That's very interesting, is there any more you can tell me about your experience?
147 karma · joined October 29, 2020
Nothing's ever perfect, there was misinformation before, but it's accelerated massively after Elon took over.
Would the sympathetic military members be able to seize sufficient weapons to fight back? Doubt it.
Also you're suggesting a group of civilians armed with AR-15s would be able to fight back. If you believe some of the military has your back then you just undermined your own point that we need to be able to fight back with our assault rifles.
>Would the military turn their guns on their own citizens?
Militaries in the world have quite often turned guns on civilians before, I wouldn't put it past ours. Not at all. Especially since a lot of it's commanded over by far-right Christian Nationalists.
>Would the military be able to protect their family members from people with AR-15s?
The military members would be able to protect their own families, if you even knew who they were in the first place. Also it's a bit messed up you basically mentioned killing non-combatants as a tactic to be used in this hypothetical war.
>People hiding in trees and caves with rifles have defeated many superior forces… including our own… twice.
Uhhh I don't know about that. Vietnam was using a lot of WWII style tech. We got really advanced stuff now. We gave Ukraine our hand-me-downs nobody wanted anymore and they're absolutely dominating Russia which has more people and lots and lots of firearms.
Face it, you're obsessed with guns. That's cool, I kinda get it because I own a few myself. However it's taken over your brain. You brought this very specific thing up in a much more general conversation so you must be thinking about this A LOT.
While they're working their employees to the bone, refusing raises, and pocketing all the profits to purchase more real estate and nicer cars, or to bribe people at the private school they send their kids to, they whitewash their actions by pretending they care about feminism, LGBTQ+ people, white privilege, and/or the environment.
The Rural crowd has a different form of virtue signaling but the richest among them are also hypocrites in their own way. Usually via saying they're Christian, going to church, and then doing nothing Christian in their day to day life.
Truth is if the government wanted to do this you'd have no chance in hell resisting using your AR-15. They's suspend the constitution and the military would be deployed Stateside.
You'd be an ill-equipped Russian soldier against NATO hardware like in Ukraine. 10-20 of you dead for every 1 US military member you take out.
The better option is to ensure you have a Democracy, so you can rule your own selves and kick the authoritarians to the curb. Authoritarians are always the folks that instigate the things you describe, be they left or right wing.
WA and CO are where my experience was. The product is more often than not cheaper than the black market prices were.
It was pretty common for a black market eighth to cost 40-80 dollars, and you're looking at 20-60 dollars for legal stuff now even with taxes. It's a bit more expensive in WA but I'd say comparable to black market prices.
That's not even to mention the convenience aspect. You can buy a joint that will last a moderate user all evening for like 5 dollars. No need to roll it yourself and all that.
They do some kind of test that can pick up if you drank in the last couple days.
The way they assign shifts too causes the problems. If a shift pops up, they wanna take it, and that could happen at any time.
In any case I'd wager it's related to the hangover problem. You don't want a tired, distracted (by headaches or whatever), grumpy person moving 12000 tons.
There are a ton of accidental overdoses because of black market opiates being laced with fentanyl.
If there were legal opiate shops, government regulated, you wouldn't have to worry about that. They could even control how much you can buy and what strength it is to ensure overdoses are rare.
Regarding organization, I have no idea. I would argue we're too busy with the increasing expectations from our jobs and we don't make as much money in terms of purchasing power as people used to.
I'm old enough to remember snail mail being dominant tech for communication. Maybe a fax machine if it's time sensitive but it was more expensive back then so a lot still was mailed. I'm a "elder" millennial, pretty much the oldest you can be without being Gen X.
That extra slowness from "the tech" at the time gave people excuses to slow down a bit, because they had to wait for replies or had to chip away at work differently. Research was a trip to the library if you didn't have the books. The internet didn't have high quality sources yet. If you weren't around your telephone then people couldn't reach you.
Now with cell phones, the internet maturing, and the exponential growth entitlements by investors we're all worked to the bone. If you don't answer the bosses call at 4AM you get a shit performance review. Oh and in spite of record profits this quarter we can't give any raises because the investors want that money.
