And anyway, why shouldn't religious groups contribute to political parties, just like any other group?
Because people who believe in completely asinine shit dreamed up by scientifically ignorant folks three thousand years ago simply because a) it's what their parents believed, b) some narrow sliver of the dogma fills a spiritual need in them, and/or c) it is politically convenient to do so, are arguably dangerously irrational and should be barred from influencing government?
Seriously, this ancient religion shit is a cancer. There's nothing wrong with spirituality, but when you start getting your moral lessons from a collection of iron-age fairy tales, you're not behaving in a civilized manner. I know, something like 80% of people are "believers" in one ridiculous ancient religion or another, and that (for example) you can't get elected President in the US unless you profess a belief in the Almighty God of the Christians, but that doesn't make it right. In this country we even have some states that have allowed religious definitions of sin and marriage to be codified into law via constitutional amendment. Some day in the future, people are going to look at the stuff our [politicians|judges|*] say about believing in God's word as guiding principle the same way we look at the Inquisition's belief in witchcraft.
I'm not saying it's a bad strategy; I'm just saying you need to have a good policy and strong discipline about which copy is "live" and which is "backup". It can be very tempting to make "temporary" edits on a backup when that's the only copy you have handy.
Yeah.... I guess... I haven't had that much trouble with it though, and I am by no means disciplined. Keep one "live" version on the main system, continuously copy it out to all three servers, the other desktop, and the laptops and periodically burn it to DVDs. It's pretty easy to not edit a backup copy when it's stuffed into a sub directory under/var/z000z/backups/.
I disagree... If you look at the later revisions to the Direct TV card encryption, the earlier versions were easy to crack, but the later revisions proved much too difficult for the average person to take on.
Meaning... If done right, the BD+ can easily prove uncrackable for many years to come. Having things done right in the corporate world, however, is rare..
Not the same issue. DirecTV uses a smart card system with an embedded ASIC. There are "secrets" in the card that cannot be discovered without extremely expensive equipment. These secrets are what make it secure. Early cards had flaws that allowed attackers to load software patches onto the card. The new cards are inaccessible. Bluray disks have all their data in the open. There are no secrets, just encryption.
How many times has this question been asked on Slashdot? I swear, it shows up on the front page at least three times a year.
As for the question itself, the answer is pretty simple, but unhelpful. Basically what it comes down to is that there is no safe place for your data. You're asking for the best type of basket to put all your eggs in. If you look at it that way, the solution is easier to arrive at. Your choices are A) spare no expense and build/buy the world's strongest basket and pray no flaw arises, or B) start copying your eggs around to all sorts of cheap baskets and continuously add more baskets in the expectation that the oldest baskets are going to fail.
Copy all your stuff to all your computers. Burn to DVD and/or CD ROM. Buy SD cards and USB flash drives. High capacity storage devices are so cheap now that you can keep all your valuable pictures of your vacation to Cleveland quite safe by constant duplication. That's the value of digital. Copies are perfect. Make lots.
I was under the impression we could just slap some solar panels on our house and take ourselves either off the grid or contribute back into it?
A general rule of thumb for PV solar is don't count on more than 0.5KWH per square meter of PV panel. Average house uses 100KWH/day. That's 200 square meters of PV panel just to hit the break even point. Not trivial either in cost or engineering requirements. Centralized generation of solar is more efficient and flexible the same way one giant coal plant outside town is better than a tiny coal plant in everyone's back yard.
So if there were really a reliable way in place to store spent fuel for a few thousand years while it decays, nuclear would be a clear winner. But there isn't.
Cripes, have you seriously NEVER read the comments to this or other articles like this on slashdot? You should have been educated on this subject a hundred times over by now. The safe, reliable way to store "spent" nuclear fuel is *** IN A FUCKING BREEDER REACTOR *** where the remaining 90% of the fission product still in the material can be used to generate power. What remains once the breeder is done with it will fit in a teacup and can be sealed in a glass block which I volunteer to store on my mantel, as it's only an alpha emitter and not dangerous unless ingested.
poverty rate is about 12.5% One in 8 people in the US live in poverty. That is bad for a developed nation, worse than Thailand for instance.
