Then clearly the world would be a better place.

Not the person you're replying to, but I felt I should step in here...

My wife always paid her fair share when we dated. I honestly felt a little uncomfortable about it at first, but she insisted.

She loves it when I buy her flowers and jewellery, but she'll buy me stuff I like too; so that seems even to me.

I'll hold doors open for her, and she is happy that I do. But she'll hold doors open for me too, and I'm happy that she does.

She most certainly would expect me to defend her in a fight; but equally, I'd expect her to defend me in one. (neither of us is particularly physically inclined, but we're also not really the types to get in to fights; so thus far it hasn't been a situation that has arisen)

Basically my point is that just because a woman expects some things from the guy, it doesn't mean she's asking for unequal treatment... she may be willing to do all those same things too.

I believe it's cultural/dialectal. In Australian and New Zealand English (at least), men can also be cunts - in fact, in southern New Zealand 15 to 20 years ago (I can't speak for today), it would have sounded very strange to call a woman "cunt" whereas greeting your male friend with, "hey you old cunt, what's up?" wouldn't be unexpected in some social circles.
I'm well aware this doesn't really make much sense, but language often doesn't.

The same almost certainly applies for "douche", "asshole", "whore" and so on. Sometimes male, sometimes female, sometime both.

And that mentality isn't necessarily wrong, given that you accept the premises they're working under.

Imagine you know that if you don't make it to a place in the next 5 minutes that a man will gun down a room full of schoolchildren. In order to get there, you have to speed and in doing so greatly increase the risk of killing a single innocent pedestrian. Even if that happens, it is a better outcome than the children being gunned down.

Now, that scenario is dramatically oversimplified. Decisions about national security concerns are however made on the same basis. The belief is that the loss of a small number of lives is worth it in order to prevent the loss of a greater number of lives or extreme suffering to a great number of people (one death is better than a million on the edge of starvation; even if no-one dies directly).

I'm not saying I agree with them - I actually don't, because I don't believe that most things they refer to as 'national security' are in fact validly so - but the logic makes sense given that you accept the premises.

Certainly not if you're looking for evidence of general action; however if you consider the original statement that there is no safe level of LSD use, then it only requires one 'negative' to disprove it.

Also, beyond simply myself there is plenty of research that shows LSD is an extraordinarily 'safe' substance by pretty much any measure you care to choose (with the exception of legal ramifications, which is a societal issue, not a drug issue).

Firstly, if Y is considered harmless enough to be legal and X is less harmful than Y, then surely the question of whether X is harmless enough to be legal is already answered, isn't it?

Secondly, asking the question this way ignores the harm of X being illegal. The war on drugs is a very harmful thing to society - far more so than the drugs themselves.

I fully believe that if all recreational drugs were legalised, there would be new problems in society that we hadn't dealt with before, but the overall amount of harm would be lower.

Psychedelics are also like that.

There was significant research performed in to whether psychedelics can directly cause psychotic episodes (as anecdotally reported on more than one occasion). It was found that in people with a known predisposition for psychiatric issues (or people with existing psychiatric issues) that a psychotic episode brought on by psychedelic use occurs in a fraction of a percent (sorry, I don't have the research in front of me to look up the exact figure). In people with no known predisposition, there was only one case (out of a very large number; again sorry, no exact number right now) where a psychotic episode occurred. This was in a person who happened to be the twin of a schizophrenic; so it is considered likely that they did in fact have a predisposition that simply wasn't noted.

Being a successful professional, a great husband and father, making inroads to becoming a moderately successful author (see sig), and having used LSD extensively for the past 16 years, I must respectfully disagree vehemently with that statement...

Alcohol is significantly more addictive than cannabis. This relatively well-known chart is a good starting point (despite being ugly and imprecise; it covers the general idea).

My theoretical solution for a lot of things is "legalise it, tax it, regulate it" - a solution that cuts out a lot of the problems of illicit SUPPLY (which is the main problem with such things), not illicit, personal substance abuse. But I'm just not sure that approach is worth the gain for something like cannabis.

While I have no personal interest in cannabis (I don't like any drug that messes with my ability to think clearly - cannabis and alcohol both included), I do think this approach is exactly what is needed for a variety of drugs, cannabis included. Take a look at how many people are currently in prison for cannabis related offences around the world (and especially in the US) and think about what it's costing to keep them there. This - in and of itself - is enough of a reason that it'd be worth it.

I'm pretty sure most western countries have a complaints department for law enforcement.

Many years ago in my teenage years in New Zealand, I was chatting to random people on IRC (a pretty new protocol at the time) and there was a guy bragging about bombing a plane - specifically, putting explosives on the landing gear of the plane.

