I would honestly love to discuss it further with you, because you seem to be really knowledgable on the topic (probably more so than me), but I've got a business trip over the coming three days and am not really one for reviving four day old discussions on slashdot (unless you really want to, in which case, reply to this in three to four days so that it's fresh for me!). I could have written out a quick off-the-cuff reply now, but I think I'd prefer to actually sit and think about my answers with you on this topic, which I sadly just don't have the time for right now.
As for your OT comment to my homepage link (and also sig) - I would strongly disagree with your friend. People who like to really examine things both deeply as well as broadly (thinking around all aspects of a topic), which it seems you are, are exactly the kind of people who should try LSD at some point in their lives (preferably in the right kind of environment and frame of mind of course... hence the topic of my book)
For the most part I agree, however, a nit pick I have with your line of thinking is that there's some arbitrary distinction between islam and islamist extremeism. True islam demands extreemeism from its subjects.
While I agree that true Islam demands extremism, I would also argue that true Christianity does as well. It just happens that Christian extremists are not quite as common (or perhaps not quite as vocal or noticeable if they are) as Islamic extremists at this particular point in history.
Western notion of moderation do not really apply.
I know quite a few people who describe themselves as 'Muslim' but pay very little attention other than observing a few things here and there because "that's the way they were brought up". To me, these are about the same as the lip-service Christians who go to church once or twice a year, don't pray, don't really examine the tenets of their religion and so forth but nevertheless profess to be 'Christian' (these are very common; my wife is (unfortunately) one of them).
Not withstanding the well know quote from a certain A Hitler about being born a catholic and dieing as one ?
While his religion is certainly debated, I personally believe that this quote and the evidence does point towards him being religious...
I'm not quite sure if you misread my post though - you seem to be backing up my point (that I don't think it is true that atheists have slaughtered more than religious folks have), but in a way that sounds like you're disagreeing. Sorry if I misinterpreted though.
In the last century Atheists slaughtered more people than Christians and Muslims combined, so there's that.
Whether true or not (actually, I don't think it is) it's also totally irrelevant to my point. Those people were for the most part not slaughtered "in the name of atheism". It seems quite certain that more people have been slaughtered 'for believing something different to the thing the slaughterer believes' than 'for believing something when the slaughterer has no religious belief'.
Or to quote Steven Weinberg:
Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
Following the " *noun* enables people to kill people" argument it just makes sense that we should start banning nouns. Obviously it's the nouns fault.
I'm not entirely sure you even read my post... or if you did, you read a hell of a lot in to it that I didn't write.
I never said "religion should be banned", nor did I say "religion enables people to kill people" (I did say "religion can motivate people to kill people" though... the difference being quite an important one)
Any religion which encourages its followers to murder people simply for expressing opposing opinions *is* worse than any religion that doesn't do that. So I think you're wrong - there is something inherent in 21st century Islam that makes it worse than many other 21st century religions.
If you think that was my argument, then you're right to call it wrong. I agree with you 100%.
That however was not my argument. My argument was that both Christianity and Islam in general and according to their own beliefs are equally as bad. The way it is practiced in the 21st century shows a clear difference; however there are passages in the Bible that could (and have been in the past) interpreted to also mean that followers of it should murder non-Christians. This interpretation isn't actually a particularly larger leap than the passages in the Qur'an that are used to justify the same behaviour.
No, one must simply not conflate the religion of the perpetrators with the act, as if they are one and the same thing.
I agree that one should not conflate the religion of the perpetrators with the act; however it is an important point to make if the act was performed in the name of the religion (regardless of what the majority of believers think).
If a Christian man kills someone because he was pissed off at work, bringing his religion in to the discussion is irrelevant. If however a Christian man kills someone because "God told him to", then bringing his religion in to the discussion is very relevant.
It would be wrong to say that "Christianity promotes killing" (based on this event alone), however it would NOT be wrong to say that "Christianity can be used as an excuse or reason to kill", because it quite clearly was so.
There are a lot of people that are anti-Islam because of the acts of a number of Islamic extremists. The religion itself (from my atheist perspective) is about equally as dangerous and violent as Christianity. There certainly are people that use it to justify violence towards others and there is a strong community ethic bound to the religion that brings other people in to commit the same acts when they previously might not have.
Christianity is currently going through a 'reasonably quiet' period as far as violence goes (although definitely not completely quiet) but history (even relatively recent history) shows that it's not always so. There's nothing inherent in Islam that makes it any better or worse.