I agree with the incarceration stats, but the poverty stat is misleading. "Poverty" in the US isn't what it is in Thailand. Eligibility for government assistance is determined by income level, which determines "poverty". Many impoverished people are receiving food, rent, and utility subsidies, which allow them to have food, housing, heat, and electricity on the cheap which frees up their "poverty" wages for things like satellite TV and overpriced used cars. They watch 300 channels of color TV every night, while impoverished people in Thailand are living in cardboard boxes and picking through garbage dumps looking for recyclables to trade in for food money. When you start judging poverty by the percentage of people living in squalor and picking through garbage cans to survive, the US is much better than Thailand.
In my experience, the government tends to handle resources at least as well as private corporations. It's just that failure to do so is often more obvious when it's the government (exceptions exist, such as the current meltdown). Prominent examples include health care, energy, public transport, banks, pretty much all manufacturing industries.
Seriously, it's ridiculous how poorly most "free market" corporations handle their affairs, and how corrupt they are. This whole "government is evil, free market is good" idea just doesn't work if you look at the actual reality.
You're missing the point. The problem isn't that government is especially inefficient. The problem is that there is no economic pressure on the government to improve the product. Computers are a good example. An IBM PC cost about $5000 in 1981 when it was released. Today you can get a laptop that far exceeds the original PC for 1/10 that price, and that doesn't even account for inflation. The market exerted pressure to improve the product. They're not made in the US anymore, and they aren't made of armor-plate steel like the old PC, but that's not what makes a computer useful. If it were the government making PCs, we'd probably have 386's about now, still in the same heavy case, and still costing $5000. Keeping the cost at $5000 despite inflation would be hailed as a hallmark of "business-grade efficiency", but you can plainly see it would really be a dismal failure to innovate. Things the government does just don't improve like market-driven things do. The government is just as inefficient as business, but it continues to back the same horses forever, no matter how much they lose. In this day when soldiers are issued polypropylene long underwear and polyester fleece jackets, we still have wool subsidies based on the value of wool as a resource for national defense! I won't even start on the repeated bailouts of various domestic auto manufacturers...
...when you read the whole mail it's quite obvious it's just a troll, no-one can be that retarded, and there's no chance in hell she's actually used it but believe that it would be illegal.
Where I work, in the second largest school district in the country (and also arguably the worst one), they'll hire anyone with a heartbeat and a teaching cert. I have met teachers exactly that stupid, and worse. I'm astounded they can find their room day after day, that their pants are on right side out, and that they know which end of the dry erase pen to use on the board. And yet there they are, teaching kids.
...I would stop paying school taxes to this non-free district.
Good luck with that. Schools are generally funded through property taxes, usually collected at the county level. The county doesn't give a crap what you think of the schools, they just want their money. Trying to avoid property taxes in protest of school policies is like trying to avoid federal income taxes in protest of federal farm subsidies.
You have failed to show how things would be worse if you could buy a 'teen of meth for $40 from the Walgreen's vs. being able to buy a 'teen of meth from Joe the Biker at the bar for $80.
More to the point, things would be better because the Walgreen's employee is much less likely to shoot you for looking at him funny.
No doubt! If I had a nickel for every speed dealer who's eagerly showed me his scary-ass gun collection.... I never got shot at, but fuck me! Those guys are fucking nuts!
As someone with an addictive personality, I disagree with you. Imagine being a recovering drug addict, walking into Walgreens to get aspirin for a headache, as you are paying for it, you see behind the cashier "ICE BRAND METH $40". You didn't walk into the store to buy meth, but your old addiction starts tempting you. It would be sooo easy to say "and can you grab me some of that meth too". You hesitate... but in a moment of weakness, you buy the meth. You are now again a meth addict.
