PixelB

>>Additionally, people can opt not to participate with an insurance company (or at least they used to be able to), so they have some motivation to be efficient and provide a basically decent level of service.

You have the same backwards concept of Healthcare as everyone else who is rich; it's only for me. Healthcare is for everyone, it is a right. It is not a privilege that you only get if you can afford it. Health insurance is THE PROBLEM.

If you don't have car insurance, you might be financially strained. If you don't have flood/fire insurance, you could loose your stuff. If you don't have health insurance (in this country) you could die. If you think these things are the same, there is no hope.

The primary function of insurance companies is to make a profit and serve their investors. These are publicly traded companies and only care about making that dollar; in this case, they make money by denying people healthcare and business is booming. Aetna for example has seen a 400% jump in their stock prices in the last 5 years.[1]

You really do sound like you work for the insurance industry, claiming their functions are necessary (even though every other country manages without them). Also, government run healthcare is bad because they are going to shoot people (or threaten to) and put them in jail for not paying their medical bills? Come on.. are you serious?

>>Personally, I feel that the government's tactic of taking someone's freedom for refusal to participate is much worse than refusing coverage, which is what the private companies do.

Oh fuck right the fuck off. The government does not throw people in jail for not having health insurance or if they can not afford it. Refusing/denying coverage KILLS PEOPLE. You sound like someone who's got it made (so screw everyone else right?), and doesn't give 2 shits about anyone but themselves.

[1]http://money.cnn.com/quote/quote.html?symb=AET

>I'm strongly in favor of legalization, but I still believe Cannabis is dangerous (just like alcohol, tobacco and countless other legal drugs are).

Oh, well if you "believe" it is dangerous. What's the LD50 on Cannabis vs alcohol, tobacco and countless other legal drugs? How many people die per year from Cannabis use vs other drugs? If you actually look at these questions with an open mind you will see which are really dangerous.

>It's a well known fact that it can trigger psychosis in susceptible persons and I have even witnessed it happen to a close friend.

It's not a "well known fact" because you saw it happen to someone once, not even mentioning their psychosis could have been triggered by a million different other things.

>It also had hugely detrimental effects on some of my weed-smoking friends, to the point that I no longer want to spend time with them since it affected their personality. I also know people who smoke it daily without any (visible) negative effects whatsoever..

All I get out of this is "some of my former friends act differently now so I don't hang out with them", which is like.. most people with or without drugs. I doubt you followed them all around 24-7 to see what their issues were, easier for you to just blame the drugs, as it were.

We have plenty of energy supply in the system, we need to optimize our distribution.

We only use about 39% of the electricity we generate. I know that seems strange, but it's true.

https://c1cleantechnicacom-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/files/201...

Keep the humidity in mind if you do this. Out in Saudi it is the desert so evaporative cooling works outstanding. Where I am the humidity often gets up to 100% overnight so you would just be sleeping with a soggy warm sheet all night.

You hit the nail on the head, pure research is not a profitable activity. This is why we can't trust companies and corporations to research.. their motives are almost always profit driven. This only underlines the importance of government funded research, and the need to have a government in place who is willing to put the advancement of our society over their own personal gain (We don't have that right now..).

This is why these corporations lobby/fight so hard to keep the prison industry private. Their profits are obscene, and the only way to keep themselves profitable is to ensure a steady supply of slaves ahem I mean "criminals". The more people we put in jail the better it is for these companies.

Can you imagine that? Your company profits off of human misery, suffering, and destroying families/lives. I hope hell exists..

Get rid of private prisons, period. You can even keep the same business model except instead of the profits going to a corporation, the system is run as a non-profit government entity and the workers are actually paid a fair wage.

As it is right now, we have slaves working to enrich CEOs, board members and investors.

The US seems to be experiencing more and more instances of "desperate" people in all senses. Desperate for jobs, healthcare, food, shelter, happiness.

>>it's better than working inside in a factory, it gives them skills for when they get out.

That argument starts to fall apart when you think about it: The skills they are gaining are only applicable to an industry that is unsustainable outside of slave labor.

Luckily, most people don't think about it and just take what they read at face value.

Mostly MDMA, LSD. To a lesser extent weed (harder to transport), coke, heroin, etc.

They do have actual bad things on these sites as well, such as the aforementioned weapons and people, but this is the subsection that we actually SHOULD be going after.

As far as how much; not much. As one other user had posted, one of these illicit markets represents approximately 1/150,000th of the world market. It is a non-issue that the government spends a lot of money on for the purpose of visibility and increased funding (Look at us! We busted the bad guys! We're doing good! Give us more money!).

Yes no longer will we have to fear the hordes of hippies high on goopballs eating our babies and raping our pets!

Your arguments are so baseless and outright ignorant that when I attempt to think about a counter it just makes my brain hurt.. it doesn't matter what points are brought up, you will ignore them all. Have fun being right all the time in your head.

I got news for you, buddy, no one cares what you want them to respond with. When you make garbage arguments you will get called out.

It's great to hear that you don't do any drugs at all. I'm assuming you don't drink coffee/tea, wine/beer, smoke, or take any pharmaceutical medications. Congratulations on not being a hypocrite! You are in the proud 0.0001% of people who follow this strict code.

