I've been paying attention to the larger economic picture just fine. By paying attention to this larger economic picture I have been able to observe that a fairly poor computer still cost a middle-income worker several months' salary in the 1980s, and that a great computer costs a minimum-wage worker about a week's salary today. Do you dispute this fact or do you just want to wave your hands about without specifics?
Which tells you, at most, that modern methods are bad but the ancient ways are OK, so you shouldn't condemn the entire drug based on modern methods. And truthfully I doubt it's as bad as it's made out to be.
As for losing to the Spanish, show me an indigenous population anywhere that did any better when faced with Europeans. The fact that the Spaniards did them a world of harm was because of technological and cultural differences, same as practically everywhere else in the world, not because they were drug hounds.
Nice way to completely change the argument. I was not arguing about criminal effects or addictive qualities. I was arguing solely about health effects. The guy up above claimed that drug legalization would be too much of a drain on the health care system and therefore drugs should be banned on those grounds. If you would like to argue against my point then feel free, but don't act like you've somehow "got" me because you're refuting something I never said.
Coca leaves have cocaine in them. It's not something you compare to cocaine, it is a way to take cocaine.
Yes, this way is different from other forms, but those other forms don't have a monopoly on "cocaine". Coca leaves have it too.
Your tax money also goes to support people who have destroyed their health by using too much sugar, milk, potato chips, or hamburgers. Shall we ban them too?
Certainly Coca-Cola wasn't anything like it is now, but the fact remains that people drank it and their lives remained intact.
As for chewing coca leaves, it is not in any manner "worlds away from doing cocaine". It is, in fact, a way of doing cocaine. Perhaps not a common way, but nevertheless it is a way to do it. Maybe the other ways are worse, but that doesn't mean the whole thing should be outlawed wholesale.
I read that Wikipedia section you linked to but I'm afraid I have no idea what point you were trying to make with it.
Probably, but so what? All that means is that some forms are worse than others. It doesn't validate the claim that "cocaine" is a dangerous hard drug that's prohibitively difficult to use responsibly. In fact it means exactly the opposite: to use it responsively, just use a weaker form!
Might want to fix the Wikipedia article then, as it claims that coca leaves do contain cocaine and that this cocaine does make it into the body.
As for drug lords and kidnappings, one big benefit of American drug legalization would be that it would, presumably, become legal to grow the stuff here instead of buying it illegally from other countries. Assuming that coca can be cultivated in the US.... But even if it can't, legitimizing the trade would probably go a long way toward removing the criminal element from it.
That's a good one too. Truth is there are tons of examples. Cheese, potato chips, candy bars, even just plain old meat. If we're banning substances because of the burden they place on health care providers, be prepared to eat a whole lot of tofu in the future.
It's their kid, so I find it unsurprising that parents are simply skipping the vaccines as long as there's the shadow of a doubt.
But that's just the thing. There's the shadow of a doubt both ways! Why is the one better than the other? Well that's easy, it's because measles sounds like something from a fairy tale, whereas autism immediately conjures up evening-news images of blank-faced kids spinning plates.
This is something that has annoyed me for some time now: the idea of "playing it safe" has been hijacked and now means "favoring the danger I'm more familiar with". 99% of the time, when someone tries to "play it safe" or "err on the side of caution" all they end up doing is accepting a greater but more familiar risk. Just because it makes you more comfortable doesn't mean it's the smart move!
A great example of this when it comes to parenting is the current scare about child predators and the almost complete destruction of childhood independence. That article a few months ago by a mother who let her boy take the NYC subway alone shows exactly what I'm talking about. Everybody freaked out about this "dangerous" ride she let him take. But in fact the risk to him was absolutely minimal, and nobody was thinking about the risk should he be sheltered to the point where he grows up stunted and is thereby never able to accomplish anything with his life, something which I fear will start to happen to millions of children when they face maturity in another decade or so.
So don't let people take this cop-out. If the facts support one decision as being safer then that's reasonable. But refusing vaccines isn't playing it safe or avoiding the shadow of a doubt, it's cowardly destroying public health because parents are incapable of acting rationally.
