You make it sound as if I have a right to the content other people produce.
I have the right to control what my computer does. I have the right to do math. I have the right to copy memory locations to disk. I have the right to communicate.
No, I don't have the right to what other people produce. But if you tell me something, I have the right to write that down. And I have the right to tell that information to other people.
If the content producer hasn't given you permission to consume their content, then you have no right to seek it elsewhere.
On the contrary, they have no right to stop me from seeking it elsewhere. They may have the legal ability, because they've bought protection from a corrupt government, but that's a far cry from a right. When I send a file to a friend, that's a private communication between consenting individuals. No third party has the right to interfere in that.
I don't consider respecting other peoples' rights to be very onerous
Great. Now convince the rest of the world to respect my right to communicate information.
When you have to deal with people who work for you and claim to be on your side and who you feel you should be able to trust only to find leaked confidential documents and conversations online and in the press...can you blame the administration for tightening their safeguards and access by the media?
Yes, yes I can. Those documents should have been public from day one.
This isn't what he wanted. He believed in his mission of "Hope and Change".
Then why hasn't he done anything about it? Not one damn thing.
People want and demand transparency. But, it's these very same people who also want to screw him over every chance they get.
Maybe he shouldn't be doing shady dealings that he doesn't want made public. The President is a public servant, he doesn't get privacy in his official capacity. If he doesn't want to get "screwed over" he shouldn't violate the Constitution.
If they let him do his job and not worry about him trying to explain his every move in explicit detail when he takes a shit, he might be more forthcoming.
And why can't he explain his every move in explicit detail? Being a good leader means you have good reasons for the actions you take. Share them with us.
We asked him to end the war in Iraq and Afghanistan and bring troops home.
Yes, and then he tried to get an extension on the SOFA with Iraq, yet another Obama lie. And we're still fighting in Afthanistan.
We then bitch about him using drones and violating sovereign turf of those nations who claim to be our "allies" so he can cut down on the number of needed body bags for brining our people home
He could just bring or people home alive, AND not send drones over. Complete withdrawal from the middle east is the best policy.
Am I thrilled by the lack of transparency? No. But, this is our doing by not supporting the person elected into the office to do a job and second guessing everything he does rather than coming together to help solve the problems. Partisan politics be damned.
No, this is our doing by electing a corrupt piece of shit into office. A good President would be proud of his decisions, and be eager to share them with the people he was elected to serve.
You're such a fucking sycophant. Blame the victim (the American people) for the bad behavior of their abuser. Remember when Iraq war protesters were called "unamerican" because they opposed the President? You're doing the exact same thing.
So is dancing naked in Saudi Arabia. We have no place sitting here clucking our tongues about how oppressive Saudi Arabia is when we have equally ridiculous laws.
No, the real issue is moralizers enforcing their twisted sense morality with violence. That's the only reason dancing naked is illegal in Saudi Arabia, and the only reason Cannabis is prohibited in the US. The two laws are exactly analogous.
The only reason these laws are still in place is we haven't changed them yet.
The reason we haven't changed them yet is an intensive, decades long propaganda campaign. How do you change that? I'll tell you how.
Using illegal drugs will not help make it happen.
It already has, in Wa and Co. People have been smoking pot, in violation of the law for decades. The more people who smoke pot, the more normal it becomes, and the less effective propaganda is. The best way to end bigotry is for people to interact with the people they are prejudiced against. When you realize that your neighbors or co-workers smoke pot, and they seem like all right guys, you're less likely to support imprisoning them.
On the other hand, if we all sat around and obeyed the law, no one would have any experience with drug users, so they'd have no reason to doubt the official propaganda. Nothing would ever change.
The war on drugs is a war on freedom, and drug users on on the side of freedom.
Regardless of the veracity of what the claim, I can, at least, know that they're unlikely to be a fly-by-night company looking to turn a quick buck and then get out before the house of cards collapses.
pets.com
Targeted advertising, at best, obscures the meta data that we might use to make purchasing decisions. I can no longer tell the difference between someone with a $1m ad buy and someone with a $100 ad buy.
As if there were some correlation between ad spending and good products? If there is a correlation, it's inverse. Anything they're spending on advertising has to be recouped from the customer. Either they're overcharging you to pay for the advertising, or they're cutting corners in quality to pay for the advertising.
