I find it amusing that the guy who has two double-shot lattes a day just likes coffee, but the guy who takes the same amount of caffeine in pill form has 'quite an addiction' when they are both consuming the same amount of the drug in question.
> you should find yourself a delicious decaffeinated coffee.
Decaf coffee is universally worse than caffeinated. It's impossible to remove the caffeine from coffee beans without also removing a good deal of the chemicals that contribute to the flavor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decaffeinated_coffee
Amusing, yes, but not illogical. If I'm away for work chances are I'll be at a starbucks 4 times a day, sometimes same at home. I love it. But I've never had a caffeine pill, and if I don't drink coffee I don't notice any difference. (Exception being that if I'm massively underslept one morning a coffee does have a really good impact on getting me to feel less shit.)
>I find it amusing that the guy who has two double-shot lattes a day just likes coffee,
I find it amusing that you say that, since I never implied any such thing. My father drinks coffee every morning and is a grump without it. He's just as much of an addict as someone who takes coffee pills. Trust me, I'm not one to use the "addiction" word as a scare word or to pass judgement. Though I do find it funny how often HN is anti-drug about things that are less dangerous and addictive than some recreational drugs.
>I find it amusing that you say that, since I never implied any such thing.
really? because four servings of coffee a day doesn't seem that much over the median dose, at least among people I know, if you adjust for body size. When I'm on, I consume more caffeine than that. So, to me, suggesting that someone has a problem when the dosage is that close to the median suggests that you are criticizing the delivery method more than the dosage.
While technically speaking many people (myself included) are 'addicted' to caffeine, I think comparing coffee dependence to something like alcohol dependence does not make a lot of sense; If I started every morning with a nice glass of scotch and finished a fifth every time I had real work to do, I'd likely be dead at this point. If I stop drinking caffeine, I sleep a lot and have a hard time getting work done. Some people get headaches. Withdrawal from long-term Alcohol abuse, on the other hand, often comes with hallucinations and sometimes death. Caffeine dependency isn't in the same class at all. In fact, while I agree that caffeine can be addictive, I'm not at all convinced that caffeine dependency is a bad thing.
I'm not criticizing the medium at all. In terms of health benefits, eating a caffeine pill is healthier than consuming the equivalent amount of coffee. No doubt alcohol withdrawl is worse, but if we're performing comparative metrics, I can vaporize cannabis for two months straight and stop all of the sudden without so much as a thought. I drank a twelve pack of coke across 4 days and had headaches for that Friday and Saturday.
I just don't know what you want me to say. It's not an addiction? Okay. Do you feel better? It's a chemical stimulant that you notice when you stop consuming it. You consume it so that you stay functional.
You can sugar coat it or say that it's not like being addicted to alcohol, but it doesn't change the fact that if you cut it out for a few weeks, you'd be more productive without the cost, dependency or negative side effects of coffee. The fact that you KNOW that, and continue to drink it, quite frankly supports the notion that it's an addiction.
People don't consume it just to stay functional, there are positives associated with caffeine that may outweigh the negatives. In particular, if you have any dementia in the family, it is one of the only known effective ways to reduce that risk.
That's absolutely fair and I was slightly familiar with the idea of benefits of caffeine. Do I think that we were discussing these benefits? Not really. Like I said, I don't have a problem with people supplementing with caffeine. As I've mentioned, I do it occasionally, I just don't make it part of my daily routine.
>I can vaporize cannabis for two months straight and stop all of the sudden without so much as a thought.
Now, I have little personal experience, and I'm not an expert; but I /have/ seen people lose their jobs due to their performance being diminished because of habitual marijuana use. I've never seen anyone lose a job because of caffeine.
I mean, I know plenty of people who use marijuana occasionally on the weekends and seem no worse for wear; from my understanding, it's not as bad as alcohol, and you may be right that it's not addictive, but it's certainly more harmful than Caffeine.
>but it doesn't change the fact that if you cut it out for a few weeks, you'd be more productive without the cost, dependency or negative side effects of coffee.
This is not true for me. Personally, I tend to ramp up my caffeine use slowly over a number of months, because I do develop a resistance. During these months, I am /significantly/ more effective than without caffeine, even if I quit for months.
Now, I do build up a resistance, so every few months I quit for a while, as I do eventually get to the point where I have diminishing returns. For me, this doesn't result in headaches, just a few days of more sleep than usual and reduced performance. Assuming I get my 12 hours a day of sleep, the reduced performance is still much better than, say, a hangover. I'm up to baseline performance within a week. (my baseline performance is /significantly/ lower than my caffeinated performance.)
