Born to Squint, Forced to See ⚜️

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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: April 26th, 2025

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  • What are they even trying to say with the whole thing about Europe vs the US? If Europe had used their devices for shorter lengths of time, ie higher capital amounts spent on tech replacements, then they would have had higher productivity?

    But that necessitates a level of investment that doesnt exist. Its like saying “if investments in the Congo were on parity with the US they would have increased productivity by 2 million percent”. Which is neither guaranteed to be true, as there are limitations in a smaller country, plus fairly useless to even say as there are limits on what is reasonably investable in the Congo without more risk than reward. Its literally useless econobabble arguing in favor of hypotheticals that make no sense on paper

    Even the tech investments that occur already in the US make no sense on paper, consumer nor commercial. People dont need a new iphone every year. I get 5 years out of mine on average





  • I would think that the primary issue is the potency of fentanyl vs heroin, as fentanyl is far more likely to cause an overdose and to be misdosed than heroin. Fent might have been in the supply on a technical basis in 2013, but it wasnt popularized whatsoever. The average American did not know what it was, and the average user was probably not taking it (at least knowingly).

    The spike in 2017 and rise beforehand probably correlates with increased presence of fentanyl in the US market, courtesy of China. Most US heroin was coming via Mexico and not highly related to the Afghanistan poppy production. As the current article notes, most of that production was supplying heroin to Europe and the eastern hemisphere.

    China, circa 2014-2015 and just before, was ramping up their supply of illicit analogue research chems to the US. It seems like that mostly dwindled down to just focusing on Fentanyl, and then fentanyl took over as the primary illicit opiate. This also correlates with the same time period that the US was significantly tightening restrictions on legitimate pharmaceutical opiates like Oxycontin. Around 2014-2016 large numbers of patients who, for better or worse, had been legally prescribed pain pills were being cut off of them. Which drastically increased the market of people seeking illicit opiates.

    I would think the overall spike is due to the increase in market size due to restricting pain pills, the popularization of fentanyl as a specifically sought substance, the ease of importing fentanyl by bad actors (given that it is a far stronger substance by weight), and the significantly higher likelihood of the end user overdosing. Due to it being a stronger substance, when it is cut with other mediums it would make any given part of the final sold product a toss up in terms of strength. One part of the cut mix might have hardly any fent, while another corner of it might have a lethal dose, even if the user is taking the same amount of the final mixture. The process of producing heroin created a more homogeneous product even if it was cut before making it to the end user. It wasnt a matter of a few grains here of there that meant life or death for the user.

    Plus you factor in that junkies have a penchant for seeking out batches that have caused overdoses rather than avoiding them, because they are looking for high strength even if it might kill them. Yet another reason why fent became so popular that it displaced heroin.

    I think very little of it has anything to do with Afghan heroin production to be honest



  • The difference can be pretty staggering between games even released a short time apart. I recently got back into AC games, and while downloading them I noticed Origins is less than 25 Gb, while Odyssey is over 75 Gb. They were only released one year apart.

    I havent started Odyssey, so I cant make a comparison, but Origins is a beautiful and well running game at less than 25 Gb of data. I cant imagine Odyssey is significantly more impressive to a point where demanding 3x the data is justified, considering it runs on the same hardware. But I guess I will see soon enough