I disapprove of those too. People should make up their own minds on products and causes, based on the best available evidence from unbiased sources. Anything more biased or misleading than a datasheet is unethical.
Targeted advertising is great if you use it purely to discover products.
You know what else is great for discovering products? Asking knowledgable people with no financial interest in my decision.
If I'm dumb
Advertising doesn't only affect the dumb. If you've seen an ad for something, even if you don't remember the ad consciously, you're still going to favor the familiar, even if you don't know you're doing it. It's insidious.
My resumes are honest, solicited, and submitted for positions where I believe I am the best candidate. You can't say that about advertisements. A data sheet is not an advertisement.
Conflict of interest. If the NRC is funded by those it regulates, it has an incentive to keep those funds coming, which won't happen if it shuts down plants.
Advertising is more than just informing someone. It's informing someone with the intent of getting them to give you money they would not have given you otherwise. What we, as good citizens and neighbors, should want is for everyone to make the best decisions based on the best information. The way people do that is to use non-biased information sources. There's no way that using biased information can lead to better decisions than non-biased information, so advertising is always harmful.
The ones I've lived with have described a tolerance to heroin like you would build up with anything else (nicotine, alcohol, etc). They slowly raise the dose to keep achieving the same or a better high, and one day the dose is too much for them.
Tolerance occurs to the life threatening effects of opiates just as it does to the euphoric effects. It's not impossible that an addict simply overdoses on his regular supply at his regular schedule, but unlikely. Notice how few overdoses are experienced by pain patients on opiates.
Could be the same stuff they've always been getting
Since we're talking about a black market, you can't know that. Even buying from the same guy, he may be cutting his stuff a little more each day because his supply is limited. Then he gets some new stuff, and doesn't cut it as much. You'd never know.
You're acting like heroin is a relatively benign substance, and it's only dangerous if the government is not regulating it.
No, we're acting like heroin is a dangerous substance, made more dangerous by the lack of government regulation.
It's dangerous regardless, heroin users will continue to die regardless of the regulation involved with heroin.
True. But fewer of them will die. That's a good thing.
What is being advocated by many for marijuana? Make it legal and tax it - like cigarettes.
No one is advocating that because they think it's the right thing to do. They advocate that because tax money is a good carrot to dangle in front of legislators who care more about money than freedom.
The actual right thing to do is to treat Cannabis like other mild psychoactives from plant sources. Put it on the grocery store shelf next to the coffee and the chocolate.
The bad effects of meth are widely known, but people still take it instead of just using marijuana
Because meth is nothing like Cannabis. Try legalizing cocaine, and I bet you'd see a large decrease in meth use.
There will always be some new designer drug or derivative that will be illegal, and that some people will want even if it destroys them.
At least that will be their choice. Instead of the multitudes of people who have had their lives ruined by drug cartels that wouldn't exist without prohibition. Or those who have had their lives ruined by having a parent arrested for simply trying to make a buck in one of the few ways they have available. Or those who have had their lives ruined due to overzealous enforcement. Or those who have had their lives ruined simply because they enjoy a joint after a hard days work.
Cigarettes are legal, but there is still considerable crime around them, including large scale smuggling and tax evasion.
Hey, lots of cars get stolen too. How about we prohibit cars? There's considerable crime around them.
Will crime disappear when we legalize drugs? No, but we have plenty of reason to believe that it will dramatically decrease.
People go looking for new, different, bigger, better, longer lasting highs all the time. And as the story about the skin eating drug Krokodil showed, people don't necessarily care about the consequences if they end up taking certain drugs.
Which is exactly why opiates should be legal. If they can't get their fix safely, they will get their fix dangerously. Better to provide them with clean pharmaceutical grade drugs and enjoy a healthier society.
But it is a fact that Prohibition caused alcohol consumption to fall sharply in the US, and per capita consumption was far lower even after it ended than before it began.
While simultaneously increasing the harm caused by alcohol. Nobody went blind from bathtub gin before prohibition. There were no gang shootouts in the street before prohibition. The problems caused by prohibition were so bad that even success in limiting drinking was not worth suffering that terrible law. If that's the case, imagine how much better the world will be when we end the War on Drug Users.
