I'm going to guess that it's easier to get addicted to weed than to alcohol due to price, pleasure, and no alcohol hang over.
Kids especially can get addicted to weed much easier than alcohol in my opinion.
I like alcohol but I see alcohol as a social drug. I never drank it alone. I also physically can't drink it too much due to hang over and complete inability to do anything useful after. During covid lockdowns, I was absolutely addicted to weed after I tried it. It had none of the draw backs of alcohol and even more pleasure in the beginning.
I was addicted for a while. It was horrible. I became unmotivated, fat from munchies, didn't talk to family or friends, always asked people I met if they wanted to smoke weed with me, was high during remote work, couldn't remember anything because my memory got very poor, had horrible acid reflux from all the smoke.
Thankfully I was able to remember what life was like before weed.
If you read https://www.reddit.com/r/leaves/ you'll see just how many people have been smoking since they were teenagers and are not 30 or 40 and don't remember what life was like.
Munchies are pretty benign if you have enough sense to stock your home with healthy options like unprocessed foods and no sugary stuff.
There is no benign volume of alcohol consumption. It's hard on your liver[0], causes cardiovascular disease[1], produces carcinogenic metabolites[2], it's a horrible drug... without even considering the high occurrence of abusive/violent drunks compared to weed.
Everyone is saying there is an "AI Bubble" and it's going to pop. Yet, no one can actually tell us when, at what prices will it pop, and how long will it take the market to recover (Nasdaq is 5x higher now than dotcom).
If it's going to "pop" but everyone knows it will go way higher than in the future than in 2025, then what exactly is the pop? A buying opportunity?
Everyone who isn't a total idiot will buy when it "pops" and wait it out for massive gains in the future. People writing these articles think the AI bubble will burst stay down forever. They keep citing dotcom but conveniently leave out the fact that tech is far bigger now than in the peak of dotcom.
This is exactly why despite these countless AI bubble burst predictions, the market is still near all time high. I'd like to see these bubble burst people put their money where their mouth is.
Here's my prediction: There will be an AI bubble but when it pops, it will still be way bigger than in December 2025. In other words, I believe we're in 1995 of the dotcom and not 1999.
> Yet, no one can actually tell us when, at what prices will it pop, and how long will it take the market to recover
... I mean, yeah, if you could reliably predict _those_, you wouldn't be _telling_ anyone, you'd be busy making billions on options.
"This will break, but we don't know exactly when" is not an unreasonable warning.
> but everyone knows it will go way higher than in the future than in 2025
Does everyone know that?
> People writing these articles think the AI bubble will burst stay down forever. They keep citing dotcom but conveniently leave out the fact that tech is far bigger now than in the peak of dotcom.
I mean, while that is true, it took a very long time (adjusted for inflation, the NASDAQ didn't recover until 2018), and most of the individual companies who were big then are now either gone or obscure (Sun's gone, Yahoo's basically gone, Cisco never recovered, Oracle arguably just about recovered, Amazon did very well). If you'd bought into the NASDAQ the day after dot-com went pop, well, you wouldn't have come out _great_; you'd have been far better off with the S&P500 or another broader index. If you'd bought into any of the dot-com darlings except for Amazon, you'd have been screwed.
And to be clear, not all bubbles recover. Railways never did, say.
To be clear I mean predicting the timing to any accuracy. That’s notoriously difficult (I’d argue pretty much impossible). A modern economist dropped in 1715 or so would be able to say with certainty that the South Sea Company and associated companies was a bubble, but they would not really be able to predict when it would pop accurately.
RE the Nasdaq, yeah, it recovered in real terms after 18 years. That would be cold comfort to most.
100% agreed. The AI "bubble" has been "going to pop" for the past year or more. Sounds a lot like Bitcoin, that was definitely popping any second now but actually did not really pop and you can still buy Bitcoin at prices higher than 6 or 12 months ago.
I need people to understand that if everyone thinks something is going to pop then it won't pop because people don't put money in risky assets. Assets only pop when everyone thinks they are absolutely safe and they can never go down in price, like what happened with the housing market.
AI bubble isn't even as big as the railroad and dotcom bubbles yet in terms of relative size to the total economy.
Yet, I feel like AI is more transformative for society than both.
One difference between dotcom and AI is that with AI, most people feel like their jobs can be automated away in a few years. This includes everyone from office workers to software devs to warehouse workers.
I don't think dotcom ever threatened this many jobs, right?
Yea but those men with 106 IQ on average lose out to men with 120 IQ and good looking on dating apps, right?
