First, the study in the article I linked to shows the exact opposite -- partial legalization of marijuana leads to *less* deaths, not more. The simple fact is that marijuana is less dangerous than alcohol, and people use it in place of alcohol, so deaths would most likely go down, not up, if it was fully legalized.
Second, don't assume prohibition itself doesn't cause loss of life -- that is very, very clearly not the case.
Read my last sentence again -- it's entirely possible to legalize marijuana and without allowing it to be sold and used in bars the way we do with alcohol.
Actually, your point about drunk drivers is a big reason to support legalizing marijuana: People substitute marijuana for alcohol and end up causing less problems because of it. This has recently been shown in a study of traffic deaths in states where medical marijuana is legal (see http://healthland.time.com/2011/12/02/why-medical-marijuana-laws-reduce-traffic-deaths/).
I'm curious if the effect would be even larger with full legalization, although as the article notes, part of the reason marijuana use causes less issues with driving may be that people are more likely to use it at home and thus have no need to drive. That might not be the case if weed was legalized completely, but then again it would be entirely possible to legalize it without allowing the sort of public use and consumption at businesses that we allow with alcohol.
In science, generally grant proposals are written by the scientists trying to get the funding. Are you suggesting we start a new industry which writes grant proposals for scientists and we fill it full of employees with Psych or English backgrounds? Not that writing ability isn't important, but the main point of a grant proposal is to demonstrate through technical knowledge that a project is worth funding. Wouldn't it be easier just to suggest scientists learn to write better rather than suggest english majors should gain a thorough technical knowledge of a scientific discipline?
Also, I'm pretty sure the problem limiting the number of projects in most scientific fields is not a lack grant *proposals*, it is a lack of grant *funding*.
I think you have confused "basic philosophy" with religion. Many of your complaints may be valid when it comes to religion, but none of them seem to be actual problems with philosophy.
Actually, "the government in its current form no long represents the will of most of the American People" was the exact same grievance the Tea Party started with, and is why they chose their name.
I'm more sympathetic to OWS, though. I'm really not sure how the heck the Tea Party went from that initial issue to the parade of ignorance and anti-intellectualism and downright cold-heartedness that has been on display at the Republican debates. It seems like the problem is that most of the Tea Party people were apparently talking not about being unrepresented on economic policies that benefit the rich over the rest of us, but rather being unrepresented on things like the general movement towards letting gay people just live their lives like straight people have always been able to do.
Barring the press? I don't really believe there's any way to see that except cynically, although perhaps it's justified again by public-safety concerns: if the press were widely covering the event, more likely more people are going to rush downtown to try to stop it.
Seems to me that if the government is going to do something so upsetting to the public that it could cause people to rush to where it is occurring, in the middle of the night, to stop it, that is exactly the sort of reason the First Amendment has that free press stuff in it. If "public safety" can justify barring coverage of an event like that, then surely the government can pretty much do whatever it wants, no matter how abhorrent.
Actually, looking closer, I think your comment is correct, too. Some of the larger canals just come to an end and are full of water that should be flowing away from the end. The channels running toward the ridge leave from the ends of the larger canals -- maybe just to get some of that water in addition to the water from the "wells"?
Ah Ha! Figured that one out, I think. It is some sort or huge collection site for water from melting snow and rainwater. All of the branches that branch off the main branch that leaves the main site are connected to smaller branches that eventually run up to the top of what appears to be a mountain ridge or even continental divide. Some of the area that looks high up also appears to possibly have some snow cover, so there must be at least some precipitation there. Perhaps it is a way of trying to cost-effectively gather a large portion of the water that falls on a large, arid region.
Just look at the details of the water flow to see the effects of gravity and thus how the land is sloping, and then use that information to project the 2d picture into 3d in your mind and you can see this.
I'm no geologist or seismologist, but the idea of fracking leading (indirectly) to larger (M3.0+) quakes doesn't seem entirely implausible. It may be that all the small quakes caused directly by the fracking might cause larger quakes to occur sooner than they otherwise would.
"Displacement rates depart from million-year average rates by up to three orders of magnitude with the size of these departures inversely related to the duration of the sample period and to fault length. Short-term (20 kyr) displacement rates generally span a greater range on small faults than large, a feature which suggests more variable growth on smaller faults."
