"Rude alert! Rude alert! An electrical fire has knocked out my voice-recognition unicycle! Many Wurlitzers are missing from my database! Abandon shop! This is not a daffodil! Repeat: This is not a daffodil!"
I know that. A lot of heroin users don't smoke pot, but they probably did once... Of course, not all cannabis users will try harder drugs, I never said that (so you can relax).
I say "yet" because I would very much like to understand how perception of drug "hardness" varies across cultures.
No, but there is a sort of pattern: There is roughly one fourth as many cannabis users as alcohol users, about one fourth as many amphetamine users as cannabis users, and one fourth as many opioid users as amphetamine users. That's here in Norway. It almost has to be different elsewere, since Norway has peculiar usage patterns (almost all heroin is IV, and cocaine is surprisingly unpopular)
I would guess that while attitudes about how much intoxication is acceptable may vary (so attitudes almost certainly bleed over from one drug to another sometimes) the ideas of how "hard" a drug is could vary a lot from culture to culture. But I really don't know much about that (yet).
I didn't know what "totalforbruksteorien" was called in English, apparently it isn't "total consumption theory". So I googled for it in my native language.
We well-informed teetotallers have known this for years about alcohol. Attitudes aren't made in a vacuum. If the drug/alcohol use of your kids, or even the use in society, bothers you, the first thing you should do is cut back (or better yet, cut out) yourself.
It was the French demographer Sully Ledermann who first suggested that alcohol consumption appears to follow a log-normal distribution - he didn't provide much evidence for it, but it turned out later he was completely right. In principle, a single variable is enough to describe the variation in total alcohol consumption across cultures: The average amount consumed. As the number of moderate drinkers increase, the number of heavy drinkers increases with about the square.
I'll quote (and translate) a piece of an article from the journal of the Norwegian physician's association:
"The stable traits and connections that have been found in this are are not natural laws, they could all in principle have been different. The suprising thing, however, is that the connections are as stable as they are.
These connections and regularities were at the outset pure statistical descriptions of reality, without any understanding of the social mechanisms that generated them. Through the 1980s there came some studies where one tried to explain how these regularities appear and are kept stable (9, 11, 13). The original hypotheses were one that drinking habits are explained by a series of factors that appear to combine multiplicatively, and another that alcohol users are strongly influenced by the drinking habits in their social networks.
Both hypotheses have good empirical support. The first one can, by the so-called central limit theorem in statistical theory, explain that the distribution becomes approximately log-normal. The second hypothesis can, from theories of interaction and spread in social networks, explain why there is such a strong connection between average consumption and the prevalence of high consumers."
Hospitals also face quite a different challenge from you in your own home, since there's a huge traffic of ill, old and immunocompromised people in and out all the time.
If anyone should face charges, it's the farmers who feed their pigs huge doses of antibiotics not because they are ill, but because they grow faster then.
Chlorine gas can kill you, no doubt, but the only mention I found of anyone actually dying from mixing chlorine and bleach was a person with an undiagnosed, rare form of brain cancer. I don't think
If that "something" is crazy geoengineering that works indirectly, for instance by reducing solar input, increasing albedo etc, or something that affects CO2 directly but has side effects we don't know the extent of (like "seeding the oceans") then the answer is no. But there are things we can and should do, because they directly reverse what we are doing that we know is bad (releasing lots of CO2). They are
1. Reducing emissions 2. Carbon capture and storage 3. Carbon sequestration through weathering of rocks. That only affects two things, namely the air and the rock. Since weathered and unweathered rocks play pretty much the same inert role in nature, I believe this sort of geoengineering is as safe as it can get.
Concern troll. Al Gore and AEI with their daffodil ads are not the same thing. Al Gore may be a politician, he may not be your kind of politician, but the science is on his side.
The pseudoscience is on the side of the "skeptics"
Amazing how stating a simple fact can be taken as "defense" of everything they did in the Soviet Union. I'm sure you appreciate being allowed to work 8+ hours per day. Then again, you aren't born a 150 years ago to a poor family in Liverpool. I'm not sure you appreciate that.
But there exist algorithms which can tell you either "this program halts!" "this program doesn't halt!" or "Oops, this program is too complex for me to decide for certain that it halts!". In some cases they can even be useful.
I'm not sure I agree that it should be criminal, but anticipating the objections, I want to point out one big difference from eugenics.
With eugenics, the state would tell an individual "you're not allowed to have children". With restrictions like bans on incest, they merely say "you're not allowed to have children with that specific other person (one out of 3 billion)". Quite a big difference.
"I am not even suggesting that two people that have Down Syndrome cannot procreate either."
I am. Not because there's anything wrong with it, but because with an odd number of chromosomes, the odds are poor. Women with Down's are less fertile, men with Down's are practically sterile.
Here, it's explicitly legal to record a discussion you are partaking in. Cell phones can still only record one side, and it's a hassle (and hardly possible to turn on quietly).
A bit strange, really. It's a feature I'd pay for - or at least, a feature which would weigh heavily next time I buy a phone.
Slashdot Mirror
It isn't hard to pronounce, but you do occasionally run into ugliness with pluralisation/definitive vs. indefinitive forms.
Unless Soulskill the slasdot editor is a closet scandinavian, I'd say some other people do it too.
"Crowns" is literally what kronor means. It's a perfectly OK translation.
Yeah, if they'd tried, it probably wouldn't have worked. But they didn't even get that far.
Honestly, it was clear from the very beginning that GGF was a very risky, very shady company.
"Rude alert! Rude alert! An electrical fire has knocked out my voice-recognition unicycle! Many Wurlitzers are missing from my database! Abandon shop! This is not a daffodil! Repeat: This is not a daffodil!"
