this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2026
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A Boring Dystopia

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https://fortune.com/2026/03/04/palantir-tech-companies-offices-vending-machines-tobacco-worker-productivity/

Free drugs for being a good cog? Man now we are talking business perks.

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[–] arcine@jlai.lu 9 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

Nicotine : one of the only drugs that makes you a better slave ; therefore, one of the very few legal ones.

[–] Krauerking@lemy.lol 3 points 12 hours ago

Yeah, I mean there were the amphetamines and opiates that they thought made people better workers too but that was just during periods where people hated reality and they realized the disassociation was worse for efficiency so now just back to nicotine.

Why can't we make our own study that says that the dopamine of watching a live hibachi chef makes us a better slave and at least get a flaming volcano of onion out of this?

[–] technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 points 15 hours ago

The original nazis used meth, but these fash aren't quite there yet.

[–] RazTheCat@lemmy.world 4 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago) (2 children)

Man, just modafinil or adderall lol.

I've heard Meth keeps you on even longer, the Nazis knew that already with Panzerschokolade.

[–] captainlezbian@lemmy.world 1 points 11 hours ago

Yeah but there's always an Adderall shortage

[–] DarkFuture@lemmy.world 2 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

At this point I think it's safe to say we're locked into the dystopian future and the utopic one was but a dream.

[–] Krauerking@lemy.lol 1 points 11 hours ago

Fun fact:
The guy that coined the term Utopia, actually meant for it to act as a pun, for "no such place" or to imply it was a false dream.
Such as, people will use the mirage of a utopia to hide the very real dystopia that this path creates.

A Eutopia is an actually "good place". A thing we have not been working towards. George Orwell also called his society a Utopia as it was a false good place.

[–] AdolfSchmitler@lemmy.world 4 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

Is coffee not good enough anymore?

[–] Krauerking@lemy.lol 3 points 12 hours ago

Considering the dosage amounts of caffeine that seem normal to people now....
No.

[–] lemjukes@sopuli.xyz 4 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

for anyone just interested in reading a recent study on the effects of nicotine.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11350241/

[–] Lucius_Sweet@lemmy.world 10 points 14 hours ago (2 children)

I found this review paper interesting and I don't doubt that nicotine can have therapeutic effects but the funding source worried me.

Conflict of interest

Authors YC, XW, XZ, HT, YZ, JZ, and SZ were employed China Tobacco Anhui Industrial Co., Ltd.

The remaining authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

The authors declare that this study received funding from Technology Project of Anhui Zhongyan Industry Co., Ltd. The funder had the involvement in the study design, data analysis, decision to publish, and preparation of the manuscript.

Funding Statement The author(s) declare that financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. This work was financially supported by the Technology Project of Anhui Zhongyan Industry Co., Ltd. (2022156), Science and Technology Projects of State Tobacco Monopoly Administration (110202201046XX-05), Startup Program of XMU and Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities.

[–] Krauerking@lemy.lol 4 points 12 hours ago

I read through it and just thought they were being generous with the fact that they were stating the positives as mostly people with depression and ADHD self medicating with an addictive substance that didnt really help as much as cause a feedback loop that felt better but more addictive...

The fact that they state the funders directly had involvement in the study... Oof.

[–] prenatal_confusion@feddit.org 6 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

Damn. That study is toasted.

[–] Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 3 points 13 hours ago (1 children)
[–] prenatal_confusion@feddit.org 2 points 11 hours ago

I dunno what you mean :))

[–] flop_leash_973@lemmy.world 4 points 16 hours ago

Why not just skip straight to the point and save us all a decade or so. Meth on tap.

[–] MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 2 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

No reason any worker couldn't just throw em in the trash, right?

[–] Krauerking@lemy.lol 1 points 12 hours ago

I imagine you would be fired and charged for destruction of property and then they would make you feel bad by having you apologize to your coworkers for hindering their ability to put forth more work.

[–] MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 1 points 15 hours ago

Is there some not-yet-specified condition of broad moral-displacement inherent to surveillists?

[–] AllNewTypeFace@leminal.space 29 points 1 day ago

Only because they don’t yet have approval to hand out amphetamines

[–] roofuskit@lemmy.world 164 points 1 day ago (5 children)

Now that's some cyberpunk dystopian shit. Corpos drugging up employees for productivity.

[–] TheReturnOfPEB@reddthat.com 79 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

in the 1960s American cigarette companies used to leave free packs of cigarettes in freshman dorms at the beginning of the school year because at least some of them would get bored and try it.

[–] user224@lemmy.sdf.org 26 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Don't worry, the Kent Micronite filter cigarettes helped with cancer thanks to the power of asbestos.

[–] ivanafterall@lemmy.world 3 points 17 hours ago

"Your honor, you can't deny they helped with the cancer..."

