Pot and coffee (or equivalent, like tea or coca cola or energy drinks) is known among stoners as the "Hippie Speedball". Among other things like alleviating caffeine withdrawals, the coffee keeps you from becoming involuntarily couchlocked.

No reason why Alzheimer patients wouldn't use that too.

These are the historical reasons. You'd be hard pressed to find a paper lobby that was dead set against hemp being harvested for fiber: the US did that quite a bit during WW2. Remember "Hemp For Victory"? The marijuana prohibition had moved into racism (those darned mexicans and niggers and hippies and so-called "musicians" and whomever the hell) and then into "the way things are" by then.

Unless you have a time machine, focusing on this stuff won't do you much good.

Sure. The long-term memory is enhanced. That's why the older kind of stoner seems wise if not particularly sharp.

I agree. Tag this article "kike", "bastard" and "jew", for I don't see any other kind of person spouting such idiocy than a kike who's merely taking a break from masturbating to fresh images of mutilated arab children, a white froth playing at the sides of his mouth.

Well that's just stupid. TPB types are quite open and frank when they commit copyright whatevers; there's no reason they'd depict something as legal when they themselves and their audience are quite willing to do it even it it wasn't.

Because self-harvesting is a feature that eats up resources better spent in growing more quickly or better end product. We can doubtlessly come up with the appropriate single-purpose harvesting machine.

This hits the nail on the head. I already paid 200 euros for my DS lite, and now these people have the fucking gall to say that I should pay 30 euros for each game too?

If it weren't for being able to warez, I wouldn't have got myself a DS. I'd be a person who doesn't have a DS, and doesn't pay for games -- compared to what I am now, a person who has a DS and doesn't pay for games. Since Nintendo is making money from each DS sold (4 megs of asymmetric memory and otherwise veeeerrrry limited hardware tends to do that), I hardly see myself being a serious wrongdoer here.

Yeah, well. A mod card for the DSi was being sold in Akihabara like weeks ago. So much for the "increased protection", eh.

You should remember that purchasing software is a choice as much as warezing is. You can stop making that choice any time you want, if the region-coding bothers you so much. It's not like a gun is being held to your head, is it?

Come on, the best chance of us coming up with artificial life is self-replicating robots. Artificial plants, essentially. Don't know why we'd want those around unless we plan to harvest them or their husks for some use like we do with wheat and hemp and so forth, but it'd surely be staggeringly interesting.

And we could get there without magical molecular biology tricks: just engineer the parts required of an universal constructor, then re-engineer those so that they can be built by one. Boosh! Well-defined and devoid of "and then it's alliiiiiivvvve!!!!" type sturm und drang.

The plan so far, as I see it, is something like this.

First, we should make participation in the market economy voluntary so that its ebb and flow does not put people into destitution or worse. Proposals to do this in countries with effective social security generally involve deconstructing the old and clunky "for those who deserve it" structure and replacing it with a universal citizen's wage, two or three of which (say in a communal setting) permits one to live in reasonable minimal comfort without being employed. This makes workers far more competitive in the job market, insofar as they choose to become involved in it: being ruthlessly exploited as a call-center servitor would no longer be a life-or-death question.

The money for citizen's wage comes from the dismantled social security systems, which are invariably far more expensive than the benefit they provide to their users... often due to market inefficiencies (chiefly profit and dividends) leading to prices going up whenever funding is increased, thus killing any progress before the sperm it would've been born of has exited it's father's dick. Obviously this would require price controls (either through legislation, or more likely state competition) on basic things such as rent, food, water, heating, etc modern infrastructure -- otherwise the proprietors would simply increase their prices to gouge whatever they can take.

Second, cut all subsidies to the market economy. They want to play free market? Let them play free market. The chickens will come back when the ground freezes over. No more socialized costs and privatized profits: if the market is so efficient then it can bloody well take care of itself. If it can.

Third, make the economic system subservient to the political system rather than the other way around (as it is today). Otherwise the will of the people, as communicated through a (future ideal of, or a near-term approximation of) decentralized system of planning combined with effective democracy, cannot be effectively implemented if it goes against what Capital wants. For examples of effective democracy, look at Switzerland's citizen proposal mechanism where anyone who collects 50k verified signatures can put a piece of their own legislation to popular vote.

The central bit here is that the market aspect of society isn't eliminated outright. That'd represent a harsh transition and most people wouldn't be able to go along with it. Rather, it's cut down piece by piece so that it becomes less critical in the everyday lives of John Smith and Janine Random.

Having a market aspect should also be useful in that it is quite efficient at exploring new and unforeseen things, even if in the long run it tends to abusive monopolies (such as in the case of AT&T Bell, Microsoft and so forth). The market's natural boom-bust cycle, once the people are shielded from it, will also provide great opportunities for the state to jump in and purchase, as an equal player in the marketplace, the resources and business of tanked companies and put them to use in serving interests other than private profit.

Communism today works via small, well-defined steps rather than Grand, Ill-Defined Revolutions that everyone supports but no one understands. This way, if we know where we are, where we're going (a reasonably small distance away, but in the right direction nonetheless) and above all how to determine if we've got there, we can make larger changes using a series of smaller changes.

It's not unlike iterative models of software or systems development, really. Of course this model of communism isn't at all popular with the old guard stalinist types... but they'll grow old and die eventually, even if they do not accept that it's the current younger generations' turn to define what Communism means now.

Enjoy your Threat Level ORANGE.

Your current shit's not looking too hot either is it. How long's it been since the last economic bust? 15 years? And now we've got another. Woo hoo.

And freedom? Well take a look at the UK. That's your capitalist freedom right there.

It's capitalism whose history is riddled with spectacular failure. In these failures, people end up homeless and dying of exposure on the streets. Middle-class people living out of their cars in all-night parking lots. And these failures have occurred all by themselves, not aided by any external enemy as in the case of the USSR et cetera. Indeed, Cuba is still alive and kicking, as are several south-east asian countries.

In my opinion, this free market stuff is just handwaving and faith in the Invisible Hand that's indistinguishable from the religious sort. It's best suited for ignorant people who don't want to think about how things should work, people who'd rather leave it to the Almighty... and now that it has been, everything is going in the shitter.

Economic planning works. Take a look at any Fortune 500 company: all of those implement a system of economic planning inside them. That nearly a century-old state-level (and a freaking huge state it was, geographically) version failed to last eternally despite bringing Russia out of agrarian society and into the industrial era says absolutely nothing about communism's overall workability!

How do you know that? Children are always around. Anyone can always make the "it's for the children" argument. There's never been anything else, as far as authoritarian regimes are concerned.

A communications disruption can only mean one thing.

It's good shit man.

I tagged this article "fourtwenty". Hoping others follow the example.