Being young and paranoid, but not yet particularly clever in the ways of the computer security world, I 'anonymously' emailed the police with information about it. My attempts at anonymity were however not good enough and a few days later the police came and took all my computer equipment. The search warrant read "Attempted murder and breach of the telecommunications act" (I still have it, along with the write up I got in the newspaper as a reminder of absurdity). Of course, I was never arrested as I had done nothing illegal.

While that all annoyed me greatly, it didn't annoy me nearly as much as them keeping my stuff for over 3 months before I got it back. When I did finally get it back, the power switch on my main system was physically broken and the HDD was formatted.

I made a complaint to the Police Complaints Authority (a government body) and they ended up writing a letter of apology. So, while complaining certainly didn't do anything useful for me, the point is that there WAS a body for me to complain to.

I'm sure it's a little more complex in countries like the US and Australia since there may be differences by state as well as the federal level to think about, but a quick Google search seems to confirm that complaints departments and/or processes do exist there also.

That is a serious strawman and if you think I said anything like that at all, you either lack reading comprehension or are just looking for a fight.

In case it's the former, please note that I also wrote: "Also note that I did say "a large number of soldiers" and not all. There are plenty of cases you can find of soldiers going against orders they believe to be morally reprehensible, but the fact that OTHER soldiers then do it is a testament for the argument and not against it.".

Beyond that, assuming your brother is a front line soldier that has seen combat, ask him about his combat experience. Ask him what was going through his head at the time. I'm willing to bet that he was 'focusing on the job at hand' - the training teaches soldiers to shut out their own concerns and doubts because otherwise they simply wouldn't be effective soldiers.

I get it. You care for your brother. You most likely respect him. You are quite likely proud of him and the job he does. You don't like that I said something bad about soldiers because it besmirches him. I don't know your brother nor anything about him beyond what you've said. But I wasn't talking about your brother - I was talking about soldiers in general. I was talking about what is intended by the training that they go through, and indeed is generally very successful.

It's even entirely possible your brother is one of those who would not blindly follows orders and would think for himself. But if that's the case, then by definition he's not a good soldier from the perspective of his superiors; they failed to do what they wanted as far as his training is concerned; and it might get him in to trouble one day.

All evidence that I've seen shows that a large number - possibly even the majority - of soldiers have been brainwashed in to following orders unconditionally and will commit the most horrendous crimes against humanity when ordered to do so. And - even when not ordered - that same brainwashing includes training in not thinking of 'the enemy' as human, because that causes you to delay in the critical moment. So they dehumanise the enemy to the point that further atrocities can be committed even when not under orders to do so.

Note that I don't blame the soldiers themselves in a lot of these situations - they are often good people who given time to think and reason it through would not behave that way, but their training has so messed with them that some actions they'll take don't reflect on the person they are.

Also note that I did say "a large number of soldiers" and not all. There are plenty of cases you can find of soldiers going against orders they believe to be morally reprehensible, but the fact that OTHER soldiers then do it is a testament for the argument and not against it.

Who says the code has to be written for the general case. It had better be a LOT more intelligent than the equivalent of a bunch of "if/then" statements.

Also, philosophically speaking, I'd say a human's decision making is just a really complex set of algorithms that we don't understand particularly well at this point. What we do know is that humans make significant mistakes with regularity, so the test isn't whether or not these autonomous systems make mistakes in difficult circumstances, but rather the ratio of mistakes compared to human agent.

Not saying I'm in favour of killbots - I'm really not. But I'm not in favour of humans killing each other either. If killing is going to be done (which it is), I'd rather go with whichever system is going to make the least mistakes and have the least side-effects.

I use deathswitch for exactly this. Because of the limitations of the free system, when I fail to log in periodically (it sends email reminders) it will send an email to an address that is then forwarded to multiple trusted people with instructions on how to retrieve my passwords. The passwords themselves aren't in the email, just 'how to figure them out'.

It's not perfect, but it covers enough of the possible scenarios that I'm happy with it. Should any of the unlikely scenarios occur where it falls down, there are probably more pressing concerns than my passwords.

Of course that has occurred to me; but I do see how you could interpret otherwise from what I wrote. I didn't really intend to go so far down on that off-topic side path.

Generally speaking, most people do not enjoy their jobs to the point that if they had the choice of making the same money to do 'whatever they want' they would choose something other than what they're doing. That's the kind of "work" I was referring to the elimination of. The "Star Trek utopia" to use a concept that most geeks should be familiar with.