Fault line displacement rates varying would, I think, mean more, larger earthquakes occur at some times than other times. Earthquakes are a consequence of faults moving toward their equilibrium point, and fracking may be able to act as a catalyst, accelerating the fault line on its journey. In doing so it could move the fault line from one of the inactive, low displacement-rate regimes into a active, high displacement rate regime. Further, the quoted part of the abstract makes it sound like this would more likely occur on small, Oklahoma style fault lines. Basically, the larger earthquakes would have been coming eventually anyway, but maybe the fracking made them get here sooner rather than later.
This may be difficult to verify, though, since we don't exactly have a way to tell if any specific quake's occurence at a certain time was purely a part of the fault's natural evolution or not. The same goes for a change to a high activity regime where quakes are more common: How would we know the regime change wasn't naturally occuring? Seems like this would make for a good topic to study with some sort of fault line model -- we could have a simulated fault line and see how its evolution varies under natural conditions versus natural conditions plus the addition of something representing the effects of fracking. Do we have deterministic fault line displacement rate models?
Anyone with more knowledge of geology want to correct me or add anything?
Hmm. Based on the observations is the abstract I'm linking to, that hypothesis would need us to assume all the variability in the fault's displacement rate is cyclic and has a frequency less than 1 million years: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v390/n6656/abs/390157a0.html
I don't know enough about seismology to know whether fault lines having cyclical, unstable displacement rates on shorter time intervals than 1 million years is realistic or not. It seems reasonable that there would be some variability somewhere on the temporal spectrum. Even assuming there are oscillations in the displacement rate when you sample with a high enough frequency, though, the oscillations would have to be larger than a certain magnitude to be important on the scale of noticeable earthquakes.
Earthquakes, especially those above M4.5, are surely very energetic events. Unless fracking is an extremely high energy process and is done in such a way as to deposit that energy into the fault line, it is next to impossible that the any of the quakes due to fracking would move the fault line significant away from its equilibrium position. Natural earthquakes should move the originating fault toward its equilibrium, and it would take a heck of lot of energy to drive that process backwards.
I suppose it is possible that small earthquakes could lead to larger ones, however, through this mechanism: I doubt we know how far from its equilibrium point the fault line is. Its configuration may be such that as it naturally settles towards that equilibrium, it will at some times have strong earthquakes and at times have weak earthquakes. Essentially, a fault's natural d[fault position]/dt function may not be constant. Sometimes it will move faster than others. It thus seems possible that fracking may push a fault out of a weak, rare earthquake regime into a strong, common quake regime. If that is the case I hope no one messes around with a big fault like the San Andreas.
I'm in Norman, OK, and there was definitely some pretty good shaking here, although not enough to cause any real damage (it knocked a stack of dvd cases off of my dresser... not sure if that counts as "damage"). In the small towns closer to the epicenter there was certainly some damage, however. At least one highway was buckled in a spot, and there were apparently multiple instances of chimneys collapsing and falling through people's roofs, so some luck was involved in no one getting seriously hurt. Not California level earthquake damage, sure, but perhaps more than just "minor", at least by OK earthquake standards.
There was also a 4.7 quake centered near the same spot around 2:15 local time yesterday morning. The area where the quakes occurred has occasionally been having small tremors for well over a year now, although the last one before yesterday that was strong enough for everyone in Norman to feel was last October (in 2010).
Wow, I was not aware of that. Now that I am, however, I started a petition calling them out on their farce of a response. I doubt they'll take it any more seriously than the earlier petitions, but right now I'm more concerned with people becoming aware that certain people in the government are legally required to lie to us if the facts don't support current drug policy. Here's a link to the new petition: http://wh.gov/b4e
I didn't miss any point -- I never claimed anonymous was trying to end the cartels. I was just responding the GP's statement of "it would be ironic if a bunch of hackers brought the cartels down." Guess I should have quoted him.
Cartels don't work that way. Even in the unlikely event that Anonymous disrupted one cartel's operations, another will simply take its place, exactly like what happens when the police do the same. Where there is a demand, there will be a supply.
Notice these aren't GRANT programs he is calling to end.
Well, the budget plan he released a week or two ago proposed zeroing out the Department of Education budget, which I believe includes federally funded education grants (or at least Pell grants, which are the largest portion of federal student grant money). So, yes, he does appear to be calling for an end to grant programs for students as well.
So I should vote for him simply on the hope that he doesn't actually mean what he said? No thanks. And having the states take over NOAA's operations is a bad idea for technical reasons. If one state decides to cut funding for an observation system, it will degrade forecast quality in the surrounding states. Also, if the states take over, which one pays for satellites? Or do all 50 of them launch their own satellites when a single satellite could cover the entire country? A similar problem would exist with weather models. Some things just work better (and cheaper) when the federal government does them, no matter what ideologues say.