And the vast majority of those 106 IQ men can't move somewhere else where their IQ advantage comes into play. Passport bros are a thing but they're a very small (but growing) part of the male population.
Maybe I don't know enough about human biology or sociology but it seems like at some point, the population will drop low enough that natural resources is high per person and people will start having many more kids again.
Am I crazy for thinking this?
Our generation might be the generation where resources can't sustain the population. Hence, people naturally have fewer kids. Zoom out to the macro level and it just seems like humanity is adjusting to the amount of available resources per capita.
In this experiment, a mouse population grew quickly, then at high population density started falling quickly. But rather than recovering when the population decreased, it continued to fall until it was wiped out, in the presence of plentiful resources.
This keeps me up at night. Please someone tell me why it doesn't apply to us.
Because we're not mice. Because he was actually studying the effects of overcrowding and not population growth & decline.
You'd need to look at more than just the population numbers, the issues were around high infant mortality and bad parenting, those are the things you should look out for over low birth rates.
We already have an abundance of natural resources (at least... for the developed countries) The problem is that they aren't evenly distributed enough, to the extent that a lower population cannot counter the increasing wealth inequality.
We already have an abundance of natural resources (at least... for the developed countries)
I'm not convinced this is true.
You can blame the billionaires who own the vast majority of the wealth but that's mostly due to the stock market giving them that value on paper. Physical resources stay finite.
>to the extent that a lower population cannot counter the increasing wealth inequality.
Wealth inequality has nothing to do with it; some of the countries with the lowest wealth inequality like Northern Europe have the lowest birthrates. A hundred years ago wealth equality in most countries was much higher than now and people were much poorer, yet they were still having many more children than people today.
By that point you would need an ubsurd amount of kids per family to recover the birth rates, also mentioning that your checks are paying for a growing elderly population and it becomes nearly impossible to recover.
Eventually the population will fall low enough that it can no longer support a society complex enough to produce birth control pills. At that point, people will start having kids again.
Overwhelmingly, across different societies, with different efforts to tweak variables, the result is that pregnancy and childbirth are risky and unpleasant enough that the average woman, given the choice, doesn't want to do it twice.
Fertility used to be higher because women used not to have that choice. At this point, if we want to grow or sustain populations, the only possibilities seem to be
1. Take that choice away from women. Not only would this be abhorrent, I'm not sure it's even possible without some sort of mass violence or horrific war.
2. Bribe women to have children, above and beyond the (economic) cost of having them. This seems difficult, and I genuinely don't know how high you'd have to go to get to replacement fertility. If you're not a woman, genuinely imagine how much you'd have to be paid to give birth to two babies you don't want. Then add the economic opportunity costs to that. Do we really have the resources to give that to half the population (because how do you know who wouldn't give birth without it)? Plus, a lot of men would be very mad.
3. Massive government investment into obstetrics to make pregnancy and childbirth dramatically easier on your body. This, to me, seems the most plausible, though there're obviously still major social barriers.
4. Develop sci-fi tech that removes or reduces the obligation for only women to bear children - either by inventing make pregnancy (halves the necessary average fertility, plus it's much easier to convince people who haven't done it before to have a baby) or artificial wombs. This is pretty far out, but I'm not aware of any actual hard limits on the possibilities. From my perspective, it's probably easier than stopping aging, which looks to have some genuine enthropic challenges.
Everyone (including me) is inclined to blame lower birthrates on their pet social cause (economic inequality, cost of housing, "The LGBT agenda", cars, cities, foreigners, the job market, social media, feminism, Marxism, conservatism, obesity, vaccines) but just as an example, the reduction US birthrates has largely been driven by a precipitous drop in teen pregnancy. As hormonal birth control and sex education has become more available, it's been easier and easier for women to prevent unwanted pregnancies without the cooperation or involvement of men, and birthrates have, predictably, dropped.
And I think it's probably going to be pretty hard to put that genie back in the bottle, unless you can get women to vote against their own right to vote and weather the inevitable storm caused by telling 50% of everyone they're not really people anymore and should just do what they're told. Women tend to be less violent and less physically imposing then men, but I don't think they're actually much less capable of causing destruction with, like, a petrol bomb, and I think we would probably find the line that overcomes that tendency pretty fast if we went down that path.
Your solutions are mostly to the birth issue, but i think there is an extra burden which is child rearing. The opportunity cost goes way beyond 9 months and even with both parents, raising more than one child is very demanding and the male may also be against further children. So women are not the only obstacle, males will also be.
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