607 karma · joined February 16, 2023
(Edit: looked more in to how to calc password entropy. Luckily I'm good. Thanks a lot for this info tho.)
I'm describing a subsection of radioactivity in that sentence, not the entire scientific notion of radioactivity as dangerous....
I don't know the laws on radioactive materials well enough to speak to specifics about if too much is banned in the name of safety.
I don't struggle to understand them. They're just machiavellian. Policy makers are bought by the capitalists, sorry, the lobbyists who benefit from billions in funding to the DEA and border control and prisons - and so they are not looking for the solution that helps constituents, they're looking for what enriches them personally thru super PAC donations or LE budgets.
It's the educated voters' positions, looking at the wealth of evidence showing prohibition is a failure at best, and a moral show put on for the puritanical more realistically, that baffles me.
People like you falling for something there's pretty much infinite evidence refuting the value of. Has the war on drugs helped ANYTHING? Anyone??? Stopped anything? It's never been easier to get drugs.
On the other hand, there's plenty of evidence that shows treatment centers safe injection sites and further, reductions in poverty do more to reduce addiction than moral policing.
It's most analogous to abortion policy. Abortion isn't reduced by banning it, it's reduced by better sex ed and access to contraceptives.
So counter intuitively to the simple minded, it may seem as if "pro choice" advocates don't also want to reduce the number of abortions. When in fact, they just use reason to solve the issue rather than a fkin harry potter book written 2k years ago they take as absolute truth.
>implementation will likely be very, very slow and difficult
Agreed, but the quicker we dispel the anti scientific notion that cartels + addicts > addicts... The quicker we may see progress.
I did time for shake I didn't even know was in my car, if I wasn't wealthy and white I would probably still be in jail rather than law school. So this is personal to me. Sorry for getting so heated
To the rest of your comment, yeah I recognize we mostly agree thus I'm not even replying to you directly, I'm defending against all the other people in this thread who go "but dur addicts bad" and can't think past that when it comes to drug policy who may be reading by adding context to your comment from my pov. Sorry about that too.
It's not about being libertarian, it's more utilitarian for me. Prohibition is horrible for everyone but the ultra wealthy and dangerously criminal. I threw out every argument against prohibition kinda all together in my anger at the silliness from engineers on a forum I respect.
There's the math, it's cheaper to sell them taxed drugs and use that money to help addicts than unsuccessful policing, it's more moral than allowing cartels to operate, more humane, etc. There's no argument against it other than being moral police. Prohibition does not do anything other than filter money to waste on cartels and law enforcement.
>Oxycontin being sold by multiple vendors competing in potency and price and selling their wares at Wal Mart
Again, from my very first comment on this thread I've never suggested limitless legal use. Daily limits, licensed taxed sellers only, could even have a licensing system. For the harder stuff could make counseling a requirement or something.
>How would the US look like if literally anyone could walk in a nearby store and buy Oxycontin practically at will?
More addicts than now is the answer you're looking for, and I'd agree if all we did was legalize drugs. but seriously consider my side for a minute. I do not want to stop at legalizing.
Consider the benefit of nearly limitless funding for rehab and counseling and other sociologically sound ways to reduce addiction. 5% of global trade $ wise cartels are responsible for. All that money turned to rehab. And you think we'd end up with MORE addicts?
I am seriously struggling to see how that even sounds logical to you.
Not to mention as a socialist I'd argue the real root cause of addiction is an alienation from our labor and the fruits of our labor. Ie: fix poverty, fix most fixable addiction.
The real thrust of my original comment was any harm legalized drugs would do is less than what the war on drugs/cartels do. And frankly you have to be an idiot to suggest some addicts AND the cartels are worse than just the addicts.
1. Who said unconstrained. I sure as hell didn't. I literally said taxed (licensed) facility that has daily limits.... So...shadow boxing.
2. No one said they didn't. Shadow boxing again. For the fifth time in this thread, I ask any of you engineers, please, just briefly try to remember your sociology elective.
Do you think drug cartels and the racist war on drugs (minorities get locked up for longer for same crimes) have a higher or lower cost to society than measured licensed legal use that funds treatment centers and clean injection sites would have?
Do I really think international 12 digit valued drug cartels are a worse outcome for society than allowing adults to buy the substances at a taxed store where the money goes to pay for addict treatment and rehabilitation??? You can't be serious. Don't you? If you don't I'll call you a blind man and useful idiot.