For the rest of us mere mortals, I suppose we will have to continue taking our medications.

From now on I'll be sure to only do things that you personally approve of.

This is exactly right, and the problem that our government just doesn't seem to 'get'.

If you want to stop people from doing something, you can't just take away their source, they will find another.. you have to give them a BETTER source.

With media, streaming services have done more to cut down in piracy than anything else.. it's convenient, so people will do it. If you're only paying a few dollars a month to save the frustration of finding movies/music, waiting to download, vs just clicking and having it right there. This is why things like Kodi were so popular, it's all about convenience.

Now drugs are not movies, but similar rules apply. Say one is addicted to heroin, and suddenly their source is taken away.. do you think they will just decide "Oh well, I am done with heroin now!", no, they will find another source. If you want to REALLY make a difference, give them a better/safer source, and help them. No one says "I want to be addicted to heroin", they have issues that cause them to be dependent on the drug (often pain). We DESPERATELY need to follow the lead of other countries and start providing drug havens for addicts. So many people die in this country ever year of opiate overdoses, with the solution right in front of our eyes (look at EU countries with drug clinics), but we refuse to do anything about it because our antiquated dinosaur politicians are afraid they will look like they support drug use; how they appear to the 1% is more important to them than saving tens of thousands of lives every year.

Great idea, never going to happen.

Why would they sign up for that when they can just as easily charge full price for those replacement drugs (as they do now)? The only people out there who can change this are making huge profits from the system currently in place, so why would they?

Sounds like you don't know what you are talking about. Your source is a book written with heavy influence by the Pharmaceutical industry to justify the obscene costs of their drugs, making billions in profits off of sick, poor people.

You are the one who is completely wrong.

The dosages most certainly do start out with a "best guess" in the pre-clinical phase. For any given drug we would guess at the doses based on our calculations, and give a range on either end. If we thought the effective dose would be 1 mg/kg, we would run an LD50 of doses much higher than that, 10mg/kg, 100mg/kg. Sometimes our guesses would be wrong, and the low dose animals would die as a result. After figuring out a safe dose, we would then split it further into different dosing groups to test the effectiveness of the compound. Most people in the field are underpaid, overworked, and do sloppy work

Please talk to someone who has actually worked in the Pharma research field, they will tell you most of what they do is just guessing.. why do you think only 1 in 10,000 make it through?

It's all a guess until the end, and even then we're often not sure. Look at anti-depressants. We still don't know how a lot of those work but prescribe them to millions of people regardless. How do you think they determined the dose when they don't know how the drug works?

Corporations are rational.

They care about one thing, dollars. If you are making them money, they will keep you no matter what. If you are not making them money, they will get rid of you. Pretty rational I think.

Pharmaceutical research.

Great, but that most certainly does not work at all companies.

The last company I worked for unequivocally treated their non-management employees like garbage. The company basically had the same management for 10 years prior, with a few "loyal" employees promoted to manager along the way. By "loyal" I mean that they were willing to sell anyone out to advance their own careers.

If the company even caught wind you were looking elsewhere, your life would become a living hell. Get ready for extra hours (Salaried, no extra pay), weekend work, Holiday work, getting your vacation time denied because they are "too busy", etc. Pretty hard to find a job when your employer is making you physically ill from stress.

In the meantime, the moment they catch wind of you looking elsewhere they start bringing in new candidates. Easy to fill those Bachelors-level positions after all, lots of recent college grads willing to not have a life in lieu of work, and they will probably want less money than you too!

I saw entire teams of 10+ people replaced within a year, then again, having to retrain their own replacements. The company even outsourced our work to Malaysia and we were warned not to tell our clients about it or we could face termination.

The only way to survive in corporate America nowadays is to be a cutthroat scumbag, no thanks.

Is this organization still around? Have you blown the whistle on them?

If not, why not? You have information that could stop these thieves from stealing people's livelihoods.

Because a handle of vodka is cheaper than a visit to the doctor and all the medications you need, and will make you forget about all your problems.

The only greyed out posts I see aren't worth reading anyway. Mostly just ignoring anyone that makes points to counter their arguments, it's like having a conversation with our President.

Clickbait trash.

It seems like after the initial program this type of scam doesn't require that much effort.. just let the programs run.

Also.. "waiting for a subset of the infected population to speed" I'm gonna go ahead and say that subset is about 99% of the population. Even if you don't speed, like most people do, there's plenty of areas for this malware to "catch" you, like when the speed limit drops unexpectedly or you are not sure of it when pulling on to a road.

Management required that you send a group email if you were going to arrive late to work. So when I'm stuck in traffic because of an accident how do I email them? Before you ask, they said no text messages were not acceptable.. their requirements were if you had any issues that you had to send an email.

I lost my job because of "noncompliance" to their demands that they have complete access to my personal phone.

The company I used to work for required that you give them backdoor access to your cell phone if you wanted to check your work email from it. This gave them the ability to factory reset your phone remotely, as well as change your pin/unlock, along with who knows what else. I refused and was terminated.