chidg

Hi, not well educated on the details of VPNs and network security so this may be a basic question, but - VPNs are used regularly by corporates to enable secure intranet access to people offsite, etc - surely completely blocking VPNs or detecting and punishing VPN users is severely detrimental to business and not something countries would want to do carte blanche? How does this work?

Yep, same experience here. The name is a big problem.

There's a major difference of scale. No individual human artist can reliably learn to copy every other artists' styles, and then produce infinite works in those styles.

This particular misspelling happens often enough (on this forum) that I don't think it's unreasonable to think that some people are doing it intentionally as a form of trolling.

I work for a company whose primary product is an extension. From my experience it's quite random; sometimes an update will pass 'review' a few hours after submission (never a few minutes, but it's clearly not being reviewed in any depth) and other times it will be held up for a few days, a week, or up to 15 days recently. It seems to be a lottery, where your chances of a manual review are increased by requiring certain permissions and other factors the chrome gods decide are risky. In our case they have rejected updates several times for spurious reasons, like claiming we do not use the notifications permission although we asked for it - even though use of the `.notifications` method on the chrome javascript api was visible in our code.

I think GPs point stands - whether or not they actually review every update, they make the claim that extensions are reviewed, and they're reviewed often enough that they should be able to catch genuinely dangerous extensions.

Yes it is, and extensions for Brave are installed through the Chrome Web Store, as are extensions for other chromium based browsers like Edge. There's no escaping the manifest v3 event horizon for extension developers.

Australia tried something similar with a carbon tax a few years ago - not for fuel, but for carbon emissions generally. The policy was very well designed and ensured that lower income earners were compensated for any increase in costs to the extent that they had a net benefit, and in the short time it was operating, was successful at reducing emissions.

Unfortunately for us (and the world) this was too complicated for many Australians to understand and the political right exploited that to tell a scary story about a 'new tax', leading to their election and the removal of the scheme.

While economists (and rational thinkers) generally love carbon pricing schemes, they have been pretty unsuccessful politically because people are generally too stupid to understand them and cynical politicians in bed with the fossil fuel industry are happy to play to that.

Hi, I appreciated your article. Do you know when Agave was introduced to India? Perhaps a timeline may assist with determining the identity of the food, since Agaves are from central and South America and were presumably brought to India sometime in the past few hundred years. Is this a food item that has a long tradition?

Small note of feedback since I couldn't find a way to comment on the Atlas Obscura site. Species names are conventionally written with the specific epithet entirely in lower case, like 'Genus species'. In the article, you have frequently capitalised the specific epithet. This is a small issue but made the article quite hard to read for a details-focused botanist such as myself.

> They have a very nice looking website. Take a look at the chocolate finder: https://theochocolate.com/chocolate-finder. It tells you to input a "postal code" which to most means a zip code

It looks like Theo is a US company, so perhaps "zip code" is more appropriate but those of us in the rest of the world are generally frustrated by websites which present a form field which could be called the generic 'postal code', meaningful to anyone in the world, labelled as 'zip code', something which is specific to the US.

Looking at the Theo website, it appears they use BigCommerce, which is an Australian ecommerce as a service site, which explains why they don't use 'zip code'. Although, your usability complaint about the behaviour of the field absolutely stacks up and suggests they might be using the wrong form widget there.

ICEs might be incremental, but its a long enough increment that it is having severely detrimental effects on planetary and human health, so I'm not sure if it counts.

Cars, on the other hand, are not incremental - they have locked us into an urban design pattern that will remain problematic no matter what the form of energy generation that drives them is.

You're right about the language, but the mechanism is real The evolution of gaseous defense hormones in plants is thought to actually benefit the same plant, but has a side effect of 'warning' the plant's neighbours. Because plants don't have a bloodstream, chemical diffusion of messenger molecules throughout a plant is pretty slow. So some plants just use the air around them as a signalling medium, and when they are damaged, release gases into the air which their other leaves can detect. Of course, the gases also affect their neighbours.

