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Is Ethanol the Answer to the Energy Dilemma?
n0xin writes "According to Fortune, "The next five years could see ethanol go from a mere sliver of the fuel pie to a major energy solution in a world where the cost of relying on a finite supply of oil is way too high." In an effort to meet fuel-economy standards, automakers already have 5 million ethanol-ready vehicles on the road. Supporters are optomistic that "we can introduce enough ethanol in the U.S. to replace the majority of our petroleum use in cars and light trucks." Are SUVs included in this category?"
Next solution please.
I realize that in this "enlightened" time it's rather uncool to ask this, but here goes... Why shouldn't they be in jail? Our laws prohibit the use, sale, growing, etc... of a particular plant. If people violate those criminal laws, why shouldn't they be in jail?
Arguing that the law is unjust is beside the point. The fact remains that growing (selling, using) marijuana is illegal in the United States.
Oh, I guess that's why they should be in jail.
Now, the next question is, who does the act of jailing all these people harm? The answer is, everybody! It harms the pot-smokers themselves more than the actual smoking did, and it harms society in multiple ways: by depriving the work force of otherwise-productive people, and by draining tax dollars to feed and house them!
I personally have absolutely no desire to do any kind of drugs, nor do I think anyone else should. However, I'd much rather leave the idiots alone than to waste my tax dollars in a futile, fundamentally stupid effort to "fix" their personality flaws! If they want to ruin their lives and/or kill themselves, I say good riddance and let them do it!
And then on top of all this, we're depriving ourselves of all the various benefits the plant itself can provide, including eliminating our dependence on foreign oil, and the trillions of dollars the war over that is costing us!
We've got the solution to both our energy needs and our prison overcrowding problems literally growing as a weed in our backyards, and we're too bent on some kind of idiotic moral crusade to take advantage of it! It's completely, absurdly, insane!
(I'm not even going to go into the whole racist origins of the law in the first place, which makes the whole thing even more fucked-up...)
Oh, by the way: the argument "It's wrong because it's illegal" is the most fucking asinine argument there is. By that logic, if "having the nickname Baren" was illegal than you'd be going to Hell right now. Does that make sense to you?!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Second, we have all sorts of helpful social programs. We have medicaid, medicare, and laws against turning people away from emergency rooms. We have social security, food stamps, welfare, and WIC. We have homeless shelters, Habitat for Humanity, loan help for first-time home buyers, and housing projects. We have public school, subsidized universities, and education grants. We even bury or cremate people who die without enough money to pay the bill.
The existance of all those social programs means that we can't stand by while people mess up their lives. If we do, we allow them to waste money via the social programs going to an unproductive member of society.
Should we get rid of all these social programs? Maybe. I'm not so sure about the unburied corpses though. In any case, we do have these social programs. Thus, we try to keep idiots from making themselves worse.