I quit smoking in the face of cigarettes at the drug store. My wife quit drinking despite aisles of booze at the grocery store. This is simply the price you pay for being an addict. You have to take some fucking responsibility for your own actions at some point.
That is me every time I walk into a convenience store, except with Black and Milds (cigars), instead of meth. The ONLY thing that prevents me from actually buying black and milds, is that it isn't worth it. 2 minutes of escape isn't enough to justify the health consequences. However, if it was meth, and the promise was 8 hours of escape, who the hell knows what I would do.
Cigarettes are harder than meth. Actually, the hardest thing to do is quit smoking while using meth, but I digress.... Yeah, who knows what you'd do? And more importantly, who the fuck cares what you'd do? Why is your inability to manage your addictions my problem? I quit meth, booze, and cigarettes (in that order) all by myself. It was hard, but so what? Most things in life worth doing are hard.
But some people are incapable of controlling themselves when it comes to escaping reality. These people will binge and binge and binge on drugs until they die
These people will be the ones huffing paint and gasoline if everything else is unavailable. They are the extreme case.
and cause some really bad things to happen in their communities.
They already do, and always have. Prohibition doesn't keep those kinds of people away from drugs.
Making drugs readily available is a bad idea. If I wanted to find meth, it would probably take me weeks, or months. I don't even know where to start.
Seedy bars after midnight. Look for places where bikers frequent. I've just shortened your weeks/months to days/hours. Really, it's all over the fuckin' place. If you wanted it, you could find it easily. Might as well be selling it over the counter, really.
As for meth... meth might be instantly addictive since it's a dopamine overdose and it simply destroys your ability to create your own dopamine. But I don't know how quickly, it'd be odd if it was the only drug out there that can instantly addict.
Meth is not physically addictive at all. It's 100% mental. If you want to quit, you can--- just like that. You're tired and crabby for a little while when you come down, but if you "can't handle" that down, a cup of coffee will get you through it just fine. What meth does to the dopamine system is block dopamine reuptake. Long term (VERY long term), you can fry your dopamine receptors, but it doesn't do a damn thing to your ability to "create your own dopamine". Cripes, google is a click away. Check a link or two before spouting off next time.
FDR presided over the end of prohibition, not the start of it, dumbass.
Read the entire thread, dumbass. He's answering the question of what the alternative to a constitutional amendment would have been. The points you are too stupid to get are 1) the constitutional amendment passed which made the alternative unnecessary, and 2) FDR used the same alternative method himself for other purposes.
I think I'd much rather have to work with an opiate addiction than a meth addiction.
Ugh. You ever seen a [heroin|morphine|vicodin|*] forced to go without their drugs? They get physically sick, and it takes days to get over that, followed by weeks of jonesing for a fix. You ever seen a meth head deprived of meth? They fall asleep for 48 hours, wake up, eat three Dominoes pizzas, sleep another 12 hours, then act a little tired and crabby for a week or so. There's no physical addiction to meth. The reason it seems worse is the worst behaved meth addict is the one on meth, while the worst behaved heroin addict is the one without heroin.
All because a small percentage of people *might* use it to make meth, even though you, me, and likely no one that either of us know has known anyone that has actually done it.
Spend some time in the "heartland of America" outside the major cities, and you'll encounter sad masses of people who have fallen victim to meth.
Yeah, and making me sign a paper to get a decongestant that works has really stopped the flow of meth, hasn't it. I can still buy meth cheaper and easier than I can fucking brand-name pseudoephedrine containing products. Only small time cooks used Dexatrim tabs bought at the drug store. The big boys use drums of the shit brought over the border from Mexico.
...I watched drugs coupled with the stupidity it brings result in a number of poor judgments in my own life as well as several dozen of my friends....I am glad that someone somewhere had enough of a moral compass in Government to make certain drugs illegal.
Why, because it stopped you from using drugs and making poor judgments? Or because it didn't? Or shouldn't have? Your arguments make no fucking sense.
