Wikipedia has a section on it's use in crime, but suggests that transdermal doses would be too small to be effective - ingesting it being the main attack method.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scopolamine#Crime
what they do is let you get close and blow the powder in your face and that is enough. usually a distraction like they will get you to open a card and doing so it sprays the powder as you get close to inspect it. super scary.
OSAC issued a warning in 2012, suggesting ~30k cases a year.
From Wikipedia:
> Between 1998 and 2004, 13% of emergency-room admissions for "poisoning with criminal intentions" in a clinic of Bogotá, Colombia, have been attributed to scopolamine, and 44% to benzodiazepines.[39] Most commonly, the person has been poisoned by a robber who gave the victim a scopolamine-laced beverage, in the hope that the victim would become unconscious or unable to effectively resist the robbery.[39]
RESULTS: 860 clinical files were reviewed. We found a greater frequency of this intoxication in young people and
male gender. The main cause was robbery.
860 clinical files reviewed. 806.13/(2004-1998)=~18 cases annually of emergency-room admissions from "poisoning with criminal intention with scopolamine for one clinic.
Now these are beverages not business cards and the number appears to be trivially small. But it's only one clinic, how many clinics are there in Bogotá and more importantly, what is their annual case load?
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12245-015-0079-y
"Seventy EDs participated (82 % response). Most EDs (87 %) were located in hospitals, and 83 % were independent hospital departments. The median annual ED visit volume was approximately 50,000 visits."
Okay, 18 annual cases per clinic. On any given night a clinic might have 18/50000 = 3.6E-4 cases of scopolamine-laced beverage poisoning.
seventy EDs participated (82 % response) 70/.82=~86 clinics in Bogotá...
863.6E-4=3.10E-02 cases a nightly.
I know my analysis is a bit rough, but I really am not worried about this happening should I visit Bogotá, Colombia. I'm not going to go out drinking alone by any means, but have some common sense this is not a frequent occurrence.
Oh is it? Never heard of that. I was on a pretty nice area of the city for about 3 months, never had a problem. Not a single one. I used to stay around the 85th street and mostly spend my time in Polo, Chico, Castellana, Usaquen, but I was also keen on Chapinero and Candelaria. I felt even safer than at home.
Doesn't make sense, Roman engineers discovered steam power but it was cheaper and easier to use slaves. It's more of a problem of demand. Why would I need a loud clunky steam engine when I can hire a dozen slaves who will not only row my boat but clean, and perform whole bunch of auxillary tasks?
Roman "steam power" worked nothing like a condensing engine and was nowhere near adequate to power a ship.
Ironically, rowing vessels was one of the tasks Romans preferred to use freemen where possible. And even the best galleys with the most motivated, coordinated and healthy rowers were vastly inferior in speed and endurance to steamships (or indeed sail powered tea-clippers). But you needed a lot of intermediate inventions to get from a lightweight device that rotated by blowing out hot air to a steamship that could cross oceans. Or from a trireme to a tea clipper that would travel faster relying on just the wind, for that matter
I wonder what the Romans could have done with designs for "modern" sailing ships? Though I also wonder how relatively useful they would be as warships absent cannons.
Here's a question back at you: how well do modern sailing ships handle the Mediterranean in winter?
As far as I know, the winds haven't significantly changed: mostly from the northwest for most of the year, with a period in the spring and summer where they swing to the from the northeast. Also, ferocious storms in the winter.
Going clockwise along the Med's coast from France to Italy, Greece, the Levant, and to Egypt is "downhill"; going the other direction will take roughly twice as long. Sailing along the north coast of Africa is kind of dangerous because a storm or navigation mistake plus the prevailing winds can put you aground hard and unexpectedly.
Modern sailing ships are much better at sailing closer to the wind, are much less limited by supplies (it's hard to get more than a few days endurance from a rowed galley) and are more seaworthy, because they could extend the sailing season and take more direct routes.
How much better is that? I don't know, but I suspect a fair bit. Galleys still have advantages in some circumstances.
Now, if you throw in some even remotely modern navigation equipment, that would be stupidly advantageous.
Source: John Pryor, Geography, Technology, and War.
> Though I also wonder how relatively useful they would be as warships absent cannons.
