Relative compared to what? MDMA is fine when nothing goes wrong, but the injury rate among users is pretty high. While it is true you generally do not see overdosing, that is not the end all and be all of side effects. MDMA can have some pretty long term neurological consequences, which is why more often then not (with exceptions) the people claiming it is safe are young and still in their 'indestructible' phase, meaning they are not old enough to have seen what it does to people they know.
Though short term, even strait MDMA can kill you, it just is not an 'overdose'. It is kinda like chloroform, statistically it is fine more often then not, but the 'effective' and 'toxic' doses are in the same range, so it is just a roll of the dice.
The legal market for opium derived recreation does not really 'meet the demand.' What the person is suggesting is a regulated recreational market, not a medical one. Very different beasts.
There are lots of things that will never be stopped, but that does not mean the fight against them is valueless.
It should also be noted that just because there is a demand for something, people attempting to meet it should not automatically be lauded and the fight against it should not simply be written off as 'but people want it!'.
Like many things, it has never been about 'stopping' it, measly trying to reduce things and the harm they do. That is not to say there is not a huge area for discussing what things should be on that list and what things should not, but one is still a fool if they believe that they can make millions off the disconnect and not get in trouble.
Yeah, somehow 'death of defenseless creature' as entertainment feels really crummy. Even if one is an omnivore and allows for use of animal products in their ethical framework, the idea of doing something that gruesome 'for the fun of it' can still cross lines.
What generally happens is that as a channel becomes successful in its niche it gets just big enough to attract the type of executives who think they can make a name for themselves by turning a 'niche' channel into a 'success'. Often this is a product of individuals trying to advance their careers at the cost of the company rather then a company wanting to be more profitable.
Right there you have a good justification, we started with speech yes but we have expanded communication so far beyond that already. We have the written word, we have pictures, we have video, we have music, history is filled with people trying to figure out how to communicate more to each other. Imagine what this type of thing could do for communication, you could teach people physical skills by moving their limbs around rather then depending on language or vision to explain motions. An even greater possiblity is what it might be like to actually convey feelings, something that historiclally we have only ever had ourselves as a single base point to guess at others with.
I don't know, this sounds pretty 'direct' to me since it is sending raw signals into the brain rather then using any of our existing specialized sense organs. The only way it could be more direct is if you started sticking spikes in people's heads or removed parts of their skull and sorts slapped two people's raw exposed brainmeats together.
As for 'millions of dollars', I am guessing you have never worked in University research. These projects tend to be very shoestring when it comes to budget.
Even that can get obnoxious. For instance, it is unlikely here anyone needs to have Microsoft or Intel explained to them. What companies will be instantly recognizable to the community is not always obvious and you do not want to assume that everything needs to be explained.
That was my initial thought too. Each language and framework within the language seems to have developed its own developer culture, with people generally gravitating towards languages popular among others like themselves. I am not even sure if it is really 'personality type' of the individuals, but instead seems more likely to be the cultural norms within the developer community and what the 'right' balances when it comes to acceptable practices and such.
Oh I agree there is a place for both, but I think it is important to not confuse one for the other. My original premise was that they guy and his company is kinda a nothing. A star within a narrow, mostly online community, but I question if he is even on the radar of government officials.
As for the era of being able to ban things coming to an end? Not really. I think a lot of people in that community tend to confuse the ease of breaking a law being equivalent to the law being unenforceable. You see this a lot in BTC rhetoric, the idea that because it makes payments hard to track it makes taxes go away and money laundering fine, but in general bans and enforcement are not rooted in tracking every single source. They are enforced via getting caught, usually due to some other investigation.
For instance, if this tech gets good enough, sure you can build more and more stuff at home, but if you build things that are illegal and something goes wrong or you commit another crime, you will probably get in trouble for that too. One current example would be conversion of semi-automatic weapons to fully automatic. You are not supposed to do it, you can physically do it at home, but if you get caught with a converted rifle you still get arrested even though they had no dragnet checking every home to see what people were building.
