But couldn't you always take a Town Car -- illegally -- for cash in NYC?

I don't count myself an expert on NYC, but early on when I started flying out there to support our small office, they told me if I had trouble finding a cab there was often a bunch of Town Cars that would do cash fares.

I didn't do it often, but 2-3 times coming out of a better restaurant there would be a few Town Cars waiting and they would take you for cash fares that didn't seem out of line for what I'd pay for a taxi.

I get the same feedback for the most part when I take Uber. I ask the drivers how they like it and they all seem pretty positive about it.

Nixon definitely did weaponize drug policy as a tool for dealing with his enemies -- hippies, left-wing types and minorities.

My problem is that I don't think drug policy really changed all that much when this happened, the only real difference was that post 1960s there were just a LOT more ordinary white people doing drugs, mostly marijuana.

But before that, drug policy had historically been used to suppress minorities too -- Chinese, Blacks, Mexicans. Sure, Nixon made it worse but it wasn't like it was great before that. In many ways, I think what Nixon made worse was not the racist aspect of it, but the concentration of authority and creating the DEA, making anti-drugs much more of an intensive effort.

The thing I wish would happen is that all the fucking Linux scolds would just shut up and stay out of these threads, as if their "you should have switched to Linux, it's easier than my wife these days" comments add any substance.

I mean, some of us (try) to make a buck doing computer work and switching people to Linux, even if we wanted to, isn't really viable when they want/expect/need Windows.

What I don't get is that Microsoft still needs the vast army of consultants/IT people to support its products yet it continues to alienate them by making their products *harder* to customize and run cleanly.

I mean, I get it -- they make money off this and if shit like Xbox and Candy Crush or whatever paid content was easy to turn off, the adoption rate would drop right off a cliff and MS wouldn't make money at it.

MS obviously sees the not-too-distant future as one where they are irrelevant and are trying to restructure their business into some weird mix of Apple, Android and Microsoft all at the same time, with consumers locked into a monthly service that Microsoft gatekeeps and collects market intel from. I'm not sure how they get hardware makers to go along with a walled garden they don't control, but maybe that's where the experience of Android comes in.

The risk charts I've seen rank "smoking", not nicotine, because until about 5 minutes ago smoking was the principal consumption source for nicotine consumption and most of the risks were associated with actually inhaling smoke; nicotine just made it really addictive and repetitive.

I think in an alternate universe with opiates as a culturally ingrained and accepted substance, there'd be a lot less overdoses than we see in the wild now because of regulated dosing and tribal knowledge of acceptable dosing. Strangely with alcohol nobody knows how much liquor can kill them, yet people seem to die fairly frequently from alcohol over-consumption.

I'd argue alcohol has a health risk from long-term consumption that opiates don't. A long-term chronic alcohol user likely faces a host of related health issues -- cirrhosis of the liver, and a whole range of metabolic illnesses (obesity, diabetes) depending on how they consume it (beer drinkers more likely to have obesity, for example).

Addiction seems to be primary health risk with long-term opiate users; therapeutic users and some addicts which self-regulate well seem to lack significant secondary health problems tied to opiate use.

My gut instinct is that if there was an alternate universe of opiate users, they would have higher rates of addiction but actually lower rates of secondary health issues. Social problems would likely be about the same, less violence associated with opiate users vs. drinkers, but maybe more problems with amotivational behavior among opiate users.

Let's say for whatever reason, opium and alcohol switch places historically and instead of alcohol being the dominant legal drug, opium derivatives become legal.

Like alcohol, the dominant forms of opiates that remain legal are low-concentrate varieties, such as smoking opium or low-strength tinctures -- in the same way that beer and wine are popular, although like spirits, morphine or heroin also exist, but are consumed mostly diluted cocktail style. For the most part, opium is sold in regulated stores and always in well-known concentrations by a well-regulated industry.

Society has recognized for centuries the problems of opium use, but as its deeply ingrained in culture only the US ever tried to ban it during Prohibition which was a complete failure. Alcohol is seen as much worse, and society is presently engaged in a "alcohol crisis" fueled by over-prescription of therapeutic alcohol and black-market alcohol which is tainted.

Would we more or less be in the same place we are now, kind of turning a blind eye to the dangers of opium -- relying mostly on the culturally ingrained "rules" for to not overdose regularly?

It seems to me that most people ignore the large-scale problems with alcohol availability and despite cultural acceptance it's probably way more dangerous than we ever consider. Millions of people are alcoholics and millions more are borderline functional alcoholics and there are vast social problems associated with alcohol, like drunk driving, violence, domestic abuse, etc.

