How far off to the right of that graph is “krokodil”?
An interesting graph, though LSD is pretty harmless in and of itself - not toxic, not addictive, so I’m not really ready to take it (the graph) at face value.
Would you operate heavy machinery under the influence of LSD?
SpaceX is taking over a town.
To be clear, “Starbase, TX” is a SpaceX town already. Pretty much every resident either works for SpaceX, or is a relative of an employee. So there was no “taking over” to begin with.
You gotta figure that people who live there are used to this shit already.
More or less. The town was incorporated in the last few weeks, so this formalizes what all those SpaceX employees should already know.
There may be an odd resident or two who is not involved with SpaceX already but there can’t be many of those.
In response to @Alessan, I am not going to try, though I did for a fun-fair once where I used the heavy machinery rides. I was not the person in control though.
And I visit Afrika Burn, where there are all sorts of dangers.
I know LSD well, I know my limits, I know what to do.
One interesting thing to note here: the reporting only concerns his behavior on the campaign trail. So this must be a source from the campaign who didn’t end up being a part of the Trump administration (and who feels safe talking about it now). This means we have no idea if Elon is still consuming a similar volume of drugs now. But how likely is it that someone who is enjoying a mix of:
…would simply stop? We already know from his time with Joe Rogan that he’ll do drugs even if it will endanger his government contracts. We already know from Trump’s previous administration that if there is supposed to be some manner of control at the White House pharmacy it has been silenced or removed. So how likely is it that Elon just decided to all of a sudden start complying with laws he’s never followed before in the overly permissive environment of Trump’s White House?
Musk is as high as a kite.
His PR team is busy with damage control, saying that poor Elon was leaving government because it was just too hard to increase efficiency, something he never showed any interest in of course. Josh Marshall at TPM, gifted:
The bigger problem with this storyline is the idea that Musk failed. I so wish that were true. But it’s simply not. To believe that you’d need to buy the idea that the goal was to streamline the government and save a bunch of money as opposed to gut the parts of the government that Trump world and the Silicon Valley right view as enemies and do so in an at best extra-constitutional fashion because it would never be possible through constitutional means. He succeeded at doing quite a lot of that, at least for now. He wrecked whole sections of the government and scooped up a ton of government contracts which not only further feathered his nest but advances the privatization of the government. He also engaged in a still-too-little-understood effort to create a vast store of integrated private information on U.S. citizens. He accomplished a huge amount.
As I said, I’d love it if Musk failed. But he didn’t. He accomplished a ton. He ran an anti-constitutional blitzkrieg through the federal government, did massive harm, violated a slew of criminal laws. And he only tired of his antics when the reputational harm to his companies became steep enough to really endanger them. He’s a destructive crook who needs to be held accountable for his actions. And that’s exactly what this press roll-out, along with gauzy interviews, is all about thwarting.
Yeah, I agree. Musk didn’t fail. He didn’t do the impossible things he claimed he was trying to do, but he was quite productive in fucking up the country and stealing information.
He’s like the guy who walks through a store, claiming he is looking for a birthday gift for his wife, then sighs and says he can’t find anything, while carefully concealing everything he shoplifted.
Presumably people losing their homes can apply for asylum in Utah alongside the Afrikaaner rejects refugees, since having their land taken from them by a government, even if only in theory, is something Musk cares deeply about.
No, not really. I do not believe “harm” can be realistically assessed in one linear scalar, and dependence is more complicated than that the substance makes you need to keep doing it. Except for coke – that shit is evil.
I think the graph is inaccurate. I know the data source is listed on Wikipedia as a presumably peer reviewed article in a fairly prestigious journal, The Lancet.
I’ve either regularly used or exprimented with 11 of the substances listed (and a huge number more, which are not listed).
I think tobacco is roughly in the right place, but ketamine is not. Alcohol should be higher. LSD bottom left.
Maybe the problem I have is that the graph conflates two very different things, and the explanation does not cover this.
These two are:
Physical addiction, and
Psychological addiction
Heroin has both, LSD only the latter.
Alcohol has mild physical addiction but strong psychological addiction. Nicotine has both, and some say it is harder to stop than heroin. (Where peer pressure, environment, legality, factors into this I an not qualified to state)
Ketamine has only psychological addiction
Etc, etc
Psychological addiction can happen with adrenline, eg BASE jumpers, because it is the pursuit of endophins, domamine and serotonin.