I'm not saying that the jobs couldn't be moved to a different department, just that I've seen no evidence of that being a part of Dr. Paul's plan. Since he himself said he thinks the jobs are nonproductive, I don't see why he would want to keep them around. Also, the country itself could probably survive just fine without NOAA -- after all, it survived before 1870 when the weather bureau was established. The problem is that a lot more of the country's citizens wouldn't survive without the work NOAA does. I don't see how Paul can claim the jobs are nonproductive after the amount of severe weather that occurred last spring. The death tolls in those events would have been much, much higher if NOAA didn't exist.
As for who I would support instead of Paul, well, that is a good question. I'm a civil libertarian and I agree with him on foreign policy issues, but I'm a centrist on economic issues, so that has always been a bit of a hangup in my ability to really get behind him. I don't know of any notable politician that I agree with on all 3 of civil liberties, economics, and foreign policy, though. Paul has 2 out of 3, but if he comes with proposals like this, 2 out of 3 ain't good enough.
Are you serious? The National Weather Service (part of NOAA, which is part of the DOC) didn't exist 15 years ago? Weather forecasting and watches/warnings were all handled at the state level in the early 90s? Stop making things up.
Here and on other forums, I keep seeing people making the claim that Paul doesn't actually intend to cut things like NOAA. Well, NOAA takes up about 50% of the DOC's budget in non-census years. If he is just planning to shuffle NOAA around then the claim that he would eliminate the DOC is just a lie. If that is the case he may as well just change the department's name and say that means he eliminated it. As crazy as I think this budget plan is (crazy enough that I can no longer even consider supporting him), Paul is actually the one current notable politician that I trust not to do something so misleading.
In the interview Blitzer mentions how many jobs would be eliminated in each of the departments he intends to cut, and Paul's response is simply "yes, but [those jobs] are nonproductive". There seems to be zero room in a blanket statement like that for him to take a more nuanced position where things like NOAA are worth saving.
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First, the study in the article I linked to shows the exact opposite -- partial legalization of marijuana leads to *less* deaths, not more. The simple fact is that marijuana is less dangerous than alcohol, and people use it in place of alcohol, so deaths would most likely go down, not up, if it was fully legalized.
Second, don't assume prohibition itself doesn't cause loss of life -- that is very, very clearly not the case.
Read my last sentence again -- it's entirely possible to legalize marijuana and without allowing it to be sold and used in bars the way we do with alcohol.
err, make that "public sale and consumption"
Actually, your point about drunk drivers is a big reason to support legalizing marijuana: People substitute marijuana for alcohol and end up causing less problems because of it. This has recently been shown in a study of traffic deaths in states where medical marijuana is legal (see http://healthland.time.com/2011/12/02/why-medical-marijuana-laws-reduce-traffic-deaths/).
I'm curious if the effect would be even larger with full legalization, although as the article notes, part of the reason marijuana use causes less issues with driving may be that people are more likely to use it at home and thus have no need to drive. That might not be the case if weed was legalized completely, but then again it would be entirely possible to legalize it without allowing the sort of public use and consumption at businesses that we allow with alcohol.
In science, generally grant proposals are written by the scientists trying to get the funding. Are you suggesting we start a new industry which writes grant proposals for scientists and we fill it full of employees with Psych or English backgrounds? Not that writing ability isn't important, but the main point of a grant proposal is to demonstrate through technical knowledge that a project is worth funding. Wouldn't it be easier just to suggest scientists learn to write better rather than suggest english majors should gain a thorough technical knowledge of a scientific discipline?
Also, I'm pretty sure the problem limiting the number of projects in most scientific fields is not a lack grant *proposals*, it is a lack of grant *funding*.
I think you have confused "basic philosophy" with religion. Many of your complaints may be valid when it comes to religion, but none of them seem to be actual problems with philosophy.
Co-option seems like the most likely explanation to me, also, and I very much agree with the rest of what you said, too.
Actually, "the government in its current form no long represents the will of most of the American People" was the exact same grievance the Tea Party started with, and is why they chose their name.
I'm more sympathetic to OWS, though. I'm really not sure how the heck the Tea Party went from that initial issue to the parade of ignorance and anti-intellectualism and downright cold-heartedness that has been on display at the Republican debates. It seems like the problem is that most of the Tea Party people were apparently talking not about being unrepresented on economic policies that benefit the rich over the rest of us, but rather being unrepresented on things like the general movement towards letting gay people just live their lives like straight people have always been able to do.
