I think that’s a very strong argument and a great metaphor, but you forget relativity.

All reference frames are valid - you could say the Earth and the people are moving and the train is stationary, you could say the train is moving and the earth and people are stationary, or you could say they each have a vector moving around the sun or anything else

But when you travel through a portal, the only valid reference frames are you and the entry portal. Your momentum relative to the Earth doesn’t matter - why would it? You can open a portal to the moon and jump through, and we see momentum is preserved. The Earth isn’t a special reference frame, it’s just the most noticeable one.

So let’s pick the reference frame of someone on the track. Let’s look through the portal and say there’s a sign on the other side - as it approaches, you’d see a sign approaching you through the portal. Relative to you, through the portal the sign is moving at 30mph. The portal passes over you - you haven’t moved, but you enter a new reference frame, a frame in which the Earth and everything on it is moving at 30mph

Have you ever had coca tea? It’s amazing - way better than caffeine. It’s more gentle, but stronger - like it gives you more energy, but you don’t get a hard crash, it’s less likely to make it hard to sleep, plus it has all sorts of health benefits - being able to adjust to high altitude for one

Cocaine probably shouldn’t be sold at the drug stores, but it would be amazing if we treated it like caffeine - you need a license to buy it, but you can get the leaves or products made for it

Plus we could make a path to legitimize cartels and stop getting people killed over the the war on drugs, which would be nice

Oh, the global economy is going to break regardless. China is physically and economically collapsing right now, and it’s going to have huge knock-on effects

Meanwhile, we still don’t even have a consensus that long COVID is a thing. I definitely feel slightly foggier long after the fact, it seems to me that it might be less about COVID doing something special - maybe all illnesses chip away at long-term health, and COVID put a lot of people in a state much worse than the flu and got us thinking about it.

Or maybe COVID has unique mechanisms, but it seems to me there’s an assumption - why do we assume that once we recover, we get all the way better? If anything, I think it might be the opposite - there’s plenty of people in my life who never felt the same after getting an illness, but no one talks about it in a unified enough way to give it a name

Which is really strange to me, I mean we’ve got early adopters and lots of technical people. It seems like science should be big here

I think it’s a combination of less presence/engagement in niche content, sorting methods not quite being there, and not enough discovery without going out of band to find things

One thing I really miss is the science groups, askscience always had great debate that I haven’t yet found here

After tech Jesus posted that, a former employee came out about all sorts of stuff about the work environment were pretty horrible