I led a small corp and our whole play was to declare war on high-sec mining corporations (a formal war deceleration allowed one to avoid the wrath of the "CONCORD" police force). We'd then gank them until they'd pay us a ransom to end the war.
Eventually, some of our former targets started paying us to target other mining groups that they were competing with!
It was really great fun and a set of systems that facilitated the "emergent storytelling" that so many new open-world/survival games aspire to.
> Energy and material intensity of GDP is falling.
Is this true globally, or just for specific economies? (My true quandary is probably evident:) Are those economies getting measurably more efficient overall, or have we just offloaded the energy and material intensive production?
I don't know what it is about Boston... maybe it's the pedestrians that don't check for traffic at all, or the taxis that split lanes, or maybe the five way intersections, or maybe the construction, or the tunnels and overpasses, or the fact the roads were laid out for horses and have absolutely no rhyme or reason most of the time... the list is long :P
Never driven in NYC, though I have walked through it as a pedestrian... it seems easier to deal with.
The social acceptability of reliance on caffeine has always struck me as a bit odd. The effects aren't as stark, but I regularly have conversations with friends and coworkers who talk about how miserable they are if they don't get their three cups of coffee in the morning. I also feel that I see a correlation between those who feel they have low energy after the work-day and heavy caffeine users.
This puzzles me. The Medication Assisted Treatment (metadone and buprenorphine) started in 1991. The Heroin Assisted Treatment (HAT) started in 1994. People that failed the MAT were enroled into the HAT.
Limited first HAT experiments were found sucessful, and thus expanded in 1999. In 2008 both approaches entered the law.
The opioid/heroin epidemic that hit the whole Europe, took place in the 80's, with AIDS making it worse at later 80's and early 90's, causing all countries in Europe to tackle the problem hard starting in the early 90's. Yet you claim that HAT not only was shutdown in early 90's but that it was the thing that created the mess.
Dates don't add up, sorry. Maybe you are talking about a different swiss experiment, and not the internationally famous HAT.
The first phase of the experiment was to have a free zone in the Platzspitz park, with a needle exchanges, and no interference to drug sales and use. The park became known as "needle park."
They shut it down in '92, which led to junkies spreading throughout the city, particularly on and around Langstrasse.
It wasn't until a real crackdown that things got better. They tried a few approaches like the treatments you mentioned, but that's very different than the laissez-faire decriminalization experiment that blew up in everyone's face.
There's a good documentary or article about the whole thing I meant to recommend but I can't find it at the moment.
When a non-Swiss person talks about "the Swiss heroing/drug experiment", they are referring specifically to the HAT program, and not to a free-for-drug park.
It's obvious that if you put all the junkies of a county in a single park, without even the minimal hygienic measures, you create a mess. That's not laissez-faire, that's a mess, but to their credit at least they tried something different than the cycle "heroin user -> scum to jail or to cemetery". It would happen with anything imaginable: "now all homeless are allowed in the Platzspitz Park and nowhere else", a month later the park is covered with homeless trash to nobody's surprise.
The HAT is a step further (not backward) in decriminalization: you are hooked to heroin, metadone doesn't work. But you are not a criminal, and thus we will take a medical approach.
Yes, the Platzspitz/Letten scenes were awful, but these are not what the post that you were initially were responding to was describing.
> It wasn’t until a real crackdown that things got better.
Yes, there was a crackdown, but it’s not like this hadn’t been done numerous times before, both in Switzerland and in other countries, so this hardly could have been the major cause of the permanent improvement (which I think we both agree did indeed occur around that time).
> They tried […] the treatments you mentioned
And THOSE were the new factor, and THAT is what made the difference. The Heroin assisted treatment is still in force (an article a few years ago mentioned that about 1400 addicts in Switzerland are in the program).
> I'm often forced to choose a side, even when it's all hypotheticals and virtues.
In what situations are you forced to choose a side? In conversations with your friends/family? At your place of employment (in whatever form that may be)?
One of my favorites to be sure - I kept pushing this on my book club for weeks until they finally caved. Its one of those works where, when people ask "what is it about?" I can never land on a succinct answer, and I love it.
> why has the media never asked politicians to produce some kind of end state to restrictions? Why have politicians and “experts” been allowed to just extend things and “wait two more weeks” without articulating a clearly defined goal?
> Why has the media never questioned high cycle rates for PCR tests?
The turnaround time of testing? I'm not sure what you are bringing up here.
> Why has the media constantly downplayed good news?
This isn't a covid problem. For a variety of reasons, the media downplays good news across the board. They have a vested interest in keeping viewers "tuned in" to problems.
I created a similar project about a year ago that never got much traction: https://paysly.io/
Its similar in principal, but it also creates a signed version of the stripe response [1], so you can hand it off to a backend and validate it without an additional stripe call.
Instead of requiring users to input auth keys, it uses stripe connect [2] to securely authenticate and act on behalf of users.
If you have an app with a traditional backend, you likely wouldn't.
I saw the need when I had a couple of simple apps where I didn't really have a web server where I could create payments/subscriptions via stripe's server-side libraries. I also didn't want to use stripe's Checkout. I had to spin up a simple service just to confirm the payments and I figured I could abstract it.
The signed jwt response can be helpful because now you just need paysly on the frontend and your backend can be dependency free - all it needs to do is parse the token.
I led a small corp and our whole play was to declare war on high-sec mining corporations (a formal war deceleration allowed one to avoid the wrath of the "CONCORD" police force). We'd then gank them until they'd pay us a ransom to end the war.
Eventually, some of our former targets started paying us to target other mining groups that they were competing with!
It was really great fun and a set of systems that facilitated the "emergent storytelling" that so many new open-world/survival games aspire to.