Almost the first thing that Clinton did as President in 1993 was to reverse the ban on gays serving in the military, with the "don't ask, don't tell" policy that we still have.
"Don't ask, don't tell" isn't exactly a reversal. Gays are still prohibited in the military--- that's what the "don't tell" part means. The only thing that changed was that they no longer forced people to lie about it by asking them. It was a bullshit window dressing move. They still throw people out for being gay. If Clinton had real balls, he'd have told the joint chiefs that their bullshit days were over, and that being gay wouldn't keep you out of the military, period. Frankly, it pissed me off at the time, for that very reason. I was in the Army back then, and with the exception of a bunch of bureaucrat brass asshats and a small subset of jackass religious cracker fucktards, none of us gave a shit about gays being in the military. Hell, we knew they were there, and in many cases, knew who they were. (Ever seen two infantrymen fight like an old married couple? It's hilarious to think that you could pretend to not know they're gay.)
Buncha bullshit, all of it. Another 20 years I'm optimistic that we'll see a little sea change on the issue.
Like any good salesman, a drug dealer will try to convert a marijuana user to use other drugs that turn a better profit. The good old upsell. Legalising marijuana would break that chain.
Bullshit. You've never bought any drugs at all, have you. Drug dealers aren't like a pharmacy with a big closet full of everything from weed to heroin. Drug dealers generally specialize in one drug, and occasionally get another one now and again. They don't have a product line that facilitates "upsell". Furthermore, I've never met a pot dealer who ever sold any of the so-called "hard drugs". Occasionally, they'd get some acid, or maybe some Ecstasy. No drug dealer has ever tried give me the hard sell on anything. You clearly got your drug education from the DEA and Nancy Reagan.
Cocaine isn't much worse than alcohol in terms of behavior changes. Legalize it, and those seeking hard drugs will use it (or heroine) rather than the highly dangerous stuff like meth, or the highly addictive stuff like crack.
Crack is still cocaine, and is no more addictive. I've used both. No big deal. Also, meth is not inherently dangerous. Military pilots going on long missions are given amphetamines to help them remain alert. I personally used methamphetamine intermittently for a period of four years in college. It's not physically addictive like nicotine, heroin, or caffeine, and has no physically damaging effects in and of itself. The problem is that people use it continuously and don't eat, drink, or sleep. The exact same thing that happens to meth heads would happen to anyone who didn't sleep, eat, or maintain reasonable hydration levels for weeks on end.
The real problem with meth is more of a "PR problem". It doesn't kill you suddenly and cleanly, like heroin, but rather it fails to kill you while you run your body into the ground. So is it really better to legalize heroin, which makes you physically sick if you stop taking it, and has an effective dosage level that continuously creeps up closer and closer to a lethal dose?
How about we just quit making judgments on the "goodness" and "badness" of various drugs based solely on media hyperbole, and just legalize all of it and let people exercise personal responsibility.
But you don't speak about the abyss of drug addiction, the income-sapping expense, the parents of kids that forget parenting while doing drugs, the accidents on the freeway, the madness of things like meth addiction and its incredible debilitating affects on the body.
So it's a good thing we have drug prohibition because without it these things would be rampant? Oh wait....
You have failed to show how things would be worse if you could buy a 'teen of meth for $40 from the Walgreen's vs. being able to buy a 'teen of meth from Joe the Biker at the bar for $80. It's not like prohibition has kept drugs away from people. I know of no one who wants drugs who can't find them.
If they have the optional power to do something specified, what kind of power do they have to do something that isn't specified?
By a straight reading of the content of the Constitution, no such power at all. Through constant incremental encroachment by degrees over the last 150-odd years, they've established themselves as having authority to do just about anything they like, constitution (particularly the 10th Amendment) be damned. Welcome to the frustration of libertarianism.
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And anyway, why shouldn't religious groups contribute to political parties, just like any other group?
