I've been a few times. I think a good session is 90 minutes. 60 seems too short for me but 90 is good enough to get the full experience. You really have to know how to relax though.
There's one in San Diego called Flot and the owner recommends at least two hours. I booked it and must've floated for closer to three, which was about right. It had three stages:
1. Mind racing, everyday worries at hand (~45-60 minutes)
2. Thinking through actual concerns and whats important (~30 mins)
3. Complete relaxation
It's an incredible experience if you devote the time to it, but to really feel it you need to get through the first stage which can take over an hour. I left happier and more peaceful than I had been in some time.
Wasn't the metric for calculating self control was how long you were willing to wait for an additional marshmallow? Seems like a proxy for measuring self control that would be biased towards people with a propensity for obesity.
It has to be for them (people who believe there is a gender pay gap) to try and make any change. There are plenty of examples where pay is different regardless of gender: sports and entertainment would be two big ones.
With sports, people are payed differently even if they fill the same position on a team. Why? They aren't the same. They bring different skillsets. It's the same with movies. The main character will make more than someone 20 spots down in the credits list. Someone with a well-known name will make even more. All of this wage difference that can occur across genders.
But with tech everyone should be paid the same if you share the same title regardless of how different you are or how much value you bring to the table.
Edit: To clarify, I have no issue with a company removing any pay difference between employees. I only have an issue with those who think paying people differently is inherently a problem.
> But with tech everyone should be paid the same if you share the same title regardless of how different you are or how much value you bring to the table.
Why? Different people bring different value. The same title can have wildly different roles, some positions with the same titles can be much harder to replace than others.
For example: at my company my team has a very specialized role that is far outside the domains of all other developers (we're talking about a large multinational here, with thousands of employees). You bet your ass we make a decent chunk more than most other devs, replacing any one of us would cost a ton of money and require over a year of learning about our stuff; replacing one of the devs who works on our main product? In half a year you could get someone to full productivity.
In other words: some employees are more expensive to replace than others, either shower them with €€€ or pay a much higher cost when they go work elsewhere.
> Women and different ethnic groups are treated in different ways with regard to things like hiring, performance reviews, etc. and there's a significant enough difference that the system could be defined as racist and sexist, even though no individual feels that they themselves are racist or sexist.
I think the issue here is that the difference in treatment is only an issue for a subset of races and genders in certain industries.
I've had the exact opposite experience (i.e. getting downvotes for saying something in defense of the government). I think political threads tend to lean in one direction pretty quickly. I usually check HN after getting home from work, at which point most threads have already been going on for several hours. At that point, if a thread doesn't already have discussion from multiple sides by then, I don't bother commenting. I feel like at that point you're only going to get downvotes for disagreeing.
Yes. It's not the case every single time. I've been upvoted for negative comments about the government but I have to be much more indirect about it. If I'm blatant about it, I get downvoted to hell.
That's not the way my parent was talking about, nor something I'm aware of.
What's very common is people getting prescribed painkillers (oxycodone, etc.) and then moving onto heroin, because they are similar drugs. But those painkillers are not psychiatric drugs.
People are generally prescribed opiates, which are not considered psychiatric but a pain reliever, and can become addicted that way. Perhaps you're thinking about benzos, like Valium or xanax, that are both psychiatric, addictive, and whose abuse/withdrawal can be extremely lethal (especially with alcohol for an overdose combination). They are similar but have different problems. Benzos are more deadly but less life-destroying. Opiates are probably prescribed too much/for too long without patient monitoring.
Even then, I vehemently disagree with you, but I at least can follow the logic.
Arguing that clozapine, diazepam, fluoxetine, etc., are gateway drugs for heroine is an argument I've never heard before. It sounds ridiculous to me, but if you have evidence to support the claim, please post.
I'm pretty sure he's thinking painkillers are classed as psychiatric drugs, which if they were would mean he was correct.
But on your point, personally I think abuse of benzodiazepines is more likely to lead to a drug like Heroin than psychedelics are. The whole concept of "gateway drugs" hasn't been proven, but the effect of benzos is a lot closer to heroin than psychedelics (anyone who has actually tried heroin might correct me on this...), so would imagine a stronger cross-over (even if not due to a gateway effect, simply down to the fact that anyone who likes downers is likely to try other downers).
There are many transactions in the world where people pay for things they didn't specifically want, e.g. buying a car and getting all the seats and safety features, or ordering a meal and paying the full price even if you ask for some ingredient to be omitted.
In none of these cases--paying for a car where you'll take out the seats, paying for a meal where you don't get the mushrooms, paying taxes for government services you don't agree with--is the payment suddenly "theft".
> There are many transactions in the world where people pay for things they didn't specifically want, e.g. buying a car and getting all the seats and safety features, or ordering a meal and paying the full price even if you ask for some ingredient to be omitted.
The difference is consent. People consent to paying for those meals or the car. But nobody ever consented to taxation. That's all part of the "social contract" we're born into.
You're right that initial decision of consent was made for you by someone else--it was made for you by your parents, when you were a child and they had custody of you.
As an adult, you are free to revoke your consent by leaving the country and ceasing to enjoy the benefits its government provides.
(And as for "nobody consented to taxation," I consented, and continue to do so, because I like contributing to the country where I live and where I'm a citizen.)
They couldn't even if they wanted to. E.g. Better social welfare, law enforcement, and education means less crime. Less crime benefits everyone in some way. Perhaps if it were made legal to commit crimes against people who don't pay taxes...
Even then, it would be basically impossible to avoid benefiting in some way without leaving the country altogether. There will always have to be at least some "core" services that everyone has to pay into, but that doesn't mean techlibertarian's idea totally lacks merit. Maybe some things should be partially opt-outable. Maybe people would start to question whether America really needs to spend half of its tax revenue on the military; maybe there would be more pressure to get some of the presently useless (and very expensive) 2.3 million prisoners back into the workforce.