Bonus: it's quite a common tactic to make a thing that many (poor) people do illegal so you can arrest most (poor) people at any time
The thing about that is, it's not poor people who do most of the drugs. Rich people actually use more drugs than poor people. They have the money and free time after all. This makes the overabundance of poor black drug users in jail all the more obviously unjust. We know for certain that they're not enforcing this law fairly.
His point isn't that we have to choose between prosecuting drug users and bankers. His point is that drug enforcement is a distraction for the people, so that they don't demand we prosecute bankers. It's misdirection.
Heroin kills more people than it would otherwise because it is illegal. When properly maintained on metered doses of pharmaceutical grade opiates, addicts don't overdose because they know what they are getting and can dose appropriately. You get overdose deaths when addicts go without supply for a while, and don't know their tolerance, or when a new batch of highly potent drugs hits the streets. That only happens because of prohibition.
No, we're arguing that drugs (hard drugs is a meaningless propaganda term) exist, and there are ways to regulate them that work better than prohibition.
Let's be clear about this. Silk Road operators had a guy killed.
So has Obama.
They are no different in that regard than the thugs running any other drug gang.
Or the anti-drug gang we call the DEA.
When you buy on the black market, you are paying with blood money that destroys other peoples' lives and livelihoods. You know this is the consequence of your action.
Same as when you pay your taxes, or buy coca-cola, bananas, iphones, diamonds, or gasoline.
You can go ahead and blame the government if you want, but YOU are providing the money that gets people killed.
The government is the one that created the black market. They know this is the consequence of their action. They bear complete responsibility for failing to regulate the drug market safely.
Yes, maybe the product should be legal. If so and you care, talk to your representatives. Start a political campaign. But DO NOT pay the murderous racket that brings you illegal drugs.
Right, and if we all stopped using drugs, and asked nicely for drug prohibition to be repealed, what do you think would happen? Why would they listen to us when from their perspective prohibition would have been a complete success? Resistance is the only way we ever win freedom.
Slashdot Mirror
You make it sound as if I have a right to the content other people produce.
I have the right to control what my computer does. I have the right to do math. I have the right to copy memory locations to disk. I have the right to communicate.
No, I don't have the right to what other people produce. But if you tell me something, I have the right to write that down. And I have the right to tell that information to other people.
If the content producer hasn't given you permission to consume their content, then you have no right to seek it elsewhere.
On the contrary, they have no right to stop me from seeking it elsewhere. They may have the legal ability, because they've bought protection from a corrupt government, but that's a far cry from a right. When I send a file to a friend, that's a private communication between consenting individuals. No third party has the right to interfere in that.
I don't consider respecting other peoples' rights to be very onerous
Great. Now convince the rest of the world to respect my right to communicate information.
Hey, you could say the same thing about voter opinion. In both cases, most of those things are rarely true.
When you have to deal with people who work for you and claim to be on your side and who you feel you should be able to trust only to find leaked confidential documents and conversations online and in the press ...can you blame the administration for tightening their safeguards and access by the media?
Yes, yes I can. Those documents should have been public from day one.
This isn't what he wanted. He believed in his mission of "Hope and Change".
Then why hasn't he done anything about it? Not one damn thing.
People want and demand transparency. But, it's these very same people who also want to screw him over every chance they get.
Maybe he shouldn't be doing shady dealings that he doesn't want made public. The President is a public servant, he doesn't get privacy in his official capacity. If he doesn't want to get "screwed over" he shouldn't violate the Constitution.
If they let him do his job and not worry about him trying to explain his every move in explicit detail when he takes a shit, he might be more forthcoming.
And why can't he explain his every move in explicit detail? Being a good leader means you have good reasons for the actions you take. Share them with us.
We asked him to end the war in Iraq and Afghanistan and bring troops home.
Yes, and then he tried to get an extension on the SOFA with Iraq, yet another Obama lie. And we're still fighting in Afthanistan.
We then bitch about him using drones and violating sovereign turf of those nations who claim to be our "allies" so he can cut down on the number of needed body bags for brining our people home
He could just bring or people home alive, AND not send drones over. Complete withdrawal from the middle east is the best policy.
Am I thrilled by the lack of transparency? No. But, this is our doing by not supporting the person elected into the office to do a job and second guessing everything he does rather than coming together to help solve the problems. Partisan politics be damned.
