I can't seem to find any info on whether or not the risk disappears if/when you give up drinking. Or is the DNA roulette wheel already spinning, like it is for people who have been heavy smokers in the past?
I think it's going to be harder for people to take on board the idea that any amount of alcohol is bad for you as, intuitively, I still believe that, in moderation, it can have some positive affects such as de-stressing and aiding sleep. Mind you, I suppose you could say some of the same about smoking and I can intuitively accept that any amount of that is bad for you.
Well, I've never smoked [tobacco] and [apart from a bit of a 'sociable relapse' over Christmas] haven't drunk for over a year now. So I should live forever!
This is the thing that's so tricky about... well, I guess the way our world models in general work.
Is drinking bad for you? Yup. Is smoking bad for you? Yup.
Is moderate social drinking bad for you? Likely, but definitely less bad for you than slamming a 6-pack nightly.
Are there other (mainly socially-mediated) health benefits from moderate social drinking? Plausibly? Probably? Occasional social smoking? Probably in some contexts.
If these effects both exist, they can be compared. Do the risk curves intersect? Where? The crossover will land in different places for different people, different circumstances.
I am not a biomedical unit, (but I have played one at work).
The mechanism to my limited understating is alcohol was invented by yeast to
slightly poison their food so the bacteria present could not out compete them.
It's fundamental creation in nature is a deliberate toxin.
At least one of the chemicals alcohol breaks down into in mammals is known to cause double strand DNA breaks.
Most often "no problem" we have builtin genetic resources to repair those breaks.
(unless you have something like Fanconi Anemia).
The reason we have a builtin mechanism to repair this sort of damage is it happens anyway at a lower rate without alcohol.
If the rate of breakage is greater than the ability to repair then stuff stays broken.
Basically the more lottery tickets you buy the more likely you are to win
but not buying them doesn't mean you wont be gifted some.
It is a strange thing to reconcile, intellectually I have first hand data there is no safe dosage, but genetically I'm from a line of alcoholics and socially (in the before times) it provides a very comfortable community building fabric.
I have become comfortable with a single drink on rare occasion.
There’s a dose dependent relationship, where heavy drinkers have the highest cancer burden. So we do expect (but aren’t sure) discontinuing use reduces risk.
I’d say we should treat alcohol very differently than tobacco. It’s got a much lower addiction liability (under 10% of people who try alcohol become addicted, while 32% of people who try nicotine become addicted). Heavy alcohol use is also way more destructive than heavy nicotine use.
Additionally, users seem to find alcohol somewhat more fun that nicotine. [1] That said, the literature supports the conclusion that alcohol decreases sleep quality and increases stress, despite what users think. Any objective benefits are likely social in nature.
Overall, I think there’s a better case to be made for socially accepting moderate alcohol use compared with the case for nicotine.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have warning labels though - most people currently underestimate the risks of alcohol.
> under 10% of people who try alcohol become addicted
Iffy number or definition? In my circles I am sure more than 10% of people abuse alcohol daily, and I would consider them addicts. Then again, New Zealand has a drinking problem.
18.8% of adults had a hazardous drinking pattern in 2021/22.
Hazardous drinkers are those who obtain an Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test (AUDIT) score of 8 or more, representing an established pattern of drinking that carries a high risk of future damage to physical or mental health.
I agree that definition of addiction, and alcoholism, vary by country.
Makes sense. I don't currently know any active alcohol abusers (knew some in college), so the 18.8% seems incredibly high to me. That said we all have biased samples
> Or is the DNA roulette wheel already spinning, like it is for people who have been heavy smokers in the past?
Heavy smokers ingest trace amounts of radioactive metals that continue to emit radiation for years to come. The mechanism is certainly not the same with alcohol.
I'm a heavy drinker and what I've read about alcohol and sleep says that it's bad for your sleep, in particular the quality of REM sleep. Anecdotally I can back that up with my own experience, as I drink before I go to sleep.
However, it's much easier to fall asleep after you've been drinking, but that's just because alcohol is a nerve depressant anyway.
I note there's no mention of importing your existing passwords from other password managers, which pretty much all the other password managers I've tried do allow. So yet another 'alternative' that expects us to abandon all our existing content/data and start over again from scratch [cf. The Fediverse]
Did you not read? It's very easy to migrate from the common password managers into Pass.
