I think a astronomically better example would be programs in the Netherlands, Denmark or Switzerland, where people heavily addicted to heroine can get into programs that will provide them with pharmaceutical heroine.
Still prescribed by doctors (although specialized ones), but not just for pulling a wisdom tooth with huge margins for the Sacklers...
The last time I looked up the Swiss program it was only servicing a small number of people. Around 1500 in a country if 9 million. It also wasn’t prescribed like a typical medication but part of a program where they received other treatment as well. There was some exception where some people could get 2 days of it at a time to take home, but it wasn’t a free for all prescription where they could just talk to a doctor and get their monthly desired supply from a pharmacy.
Many countries, including the US, use methadone for maintenance. As I understand it it’s not as enjoyable as some people’s opioids of choice but it’s still an extremely powerful opioid depending on the dose (easily fatal).
So it’s not only the countries you mentioned that provide pharmaceutical opioids as maintenance treatment. The US does too, though the form is different.
I'd say it is about what you expect for a country with voluntary programs. In the Netherlands the original program like the Swiss, resulted in heroïne becoming a medication for heavily addicted people usable under supervision. In the Netherlands there are about 4000 people with medical prescriptions for heroine on a 18M population.
Note that it is free, supervised and voluntary so ymmv in other countries. The conclusions of the original program with methadone in the 80s was that it resulted in hardly any reduction amongst heavy and problematic users and they were likely to go back to using heroine with all the associated problems, the heroine distribution program worked but needed some tweaking, thus the program was fully legalised and put into law resulting in supervised consumption (at the distribution point) with dosage control and medical checkups and far less issues.
A problem LAR programs have had since the start is that although methadone is less attractive as a drug than heroin, it's still attractive, and basically the only way to figure out how much a heroin addict needs is to ask them. Leading to users asking for extra, selling the excess (to users who were not in the LAR program) and buying other drugs with the profits. For some years, more people died from methadone overdose in Norway than heroin.
Sure, you could demand injection on site to reduce this problem. But that just makes the program less appealing. You could also just hand out the users' drug of choice directly (heroin) rather than the less harmful substitute, but at some point that starts counting as physician-assisted suicide, really.
Don't Spain and Portugal also have fairly progressive policies/programs for drug harm reduction? I remember reading about it a while back, but it was a US source and they were trying really, really hard not to have to say "you know, this might actually be a good way to handle it".
I believe OP wanted to make the point that one of the most important things for people profiting from the illegal sale of drugs (meth or heroin/opiates) is to minimize the amount that has to be trafficked (1kg of 10% meth vs 100g of pure meth or 1kg of heroin vs 10g of fentanyl).
Normally the risk of airborne spores taking over your growing material is much more likely than your (most of the time very selected and in no way adapted to the "normal" surroundings you try to grow them in) taking over your home. Keep in mind that almost all fungi like similar conditions and there are already loads of spores of fungi that are more adapted to your living conditions in the air.
Reminds me of the story where two guys went for a joyride in a Tram in Braunschweig (DE). They boarded a tram during the night, drove for a few stops (including letting passengers board & leave) and left the tram there.
The funniest part of the story is that they didn't commit any crime and were let go.
Yup. Got my own domain(s) and use a different address for all my services (like with Gmail where you could append +service to your email but with a completely distinct email per service like paypal@mydomain.com). Helped my several times to identify spam & phishing without even having to check the E-Mail itself.
My guess is that you probably know what I'm going to write, but a lot of people don't realize this 'Gmail trick' doesn't really work.
The problem is that foo+bar@gmail.com and foo@gmail.com are delivered to the same inbox, so if you are trying to scam someone it is safe to remove anything after the + in a gmail address.
And having a custom domain on gmail doesn't improve your situation, because with just a simple 'dig mx' you can know if the domain is hosted on gmail and apply the same regex to remove all labels.
So, to be less inflammatory the feature works as expected. But it only protects you if the bad actor is really dumb/lazy or if he is honest.
I do the same as the person you're responding to. There is no '+' in my email, I just create random strings @mydomain. It's impossible for a scammer to know they all go to one inbox.
Some people really love putting dumb validation rules for emails in forms... You would be surprised to know how many system in the real world will just refuse anything that is not a letter or a number in your email.
