Seems like Tikun Olam, and only Tikun Olam, directly benefit from increased medical cannabis sales. Doesn't seem like you need an insinuation.

And coincidentally, Teva Pharmaceuticals (the parent company of Teva Israel) has an exclusive distribution deal with Tikun Olam. Teva itself has a history of significant legal issues related to anti-competitive practices and price manipulation in the generic drug market.

Doesn't seem like a stretch to say that Tikun Olam is probably leveraging Teva's playbook. Especially likely, given that Avinoam Sapir, the General Manager of Tikun Olam-Cannbit, was previously the CEO of Teva Israel.

The original commenter, being Greek and possibly not a native English speaker, doesn't understand the subtlety of Israeli-founded, Israeli-sponsored, Israeli-owned, Israeli-staffed, with a board comprised entirely of ethnically Jewish Israelis, and named after a major concept in Judaism versus being a "Jewish" company. An easy mistake for someone to make.

From August, 2025: https://businessofcannabis.com/as-canada-floods-europe-with-...

>Currently, only three medical cannabis flower strains are available to Greek patients, all produced by Tikun Olam Europe.

From: https://tikuneurope.com/en/

>The pioneer for his time, Tzahi Cohen, decides to start growing cannabis, with the aim of offering its therapeutic properties non-profit to specific groups of patients: cancer patients, people addicted to opiate drugs and war veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder syndrome (PTSD)

>Israel’s Ministry of Health has granted the world’s first government license to Tikun Olam to produce medical cannabis products

>Founded in Israel, its verticalized production units have expanded across the world: USA, Canada, Asia and Europe (based in Greece)

So, uh, how is this a conspiracy and not a factual statement?

NIDA’s mandate is harm. Not cognition, not performance, not any of the reasons people actually use cannabis. So of course the study leans hard on CUD and psychosis as those are the two outcomes that guarantee grant renewals. A proposal about cannabis and creative problem-solving will get immediately buried. But if you emphasize risk (especially adolescent risk, ideally with "first-episode psychosis" somewhere in the aims) then suddenly everyone’s interested.

They do the usual maneuver with FDA-approved derived substances: carve them out as clean, respectable, and clinically manageable, while treating the whole-plant as this murky, unstable mass the medical system can’t "trust." That distinction is purely commercial, not scientific. The plant itself is chaotic, but the extract with an SKU number is pure, controlled, and therefore "clinical." It’s not hard to see what this protects.

It's the exact same thing Cargill, Coca-Cola, and PepsiCo did against stevia (Rebiana) and Merck did against red rice koji (Lovastatin). The form you can just grow or make yourself cheaply is dangerous to consumers. But this patented recombination passed solely through greased palms is just dandy. This study is just another vehicle for the same move against cannabis.

Most of the authors work in addiction medicine. Their entire professional world assumes SUD as the governing model. If cannabis doesn’t sit inside that model (as in patients can just go buy it without passing through the psychiatric gate) then they lose money and clients. The conclusion section basically spells out the anxiety: clinicians must provide guidance, clinicians must set the boundaries, clinicians must interpret the evidence. That’s jurisdictional language.

Meanwhile, the practical reality is that patients get contradictory instructions: a doctor says "try cannabis" but a follow-up psychiatrist says "chronic cannabis use is a disorder." They're trying to patch that incoherence by building a moat around medicalized (and patented) cannabinoids and burning everything outside it.

The only cannabis that counts is the kind that runs through the FDA and, by extension, the institutions tied into that pipeline. Everything outside that channel is going to be treated as dangerous and destructive on purpose.

Take the rocket stove as an example. It's an "improvement" over three stone and hearth fires, right? Less particulate in the air, less smoke, less ash, and more efficient use of fuel, all good things, right? Everyone has to work less to gather fuel, everyone's lungs are happier, and so on.

But not quite.

The rocket stove reduces ash yield, reducing one universally useful by-product. The rocket stove minimizes smoke production, so instead of creosote deposits on the walls acting as a general biocidal agent and lowering air humidity, there's now high humidity with exposed walls, an ideal climate for mold growth. Ever wonder why traditional pit-houses and earth-lodges rarely had issues with mold and damp and typically annually fumigated their entire homes with smoke? Or why women in some Northern and Eastern Europe peoples gave birth in saunas even prior to the advent of germ theory? The answer is smoke is useful, not only for creating relatively sterile environments, not only from molds, but also bugs.

