrahamic religion to Britain, complete with chariot races around Stonehenge.
Reminds me, of the Hindu Nationalists view of history. Maybe not in form but in motivation. State/Church wanting to found its origins in itself.
I remember PH having the same issue. Do payment processors take on liability for facilitating sexual content that is illegal in some way? Is it a PR thing? Is mastercard owned by the Holy See? What's the deal?
Yeah these findings remind me of a passage from the book "Talent Is Overrated". Thesis of the book is that world class talent is mostly due to hard work over innate ability. He supposes that one way that children develop drives in different directions is some identification of ability (even when it is not there really) in some domain leads adults to heap praise on them for that particular talent, causing a virtuous cycle of work and praise.
You can see this in parents who marvel at how great their children are at x, seems to be how kids are pushed. If kids are designed to be pushed to develop their skill sets by the dopamine inducing praise it could be that these drugs work because they tap into that pathway.
I am super skeptical of this. i play sports, and talent is evident. I have played soccer for 20 years and never gone past upper intermediate level.
Yet, i have had younger people join, that didn't really know how to play, get really good. Their talent: They were super fast. Track athelete fast. They knew nothing about soccer, but after a year or two of playing, they became better than the players that had been playing for over 10 years.
Their advantage: Sheer speed, and fast reflexes. At some point the mantra 'if you try hard enough you will became great', becomes sheer lie. Some people, with given the same amount of training, or even less, became much much better...
But, hey, the '10k' hour rule type of books that give false hopes do sell, so the fradulent authors will keep em churning.,
Book was more oriented to explaining world class performance not high school or college. It made a pretty convincing case by going through some really famous examples of excellent young talent (Tiger Woods, Jerry Rice and Mozart).
Goes a lot into the studies on the matter and he argues it they paint a pretty clear picture.
> the current fuel density in much of the Sierra, mixed with the hotter, drier conditions already triggered by climate change, has made managing wildfire even riskier than it was when forest managers started allowing fires to burn in Yosemite in 1972.
So if fire fighters and politicians do not want to start a burn policy now that there is so much fuel, why not log an area for a while then start burning? Is there something I am missing about the nature of the problem?
Logging takes the healthiest and largest trees. The ones most likely to survive a fire. While leaving behind all of the fuel. Doesn’t seem like it would help much.
I feel like in a better world we could log the bad ones and make paper or something, but everyone knows the logging would be 100% regulatorily-captured and so no one wants to go this route. :/
Logging increases fire risk in the short term, because it leaves behind a lot of slash fuels and stimulated brushy undergrowth. It is not analogous to a burn.
Could we place some requirements on the logging companies to leave the ground in a certain state? Or would hauling off the undesirable material make logging unprofitable?
Doing prescribed burns outside of the normal fire season allows them to reduce the fuel load and restore more natural conditions without the risk of creating giant runaway fires.
I must admit the log + fire approach sounds tempting: sequestering the carbon (in buildings or, hell, buried logs) sounds too good to pass up.
To be clear the idea isn't logging > fire, but logging just to undue the past mismanagement such that a very loosely controlled burn would be mild and as if the extra stuff hadn't accumulated the past 100 years in the first place. Definitely still need the fire.
California is not the problem here. A policy of controlled burns is not tenable anywhere in the United States right now, because we've spent so long fighting wildfires in order to protect the logging industry. The problem is that we've had almost eighty years of Smokey Bear telling people that wildfires are always bad.
It took the catastrophic Yellowstone fires of 1988 to even make the current Yellowstone policy possible. That policy is to allow a naturally caused fire to continue until it threatens humans or buildings, but to stamp out human caused fires with extreme prejudice. This obviously makes no sense -- the forest does not care a bit whether the fire was started by a lightning strike or by a campfire -- but it's the only thing that is politically tenable.