The problem is that if you can take something so 'directly said' as being metaphor, then you can essentially pick and choose any part of the text to be metaphor the moment it disagrees with reality. By doing this, you no longer have a text with any meaning whatsoever.
If you don't do this and have pre-decided that 'these parts are metaphor', 'these other parts aren't'; then would you change your beliefs when a part that you believed to be statement of fact is proved wrong?
When has with holding information 'ever' been the right move?
That depends on the kind of withholding, the period of it and the type of information. I withhold information from the public such as my bank card's PIN, my password, and so on.
I think it's at the very least an arguable case as to whether these researchers should withhold this. By releasing it, there would be a non-zero danger that it would be used for harm with little to no positive gain. The exact value of this non-zero danger vs the value of the positive gain is what they likely thought about before making the decision.
Whether you agree or disagree with their decision, surely you must see the merit in this kind of evaluation?
Oh really? When someone quits tobacco, alcohol, or caffeine do they exhibit physical withdrawal symptoms such as agitation, anxiety, muscle aches, Increased tearing, Insomnia, runny nose, sweating, yawning, abdominal cramping, diarrhea, dilated pupils, goose bumps, nausea, and vomiting? Nope, they only get that with heroin. Nicotine, alcohol, and caffeine are not nearly as physically addictive as any opiate or cocaine.
While it's true the physical withdrawal symptoms of heroin are pretty bad, that's not actually a good indicator of the addictiveness. People don't (only) fail to quit or avoid quitting a substance because they can't handle the withdrawal, they do so because they 'feel they need' the substance - that's what addiction is.
That aside, these other substances aren't without their withdrawal symptoms as well:
- Tobacco withdrawal can cause constipation, depression, sleep difficulties, and energy loss.
- Caffeine withdrawal is pretty mild in general, but can include headaches, depression, anxiety, nausea, vomiting and muscle pain. I've experienced this first hand, going from a regular habit of 20 strong cups of coffee per day to zero (I later resumed at around 4 to 5 mild cups per day). The initial symptoms were very unpleasant and lasted around two days, with minor symptoms continuing for around another week after that. The worst part was the intense cravings for coffee, which I didn't expect (far worse than my cigarette cravings when I quit smoking, which themselves were pretty bad).
- Alcohol is the worst of the three by far. Withdrawal for a serious alcoholic can include hallucinations, anxiety, shakiness, seizures and delirium tremens (DTs). DTs are characterised by fever, rapid heartbeat and severe confusion. They can be fatal (estimated 1% to 5% of cases). Alcohol withdrawal for a serious alcoholic can be as bad or worse than heroin withdrawal for many junkies.
Also note that the symptoms you listed for heroin withdrawal are 'worst case' - not everyone goes through that, just as many alcoholics can quit without all of the nasty symptoms I just listed.
I was HOPING in this second part, he'd say something new; but in essence it seems his entire argument comes down to various themes of "targeted advertising (online) is cheap and therefore anyone can and will advertise anything and you can't trust it".
Is that really it, or did I miss some insight as his voice made me doze off?
Your slashdot sig is not an advertisement. Your using the same misconception as girlintraining.
All advertising is communication for the purposes of marketing.
Honestly, my slashdot sig is an advertisement. It is exactly for the purposes you describe. Specifically to "encourage an audience (slashdot readers) to take a specific action (buy my book)". I am marketing my book through my sig (amongst other methods of course).
This is what I meant when I said you were either building up a strawman or using a no-true-scotsman fallacy. If you define advertising as being something very specific that no one else uses as the definition, then you can make any claims you like about it. However as that's not the commonly understood definition, it's only going to misdirect people hearing/reading your statements to think you mean something else.
I have never seen advertising that contained a shred of truth.
I challenge you to find a single lie in the advertisement that constitutes my slashdot sig or even the Amazon web page it links to.
Once you have a tighter definition of just what advertising is , it's clear that he is absolutely correct. All advertising is indeed harmful, because all advertising contains only manipulative content devoid of any real truth. In fact, dissemination of truth is the last purpose of advertising.
With this argument you're either building up a strawman or using a no-true-scotsman fallacy (too early to tell, but could be both). A lot of advertising is manipulative content devoid of any real truth, but that's not the definition of advertising. It's fair enough to say that advertising that falls in to this category is harmful, however - even if that were 99.999% of advertising which exists (which I doubt) - that still does not say that advertising itself is always harmful.
