However, if you're in a positivity cult, and don't realize you're in a cult, and don't have someone guiding you to consider you might be in a cult, the shrooms are just as likely to make the cult seem like the most profound and important experience in your entire life.

If you are a lead in a company, you suddenly have a profound spiritual experience based around your ability to hire and fire people and tell them what to do and can use the drug to convince yourself that the ideas you are coming up with are the most profound thoughts a person has ever had. You won't even realize you're shutting out good ideas, because you have a messianic belief in AI or crypto or whatever the thing is, and you take the shrooms to reinforce that belief and you create an environment around yourself and put people around you that reinforce that belief.

It's a very different experience than going to therapy to work through your fear or depression.

It's hallucinogens. That's the drug of choice in tech. What that leads to, other than the obvious hallucinations, is an obsession with set and setting. Bad vibes will literally give you a bad trip and ruin your high. I've seen this with wealthy shroom heads over and over again. Their entire life becomes centered around making sure the set and setting are always perfect, which means any little bit of someone trying to talk some sense in to them, they get ignored.

Once you start to think through the kinds of behaviors that shroom addicts would start to engage in, especially if they had the wealth and resources to facilitate their addiction, you'll see it everywhere. It's not the typical "ruin your life" kind of addiction, but it's having an impact on what kind of ideas are allowed among the SV venture types.

You could just as easily have a research club where awards are given for the best research on any given topic. That's essentially what the science fair is.

But it's important to you to have a winner declared between a and b? A fun game, sure, but don't delude yourself into thinking it had more value than entertainment. You could have learned about or been taught energy policy through any number of means. But you are failing to consider why the framing of HIV vs energy funding as a winner take all debate is, as I said above, incredibly dumb.

From a carbon perspective, net metering was basically paying homeowners to provide useless power to the grid (at the bottom of the duck curve) but be able to cash it in when they actually needed it around 7 pm. This meant generating useless solar power and in exchange for letting burning a ton of natural gas when you actually needed the power.

The next step is pairing solar with residential and grid scale storage. Personally, with how intermittent production can be now, the grid should be more like AWS. Allow for per minute billing and rates that fluctuate for some customers. If you can pair storage with solar (or even just storage if you could buy low sell high off the grid), that would be the next big step in the renewable revolution.

Net metering always had to die for the next step (storage) to happen. With the electric car mandate coming into 2035 so that millions of homes will own a giant battery this will eventually be even more important.

Drinking coffee is an experience that also requires things. It doesn't always require spending a lot more money or even getting a lot more equipment, but a great cup of coffee always involves focusing on the quality and little improvements you can make.

I think you'll find any real minimalism practice is more about minimizing low quality things and experiences to allow the things and experiences that remain to be maximally enjoyable.

The Vancouver specific reaction has been the "Empty Homes Tax" https://vancouver.ca/home-property-development/empty-homes-t...

And according to Vancouver again, while the tax did cause a drop in empty houses declared, in every neighborhood except West End they represent less than 1% of total housing supply )https://vancouver.ca/news-calendar/more-vancouver-homes-occu...) and in most cases less than 0.5% of housing supply.

So while this may be an issue, it doesn't appear to be the issue and it seems that the basic economics here suggest that the issue in Vancouver was not limited to foreign investment. It would appear that in the Vancouver case, this ban on foreign homes would in fact be ineffective since it represents such a small share of housing.