I'm from a different country, so I get exposure to different media sources, but from my position, this sounds very strange. The media has been absolutely complicit in enabling Trump and the far right over the past four years, so while I agree that there is no reason to trust them, it's not because they aren't fair to Trump.

Even when not traveling, for people with 'unusual' names it's not uncommon to use a more easily recognisable 'cafe name' to get around this issue.

They may just be being blocked at the DNS level by your ISP. This is relatively easy to bypass by using one of the many other DNS services available like 9.9.9.9 or 1.1.1.1 (I'm sure everyone on HN will have opinions about which one is better). You can google to figure out how to change the default DNS used by your computer depending on your OS.

Farmland is a good place to put it because rock dust is also high in phosphorous and other minerals and for that reason is often used anyway as a fertiliser, particularly in organic agriculture.

Basalt is one of the types of rock that can react with CO2 to trap carbon.

It's not classic trolley problem, because there are no second order effects modeled in the trolley problem. In this case, there is a secondary effect which is that the public realises they've been lied to and loses trust in public health authorities, which is exactly what has happened. You can only do that a couple of times before the authority has no authority.

Thanks, I had the same issue - and only figured it out because this comment came up in Google results for the error message.

Although this is a great piece of public art, it's worth noting that the pollution they refer to is really only particulate matter, with some effect on nitrogen oxides. These mosses would be far less effective at scrubbing CO2 than a 'regular' tree.

You could get a pretty similar effect by installing a mechanical air filter and planting some trees.

No, its not just an oversimplification. It's entirely incorrect. Most psychedelic drugs are very low in toxicity, to the extent that they can accurately be called non toxic.

Except gun ranges are not just liberally sprinkled throughout cities, making it difficult to leave the house without having to move through one.

With regard to 2CB and 2CE - This might be somewhat true in some local markets, but it seems very unlikely to be widespread, at least with experienced drug users, because the dose of LSD vs the 2Cs (except for the brominated ampetamine 2C derivatives) are very different. The dose of LSD is usually around 100 micrograms while a dose of 2CB is somewhere around 10-30 milligrams - so around 100 times as much. The amount of LSD in a dose is so small that it can fit on a blotter paper. This is not the case with most other drugs. There are some 2C derivatives which have very low doses and can be put on to blotter, but they tend to have much longer durations of action than LSD so would also be discernable by an experienced user (or even a new user who had done some reading before hand).

There are other increasingly common substances like NBOMe which are substitutable for LSD in potency and are also very dangerous. These have been reported sold as LSD on blotting paper and also show up in 'ecstacy' pills.

Going back to the original topic, it does seem unlikely the drug in question was LSD. It is more common for people to experience violent psychosis on drugs like PCP or potentially some ampthetamines. I hope the guy recovers.

Elsewhere in this discussion someone who deals with these samples has said that the scotch tape is a problem for the lab technicians.

It seems likely the person you are replying to has english as a non-first language and may be using this phrase incorrectly.

Mycologist here. Yes, they are different species. Your quote is partly correct in that 'magic truffles' (also known as philosopher's stones) are not real truffles. They are in fact sclerotia, a hardened 'resting stage' of the organism that protects against drought, and they are not a sexually reproductive part of the organism, unlike a true truffle or a mushroom. However it is incorrect in saying that apart from the visual appearance there is no difference, because there is a clear difference in biological function, and they are generally different species, at least as found in the commercial trade.

The species commonly sold and used as magic mushrooms (primarily Psilocybe cubensis) do not produce sclerotia. Conversely, the species that commonly produce sclerotia (Psilocybe mexicana amongst others - there's a lot of taxonomic uncertainty, partly because the mushrooms themselves are required for identification), although they can and do produce mushrooms, are never reported to be found being sold as mushrooms in commerce - only as sclerotia.

Further, there are consistently reported subjective differences in the experiences engendered by Psilocybe cubensis magic mushrooms and P. mexicana et al. sclerotia. Whether or not this is due to small differences in the profile of the various alkaloids, an as yet unidentified other psychoactive component, or simply psychological priming due to users being told they are different, we do not know.