No, this is our doing by electing a corrupt piece of shit into office. A good President would be proud of his decisions, and be eager to share them with the people he was elected to serve.
You're such a fucking sycophant. Blame the victim (the American people) for the bad behavior of their abuser. Remember when Iraq war protesters were called "unamerican" because they opposed the President? You're doing the exact same thing.
I mean, the plant is illegal, dude
So is dancing naked in Saudi Arabia. We have no place sitting here clucking our tongues about how oppressive Saudi Arabia is when we have equally ridiculous laws.
No, the real issue is moralizers enforcing their twisted sense morality with violence. That's the only reason dancing naked is illegal in Saudi Arabia, and the only reason Cannabis is prohibited in the US. The two laws are exactly analogous.
10 years for growing the wrong plant.
Yes, exactly like the PTO. Still open, but completely corrupt/incompetent depending on your degree of cynicism.
The only reason these laws are still in place is we haven't changed them yet.
The reason we haven't changed them yet is an intensive, decades long propaganda campaign. How do you change that? I'll tell you how.
Using illegal drugs will not help make it happen.
It already has, in Wa and Co. People have been smoking pot, in violation of the law for decades. The more people who smoke pot, the more normal it becomes, and the less effective propaganda is. The best way to end bigotry is for people to interact with the people they are prejudiced against. When you realize that your neighbors or co-workers smoke pot, and they seem like all right guys, you're less likely to support imprisoning them.
On the other hand, if we all sat around and obeyed the law, no one would have any experience with drug users, so they'd have no reason to doubt the official propaganda. Nothing would ever change.
The war on drugs is a war on freedom, and drug users on on the side of freedom.
Regardless of the veracity of what the claim, I can, at least, know that they're unlikely to be a fly-by-night company looking to turn a quick buck and then get out before the house of cards collapses.
pets.com
Targeted advertising, at best, obscures the meta data that we might use to make purchasing decisions. I can no longer tell the difference between someone with a $1m ad buy and someone with a $100 ad buy.
As if there were some correlation between ad spending and good products? If there is a correlation, it's inverse. Anything they're spending on advertising has to be recouped from the customer. Either they're overcharging you to pay for the advertising, or they're cutting corners in quality to pay for the advertising.
I disapprove of those too. People should make up their own minds on products and causes, based on the best available evidence from unbiased sources. Anything more biased or misleading than a datasheet is unethical.
Targeted advertising is great if you use it purely to discover products.
You know what else is great for discovering products? Asking knowledgable people with no financial interest in my decision.
If I'm dumb
Advertising doesn't only affect the dumb. If you've seen an ad for something, even if you don't remember the ad consciously, you're still going to favor the familiar, even if you don't know you're doing it. It's insidious.
My resumes are honest, solicited, and submitted for positions where I believe I am the best candidate. You can't say that about advertisements. A data sheet is not an advertisement.
Conflict of interest. If the NRC is funded by those it regulates, it has an incentive to keep those funds coming, which won't happen if it shuts down plants.
Advertising is more than just informing someone. It's informing someone with the intent of getting them to give you money they would not have given you otherwise. What we, as good citizens and neighbors, should want is for everyone to make the best decisions based on the best information. The way people do that is to use non-biased information sources. There's no way that using biased information can lead to better decisions than non-biased information, so advertising is always harmful.
Advertising Considered Harmful.
The ones I've lived with have described a tolerance to heroin like you would build up with anything else (nicotine, alcohol, etc). They slowly raise the dose to keep achieving the same or a better high, and one day the dose is too much for them.
Tolerance occurs to the life threatening effects of opiates just as it does to the euphoric effects. It's not impossible that an addict simply overdoses on his regular supply at his regular schedule, but unlikely. Notice how few overdoses are experienced by pain patients on opiates.
Could be the same stuff they've always been getting
Since we're talking about a black market, you can't know that. Even buying from the same guy, he may be cutting his stuff a little more each day because his supply is limited. Then he gets some new stuff, and doesn't cut it as much. You'd never know.
You're acting like heroin is a relatively benign substance, and it's only dangerous if the government is not regulating it.
No, we're acting like heroin is a dangerous substance, made more dangerous by the lack of government regulation.
It's dangerous regardless, heroin users will continue to die regardless of the regulation involved with heroin.