I know that. A lot of heroin users don't smoke pot, but they probably did once... Of course, not all cannabis users will try harder drugs, I never said that (so you can relax).
I say "yet" because I would very much like to understand how perception of drug "hardness" varies across cultures.
Better than Gene Ray, at least. Or Gene Raskin.
No, but there is a sort of pattern: There is roughly one fourth as many cannabis users as alcohol users, about one fourth as many amphetamine users as cannabis users, and one fourth as many opioid users as amphetamine users.
That's here in Norway. It almost has to be different elsewere, since Norway has peculiar usage patterns (almost all heroin is IV, and cocaine is surprisingly unpopular)
I would guess that while attitudes about how much intoxication is acceptable may vary (so attitudes almost certainly bleed over from one drug to another sometimes) the ideas of how "hard" a drug is could vary a lot from culture to culture. But I really don't know much about that (yet).
I didn't know what "totalforbruksteorien" was called in English, apparently it isn't "total consumption theory". So I googled for it in my native language.
We well-informed teetotallers have known this for years about alcohol. Attitudes aren't made in a vacuum. If the drug/alcohol use of your kids, or even the use in society, bothers you, the first thing you should do is cut back (or better yet, cut out) yourself.
It was the French demographer Sully Ledermann who first suggested that alcohol consumption appears to follow a log-normal distribution - he didn't provide much evidence for it, but it turned out later he was completely right. In principle, a single variable is enough to describe the variation in total alcohol consumption across cultures: The average amount consumed. As the number of moderate drinkers increase, the number of heavy drinkers increases with about the square.
I'll quote (and translate) a piece of an article from the journal of the Norwegian physician's association:
"The stable traits and connections that have been found in this are are not natural laws, they could all in principle have been different. The suprising thing, however, is that the connections are as stable as they are.
These connections and regularities were at the outset pure statistical descriptions of reality, without any understanding of the social mechanisms that generated them. Through the 1980s there came some studies where one tried to explain how these regularities appear and are kept stable (9, 11, 13). The original hypotheses were one that drinking habits are explained by a series of factors that appear to combine multiplicatively, and another that alcohol users are strongly influenced by the drinking habits in their social networks.
Both hypotheses have good empirical support. The first one can, by the so-called central limit theorem in statistical theory, explain that the distribution becomes approximately log-normal. The second hypothesis can, from theories of interaction and spread in social networks, explain why there is such a strong connection between average consumption and the prevalence of high consumers."
Emphasis mine. Original article with references here: http://www.tidsskriftet.no/?seks_id=649944
Your last paragraph says it all. The ocean may not get much heat transfer directly from the air, but sunlight strikes the sea too, you know.
Unlike you I trust the scientific institutions enough to get the orders of magnitude right, at the very least.
This sounds like the plot for a movie. Possibly a porn movie, but nonetheless.
Hospitals also face quite a different challenge from you in your own home, since there's a huge traffic of ill, old and immunocompromised people in and out all the time.
If anyone should face charges, it's the farmers who feed their pigs huge doses of antibiotics not because they are ill, but because they grow faster then.
That should be ammonia and bleach, of course.
Chlorine gas can kill you, no doubt, but the only mention I found of anyone actually dying from mixing chlorine and bleach was a person with an undiagnosed, rare form of brain cancer. I don't think
If that "something" is crazy geoengineering that works indirectly, for instance by reducing solar input, increasing albedo etc, or something that affects CO2 directly but has side effects we don't know the extent of (like "seeding the oceans") then the answer is no.
But there are things we can and should do, because they directly reverse what we are doing that we know is bad (releasing lots of CO2). They are
1. Reducing emissions
2. Carbon capture and storage
3. Carbon sequestration through weathering of rocks. That only affects two things, namely the air and the rock. Since weathered and unweathered rocks play pretty much the same inert role in nature, I believe this sort of geoengineering is as safe as it can get.
Concern troll. Al Gore and AEI with their daffodil ads are not the same thing. Al Gore may be a politician, he may not be your kind of politician, but the science is on his side.
The pseudoscience is on the side of the "skeptics"
Amazing how stating a simple fact can be taken as "defense" of everything they did in the Soviet Union. I'm sure you appreciate being allowed to work 8+ hours per day. Then again, you aren't born a 150 years ago to a poor family in Liverpool. I'm not sure you appreciate that.
But there exist algorithms which can tell you either "this program halts!" "this program doesn't halt!" or "Oops, this program is too complex for me to decide for certain that it halts!". In some cases they can even be useful.
I don't think my mother knows what a troll is...
I'm not sure I agree that it should be criminal, but anticipating the objections, I want to point out one big difference from eugenics.
With eugenics, the state would tell an individual "you're not allowed to have children". With restrictions like bans on incest, they merely say "you're not allowed to have children with that specific other person (one out of 3 billion)". Quite a big difference.
"This really is just a mix of bigotry and eugenics at work and its quite disgusting that this is enforced by the law."
But is it? Isn't it a sleeping law in most jurisdictions?
"I am not even suggesting that two people that have Down Syndrome cannot procreate either."
I am. Not because there's anything wrong with it, but because with an odd number of chromosomes, the odds are poor. Women with Down's are less fertile, men with Down's are practically sterile.
Here, it's explicitly legal to record a discussion you are partaking in. Cell phones can still only record one side, and it's a hassle (and hardly possible to turn on quietly).
A bit strange, really. It's a feature I'd pay for - or at least, a feature which would weigh heavily next time I buy a phone.
"Or are German summers much cooler than they are in the Mid-Atlantic states of the USA?"
Yes.