I rigged up something similar in my first corporate job in 2000, plugging an ORiNOCO into the PCMCIA slot of my corporate laptop and a spare at my desk. My boss, an old mainframe guy, was blown away that I could check email during the team meeting in the conference room without going back to my desk. Now wifi is so ubiquitous we don't even think about it.
I wish more thought about making wifi better. It could be so much more awesome now if we just sank more thought and resources into it. https://lwn.net/Articles/705884/
"The leftist of the over-socialized type tries to get off his psychological leash and assert his autonomy by rebelling. But usually he is not strong enough to rebel against the most basic values of society. Generally speaking, the goals of today’s leftists are NOT in conflict with the accepted morality. On the contrary, the left takes an accepted moral principle, adopts it as its own, and then accuses mainstream society of violating that principle.” --Theodore J. Kaczynski
Gas is obviously far more resilient, though not immune to more extreme problems. I’ve literally never experienced a gas outage, yet power outages are routine almost everywhere I’ve lived.
My aunt died of cancer a couple of years ago. She took an unorthodox treatment of extremely high doses of marijuana, which her husband encouraged. It was frustrating for the rest of the family since it was impossible to have a coherent and meaningful conversation with her in her final months. My dad and I had some doubt about it, but the decision was entirely in the hands of her husband because she was too inebriated to think for herself. I’m not saying it was a wrong choice necessarily, but there are downsides.
Cancer is just a bad illness. I too have had the experience of trying to interact with family members in the terminal stages. Neither of them were using marijuana, and they were often not coherent (when they were even awake).
Not to diminish your grief, but your aunt might not have been any more available if she had been using other pain management methods. It's just a terrible, overwhelming thing to happen to the body, and it saps a huge amount of the sufferer's energy.
Unfortunately, there has been quite a few deaths in my family in the last decade, and most were on some form of pain management. They weren't always lucid, but none were as perpetually loopy as my aunt was in the last few months of her life. Someone in the forum accused me of being self-centered for simply mentioning this, but her incoherence did add to my, and particularly, my father's (her brother) grief.
How so? I was respectful of her decision -- although I suspect it was more her husband's decision -- but I wouldn't have made the same myself. It seemed like there was a lot she had to say, but couldn't in that state due to the drug. I suppose she thought she was making sense, but objectively wasn't.
You say you respect her decision, but then in the same breadth go on to say you think it wasn't her decision at all. You've written much in this thread to strangers on the internet about how you believe it was a wrong decision. You have a peculiar way of respecting others' opinions.
My aunt passed away a few years ago now. Her husband will never read this. The rest of the family agrees with me as far as I know. I don't see who I'm disrespecting by publicly and semi-anonymously questioning those decisions in retrospect.
Maybe cancer was giving her bigger challenges to deal with than making sense to you which lead to extreme measures like high drug doses (chemotherapy, marijuana, opioids).
To me it sounds like complaining that your friend with cancer is objectively a worse friend because he doesn't feel like playing Mario with you anymore after taking his cancer drugs or painkillers. He thought he was a good friend, but he objectively wasn't >:(.
Maybe there's reasoning behind the trade-offs they chose that involves more than you?
As I said, I respected her decision. But I question whether it was the right one because it left her unable to communicate despite an obvious desire to do so. I’ve had conversations with people on high doses of opiates, and while they were far from their full mental capacity, they were intelligible. My dad tried to convince her husband to use conventional painkillers, which I supported, but he wouldn’t hear of it.
So that's entirely different from what the article is talking about. Psychedelic treatments for terminal patients often involve a single large dose of psilocybin in a clinic, and that's the end of it. In the article, the first case study is like that, just one dose and three months later the patient still felt profoundly changed.
I hadn’t thought about it consciously before, but when I hear “Macintosh” a beige box from the 80’s or 90’s comes to mind, and with “Mac” I’m thinking post-millennial aluminum and glass. So, it’s sort of a temporal indicator for the product line.