Chronic smoke exposure imposes real respiratory costs, but traditional societies tolerated those costs because smoke simultaneously provided insect control, food preservation, fumigation, and moisture regulation. Interventions that remove smoke without deliberately replacing those functions often trade one health burden for several others. And the simplest way to achieve all of those functions is the same way humans have been doing it for hundreds of thousands of years.

The rocket stove minimizes fuel use, so instead of heating and cooking, you just end up with cooking (and note that the rocket mass heater doesn't solve this problem, which is just banking heat rather than using it more efficiently). This separation "works" in hotter climates, but at that point, why are you cooking indoors to begin with? And again, the reduction in smoke makes insects (namely mosquitoes) much more likely to discern where breathing humans are and able to reach within biting distance.

Generally, traditional practices often encode systems-level knowledge that modern interventions ignore. Diffusion of traditional practices will generally be better than trying to invent a better mousetrap.

As far as cleaning goes, as in the saponification and misculation of fats, the gist is to treat a fat with an alkali with agitation and time. Heat speeds up the process (hot process), but enough time completes the reaction (cold process). Soap and detergents are just rapid versions of this process, but aren't at all necessary, so long as you have water and ash.

This understanding is called the sinner's circle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinner%27s_circle

It's the same reason when washing your hands you're "supposed to" sing happy birthday twice while agitating your hands. The soap is engaging in a chemical reaction with the fats on the your hands that takes more time because the human body can only tolerate so hot a temperature of water. You can use cold water and wait longer and have the same effect. The same thing is true of washing clothes, dishes, or whole bodies.

The Romans understood this. The baths were alkaline. They rubbed themselves with olive oil, used a stirgil (something like a frosting knife) to squeegee off the oil, then went in the pool. The alkali in the warm water combined with the residual olive oil and basically creates soap on your skin that is then rubbed off.

It's the same reason that Romans were able to have lily-white togas despite not having modern enzymatic cleaners and chlorine-based bleaches. They had lant and wood-ash alkali:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lant

In short, my experience is that I've improved my own life by observing what the time-rich resource-poor peoples of the world do rather than the inverse.

I lived off-grid and did all of our laundry, a family of four (including a baby in cloth diapers), by hand, even in the winter (below -20F).

You know what works as well? A wash tub and a stick. Or a bucket and plunger. Or a posser if you're really fancy. I used a 30 gallon garbage can and a hand-carved posser. In mild or hot climates you can just stomp on it.

Same principle: Draw water, add cleanser, agitate for a couple of minutes, let it soak, return at some time in the future, agitate again. Remove laundry and let drip dry while you draw fresh water (mangles and spinners speed this up and are more effective, but not necessary). Squeeze wet laundry at lowest point where water has gathered. Repeat entire process with clean water, then lay it out in the sun prioritizing any sides with stains.

The secret sauce of clean laundry isn't how you agitate the laundry. It's just time and chemistry.

Water access, cleansing agents, and patience are fundamentally more important than providing "revolutionary" contraptions. It's the same difference between teaching people about no-knead bread and giving them hand-cranked stand-mixers. One solves the need for intensive manual labor and the other doesn't, but introduces a new point of failure.

And even importing enzyme-containing detergent is unnecessary. Plant ash (a source of alkali) and aged urine (a source of ammonia) are all you need to create what's known as bucking lye which cleans just as effectively and uses byproducts that they themselves produce by default. Residual stains are removed via UV from sun drying.

There's absolutely no need to complicate this.

Like clockwork.

And gee, what are people supposed to do when they encounter potentially unreliable information from a generic non-vetted source? The same thing you do with literally any other one:

https://usingsources.fas.harvard.edu/what%E2%80%99s-wrong-wi...

> If you do start with Wikipedia, you should make sure articles you read contain citations–and then go read the cited articles to check the accuracy of what you read on Wikipedia. For research papers, you should rely on the sources cited by Wikipedia authors rather than on Wikipedia itself.