Without cannons, maneuvering becomes a lot more important because you rely on either ramming the enemy, or pulling up alongside them and boarding them (or both.) These tactics favor rowed galleys, which can sprint quick for short distances and don't depend on the wind.
Even after the invention and proliferation of cannon, navies and pirates in the Med continued to use rowed galleys, direct descendants of ancient triremes, through the middle ages into the 18th century.
if the Romans were the only empire with relatively modern sailing vessels, I'm not sure lack of cannon would have hampered them.
And the inhabitants of most of the areas they'd be able to reach beyond the Mediterranean and Red Sea weren't going to sail out to meet them.
I guess a Roman conquest of the Americas would be pretty boring for archaeologists and architecture students. No Macchu Picchu or Teotihuacan, not even a Chan Chan, but the crumbling 2000 year old columns of Washington DC instead ;)
Of course, if you already have the technology to build boats, it's not going to take you long to copy the other guy's design.
Later sail warships mostly didn't use triangular sails either. I assume this is related to volume in some manner. Clipper ships were very fast but they had relatively little capacity so were used for high value goods.
Robotics has the same problem today: Human labor is cheaper and more flexible.
In the future we might see this as having been as stupid and inhumane as we today see slavery in the Roman times.
> Roman engineers discovered steam power but it was cheaper and easier to use slaves.
I think the key reason why is not because the Roman Greeks did some type of cost benefit analysis, it's the fact that the idea of applying automation of labor using the Aeolipile(which was regarded as a novelty rather than a tool) never even occurred to them. The concept of industrial production did not really exist yet, even when there was some forms of it in existence, the very idea of applying it to everything is not something anyone even thought about.
I thought Brave was just a web browser with built-in adblock, but after your comment I decided to look it up on wikipedia. Holey moley, what a nightmare.
It's by far the best browser out there. Based on Chromium. Doesn't allow websites to abuse its technical capabilities (i.e. share your data via 3rd party ad servers). You can tip content creators. You can partake in the community and all the things Brave is building, or just use the browser in its default state. If you want a crypto + search laughing stock, check out https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/presearch/ .
Same. I wonder what the web would look like now if not for Mozilla fighting for open web standards.
I guess I don't really have to wonder. I could just factory reset any Pixel phone, swipe to the news feed, and click on any story. It's literally hard to find the content (drivel) between the advertisements and screen hijacking bullshit.
yeah, multiple times i have asked people "why isnt brave a fork of firefox" and they say "its pita" and you need quick and easy way to customize, blah blah blah.
then you have half a dozen firefox forks running absolutely fine, each one has its good and bad but the thing is, if these 1-2 man outfits can fork and release their own firefox forks with additional features/customizations, why cant brave? or do they don't want to do the actual leg work and only want to take praise for "doing best", eh
sorry for not responding earlier..... my initial question still remains.
there is a "The benefits of moving from Muon to Chromium" so if you replace the word chromium with firefox, do you think any line would be wrong or a lie?
extensions are available in firefox just as easily so that sounds like a lame excuse.
I don't see how it's a scam or ponzi scheme. It's completely opt in. You don't put in any money yourself. There is no referral nonsense.
It's just a little token they pay you with should you decide to turn on ads. It's actually a rather interesting cryptocurrency given that it's actually being used for something.
BAT is even traded at Binance. At the height of the cryptocurrency bull market, it was worth almost 2 US dollars.
The weirdest part of it all is I see censorship, gaslighting when you bring up contraception possibly having impact on fertility. All discourse around it is stopped. We can't even question it. But we do know that contraception in developed countries were pushed heavily and is it concidence that in countries that don't have access to it have unchanged birth rates?
Even without evidence of contraceptions impact on fertility, when you repeatedly disrupt a natural process such as through abortion, is it any surprise that most development countries have dwindling birth rates? Is it a surprise that a country like South Korea with high abortion rate have the lowest birth rate?
Correlation may not mean causation but the probability is high. What doesn't help is that we censor/cancel people for even mentioning that abortion/contraception have unknown impact on fertility and we are left guessing what else it could be: plastic? air pollution? marijuana? All of these have been without previous generation but what was absent then compared to today was the ready availability of contraceptives/abortion.
