i waded through your dreary insults then stopped reading here:

I personally see absolutely nothing cruel about warning someone against doing drugs because it will lead to a life of poverty, addiction, and early death and then making them face the consequences of their decisions when the turkey comes home to roost

no, douchebag, that is cruel

your views are invalid as your attitude is immoral

coming after all the condescension and assumed superiority, it was actually quite funny

Well, the idea of copyright is to incent creators to create, not to reward them per se. So the sensible way of approaching is to ask how many years in advance a reasonable person would make economic plans for.

Corporations seldom worry about income streams ten years out; such future income is discounted to insignificance. On the other hand an artist planning on managing his own creations might very reasonable think about fifty years out. Seventy-five years is beyond the pale of reason if we're talking about incenting creation. So is any extension of pre-existing copyrights.

If we wanted to maximize the present value of future income to an artist contemplating creating or performing a song, I think a fifty year term would be reasonable, with the proviso that any assigned rights automatically return to him without encumbrance after ten or fifteen years. Such an arrangement would have no impact economic on his ability to sell the rights to his work immediately, and hold out the promise of getting a second bite of the apple in a decade or so.

when you're an addict you can't maintain a job or relationship. so someone has to feed and house you. that's the taxpayer. therefore, we are involved

the notion that it is all just about freedom is a very immature teenage notion

we're also involved because the side effects of addiction don't happen on desert islands, they happen in our communities. you understand there are side effects to addiction like destroyed lives. you do understand that right?

it's simply not a question of just personal freedom unless you're an ignorant simpleton who can't see the big picture. how do you eat? where do you sleep? how can you get a job or have a relationship when feeding an artificial need is more important to you than everything?

so you're angry, you want to fight because you don't see the problem. and you're stupid, because you don't understand it's not just about personal freedom. you're a complete loser

the tragedy of drugs is it can start in teenage years when:

1. people are in the most pain psychologically. friends, romance, etc.: it hurts in unique ways when you are young. turning to drugs is appealing to deal with this pain that would otherwise normally subside with age
2. people think they are immortal and invincible and their willpower is stronger than addiction. it never is
3. people are dumb. they can have a lot of book smarts but they don't have enough social awareness to understand where this all leads

so you wind up with ruined lives

addicts should always be treated the portuguese way" healthcare, not jail. it's just cheaper and a lot more humane

however the portuguese still go after dealers and the drug trade is still illegal. no country in the world is "all drug trade should be legal." no one thinks that works. because it proliferates more addicts

so it's a cost/benefit analysis: i am spending my money feeding and treating and housing addicts, or i am spending my money fighting dealers. i will probably do both, that's just the maintenance cost of civilization, but i'd like to jail as many dealers as i can first, to minimize costs and prevent the proliferation of more addicts

but of course, it costs society in terms of mafia proliferation when you make the drug trade illegal. yet don't forget: if you permissively allow hard drugs to flow freely, more people turn to them for their problems, and there are more addicts you have to feed and house

so it is a very tricky balance. a cost/ benefit analysis of going after the drug supply, or just passively dealing with the costs of addiction

and every drug is different. every drug needs their own policy. there is no such thing as one drug policy for all drugs. there has to be a unique policy for each drug. and each policy is some combination of going after dealers and treating addicts. for some drugs, you forget the dealers and just treat the addicts, with other drugs you have to treat so many addicts, it helps to crush the dealers

something like alcohol, it's better to deal with alcoholism and allow the drug to flow freely. that's the lowest cost on society

but something like heroin, it's very important to remove dealers ASAP, as heroin addiction is life crippling and easy to acquire. so the lowest cost is to go after the drug trade aggressively

something like marijuana, that should be completely legal and ignored. it's not addictive

when you're an addict you can't maintain a job or relationship. so someone has to feed and house you. that's the taxpayer. therefore, we are involved

the notion that it is all just about freedom is a very immature teenage notion. the simple truth is, we're not cruel, we don't just let addicts turn to crime and starve and die and ignore them. and we're also involved because the side effects of addiction don't happen on desert islands, they happen in our communities. it's simply not a question of just personal freedom unless you're an ignorant simpleton who can't see the big picture and see how the problem festers and grows

