Is there a better way to start a year than with acts of generosity?

Recently, I learned about the Seva Foundation, which counts Larry Brilliant, Ram Dass and Steve Jobs among its founders. The foundation's mission is to "build sustainable eye care systems worldwide by creating equitable access to eye care, building capacity of new and existing eye hospitals and systems, and collecting and learning from evidence."

I perused their website, and was taken aback by how common it is in many parts of the world for scores of people to suffer from vision impairment due to cataracts - a condition that can be easily cured with a simple surgery that costs 50$ to carry out.

It is a powerful reminder of the stark inequalities that exist in the world. I feel grateful that there are people like the Seva Foundation, who are doing something about it.

You can learn more about the foundation and donate to the cause at:

https://www.seva.org/

P.S. I am not affiliated with the Seva Foundation, I just found them to be a genuinely great organization and wanted to spread the word.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34208100

Points: 135

# Comments: 29

I don't see how you could afford all the things you mentioned on an average SWE salary in Europe. I have a very much above average SWE salary, and don't seem to be in any danger of getting a house and two cars anytime soon. I rent and don't have any cars, actually.

Healthcare is free, for the bare essentials. I pay a crazy amount per year for (private) healthcare, because the standard, mandatory insurance covers just about nothing of what I actually need. Consider that every month, I pay into the government healthcare system a lump sum which is approximately equivalent to the median salary in my country. This doesn't buy me any benefits - I get the same minimal coverage as everyone else. Socialism at its finest.

I'd be OK with it if the money actually went towards worthy causes. That is not the case, however - I am pretty sure most of the healthcare budget goes towards funding an antiquated, insanely oversized bureaucratic system. There's a whole social class of bureaucrats on the government payroll, who do pretty much nothing at all - you won't find them in the office after 3PM - who collect a meager but secure salary for their utter lack of effort and general uselessness.

More and more, I am jaded by the illusion of a "fairer" society in the EU, which often ends up being just a case of "everyone is guaranteed to get the same low-quality treatment".

That will get us to the point where your personality quirks, likes and dislikes, gender expression and sexual orientation, etc., have no impact on your career prospects, social integration prospects, and your ability to participate in society in general.

Retreating back into the privacy bubble is not an option. We need to go in the opposite direction, and put it all out there. When being completely naked, completely transparent becomes the new normal, compassion and empathy will well up in society to an extent never before experienced. We will all see that the emperor of social pretense and conformity never had any clothes, and this will be a watershed moment in how people relate to each other.

Really I can't even speak of time in this context. It felt more like a series of moment instants, and usually, before I even located "myself" in the experience, it was over.

I'm going to be bold here and say that if someone speaks of experiencing time dilation or loops on DMT, it is more of a question of the rational, linear mind, trying to make sense of a timeless, or non-linear experience of time (which it is not able to comprehend), by imposing familiar, linear concepts on it post-facto.

So, someone might speak of a time loop after the trip, but while you're actually having a DMT breakthrough experience, there simply is no "observer" there to generate the thought "oh, I am stuck in a time loop here". Therefore, the feeling of anxiety or terror, which might normally be associated with such a finding, will not arise.

It also helps that the whole thing is so otherworldly, the thinking mind is simply awed into silence. It takes a while before you could even begin to develop a conceptual interpretation of what is happening, and by then the whole thing is over and you are back to your sober self.

With other, long-acting psychedelics, there is plenty of time and opportunity for the mind to develop its own "spin" on the experience, and produce anxiety. Not so with DMT - it's like being shot out of a cannon and then coming back to earth just as fast.

It sounds terrifying and it is, when you're reflecting on it outside of the container of the trip. Somehow, while it's happening, you don't even have time to think about how terrifying it is, and as a result of that it ends up being OK. Tells you a lot about the nature of anxiety, really.

It takes years to develop that level of attentiveness, but it's oh-so-worth-it. And not just because it lets you avoid the seasonal colds :)

The rest is up to you, whether it's the third path, fourth path, or the umpteenth path.

Drug laws vary wildly in the regions you mentioned. Just about the only thing that they have in common is that drugs are illegal.

And it's not just a question of laws, either. Laws are one thing, and policing is another. There are countries which don't really enforce the law for personal use amounts.

The US has draconian laws, and punitive policing. There's your problem. It turns out that the worse you treat your criminals, the worse your crime problem gets.

Therefore, 15g of truffles is more like 1.5g of dried mushrooms.

The amount of psilocin and psilocybin given in the article confirms this. It's a very low dose.

When I was in Amsterdam, I bought a package containing 20g of these truffles. The label on the packaging said you should split it into two doses, but I've never been one to diddle the dose, so I ate 'em all, en route to the famous Amsterdamse Bos.

It ended up being, quite literally, a walk in the park :)

As little as a coffee in the morning would basically make me prone to fly off the handle due to the most insignificant, trivial little things. Cost me and my wife many hours spent in pointless discussions and unnecessary arguments.