Because people who believe in completely asinine shit dreamed up by scientifically ignorant folks three thousand years ago simply because a) it's what their parents believed, b) some narrow sliver of the dogma fills a spiritual need in them, and/or c) it is politically convenient to do so, are arguably dangerously irrational and should be barred from influencing government?
Seriously, this ancient religion shit is a cancer. There's nothing wrong with spirituality, but when you start getting your moral lessons from a collection of iron-age fairy tales, you're not behaving in a civilized manner. I know, something like 80% of people are "believers" in one ridiculous ancient religion or another, and that (for example) you can't get elected President in the US unless you profess a belief in the Almighty God of the Christians, but that doesn't make it right. In this country we even have some states that have allowed religious definitions of sin and marriage to be codified into law via constitutional amendment. Some day in the future, people are going to look at the stuff our [politicians|judges|*] say about believing in God's word as guiding principle the same way we look at the Inquisition's belief in witchcraft.
Anyone of a rational bent interested in a good examination of the dangers of religion, even as practiced by "moderates", pick up a copy of The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason by Sam Harris. It's very good.
I'm not saying it's a bad strategy; I'm just saying you need to have a good policy and strong discipline about which copy is "live" and which is "backup". It can be very tempting to make "temporary" edits on a backup when that's the only copy you have handy.
Yeah.... I guess... I haven't had that much trouble with it though, and I am by no means disciplined. Keep one "live" version on the main system, continuously copy it out to all three servers, the other desktop, and the laptops and periodically burn it to DVDs. It's pretty easy to not edit a backup copy when it's stuffed into a sub directory under /var/z000z/backups/.
I disagree... If you look at the later revisions to the Direct TV card encryption, the earlier versions were easy to crack, but the later revisions proved much too difficult for the average person to take on.
Meaning... If done right, the BD+ can easily prove uncrackable for many years to come. Having things done right in the corporate world, however, is rare..
Not the same issue. DirecTV uses a smart card system with an embedded ASIC. There are "secrets" in the card that cannot be discovered without extremely expensive equipment. These secrets are what make it secure. Early cards had flaws that allowed attackers to load software patches onto the card. The new cards are inaccessible. Bluray disks have all their data in the open. There are no secrets, just encryption.
why the fuck would he buy a reader he knows won't work in his machine? That's a stupid fucking question, even if it was rhetorical.
How many times has this question been asked on Slashdot? I swear, it shows up on the front page at least three times a year.
As for the question itself, the answer is pretty simple, but unhelpful. Basically what it comes down to is that there is no safe place for your data. You're asking for the best type of basket to put all your eggs in. If you look at it that way, the solution is easier to arrive at. Your choices are A) spare no expense and build/buy the world's strongest basket and pray no flaw arises, or B) start copying your eggs around to all sorts of cheap baskets and continuously add more baskets in the expectation that the oldest baskets are going to fail.
Copy all your stuff to all your computers. Burn to DVD and/or CD ROM. Buy SD cards and USB flash drives. High capacity storage devices are so cheap now that you can keep all your valuable pictures of your vacation to Cleveland quite safe by constant duplication. That's the value of digital. Copies are perfect. Make lots.
I was under the impression we could just slap some solar panels on our house and take ourselves either off the grid or contribute back into it?
A general rule of thumb for PV solar is don't count on more than 0.5KWH per square meter of PV panel. Average house uses 100KWH/day. That's 200 square meters of PV panel just to hit the break even point. Not trivial either in cost or engineering requirements. Centralized generation of solar is more efficient and flexible the same way one giant coal plant outside town is better than a tiny coal plant in everyone's back yard.
So if there were really a reliable way in place to store spent fuel for a few thousand years while it decays, nuclear would be a clear winner. But there isn't.
