Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Prohibition Yay!! (Score 2) 194

That data is very hard to come by, as we don't really have good numbers on how much marijuana gets used. Canada has very good data on how marijuana impaired accidents nearly quintupled when they legalized marijuana. The doctor that wrote that paper had this to say about comparative deadliness of the two substances:

“Stoned driving is as dangerous, if currently less deadly, than drunk driving. Many people don’t understand that, and have a false sense that driving while intoxicated on cannabis is safe, which is untrue. “The odds of being involved in a motor vehicle crash when driving ‘stoned’ are approximately double those of sober driving, but significantly less than the 10 to 15 times increase when driving with a blood alcohol concentration of approximately 0.1,”

On it's face this would seem to agree with your assessment that marijuana is less deadly than alcohol. From a driving perspective it probably is. Although the paper went on to talk about how very few of the people who tested positive for marijuana only tested positive for marijuana. Most also tested positive for alcohol and that combination was significantly more deadly than alcohol alone.

It turns out that people that get stoned and drive tend to also be drunk, and the combination makes them even more dangerous than simply being drunk.

It also doesn't take into consideration increased risk factors long term for cardiovascular and other health related issues arising from marijuana use. Right now, admittedly the science behind that is murky. Numbers are hard to get for criminalized substances, and it is very difficult to separate the effects of marijuana from the effects of other drugs that often get used in combination with marijuana (alcohol being a prime example). That being the case smoking marijuana probably has most of the same health problems that smoking tobacco has. From the limited studies that have been done marijuana smokers can probably expect similar if not worse mortality rates. Not to mention the fact that while most marijuana users don't go on to use other "harder" drugs. There is a statistical link between marijuana use and later use of other drugs. Some of that makes sense. I have several friends that have told me that they have been given marijuana spiked with some other substance at one time or another.

It turns out that drug dealers are not nice people. Hanging out with them is a very serious health risk.

Just for the record, I am personally in favor of the decriminalization of marijuana, and I have even helped my niece get a medical marijuana card. I recognize that the science on some of this is still out. I just don't think that when the research is done, that marijuana is going to turn out to be as benign a substance as many marijuana advocates currently insist that it is. I think that it is at least safe to say that it is probably as harmful to your health as cigarette smoke, and long term cigarettes are invariably an early death sentence.

Comment Re:Prohibition Yay!! (Score 0, Troll) 194

Interestingly enough the U.S. actually tried criminalizing alcohol distribution and use. You can read the history of prohibition if you want. I personally am a tee-totaler, and I spend a fair share of my time trying to convince youth to never drink alcohol. That being the case, even I think that criminalizing alcohol was a mistake. Alcohol is simply too easy to make, and too much a part of most people's culture to successfully make illegal.

That being the case just because criminalizing alcohol was overzealous does not mean that decriminalizing other drugs is a good idea. Oregon has basically proven that it is better for society for some substances to be illegal. Yes, alcohol kills more people, but most drugs (including marijuana) are more deadly. Fortunately all other drugs are simply far less popular than alcohol. The last thing that we want is for these other drugs to become more popular.

As an aside, you really should consider giving up alcohol as well.

Comment Re:Plastic recycling has always been a scam (Score 4, Insightful) 101

I remember when almost all glass bottles were recycled. Milk came in glass bottles that were refilled over and over. Soda came in glass bottles which were refilled and used over and over. These bottles were worth money to retailers, not because the government put some sort of tax on them, but because they would resell them to the distributors who would wash them out and reuse them.

This system lasted much longer in some parts of the world than others. Recycling soda bottles was the norm in Latin America clear into the 90s, maybe longer. I moved back to the United States and I stopped paying attention. Of course, they weren't melting the bottles down or anything crazy like that. They simply washed them out. After a while the bottles would get so worn that they would get hazy on the outside. The still held Coca-Cola just fine.

I suspect that even the most granola of today's customers would be put off by this sort of recycling. And there is no question that gathering and washing glass bottles is definitely more expensive than simply manufacturing brand new plastic bottles. Before plastic, however, that was simply the world that we lived in. Even 30 years ago recycling glass was still economically viable in locations where the packaging machines hadn't been upgraded.

Part of the reason that I am so skeptical of any sort of recycling program is that recycling proponents always seem to gloss right over the history of what societies did before plastics were widespread. Humans have already solved how to package goods in a world less reliant on plastic. But instead of pushing for well known solutions to the problems of plastic we would rather point the finger at Big Oil and blame them for our plastics problem.

Comment Re:legality of user content (Score 2) 16

The license that Youtube has content providers agree to is incredibly broad. Youtube can basically use that content however it would like, including sublicensing it, monetizing it, and retaining it after you have deleted it from the service. People uploading stuff to Youtube give Youtube an incredible amount of rights over their work.

Github's license, on the other hand, does not grant them extensive rights. Heck, they treat most repos as private. Worse, many of the Free Software licenses that they probably could use to train the AI might potentially create derivative works that would also be copylefted. The lawyers at the FSF has definite beliefs about this (here's the link), and their beliefs just happen to line up with the beliefs of most content creators. I suspect before too long we will have either legislation or case law that will spell this out concretely. To this point the folks training AI models have just moved forward under the impression that they could train their AI with whatever content they wanted, whether it was licensed to them or not. That's unlikely to stand long term.