People here do not read my comment because I advocate for something that hurts their little sanctimonious puritanical brains. Would swear you lot are Mr mackey. Nothing more material than "drugs r bad mkay. Addicts bad mkay." Stick to STEM i guess. Sociology isn't for you.
>How about prohibition of possessing and manufacturing radioactive materials?
Yeah, radioactivity that harms everyone around the material is def the same as me getting high in my house after work and playing a video game. Definitely arguing in good faith innit. The drug discussion makes people like you so damn silly and childish it's crazy
The question I have for you is, is anything addicts do to themselves society whomever, worse than what drug cartels do to it? Fuck. No. I'd rather have addicts than international drug cartels with hundreds of billions of $, any day of the week. Not to mention we have tons of addicts NOW. The war on drugs does not solve addicts.
You know what does? Treatment/rehab centers funded by taxes. If only there was some way we could fund them tho.... Crazy to me you lot just ignore the damage the war on drugs does "bc addicts bro". As if we don't have addicts now. So idiotic.
I ask again, a cost greater than the impotent war on drugs and the cartel violence? I say of course not. I'd rather have some addicts in rehab centers than drug cartels with 5% of the global economy, and frankly I question the judgement of anyone who can't do that math.
At this point It's a way to funnel money that could go to addiction treatment to the DEA, money going to an unwinnable war to control adults who are going to do what they want.
5% of the global economy in the black market we could take from criminals and turn it towards the social good. Instead of violent cartels that will serve the need no matter what we could have taxed businesses with daily limits. "But ppl will do bad things". Tell me how that's worth the cost of the war on drugs? Shocking position. Please explain it to me how what cartels do is worth your desire to be sanctimonious??
The only thing we have to do to get huge financial and social benefits is give up your frankly childish notion that we should control uncontrollable substances and police adults in something that in most cases harms no one. Police adults who commit crimes on substances extra. Let adults make their own choices otherwise. The war on drugs and anyone still supporting it as a way of doing anything but throwing money in a fire pit are a joke.
This is a pretty common scam among neoliberals that I don't know how it's still a mystery to people. "Dur freedum markets good!" or whatever populist lies to get elected then crank up subsidies to your friends. A tale as old as time.
Right up there with "defund state institutions and then point to their dilapidated state as evidence of their inherent failure". Nhs in the uk for an easy example.
You mean at the risk of sounding like an anti semite???? You are mentally ill if you think that is relevant. Please seek mental help.
It's the worse than the previous gilded age inequality causing all this despair that drives people to cope in increasingly self and society damaging ways, surely. Look a little further than porn. Porn (to that level) is a self administered medicine for the sick, not the disease.
The disease is despair. As a socialist I'd argue that despair is primarily caused by alienation from our labor and the fruits of that labor. For decades now we've seen X% increases in productivity increase our bosses wages X%, not decrease the amount of work we have to do to earn the same money, or make more money ourselves.
We see an increasing share of society confident our jobs provide no value. Porn drugs gambling over eating all the addictions are an attempt to quell despair.
And can we really be surprised a world where 3 own more wealth than the bottom 50% combined[1], is abundant in despair?
>at one point he did seek mental health treatment, failed to find it, and consoled himself with...porn
You say near as much here, to my ears.
>low cost of consumption
You're really on to something here though. It definitely is the easiest vice to consume. Like imagine if heroin were free in infinite amounts out of your computer I imagine a lot more people would become junkies.
>for some people, it really can be as bad as Texas claims.
And here too really on to something. This is a bar, if cleared, we deem acceptable and actionable. One we can and do warn all users for , look no further than cigarette packaging. Really interesting stuff here for something I never gave much thought to past blind rejection as ridiculous.
[1] In the united states
[0] https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/op-eds/obamas-ope...
No, crypto is pseudonymous, not anonymous. The whole point of cryptos that aren't monero is that every transaction ever is visible to everyone all the time. That's the point. Not one central person keeping the ledger of transactions, but everyone so everyone can verify. So no, explicitly the entire system relies on absolute traceability for every dollar in the system, from provenance as a mining reward to its current owner.
There are ways to maintain anonymity in this environment, zero knowledge maths, mixers like tornado cash, but as far as basic systems, the absolute opposite is true.