Some people notoriously are habitual brawlers, perhaps for the same reason.
FWIW, here is what the graph is, according to wiki. All emphasis in quotes is added by me.
The data in the paper is obtained solely from questionnaire results obtained from two groups of people: the first comprised people from the UK national group of consultant psychiatrists who were on the Royal College of Psychiatrists’ register as specialists in addiction, while the second comprised of people with experience in one of the many areas of addiction, ranging from chemistry, pharmacology, and forensic science, through psychiatry and other medical specialties, including epidemiology, as well as the legal and police services; the experts are not named and were chosen by the authors. This is a tertiary source (see Wikipedia policy on primary, secondary, tertiary sources) as it summarizes experts’ opinions on the matter (which are secondary sources) without any direct references to primary sources.
So it’s a summary of expert opinion c 2007. Useful I say. It would have been nice if the circles corresponded to the diversity of opinion in their sample (the standard deviation or mean absolute deviation, if you’re into statistics).
Here’s a link to the paper, via google docs:
Here’s the abstract:
Drug misuse and abuse are major health problems. Harmful drugs are regulated according to classification systems that purport to relate to the harms and risks of each drug. However, the methodology and processes underlying classification systems are generally neither specified nor transparent, which reduces confidence in their accuracy and undermines health education messages. We developed and explored the feasibility of the use of a nine-category matrix of harm, with an expert delphic procedure, to assess the harms of a range of illicit drugs in an evidence-based fashion. We also included five legal drugs of misuse (alcohol, khat, solvents, alkyl nitrites, and tobacco) and one that has since been classified (ketamine) for reference. The process proved practicable, and yielded roughly similar scores and rankings of drug harm when used by two separate groups of experts. The ranking of drugs produced by our assessment of harm differed from those used by current regulatory systems. Our methodology offers a systematic framework and process that could be used by national and international regulatory bodies to assess the harm of current and future drugs of abuse.
Here are the 9 categories of harm:
Physical harm
One Acute
Two Chronic
Three Intravenous harm
Dependence
Four Intensity of pleasure
Five Psychological dependence
Six Physical dependence
Social harms
Seven Intoxication
Eight Other social harms
Nine Health-care costs
For those wondering about intravenous harm:
Finally, there are specific problems associated with intravenous drug use. The route of administration is relevant not only to acute toxicity but also to so-called secondary harms. For instance, administration of drugs by the intravenous route can lead to the spread of blood-borne viruses such as hepatitis viruses and HIV, which have huge health implications for the individual and society. The potential for intravenous use is currently taken into account in the Misuse of Drugs Act classification and was treated as a separate parameter in our exercise.
Experts are all well and good, but distilling rich and complex information down to simple lines on a graph is always misleading. Always.
Not to a learned audience, IMnotsoHO. Because those who understand the graph won’t be misled by it. Generally speaking, any phenomenon can be understood accurately, which is to say granularly, and it can be understood roughly, according to rules of thumb. It’s the job of the reader or analyst to be able to zoom in and out. There will always be a tradeoff between accuracy and clarity. Accuracy is required for understanding; clarity is required for decision making.
One aspect of accuracy: you don’t understand a phenomenon if you don’t have a sense of the error bounds. The underlying average may be the most important thing, but it’s nonetheless way overemphasized in most discussion.
New controversy. Video of Musk playing with this silverware during a dinner at Bedminster golf club in New Jersey. Computer scientist Paul Graham insists this is totally normal behavior in public and they are sometimes called cutlery towers. Retired army medic Molly Ploofkins thinks ketamine is the underlying causal factor.
I say this could be a category 8 effect of chronic ketamine abuse. This poses a question for the experts: have you ever looked at your cutlery? I mean really looked at it?
ETA below: I see the Bedminster clip is from March. Graham made his comment yesterday; Musk replied with a denial of being on ketamine. Really weird that they would reply now.
This is very old news though
Ketamine is an appetite supressant, so maybe he just wasn’t hungry.
Or he is like an 8 year old boy who has just realised how to enmesh several forks to make “sculpture”.
Or both.