Yellowstone is mostly in Wyoming. It's not a California problem; the problem is a national population that's been misled about what constitutes good forest management. We need controlled burns, building bans in large areas of forest, and judicious use of eminent domain to purchase properties in forest areas so that they can be permitted to burn.
Most of the Californian land in question is owned and managed by the federal government. See eg. this map of land ownership in CA - green, orange, and pink are various federal agencies, while brown is CA state/county lands and yellow is private:
Land management in the west is different from the east. On the east coast almost everything is private, then divided up into municipal, county, and state governments. In the West large chunks of land are still owned by the federal government. Private ownership under state authority is only about 40% in CA and less than 20% in NV.
Much of the forest in CA is managed by the US Forest Service, so you can't blame CA officials for everything. Plus, you can only safely do controlled burns in certain weather windows (not super hot, rain likely coming, etc.). Given we are in the middle of a historic drought, the dry fuel levels are likely much too high to safely start controlled burns.
Not sure how valid but I think a case from this hypothesized Chinese Government perspective can be made even without criticizing Netflix itself.
When Hollywood was built in the 1920's it was not exactly the backbone of the economy. The article argues that the Chinese Government sees value in the economy beyond GDP goes up and cash flows good. Technology and manufacturing are important to national security.
The article quote Xi Jinping saying “we must recognize the fundamental importance of the real economy… and never deindustrialize.” I guess the national question for the other super power is how important is this "real economy" to itself. Is too much talent and labor sucked up in profitable activity that is suboptimal for a nation? Are these 21st century company's like Netflix good enough for our nation?
> “we must recognize the fundamental importance of the real economy… and never deindustrialize.”
This is a valid point, and I tend to agree with it. However I see entertainment as part of the "real" economy. It's an incredibly old industry, provides real value to nearly every human being, creates high-, medium-, and low-skilled employment across a wide variety of disciplines, can allow your culture to punch above its weight, and produces art that endures across generations and centuries (for example, Shakespeare).
The real problem is that when the basic infrastructure that maintain the entertainment industry is gone, then the whole thing breaks down in shambles. For example, someday there might be a global shortage of electronics due to geo-political factors, and then you will have no chips to make those fancy consoles and PCs with.
> You need a bit of arrogance to think cannabis is on your side and you can dominate it, as I witnessed myself when I started stumbling as a teenager.
I have had similar experiences. Without your mind you are not you, a drug which changes the minds substrate (in some ways permanently) is going to be outside the control of the effected mind. Beware the Snoop Dogg pool party.
Seems like we are leaving the cultural moment that presented Marijuana as a glorious panacea which would open your third eye if only you let go of your fear. Our culture was so scared of the stuff before, maybe we needed to paint an unrealistically bright picture to find the courage to leave the cave.
To the unfamiliar it can be a thrilling adventure, to others it can serve as inspiration. It feels like it has mental costs though. Being wary of regular recreational use seems warranted.
> No reason to be wary of recreational use. No more so than you might of caffeine
You should be wary of caffeine use, especially if your culture does not have any rules about its use, or complete enough understanding about its effects. We like drugs because they work, but the problem is we do not know what they do over larger timescales or how to fit them into your life.
Weed is a relative newbie in the average American's life and we would be silly to not respect the drug enough to be wary.
People have been using both for thousands of years.
Feel free to be wary. Many of the rest of us will enjoy our lives otherwise without perpetuating unnecessary and by and large scientifically unfounded, culturally-based fears of reasonably innocuous substances.
This was a great read. The history of human cognition is obviously fascinating and there is a lot written on subject for me to devour which is great. But what about his thoughts on hypnosis?
I guess it is not as sexy a topic as the history of the mind but his ideas about it are really intriguing. Been a year since I read the book, but hypnosis as painted in the book changes in form with peoples ideas about what hypnosis is, pretty much everything that people say about it is culturally determined and yet it still is real. People will themselves into into filling out these cultural forms where they are in a totally different cognitive state when in the right social context and most people just think of it as a party trick.
Lol, what a shame