Barring the press? I don't really believe there's any way to see that except cynically, although perhaps it's justified again by public-safety concerns: if the press were widely covering the event, more likely more people are going to rush downtown to try to stop it.
Seems to me that if the government is going to do something so upsetting to the public that it could cause people to rush to where it is occurring, in the middle of the night, to stop it, that is exactly the sort of reason the First Amendment has that free press stuff in it. If "public safety" can justify barring coverage of an event like that, then surely the government can pretty much do whatever it wants, no matter how abhorrent.
Actually, looking closer, I think your comment is correct, too. Some of the larger canals just come to an end and are full of water that should be flowing away from the end. The channels running toward the ridge leave from the ends of the larger canals -- maybe just to get some of that water in addition to the water from the "wells"?
Ah Ha! Figured that one out, I think. It is some sort or huge collection site for water from melting snow and rainwater. All of the branches that branch off the main branch that leaves the main site are connected to smaller branches that eventually run up to the top of what appears to be a mountain ridge or even continental divide. Some of the area that looks high up also appears to possibly have some snow cover, so there must be at least some precipitation there. Perhaps it is a way of trying to cost-effectively gather a large portion of the water that falls on a large, arid region.
Just look at the details of the water flow to see the effects of gravity and thus how the land is sloping, and then use that information to project the 2d picture into 3d in your mind and you can see this.
I'm no geologist or seismologist, but the idea of fracking leading (indirectly) to larger (M3.0+) quakes doesn't seem entirely implausible. It may be that all the small quakes caused directly by the fracking might cause larger quakes to occur sooner than they otherwise would.
The quote below is from the abstract to this article: http://www.mred.tuc.gr/home/vasiliki/publications/Mouslopoulou_etal_2009_EPSL.pdf
"Displacement rates depart from million-year average rates by up to three orders of magnitude with the size of these departures inversely related to the duration of the sample period and to fault length. Short-term (20 kyr) displacement rates generally span a greater range on small faults than large, a feature which suggests more variable growth on smaller faults."
Fault line displacement rates varying would, I think, mean more, larger earthquakes occur at some times than other times. Earthquakes are a consequence of faults moving toward their equilibrium point, and fracking may be able to act as a catalyst, accelerating the fault line on its journey. In doing so it could move the fault line from one of the inactive, low displacement-rate regimes into a active, high displacement rate regime. Further, the quoted part of the abstract makes it sound like this would more likely occur on small, Oklahoma style fault lines. Basically, the larger earthquakes would have been coming eventually anyway, but maybe the fracking made them get here sooner rather than later.
This may be difficult to verify, though, since we don't exactly have a way to tell if any specific quake's occurence at a certain time was purely a part of the fault's natural evolution or not. The same goes for a change to a high activity regime where quakes are more common: How would we know the regime change wasn't naturally occuring? Seems like this would make for a good topic to study with some sort of fault line model -- we could have a simulated fault line and see how its evolution varies under natural conditions versus natural conditions plus the addition of something representing the effects of fracking. Do we have deterministic fault line displacement rate models?
Anyone with more knowledge of geology want to correct me or add anything?
Hmm. Based on the observations is the abstract I'm linking to, that hypothesis would need us to assume all the variability in the fault's displacement rate is cyclic and has a frequency less than 1 million years: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v390/n6656/abs/390157a0.html
I don't know enough about seismology to know whether fault lines having cyclical, unstable displacement rates on shorter time intervals than 1 million years is realistic or not. It seems reasonable that there would be some variability somewhere on the temporal spectrum. Even assuming there are oscillations in the displacement rate when you sample with a high enough frequency, though, the oscillations would have to be larger than a certain magnitude to be important on the scale of noticeable earthquakes.
Earthquakes, especially those above M4.5, are surely very energetic events. Unless fracking is an extremely high energy process and is done in such a way as to deposit that energy into the fault line, it is next to impossible that the any of the quakes due to fracking would move the fault line significant away from its equilibrium position. Natural earthquakes should move the originating fault toward its equilibrium, and it would take a heck of lot of energy to drive that process backwards.
I suppose it is possible that small earthquakes could lead to larger ones, however, through this mechanism: I doubt we know how far from its equilibrium point the fault line is. Its configuration may be such that as it naturally settles towards that equilibrium, it will at some times have strong earthquakes and at times have weak earthquakes. Essentially, a fault's natural d[fault position]/dt function may not be constant. Sometimes it will move faster than others. It thus seems possible that fracking may push a fault out of a weak, rare earthquake regime into a strong, common quake regime. If that is the case I hope no one messes around with a big fault like the San Andreas.
