Is it normal for a young child to not want to share anything—toys, food, outerwear? #

Yes, completely normal. Young children are egocentric by design. Their brains are still developing the capacity for perspective-taking, impulse control, and emotional regulation. True perspective-taking doesn’t emerge until around ages four to six. Children may eventually outgrow selfishness, but waiting for that to happen is a missed opportunity. The brain is also highly plastic at this age. Parents have enormous power to foster generosity, and the earlier they start, the better.

Got home from a Santo Daime work tonight. Then I drank some water. Carelessly. The way a person does who has forgotten that the universe enjoys irony.

Hic.

You’d think I’d have learned to sip like a Victorian lady at high tea by now. Instead, I apparently chug like I’m trying to win a contest. The hiccups arrived right on schedule to collect their tribute.

I tried sugar, the classic remedy. Hic.

Most cannabis formulations, built around just THC and CBD, can work for intimacy—but they require a certain amount of mental effort to stay in a good headspace. That’s the kind of effort you don’t need to be making.

Relax Blend #

Adding a third cannabinoid—CBN (cannabinol)—to the THC+CBD combination creates something noticeably more stable. In a 1:1:1 ratio of Δ9-THC, CBD, and CBN, the experience is self-regulating. You don’t need to steer your mood. The blend handles that, freeing your attention for your partner, your body, and the moment.

The Viral Moment #

A parent hands their child an apple-shaped token. The deal: bring me this token and you can tell me anything—no punishment, no consequences. The video spread because it feels like a breakthrough. Parents watching think, why didn’t I think of that?

It’s an ill-conceived strategy.

Why Children Hide Things #

Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy holds that the mind is made up of parts with distinct roles. When a child hides something, a part is at work whose job is to keep the secret—call it Keeper. Keeper fears the parent’s reaction: anger, punishment, shame, withdrawal of love. That fear may be justified by past experience or purely anticipatory. Either way, Keeper concluded that honesty with this parent is too risky.

I recently tried 5-MAPB (5-(2-methylaminopropyl)benzofuran) at 80mg on a single occasion—my first experience with an MDMA-like compound. This gave me a useful point of comparison with psilomethoxin (Pm).

In my judgment, Pm at 0.5–1g most closely resembles 5-MAPB. Below that range, Pm is too subtle; above it, the experience pulls inward too firmly in a way that diverges from the 5-MAPB character.

The comparison confirmed differences I had suspected. 5-MAPB is a stimulant—sleep on the day of administration was a challenge. Pm is not a stimulant; as noted in the original case report, falling asleep at the peak is possible.

This is a follow-up to LuaLaTeX Footnote Maze, which documented the long road to making memoir paragraph footnotes work inside breakable tcolorbox environments with hyperref. That solved half the problem. This post solves the rest of the problem: deciding exactly where on the page footnotes appear.

Downloads: memoir-fnqueue.sty · memoir-tcolorbox.sty · test-fn.tex · test-fn.py

The Remaining Gap #

After the earlier work, footnotes escaped their tcolorbox prisons and rendered as proper paragraph footnotes with working hyperref links. But placement was still automatic—footnotes released at the end of a box landed wherever TeX’s page builder decided, sometimes colliding with other content when the combined height of sidebar plus footnotes barely exceeded the page.

Balance of Power #

Abstract #

This is my remix of Vitalik’s Dec 30 essay of the same title.

Modern civilization depends on powerful institutions—corporations, governments, and mass movements—to drive progress, yet these same forces threaten freedom and flourishing as they concentrate power. This essay examines how Big Business, Big Government, and Big Mob each become dangerous through specific mechanisms: corporations through profit optimization that diverges from social welfare and through homogenization driven by scale; governments when they shift from neutral frameworks to active agents pursuing their own agendas; civil society when diverse institutions collapse into unified mobs.

A digital illustration of a young woman with long, wavy brown hair. She rests her chin on her fist, her expression conveying boredom or mild annoyance. She wears a pink tank top. The style is semi-realistic with soft brushwork.

LuaLaTeX Footnote Maze #

UPDATE 2025-12-04: Sidebar Footnote Collision Problem #

Testing revealed a critical issue: when a sidebar with footnotes barely fits on a page, the footnotes can collide with the sidebar content. The sidebar itself fits, but the combination of sidebar plus footnotes exceeds available space, causing collisions with page content and page numbers.

The problem occurs regardless of sidebar length. Tests with varying sidebar sizes—from compact to extended—all demonstrated collisions when the total height (sidebar + footnotes) was just over the page limit.

Subject: Request to Reconsider Ban on Synthetically Derived Cannabinoids Under HB 3000
To: [email protected], [email protected]
CC: [email protected]

I am writing as your constituent in [City], Oregon, to express my concerns about HB 3000’s ban on synthetically derived cannabinoids by the Oregon Liquor and Cannabis Commission (OLCC).

The Current Problem

The OLCC has banned all artificially derived cannabinoids based on health concerns, specifically worries over consumers ingesting or inhaling the residue of chemicals used to process CBD into other cannabinoids. While I understand the intent to protect consumers, this blanket prohibition creates several significant issues: