Or, make a BEGIN statement on top of your main project, ie:
BEGIN {
push @INC, glob "/home/project_modules/*/lib";
}
You dont need to use anything global, and its better you dont. Never execute anything as root. You are able to execute local modules just like node, rvm, etc. Its all the same.
Some linux installs come with perl/python installed. It is used by the system and is refered to as "system perl" or "system python" or "system ruby", etc.. and it is not recommended to make upgrade on those "system XXX". Only your system should upgrade the libraries it uses. That is why you should always use a local perl/python/ruby install.
Perl5 is a great language. For internet and system related tasks it is great! It was created long time ago and evolved over the years.
One thing is true, it had a lot of advantage over other languages for a lot of years. However, now in 2018, other languages have also evolved and gained a lot of traction. One example is javascript/node which is now being used more and more. For a lot of time, a lot of frontend focused developers didnt really want to try backend development... specially because backend development was usually done in another language which was not javascript. So some never really attempted to do backend development. However when node was released, that opened a lot of new opportunities for the front end developers.
There are a lot of languages these days and many of them are capable enough to do many types of projects.
The important thing is, some languages have a bigger concentration of more capable engineers. One of these languages is perl. The perl programmers are excelent. They have real close experience with the kernel and systems and usually have great experience in complex backend tasks. Many are not as great with front end development. Some are.
Some projects can be done and deployed by 1 single perl developer. The same project if done in java for example might require more than 1 java developer.
The microsoft language creates a bubble and their developers sometimes dont know universal technical terms, they only know the microsoftish terms. Ie. they might not know what a "web server" is, but they know what "IIS" is. They might now know what a "hash" is, but they know what a "dictionary" is. Perl developers use universal terms.
Amazingly, javascript, especially ES6 is looking more and more like perl. Those that know both will agree sometimes it reminds of perl.
There are many projects people dont know about that use perl behind the scenes. But of course there are not as many perl programmers as there are in other languages and thats one reason you dont hear much about these projects.
Companies embrace more and more the modern perl development. Java, microsoft, node, python, ruby, etc are more popular of course. Specially because a lot of banks use java and they push java via universities. In the past I have seen labs with SUN machines on universities that teach Java. Microsoft also gives students free software licenses via universities. Thats another reason Microsoft and Java are very popular.
The thing about perl which people really don't appreciate is that it scales. From a thow-away oneliner to a few hundred thousand lines of code [1]. But achieving that coherently takes a depth of knowledge of the language[2] and a reluctance to reinvent the wheel.
My main problems with perl is that I haven't found any normal programming activity I can't do with it, and that it's sucked enough of my time up over the past decade that people pay me and give me good working conditions in which to use it.
[1] But if you get to "a few hundred thousand lines of code" it's likely that there's some significant architectural mistake in your code. Architectural mistakes are not a perl-specific thing. Perl's biggest strength is also its biggest weakness - it's flexible.
[2] Depth of knowledge of a language is something that seems to be quite unfashionable in the industry at the moment, and some of perl's design decisions seem to be optimised for a style of knowledge that's also unfashionable.
Could you elaborate on point 2 there? I think that's an interesting point. I think it fits with a theme I've been mulling over regarding more people being tool users than tool builders.
One example I can think of is this: if you write perl using 'canonical' expressions, your code will often get compiled to optimized function calls. But if you use non-canonical expressions to perform the same operation, the compiled code won't be optimized and will run a lot slower.
An example would be using a map expression instead of a for loop. The map expression will typically run faster, even though its body is pretty much the same as the for loop's body.
No. map should be much slower than a for loop, because map has to cons the result list, while the for loop only does it for side effects, but ignores all the return values. If map is faster, then there's some thing wrong with the loop optimizer or loop run-time overhead.
In cperl there are many loop optimizations which are not in perl5. I'm pretty sure "for" is faster than "map" there.
FWIW, in Perl 6 there is no real difference between a `map` and a `for` loop: in the case of the `for` loop, the final value of each iteration is simply discarded.
Most decent computer languages are heavily inspired by theoretical linguistics. So education tends towards that. Perl is inspired by practical linguistics. It's a total mess like English and amazingly expressive like English. This doesn't fit well with standard computing paradigms, but it does make perl a decent language for people from non-standard backgrounds.
A lot of people from "standard backgrounds" have the theoretical linguistics approach baked in to their literacy. Perl on the other hand has a much easier time adapting to varying thinking styles. Here's a comment I made about a former colleague's code earlier today:
> one thing people like about perl is it can shoehorn into pretty much any mental model. [ colleague ]'s model is quite solid but also pretty mental
There's something to be said for enforcing a certain kind of mental model. Java and C# do a terrible job of this. Python does a reasonable job. Ruby is just perl done differently - seems to make the "mental" part a bit easier. Personally aside from perl the programming I've most enjoyed is arduino flavoured C, but that's just for fun. I do perl for fun and profit.
Ironically, the universal terms for ‘hashes’ are ‘map,’ ‘associative array’ or, at the worst, ‘table.’ Even ‘dictionary’ makes sense and is definitely used outside of MS.
Hashes are completely different things, the use of them is an implementation detail and not necessary.
For a small amount of short keys hash tables perform worse than a simple linear scan. 127 is a good number but it depends on the design.
O(1) is completely missing the point of hidden constant factors. For many applications, like the one used in javascript, ruby or perl - map as objects with 3-7 short keys - hash tables are totally overblown.
For compile-time known keys you better create a perfect hash table, where the fastest could be a switch of pre-compiled word-aligned memcmp statements. http://blogs.perl.org/users/rurban/2014/08/perfect-hashes-an...
Haven't done that yet with SIMD instructions, which should be much faster.
For mostly read maps (like e.g. for mysql applications) it's mostly faster to run-time compile a shared lib with a perfect hash table. Compilers are very fast with data-only.
For many other use cases a judy tree, compressed patricia tree, ctrie, HAMT, CHAMP or even a btree may be faster than a typical hash table. Esp. considering cache oblivious architectures.
The modern swiss table doesn't look like an old-style hash table anymore, more like a patricia tree.
E.g. almost everything is faster than the default C++ hash table.
That's not the issue. If you have a Dictionary interface that says it provides you with O(1) lookup, you don't care if it uses a hashtable or magic dust to do it.
My point is that, since a hashtable is the only way to provide the desired performance characteristics, it's not unreasonable at all to say "I want a hashtable", instead of "I want a Dictionary implementation with O(1) lookup". The former is more succinct.
When someone says "hashtable" in the context of writing software, they're most often specifying desired performance characteristics, not the specific implementation details. This is how Perl does it, for example.
Also, there are Map implementations that don't have these performance characteristics, e.g. a TreeMap in Java which internally uses a red/black tree and thus provides logarithmic lookup and insertion. If I'm writing something that needs to do a lot of efficient lookups but only write "Map" in the spec, there's danger that the wrong thing will be used, and performance will suffer. It really does need a hashtable, not just a generic lookup interface.
In theory, I don't think hash tables are O(1): even if you ignore the atrocious worst-case performance and just look at average performance you still have to make the size of the hash depend on the number of entries, which brings in a factor of log(n), which is exactly what tree-based algorithms have.
In practice, the performance of a hash table definitely does depend on the number of entries because of the cache hierarchy and stuff like that.
I could easily be wrong about the theory: there are, of course, lots of different kinds of hash table and different ways you might formalise the meaning of "O(1)".
Hashtables are typically considered amortized O(1) for insert and retrieve. The atrocious worst-case performance doesn't happen in common implementations because the hashtable gets enlarged before or when it occurs (and these resizes still allow for amortized O(1) performance).
And logarithmic growth in the key size is definitely not as bad as logarithmic growth in the number of nodes in a tree to traverse, because going from calculating e.g. a key size of 28 to 29 bits is not a big deal at all, but going from 28 to 29 levels in your tree means an entirely new memory lookup to grab that one node. The hash calculation is always cheap, whereas traversing a tree thrashes caches -- you only need one memory lookup in a hashtable, whereas you need logN in a tree. Those lookups are orders of magnitude more expensive time-wise than the simple integer math involved in calculating the hash.
You are definitely right for most hash tables. Determining the right bucket is O(1) but there will be collisions. Open hashing solves it by creating a linked list within buckets which you will need to traverse. Closed hashing solves it by probing, you might test several buckets before finding the right entry. In both cases, you get O(log(n)) as the average lookup performance.
You actually get O(1) with perfect hash functions, but doing so requires choosing a hash function by the data set. This is normally only feasible for precalculated hash tables, not those that are being filled dynamically.
The average lookup performance on a hashtable is definitely not O(logN) -- it's amortized O(1). Just Google for "hash table performance" and observe that all the results are saying O(1), not O(logN). I'd like to request some reputable sources from you showing O(logN).
The modal number of buckets you have to look into (or the modal size of the linked list) is 1. If it's more than 1, then your hash table is too full, and you need to enlarge it. This is admittedly an expensive operation, but it still amortizes out to O(1). And if you know in advance how many elements will be in a hashtable (this is common), then you never even need to resize.
It's important to distinguish between graphs of performance as measured on real hardware and theoretical results from computational complexity theory. It might be clearer to say "near-constant time over the region of interest" if you're talking about the former because "O(1)" has a precise meaning and refers only to what happens in the limit. Real programs usually only work for "small" n: they stop working long before the size of the input reaches 2^(2^(2^1000)), for example. But whether the algorithm is O(1) or not depends only on what happens when the input is bigger than that.
Another way of putting it: if you modify your practical program so that it runs on a theoretical machine that handles any size of input then you will probably find that another term appears in the execution time, one with a "log" in it, and that term eventually dominates when n gets big enough.
Yes, I am being a bit pedantic. But "O(1)" is mathematical notation and you have to be pedantic to do maths properly.
It should be obvoius that hash table lookups are above O(1) as long as collisions exist. Tweaking the load factor can reduce the probability of collisions, but that's merely a constant factor to the lookup complexity. As to whether O(log(n)) is a good approximation for the average, we can certainly discuss that. It depends a lot on the algorithm, but https://probablydance.com/2017/02/26/i-wrote-the-fastest-has... shows (first graph) that the reality is typically even above logarithmic for some reason.
> It should be obvoius that hash table lookups are above O(1) as long as collisions exist.
This doesn't follow at all. If the average number of lookups is 2 instead of 1, then it's O(2), which is O(1) because it's just a constant factor. The number of collisions needs to grow proportionally to the total number of elements being stored, which does not happen because the hashtable itself is also grown to keep the average number of collisions constant and low.
A hashtable that is 80% full has the same small number of collisions regardless of whether the hashtable has a thousand elements in it or a billion. Meanwhile, a BST would have to make 10 lookups in the first case and 30 in the second case -- that's logarithmic for you.
Your link shows lots of real performance figures which are dominated by CPU cache misses and other non-intrinsic factors. That's what's responsible for the reduction in performance on larger data sets, not anything intrinsic to hashtables themselves. If you look at the aforementioned first graph, the best hashmap performs at around at worst around 10ns up through ~200K elements, whereupon it blows out the fastest CPU cache and then takes around a max of 25 ns for the max size tested (~700M?). Factoring out the cache issue, it definitely does not look super-logarithmic to me. It might not even be logarithmic; I'd need to see raw data to know for sure (it's hard to tell by estimating from the graph).
There are some options. For example, if the indexes are known to be within a certain range, a plain array will do better. For tables below a certain size, an array of key/value tuples might also perform better. An implementation could even switch between the underlying approaches depending on the data at hand, choosing between hash tables and something else depending on what should perform better.
Yes, the "hash" part is an implementation detail. The performance is also an implementation detail by the way. Often, tables will optimize for a different criterion such as memory efficiency. Lookup will be less efficient then. And, as another person noted, you cannot really expect O(1) from a hash table anyway.
Lookup in a trie is O(L) where L is the length of the key; not that different if you take into account that to lookup into a hashtable, you also have to compute the hash of the key.
I also remember quite a lot of Perl script in the WDK (Windows Driver Kit) back then. Was surprised by it that there were so many perl hackers @ Microsoft.
My only real dealing was ~2001 and fixing shitty cgi-bin-webscripts in Perl. PHP4 was a huge improvement over that :)
As the years went on and I did more admin work I've come to really enjoy having perl5 available basically anywhere - the power of python with the availability of shell scripts.. but without the hassle. I'm also kinda sad they didn't write puppet in Perl but chose Ruby. I bet it would have prevented all my "too slow" and "needs too much RAM" problems with it...
My memories over a decade old here but ... as I recall there was an early perl based protopuppet that luke wrote and used in his consulting roles in the early 2000s. This was after splitting from cfengine and moving towards a declarative model.
For better or worse Ruby really does seem a good fit for the puppet use case. A flexible DSL for expressing config intent, coupled with a very extensible/inheritance based parse & apply model.
There are no “universal” terms. You used hash as an example, that’s already less universal than calling it a dictionary - it’s a hash map/table, and I’ve only ever heard this term from Perl developers.
That's because perl developers knew lisp and functional languages before and therefore avoided the misleading term "map", which is an operator to apply a function on a vector (=array) or list since the late 50ies.
a map vs to map is misleading.
"table" is shorter than "dictionary" and also describes the structure better. A dictionary is mostly a book, or a list of keys (/usr/share/dict).
prolog also used the term "table" or "tabling" for its caching of backtrackings, what we would call "memoize" or memoization via a hash table.
> perl developers knew lisp and functional languages
It's a practical certainty that the vast majority do not, and its design (up to Perl 5, at least) smacks of total Lisp ignorance.
"Map" is used in mathematics as a kind of synonym for "function", especially from some arbitrary set to another one. If you assign the domain < 1, 2, 3, 4 > to the range < 3, 2, 4, 1 >, that's a map. We can draw it as two bubbles containing labeled dots, and draw arrows between the bubbles.
This sense of "map" is widely used in computing. For instance "keyboard scan codes get mapped to characters" or "a coordinate in the abstract canvas get mapped to the viewport, which is mapped to the screen" or "the temperature sensor is mapped to GPIO-s 13 to 17."
The "map" in Lisp's mapcar is exactly this sense. The map is the function that is being applied: mapcar is using the verb sense: take the car of every cell through the function: i.e. map each domain value to the range. This is called "projection" or "mapping"; "map" is just the verb describing what happens to each individual element.
Yes. If Larry knew how a LISP is implemented, many internals would have looked better. the symtab, the optree, the stack and esp. the lexicals. Just compare to the ruby internals.
But at least he knew the terminology, and got the concepts right. In opposition to php and python which failed miserably.
For what it's worth, the three main Java map implementations are HashMap, which does what it says on the time, LinkedHashMap, which has some additional pointers to maintain insertion order (and thus has performance that suffers by a constant factor), and TreeMap, which is really a red/black tree which thus offers logarithmic lookup time instead of constant lookup time (i.e. it's not a hashtable at all).
I am evaluating Runbox and Migadu right now; My only nitpick with Runbox is their pricing page, they need to clean it up and simplify it. Its information overload. I can always ask/click for more details but present me with the most basic info up front and centre.
It is important to pay for email services and support the diversity of email companies.
Paid services tend to have good support and care for their users.
Users of free email service that hit a problem (ie. password lost), are essentially screwed. The free email service (gmail/yahoo/outlook) will not give proper "manual" support to solve that problem. They are so big and this fact essentially makes the users of free email services just another user (worth nothing). The big brands that provide free services will not care about your problem when you go in trouble.
Users that only have free email services, should really consider testing paid email services. And slowly move all their emails into a paid email service. But dont forget, it is very important to use purchase your-domain.com and use that in signups. Never use your-user@gmail/yahoo/hotmail/outlook.com to signup. Because when the user uses @gmail/yahoo/etc they get locked in and it gets hard to move out of the free email services after a while (because all the friends, family and websites will only know your free services email).
Another important point to note is, the only secure encryption is end-to-end encryption that the user has control of. For example openpgp. Users that care so much about encryption should rely on openpgp. If encryption is so important, dont belive the servers and use openpgp. No matter what, when the email is sent, its sent in plain text. So openpgp is the only way to send it in plaintext encrypted.
Paid services will care more about the user than free services.
"Hushmail supplied cleartext copies of private email messages associated with several addresses at the request of law enforcement agencies under a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty with the United States.; e.g. in the case of U.S. v. Tyler Stumbo. In addition, the contents of emails between Hushmail addresses were analyzed, and 12 CDs were supplied to U.S. authorities."
"The court records show that the FBI sought Lavabit's Transport Layer Security (TLS/SSL) private key. Levison objected, saying that the key would allow the government to access communications by all 400,000 customers of Lavabit. He also offered to add code to his servers that would provide the information required just for the target of the order. The court rejected this offer because it would require the government to trust Levison and stated that just because the government could access all customers' communication did not mean they would be legally permitted to do so. Lavabit was ordered to provide the SSL key in machine readable format."
Parent doesn't seem to be arguing that these providers are anonymous, just that you get what you pay for in customer service. They explicitly say that end to end encryption (ie client side PGP) is required for privacy.
Then his argument is even more flawed, because one can just as well pay for Gmail or Outlook and use PGP with them, without exposing himself to vulnerabilities of smaller email providers.
You are not paying for customer service, you are just becoming a paid customer[1]. And then you can compare which email provider treats its paid customers best. For me, the best treatment is when a product is so well thought-through, that I never need to contact anyone about it.
ProtonMail also offers a free inbox with a way to pay for additional storage[1]. Would you also think, that by upgrading your ProtonMail storage you are not paying for email service? The only difference is, that Gmail doesn't limit its features for the free users. It's just a different business model.
I like wires. Every time i can, i choose to use a wire. Be it for internet or headphones.
The reason for my wired preference is security. I trust cables more than i trust wireless.
Bluetooth is insecure. I dont think it is secure to walk around in a mall with your bluetooth turned on. (correct me if i am wrong)
Wifi WPA2 is probably secure. However wifi WEP is completely insecure. For many years WEP has been widely used. Another problem with wifi are fake networks that use the same name as a public network.
Another interesting fact with wired headphones is they wont fall down directly on the floor, because of the wires. The same goes with the computer mouse.. sometimes it moves to the edge of the table and might want to fall.. the wire will hold it.
Wireless keyboards is definitively a no go since teorically its possible to passively listen for pressed keys just like a keylogger.
Wireless technology sure looks better without all the wires, however when people choose convenience(wireless), they lose some security.
The WPA2 standard is not secure against key reinstallation attacks, which can be used to decrypt packets in an MitM position. Most implementations of WPA2, though, have patched themselves in a backwards-compatible manner since discovery of this vulnerability.
The IEEE has put out WPA3 which fixes this vulnerability (among other changes).
Well that and I have some very nice headphones that I am obviously not going to ditch because some smartphone removes the single world-wide standard socket in existence...
> I dont think it is secure to walk around in a mall with your bluetooth turned on. (correct me if i am wrong)
You are wrong. I don't recall any Bluetooth security issues from just having Bluetooth on or from having an established connection. Those things are pretty well solved in all vaguely modern wireless standards.
The issues are always around the initial connection and key exchange. PIN-based pairing has various flaws in Bluetooth, but Bluetooth headphones use "Just Works" pairing, which I don't think has had any issues, other than the design compromise that it is vulnerable to MitM. That is vanishingly unlikely to happen with Bluetooth headphones though.
WPA2 is secure if you use a very strong password. WEP is basically extinct.
> "In computer software and media, an Easter egg is an intentional inside joke, hidden message or image, or secret feature of a work. It is usually found in a computer program, video game, or DVD/Blu-ray Disc menu screen. The name is used to evoke the idea of a traditional Easter egg hunt.[2] The term was coined to describe a hidden message in the Atari video game Adventure that encouraged the player to find further hidden messages in later games, leading them on a 'hunt'.[3]"
He is not an exclusionary person, and labeling him as such, based on an impulsive reaction to an abstract word, with multiple contextual interpretations, is a misguided interpretation of recent events.
His frustration at irrational demands for unnecessary effort is understandable.
Pointing out that someone might be viewed as putting forward "dismissive reactionary political statements against the removal of exlusionary language" is most certainly an attempt to smear and label someone.
> In March, Insys launched a multinational study of 190 children to evaluate cannabidiol as a first-line therapy for infantile spasms. We are eager to see how well the compound performs when given in the first days and weeks of the condition. If it turns out to be effective, cannabidiol would represent a substantial improvement over current drugs, all of which have serious side effects: One, for example, causes irreversible vision loss in as many as one-third of the children who take it.
