> While criminalising hard drugs is not ideal, legalising them and thereby making them more easily available will have a devastating impact and destroy too many lifes.

You mean your friends live in a country where cocaine is legal? o.O Would love to know more about that!

Or is it that you just didn't understand the arguments in favour of drug legalization and decriminalization?

Mushrooms and mycelia can be used as a resource to fabricate textiles, packaging, bricks etc.

Also, if the mushrooms grow only on what they can break down it's totally safe to eat them. It has to be a controlled process. Not just trying to grow mushrooms on a heap of trash you'd otherwise just burn.

Having said that - even mushrooms won't liberate us from using resources more responsibly.

if I can have a scotch, I'm in!

When you're settling down you can still come back to Germany enjoying a mostly functioning society and reasonable expenses. You'll just need to figure out a way to evade taxes.

I have no reason to be there. Came there for the "startup scene" but realised after a while how weak, unoriginal and underpaid most of it is

Living off capital gains is the easiest tax dodge in Germany. You pay ~50% on income, but only ~25% on dividends etc. (and that's before your financial adviser gets creative).

I think you should check the meaning of "cargo cult".

Shouldn't you rather continue working to make sure that if such a destiny awaits you, you have enough money to at least buy yourself some comfort? If he wasn't a former successful actor, he couldn't afford "to move around" in his condition.

>Shouldn't you rather continue working to make sure that if such a destiny awaits you, you have enough money to at least buy yourself some comfort?

Until when? How much is "enough"? Life is uncertain. Take Michael J. Fox, for instance.

I mean, this is the plan for a ton of people who go to California, particularly in the software world: "I'll work really hard for <major company> and put away a lot of money, then I'll move to a small place and work on what I really want to do, and live happily ever after."

How many people actually achieve this? It's harder than you think.

my comment is obviously tongue in cheek. I'm leading the conclusion of OP ad absurdum. maybe I expect too much from the HN crowd.

The irony in an ironic statement is difficult to detect when a sufficiently high percentage of the population believes it unironically. That is why sarcasm cues, like obvious exaggeration, can be useful.

Instead of calling their parents now? That seems a priority inversion to me.

Isn't that more of a metaphor? I mean how long does it take to call parents? 5 to 10 minutes? You can do it in the lunch break if you have to.

I have some sympathy with your perspective and still live my life a lot aligned to that mindset.

But the idea that you should wait until a lunch break to do <any actually important life thing> suggests that work and generating income is strictly higher priority than living.

For the same reason that you “pay yourself first” to save for retirement, you probably should think even more strictly about how you prioritize your time.

So sure it’s a metaphor, but a well-chosen one.

> I have some sympathy with your perspective and still live my life a lot aligned to that mindset.

I've struggle with this as well. I think the key is to avoid thinking "priority" as one dimensional.

A goal can be high-priority because it is urgent. Continuing to work until today's lunch break is more urgent than calling your parents, because you can only work until today's lunch break today, while you can call your parents at any time.

A goal can be high-priority because it is important. As a goal, calling your parents may be more important than continuing to work until today's lunch break.

In order to avoid the outcome that calling my parents is important, but I haven't called them in months because it was never urgent, I have to increase the urgency of the goal by constraining it in time: It's important to call my parents, and urgent to call my parents before the upcoming holiday.

Does prioritizing work truly make one's life more meaningful? Does being productive for a company (less abstractly, for someone else, whoever owns the capital) really give life purpose?

Work that is not benefitting your community and strengthening the bonds between others is worth putting off for a ten minute phone call with those who love you.

You do need to prioritize work to some extent because if you don't then you'll be unable to maintain a job, and then you'll have no money and be homeless and unable to feed yourself. Your life will be a lot worse in aggregate than if you merely prioritized work to at least some extent and were able to maintain an income to pay for creature comforts.

You can't just, at every moment, prioritize whatever is most fulfilling or heartwarming or whatever at that moment, and then have it negatively affect other long-term important stuff like maintaining your income. I'm not gonna skip a meeting that people are expecting me to attend to call my mom when it can wait until later in the day. If she were on her deathbed -- of course. but she's not.

That is all overly sanctimonious.

You have clearly never spoken on the phone with my mother.

Mine are dead.

It’s going to be a while before I can talk to them again.

That's more a problem with the society you live in than your own personal priorities. Nobody should be left behind if they haven't got the means.

McBooks only convince in two areas: display and touchpad. That's it. Nothing more. The rest is just hindsight justification caused by drinking too much of the KoolAid.

Linux Mint on a ThinkPad and then you can just go on with your life.

I have to use a MBP for work and it's a nightmare compared to my unsophisticated Linux setup. Updates take ages, possibly break your applications and are totally obnoxious.

reducing contact is a statistical method. But it's ethically questionable to allocate the stochastic social activity budget primarily to work.

That's a very good point! Add to that YT's abysmal organization of subscribed channels and their terrible recommendation engine. I have to say I really like it.

I have to agree about the recommendation engine. I know there is a lot of interesting new content that I might be interested in uploaded every day, but for some reason it's recommending years old videos that I've already watched AND voted on. WTF?!

Yes! I am regularly in the mood to watch something on YouTube - mostly new documentaries on societal/political subjects. But I just can't find anything relevant. Also the search function is critically handicapped. It's really frustrating. They are not increasing my time on YouTube, they reduce it.

The recommendation engine was intentionally crippled because it was radicalizing people who were into conspiracy theories, militias, terroristic acts, etc. It sucks but I assume there's some work being done to get a new engine out without sending people down a rabbit hole.

For that I actually have a nice observation: I always clear my cookies and website data on browser quit, and never login into Youtube. Which means I get a pretty vanilla "recommendation" experience, additional tracking attempts from Google put aside.

Visiting youtube, I could swear that the recommendations Youtube is trying to shove my way only change after several weeks or sometimes even months, it is always the same 8 videos on top of the front page for very long periods.

It starts to get somewhat relevant after I watch something, but then it looks like their recommendation engine does nothing more than "Recommend to user x the n most popular videos of roughly the same category as the last video user x watched" with a little bit of shuffling 1-3 videos from a larger set between those, sometimes, and that appears to be it.

I don't believe that. They could have restricted this to problematic videos which promote conspiracy theories and their likes.

I’m subscribed to an old channel, with 200 videos that need to be watched in order. They are all long enough that I have to stop at least once in the middle, sometimes as many as 3 times. If I come back or switch devices, I have to go to my history to find the video I was watching, because recommendations either get the previous or next videos half the time.

Maybe if they add a few more crappy features I can avoid YT altogether!

My T480 with LM20 is objectively the better workstation than my company MBP2019 - but at least it's 3 times as expensive and looks very shiny.