We CAN cure addiction. In many different ways. America just fucking sucks at it because we'd rather send people to jail for having drugs than treat them for addiction. More money in it, I guess.

Anyway, there are a couple of different GOOD treatments, but none of them will work unless the addict wants them to work. Truly wants them to work, not just because they ran out or because they're broke.

One is replacement therapy. You can move off onto something like Suboxone (not mentioning methadone since it is literally worse than the drugs you could be addicted to and takes months to get off of), and then taper down the Suboxone. It works by filling the receptors that opiates stimulate. You don't get high, but your cravings go away...even if you continue your drug use, you don't get much pleasure as the Suboxone binds to the receptors better. Some countries say 'fuck it' and give people access to the drug of their choice, since the social effects are the worst parts of addiction anyway. Sure they might eventually die earlier or harm themselves, but that's their choice if they want to.

Another is hallucinogen therapy. We're making advances in treating people with ibogaine, MDMA, ketamine, etc. With some psychotherapy thrown in, you can help the brain to rewire to make the cravings less intense...this is best if combined with something like Suboxone therapy.

If someone really wants to quit, they can. It isn't THAT difficult with medical treatment. What really sucks is as soon as you say you want to quit, you get treated like a criminal and no one has any sympathy for you whatsoever. If you tell your doc they won't say 'oh okay let me taper your meds' they'll just tell you to go to a pain clinic which will be seeing new patients in about seven months, and they can help out. Sorry I have to drop you as a patient because wanting to get clean is drug seeking behavior.

Addiction is a complex social and medical issue. We've made very few concessions on the social side, but we've almost got the medical side completely cleared up.

It's not even that easy, because 15% to you or I is worth a lot more to us than 15% to a corporation. To you or I, that 15% is the difference between living in a so-so apartment to living in a GOOD apartment. To them, that 15% is just less money in the pockets of the already super rich who want golden toilets and new yachts every year.

This is like treating your kid who bites their nails by having their nails surgically removed. It doesn't address the WHY of addiction, it simply removes one aspect of it. I'd wager that people who are cured of their addiction by this method are also cured of things like pleasure, joy, motivation, etc.

But I'm sure America will adopt it soon enough. We're more interested in punishing people for drugs than treating the cause behind those drugs.

Not necessarily. Imagine the shit people did all the damn time that they eventually 'got over.' Like men being required to wear suits/ties 100% of the time. I imagine by the time of Alderaan, people will have mostly stopped caring about twittering/Facebooking 24/7 on their phones. It'll no longer be new. It would probably even be a very niche thing at that point...not just talking about those sites, but those KINDS of sites.

In order for this to be a more fitting analogy, someone has paid someone else to contract 10,000 car thieves to steal 10,000 cars and all come by and fling shit at your house all night. You ask the police for help and they say they can't really do anything because there's goddamn 10,000 cars and they'd have to build a prison in order to house all the car thieves.

But, your home owner's association decides to enact a temporary 'show proof of residence in this area to get through' rule and the shit-flinging is stopped. Some people are mad because now they can't get to your house and buy those yummy pies that you sell, though.

Bacteria are important in our digestive system for two reasons: To extract vitamins/minerals from food more efficiently (bacteria eat it and poop out things we can better use), and to break down things we normally couldn't break down. Perhaps if the bad bacteria wasn't efficient, it would cause us to be hungrier (as we aren't getting enough vitamins/minerals) and eat more, which would in turn cause weight gain due to the vitamin/mineral to fat/carbs/etc ratio being so shitty in regular food.

Goddamn, I hate this. Back when I bought my last laptop I got the one with the best possible graphics card. Had something like 4GB RAM, a decent processor, and a decent video card. The shit can't run 5+ year old games at any playable resolution. The original Half Life is barely playable, I get like 15 stuttery FPS on it. It could barely run SNES emulators.

No need for a tailgating gun. You can usually pick them out. Most people will settle into an average distance between their car and the car in front of them. You'll see five cars in a row with a decent distance between them, then you'll see a car practically touching the bumper of the car in front of them. Those are the dangerous people.