You know what else is great for discovering products? Asking knowledgable people with no financial interest in my decision.
My sig is an ad. It's advertising a book I wrote. Let's look at a couple of hypothetical where I decided not to ever advertise it.
1) Let's say you're interested in the subject of Self-Discovery through psychedelics, but you're unsure what good books there are on the topic. You Google around and find.... a couple of Amazon links to books written a long time ago that other people have finally written reviews for. Do you find my book? Not likely. No one has ever heard of it so no one ever wrote anything about it. It's there on Amazon, but so far down in the list that unless you were searching for it specifically it won't come up.
Why is this a bad thing? Why should my book get advertised and get some priority? Well, because it's new and it might be better than other existing works on the topic. You'll never know if you don't get a chance to ever even know it exists.
2) You're a psychologist but have somehow never come across the idea of psychedelic assisted psychotherapy during your studies. "Recreational drugs" have never really interested you, so you never specifically go searching online for anything to do with them. The chances of you ever hearing about my book are very slim. As it turns out though, psychologists who have never heard of psychedelic assisted psychotherapy are exactly the kind of people who may be very interested in my book, as it gives them a wealth of information that they can then use as a starting point for further investigation in to the subject.
So yes, I have a financial interest in your decision of whether to buy my book or not, and I'm advertising it with the specific hope that people buy it and give me money. However the alternative would be that my book sales remain at near zero forever and I wasted a lot of time writing it. I never wrote it to get rich - I wrote it because I'm passionate and knowledgable about the subject and want to spread that knowledge to others. The money from it is nice to have and I feel it's only fair to compensate me for my work, so I won't give it away for free to everyone (also 'free books' are usually not viewed as well by large subsets of my target audience) but it still is a secondary motivation to the desire for my book to be read.
I think it depends on what is being advertised and the method of targeting.
You (and Mr Marti) make a point, but I think it's only a point against one of the very common forms of targeted advertising that exists today.
In your first example, they don't know you bought the windscreen wipers, so they keep advertising them to you and it's useless to both you and them. In your second example, they're targeting to you for the wrong products based on incomplete information about you. These are problems with the implementation, not the concept.
As per my sig, I recently launched my first book. My sig is an example of nontargeted advertising. Anyone who notices it and is interested may click on one of the links and may end up buying my book (and I thank anyone reading this who has done so or will do so!). However I don't expect it to be a particularly large generator of sales. The intersection of 'slashdot readers' and 'people interested enough in knowing more about psychedelic assisted self-discovery' is probably not very high (although hopefully greater than an empty set).
Facebook's advertising however is different. On facebook, people list their own interests. This therefore allows me to pay some money and specifically target my ads at (for example) people who 'speak English'; 'are interested in psychedelics'; and 'enjoy reading'. This way, I can be sure that my ad only appears in front of people that at least have a reasonable chance of being interested. This not only means that people who might be interested get made aware of my book, but also I don't have to worry that I'm paying for showing it to people who will absolutely never be interested in reading it.
This kind of targeted advertising makes a lot more sense to me and I have yet to see a downside.
I think that your post nicely dovetails with my overall point - there will almost certainly still be black markets even after legalization of various drugs. There will still be people pursuing illegal highs.
I believe there would be, yes... however if you legalise the 'safer' variants of most classes of drugs, the quantity of people persuing illegal highs will be significantly lower. As another poster mentioned, no one* would take "Krokodil" who could get their hands on cheap and easy Heroin.
Just legalise one or two opiates; one or two amphetamines; an entactogen or two; most of the tryptamine psychedelics; a few of the phenethylamine psychedelics... etc.
* "No one" meaning 'almost no one', since there'll always be morons.
right....because if it were all legal, people wouldn't be addicts still...
So, based on this line of thought, we should immediately outlaw alcohol, tobacco and coffee; all three substances only have very limited positive use and a high potential for harmful addiction.
The risk of addiction - hell, even the DANGER of the substance - has very little if anything to do with its legal status in most countries' legal systems.
Legalising or decriminalising various drugs may or may not reduce the number of addicts; but it WILL decrease the associated dangers that only exist because of the current legal status.
The bad effects of meth are widely known, but people still take it instead of just using marijuana.
That has nothing to do with the relative dangers of the substances and everything to do with that the 'desired effect' of the drugs are totally different. It's like saying, "the bad effects of McDonalds are widely known, but people still eat there instead of just having a raw carrot.".