Migrating to pass
To free password data from the clutches of other (bloated) password managers, various users have come up with different password store organizations that work best for them. Some users have contributed scripts to help import passwords from other programs:
1password2pass.rb: imports 1Password txt or 1pif data
keepassx2pass.py: imports KeepassX XML data
keepass2csv2pass.py: imports Keepass2 CSV data
keepass2pass.py: imports Keepass2 XML data
fpm2pass.pl: imports Figaro's Password Manager XML data
lastpass2pass.rb: imports Lastpass CSV data
kedpm2pass.py: imports Ked Password Manager data
revelation2pass.py: imports Revelation Password Manager data
gorilla2pass.rb: imports Password Gorilla data
pwsafe2pass.sh: imports PWSafe data
kwallet2pass.py: imports KWallet data
roboform2pass.rb: imports Roboform data
password-exporter2pass.py: imports password-exporter data
pwsafe2pass.py: imports pwsafe data
firefox_decrypt: full blown Firefox password interface, which supports exporting to pass
You got me there! -- I did read, but only down as far as the download links. As they came after a substantial amount of blurb, I assumed they were the last item on the page and didn't scroll any further.
I humbly withdraw my snidey comment [although not the bit in regards to the Fediverse!]
I use Bitwarden myself and it gets some kudos for being free for personal use and open source. But the browser extension usability is badly flawed and the app suffers from an arrogant "You're holding it wrong!" dev team, who refuse to address these problems.
Also, its autofill functionality is completely broken on Android, and has been since forever. So, while it's preferable to LastPass, it's still pretty mediocre.
>You described Germany! Britain and France are quite independent...
Germany I'll give you. They've definitely been putting in a herculean effort on the American Poodle front of late. But they'll have to go some to beat the UK's decades' long subservience. When it comes to foreign policy, the UK is basically a US satellite state.
France, on the other hand, were historically probably the Western European nation most likely to tell the US 'Non!' --although, that seems to be increasingly a thing of the past now too.
I'm a non-artist, and I've read several books on how to draw, including the (in)famous "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain." Every one of the books was way too advanced for my primitive skills, including the ones that claimed they were for absolute beginners.
I haven't tried this guy's exercises, but I applaud his approach. Just learning to control your pencil, learning to make smooth and organized marks on paper, are skills that many people (definitely including me) don't have.
I am an artist and these kind of articles and numerous similar videos on YouTube: 'How to draw faces... How to draw a cat... How to draw a horse...' annoy the hell out of me. As if 'learning to draw' consisted of following some formulaic recipe, without even having the object in question in front of you, or even having seen it.
The number one skill in learning to draw is learning to see properly. The vast majority of non-artistic people look at things without ever really seeing them. A classic example can be found on Gianluca Gimini's Velocipedia project:
Mechanically filling a page with shapes or following some idiotic 'how to draw a...' tutorial on YouTube will only teach you how to fill a page with shapes or make a bad copy of someone else's bad drawing. Learning to really look at things and attempting to put down what you see [as opposed to what you thought the item looked like before you actually studied it] is a far far more useful exercise.
I take your point that this article might provide some useful exercises for loosening up your doodling technique, to people who find it awkward to manipulate a pen or pencil freely. But calling it 'learning to draw' is as hyperbolic as calling some warm-up stretches 'learning to run a marathon'.
>I read a hard copy that was passed around my high school in the early 90s...
Slightly veering away from the subject. But your comment reminded me of 'The Little Red Schoolbook' --which was the [supposedly banned] book that we all passed around in school. Although being sadly older than you, this would have been the early 80s. I wonder if anyone else remembers it?
As I recall it was pretty subversive in content, with sections on sex, drugs and anrachist politics.
EDIT: Seems it was quite well-known after all. Wikipaiedia has an article on it:
Ironic that the US is crying foul on China [allegedly] keeping tabs on its own citizens overseas --when the US has been treating the entire planet like it falls under their own legal jurisdiction.
I think it's pretty clever, and demonstrates something very powerful about GitHub's position as de facto global code repository: you can get a strong cryptographic identity for (almost) anyone on the service, which you can then sign/encrypt to, verify for, etc.
age (another tool of Filippo's) leverages this to make encrypting to any GitHub user easy[1].
In the end, it isn't that useful. I only routinely sign digitally to deal with the (Spanish) government, and they provide their own certificates and software to do that.
I think it's going to be harder for people to take on board the idea that any amount of alcohol is bad for you as, intuitively, I still believe that, in moderation, it can have some positive affects such as de-stressing and aiding sleep. Mind you, I suppose you could say some of the same about smoking and I can intuitively accept that any amount of that is bad for you.
Well, I've never smoked [tobacco] and [apart from a bit of a 'sociable relapse' over Christmas] haven't drunk for over a year now. So I should live forever!