This. There are two major schools of thought in management: One is that managers should ride everyone's ass because as soon as the manager leaves their field of view they're going to be playing solitaire and wasting company money, the other is that all they themselves should have to do is relay orders from Up Above and then fire up solitaire themselves.

In reality, management is a logistical position. Their job is to make sure orders get relayed, everyone is cool with it (aka that it is well within their possibility to complete as requested), make sure people are keeping up to performance standards, and making sure everyone gets what they need to do their jobs. That's it. Unfortunately, it does usually require a little 'power' to do this, which is what quickly goes to peoples' heads. Instead of being logistical, they see themselves as the ones doing the REAL work. That's why you get those companies with departments consisting solely of middle management. They'll all stand around yelling at each other to take the garbage out and it'll never get done.

Financial companies and the like are the worst. My friend's department consists of four workers and EIGHT bosses. The workers bring in ~90% of the revenue for the team, the bosses go on expensive trips and bitch that their department isn't making enough revenue.

In order for manslaughter to apply, you would have had to be found guilty of either gross negligence or malicious intent. It would not apply in your situation because simply hitting someone with a vehicle does not automatically imply either. Rather, the circumstances surrounding it do. Gross negligence means you would have had to ran a red light or failed to yield to a pedestrian pursuant to your local laws (like they were in a yield-to-pedestrians zone in a crosswalk). Malicious intent means you acted to intentionally cause harm to them. One or the other of these things must be proven beyond the shadow of a doubt by the prosecution (since it's a felony), in order for you to be found under some part of the manslaughter crime.

Someone being struck in the road by a car at night while wearing all black automatically throws up a 'reasonable doubt' that you even knew they were there, much less could you have intentionally hit them, or taken actions not to hit them.

You MIGHT have had a good case against you as a misdemeanor, but toxicology showed he was under the influence of a mind altering and intoxicating drug, so you'd probably get let go on that if your lawyer could play that card up a little.

The next phase would be warding off the civil lawsuit they'll inevitably file against you because they can't afford the $40k+ it probably took them to get patched up. Good luck to that one, I say. Your best bet is to let it play out and then counter sue for the same amount for damaging your car.

Or once all insurance companies start requiring them to be installed, as you can't legally drive a car on the streets without liability insurance (or proof that you can pay off a few million in damages or something like that).

We don't have to bury it at all. We could reprocess almost all the high level nuclear waste and turn it into some kind of usable form. But alas, reprocessing is taboo here in the US, so we like to ship it to France (paying them to take it), have them reprocess it, and then buy it back from them.

As an example, let's say that you have a hotel room. You go out on the town one day and come back to your laptop, camera, etc, all missing. It isn't a stretch to say the hotel stole them. The only people that should have had access to the room were yourself and the hotel. There's no 'losing them' because no one should have taken them into their possession to begin with. The MOST that should have happened was that they get rearranged within the room so that housekeeping can better clean up the room (like moved off the bed and into the chairs/onto the table).

This isn't even like when the TSA rips off your goods from your bags...because it could have been LOTS of people in the airport, not just the TSA.

The problem is that the trend simply can't go on forever. It'll come to the point where companies have to start selling off vast assets and workers just to pay the ruling class a little more, then you get a bunch of chiefs yelling at each other to make some profit, but there's no more workers, and they sure aren't going to dirty their hands.

This only applies to companies that actually provide products/services, not investment firms and the like that just shift money around between accounts to generate a couple of bucks.

It isn't scary. YET. Currently, the FBI really only sticks its nose into people that have done something 'big.' Getting electronic communication records should be only for matters of national security or life and death time sensitive situations. They rarely had problems before getting witnesses to talk, and there are almost always witnesses. Either someone saw you shoot the guy or your friend you were texting about it got mad at you and wants to make sure you go away.

It will become a lot scarier once automated software flags out all kinds of interesting keywords, which all get followed up on. Ma'am, we're here because you texted the word pot to your friend. We now have probable cause to arrest you and search your home, pending an investigation into the sale and/or use of illegal drugs. They've already been arrested for the same reason, only we found some expired pain medication in their cabinet so brought them in for possession of narcotics. In addition to that, your husband will lose their security clearance and your children will be placed in protective custody for the duration.