I think there have been attempts to quantify the risks associated with the various varieties of psychoactive substances and almost always alcohol and tobacco come out 1 or 2 with opiates further down the list maybe behind barbiturates, which society mostly has avoided as a long-term crisis or black market drug.

The latter is kind of interesting considering the popularity of Seconal and Quaaludes in the late 1960s and 1970s -- it's somewhat surprising that with the surge in illciit lab-made fentanyl and other "research chemicals" that there hasn't been a parallel surge in illicit lab-made Quaaludes or Seconal.

People believe their interests as law abiding citizens and the police's interests as law enforcers are somehow aligned, that they're on the same side or allies.

I think it's partly what gets ordinary people into such trouble with the cops. They just assume that being open and honest with the cops won't somehow lead to the cops arresting them for anything they say, since cops are mostly incentivized to arrest people. And I'm not talking about people who commit a crime and "spill the beans", but people not committing crimes stopped apparently at random who just answer their questions.

I'm mostly convinced that unless you have a serious need for police services, it's best to keep your distance.

Remember when application protocols were defined by academics in public RFCs?

For one, they started out the idea that there was no globalized central data repository -- that there would be multiple data repositories, requiring both client-server and server-client protocols. And that there would be multiple software implementations, so just define a protocol and let people implement it as they saw fit.

Now it's all designed for central monopoly data storage and a single source for software from the same people that control the data storage. Thanks, corporations.

This. My 14 year old 8th grader just started a new late start time -- 9:30. It had been 8:25, which was kind of ideal from a parental oversight perspective. He walks to school, so I was pretty much always able to monitor his progress and make sure he got up and ready for school.

9:30? He wants/expects to sleep until 8:30 and I nearly always have to leave for work at 8:00 and while it worked out OK the first couple of weeks (new school year novelty), Friday he was almost late.

I'm just lucky he only has to walk and he's 14. If he was 10, had to ride the bus and had to start at 9:30? I'd have no choice but to pay for before school care (which the elementary schools already have, some parents drop off hella early, like 7:00).

I think a confounding factor in all of this is that the general public mostly understands school start times in the context of their own experience 30-odd years before. And the basic design of the school experience seems kind of wed to the structure of the stay at home mom, the very close neighborhood school that was walking distance for anyone over 7 in 1960.

Once schools used bussing for desegregation and for facilitating school consolidation it all kind of went out the window, and now start times and distances are driven by bureaucratic goals of racial balance and efficiency.

I thought this was puzzling, too.

Best thing I could think of would be paperwork the employee had to fill out documenting a medical condition that interfered with work or resulted from an on the job injury.

Ordinary medical treatment involving a doctor, I don't know how a specific store location would see this even if TRU had been the insurer of record. Some kind of statement about the employee treatments (using the bizarre, technical coding language of health insurance) may have gone to some TRU home office. It seems like when I use health insurance I get a letter from the insurer telling me what I'm not getting coverage on and then a bill from the provider.

I'm skeptical that TRU provided that good/comprehensive enough insurance for most employees to begin with. I'd bet most employees (numerically) would have been part time and paying cash, using a spouse/parent's insurance, etc, never even giving TRU a reason to get into the paper flow.

Everything being sold for currency just happens to be mostly about money.

Those circus tents can be heated with forced air heaters. They set them up here in Minnesota, and we're as cold as most of populated Canada.

I think they would benefit more from trying MDMA on dogs.

We have a pretty good understanding about canine socialization and interaction and can better interpret ambiguous behavior on their part.

And what about trying it on chimps or other great apes? I suppose the argument there is they are SO similar to humans that the effects are probably entirely predictable.

Or is the whole point of this to actually see if octopuses specifically provide human-like responses to mind altering drugs as a means of evaluating octopus cognitive abilities?

The problem with this multi-layered, outsourced internet economy is that there's just about zero accountability for shitty service or products anymore.

I barely blame the delivery guys for not giving a shit considering how little they get paid and the crushing scheduling/travel burden imposed by Amazon.

Be grateful they're only unhappy enough with their employment to just toss packages. My guess is that the next iteration of unhappy employment involves burning those packages in a giant pile someplace, and the one after that involves rich people lined up against a wall.

I think it's just to create chaos.

I mean, if there's anything at all to the "Russians did it" in so many fields their main motivation seems to be create conflicts, not create any specific advantage.

It does seem like the one side effect of the social internet is that you can create real conflict very easily.