161–170 of 343 posts
> The pictures included closeup pictures of Porras’ hand with visible fingerprint ridges. I thought via the title that they fingerprinted the lens used to take the photograph, not that there was literal pictures of fingers.
Of course as a SW engineer you think any kind of digitally embedded fingerprint first.
What a colossal waste of time. Prosecuting someone for selling online something that is illegal in a lot of states. Mindblowing how stupid the war on drugs is.
There is considerable information back from the 80s to suggest that the US war on drugs was actually a system to enable racial discrimination. Then some years later, the ear on drugs became associated with the growth of the private prison industry and it's lobbyists. Indeed I provide no references here because it is quite an involved topic and difficult to prove given the publicly available information.
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Prohibition doesn't work for meth or heroin either. Making them freely available under doctor supervision is what works. Switzerland did it and an out of control heroin problem went away and especially important, usage among young people plummeted. Yes it costs money to treat a medical problem. It costs way more money to treat medical problems as something else. Let's go with the most effective solution even if "free…
> Prohibition doesn't work for meth or heroin either. Making them freely available under doctor supervision is what works. Those things can be mutually exclusive though. For example, you could make it so meth/heroin isn't readily available at the local pharmacy/gas station, yet also make it freely available under doctor supervision at rehab centers. I think many people (myself included) are apprehensive about making…
Well yes, a lot of the discussion is around fear of what might happen. Why isn't anyone afraid of what already is happening? Illegal recreational drugs are literally a greater than $ billion dollar a year business in the US alone. I could understand this position if recreational drugs were somewhat uncommon and the fear was that legalizing them would make them more widespread. They are widespread already. Anyone who wants recreational drugs in the US can easily get them.
> many law abiding citizens who otherwise would have never touched the drug may whimsically decide to try it at a rough patch in their life just by seeing it on the shelf at the gas station
They already do. Anyone can try alcohol to get over a rough patch in life. I think a lot of people would be shocked just how low addiction rates are for addictive drugs. Even a drug like heroin that can cause physical dependence, has an addiction rate of about 12%. Let's turn that around. A full 88% of people who try heroin never get addicted. Plenty of people even become physically dependent on opiates like heroin but never become addicted. Think pain treatment and then the thing causing the pain goes away. People successfully withdraw from the physical dependence because they don't have an addiction problem.
> I would like to see advertising completely banned, behind-the-counter only, generic labels only
I don't find that unreasonable. Interesting how that contrasts to the constant advertising on TV in the USA for prescription drugs.
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The motivation for fictitious wars against bogeymen is to empower and bankroll law enforcement while diminishing the civil rights of citizens. Like the war on terror, the decades long war on drugs has been a roaring success.
The war on terror and war on drugs are closely related enough (through expansion of powers and economic policies such as allowing police to purchase old military equipment) that I wonder if it’s worth even treating them as separate things.
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Does it necessarily? Was Paul Erdös a burden on society, both financially and socially? Are people who have handicaps because of sporting accidents not a financial burden on society, should we outlaw Snowboarding?
Well, he probably didn’t burglarize and mug people for snowboard gear, so there’s that.
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I can partially understand that point of view for marijuana (though I think it’s important for a functional society to obey laws, and get them changed if they aren’t working instead of just breaking them based on personal preference). But the guy had been selling methamphetamine too, which is life destroying poison. Our government provides costly services for people who are incapable of taking care of themselves, and…
Meth isn’t life destroying poison sorry to inform you. I take 10mg for ADHD a day and it’s saved my life when all other alternatives have failed. I would argue the bad cases you’ve seen are from people with no self control. Why should the government be able to tell you what you can and cannot put into your own body? Better, let people do what they want as long as they don’t hurt anybody else and educate them.
Compared to dexamphetamine:
- It has less cardiovascular impact (no cold extremities, no excessive sweating, less "fight or flight")
- It has a lower impact on sleep (I can take a nap while under the influence)
- It lasts longer (9 to 12 hours, compared to 4 to 6)
- It makes living a balanced live easier (dexamphetamine would feed perseveration, meth makes switching tasks much easier)
- No noticeable comedown
Some of the downsides of methamphetamine include:
- A much higher abuse potential (however, I have never felt the need to exceed my daily dose. I want to live a normal live, not experience some shallow euphoric bliss.)
- It is unclear what the neurotoxic properties are in therapeutic dosages.
- The social stigma
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> It might not sound like it, but this is nothing but a tautology. Quite the opposite. Focusing on the substance instead of the medical condition is part of the war on drugs and essential for the propaganda to work.
Here's what I'm saying: Imagine two people who regularly consume cocaine. One of them is homeless; the other is an executive somewhere. By definition , the definition of "addiction", the first one was "addicted", and the second one wasn't. There are arguments to be made for this kind of definition. But you can't use it to say "addiction is what destroys lives, not drugs". That's a tautology. Addiction is the name we…
Sure you can. It's perfectly reasonable to say sports injuries are what hurts people, not sports themselves. Even though by definition an injury hurts someone. Especially to make the point that what we want to focus on is reducing the injuries, not reducing the sports.
Everyone understands why the distinction was made, and flagging it as a tautology is just engaging in pedantry.
But here's an interesting experiment: rewrite my point that "it isn't the substance that destroys lives but the medical condition of addiction" - without using the offending tautology. Maybe I'll learn something.
What I find the most interesting about this article is that someone was able to be identified using a picture of their fingerprints. Thus, any photos posted online could be scoured for identification information. And with computer vision technologies becoming more mature, it means that regular video footage of people could identify them the same way in seconds or less using a wide variety of different visual traits.…
I used it on reddit to convince people it was unsafe to post any images of that sort. It seemed to work for about 6 months.
There's magic in image enhancement, but I don't know that ridges and valleys of a fingerprint are there, yet. I don't even know that "this specific person is scared that they leaked their face in a way that is recognizable to them" even scales to "never upload anything" - it could be this sort of news is programming the population that computers can tease out identities with any and all leaked information, pictures, audio, etc.
Heck, a decade and a half ago there were claims that governments could narrow a search for an audio file upload based on the deviation from 60hz on the power line noise - in an audio recording.
So who knows?
What are some actual, practical steps we all can take towards making decriminalization a reality?
What a colossal waste of time. Prosecuting someone for selling online something that is illegal in a lot of states. Mindblowing how stupid the war on drugs is.
There is considerable information back from the 80s to suggest that the US war on drugs was actually a system to enable racial discrimination. Then some years later, the ear on drugs became associated with the growth of the private prison industry and it's lobbyists. Indeed I provide no references here because it is quite an involved topic and difficult to prove given the publicly available information.
> I provide no references ... it is ... difficult to prove given the publicly available information
These claims seem to strongly negate each other... to a degree that one detects the putrid scent of conspiracy theory.