True. But fewer of them will die. That's a good thing.
That's why we have regulatory agencies.
And what exactly is the point of your point? That we should never reform anything because no reform is perfect?
What is being advocated by many for marijuana? Make it legal and tax it - like cigarettes.
No one is advocating that because they think it's the right thing to do. They advocate that because tax money is a good carrot to dangle in front of legislators who care more about money than freedom.
The actual right thing to do is to treat Cannabis like other mild psychoactives from plant sources. Put it on the grocery store shelf next to the coffee and the chocolate.
The bad effects of meth are widely known, but people still take it instead of just using marijuana
Because meth is nothing like Cannabis. Try legalizing cocaine, and I bet you'd see a large decrease in meth use.
There will always be some new designer drug or derivative that will be illegal, and that some people will want even if it destroys them.
At least that will be their choice. Instead of the multitudes of people who have had their lives ruined by drug cartels that wouldn't exist without prohibition. Or those who have had their lives ruined by having a parent arrested for simply trying to make a buck in one of the few ways they have available. Or those who have had their lives ruined due to overzealous enforcement. Or those who have had their lives ruined simply because they enjoy a joint after a hard days work.
Prohibition ruins more lives than drugs.
Cigarettes are legal, but there is still considerable crime around them, including large scale smuggling and tax evasion.
Hey, lots of cars get stolen too. How about we prohibit cars? There's considerable crime around them.
Will crime disappear when we legalize drugs? No, but we have plenty of reason to believe that it will dramatically decrease.
People go looking for new, different, bigger, better, longer lasting highs all the time. And as the story about the skin eating drug Krokodil showed, people don't necessarily care about the consequences if they end up taking certain drugs.
Which is exactly why opiates should be legal. If they can't get their fix safely, they will get their fix dangerously. Better to provide them with clean pharmaceutical grade drugs and enjoy a healthier society.
But it is a fact that Prohibition caused alcohol consumption to fall sharply in the US, and per capita consumption was far lower even after it ended than before it began.
While simultaneously increasing the harm caused by alcohol. Nobody went blind from bathtub gin before prohibition. There were no gang shootouts in the street before prohibition. The problems caused by prohibition were so bad that even success in limiting drinking was not worth suffering that terrible law. If that's the case, imagine how much better the world will be when we end the War on Drug Users.
Bonus: it's quite a common tactic to make a thing that many (poor) people do illegal so you can arrest most (poor) people at any time
The thing about that is, it's not poor people who do most of the drugs. Rich people actually use more drugs than poor people. They have the money and free time after all. This makes the overabundance of poor black drug users in jail all the more obviously unjust. We know for certain that they're not enforcing this law fairly.
His point isn't that we have to choose between prosecuting drug users and bankers. His point is that drug enforcement is a distraction for the people, so that they don't demand we prosecute bankers. It's misdirection.
Heroin kills more people than it would otherwise because it is illegal. When properly maintained on metered doses of pharmaceutical grade opiates, addicts don't overdose because they know what they are getting and can dose appropriately. You get overdose deaths when addicts go without supply for a while, and don't know their tolerance, or when a new batch of highly potent drugs hits the streets. That only happens because of prohibition.
No, we're arguing that drugs (hard drugs is a meaningless propaganda term) exist, and there are ways to regulate them that work better than prohibition.
Let's be clear about this. Silk Road operators had a guy killed.
So has Obama.
They are no different in that regard than the thugs running any other drug gang.
Or the anti-drug gang we call the DEA.
When you buy on the black market, you are paying with blood money that destroys other peoples' lives and livelihoods. You know this is the consequence of your action.
Same as when you pay your taxes, or buy coca-cola, bananas, iphones, diamonds, or gasoline.
You can go ahead and blame the government if you want, but YOU are providing the money that gets people killed.
The government is the one that created the black market. They know this is the consequence of their action. They bear complete responsibility for failing to regulate the drug market safely.
Yes, maybe the product should be legal. If so and you care, talk to your representatives. Start a political campaign. But DO NOT pay the murderous racket that brings you illegal drugs.
Right, and if we all stopped using drugs, and asked nicely for drug prohibition to be repealed, what do you think would happen? Why would they listen to us when from their perspective prohibition would have been a complete success? Resistance is the only way we ever win freedom.