Women have more power and independence than anytime in history, they can have a career, they can be sexually active, they can abort their fetus or put in their body all sorts of ways to prevent pregnancy. Is it any surprise that they are now finding it difficult to conceive?
or in the case of Paris, extreme tax/socialist policies/reckless immigration creating uncivil environment. Seriously, very few places I find in Europe that is attractive now, lot of places in Asia have caught up or exceed in value.
For Canadian nomads: can't one just move to Malaysia/Jersey and not pay taxes after the tax residency kicks in? Taxes are ridiculous in Canada
I wish East Asia was more proactive with digital nomads. For example, Japan is notoriously tough to get in. Korea offers visas for Korean diaspora but not much for foreigners.
My dream would be remote working in Japan but they still rely on fax machines and stupidly outdated formal procedures, it was like living in the 90s, but I loved it while I was there shortly. Many foreigners I saw were working remotely but never reported it on their "tourist" visa. I wonder if this is sustainable.
is your friend named SWIM? I concur though, i've personally helped a number of people experience psychedelics for the first time, though it definitely helps to have some benzos on hand for the outliers who are just incompatible with psychedelics.
Some people, for whatever reason, are just unable to separate themselves from the experience or accept what is happening without extreme stress. It's almost like classic psychedelics act more like disassociatives for them.
Indeed. Interestingly, psychedelics (mushrooms, LSD) work wonderfully for me, but cannabis is typically a bad experience (anxiety, nausea, no attention span, racing thoughts). Every brain is wired differently.
-- THC is also a lot wider ranging than typical psychedelics - a dose of LSD tends to be a does of LSD - from my experience a trip on AL-LAD or LSD are basically same - also true with PE vs Golden Teachers Psilocybin - however - strands and doses of sativa vs indica can differ massively - won't smoke Jack the Ripper as it's just not a good time for me --
in my experience, nausea tends to be dose-dependent...and edibles are the most efficient way the human body can metabolize the THC family, so proper dosing is much more important for edibles. if you're smoking, and have zero tolerance, a single small toke is probably advised. at least then any discomfort won't be terribly long-lived.
manic symptoms vs. depressive symptoms can definitely be linked to strain, and the balance of constituent psychoactives...of which there are plenty. ask a reputable bud tender for sleepy weed and i wager your experience might be more pleasant.
Think they are looking for the USG to sanction them....hear me out:
what better way to never have to redeem ppl than being sanctioned? oh we are a stablecoin and we want to cash your tether to USD but unfortunately we got sanctioned ---> pass blame to USG
I can't believe they are this stupid and brazen enough to challenge the USG like this.
They can attempt to pass the blame to the US Gov't, and maybe some individuals would be fooled, but larger investors wouldn't be and would see through their ruse and would both be upset and basically lose any faith they have in the system, making the value of Tether plummet. No one would touch Tether, making it worthless, since the big exchanges would then not let you exchange between <Coin> <-> Tether, and so even if they have some assets backing them up they would effectively be worthless as a company because of loss of trust.
So they lose faith in the system... so what? Tether still has all the assets, why would they care that the itchy and scratchy money they gave everyone is worthless?
Another comment in this thread asked what happens to the backing assets when USDT gets sanctioned. Imagine if large amounts of USDT get sanctioned so Tether can refuse to ever redeem them, yet they keep the collateral. They could go from insolvent to super-profitable overnight!
it simply is not because EV cars are far out of reach for most Americans. Unless they are providing upto 95% subsidy most will not sell their ICE cars and will keep buying used ICE cars
In fact this type of virtue signaling only hurts the people on the fringes because now the ICE car market and dealers will just cite this ban to markup their cars even more on top of the supply chain excuse.
This is a "let them eat cake" moment on already widened wealth gap. The people at the top sure do care more about these things than their fellow Americans who are barely above the poverty line.
Your comment is classicist. People finance their cars and most EVs are far far above what you would get with an entry level cars. Now those market including secondary market are going to see a rise in prices.
This is not true where I live. The cheapest electric cars here are only about 20% more than the cheapest entry level cars, and loans have better terms for electric, making the monthly cost almost the same. I am not sure how true it is in California, but even if it is, it clearly doesn't have to be.