Either way, however, Youtube has direct access to the motherlode of data when it comes to video, and it is all licensed to them under a very lenient license. That advantage actually is likely to be hard to beat.

Comment Re:Should be Gigabit (Score 1) 103

I personally don't want to pay for everyone to have the ability to stream at 8K. I don't even see at 8K. Why should I be paying taxes to guarantee that my neighbors can watch their sportsball at ridiculous resolutions? What's the other use case for such ridiculous amounts of bandwidth?

There is a certain amount of broadband that I feel that we should subsidize, but I think that it is very easy to get carried away.

Comment Re:how do they know who is driving the car or the (Score 1) 117

Believe me, I would be upset if I found out that my auto maker was using my driving data against me. That's part of the reason that my daily driver is a 96 Honda Civic. I drive carefully (as evidenced by the fact that I have been driving the same car for nearly 30 years), but that doesn't mean that I want anyone keeping tabs on how I drive. I especially don't want someone keeping tabs on how I drive without my knowledge. Worse, the automakers are profiting by sharing that information and I don't get a cut.

That being the case, if what you are upset about is that your insurance agency doesn't know who is actually driving your car, then I can't sympathize. They don't care who is driving the car. They simply want to know how badly the car is being driven. If you loan your car out to someone that is a terrible driver then I actually think that the insurance agency should get to know about that. After all, they sold you insurance based on the risks they perceived from you, not someone else that might be driving your car.

As an example, I have a 16 year-old daughter that just started driving. I made it very clear to the insurance agent that she wouldn't be driving my wife's car (a late model Honda Odyssey), and instead she would be driving the 2006 Kia Sedona. Mechanically the Kia Sedona is still sound. It has new brakes and tires, and it has been well maintained. It's a big vehicle with ABS brakes and side airbags. When (not if) my daughter gets in an accident she will be as safe as I can make her. I still got a discount from specifying that she wouldn't be driving the Odyssey. Insurance companies just want a reasonable idea as to how much risk they are taking on. Personally, I think that is fair.

I would consider using a telemetry app for her when she drives. It would have to be phone based, and not based on the information from the vehicle, as there is no way that I would put her in a vehicle new enough to support telemetry. The biggest reason that I wouldn't want to share her driving information is that I have driven with her and I suspect she is in the lowest quartile of new drivers. In fact, I suspect that if the insurance agency knew how terrible she was they would charge me more to insure her. On the bright side she is getting better with practice, and she is cautious about driving places that she isn't already familiar with. That makes a big difference in practice, but it is unlikely to show up on any sort of telemetry app. Hopefully she can avoid any accidents and improve her skills to the point where I don't feel like I am taking advantage of my insurer.

Comment Re:how do they know who is driving the car or the (Score 1) 117

They don't care. They aren't trying to prosecute you for bad driving. They are simply trying to charge you more money if the vehicle that they insure gets driven badly. If you let knuckleheads drive your vehicle then you probably should be charged more in insurance.

Comment Re:Ridiculous (Score 1) 94

No one gets 45 years for smuggling drugs, or for that matter, for smuggling live bodies. If you look at the list of charges, they're a damned long stretch, making it sound like he was a massive smuggling op, not someone who had the wrong tank in the back of his truck.

If you move your household from Mexico to Arizona and bring along your fridge, have you committed a crime?

Comment Re:Netflix Crackdown is Underwhelming (Score 1) 62

You are lucky then. I have an another location 10 miles away where I sometimes watch Netflix and now every time I do I have to adjust my household. I am on the Ultra Premium account, and I am supposedly able to watch 4 streams at a time, but only if we are sitting in each other's laps.

I just did the math and my family watches less than 20 hours of Netflix a month (I have 6 kids). It turns out that I haven't watched Netflix since November. It's not that big of a deal, but getting a message from Netflix every time one of my kids wants to switch where the household resides is just enough of a pain that it makes me want to stop using Netflix completely.

Per hour they are definitely my most expensive service. We can definitely live without them.

Comment Re:Parents failed me less than you think. (Score 1) 143

True. But it used to be more or less assumed that if you did the stupid, you paid a penalty and learned better. (Bet you never touched another hot stove. And learned a valuable lesson about impulse control.) Now we're protected from the penalty, so there's no downside to stupid, so there's a perception that we must be protected from stupid...

Comment Re:Parents failed me less than you think. (Score 1) 143

It used to be normal to learn, quite young, that some stuff was not ours to fuck with. We could look at it, maybe (depending) handle it, but it was not to be eaten, played with, dismantled, or anything else. We were then trusted to have the sense the gods gave a turnip, and abide by those rules. I expect the teaching and the trust are much the same element.

Even dumb kids learned that much, so I won't buy that kids have declined so much that they can't understand the rules.

Slashdot Top Deals

A morsel of genuine history is a thing so rare as to be always valuable. -- Thomas Jefferson

Working...