I'm a relatively frequent user of psychedelics (as my post history and sig clearly show), however have absolutely no interest in marijuana, opiates, or alcohol despite having tried all of them. On rare occasions (approx. once a year) I enjoy entactogens (almost exclusively MDMA) and on very rare occasions (approx once every two to three years) will also use amphetamines, however that's more for their direct use (in helping to perform a long repetitive task without losing focus or getting tired) than for any kind of enjoyment.
The bigger problem though, is if synthetic drugs are cheaper and easier to make - they'll still appear and be sold, perhaps even disguised as the "real thing".
Usually, the synthetic drugs are much more difficult and expensive to make as they're far more chemically complex than the simpler 'traditional' recreational substances.
There are a few cases of some reasonably difficult to make drugs - such as LSD - however make one large batch and you've just created a year's supply for an entire average sized nation, so it does tend to balance out.
(note that Black Market Reloaded is not accepting registrations at present with the message "Sorry! Registrations are closed at the moment, due to needed upgrades."... I assume this is to upgrade for the potential new demand)
I was curious what was all the huss around the bit coin mining about. Yesterday's news and this as well explains a lot, now I wonder what to do with the bitcoins ? Are there any similar uses of this currency that i do not know of?
Similar uses? Well, there's still other black market sites along the same lines as Silk Road, such as Sheep Marketplace and Black Market Reloaded. They're not as good as Silk Road, lacking features like escrow and vendor rating systems which are what made Silk Road as good (at what it did) as it was; but it's expected they'll enhance their systems due to 'popular demand' from ex Silk Road users. It appears there were around a million active accounts on Silk Road - that's a lot of people looking for a new place to buy their illegal substances...
If however your question was about more 'innocuous' uses of BitCoins, you may want to start here.
For some reason it doesn't surprise me that a guy who wrote a book about LSD and self-discovery knows all about how to develop home nude photographs.
Actually, I know very little about photography in general; I just remember those old Polaroid cameras being all the rage in TV and movies from my youth. My point was simply that digital cameras certainly didn't mark the beginning of the time that people have been able to take photos without going to get the film developed.
If you make assumptions about me based on the book I wrote, you probably have a very narrow world view. Your sig may perhaps be something for you to think about in this instance.
Slashdot Mirror
I would honestly love to discuss it further with you, because you seem to be really knowledgable on the topic (probably more so than me), but I've got a business trip over the coming three days and am not really one for reviving four day old discussions on slashdot (unless you really want to, in which case, reply to this in three to four days so that it's fresh for me!). I could have written out a quick off-the-cuff reply now, but I think I'd prefer to actually sit and think about my answers with you on this topic, which I sadly just don't have the time for right now.
As for your OT comment to my homepage link (and also sig) - I would strongly disagree with your friend. People who like to really examine things both deeply as well as broadly (thinking around all aspects of a topic), which it seems you are, are exactly the kind of people who should try LSD at some point in their lives (preferably in the right kind of environment and frame of mind of course... hence the topic of my book)
For the most part I agree, however, a nit pick I have with your line of thinking is that there's some arbitrary distinction between islam and islamist extremeism. True islam demands extreemeism from its subjects.
While I agree that true Islam demands extremism, I would also argue that true Christianity does as well. It just happens that Christian extremists are not quite as common (or perhaps not quite as vocal or noticeable if they are) as Islamic extremists at this particular point in history.
Western notion of moderation do not really apply.
I know quite a few people who describe themselves as 'Muslim' but pay very little attention other than observing a few things here and there because "that's the way they were brought up". To me, these are about the same as the lip-service Christians who go to church once or twice a year, don't pray, don't really examine the tenets of their religion and so forth but nevertheless profess to be 'Christian' (these are very common; my wife is (unfortunately) one of them).
Not withstanding the well know quote from a certain A Hitler about being born a catholic and dieing as one ?
While his religion is certainly debated, I personally believe that this quote and the evidence does point towards him being religious...
I'm not quite sure if you misread my post though - you seem to be backing up my point (that I don't think it is true that atheists have slaughtered more than religious folks have), but in a way that sounds like you're disagreeing. Sorry if I misinterpreted though.
In the last century Atheists slaughtered more people than Christians and Muslims combined, so there's that.
