No. Is that your lazy attempt at reframing my challenge?

I didn’t say department. I said program or budget. You listed a bunch of departments.

I want to know what, specifically the American people are being deprived of, that the government was providing before.

Every example I’ve seen has been useless bullshit.

ED, USAID, DoD, NIH all still exist. What has been cut?

This means they’re gonna make wooly elephants and try to make us call them woolly mammoths.

challenge: name a program or budget that DOGE cut, and provide evidence of it

You know you’re allowed to print off a new copy

But they don’t treat the depression by simply forcing consciousness upward through the emotional landscape. They facilitate a restructuring of conceptual maps and perceptions, and lots of this is in relation to the world and to others.

The fact that psychedelics can do this, but only tend to when they produce this big restructuring, means it’s the restructuring that does it.

And the happiness often is associated with an improved relationship with the world, an improved approach to life.

I know the relief comes before the new approach manifests, but that doesn’t mean the relief comes before the mental identification and exploration of that new approach.

The person’s karma changes before it manifests into their life. Like, even though you couldn’t measure it with a video camera, the new behavioral program’s been written. The new path has been seen.

So I think psychedelics just further indicate how non-arbitrary happiness is.

Like a person might be happier in their poverty and disease, but that doesn’t mean their life didn’t change. Their life changed because they changed — instead of snapping at their spouse they see it coming and stop to take a breath. That’s a little micro-change they got from seeing themselves and reorganizing their perceptions with psychedelics.

But when they go to family christmas they aren’t going to tell their father-in-law “I stopped snapping at her so much. I was doing it all the time and then I became conscious of it and I do it a lot less”.

That’s a change in the person’s life, which slips past our notice when we conceptualize “what were his circumstances? Did the mood change come from a change in circumstances or some chemical thing?”

If those are the only two categories, taking a heroic dose of shrooms to explore one’s depression and anxiety might seem like it falls under “some chemical thing” being the change that happened.

But if we allow more categories, it’s better to say he changed his karma. It may manifest later in a higher paying job or a new house, but for now it’s only manifest in a change of the amount of tension in the room between him and his wife.

Just because something doesn’t happen doesn’t mean it can’t be done. It’s like saying one can grow an orchid over six feet tall. One can get a PhD. One can bench their body weight.

Not that it happens all the time, but that it’s possible.

I’m only saying that it’s possible to resolve differences in “beliefs” using mutual presentation and examination of evidence.

Of course perception cannot be articulated, and can differ, and so may present unresplvable differences. But those differences can be reasoned about and recognized. A person is less touchy about their perceptions than about their values, so if you can prove to me something like “You tend to see 90 degree angles as acute”, I can (a) be thankful about that and (b) work around it.

It’s harder to do that with values. Values are built into a person like perceptions are, below articulated knowledge, but they’re also (by definition) too important to “work around” or “correct for”.

My brain’s been fried at times too man, from drugs, trauma, brain impacts, etc.

One time I had a mold problem in my apartment and didn’t know how to handle it and part of the problem was the mold itself was making it hard to function mentally and otherwise.

In that case, having a premium subscription to chatgpt helped. Meaning having access to GPT4 instead of what they had free at the time which was GPT3.

The LLM wrote me up a step by step plan for exactly how to determine if I had mold and then whom to email when and how and in what sequence to handle it.

It was really helpful.

If you can afford it, $20 to have a month’s access to talk to GPT4 or maybe Claude 3.7 might be a good idea.

If you can’t afford it, I can spot you a month of one of these. AI isn’t necessarily superhuman in terms of precise reasoning, but it’s already superhuman in terms of just being able to articulate knowledge about all sorts of crap.

Really useful when your brain’s recovering from being cooked or fucked up, too.

If you can’t bring yourself to sleep in the bed, a nice warm ham should substitute nicely.

In my experience with bedbugs, the way I found out I had them was my sleep schedule reversed. I just found myself up all night and only sleeping during the day.

Only later did I discover it was due to bed bugs. My subconscious responded to them before I became aware of them consciously.

The reason I say this is that you mentioned your being a light sleeper with PTSD.

Bed bugs will affect your sleep. You need to take this into consideration when planning your life.

My advice leans toward saying fuck that place and finding a new one, and the reason isn’t the bedbugs but rather your landlord’s dishonesty.

Your landlord is either lying to you (concerning) or to himself (double concerning). The fact your landlord has taken anti-bedbug measures and yet claims there are no bed bugs is a major red flag.

Bed bugs are hard enough to deal with when everyone is on board and communicating, and not in denial about their existence. One of the hardest aspects of bed bugs is they’re easy to be in denial about. If anyone is showing signs of denial, that is in turn a sign that this might be an unwinnable bed bug fight.

It takes a lot of coordinated, disciplined action among a group of people to eradicate a bedbug infestation. If someone in the group is lying, that’s a very bad indication for the group’s ability to succeed.

My advice would be to confront the landlord about exactly what the fuck is going on with the bedbugs, what the history is, etc. Then, based on how authentic and trustable your landlord presents in that conversation, decide based on that.

“We did it! An artificial 17 year old!”

1234?? That’s the kind of code an idiot would have on his luggage

Get some soylent and take it with you to the job site. You just unscrew a bottle and you can chug 320 calories in a few seconds.

Easy, clean energy. Doesn’t have to replace your meal either. Just something you can ingest very rapidly even if you don’t have an appetite.

In other news, nuts are very calorically rich for their volume. So if you’re just wondering how to get a lot of calories with something you can take on-site, a big jar of mixed nuts can’t hurt. Keep it in your car or break room.

Don’t fucking cut him loose!

What the fuck. If you’re gonna do it, own it. if you’re not clear about it being the right thing to do, don’t do it.

Friends are precious in this life.

Start by figuring out where you and your friend differ on morals. That’s what good fiction is for: gives you something to discuss ethically without it being too personal an issue to see clearly.

If you have the same values, then having different worldviews is to your mutual benefit.

I think friendship is the only context in which political change can happen, especially in today’s hyper-political climate.

Friendship is the only place people of opposing viewpoints can ever have a civil discussion (or perhaps more importantly, get un-civil and have the conversation continue).

Capitalism is a result of free markets, and not the other way around.

If you let people do as they please with their money, stuff, and time, eventually someone’s gonna hire some help and then capitalism’s happening.

But you can have people who take all the profit, ie a profiting/owning class, and that won’t necessarily lead to free trade happening.

People who question the existence of robots may themselves be robots

I’m curious. If Trump cedes power at the end of his second term are you gonna reach out and try to patch things up with your friend?

I have a hard time seeing how that’s something to “see” since it’s in the future. But you made a life-altering decision based on someone else refusing to “see” that.

Do you have a plan for what to do if it turns out you were seeing something that wasn’t there?

I’d say this is good advice. Similar to what I wanted to say but I wasn’t sure how to word it.

I’d say it’s important to clearly differentiate between values and beliefs. What you’re referring to as beliefs I think might be what I’m referring to as values?

Things like “Nobody should starve to death” is often called a “belief” but I see that as a value.

OP should get really, really clear on what his or her values are. Then, find that same clarity with their friend.

If the two friends have the same values but different beliefs, friendship can work.

If they actually have different values, at best they can be trading partners or allies. Friendship requires (among other things) shared values.

A difference in beliefs — beliefs meaning things like “I think covid wasn’t real”, or “I think vaccines cause autism”, or “I think lower taxes can make an economy prosper” — can be addressed through the inspection and sharing of evidence.