[–] zeezee@slrpnk.net 49 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I mean that's not new - tech companies will still advertise "coffee on tap" as a perk to work for them

[–] toiletobserver@lemmy.world 28 points 1 day ago

Can confirm, my time at microslop in the mid 2000s included break rooms with coolers full of every caffeinated beverage you can think of.

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[–] GorGor@startrek.website 21 points 1 day ago

the whole idea of a coffee 'break' was created to pump stimulants into workers to improve productivity.

[–] Krauerking@lemy.lol 18 points 1 day ago

Hey with the added benefit of addiction they can't afford to leave the office now!

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[–] Paranoidfactoid@lemmy.world 1 points 16 hours ago

Amlodipine.

[–] oopsgodisdeadmybad@lemmy.zip 12 points 1 day ago (4 children)

Fuck this to hell. I want tobacco to go extinct, not be more accessible.

If there was a button that just made every tobacco plant (and the backups in that one seed vault place) die, I would keep pushing it for days just to make sure it was all gone. Including existing smoking products.

Not sorry not sorry. Addicts all going cold turkey that day.

[–] ImNotThatPokable@lemmy.world 7 points 13 hours ago

As a nicotine addict, I wouldn't advise this. Making every one of us go cold turkey in one moment will be the end of humanity. Nicotine withdrawal is no joke.

I don't understand your fury to be honest. It's unhinged. So what happened to make you feel this way?

[–] dsilverz@calckey.world 5 points 16 hours ago

@oopsgodisdeadmybad@lemmy.zip @Krauerking@lemy.lol
@aboringdystopia@lemmy.world

First, I don't smoke and never had smoked (not considering the passive smoking from being close to smokers), the only "drug" I use non-frequently is alcohol (a vodka-saké beverage).

This said, your paternalistic implied thought ("drugs are bad, people shouldn't use drugs"; are their bodies yours, to begin with? Do you happen to have some kind of ownership over other's bodies? Who gave you this almighty authority, do you happen to be a Demiurgal Archon of sorts?) is missing the forest for the trees.

I'm barely knowledgeable about biology, but I know enough to remember about symbiotic relationships in nature, as well as phylogenetics. The plant responsible for tobacco wasn't some kind of lab creation, IIRC tobacco plant even predates us homininae, and this means there are certainly species biologically interacting with the tobacco plant, perhaps species reliant of tobacco plant (not necessarily because of nicotine, but because it's a plant which siphons nutrients and resources from the soil, displacing water and somehow contributing to water cycles).

The moment this Archonic hubris illustrated by your text were to render tobacco extinct, unbeknownst to you, other species would be going extinct as well, and this may include humans due to how food web is so interconnected in ways we're still trying to figure out. That's part of why we try to classify species taxonomically and phylogenetically, because this is also valuable for us to identify potential interspecies relationships. I mean, this is exactly what phylogenetics is about: study of evolutionary relationships among biological entities.

So, please, seek some phylogenetics and biology awareness before feeding paternalistic, bigoted anti-drug thoughts. Others bodies aren't yours for you to wish for control, let alone other species.

[–] JamesBoeing737MAX@sopuli.xyz 3 points 15 hours ago

Well, headache medicine sometimes includes nic.. They would probably just switch it to something worse.

[–] Jax@sh.itjust.works 4 points 16 hours ago

Yes drugs are bad, we should all have to rawdog experiencing the planet boiling.

What an enlightened take, that's positively upvoted — no less!

[–] 01189998819991197253 11 points 1 day ago

Why don't they just use their job replacing AIs?

[–] CubitOom 54 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (3 children)
[–] Korhaka@sopuli.xyz 17 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Is there more footage of Hitler tweaking? Show modern nazis what their shitty "master race" looks like.

[–] wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

That's fucking hilarious, hitler was a tweaker

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[–] Kolanaki@pawb.social 27 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I'm still going outside for a smoke when I get my 15. They are only providing pouches (snuff) so people don't have to leave their workstation to get their fix.

[–] kamen@lemmy.world 2 points 17 hours ago

I don't smoke, but would still sometimes go out with my colleagues who do smoke.

[–] Krauerking@lemy.lol 21 points 1 day ago

Yeah. I can't wait for my complimentary IV and catheter at my cubicle and 0 breaks.

I used to take smoking breaks without smoking cause it wasnt fair to dish them out to only smokers.

[–] Gerudo@lemmy.zip 15 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Hmmm, how much you want to bet the tobacco companies slipped a little money under their door mat

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[–] yucandu@lemmy.world 11 points 1 day ago

Always with the "extract every ounce of yourself for us", never with the "take care of yourself to maximize your potential for us".

[–] someguy3@lemmy.world 17 points 1 day ago (1 children)

What do you think free coffee is for?

[–] Thedogdrinkscoffee@lemmy.ca 10 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Less for the caffeine, more for stopping people from going out for coffee.

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[–] TheReturnOfPEB@reddthat.com 16 points 1 day ago (3 children)
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