Whether true or not (actually, I don't think it is) it's also totally irrelevant to my point. Those people were for the most part not slaughtered "in the name of atheism". It seems quite certain that more people have been slaughtered 'for believing something different to the thing the slaughterer believes' than 'for believing something when the slaughterer has no religious belief'.
Or to quote Steven Weinberg:
Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
Following the " *noun* enables people to kill people" argument it just makes sense that we should start banning nouns. Obviously it's the nouns fault.
I'm not entirely sure you even read my post... or if you did, you read a hell of a lot in to it that I didn't write.
I never said "religion should be banned", nor did I say "religion enables people to kill people" (I did say "religion can motivate people to kill people" though... the difference being quite an important one)
Any religion which encourages its followers to murder people simply for expressing opposing opinions *is* worse than any religion that doesn't do that. So I think you're wrong - there is something inherent in 21st century Islam that makes it worse than many other 21st century religions.
If you think that was my argument, then you're right to call it wrong. I agree with you 100%.
That however was not my argument. My argument was that both Christianity and Islam in general and according to their own beliefs are equally as bad. The way it is practiced in the 21st century shows a clear difference; however there are passages in the Bible that could (and have been in the past) interpreted to also mean that followers of it should murder non-Christians. This interpretation isn't actually a particularly larger leap than the passages in the Qur'an that are used to justify the same behaviour.
No, one must simply not conflate the religion of the perpetrators with the act, as if they are one and the same thing.
I agree that one should not conflate the religion of the perpetrators with the act; however it is an important point to make if the act was performed in the name of the religion (regardless of what the majority of believers think).
If a Christian man kills someone because he was pissed off at work, bringing his religion in to the discussion is irrelevant. If however a Christian man kills someone because "God told him to", then bringing his religion in to the discussion is very relevant.
It would be wrong to say that "Christianity promotes killing" (based on this event alone), however it would NOT be wrong to say that "Christianity can be used as an excuse or reason to kill", because it quite clearly was so.
There are a lot of people that are anti-Islam because of the acts of a number of Islamic extremists. The religion itself (from my atheist perspective) is about equally as dangerous and violent as Christianity. There certainly are people that use it to justify violence towards others and there is a strong community ethic bound to the religion that brings other people in to commit the same acts when they previously might not have.
Christianity is currently going through a 'reasonably quiet' period as far as violence goes (although definitely not completely quiet) but history (even relatively recent history) shows that it's not always so. There's nothing inherent in Islam that makes it any better or worse.
The problem is that if you can take something so 'directly said' as being metaphor, then you can essentially pick and choose any part of the text to be metaphor the moment it disagrees with reality. By doing this, you no longer have a text with any meaning whatsoever.
If you don't do this and have pre-decided that 'these parts are metaphor', 'these other parts aren't'; then would you change your beliefs when a part that you believed to be statement of fact is proved wrong?
When has with holding information 'ever' been the right move?
That depends on the kind of withholding, the period of it and the type of information. I withhold information from the public such as my bank card's PIN, my password, and so on.
I think it's at the very least an arguable case as to whether these researchers should withhold this. By releasing it, there would be a non-zero danger that it would be used for harm with little to no positive gain. The exact value of this non-zero danger vs the value of the positive gain is what they likely thought about before making the decision.
Whether you agree or disagree with their decision, surely you must see the merit in this kind of evaluation?
Oh really? When someone quits tobacco, alcohol, or caffeine do they exhibit physical withdrawal symptoms such as agitation, anxiety, muscle aches, Increased tearing, Insomnia, runny nose, sweating, yawning, abdominal cramping, diarrhea, dilated pupils, goose bumps, nausea, and vomiting? Nope, they only get that with heroin. Nicotine, alcohol, and caffeine are not nearly as physically addictive as any opiate or cocaine.
While it's true the physical withdrawal symptoms of heroin are pretty bad, that's not actually a good indicator of the addictiveness. People don't (only) fail to quit or avoid quitting a substance because they can't handle the withdrawal, they do so because they 'feel they need' the substance - that's what addiction is.
That aside, these other substances aren't without their withdrawal symptoms as well:
Also note that the symptoms you listed for heroin withdrawal are 'worst case' - not everyone goes through that, just as many alcoholics can quit without all of the nasty symptoms I just listed.
Psychedelic psychotherapy is an interesting new field... combining it with online therapy might make for some interesting experiences!
(honestly yes, I am joking... please don't take that as a serious suggestion)
I was HOPING in this second part, he'd say something new; but in essence it seems his entire argument comes down to various themes of "targeted advertising (online) is cheap and therefore anyone can and will advertise anything and you can't trust it".