I'd love to see that claim backed up by one iota of science. Considering it takes less to overdose on caffeine, caffeine has actual chemical withdrawl symptoms, that cannabis has numerous anti-cancer properties that are acknowledged by everyone (including the governmental organizations tasked with analyzing it, etc) except the US government, etc.
You're still missing the point anyway. You continue to discuss all the merits of caffeine and how you use it that specifically DEPICT how it is a habit forming drug and support all of my points. That's my only point, and you and this other guy keep repeating yourselves about how you're "good people" or something and defending yourselves from attacks that I'm not making.
Thanks for the immediate downvote too. :) Cheers!
tl;dr: I point out that caffeine is a habit forming stimulant, fellow HNer takes offense at the categorization, goes on downvoting spree and defends himself against attacks that I'm not making.
Cool. Love to see that commenting continues to improve here.
wait, what? first, I didn't downvote you. Even if I could, I would not; and I can't. the downvote button doesn't exist for posts that are responses to mine. Next, I'm not arguing that caffeine is not a habit forming drug. It obviously is habit forming. What I'm trying to say is that because the side effects are so mild, it's not that big of a deal that it is habit forming. Next, I'm not saying people who use a certain drug are 'bad people' - just that some drugs carry higher levels of risk than others, and I believe that caffeine has a very low risk of causing serious problems, even though it is habit forming.
Now, you seemed to think that the guy ought to kick his caffeine habit, which would suggest that you think there are some dangers or other serious downsides to caffeine dependency, which is why I'm addressing that. If you do have evidence for serious side effects to caffeine use, please do cite references. As far as I can tell, caffeine just isn't a very dangerous drug when consumed in anything like the usual quantities, and the side effects are fairly mild for most people.
You seemed to suggest that marijuana is better than Caffeine because it is less habit forming. My point was that marijuana has some major risks associated with it; even if it's not habit forming at all, and my observations (that heavy users of marijuana tend to have significant and long-term loss of productivity) are mere coincidence and the stuff is completely safe from a pharmaceutical standpoint, there are very serious legal dangers associated with obtaining and using marijuana.
Now, maybe we are just talking past oneanother, but I'm not seeing how you are going from what I'm saying to "I'm a good person"
You're defending caffeine use. Please show me one place where I suggested he should stop or sad that using caffeine was bad. In fact, I've gone out of my way half a dozen times to suggest the opposite.
All I did was ask why, rather than replace coffee with caffeine, he didn't simply kick caffeine all together.
Heh, legal dangers aren't probably as severe a concern as dangers during acquisition. I would suggest that anyone using cannabis at work is as dumb as anyone drinking at work. If you want to light up after work, I don't really see how that affects your performance at work. You don't get a hangover from cannabis use.
Maybe my tone conveyed otherwise, but I was really just curious as to why it was easier for the (parent, parent, parent) comment to keep using caffeine in a different form if he didn't enjoy drinking coffee.
I guess I'm still surprised at the ease of which people can ween themselves off of what I would call large doses of it. But that skepticism really isn't fair of me, especially considering peoples' default opinion of cannabis use and how much all of my experiences and friends' experiences differ from the typical stoner stereotype.
I am curious now though, when you say "heavy users tend to have long-term loss of productivity", is that even when at work, not high? Is that even after they've stopped smoking for long periods of time? Because even anecdotally, I've never really heard of that. I mean, I ditched a friend because he was addicted to pot. He was addicted to cigarettes and drinking and attention and designer glasses and he used people to get his way so I don't really think cannabis was the root issue, but I'm surprised to hear of people in the tech industry experiencing people that suffer as a result of use.
Oh well, I'm way off topic. tl;dr, I think we were talking past each other, more just making different points. Sorry for any attitude I had earlier. It's no excuse but it's been a long day, had some major presentations going on.
>You're defending caffeine use. Please show me one place where I suggested he should stop or sad that using caffeine was bad
At the beginning of this thread, you wrote:
>That's quite an addiction you have. Have you considered kicking it?
Which I interpreted to mean that you thought this caffeine addiction was a bad thing, and that he should try to kick it. Of course, it's possible that you were asking if he had withdrawal symptoms when he stopped or perhaps something else entirely, but that's why I was defending caffeine use.
>I am curious now though, when you say "heavy users tend to have long-term loss of productivity", is that even when at work, not high? Is that even after they've stopped smoking for long periods of time?
Honestly, I don't know if the people I've known with those problems were high at the time or not; Either there was some sort of lasting effect, or the people in question chose to continue using when it was clear that they were damaging their career.
I mean, like I said, I know far more people who use every now and then and seem to be fine with it, but for some people, it can be (or, at least contribute to) a problem.