HIV does this, to the extent that the vaccines never really get a chance to work in the first place. The reason an HIV vaccine is so extremely difficult to create is that HIV mutates like crazy and renders a vaccine ineffective almost immediately. (I believe this is also why our bodies can't fight it off naturally. You'll note that all or nearly all diseases which have vaccines can also be beaten naturally, albeit usually with a fairly high chance of death and/or permanent disability or disfigurement.)
In principle I don't think there's any reason why other diseases couldn't do exactly the same thing. In practice... well, it must not happen very often. And the new strain is likely to mutate as slowly as the old strain, so it would presumably be a quick job to come up with a new vaccine for the newly infectious strain.
Well if it's true that the older forms were less dangerous, then the answer is to regulate the different forms in different ways so as to encourage users to go for the safer stuff, much like hard alcohol tends to be much more heavily regulated and taxed than wine and beer.
In any case, I agree with your overall point that the really dangerous drugs should be treated differently and it shouldn't just be a blanket acceptance of everything. But the long drug prohibition has demonized many of these substances such that their reputation far exceeds their reality, so we need to be careful with what we "know" about them.
I buy Ivory soap bars by the dozen for a pittance at the local grocery store. No specific antibacterial content as far as I know. Extremely easy to find. Soap is soap is soap, there's no need to buy special "hand" stuff that flows as a liquid and comes in a fancy bottle.
"Hard" drugs like Cocaine should probably remain illegal - it is impossible (or prohibitively difficult, at least) to "use them responsibly" and their health effects are much more marked.
Cite? The fact that Cocaine was used as an active ingredient in a popular fizzy drink would seem to speak otherwise. And let's not forget that Cocaine is known because in its native region, the indigenous people used it constantly and they did alright.
I admit that I'm not particularly knowledgeable about drug culture, but I always had the distinct impression that the people you bought marijuana from were not the type of people who would be selling other drugs. It's a fairly distinct culture where marijuana is generally sourced from a network of friends, not some dealer on the street corner who isn't going to risk his hide for something as unprofitable and unaddictive as marijuana.
What good does all this mass-produced stuff do us if we're increasingly unable to afford to possess it because the predominant flow of money and resources is IN TOWARD that wealthy controlling minority and not OUT FROM them? The majority is slowly but increasingly disadvantaged to their benefit; though it's happening so slowly that many people are oblivious to the effect, it's significant and detrimental and something Hari Seldon would recognize. It's what causes exoduses and revolutions.
I have to wonder if you're living in the same world I am. Computers and electronics in general have become steadily more accessible and more affordable over the past decades. In the 70s only big companies, universities, and crazy hobbyists had computers. In the 80s, people with a lot of money and a real need had them. In the 90s owning a computer ceased to be a mark of wealth or a technical trade and became somewhat commonplace. Now, not owning a computer is nearly as bizarre as not having a telephone.
You can go out and buy a highly capable computer for about a week's worth of minimum wage now. And you're trying to tell me that this stuff is getting less affordable?
Without people like Jobs, Woz would have been "that guy who built his own toy computers" and we'd probably still be using remote terminals to telnet into some gigantic mainframe.
And lest anyone think I'm leaning too far the other way, without people like Woz, Jobs would have been "that asshole who used to hack the phone system" and we'd also probably still be using remote terminals to telnet into some gigantic mainframe.
I don't understand at all why you call this a "marriage made in hell". Seems to me that the combination of inventer and entrepreneur is what gives us all this awesome technology that we enjoy today.
Yes, it would have been so much better if Apple had decided to preserve backwards compatibility at any cost and ended up with a "turtles all the way down" situation like the PC!
Oh please, get over yourself. Out here in the real world, planning for death before it actually happens is called "smart". I suppose you would think that asking somebody beforehand whether they prefer cremation or burial to be too uncaring and calculating, and would prefer to wait for them to die before you ask how they want their remains to be treated!
It contradicts it for me personally, because this is an experience that I've had.
Either you didn't understand my question or you're dodging it. My point was that your "personal experience" includes those selection biases which make it unreliable. I pointed out how your observations could be due entirely to chance. If you accept that, then your experience actually tells you nothing, since it is compatible with chance. If you don't accept that, then some part of your experience shows you that it's beyond what chance would allow. What part of that is it? Please don't tell me that it's a "feeling", as that would be entirely ridiculous.