I'm not sure about GenZ but us Millenials work really hard and have a lot less money to do anything with than our parents did. We're slightly better off than GenX though so I imagine GenX is having a harder time organizing. You need time off and money to be able to organize.
Most folks I know my age haven't taken a vacation in years. We rarely take time off, and often work late or a few hours weekends. Plus we're often working in the cities because of how knowledge and service work eclipsed other kinds of jobs, and the commute takes up to 2 hours out of our day due to congestion and sub-par (compared to worldwide) transit systems.
Nobody should be intoxicated on the job.
However if they smoked a joint yesterday they shouldn't lose their job today when it's already out of their system.
Unfortunately about half the population doesn't have empathy for anyone they don't grow up with, and some of those have empathy for no one at all.
I know a thing or two about these folks and they're all suffering before they started using. They often start by self medicating because they were traumatized or incredibly impoverished due to a series of unfortunate accidents.
So, yes, I believe it's the right thing to do to treat rather than imprison.
They both did it right, and took different approaches even. Colorado is a bit looser on the requirements for dispensaries and have cheaper product overall. There is a licensed dispensary just about every block in Denver, sometimes two, when I left. Not sure about now.
In Colorado actually the legal product is cheaper than former black market prices too. In WA is about the same price but there are some cheaper options if you're OK with a lower quality product.
By "Quality" here I don't mean that it's laced, but that it's a product with less high quality plant in it. More stems, less buds, that kind of thing.
I don't know NY law or licensing, but I've heard that this sort of unlicensed pop-up pot shop problem occurred in some States where they didn't plan the roll out and licensing very well.
Either couldn't get their shit together to regulate it properly, and dragged their feet for too long after legalization, or didn't issue nearly enough licenses to sell to meet the demand.
WA had more issues than Colorado actually with meeting demand initially but they recovered pretty quick. It was because they had a different licensing scheme whereby you can't grow and also sell retail, you gotta pick one.
In Colorado you can grow your own and sell it to retail customers. They also seemed to issue far more licenses than WA did.
In any case, I'd look to Colorado for a good case study. WA for a mediocre one. And then CA and NY for what not to do. CA also had some of those pop up shops that were unlicensed.
But somehow we're ok with selling unlimited quantities to people.
Most opiates are downright docile by comparison. A person passes out and can't harm anyone anymore.
Legalization would mean opiates are regulated. You can only get a certain strength. You can only buy so much per visit. Purity is regulated so you wouldn't accidentally get Fentanyl laced stuff and die.
There should be treatment options, of course, because it's the right thing to do, and it's also much cheaper than fixing the damage addicts can do, and also cheaper than the cost throwing them in prison.
Generally speaking drug addicts are actually self-medicating something anyway, it's like a slow suicide attempt due to some mental trauma or other mental illness like schizophrenia.
The OP is right. Decriminalization is the worst of both worlds.
For a long time we got use to not seeing as many drug addicts because a lot of them were thrown in prison where you don't see them anymore. Each one costing tax payers a full time wage, 35k per year per prisoner.
Decriminalization means you see more addicts out on the streets, but they're still getting overly strong, even laced stuff on the black market and are taken advantage of by predators.
Where marijuana legalization occurred there are purity limits on things like edibles. And you can only buy so much at once. It hasn't lead to really any problems but of course marijuana is one of the least harmful drugs out there. It's far less harmful than alcohol, so it might not be the best example.
I'd say alcohol is a better comparison to opiates and other hard drugs.
Legalization is the better path. We already should know better via our exercise in alcohol prohibition.
Decriminalization isn't legalization. Legalization would mean controlling purity, and strength where the drug is licensed to be sold.
Marijuana legalization hasn't lead to any major problems. People don't even bother getting it on the black market anymore where it is legal. They go for what's convenient.
Beyond that simply throwing people in prison doesn't mean that we reduced the number of drug addicts. It just means you don't see them anymore.
Decriminalization actually would mean you see more of them out on the streets because they're not being locked away in prison.
Drugs will always be a part of the human experience. People will continue to use them whether it's legal or not.
