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“Get a rat and put it in a cage and give it two water bottles. One is just water, and one is water laced with either heroin or cocaine. If you do that, the rat will almost always prefer the drugged water and almost always kill itself very quickly, right, within a couple of weeks. So there you go. It’s our theory of addiction. Bruce comes along in the ‘70s and said, “Well, hang on a minute. We’re putting the rat in an empty cage. It’s got nothing to do. Let’s try this a little bit differently.” So Bruce built Rat Park, and Rat Park is like heaven for rats. Everything your rat about town could want, it’s got in Rat Park. It’s got lovely food. It’s got sex. It’s got loads of other rats to be friends with. It’s got loads of colored balls. Everything your rat could want. And they’ve got both the water bottles. They’ve got the drugged water and the normal water. But here’s the fascinating thing. In Rat Park, they don’t like the drugged water. They hardly use any of it. None of them ever overdose. None of them ever use in a way that looks like compulsion or addiction. There’s a really interesting human example I’ll tell you about in a minute, but what Bruce says is that shows that both the right-wing and left-wing theories of addiction are wrong. So the right-wing theory is it’s a moral failing, you’re a hedonist, you party too hard. The left-wing theory is it takes you over, your brain is hijacked. Bruce says it’s not your morality, it’s not your brain; it’s your cage. Addiction is largely an adaptation to your environment. […] We’ve created a society where significant numbers of our fellow citizens cannot bear to be present in their lives without being drugged, right? We’ve created a hyperconsumerist, hyperindividualist, isolated world that is, for a lot of people, much more like that first cage than it is like the bonded, connected cages that we need. The opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection. And our whole society, the engine of our society, is geared towards making us connect with things. If you are not a good consumer capitalist citizen, if you’re spending your time bonding with the people around you and not buying stuff—in fact, we are trained from a very young age to focus our hopes and our dreams and our ambitions on things we can buy and consume. And drug addiction is really a subset of that.”

— Johann Hari, Does Capitalism Drive Drug Addiction?

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A grassroots movement is calling on all Americans to abstain from shopping with major retailer tomorrow, February 28, as part of an “economic blackout.” I encourage you to join.

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Ms. Rosamund “I have three late-night hours to kill so I’m going to brute force my way into a pineapple” Pike

ha hee hee HEEE! wowza.

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Skip Google for Research

As Google has worked to overtake the internet, its search algorithm has not just gotten worse.  It has been designed to prioritize advertisers and popular pages often times excluding pages and content that better matches your search terms 

As a writer in need of information for my stories, I find this unacceptable.  As a proponent of availability of information so the populace can actually educate itself, it is unforgivable.

Below is a concise list of useful research sites compiled by Edward Clark over on Facebook. I was familiar with some, but not all of these.

⁂

Google is so powerful that it “hides” other search systems from us. We just don’t know the existence of most of them. Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information. Keep a list of sites you never heard of.

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.pdfdrive.com is the largest website for free download of books in PDF format. Claiming over 225 million names.

www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free

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talks with my friends who are going to kink parties and having t4t orgies and doing petplay and then goes to sleep in my childhood bedroom and dreams of the snow, and rain

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narratives about doomed love that aren’t romantic in nature. the love between siblings who understand each other the most but are growing apart no matter how much they try to come back to one another. the love between friends whose life paths pull them apart and they never see each other again, only remembering the face of a once kind childhood. the love for a hometown that year by year becomes less and less the one that raised you until you are a foreigner in your own backyard. there was no stopping it. the love was there and it mattered and you can never come back again.

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nothing could prepare you for the opening of the second paragraph (source)

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Here is the hard truth, which no one else has the heart to tell you.

HOUSE OF THE DRAGON 1.02 "The Rogue Prince"

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A little advice from someone studying extremist groups: if you’re in a social media environment where the daily ubiquitous message is that you have no hope of any kind of future and you can’t possibly achieve anything without a violent overthrow of society, you’re being radicalized, and not in the good way.

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Things that will make your computer meaningfully faster:

Replacing a HDD with an SSD

Adding RAM

Graphics cards if you're nasty

Uninstalling resource hogs like Norton or McAfee (if you're using Windows then the built-in Windows Security is perfectly fine; if you're using a mac consider bitdefender as a free antivirus or eset as a less resource intensive paid option)

Customizing what runs on startup for your computer

Things that are likely to make internet browsing specifically meaningfully faster:

Installing firefox and setting it up with ublock origin

adding the Auto Tab Discard extension to firefox to sleep unused tabs so that they aren't constantly reloading

Closing some fucking tabs bud I'm sorry I know it hurts I'm guilty of this too

Things that will make your computer faster if you are actually having a problem:

Running malwarebytes and shutting down any malicious programs it finds.

Correcting disk utilization errors

Things that will make your computer superficially faster and may slightly improve your user experience temporarily:

Clearing cache and cookies on your browser

Restarting the computer

Changing your screen resolution

Uninstalling unused browser extensions

Things that do not actually make your computer faster:

Deleting files

Registry cleaners

Defragging your drive

Passively wishing that your computer was faster instead of actually just adding more fucking RAM.

This post is brought to you by the lady with the 7-year-old laptop that she refuses to leave overnight for us to run scans on or take apart so that we can put RAM in it and who insists on coming by for 30-minute visits hoping we can make her computer faster.

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“You gotta make a decision leave tonight or live and die this way” is such a raw line you’d think it was from Tracy Chapman’s fast car. And it is in fact from Tracy Chapman’s fast car.

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Rewatched The Good Place for the first time since s4 dropped and. Oh my god. The Good Place said "people are a result of their environment but we always have a moral responsibility to be better" and The Good Place said "every day the world gets a little more complicated and it gets a little harder to be good" and The Good Place said "even in the face of total nihilism, when nothing you do will matter, you still have to at least try. Because trying is better than the alternative" and The Good Place said "if you have bills to pay and shit to deal with you don't have time or energy to become a better person" and then The Good Place really said "people get better when they get external love and support. How can we hold it against them when they don't " and THEN The Good Place really said "no one is irredeemable. Everyone can try to be better today than they were yesterday" AND THEN! The Good Place said "Heaven is just enough time with the people that you love" OH MY FUCKING GOD.

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yeah no offense to confucius or anything but if i was about to embark on a journey of revenge i would simply not dig two graves

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The thing about wanting to write smart essays is you truly do have to read books to do that, and the thing about reading books is that it is way harder now that I am not 17 and smartphoneless