Another fun example is that kid who built a breeder reactor in his shed. The raw materials were all (ok, with some exceptions) legally sourced and he did all the work himself. Anyone can do it, but we are not living in a time where bans on home fission reactors simply went 'poof' or are impossible to enforce.
I think there is a certain techie appeal to the dragnet imagry, it is a very technological problem with very technological solutions. Humans on the ground investigating crimes on the other hand, is much softer and the solutions to that are not nearly as sexy.
Enforcing contracts is part of the FTC's job. Butterfly labs took payment in exchange for goods and services they did not deliver, thus they are essentially holding on to assets they do not own. The market might decide future sales, but for past ones, the market does not really have a mechanism for that. This is where the legal framework comes into play. Someone steals your stuff, the state can get it back.
To be fair, editors have to take guesses at what is going to be common knowledge in the readership vs things that need to be explicitly stated. It is not always an easy thing to get right, and always erring on the side of explaining is its own problem.
If one is going to be generous, they could also be thought of as people who had honest intentions but got in WAY over their heads.
In a completely different industry, you see this basic pattern with people on Ravelry who try to dip into selling yarn they spin. Sometimes you will get people who honestly want to do it but just don't have the skills or resources to deal with the project they take on. They work hard, things start to fall apart, they panic, and then the PR mess starts.
They were one of the early companies making ASIC Bitcoin rigs and had a bit of a reputation for long delayed delivery, often to the point the rigs could not make the money back.
The thing about equal protection is, weak groups tend to need a bit more protection then strong ones. Strong groups generally can protect themselves and do not benefit nearly as much from the scraps of help others get.
It is also not a zero sum game. Believe it or not, a society of 300+ million people can both address 2nd amendment issues AND civil rights. The classic argument of 'we shouldn't do anything about XYZ issue I do not care about until ABC issue I do is completely settled!' is just another way of never getting around to XYZ.
While I can acknowledge that goal, I still put that more in the 'hype' box. For the foreseeable future at least the solutions he is working on generally require greater skill and resources then the more traditional methods for producing home firearms. It is kinda like the people working on laser pistols and DIY coil guns, yeah they work and do not count as 'weapons' under federal law, and yeah you can build them at home, but outside the naughty little high of building such devices, they really do not actually add much to the day to day reality of things. Maybe some day some new materials or tools will come out that actually does result in no-skill DIY firearms, but until then they are just philosophical points and that is about it.
That is a general problem yes, but the question is if they care enough to actually exert pressure to stop processors from working with this specific company. Cody Wilson's main product is hype and attention, he and his supporters have a seriously inflated sense of importance and persecution. They ramp up the rhetoric to make his stuff sound more influential then it actually is, when all he has really done is repeat what people have been doing for decades, but doing it worse.
If the government does end up cracking down on his cluster of companies it will be his own stupid fault for producing the hype and someone with regulatory authority actually buying into it.
He did early on, and that was one of his biggest mistakes. In diplomacy if you have two parties, one willing to compromise to reach a goal and the other who's goal is to not compromise, the former's actions are simply interpreted as weakness and set the stage for the rest of the negotiation. This is probably a good example of why he was not the right person for the job, he was too idealistic and was simply no prepared for the games involved.
I think the libertarian program is that private power is ok as long as it is being used the 'right' way. As soon as it is being used the 'wrong' way it is somehow the government's fault behind the scenes, or the private power is simply a traitor to freedom.
More importantly, the image of being able to 'rise against tyranny' with arms means you do not have to have popular support for your revolution. Weapons are a force multiplier, you need fewer people to accomplish your goal if they are armed. So instead of getting the support of a thousand residents, all you need is 20 armed ones. It allows new minorities to picture themselves in charge instead of that pesky majority that refuses to put the revolutionaries' priorities ahead of their own.
Slashdot Mirror
Relative compared to what? MDMA is fine when nothing goes wrong, but the injury rate among users is pretty high. While it is true you generally do not see overdosing, that is not the end all and be all of side effects. MDMA can have some pretty long term neurological consequences, which is why more often then not (with exceptions) the people claiming it is safe are young and still in their 'indestructible' phase, meaning they are not old enough to have seen what it does to people they know.
