I've always wondered why city busses and other utility vehicles couldn't be mounted with sensors to measure the condition of the road surface in urban areas. You could get multiple times per day readings on many arterial streets and probably the entire city's road surface 3D scanned annually.

The data could be used for planning and organizing street patching and repair tasks at a minimum. It might also help with surfacing technology and better determine long-term major maintenance.

Laws against drug use are used as a means of control and intimidation by providing the police with a tool to suspect, stop and search people, usually the underclass. It's mostly a coincidence that the underclass is predominantly minority and it certainly enables further intimidation and control of minorities to be sure.

But I think a big reason marijuana remains illegal is not because of any specific risk from marijuana use itself, but because marijuana use is so widespread it provides the police with near limitless justification, opportunity and motivation to suspect and search people. If you legalized marijuana you move the decimal point several places to the left on the chances someone you randomly stop may actually be a person of legitimae interest. You also lose the influence you had over people who use marijuana.

Bottom line is legalization means the cops lose a major rationale to treat most people like criminal suspects. It makes it harder to run roughshod over minorities, too, but I think the general power and control outweighs its specific utility against minorities.

I had never seen a black rectangle with rounded edges before the iPhone! ... ...well unless you count the TV I had as a child. And the TV I have now. And probably half the electronics in my house.

The whole "trade dress" concept seems a bit silly to me in the first place but ti is beyond stupid when they can claim something as simple as their rounded rectangular design as being "trade dress".

The Harrison Narcotics Tax Act was passed in 1914, but the impetus started closer to 1901.

While it's a common theme in anti-drug control rhetoric to blame racism for drug bans, I think the race/drug tie-in is possibly something that happened later and not a prime mover for the origin of drug controls. I think once drugs were already illegal, the laws were adjusted in ways that made them more effective tools to use against people deemed undesirable.

Personally I think the laws against drug use were probably at least as much motivated by industrialists who saw drug use as an obstacle in using low-skilled poor people in the new mass-production factories. Prior to the assembly line, I think a fair amount of industrial work was little more than scaling up the work of skilled artisans, people who probably had internalized a certain amount of self-discipline and work ethic. They were probably also drunks, too, but by virtue of their holding a skilled trade they were sort of self-selected into the group of people who could more or less hold their liquor.

Once you got the assembly line and mass production involved, the growth in industrial employment required large workforces of unskilled workers from the lower classes of society, a demographic at the time that came from cultures where alcohol use was high and who probably used drugs and alcohol more like a crude anti-depressant tonic against the fairly harsh standard of living of being poor in the late 19th century.

But you can't build an industrial empire with people who see a subsistence living under the influence as more desirable than industrial wage slavery, so better to criminalize their substance use and make work a slightly more palatable option than prison.

It was really no different for the Harrison Act -- the impetus was some Protestant religious figure appalled with opium-consuming native savages in the Philippines who knew that he wasn't going to convert them into good little Protestants if chasing the dragon and lying in the sun was an alternative.

I think a lot of the opposition to marijuana legalization really boils down to this -- a lot of moral cluckers who worry that if Johnny smokes pot, he won't be enthusiastic about going $150.000 in debt for a college degree and buying a house in the suburbs -- he'll think that it'd make much more sense to, in the words of Grandmaster Flash, "...learn to smoke reefer and be a street sweeper."

Society *needs* bodies on the treadmill to keep it going. People who use substances tend to give a lot less of a shit about the treadmill.