Is that really it, or did I miss some insight as his voice made me doze off?
Your slashdot sig is not an advertisement. Your using the same misconception as girlintraining.
All advertising is communication for the purposes of marketing.
Honestly, my slashdot sig is an advertisement. It is exactly for the purposes you describe. Specifically to "encourage an audience (slashdot readers) to take a specific action (buy my book)". I am marketing my book through my sig (amongst other methods of course).
This is what I meant when I said you were either building up a strawman or using a no-true-scotsman fallacy. If you define advertising as being something very specific that no one else uses as the definition, then you can make any claims you like about it. However as that's not the commonly understood definition, it's only going to misdirect people hearing/reading your statements to think you mean something else.
I have never seen advertising that contained a shred of truth.
I challenge you to find a single lie in the advertisement that constitutes my slashdot sig or even the Amazon web page it links to.
Once you have a tighter definition of just what advertising is , it's clear that he is absolutely correct. All advertising is indeed harmful, because all advertising contains only manipulative content devoid of any real truth. In fact, dissemination of truth is the last purpose of advertising.
With this argument you're either building up a strawman or using a no-true-scotsman fallacy (too early to tell, but could be both). A lot of advertising is manipulative content devoid of any real truth, but that's not the definition of advertising. It's fair enough to say that advertising that falls in to this category is harmful, however - even if that were 99.999% of advertising which exists (which I doubt) - that still does not say that advertising itself is always harmful.
You know what else is great for discovering products? Asking knowledgable people with no financial interest in my decision.
My sig is an ad. It's advertising a book I wrote. Let's look at a couple of hypothetical where I decided not to ever advertise it.
1) Let's say you're interested in the subject of Self-Discovery through psychedelics, but you're unsure what good books there are on the topic. You Google around and find.... a couple of Amazon links to books written a long time ago that other people have finally written reviews for. Do you find my book? Not likely. No one has ever heard of it so no one ever wrote anything about it. It's there on Amazon, but so far down in the list that unless you were searching for it specifically it won't come up.
Why is this a bad thing? Why should my book get advertised and get some priority? Well, because it's new and it might be better than other existing works on the topic. You'll never know if you don't get a chance to ever even know it exists.
2) You're a psychologist but have somehow never come across the idea of psychedelic assisted psychotherapy during your studies. "Recreational drugs" have never really interested you, so you never specifically go searching online for anything to do with them. The chances of you ever hearing about my book are very slim. As it turns out though, psychologists who have never heard of psychedelic assisted psychotherapy are exactly the kind of people who may be very interested in my book, as it gives them a wealth of information that they can then use as a starting point for further investigation in to the subject.
So yes, I have a financial interest in your decision of whether to buy my book or not, and I'm advertising it with the specific hope that people buy it and give me money. However the alternative would be that my book sales remain at near zero forever and I wasted a lot of time writing it. I never wrote it to get rich - I wrote it because I'm passionate and knowledgable about the subject and want to spread that knowledge to others. The money from it is nice to have and I feel it's only fair to compensate me for my work, so I won't give it away for free to everyone (also 'free books' are usually not viewed as well by large subsets of my target audience) but it still is a secondary motivation to the desire for my book to be read.
I think it depends on what is being advertised and the method of targeting.
You (and Mr Marti) make a point, but I think it's only a point against one of the very common forms of targeted advertising that exists today.
In your first example, they don't know you bought the windscreen wipers, so they keep advertising them to you and it's useless to both you and them. In your second example, they're targeting to you for the wrong products based on incomplete information about you. These are problems with the implementation, not the concept.
As per my sig, I recently launched my first book. My sig is an example of nontargeted advertising. Anyone who notices it and is interested may click on one of the links and may end up buying my book (and I thank anyone reading this who has done so or will do so!). However I don't expect it to be a particularly large generator of sales. The intersection of 'slashdot readers' and 'people interested enough in knowing more about psychedelic assisted self-discovery' is probably not very high (although hopefully greater than an empty set).
Facebook's advertising however is different. On facebook, people list their own interests. This therefore allows me to pay some money and specifically target my ads at (for example) people who 'speak English'; 'are interested in psychedelics'; and 'enjoy reading'. This way, I can be sure that my ad only appears in front of people that at least have a reasonable chance of being interested. This not only means that people who might be interested get made aware of my book, but also I don't have to worry that I'm paying for showing it to people who will absolutely never be interested in reading it.