Though short term, even strait MDMA can kill you, it just is not an 'overdose'. It is kinda like chloroform, statistically it is fine more often then not, but the 'effective' and 'toxic' doses are in the same range, so it is just a roll of the dice.
The legal market for opium derived recreation does not really 'meet the demand.' What the person is suggesting is a regulated recreational market, not a medical one. Very different beasts.
There are lots of things that will never be stopped, but that does not mean the fight against them is valueless.
It should also be noted that just because there is a demand for something, people attempting to meet it should not automatically be lauded and the fight against it should not simply be written off as 'but people want it!'.
Like many things, it has never been about 'stopping' it, measly trying to reduce things and the harm they do. That is not to say there is not a huge area for discussing what things should be on that list and what things should not, but one is still a fool if they believe that they can make millions off the disconnect and not get in trouble.
Yeah, somehow 'death of defenseless creature' as entertainment feels really crummy. Even if one is an omnivore and allows for use of animal products in their ethical framework, the idea of doing something that gruesome 'for the fun of it' can still cross lines.
You know, if the anaconda ends up being CGI or paper mache, THAT might actually be worth watching!
What generally happens is that as a channel becomes successful in its niche it gets just big enough to attract the type of executives who think they can make a name for themselves by turning a 'niche' channel into a 'success'. Often this is a product of individuals trying to advance their careers at the cost of the company rather then a company wanting to be more profitable.
Right there you have a good justification, we started with speech yes but we have expanded communication so far beyond that already. We have the written word, we have pictures, we have video, we have music, history is filled with people trying to figure out how to communicate more to each other. Imagine what this type of thing could do for communication, you could teach people physical skills by moving their limbs around rather then depending on language or vision to explain motions. An even greater possiblity is what it might be like to actually convey feelings, something that historiclally we have only ever had ourselves as a single base point to guess at others with.
I don't know, this sounds pretty 'direct' to me since it is sending raw signals into the brain rather then using any of our existing specialized sense organs. The only way it could be more direct is if you started sticking spikes in people's heads or removed parts of their skull and sorts slapped two people's raw exposed brainmeats together.
As for 'millions of dollars', I am guessing you have never worked in University research. These projects tend to be very shoestring when it comes to budget.
Even that can get obnoxious. For instance, it is unlikely here anyone needs to have Microsoft or Intel explained to them. What companies will be instantly recognizable to the community is not always obvious and you do not want to assume that everything needs to be explained.
That was my initial thought too. Each language and framework within the language seems to have developed its own developer culture, with people generally gravitating towards languages popular among others like themselves. I am not even sure if it is really 'personality type' of the individuals, but instead seems more likely to be the cultural norms within the developer community and what the 'right' balances when it comes to acceptable practices and such.
Oh I agree there is a place for both, but I think it is important to not confuse one for the other. My original premise was that they guy and his company is kinda a nothing. A star within a narrow, mostly online community, but I question if he is even on the radar of government officials.
As for the era of being able to ban things coming to an end? Not really. I think a lot of people in that community tend to confuse the ease of breaking a law being equivalent to the law being unenforceable. You see this a lot in BTC rhetoric, the idea that because it makes payments hard to track it makes taxes go away and money laundering fine, but in general bans and enforcement are not rooted in tracking every single source. They are enforced via getting caught, usually due to some other investigation.
For instance, if this tech gets good enough, sure you can build more and more stuff at home, but if you build things that are illegal and something goes wrong or you commit another crime, you will probably get in trouble for that too. One current example would be conversion of semi-automatic weapons to fully automatic. You are not supposed to do it, you can physically do it at home, but if you get caught with a converted rifle you still get arrested even though they had no dragnet checking every home to see what people were building.
Another fun example is that kid who built a breeder reactor in his shed. The raw materials were all (ok, with some exceptions) legally sourced and he did all the work himself. Anyone can do it, but we are not living in a time where bans on home fission reactors simply went 'poof' or are impossible to enforce.