Don't get me wrong, I love coffee, but I have to treat it like you would a recreational drug. Only to be enjoyed when the set and the setting is right.

I have been taking a green tea supplement occasionally. I saw it in a vitamin store, and bought it because of the supposed benefits of antioxidants. I figured - I have a stressful job, I live in a polluted city and do drink alcohol - I probably need the antioxidants. Plus, something that's made out of green tea sounds safe, not likely do any harm, right?

Well. I am disposing of the supplement, obviously. More to the point, though, I have to revisit my whole thinking process around supplements. I take a bunch of them, and it's purely on the basis of "I read a study somewhere or other that this is supposed to be good for you" - and not because I have a specific health concern that I need to address.

This approach suddenly does not seem so sane anymore, and I need to take a step back and rethink what I am doing here.

It's amazing how easy it is to gradually lose touch with your common sense, simply because you read the "right" subreddits (in this particular case, /r/nootropics), and start to subscribe to the hype.

Oh dear.

The "filtration system" that is talked about here is not comparable to a root system, or, in other words, any life-sustaining or life-promoting system.

Rather, a malignantly overgrown filtration system is the root cause of feelings of disconnectedness, deprivation, and subsequent depression, that are so common nowadays.

A societal tendency to bulk up the "filtration system" to pathological dimensions is the reason why there is an opioid epidemic in North America right now. Thanks to our massive filtration systems we have filtered out most that is good about the human race, and have managed to build a civilization/economic system that is so dehumanized, cutthroat, unfair, lifeless and ultimately unfulfilling and meaningless, that most of us subjects walk around in a daze, in states of deep emotional deprivation, just looking for something, anything, to either anesthetize those painful feelings (opioids and other downers), or distract us from them (social media, porn, television, VR..."entertainment").

Like everywhere in nature, balance is the key to a healthy state. We have erred, for centuries, on the side of boosting the filtration system through whatever means were available, and have managed to build very effective and tall walls within ourselves that separate us from our fellow men, from the environment, and even from deeper strata of our own consciousness. Now, we are reaping the harvest of that - a mankind that is plagued by mental illness, carrying out environmental destruction wherever you look.

But I digress. What I really wanted to say is - please, don't draw parallels between the "filtration system" and a root system. Really, most of us would benefit from downsizing the filtration system a notch or twenty...unlike plants, where cutting away roots would be of little benefit.

The problems that the US and Canada have with opioids are of their own making, and that's also where they should look for a solution to these problems.

I am amazed at what I read as a not-so-subtle suggestion, writ between the lines, that China is doing something wrong by not policing analogs and precursors more vigorously, and allowing the sale of pill presses.

China is a sovereign country, and, given that they do not have a massive problem with opioid addiction, there is little incentive for them to invest a lot of time and effort into expanding the war on drugs within their borders.

Perhaps, instead of blaming China for their problems, the US can take a long, hard look at their failed drug policies and dysfunctional healthcare industry (after all, over-subscription of legal opioids is what led to the current wave of addiction), and start to figure an honest, self-reliant way out the mess that they're in.

Interestingly enough, there's next to no problem with fentanyl in many European countries. Yet these same countries happily do trade with China, there are no embargoes in place or anything of that sort. I find that quite revealing.

You'd think that having achieved the seemingly hardest part, which was to get Zuck to talk to these bodies at all, care will be taken to make the most of the opportunity. Rather, the complete opposite has taken place.

I found it laughable how many times I've heard, during the US Senate session, an injunction addressed to the speaker to wrap it up, as their allotted time was up. The entire thing was rushed as if they were in a hurry to catch a train.

Is the Cambridge Analytica fiasco alone not reason enough to keep Zuckerberg in the hot chair for 12 hours over 2 days, if need be, if that is what is ultimately required to get him to actually divulge meaningful information, rather than the sound bites that he happily served up?

It seems that these hearings were mostly carried out for show, and rather than actually protect the interests of their constituents, these legislative bodies are content to operate on a purely formalistic level, devoid of any actual meaning. This is global politicians v.2018 for you - fumbling, toothless, woefully out of their depth on crucial issues of our time.

Not that it wasn't obvious, but you should still disclose your bias.

Good luck with your vegan diet. I hope that beans and veggies can provide for all your nutrition needs. But better keep going to those regular doctor checkups.

It is also not particularly Patreon-esque. You don't pay the artist a recurring fee. You can listen to the music for free only a handful of times, then you need to buy it, in a one-time transaction.

Bandcamp is really a place to discover music, buy it and download it. It's not similar to Soundcloud, or Spotify, which focus on streaming. A more apt comparison would be Beatport.

The target audience of Bandcamp are DJs and music connoisseurs, who want to own the music they like, in high-quality formats.

Bandcamp does a really good job of staying focused on these core user groups, and apparently is also doing rather well, financially:

https://daily.bandcamp.com/2017/01/24/everything-is-terrific...

I guess they're something of a reverse Soundcloud.

And yes, `[[ ... ]]` is a bashism. It's not going work on the HP-UX box, that you do not have in your server fleet.