This kind of targeted advertising makes a lot more sense to me and I have yet to see a downside.
I think that your post nicely dovetails with my overall point - there will almost certainly still be black markets even after legalization of various drugs. There will still be people pursuing illegal highs.
I believe there would be, yes... however if you legalise the 'safer' variants of most classes of drugs, the quantity of people persuing illegal highs will be significantly lower. As another poster mentioned, no one* would take "Krokodil" who could get their hands on cheap and easy Heroin.
Just legalise one or two opiates; one or two amphetamines; an entactogen or two; most of the tryptamine psychedelics; a few of the phenethylamine psychedelics... etc.
* "No one" meaning 'almost no one', since there'll always be morons.
Does a shovel, when used as intended by the seller cause anyone harm?
Depends on the seller's intention... generally not, but maybe.
Does a knife, when used as intended by the seller cause anyone harm?
Depends on the seller's intention... generally not, but maybe.
Does heroin, when used as intended by the seller cause anyone harm?
Depends on the seller's intention... generally not, but maybe.
Drug dealers usually don't want to harm or kill their customers. It tends to reduce repeat business...
right....because if it were all legal, people wouldn't be addicts still...
So, based on this line of thought, we should immediately outlaw alcohol, tobacco and coffee; all three substances only have very limited positive use and a high potential for harmful addiction.
The risk of addiction - hell, even the DANGER of the substance - has very little if anything to do with its legal status in most countries' legal systems.
Legalising or decriminalising various drugs may or may not reduce the number of addicts; but it WILL decrease the associated dangers that only exist because of the current legal status.
The bad effects of meth are widely known, but people still take it instead of just using marijuana.
That has nothing to do with the relative dangers of the substances and everything to do with that the 'desired effect' of the drugs are totally different. It's like saying, "the bad effects of McDonalds are widely known, but people still eat there instead of just having a raw carrot.".
I'm a relatively frequent user of psychedelics (as my post history and sig clearly show), however have absolutely no interest in marijuana, opiates, or alcohol despite having tried all of them. On rare occasions (approx. once a year) I enjoy entactogens (almost exclusively MDMA) and on very rare occasions (approx once every two to three years) will also use amphetamines, however that's more for their direct use (in helping to perform a long repetitive task without losing focus or getting tired) than for any kind of enjoyment.
The bigger problem though, is if synthetic drugs are cheaper and easier to make - they'll still appear and be sold, perhaps even disguised as the "real thing".
Usually, the synthetic drugs are much more difficult and expensive to make as they're far more chemically complex than the simpler 'traditional' recreational substances.
There are a few cases of some reasonably difficult to make drugs - such as LSD - however make one large batch and you've just created a year's supply for an entire average sized nation, so it does tend to balance out.
(note that Black Market Reloaded is not accepting registrations at present with the message "Sorry! Registrations are closed at the moment, due to needed upgrades."... I assume this is to upgrade for the potential new demand)
I was curious what was all the huss around the bit coin mining about. Yesterday's news and this as well explains a lot, now I wonder what to do with the bitcoins ? Are there any similar uses of this currency that i do not know of?
Similar uses? Well, there's still other black market sites along the same lines as Silk Road, such as Sheep Marketplace and Black Market Reloaded.
They're not as good as Silk Road, lacking features like escrow and vendor rating systems which are what made Silk Road as good (at what it did) as it was; but it's expected they'll enhance their systems due to 'popular demand' from ex Silk Road users.
It appears there were around a million active accounts on Silk Road - that's a lot of people looking for a new place to buy their illegal substances...
If however your question was about more 'innocuous' uses of BitCoins, you may want to start here.
For some reason it doesn't surprise me that a guy who wrote a book about LSD and self-discovery knows all about how to develop home nude photographs.
Actually, I know very little about photography in general; I just remember those old Polaroid cameras being all the rage in TV and movies from my youth. My point was simply that digital cameras certainly didn't mark the beginning of the time that people have been able to take photos without going to get the film developed.
If you make assumptions about me based on the book I wrote, you probably have a very narrow world view. Your sig may perhaps be something for you to think about in this instance.
"So in the "olden days" i.e. pre-cheap digital cameras, nudey pictures were very rare."
They weren't "very rare". They were just mainly confined to those who had their own darkrooms.
Or anyone who had one of these...