Cripes, have you seriously NEVER read the comments to this or other articles like this on slashdot? You should have been educated on this subject a hundred times over by now. The safe, reliable way to store "spent" nuclear fuel is *** IN A FUCKING BREEDER REACTOR *** where the remaining 90% of the fission product still in the material can be used to generate power. What remains once the breeder is done with it will fit in a teacup and can be sealed in a glass block which I volunteer to store on my mantel, as it's only an alpha emitter and not dangerous unless ingested.
Actually, it looks like it's a "talkback" post in reply to this, which is a reply to this gem. Classic stuff.
poverty rate is about 12.5% One in 8 people in the US live in poverty. That is bad for a developed nation, worse than Thailand for instance.
I agree with the incarceration stats, but the poverty stat is misleading. "Poverty" in the US isn't what it is in Thailand. Eligibility for government assistance is determined by income level, which determines "poverty". Many impoverished people are receiving food, rent, and utility subsidies, which allow them to have food, housing, heat, and electricity on the cheap which frees up their "poverty" wages for things like satellite TV and overpriced used cars. They watch 300 channels of color TV every night, while impoverished people in Thailand are living in cardboard boxes and picking through garbage dumps looking for recyclables to trade in for food money. When you start judging poverty by the percentage of people living in squalor and picking through garbage cans to survive, the US is much better than Thailand.
In my experience, the government tends to handle resources at least as well as private corporations. It's just that failure to do so is often more obvious when it's the government (exceptions exist, such as the current meltdown). Prominent examples include health care, energy, public transport, banks, pretty much all manufacturing industries.
Seriously, it's ridiculous how poorly most "free market" corporations handle their affairs, and how corrupt they are. This whole "government is evil, free market is good" idea just doesn't work if you look at the actual reality.
You're missing the point. The problem isn't that government is especially inefficient. The problem is that there is no economic pressure on the government to improve the product. Computers are a good example. An IBM PC cost about $5000 in 1981 when it was released. Today you can get a laptop that far exceeds the original PC for 1/10 that price, and that doesn't even account for inflation. The market exerted pressure to improve the product. They're not made in the US anymore, and they aren't made of armor-plate steel like the old PC, but that's not what makes a computer useful. If it were the government making PCs, we'd probably have 386's about now, still in the same heavy case, and still costing $5000. Keeping the cost at $5000 despite inflation would be hailed as a hallmark of "business-grade efficiency", but you can plainly see it would really be a dismal failure to innovate. Things the government does just don't improve like market-driven things do. The government is just as inefficient as business, but it continues to back the same horses forever, no matter how much they lose. In this day when soldiers are issued polypropylene long underwear and polyester fleece jackets, we still have wool subsidies based on the value of wool as a resource for national defense! I won't even start on the repeated bailouts of various domestic auto manufacturers...
...when you read the whole mail it's quite obvious it's just a troll, no-one can be that retarded, and there's no chance in hell she's actually used it but believe that it would be illegal.
Where I work, in the second largest school district in the country (and also arguably the worst one), they'll hire anyone with a heartbeat and a teaching cert. I have met teachers exactly that stupid, and worse. I'm astounded they can find their room day after day, that their pants are on right side out, and that they know which end of the dry erase pen to use on the board. And yet there they are, teaching kids.
...I would stop paying school taxes to this non-free district.
Good luck with that. Schools are generally funded through property taxes, usually collected at the county level. The county doesn't give a crap what you think of the schools, they just want their money. Trying to avoid property taxes in protest of school policies is like trying to avoid federal income taxes in protest of federal farm subsidies.
And nearly every other language has two different words for those concepts.
English has it too: "Liberty". It just isn't used as much as "free" and "freedom".
More to the point, things would be better because the Walgreen's employee is much less likely to shoot you for looking at him funny.
No doubt! If I had a nickel for every speed dealer who's eagerly showed me his scary-ass gun collection.... I never got shot at, but fuck me! Those guys are fucking nuts!
As someone with an addictive personality, I disagree with you. Imagine being a recovering drug addict, walking into Walgreens to get aspirin for a headache, as you are paying for it, you see behind the cashier "ICE BRAND METH $40". You didn't walk into the store to buy meth, but your old addiction starts tempting you. It would be sooo easy to say "and can you grab me some of that meth too". You hesitate... but in a moment of weakness, you buy the meth. You are now again a meth addict.