But it also makes sense to me to not automatically completely invalidate my subjective experience in favor of these same objective tools.
I never said you should completely invalidate it. I merely said that you can't rely on it, and that it must be checked. Subjective experiences are often the beginning of great discoveries. But you can't come to any sort of conclusion based on your subjective experience. It may give you a place to start, but it's not proof or even really much in the way of evidence.
Your subjective experience that friends can sense you looking at them even when they're not looking at you would be a great start to a scientific investigation. But in the absence of an objective investigation, and with observations which are entirely compatible with chance, all you can say is that you think something might be going on. It certainly isn't enough to conclude that something is happening which "hasn't been fully defined by science yet", as you said a couple of posts ago. It might be, but it might not, and in the absence of any good evidence the weight goes to the "not".
You got three threads out of it. You lost out on any further speed increases past 3 cores, and 4 cores is becoming pretty common now. 8 core machines are not difficult to find, and will be common in another year or so. Am I to conclude that your software was not written correctly in the first place as you claimed? Keep in mind that the question is not how to make software take advantage of today's machines, but rather how to make software take advantage of tomorrow's 16+ core machines.
"X is only useful for those who are too lazy to do Y."
It's been said about assembly language, high-level languages, garbage collection, plug-n-play, and practically any other technology you can name. It is not actually a valid criticism.
That's simply ridiculous. Back when essentially nobody had more than one CPU core in their PC, writing PC software to be massively multithreaded just because you had a "parallel task" would have been utterly stupid. Such code would be more complicated, more bug prone, and slower. So why should it have been created?
You're correct that multi-CPU setups have existed for a long time. However, the proportion of users which had them was so close to zero as to make no difference. Even for those which did have them, the vast majority had only two CPU cores, and multithreaded programming to take advantage of two cores is way different from the 16+ that are predicted as being the norm in just a couple of years.
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I've been paying attention to the larger economic picture just fine. By paying attention to this larger economic picture I have been able to observe that a fairly poor computer still cost a middle-income worker several months' salary in the 1980s, and that a great computer costs a minimum-wage worker about a week's salary today. Do you dispute this fact or do you just want to wave your hands about without specifics?
Which tells you, at most, that modern methods are bad but the ancient ways are OK, so you shouldn't condemn the entire drug based on modern methods. And truthfully I doubt it's as bad as it's made out to be.
As for losing to the Spanish, show me an indigenous population anywhere that did any better when faced with Europeans. The fact that the Spaniards did them a world of harm was because of technological and cultural differences, same as practically everywhere else in the world, not because they were drug hounds.
Nice way to completely change the argument. I was not arguing about criminal effects or addictive qualities. I was arguing solely about health effects. The guy up above claimed that drug legalization would be too much of a drain on the health care system and therefore drugs should be banned on those grounds. If you would like to argue against my point then feel free, but don't act like you've somehow "got" me because you're refuting something I never said.
Coca leaves have cocaine in them. It's not something you compare to cocaine, it is a way to take cocaine.
Yes, this way is different from other forms, but those other forms don't have a monopoly on "cocaine". Coca leaves have it too.
Your tax money also goes to support people who have destroyed their health by using too much sugar, milk, potato chips, or hamburgers. Shall we ban them too?
Certainly Coca-Cola wasn't anything like it is now, but the fact remains that people drank it and their lives remained intact.
As for chewing coca leaves, it is not in any manner "worlds away from doing cocaine". It is, in fact, a way of doing cocaine. Perhaps not a common way, but nevertheless it is a way to do it. Maybe the other ways are worse, but that doesn't mean the whole thing should be outlawed wholesale.
I read that Wikipedia section you linked to but I'm afraid I have no idea what point you were trying to make with it.
Probably, but so what? All that means is that some forms are worse than others. It doesn't validate the claim that "cocaine" is a dangerous hard drug that's prohibitively difficult to use responsibly. In fact it means exactly the opposite: to use it responsively, just use a weaker form!
Might want to fix the Wikipedia article then, as it claims that coca leaves do contain cocaine and that this cocaine does make it into the body.
