By far most legally prescribed ADHD meds are not methamphetamine, only some are even amphetamines at all, and they affect people with ADHD quite differently from neurotypical people.
Among people with ADHD the specific experience varies widely by person.
My personal experience using legally prescribed Adderall XR was so unpleasant that I can’t imagine voluntarily using it for recreational purposes or often enough for any purpose to end up addicted. It was more a question of “does this situation require me going through the downsides of taking it, and how do I make sure it helps more than it interferes.” There’s no way that’s what neurotypical recreational users experience.
My current ADHD treatment does not involve any amphetamines, and I’m completely fine with that.
(Why did I use “generally” in the first sentence of this comment? Legal prescription methamphetamine is technically available in the US and approved for ADHD treatment, under the brand name Desoxyn, but it’s very much not a common choice to say the least. All other options are vastly more commonly prescribed. For my own ADHD treatment I’ve never been prescribed meth, even though I’ve been prescribed most of the common ADHD meds over the years including several different amphetamines and multiple non-amphetamine options.)
It's not conducive to a productive discussion to ignore the vast majority of what I wrote, including my entire substantive argument, while nitpicking on one point of terminology when the meaning I meant was clear from context.
If you want me to be explicit about this contextual meaning: since I was discussing the pharmacological differences for these medicines in people with vs without ADHD, "neurotypical" in this particular context simply has the contextually narrowed meaning of "without ADHD".
I didn't use the word neurodivergent in this conversation, so I won't address it in this comment, nor will I address the question of whether "neurotypical" is a useful word now that you definitely know what I actually meant.
My prior comments in this conversation are now outside of the edit window. So, in your brain, I encourage you to replace my phrases "neurotypical people" and "neurotypical recreational users" with "people without ADHD" and "recreational users without ADHD" respectively. Hopefully you agree that these are real categories of people, whether or not you like the word "neurotypical" to describe them.
Within that understanding of what I meant, I also encourage you to proceed to respond to the rest of what I said in a substantive and productive way. If you do that, I will happily respond substantively and productively in return.
But if I see any further non-substantive responses from you in this subthread, I will simply choose not to respond and will leave you with the last word, instead of spending even more of my my time on a non-substantive discussion than I have so far.
This is because pharmacology is a shell game, where there is a constant pipeline of new chemicals being rotated in as soon as they're "recognized as safe". That is because people start to notice the adverse, toxic effects of the "old and busted" chemicals, such as Thalidomide or Phen-Fen, aren't such the "miracle drugs" they were cracked up to be, so there needs to be a constant stream of new stuff to replace it. They simply need to approve drugs a bit faster than attorneys can file class-action lawsuits.
Another effect is that the "new stuff" is a weak synthetic facsimile of whatever the previous drug generations were, and eventually you end up with 100% fake treatments, often doing the opposite, exacerbating and magnifying the very symptoms they're prescribed for, or damaging the target organs/glands, and shutting them down.
"Fail first" or "step therapy" policies by insurance carriers will aid and abet this behavior, as the prescribers are forced to begin with inexpensive and ineffective (or harmful) treatments before they can even propose a treatment that is deemed efficacious.
So, yes, my comment about people high on amphetamines was relatively tongue-in-cheek, because physicians are seldom incentivized to get people high these days: they're incentivized to push the new hotness wonder-drugs that people haven't figured out are just as horrible as the old ones.
Nope. The two most common non-amphetamine ADHD drugs, methylphenidate and atomoxetine, are both now old enough that they’re available in generic form, and methylphenidate is cheap enough that step therapy is not routinely required before insurers cover it. Even one of the pretty new and therapeutically effective long-release amphetamines, Vyvanse/Elvanse, is now available as a generic as of (I think) summer 2023. So are most of the other amphetamines.
You’re right in general about how much of the pharma industry prefers to operate, but wrong about what’s true in the specific context of ADHD treatment, and also wrong (even if your remark was only tongue-in-cheek) about whether people with ADHD get high when they do take an amphetamine as prescribed.
That last misconception is actually quite harmful, whether or not you were joking. It’s a perverse fact that most of the obstacles which state and federal legislators, state and federal regulators, major pharmacy chains, and pharmacists put in the way of smooth access to most ADHD medications - primarily as part of the war on drugs - are uniquely hard to handle and overcome for people with ADHD, due to the types of life struggles that ADHD causes in particular.
The widespread stereotype of people with ADHD as drug seekers looking to get high, at least in much of the US, makes appropriate policy outcomes hard to achieve and hard to experience in practice. The benefit of medicines to people with ADHD is no less legitimate than the benefit of Ozempic or insulin to people with diabetes. And nobody with ADHD gets high from therapeutic doses of ADHD medicines.
Anyone who does get high from such doses doesn’t actually have ADHD, and so either they got the prescription from a doctor guilty of diagnostic medical malpractice (or a doctor complicit in a false diagnosis/prescription) or they lied to the doctor in a fraudulent way when undergoing the diagnostic process. Those are worth punishing, but not at the expense of making it unreasonably difficult for the medicines to be accessed by the very same population for which they are quite legitimately approved and prescribed.
tbf, they still work, but my educated guess would be that the overall ROI distribution looks similar to the gambling/adult industries: a minority of the population bringing in an outsized return due to peculiarities in how their brains work
In a sense, doesn't speaking naturally in front of a camera require you to be more fake?
It's not the easiest thing to do, trying to address audience without any feedback, looking at a black object sitting in a room, in multiple attempts and with random interruptions needed to fix technical issues or change shot, while pretending that it is all part of normal, continuous discussion.
People watch him because he is genuinely good at what he does, not because of his presentation or editing skills.
Just for yourself, write a short script for a youtube video. Try to make it engaging, even if it's just a paragraph. Then put your phone up on your desk, put your script next to it. Read the script and record yourself.
yeah, it's awful. I have a 32gig machine and "only" windows 10. And have to go back to micro-managing memory like in winxp times. Restarting programs from time to time - and rebooting every couple of days. Inb4 "free memory is wasted memory" apologists. Programs just flat out refuse to start or crash when memory is >85%.
First attempt to catch the booster back at the launch site.
The "mechazilla" launch tower has two "chopstick" arms which are used to pick up and stack both stages and which are intended to be able to catch the returning booster and maybe also the returning Starship upper stage.
Yes. The booster has two pins that stick out at the top that are designed to hold the weight of the entire booster when empty. The plan is for the booster to return to the launch tower, position itself between the arms which will close on it and then the pins will “land” on the arms, completing the catch.
I’d say the main difference, then, is that the booster will be supported by those pins resting on top of the arms. Chopsticks use friction to hold up their load.
yes the booster’s structure is very strong vertically but not nearly as strong horizontally. There may be some “squeezing” forces from the chopsticks but this is effectively for fine positioning only. It will not support the weight. The booster will “land” by getting its pins (which stick out a bit) on the top rail of the arms.
It should be better described as having the booster land on the arms. The arms will probably be able to adjust a little to assist in alignment, but the booster is doing most of the work to be 'caught'.
How could it possibly be meant literally? Do you consider it possible for a rocket to be caught by a literal person with literal wooden sticks?
I guess I don't really understand what you are asking. There's a tower with some huge metal arms that is meant to catch the rocket. They call them chopsticks in a joking manner. Obviously, I would have thought.
Yeah I totally envisioned a person holding wooden chopsticks trying to catch a booster /s
You missed the quoted part about > which are intended to be able to catch
Which would be the unique thing to clarify. As in "something like" the "chopsticks" moving to > catch < the thing -- Like Mr. Miyagi moving the chopsticks to > catch < the thing
It allows removing the landing gears on the booster, which saves wheight, which saves fuel, which increases efficiency and reduces costs. It also avoid having to fetch the booster from wherever it would have landed.
Given that a lot of the landing failures we've seen started with a near perfect landing followed by the rocket tipping over, I suspect one benefit is that the contact point is now above the center of gravity and thus it can't really tip over.
Of course, it can't tip over unless something fails or the rocket ends up in the wrong spot (and fails to get caught) and the previous tip-overs also had to involve failures (of the landing strut, in the latest loss) or landing in some way that isn't perfectly aligned.
Their launch license requires them to initially aim at the water, and only shift to aiming at their tower if both the booster internally judges it's in perfect health, and they send the signal from their control system.
I think there is a reasonable possibility that something goes wrong enough at some point for the booster to go in the drink. But if that happens, maybe it'll be close enough to the shore that we'll get some nice video of it?
This is also standard procedure for Falcon 9 landings. They would do it this way even if the launch license didn't require it, because they know the probability of some sort of failure of the booster is high, and they don't want to destroy the launch tower if they can help it.