I quit smoking in the face of cigarettes at the drug store. My wife quit drinking despite aisles of booze at the grocery store. This is simply the price you pay for being an addict. You have to take some fucking responsibility for your own actions at some point.
That is me every time I walk into a convenience store, except with Black and Milds (cigars), instead of meth. The ONLY thing that prevents me from actually buying black and milds, is that it isn't worth it. 2 minutes of escape isn't enough to justify the health consequences. However, if it was meth, and the promise was 8 hours of escape, who the hell knows what I would do.
Cigarettes are harder than meth. Actually, the hardest thing to do is quit smoking while using meth, but I digress.... Yeah, who knows what you'd do? And more importantly, who the fuck cares what you'd do? Why is your inability to manage your addictions my problem? I quit meth, booze, and cigarettes (in that order) all by myself. It was hard, but so what? Most things in life worth doing are hard.
But some people are incapable of controlling themselves when it comes to escaping reality. These people will binge and binge and binge on drugs until they die
These people will be the ones huffing paint and gasoline if everything else is unavailable. They are the extreme case.
and cause some really bad things to happen in their communities.
They already do, and always have. Prohibition doesn't keep those kinds of people away from drugs.
Making drugs readily available is a bad idea. If I wanted to find meth, it would probably take me weeks, or months. I don't even know where to start.
Seedy bars after midnight. Look for places where bikers frequent. I've just shortened your weeks/months to days/hours. Really, it's all over the fuckin' place. If you wanted it, you could find it easily. Might as well be selling it over the counter, really.
As for meth ... meth might be instantly addictive since it's a dopamine overdose and it simply destroys your ability to create your own dopamine. But I don't know how quickly, it'd be odd if it was the only drug out there that can instantly addict.
Meth is not physically addictive at all. It's 100% mental. If you want to quit, you can--- just like that. You're tired and crabby for a little while when you come down, but if you "can't handle" that down, a cup of coffee will get you through it just fine. What meth does to the dopamine system is block dopamine reuptake. Long term (VERY long term), you can fry your dopamine receptors, but it doesn't do a damn thing to your ability to "create your own dopamine". Cripes, google is a click away. Check a link or two before spouting off next time.
FDR presided over the end of prohibition, not the start of it, dumbass.
Read the entire thread, dumbass. He's answering the question of what the alternative to a constitutional amendment would have been. The points you are too stupid to get are 1) the constitutional amendment passed which made the alternative unnecessary, and 2) FDR used the same alternative method himself for other purposes.
I think I'd much rather have to work with an opiate addiction than a meth addiction.
Ugh. You ever seen a [heroin|morphine|vicodin|*] forced to go without their drugs? They get physically sick, and it takes days to get over that, followed by weeks of jonesing for a fix. You ever seen a meth head deprived of meth? They fall asleep for 48 hours, wake up, eat three Dominoes pizzas, sleep another 12 hours, then act a little tired and crabby for a week or so. There's no physical addiction to meth. The reason it seems worse is the worst behaved meth addict is the one on meth, while the worst behaved heroin addict is the one without heroin.
Spend some time in the "heartland of America" outside the major cities, and you'll encounter sad masses of people who have fallen victim to meth.
Yeah, and making me sign a paper to get a decongestant that works has really stopped the flow of meth, hasn't it. I can still buy meth cheaper and easier than I can fucking brand-name pseudoephedrine containing products. Only small time cooks used Dexatrim tabs bought at the drug store. The big boys use drums of the shit brought over the border from Mexico.
...I watched drugs coupled with the stupidity it brings result in a number of poor judgments in my own life as well as several dozen of my friends. ...I am glad that someone somewhere had enough of a moral compass in Government to make certain drugs illegal.