Here's the official info on the quake from the USGS: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqsus/Quakes/usb0006klz.php
I'm in Norman, OK, and there was definitely some pretty good shaking here, although not enough to cause any real damage (it knocked a stack of dvd cases off of my dresser... not sure if that counts as "damage"). In the small towns closer to the epicenter there was certainly some damage, however. At least one highway was buckled in a spot, and there were apparently multiple instances of chimneys collapsing and falling through people's roofs, so some luck was involved in no one getting seriously hurt. Not California level earthquake damage, sure, but perhaps more than just "minor", at least by OK earthquake standards.
There was also a 4.7 quake centered near the same spot around 2:15 local time yesterday morning. The area where the quakes occurred has occasionally been having small tremors for well over a year now, although the last one before yesterday that was strong enough for everyone in Norman to feel was last October (in 2010).
Wow, I was not aware of that. Now that I am, however, I started a petition calling them out on their farce of a response. I doubt they'll take it any more seriously than the earlier petitions, but right now I'm more concerned with people becoming aware that certain people in the government are legally required to lie to us if the facts don't support current drug policy. Here's a link to the new petition: http://wh.gov/b4e
I didn't miss any point -- I never claimed anonymous was trying to end the cartels. I was just responding the GP's statement of "it would be ironic if a bunch of hackers brought the cartels down." Guess I should have quoted him.
Cartels don't work that way. Even in the unlikely event that Anonymous disrupted one cartel's operations, another will simply take its place, exactly like what happens when the police do the same. Where there is a demand, there will be a supply.
Notice these aren't GRANT programs he is calling to end.
Well, the budget plan he released a week or two ago proposed zeroing out the Department of Education budget, which I believe includes federally funded education grants (or at least Pell grants, which are the largest portion of federal student grant money). So, yes, he does appear to be calling for an end to grant programs for students as well.
So I should vote for him simply on the hope that he doesn't actually mean what he said? No thanks. And having the states take over NOAA's operations is a bad idea for technical reasons. If one state decides to cut funding for an observation system, it will degrade forecast quality in the surrounding states. Also, if the states take over, which one pays for satellites? Or do all 50 of them launch their own satellites when a single satellite could cover the entire country? A similar problem would exist with weather models. Some things just work better (and cheaper) when the federal government does them, no matter what ideologues say.
I'm not saying that the jobs couldn't be moved to a different department, just that I've seen no evidence of that being a part of Dr. Paul's plan. Since he himself said he thinks the jobs are nonproductive, I don't see why he would want to keep them around. Also, the country itself could probably survive just fine without NOAA -- after all, it survived before 1870 when the weather bureau was established. The problem is that a lot more of the country's citizens wouldn't survive without the work NOAA does. I don't see how Paul can claim the jobs are nonproductive after the amount of severe weather that occurred last spring. The death tolls in those events would have been much, much higher if NOAA didn't exist.
As for who I would support instead of Paul, well, that is a good question. I'm a civil libertarian and I agree with him on foreign policy issues, but I'm a centrist on economic issues, so that has always been a bit of a hangup in my ability to really get behind him. I don't know of any notable politician that I agree with on all 3 of civil liberties, economics, and foreign policy, though. Paul has 2 out of 3, but if he comes with proposals like this, 2 out of 3 ain't good enough.
Are you serious? The National Weather Service (part of NOAA, which is part of the DOC) didn't exist 15 years ago? Weather forecasting and watches/warnings were all handled at the state level in the early 90s? Stop making things up.
Here and on other forums, I keep seeing people making the claim that Paul doesn't actually intend to cut things like NOAA. Well, NOAA takes up about 50% of the DOC's budget in non-census years. If he is just planning to shuffle NOAA around then the claim that he would eliminate the DOC is just a lie. If that is the case he may as well just change the department's name and say that means he eliminated it. As crazy as I think this budget plan is (crazy enough that I can no longer even consider supporting him), Paul is actually the one current notable politician that I trust not to do something so misleading.
Also, for anyone who thinks he just intends to shuffle the duties of things like NOAA, USGS, and NIST to other departments, they would do well to read Paul's interview with Wolf Blitzer from a few days ago: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2011/10/17/interview_with_presidential_candidate_ron_paul_111725.html
In the interview Blitzer mentions how many jobs would be eliminated in each of the departments he intends to cut, and Paul's response is simply "yes, but [those jobs] are nonproductive". There seems to be zero room in a blanket statement like that for him to take a more nuanced position where things like NOAA are worth saving.