I think there is a certain techie appeal to the dragnet imagry, it is a very technological problem with very technological solutions. Humans on the ground investigating crimes on the other hand, is much softer and the solutions to that are not nearly as sexy.
Enforcing contracts is part of the FTC's job. Butterfly labs took payment in exchange for goods and services they did not deliver, thus they are essentially holding on to assets they do not own. The market might decide future sales, but for past ones, the market does not really have a mechanism for that. This is where the legal framework comes into play. Someone steals your stuff, the state can get it back.
Actually this is pretty standard when dealing with non-cash assets that need to be transferred over to debt holders.
Given how previous attempts at digital currencies often were not even legally recognized as having value at all, it is still a big step.
To be fair, editors have to take guesses at what is going to be common knowledge in the readership vs things that need to be explicitly stated. It is not always an easy thing to get right, and always erring on the side of explaining is its own problem.
If one is going to be generous, they could also be thought of as people who had honest intentions but got in WAY over their heads.
In a completely different industry, you see this basic pattern with people on Ravelry who try to dip into selling yarn they spin. Sometimes you will get people who honestly want to do it but just don't have the skills or resources to deal with the project they take on. They work hard, things start to fall apart, they panic, and then the PR mess starts.
They were one of the early companies making ASIC Bitcoin rigs and had a bit of a reputation for long delayed delivery, often to the point the rigs could not make the money back.
The thing about equal protection is, weak groups tend to need a bit more protection then strong ones. Strong groups generally can protect themselves and do not benefit nearly as much from the scraps of help others get.
It is also not a zero sum game. Believe it or not, a society of 300+ million people can both address 2nd amendment issues AND civil rights. The classic argument of 'we shouldn't do anything about XYZ issue I do not care about until ABC issue I do is completely settled!' is just another way of never getting around to XYZ.
While I can acknowledge that goal, I still put that more in the 'hype' box. For the foreseeable future at least the solutions he is working on generally require greater skill and resources then the more traditional methods for producing home firearms. It is kinda like the people working on laser pistols and DIY coil guns, yeah they work and do not count as 'weapons' under federal law, and yeah you can build them at home, but outside the naughty little high of building such devices, they really do not actually add much to the day to day reality of things. Maybe some day some new materials or tools will come out that actually does result in no-skill DIY firearms, but until then they are just philosophical points and that is about it.
That is a general problem yes, but the question is if they care enough to actually exert pressure to stop processors from working with this specific company. Cody Wilson's main product is hype and attention, he and his supporters have a seriously inflated sense of importance and persecution. They ramp up the rhetoric to make his stuff sound more influential then it actually is, when all he has really done is repeat what people have been doing for decades, but doing it worse.
If the government does end up cracking down on his cluster of companies it will be his own stupid fault for producing the hype and someone with regulatory authority actually buying into it.
Not really. It has been really hyped up by a contingent of anti-obama people but outside that community it is not a terribly big issue.
He did early on, and that was one of his biggest mistakes. In diplomacy if you have two parties, one willing to compromise to reach a goal and the other who's goal is to not compromise, the former's actions are simply interpreted as weakness and set the stage for the rest of the negotiation. This is probably a good example of why he was not the right person for the job, he was too idealistic and was simply no prepared for the games involved.
I think the libertarian program is that private power is ok as long as it is being used the 'right' way. As soon as it is being used the 'wrong' way it is somehow the government's fault behind the scenes, or the private power is simply a traitor to freedom.
More importantly, the image of being able to 'rise against tyranny' with arms means you do not have to have popular support for your revolution. Weapons are a force multiplier, you need fewer people to accomplish your goal if they are armed. So instead of getting the support of a thousand residents, all you need is 20 armed ones. It allows new minorities to picture themselves in charge instead of that pesky majority that refuses to put the revolutionaries' priorities ahead of their own.
I am skeptical that the government cares enough to be exerting pressure. This is more likely the effect of media hype.