As for drug lords and kidnappings, one big benefit of American drug legalization would be that it would, presumably, become legal to grow the stuff here instead of buying it illegally from other countries. Assuming that coca can be cultivated in the US.... But even if it can't, legitimizing the trade would probably go a long way toward removing the criminal element from it.
That's a good one too. Truth is there are tons of examples. Cheese, potato chips, candy bars, even just plain old meat. If we're banning substances because of the burden they place on health care providers, be prepared to eat a whole lot of tofu in the future.
It's their kid, so I find it unsurprising that parents are simply skipping the vaccines as long as there's the shadow of a doubt.
But that's just the thing. There's the shadow of a doubt both ways! Why is the one better than the other? Well that's easy, it's because measles sounds like something from a fairy tale, whereas autism immediately conjures up evening-news images of blank-faced kids spinning plates.
This is something that has annoyed me for some time now: the idea of "playing it safe" has been hijacked and now means "favoring the danger I'm more familiar with". 99% of the time, when someone tries to "play it safe" or "err on the side of caution" all they end up doing is accepting a greater but more familiar risk. Just because it makes you more comfortable doesn't mean it's the smart move!
A great example of this when it comes to parenting is the current scare about child predators and the almost complete destruction of childhood independence. That article a few months ago by a mother who let her boy take the NYC subway alone shows exactly what I'm talking about. Everybody freaked out about this "dangerous" ride she let him take. But in fact the risk to him was absolutely minimal, and nobody was thinking about the risk should he be sheltered to the point where he grows up stunted and is thereby never able to accomplish anything with his life, something which I fear will start to happen to millions of children when they face maturity in another decade or so.
So don't let people take this cop-out. If the facts support one decision as being safer then that's reasonable. But refusing vaccines isn't playing it safe or avoiding the shadow of a doubt, it's cowardly destroying public health because parents are incapable of acting rationally.
HIV does this, to the extent that the vaccines never really get a chance to work in the first place. The reason an HIV vaccine is so extremely difficult to create is that HIV mutates like crazy and renders a vaccine ineffective almost immediately. (I believe this is also why our bodies can't fight it off naturally. You'll note that all or nearly all diseases which have vaccines can also be beaten naturally, albeit usually with a fairly high chance of death and/or permanent disability or disfigurement.)
In principle I don't think there's any reason why other diseases couldn't do exactly the same thing. In practice... well, it must not happen very often. And the new strain is likely to mutate as slowly as the old strain, so it would presumably be a quick job to come up with a new vaccine for the newly infectious strain.
Well if it's true that the older forms were less dangerous, then the answer is to regulate the different forms in different ways so as to encourage users to go for the safer stuff, much like hard alcohol tends to be much more heavily regulated and taxed than wine and beer.
In any case, I agree with your overall point that the really dangerous drugs should be treated differently and it shouldn't just be a blanket acceptance of everything. But the long drug prohibition has demonized many of these substances such that their reputation far exceeds their reality, so we need to be careful with what we "know" about them.
Indeed. Never mind death or permanent disability, my kids could get a fever!
I buy Ivory soap bars by the dozen for a pittance at the local grocery store. No specific antibacterial content as far as I know. Extremely easy to find. Soap is soap is soap, there's no need to buy special "hand" stuff that flows as a liquid and comes in a fancy bottle.
"Hard" drugs like Cocaine should probably remain illegal - it is impossible (or prohibitively difficult, at least) to "use them responsibly" and their health effects are much more marked.
Cite? The fact that Cocaine was used as an active ingredient in a popular fizzy drink would seem to speak otherwise. And let's not forget that Cocaine is known because in its native region, the indigenous people used it constantly and they did alright.
Replace drugs with sugar or fat and ask yourself the same question.
Potato chips create more health care costs than any drug ever has.
I admit that I'm not particularly knowledgeable about drug culture, but I always had the distinct impression that the people you bought marijuana from were not the type of people who would be selling other drugs. It's a fairly distinct culture where marijuana is generally sourced from a network of friends, not some dealer on the street corner who isn't going to risk his hide for something as unprofitable and unaddictive as marijuana.