i am spending my money feeding and housing useless addicts, or i am spending my money fighting dealers. i will probably do both, that's just the maintenance cost of civilization, but i'd like to jail as many dealers as i can first

of course, it costs society in terms of mafia proliferation when you make the drug trade illegal. but if you permissively allow hard drugs to flow freely, more people turn to them for their problems, and there are more addicts you have to feed and house

so it's a cost/ benefit analysis of going after the drug supply, or just passively dealing with the costs of addiction. and the truth is every drug is different

something like alcohol, it's better to deal with alcoholism and allow the drug to flow freely. that's the lowest cost on society. but something like heroin, it's very important to remove dealers ASAP, as heroin addiction is life crippling and easy to acquire. so the lowest cost is to go after the drug trade aggressively

something like marijuana, that should be completely legal and ignored. it's not addictive

there is no such thing as one drug policy for all drugs. there has to be a unique policy for each drug. and each policy is some combination of going after dealers and treating addicts. for some drugs, you forget the dealers and just treat the addicts, with other drugs you have to treat so many addicts, it helps to crush the dealers

There's a phase people go through in life where commitments pile up and play becomes something we intend to get around to. Look around. If you decorate your office space with posters of kayaking/rock climbing/whatever you're into, but you haven't actually done it in the last year because you don't have time, you have entered that phase.

The thing is, people in that phase still dress the part of their younger selves. And for a while at least they even still buy the stuff, until they don't have space for it.

People buy SUVs, even though they're ridiculously impractical for their situation, as a fashion statement. Turning a car from a utilitarian object into a fashion statement is what automobile marketing is all about. Look at SUV ads; what you're telling the world (or perhaps yourself) is that maybe on a whim you'll go off-roading or picnicking on the beach, instead of commuting to and from work, making runs to the supermarket, or chauffeuring your kids to soccer and music lessons. It could happen. Only it won't.

That's the reason SUVs back into parking spaces. Subconsciously their drivers are longing for a quick escape that will never come. SUVs would be the saddest of vehicles, or they would be if the people who bought them had a little more self-awareness.

the greatest authoritarian government, run by the most fascist, megalomaniacal, sadistic person who has ever lived, would find no better tool of absolute control than mandatory hard drug use like meth, cocaine, or especially heroin

physical bars can be transcended via the mind. but bars in the mind?

i never understood people who, in the name of freedom, support the use of the most freedom destroying methods known to man. anything that causes easy addiction is freedom destroying. a chemical interrupt switch in the mind that must be fed is not freedom and prioritizes over all other pursuits: work, food, sex. that's existential slavery and destruction of the self

i know some people have painful lives. and we all feel temporary pain or tedium that is relieved with substances with much power addictive potentials, that's ok. so let's call hard highly addictive drug use what it is: slow motion suicide by people with serious psychological problems. and after enough addiction, it's hard to tell how much of the original pain is still the causative agent. which is the problem: a perhaps temporary problem is now a permanent life hobbling addiction. let's stop lying by saying hard highly addictive drug use is some great exercise in freedom. it's exactly the opposite

you are not in any masters program in any college or university. you're a bad liar as well as a moron

no one as stupid as you can get that far and still believe what you have written about a democracy and a republic

you really need to learn to stop talking about topics you obviously do not understand. unless you like people hating you and laughing at you

well said with an even temper

i don't have a position. i am educating you on actual history and economic fact

meanwhile, the idea that markets self-regulate is not an extreme position. it is a moronic position. to believe markets achieve fairness on their own requires one to deny well-established facts and to believe in low iq fantasies. you are on the same order as an antivaxxer or a creationist. really

the physical cost is the fusing of atomic nuclei in a ball of gas we did not invest anything in and will burn for another few billion years with no effort on our part

the financial cost of the energy source is actually zero

Thousands of them, trained by some very serious, very passionate people who don't even begin to fit the cartoon caricature description of cops who fake drug busts

How many is a "number," relative to the all day, every day work these dogs and their handlers do?

solar energy is not a perpetual motion machine