turboSnail

People seem to move on from one debt to another. If you just paid your car loan, now you're suddenly fixing up your kitchen and getting another loan for that. When does this end? Oh, it never does. People seem to be married with their local bank, and that relationship is toxic.

You didn't nee to buy that car. Could have just used your old car, or bought a used one instead of a new one. You can totally buy stuff with your own money too. Making your kitchen new and shiny wasn't an urgent need either. What if you saved money for a few years and then spent it on the kitchen? Never occurred to you, huh? Impatience like this is a really expensive hobby, and the banks are the only ones benefiting.

Oh, so that’s why so many financial fake gurus come from America. It’s the perfect audience for false hope. People are so desperate and uneducated that they’ll buy anything, even BS books and useless courses.

I go through periods of high and low caffeine intake, so I have some experience in managing withdrawals.

Let's say you want to go down from 4 cups to 2 cups. Here's how to do it:

1. Write down how much you currently use. Let's say you're using the traditional 60 g/l recipe and a 200 ml cup. Therefore your starting point is: 60 g/l × 0.2 l × 4 cups/d = 48 g/d
2. Prepare a daily plan on how do you go from 48 g/d (4 cups/d) to 24 g/d (2 cups/d). I would recommending reducing the does by 1 g of beans per day. So, if you used 48 g of beans yesterday, grind only 47 g today and 46 tomorrow etc. If headaches occur, you need to go slower. If you're drinking dark roast or if you have a headache resistant head, you can probably get away with 1.5 g/d or 2 g/d reduction rate.
3. Don't switch to another type of coffee while ramping down your intake, since the different caffeine concentration in the beans will change the daily dose. You don't know the mass of caffeine, but you do know the mass of the beans you grind. Don't introduce unknown variables. This is hard enough as it is.
4. Don't drink coffee made by other people. You won't be able to control your intake properly.

That's how I do it when ramping down my intake. You can also go all the way to zero if you like. The same logic applies to tea as well, but doing it gets a bit tricky. The concentration of caffeine in the solids is much higher in tea, so 1 g/d reduction rate is far too rapid. You also need to have a good scale, and you need to weigh very small masses, which may require some trickery.

Interestingly, Mussolini stayed in power for 22 years. That’s how long it took Italians to realise they’ve had enough, and decided to fix the problem.

looks like a punctuation error to me. I would have written it this way:

Honestly—the way they’re speaking—I’m fine with them calling it ‘“american.”

You could separate the interjection with commas or parentheses too. the em dashes give some extra emphasis, while commas make it blend in a bit better.

Oh, ok so that was only a 10⁹ times more... No biggie. LOL.

Anyway, as long as you're able to sleep well, it should be ok. Personally, I think 2 cups (2*200 ml) is a good amount for me. The exact amount of caffeine that contains depends on the type of coffee beans I use. The concentration in the drinkable liquid should be around 300 mg/l, but who knows really. Dark roast will have less than light roast. In any case, that could be something like 2cups/d *0.2 l/cup *300 mg/l = 120 mg/d. Compared to that, I would still say your caffeine intake is a lot higher than mine.

Anyway, as a fun thought experiment, I looked up what caffeine costs and what it would take to buy 400 Mg of it. Sigma-Aldrich/Merck sells 25 kg drums of this stuff and they charge only 1060 € for each. What a bargain for food grade caffeine!

That means, you would need to order 16 000 drums of it. That will be quite a few pallets. Is that going to be more than a single lorry? Don't worry about it. It will cost you only 16 960 000 €, so I guess now would be a good time to start a company to get those tax deductions on chemical orders. On the other hand, you might actually want to contact one of the many factories that produce decaf beans and ask for a better price. All of that caffeine has to go somewhere, right?

Usually, I would recommend using gloves, respirator, full hazmat suit etc. when handling this kind of cargo, but in this case that would kinda defeat the purpose.

source: https://www.sigmaaldrich.com/DE/en/product/aldrich/w222402

Exactly. Capital letters matter in science and technology.

400 Mg? sounds orders of magnitude beyond lethal. How do you even shove all that into your system?

😃 Worried about scratching the print job? Tell that to the shovels, hammers, cables and other random work stuff I threw in there. Oh wait, some people don’t use a truck like a tool.

I wonder if it would be cool to own an excavator and never dig anything with it. At least the bucket would stay yellow.

Same here. Those cars are so expensive to own, that you don’t ever even think of getting one unless you really really need it for a specific purpose. However, I’ve heard that Americans don’t think that way.

What about the other people who drive a pickup truck? Do they actually haul cargo or tow a boat?

Some people say Oracle doesn’t have clients. They have hostages.