301–310 of 446 posts
May be more clear to refer to it as Foam Banana Candy syndrome
https://10best.usatoday.com/food-drink/bananas-arent-good-as...
> The constant search for the next big thing, the next big hit of dopamine, The search itself is the dopamine hit. I think the author, if anything, meant endorphins, it's just that there's so much misleading pop science about this, that everyone blames poor old dopamine for their woes.
its just like normal drugs, alcohol, weed cocaine and everything. dopamine, quick release, addiction, none of that is harmful by itself. some of them just have danegrous side effects when you OD so you need to watch out if you decide to take them. i know im a dopamine addict. i watch reels, play fortnite and only go out when i have someone to talk with. just walking by myself is too calm even with music. i cant sit o…
except that, according to your own experience, it eventually leads to you becoming unable to engage with anything that isn't an instant dopamine hit whose entire arc occurs in a few minutes. you just used writing a 3 paragraph comment as an example of an activity that required long term focus.
and to be clear, i have a lot of the same problems, so i'm not trying to come off overly judgmental here. but i view it as a personal problem that I struggle to finish a book these days, or to invest sustained attention in a challenging side project or even, at times, a fucking video game. (i've caught myself scrolling youtube shorts in my chair at my pc, procrastinating playing a video game of all things).
what you describe (and again, what I also experience, maybe to a slightly lesser extent) doesn't seem conducive to a happy and fulfilling life - or at least it seems fair to guess that a life without the dopamine addiction you're diagnosis could be happier and more fulfilling.
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I feel like they do and they don't at the same time. The buildings may look different, but city center rents driving out a lot of small local businesses, and leaving the same brands everywhere.
You are right, that the city centers are often heavily commodified to the point where they do not differ from other cities anymore. However, European cities are not just the city center, you have a lot of different districts where the commodification has not progressed to this degree as in the city centers. Case in point, you often do have small grocery stores in those districts, mostly owned by immigrants or they ar…
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I didn’t mean to come off as criticizing you, just providing a balancing counterpoint on some of the ideas. The question is: can you give billions of people the “authentic” version? In some cases you can. In the US at least there’s boutique groceries and farmers markets that sell more authentic organic food that usually does have better nutritional value. But it costs more. The artificial mass market imitation is che…
This is exactly what the article touches on, the race to the bottom. It drags everyone's experience down. This appeal to scalability is part of the problem, IMO. Not every experience is or should be scalable. Some kids find blackberry bushes at grandma's instead of strawberries. Little is gained by strip mining human experience so the thinnest veneer can be "scaled".
Our one dominant model of technology-driven economic progress is the industrial revolution. Manufacturing. As Ai companies argue for market cap based on projected economic output... I'm increasingly thinking this model can be badly misleading. It's very rare that the PC Revolution and or the internet Revolution are used as a primary model to explain technology and how it affects the economy. Network enabled PCS are a…
The original sin is the idea that the profit motive on a free market will solve all our resource allocation problems, and that consumption demand should be the ultimate arbiter of social value. Markets are pretty freaking amazing things. But their efficiency relies on assumptions that knowledge economies and software break on pretty much every front. So, it's really no surprise that we're in this mess. I don't really…
Like you, I also don't know what would work better, nor do I believe any one individual can know.
But I do have some ideas for what would make a good framework for the evaluation?
If the idea is to allocate resources in a way that provides the most benefit to the most people, where most feel they are getting a 'fair deal' or something...
and we have social institutions that convert 'resources' to value (in quotes because time, attention, etc are 'resources'. The key principle is organizing human behavior over time to produce something humans value)...
Companies Religion Sports Government
then think about what value each creates, how it is delivered, how it is captured, ... recognizing that each offers some unique strengths and unique limitations.
The strawberry example reminds me of the Instant Mashed Potatoes non-book review [0]. > Since World War II and the large-scale industrialization it fully unleashed, a core method driving ‘progress’ across many different fields of human endeavor has been to shred something real and reconstitute it into a faster, easier, less appealing IMPish substitute for what we used to make out of it. This is the parsimonious recip…
I substitute warm heavy cream for half the water and add extra butter which gets me to a 6/10. Mix in some cabbage or kale and you have a quick Colcannon.
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Other possibilities: * The people are not fine with bad strawberries but have no other choices available * The people are not fine with bad strawberries but can't afford better choices * The people are not fine with bad strawberries but they don't know good strawberries * The people are not fine with bad strawberries but they're cheap enough to ship and sell that there's no economic case for good strawberries, so no…
The people are not fine with bad strawberries but they don't know good strawberries You most definitely get this phenomenon with tomatoes. There’s little demand for actually good tomatoes, because most people don’t even know what a good tomato tastes like at this point. This applies to countless things, but tomatoes are a prime example because they deteriorate so quickly once picked relative to other fruits I guess.…
The older generation here remember good tomatoes, so they continue to buy bad tomatoes but will complain every time they eat them about the quality. I get told a lot about heirloom varieties and how good they are in comparison.
I grew up with modern tomatoes. I've never tried an heirloom so I can't compare, but I don't recall ever eating a good tomato, so I just don't buy them. The market has moved itself into a position that shrinks its own demographic.
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A Canadian friend brought me back 2 bottles of local maple syrup as a gift. Ok, I'm a pretentious Frenchman when it comes to food and I do think most North Americans have no idea how real food tastes. But that stuff, I didn't know how it really tasted before trying the OG thing. Globalisation gave us the illusion of experiencing the world.
I think it's worse than that. It promotes race to the bottom. I love strawberries, blueberries (bilberry variety) and tomatoes, but apart of the few times in the year when I can collect my own or visit a PYO farm I'm not eating them at all. Every shop (small and huge alike) only sells the fake, hyper-accelerated garbage (sorry Spain and Morocco, but that stuff is just gross), or - in season - locally grown similarly…