And the 'fuck them, I won't do business with them' attitude doesn't really work if the system that wont accept your email is the local gas company.
And there is another problem, some systems will just remove any label without informing you. I've had this problem logging in some random websites. My account was created with foo+bar@gmail.com but to log I had to use foo@gmail.com.
Not surprised at all, I've been using the Internet and writing software for a couple decades now. Heck, I might've written one of the validators you're complaining about. But they are typically written to avoid +, for the exact reasons you described.
For those sites, you can add a dot in your username. Then you can ignore any emails sent to an address without the presence of a dot or a plus.
I'm sure there are sites that don't accept dots either, but I've never run into one. So you have to make an exception? Oh well.
I agree that it's easiest to do with service@domain.tld, like the grandparent suggested.
IIRC dot is one of the characters that can't be discarded when checking local addr part (RFC 5322). So fubar@domain.tld and fu.bar@domain.tld are different addresses really. As far as I understand - it's a Gmail's team decision to configure local addr interpretation and allow `helloworld@gmail.com` and `hello.world@gmail.com` to be treated as the same address.
I'd expect that dot trick rarely works anywhere outside of gmail world.
+ sign is part of the standard (`atext` token, RFC 5322), so sites, which disallow it in address are doing it wrong.
The fact, that industry adopted a practice of using everything after + sign as a "tag" is not captured anywhere so this creates even more mess in already messy space (e.g MS followed GSuite in this too and added subaddressing - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/recipients-in-exc...)
My girlfriend (who has quite severe ADHD) is exactly like you. Before she can get any work done in our office everything needs to be put away/organized/in it's place or she'll get detracted all the time.
It's not just software. Law and policy do the same thing. So does science - even ostensibly fundamental concepts such as "temperature" are really just a simplifying stochastic model of a complex physical system. This is what natural language does, too.
As another commenter pointed out, "The map is not the territory."
The full Korzybski quote is perhaps more insightful, if less pithy: "A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness."
Right, "the map is not the territory" is just half of the quote, and the worse half at that. It's like saying "well, you never know" to everything. Okay, thanks for your help.
> The full Korzybski quote is perhaps more insightful, if less pithy: "A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness."
Right, nobody is expecting a map to actually be the territory. The only question is whether it's useful. We do have a pithier quote for that; one of my favorite quotes of all time:
"All models are wrong, but some models are useful."
Yes. That was the point of my original post: abstractions generate problems.
But abstractions are also useful. You can't just not abstract anything at all.
I took a look at my company's metrics this morning. Approximately 30% of the candidates we send to clients (and who have not ended up out of the process for reasons outside of quality, e.g. the company hired someone else) have ended up getting an offer. That's an important piece of information: it tells me that my company does not have a problem with failing to screen out weak candidates.
Is that leaving out some important details? Yeah, of course! One of our candidates failed an interview because he was too aggressive in questioning his interviewer about their company's prospects. That's a useful piece of information, too; it was (along with a couple other anecdotes) a clue that we should try to do more basic coaching for candidates before interviews.
The data tells me how common the problem is, and suggests which problems are most critical to solve first. The anecdotes can tell me in detail about the nature of the problems, and suggest to me possible interventions. Both of those things matter.
Same for leaf blowers. I worked on a farm in the Swiss mountains where we used large Stihl leaf blowers to get the hay down the mountain [1] so we could pick it up by machine and electric leaf blowers were only used for cleanup jobs in the barn.
Nowadays I live in the city but I still get sweaty flashbacks whenever I hear a gas leaf blower during the summer months.
Oh, I hear you, every fall in Ontario (and now Wisconsin) the sound of gas leaf blowers and that high-pitch whine drives me crazy. I have an electric one to basically clear off the front porch but I feel like even that is noise pollution (much worse than a riding mower to my ears) and so I rake an acre of mixed hardwood next to the house by hand spring and fall and trailer the leaves a half mile up the road to compost.
I'm sure it was hard work, but a farm in the Swiss mountains for a period of time sounds like a life experience!
Sorry, I should clear that up. I mulch (mower) as much of the leaves as I can and leave it on the ground, I only rake up what I can't mulch. And that's to protect the ground cover under the oak trees from dying under the leaves and turning everything in to mud/eroding.
