I agree to a point. Although, alcohol (when consumed responsibly) has a social element to it, so companies having a "beers on Friday after 4pm" just feels different than "here's nicotine so you can be more productive and make us more money." They are serving different functions.
> just feels different than "here's nicotine so you can be more productive and make us more money."
More likely these companies just offered to give them some free vending machines and some office manager said sure why not. Not everything is a careful corporate strategy.
Beers on Friday after 4pm is rarely done because management really cares about the employees. It's a type of team building, improves employee morale and humanizes management. All lead to improved productivity in the long term.
If my boss gives me a stimulant to be more productive, especially a relatively harmless one like nicotine, I would gladly take it, as I like stimulants and am an adult capable of making decisions for myself. If I didn't, I would just refuse, just how I might refuse the free coffee by boss offers me.
I doubt anyone is forcing the employees to take the stimulants. That would be bad, indeed.
> It's a type of team building, improves employee morale and humanizes management. All lead to improved productivity in the long term.
Yes, but the important distinction is that its intention is to bring people together face-to-face, not isolate them to their desks for continued work. Just because the end goal is "productivity" broadly speaking, doesn't mean the mechanisms are socially/morally equivalent.
> I doubt anyone is forcing the employees to take the stimulants.
I agree, and I hope my comment didn't imply I thought that was the case.
I don't see how offering nicotine (or caffeine, or amphetamine) is morally wrong if it's not mandatory. In fact, given 2 companies that only differ in what they offer - free beer on Fridays for 1 hour or free stimulants all the time - I would choose the second one in a heart beat. Many people wouldn't, and that's their choice. I just don't see how one approach is better ethically than the other at all.
That's unnecessarily cynical. I've been in plenty of companies where the staff, managers included, enjoy going for a pint together. I'm in the UK, maybe it's cultural.
I agree, I made it too black and white. I should've said that some, probably most (in my opinion), of such decisions are made with productivity in mind, whether it's in the form of team cohesiveness or favorable view of management, but some are just because managers have the best interest in mind for their subordinates.
OTOH, if you've witnessed how most managers talk about their employees to one another, it's with a cold calculating language. Sure, a manager may feel bad for firing an employee, but first and foremost is the business analysis of whether it makes sense to do so - just pure math and predictions.
Personally, if I was in a management position and an employee asked me for a cigarette, I would happily give it to them. In fact, a few times a week I give a few cigarettes to 1 person who is not my employee, but who I talk to from time to time. I don't gain anything from this and I give them cigarettes because they are on a tight budget.
Also, if I, as a hypothetical manager, realized a lot of my employees would take an offer for free coffee, cigarettes, pure nicotine, beer or another drug, I would give it to them as long as it didn't hurt productivity too much. Of course some drugs like alcohol could hurt short term productivity, but it would make them happier overall, which would have positive long term effects. If asked why I do this, I would say that I'm both giving them out of my good will and to increase productivity, which would be true.
Tech companies are less receptive to alcohol than they used to be. There was a post (can't find it now) from a VC firm saying something like, "We encourage our companies to throw no alcohol parties; there's less risk of all kinds, and overall it's less messy."
wasi_master said this the last time this project was posted -
"Hello everyone, it's the author here. I initially created 13ft as a proof of concept, simply to test whether the idea would work. I never anticipated it would gain this much traction or become as popular as it has. I'm thrilled that so many of you have found it useful, and I'm truly grateful for all the support.
Regarding the limitations of this approach, I'm fully aware that it isn't perfect, and it was never intended to be. It was just a quick experiment to see if the concept was feasible—and it seems that, at least sometimes, it is. Thank you all for the continued support."
I am curious why these workarounds continue to work .
If the content owners care so much about the paywall integrity they can verify if it is really google bot . Google provides a reverse dns lookup of the IP addresses of their bots[1]
I have a brain disease driven by an infection that gets better with long term antibiotics.
One of my main symptoms was MCI. Interesting that after long term treatment not only the MCI improved or subsided but also my very long standing ADHD (present for as long as I can remember) got dramatically better, makes you wonder.
That actually makes a lot of sense to me. ADHD can be phrased as a regulation disorder. Emotions, executive function/ attention. If anything internal (literally any kind of pain) presents itself for my attention, it wins. No contest.
I have nasty seasonal allergies (at least one per season). Whenever it flares up, the is a marked increase in my needs and decrease in my productivity. I'm hoping to start immunotherapy for them soon. I get my ADHD and my allergies from my dad and immunotherapy has done him wonders.
Meditative techniques can assist with the regulation of emotions/attention. I speak from experience. It takes practice when you’re feeling well to be able to channel it when you’re not feeling well. It’s not as hippy-dippy as you might think (unless you want it to be). No yoga mat required.
For someone who has been forced to try countless substances / diet regimens / health strategies due to a pervasive chronic disease, I beg to differ. There's so many things that you can personally do that will alter your cognitive abilities, sometimes to an incredible extent. The tricky bit is that there is indeed no silver bullet, and what works for someone might do nothing or create harm for another. So in my opinion, understanding that there are alternatives to resignation is really the critical component.
Hearing very interesting (yet unpublished) results coming out of Dayan Goodenowe's trials of supplementing Plasmalogen precursors on Alzheimer patients. A lot of folks over at APoE4.info have been on the precursors for many months.
Seems it wasn’t just “possession of an oil filter silencer”:
> Candelario sold and manufactured AR-15 style assault rifles in Maryland without a license. The ATF caught Candelario by using an anonymous man to purchase the firearms in a gas station parking lot. This agent purchased six rifles, as well as two fuel filter silencers.
I recommend to take a look at this interview by the very Bredesen, to a scientist called Dayan Goodenowe, working also on the Alzheimer problem. He has a very interesting book called "Breaking Alzheimer" that postulates that DHA Plasmalogen deficiency is causative for Alzheimer. Very interesting stuff:
I agree Dr. Bredesen's protocol probably can't hurt as it advocates a healthy lifestyle and diet, but there is NO evidence that it can prevent or reverse Alzheimers[1], as he claims. Also, Dr. Bredesen charges $1800+ for the protocol[2] in addition to selling branded supplements.
There is evidence, but I agree it is not rigorous and does not rise to the level of proof. I hope it can inspire other researchers to research parts of it more thoroughly.
With respect to Dayan Goodenowe and his Plasmalogen theory, I think the Rush study should be reproduced by other groups. I am no qualified to judge it either, but thinking critically, unless some glaring statistical mistakes were made, or error measuring the levels, or simply that plasmalogen deficiency is a biomarker more than causative (he goes at length as to why he considers it to be the latter), we are talking about natural compounds (Plasmalogen precursors, or IV plasmalogens) that do not require FDA approval, so it should be fairly straightforward to fund, develop and test.
“The clinical implications of this study are obvious. This is the first reported evidence of a metabolic phenotype with the same clinical characteristics as the APOE ε2ε3 genotype. The probability of dementia in participants with either a high PBV or an APOE ε2ε3 genotype was indistinguishable”