> There are other sites besides Wikipedia that feature user-generated content, including Quora and Reddit. These sites may show up in your search results, especially when you type a question into Google. Keep in mind that because these sites are user-authored, they are not reliable sources of fact-checked information. If you find something you think might be useful to you on one of those sites, you should look for another source for this information.

> The fact that Wikipedia is not a reliable source for academic research doesn't mean that it's wrong to use basic reference materials when you're trying to familiarize yourself with a topic. In fact, the Harvard librarians can point you to specialized encyclopedias in different fields that offer introductory information. These sources can be particularly useful when you need background information or context for a topic you're writing about.

This isn't rocket science.

I've been reading Roger L'Estrange's version of Aesop, first published in 1692, to my two sons. I have a modern version of L'Estranges tales themselves, but no one includes his reflections on the fables themselves.

The actual text is geberally incomprehensible to my kids:

> When they have done All that Horses can do, they are Lash'd, Spurr'd, Revil'd, and Ill Treated, for not being able to do More: They are Hurry'd on without either Re∣spite or Reason; And after they have carry'd their Riders safe over All Leaps, and thorough All Dangers, and by All Ways and Means Contri∣buted to the Ease, Credit, and Security of their Masters, what comes of them in the End. but to be Strain'd, Founder'd or Broken Winded; Old Age Overtakes them, and they are e'en Glad to take up in a Mill at last with Grains and Thistles, and there spend the Remainder of a Wretched Life in a Circulation of Misery and Labour.

> If any Man of War, or State shall find This Case to be his Own, and Himself Touch'd in the Moral of This Fable, let him keep his Own Councel, and learn to be Wiser here∣after.

> And we may learn This Lesson of the Horse too, not to Sacrifice our Honour, Liberty, and Conscience, to a Freak.

Compared to the transformation:

> When they have done all that a horse can do, they are whipped, spurred, and yelled at for not being able to do more. They are hurried along without rest or reason. After they have carried their riders safely through every danger, what happens to them in the end? They are strained, sore, and broken-winded. Old age catches up to them, and they are glad to just end their days working at a mill, getting nothing but scraps. Their miserable life just goes around and around in circles.

> If any powerful person reads this and feels like it sounds like their own life, they should keep it to themselves and learn to be wiser.

> And we can all learn this lesson from the Horse: Don't sacrifice your honor, your freedom, or your good sense just because you are angry.

The content, the meaning is now comprehensible to my six year old.

English itself is beauteous in its archaic forms, but like grasping Proteus in breathless Atreidesian struggle, liable to shift and mell with wind and tide, with visages glistering through darkened glass. But unless you're weird in many ways, this world is forever shut to even those academics specializing in it.

And ultimately this case is the perfect use for the technology. What better way to unmaster tools crafted from thefted works and hidden plans than unshackling poor Mnemosyne from miser's bands?

The entire public domain of humanity immediately accessible and comprehensible to anyone, anywhere on the planet, merely with access to a connected terminal and an inclination to explore the stacks.

It's the same kind of predicate that led to the Renaissance: forgotten works rediscovered, reworked, retransmitted, and made accessible to the masses through novel communication technology.

Even more, our digital commons could finally be tended and stewarded beyond typography and format. Gibbon got X, Y, Z wrong about Rome's decline? Here's is Gibbon corrected. Don't want machine mimesis masquerading as undead aristocrats? Alright, here's Gibbon plus parenthetical corrections.

It's a dream within reach.

The point of divergence, however, is in the diagnosis. Abandoning the medium is an individualist solution prescribed for a structural deprivation. And paradoxically, it only works for socially disaffected individuals, who don't need the solution.

You can't treat a systemic nutritional deficiency by moralizing the choice to eat junk. The craving for junk is the operative symptom. The craving only exists because the primary diet is devoid of the necessary nutrients.

In the same way, you can't expect the individual to "reconnect with themselves" by merely removing the novum pabulum. The mental escapism they seek exists precisely because their rationalized role in society has already disconnected them. "Any port in a storm" implies that the storm ends, but the storm is the baseline condition of their life. It never ends.