No they wouldn't, how naive are you? they'd get fined a small fraction of the amounts they likely earned for the crime. [1,2,3] + 10 others from one bing search.
[1]https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/jul/21/drug-cartels-b...
[2]https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/apr/03/us-bank-mexico...
[3]https://money.cnn.com/2018/02/08/news/rabobank-mexico-drug-m...
Literally any time/where I would use a translate app that speaks the target language???? Personally, like you, I don't care if it sounds like my voice, but is it really hard to imagine someone who might?
Are you "pretending" to speak other languages when you communicate across any translation layer? Could help one learn what their voice might sound like in a language or maybe on discord there's a layer so we can all hop in to any language discord, speak, and everyone hears us in their native language. No more robotic translator voice or whatever friction exists as is.
Are you named like that because your brain is powered by an early llm?
Re govt distrust, not uniformly. As my older leftist friends remind me they grew up in a time were they thought anything was possible for their government to do, with enough protest they could get the civil rights act, the voting act, the infrastructure spending , etc with all their dreams on the horizon. Then a few people got a little too loud about ending poverty and other more ""radical"" progressive stuff and got killed for it. But it is possible, we've just been beat down for 50 years by neoliberal austerity politics.
Very interesting stuff re SSL. Any book recommendations you might have on the history of stuff like that? How security standards manifested and became adopted? from https to aes to pgp I vaguely know about all these things but would love to read more. I thoroughly enjoyed chip wars and master switch and stuff in that vein.
In practice, I agree with your conclusion as the likely course of action.
One side : use our immense wealth as the richest nation on earth to provide basic services to all citizens by maybe taxing billionaires so they only have 1/10 b instead of 100.
Other side: if you're poor, it's your fault. Get fucked.
Laughable you can consider those two positions in any way comparable or equitable. Absolutely silly the enlightened centrism I'm seeing here. Gross and dishonest to even pretend like there's more than one viable non ecology destroying, democracy preserving political position in the us.
Stop obsessing over what marxists think of profit, consider what they want to do with the wealth they redistribute. Make all our lives better for literally zero quality in life change for the rich who we'd tax. Tell me who's going to have any discernible decrease in quality of life if wealth was capped at 1b or 10 vs infinite and I'll call you a silly little child.
what really makes me see red is the fact that how we do healthcare is worse, more expensive, and less helpful than were it given to all, and STILL, people vote against universal health care. The only benefit to our system as yet is its ability to enrich a few rent seeking billionaires in the middle of us and our doctors. But because crab in a bucket Billy Joe in rural kansas "don't wanna pay for sum un elses helfcare". Evil, stupid, individualistic self harming fucking animals we are in the US. Barbarians to let our citizens in the richest country in the world go bankrupt because they got sick. Evil.
Joking aside I imagine taking licenses away are a big part of it, but that doesn't stop them from driving, at least the license plate warns the rest of us not to drive too close to the guy.
As I've commented before, the things we all consume could be produced more ecologically, at the cost of reduced profits. Which will never happen unless through legislation.
>My purchasing choices (or lack thereof) will have far more impact on co² reduction than my vote
Agree to disagree here. Heard of the EPA? What purchase can you make that has anywhere near the impact of an institution like that? (Before it was regulatory captured...)
>there isn't a single candidate, let alone party, that is going to do a damn thing about it
Patently false. Plenty has been done research and legislation wise, but since there isn't enough support to get stuff like the green new deal passed, what are we do to? Oh, elect more politicians that DO support it? Think i mentioned something like that...
>If being close to carbon neutral does nothing more than let me say "I did my best, so I'm not gonna beat myself up", them so be it
Again, not saying you should stop, just saying a conscientious actor might feel even better if you did a notably more effective action, and it might do a lot more for climate change to boot.
> I could do as I please and not worry about my conscience!
Another misrepresentation of my stance. I am not suggesting that, I'm simply suggesting political action is a much more efficacious approach. The fact you believe not a single politician cares about climate change is a depressing and inaccurate stance that does explain your position though, as much as I disagree with it.
>A lot of stuff will become green when energy and transport is green.
Exactly, which is why we should utilize regulation to tip the economic scales of profitability in different methods of energy production... And other such legislative tools we can use to incentivize such transitions... All of which relies not on "paper straws" but on concerted political action.