The other side of it is most cities don't spend much money on harm reduction strategies or treatment options because of the stigma associated with drug users. Tax payers look at them as subhuman and don't do the math.
It costs more to let a drug addict run around town stealing and breaking things, or getting sick and going to the ER, than it does to mandate they spend some time in a State funded mental hospital.
Prisons also cost a lot. It costs a full time job's worth of money ~35k to imprison 1 person per year.
Not only did you take a potential worker out of the work force, but now you're sinking a full time jobs worth of money into keeping them in prison.
For a murderer, that seems worth it because they literally cost the world a full time worker and maybe more. But for a homeless drug addict it really doesn't seem worth it to me.
I use cannabis sometimes but it's more the principal of it.
It's a privacy violation and positive results don't actually mean you're intoxicated on the job. What people do in their free time is nobodies business so long as it's not harming other people.
The dealers are often up-charging MORE for fuel efficient hybrids or EVs. It might be 2-5k more for a gas burner, but you get nailed 10k over MSRP for the hybrid or EV option.
They're effectively making you pay the difference in the cost of gasoline up front so there's no economic incentive to the consumer to get the better MPG or emission-free option.
I haven't done the math but intuitively it seems like you end up pre-paying the difference you'd save by using less to no gasoline.
I think part of it is also that dealers / manufacturers are creatively trying to capture tax incentives as well. Instead of the consumer getting a cheaper EV via tax breaks, the dealer or manufacture charges that much more and it ends up in their pocket.
It's messed up. Just about every large business in America is on the government teat in various creative ways. They're not innovating or competing anymore.
Ford should go direct. Lobby for changing the law to get rid of these parasites.
I just bought a ford less than a year ago. One of those Maverick trucks since the gas mileage is really good. It's a good suburban truck for hauling or camping that still lets you commute to the city and navigate tight spaces.
The hybrids were actually marked up the worst, often 10k rather than 5k, and couldn't have AWD which was one of my requirements.
They feel entitled to very large returns. The executive leadership's job is to give it to them.
Gone are the days of expecting a stable, life-long dividend.
Now if you're not cutting labor costs to the bone and impoverishing your workers, applying shrinkflation strategies, or monopolizing markets and fixing prices, then you aren't able to satisfy your increasingly greedy investors.
They're more active and more socially responsible. They're voting more than the boomers did at a younger age.
The older generations with their war chests won't let us lead and use their money to ensure things don't change.
True, it won't solve the problem of malware botnets, but PoW or PoBandwidth schemes can make it too expensive to run botnets on cloud services so the only place left to go is illegal botnets.
It's a really interesting space to research for economists or political scientists. It's also a lever to turn government, social, financial and other systems into software.
All that to say, yes, PoW and PoS are not necessarily tied to blockchains or DLTs.
You can use PoW as a sort of captcha, for example. If it costs a little bit of CPU to submit a request to a website it's not a big deal for a human. However, if you're running a bot-net suddenly it starts to hurt!
For example, if a hospital wants your health information, you have to manually approve their access over there. The same is true for other information the government stores. Government agencies likewise have to ask for access to information, for example, the equivalent of a DMV would request some personal info before they can obtain it.
I think you need to follow your own advice! You and those like you don't have a monopoly on what this term means either. In fact I'd argue the people who created the term have the right to define it.
To your point, right leaning people can also be woke! I.e. concerned with inclusion, kindness and equity.
Perhaps it's time to retire the word. It's become some off the cuff, ad hominem insult by right wing leaning people rather than retaining any of the original meaning.
What I gather is that you actually have a problem with something specific that isn't related to "wokeness" but to the tribalism and "othering" that is going on among some left leaning people. This can be talked about specifically without abusing definitions or changing the meaning of words.
I'd go further and argue using woke the way it is used currently by right leaning people is a form of othering in and of itself.
I felt like I had to say it because the people complaining the loudest about "wokeness" have no clue what they're talking about. It's just a label they co-opted for some other behavior they don't like, and they need to get more specific about it because they're arguing using a totally different definition of "woke" than everyone else is using.
It's most certainly a "they" thing.