What good does all this mass-produced stuff do us if we're increasingly unable to afford to possess it because the predominant flow of money and resources is IN TOWARD that wealthy controlling minority and not OUT FROM them? The majority is slowly but increasingly disadvantaged to their benefit; though it's happening so slowly that many people are oblivious to the effect, it's significant and detrimental and something Hari Seldon would recognize. It's what causes exoduses and revolutions.
I have to wonder if you're living in the same world I am. Computers and electronics in general have become steadily more accessible and more affordable over the past decades. In the 70s only big companies, universities, and crazy hobbyists had computers. In the 80s, people with a lot of money and a real need had them. In the 90s owning a computer ceased to be a mark of wealth or a technical trade and became somewhat commonplace. Now, not owning a computer is nearly as bizarre as not having a telephone.
You can go out and buy a highly capable computer for about a week's worth of minimum wage now. And you're trying to tell me that this stuff is getting less affordable?
Without people like Jobs, Woz would have been "that guy who built his own toy computers" and we'd probably still be using remote terminals to telnet into some gigantic mainframe.
And lest anyone think I'm leaning too far the other way, without people like Woz, Jobs would have been "that asshole who used to hack the phone system" and we'd also probably still be using remote terminals to telnet into some gigantic mainframe.
I don't understand at all why you call this a "marriage made in hell". Seems to me that the combination of inventer and entrepreneur is what gives us all this awesome technology that we enjoy today.
Yes, it would have been so much better if Apple had decided to preserve backwards compatibility at any cost and ended up with a "turtles all the way down" situation like the PC!
Oh please, get over yourself. Out here in the real world, planning for death before it actually happens is called "smart". I suppose you would think that asking somebody beforehand whether they prefer cremation or burial to be too uncaring and calculating, and would prefer to wait for them to die before you ask how they want their remains to be treated!
How does that personal experience contradict it?
It contradicts it for me personally, because this is an experience that I've had.
Either you didn't understand my question or you're dodging it. My point was that your "personal experience" includes those selection biases which make it unreliable. I pointed out how your observations could be due entirely to chance. If you accept that, then your experience actually tells you nothing, since it is compatible with chance. If you don't accept that, then some part of your experience shows you that it's beyond what chance would allow. What part of that is it? Please don't tell me that it's a "feeling", as that would be entirely ridiculous.
But it also makes sense to me to not automatically completely invalidate my subjective experience in favor of these same objective tools.
I never said you should completely invalidate it. I merely said that you can't rely on it, and that it must be checked. Subjective experiences are often the beginning of great discoveries. But you can't come to any sort of conclusion based on your subjective experience. It may give you a place to start, but it's not proof or even really much in the way of evidence.
Your subjective experience that friends can sense you looking at them even when they're not looking at you would be a great start to a scientific investigation. But in the absence of an objective investigation, and with observations which are entirely compatible with chance, all you can say is that you think something might be going on. It certainly isn't enough to conclude that something is happening which "hasn't been fully defined by science yet", as you said a couple of posts ago. It might be, but it might not, and in the absence of any good evidence the weight goes to the "not".
One thing your generation doesn't realize is that every generation is like this. :-)
You got three threads out of it. You lost out on any further speed increases past 3 cores, and 4 cores is becoming pretty common now. 8 core machines are not difficult to find, and will be common in another year or so. Am I to conclude that your software was not written correctly in the first place as you claimed? Keep in mind that the question is not how to make software take advantage of today's machines, but rather how to make software take advantage of tomorrow's 16+ core machines.
I can summarize this article in one sentence:
"X is only useful for those who are too lazy to do Y."
It's been said about assembly language, high-level languages, garbage collection, plug-n-play, and practically any other technology you can name. It is not actually a valid criticism.
That's simply ridiculous. Back when essentially nobody had more than one CPU core in their PC, writing PC software to be massively multithreaded just because you had a "parallel task" would have been utterly stupid. Such code would be more complicated, more bug prone, and slower. So why should it have been created?
You're correct that multi-CPU setups have existed for a long time. However, the proportion of users which had them was so close to zero as to make no difference. Even for those which did have them, the vast majority had only two CPU cores, and multithreaded programming to take advantage of two cores is way different from the 16+ that are predicted as being the norm in just a couple of years.