Why, because it stopped you from using drugs and making poor judgments? Or because it didn't? Or shouldn't have? Your arguments make no fucking sense.
Almost the first thing that Clinton did as President in 1993 was to reverse the ban on gays serving in the military, with the "don't ask, don't tell" policy that we still have.
"Don't ask, don't tell" isn't exactly a reversal. Gays are still prohibited in the military--- that's what the "don't tell" part means. The only thing that changed was that they no longer forced people to lie about it by asking them. It was a bullshit window dressing move. They still throw people out for being gay. If Clinton had real balls, he'd have told the joint chiefs that their bullshit days were over, and that being gay wouldn't keep you out of the military, period. Frankly, it pissed me off at the time, for that very reason. I was in the Army back then, and with the exception of a bunch of bureaucrat brass asshats and a small subset of jackass religious cracker fucktards, none of us gave a shit about gays being in the military. Hell, we knew they were there, and in many cases, knew who they were. (Ever seen two infantrymen fight like an old married couple? It's hilarious to think that you could pretend to not know they're gay.)
Buncha bullshit, all of it. Another 20 years I'm optimistic that we'll see a little sea change on the issue.
Like any good salesman, a drug dealer will try to convert a marijuana user to use other drugs that turn a better profit. The good old upsell. Legalising marijuana would break that chain.
Bullshit. You've never bought any drugs at all, have you. Drug dealers aren't like a pharmacy with a big closet full of everything from weed to heroin. Drug dealers generally specialize in one drug, and occasionally get another one now and again. They don't have a product line that facilitates "upsell". Furthermore, I've never met a pot dealer who ever sold any of the so-called "hard drugs". Occasionally, they'd get some acid, or maybe some Ecstasy. No drug dealer has ever tried give me the hard sell on anything. You clearly got your drug education from the DEA and Nancy Reagan.
Cocaine isn't much worse than alcohol in terms of behavior changes. Legalize it, and those seeking hard drugs will use it (or heroine) rather than the highly dangerous stuff like meth, or the highly addictive stuff like crack.
Crack is still cocaine, and is no more addictive. I've used both. No big deal. Also, meth is not inherently dangerous. Military pilots going on long missions are given amphetamines to help them remain alert. I personally used methamphetamine intermittently for a period of four years in college. It's not physically addictive like nicotine, heroin, or caffeine, and has no physically damaging effects in and of itself. The problem is that people use it continuously and don't eat, drink, or sleep. The exact same thing that happens to meth heads would happen to anyone who didn't sleep, eat, or maintain reasonable hydration levels for weeks on end.
The real problem with meth is more of a "PR problem". It doesn't kill you suddenly and cleanly, like heroin, but rather it fails to kill you while you run your body into the ground. So is it really better to legalize heroin, which makes you physically sick if you stop taking it, and has an effective dosage level that continuously creeps up closer and closer to a lethal dose?
How about we just quit making judgments on the "goodness" and "badness" of various drugs based solely on media hyperbole, and just legalize all of it and let people exercise personal responsibility.
I'll agree that there's a profit motive.
But you don't speak about the abyss of drug addiction, the income-sapping expense, the parents of kids that forget parenting while doing drugs, the accidents on the freeway, the madness of things like meth addiction and its incredible debilitating affects on the body.
So it's a good thing we have drug prohibition because without it these things would be rampant? Oh wait....
You have failed to show how things would be worse if you could buy a 'teen of meth for $40 from the Walgreen's vs. being able to buy a 'teen of meth from Joe the Biker at the bar for $80. It's not like prohibition has kept drugs away from people. I know of no one who wants drugs who can't find them.
If they have the optional power to do something specified, what kind of power do they have to do something that isn't specified?
By a straight reading of the content of the Constitution, no such power at all. Through constant incremental encroachment by degrees over the last 150-odd years, they've established themselves as having authority to do just about anything they like, constitution (particularly the 10th Amendment) be damned. Welcome to the frustration of libertarianism.