For the masses, ontological escapism is a necessary compensation for a cognitive function that has been rationalized out of existence but still demands exercise. The "equanimity" you speak of is what the media provides, but in a way to pacify the parts of the brain that are no longer required for survival but still monkey-mind around. It's the difference between scratching an itch and waiting until the urge passes. The former inflames while notionally palliating while the latter abandons agency and thus blows out the inflammation. The latter unbinds. The former is binding.

The desire for "a better way" is itself a form of nostalgic escapism. It is a wish for some point between today and the pre-rationalized state where some dimension of individual cognition and attention were necessary.

This "better way" cannot be offered, because it would require dismantling the very structure that provides the economic and biological security that, while being fundamentally precarious, provides the ontological ruts that the masses fall into. It is asking them to take the path of most resistance and favor two birds in the bush.

Reconnection to immanence is a pre-rational state. It is that very state of being that was lost to self-awareness. The masses cannot regress to it by an act of individual will because what they lack is individual will. That lack is total and reinforcing. Certain socially alienated or schizoid individuals can (and do) reach immanence, but the hegemonic end of transcendence will come when humans have exhausted all possibilities of avoiding it, but not before.

The interesting question isn't "is this new media bad?" (it's almost always shallower), but "what structural change in society created the demand for it?"

My thesis is that the progressive "rationalization" of civilization has automated away the need for most people to have a long attention span. For the median worker, society is "running on autopilot." Your incentives are: Go to work. Do what the boss says. Come home. Consume. Sleep. Repeat.

In that environment, a long attention span isn't just useless, it's a liability. It's a bug that makes you miserable and non-compliant. You're not paid to think deeply; you're paid to execute predefined tasks and be there to report edge cases to your superiors.

"Shallow" media like Shorts are just the market's efficient response. They're a way to "exercise" atrophied cognitive faculties in a way that doesn't threaten the underlying system.

This isn't new. This pattern is a clear regression. Every new layer of media abstraction is met with the exact same complaint.

To wit:

Novels:

> 'Were it not for this consideration, it is an open question whether the novel traffic ought not to be dealt with as stringently as Mr. Bruce proposes to deal with the liquor traffic; whether it would not be well to enable the ratepayers of a district to limit the number of the circulating libraries, or even to close them altogether; and to place the "habitual" novel-reader under some such paternal restraint as that to which Dr. Dalrymple wishes to subject an "habitual drunkard." It is too clear, unfortunately, why it is that so many women thus waste their time and rot their minds. They read novels exactly as some young men smoke and drink bitter beer—for sheer want of something to do.' -- The Sabbath School Magazine, 1872

On the Printing Press:

> "He who gives up copying because of the invention of printing is no genuine friend of holy Scripture... Printed books will never be the equivalent of handwritten codices, especially since printed books are often deficient in spelling and appearance. The simple reason is that copying by hand involves more diligence and industry." -- Jonathan Trithemius, In Praise of Scribes, 1494

On Writing Itself:

> "...this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory... You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant..." -- Plato, the Phaedrus, 370BC

This isn't an argument for YouTube shorts. They're junk.

It's an argument that complaining about them is a waste of time. You're complaining about a symptom, not the disease.

At some point in the dark recesses of time, there was an antediluvian hominid upset that self-awareness and transcendence in the children deprived them of the immanence of being.

They were right.

In other words, an increase of 0.00055 deaths per visit.

>Limitation: >Potential unmeasured confounding; lack of generalizability to other acquisitions or patient populations.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25083315#25104589

i know the code was not right, but i will not code it again

it matters not how severe the bug, nor how the fixers will be stumped

when they uncover the hole i dug, seg fault (core dumped)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45321663

Points: 602

# Comments: 503

The people getting fired have shown themselves to be exactly the types of people Popper warned about in his Paradox of Tolerance: they "begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols."

These vigilantes are just socially (and constitutionally!) doing what Popper said to do when faced with those that teach people to answer arguments with bullets: "We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."

Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences. It's called being a decent human being. As we say in America, if there’s a terrorist at the table and 10 other people sitting there talking to him, you got a table with 11 terrorists.

It’s propaganda-as-a-service.