Its ok to sell: "a drug that causes irreversible vision loss in as many as one-third of the children who take it"
Its against the law: canabidiol from a plant, or even grow the plant yourself
What drives me crazy is, if you go to a psychiatrist today and lie about having hard time sleeping, they can immediately prescribe you Ambien which not only causes dementia and other neurological problems in long term use, but systematically makes people do absolutely batshit crazy things they'll never remember the next morning. In the US, drug regulations are absolutely ridiculous and have no scientific basis, it is randomly decided by a few individuals and systematically affect the lives of each and every person living in the US, citizen or not. I can't even begin to believe how&why we let things like this happen.
> they can immediately prescribe you Ambien which not only causes dementia and other neurological problems in long term use, but systematically makes people do absolutely batshit crazy things they'll never remember the next morning.
Not only that, the same psychiatrist might be getting kickbacks from the maker of ambien to peddle it to their clients.
>it is randomly decided by a few individuals
It isn't randomly decided. It's systematically decided by drug companies.
It's bizarre. I have been treated for ADHD with stimulants for years and when I walk my psychs office there is Adderall/Vyvanse and Shire Pharmaceutical paraphernalia all over the walls, posters, tote bags, little models of the brain stamped with "Adderall XR".
Don’t know why you’re downvoted, since the Controlled Substances Act was meant to disrupt African American and leftist political efforts, according to Nixon’s domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman.
They couldn’t raid black panther meetings for legally possessing guns, but they could for smoking joints and selling drugs.
"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people," former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman told Harper's writer Dan Baum for the April cover story published Tuesday.”
So far I did not have that issue, but I am getting a bit concerned. If that is correct, going to a doctor, despite paying a hefty price, I have to double and sanity check my doctor's prescriptions. I don't want to end up accidentally dealing with terrible side-effects for little gain...
And I can not say I can trust my pharmacist to raise a flag on a dangerous prescription or interference between medication, as I would back home. Perhaps this is a subjective feeling.
P.S. On second thought: I am concerned about a friend who is getting over prescribed addictive medication for chronic back pain (see Vicodin/ Hydrocodone w. paracetamol). I have discussed this with a few family doctors overseas who all agree it is a terrible idea. Yet it is kind of standard in the U.S. Anyone with medical training in the U.S. has experience, thoughts or care to pitch in?
I was prescribed Ambien by going to a doctor for insomnia. No tests, no nothing. Sure I legit had insomnia, a pretty bad one at that, but they just asked me my problem I told them I can't sleep, next thing I know I'm prescribed Ambien. This the university hospital one of the best universities in US, not some random rural hospital.
You should never ever use any drug without doing your own research about it. Doesn't matter if #1 MD in the Western World prescribed it. Drug industry is nothing but a game to make 1% of 1% richer.
My other half has a chronic psychiatric condition, after struggling for 2 years we'd found a combo that worked. Prior to that though, we'd had to check drug/drug interactions ourselves because a previous doctor simply didn't, nor did the pharmacist...
Been using Epocrates (the free parts) to check interactions and side effects. Beats digging through the FDA website for it.
One suggestion, NEVER look up common drugs like Advil.
Because if there was one instance of it during trial or there was someone that had it while on the medication even unrelated it's probably in there.
So say someone took Advil then had, as a minor example, violent giggling fits completely unrelated. Now violent giggling fits is going to be listed as an adverse effect for Advil because, maybe it caused it?
Now replace violent giggling with fun things like: stroke, Stevens-Johnson syndrome, or whatever other fun things are listed on Advil...
Basically, likely to scare yourself for no reason. But for more serious drugs? Maybe worth some digging.
This shows the derangement of the people in charge.
Why is this? Why this derangement on the subject of cannabis? I've read a fair amount, and every time I've brought it up, I get downvoted to hell. So, I'll ask:
Anyone have a hypothesis on why a large number of our leaders, who happen to be older white men, are insanely against this plant?
No need to hypothesize. The rampup of the drug war under Nixon was largely to attack blacks, hippies (antiwar), and other counterculture figures. [0]
"We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did." (John Ehrlichman, Nixon's domestic policy chief)
In the interim, it became a wedge issue and via "tough on crime", an extension of certain party platforms, (also in that it has effectively become the status quo for some population segments) and I think persists largely as some combination of the above.
I don't feel like you gave the article due diligence; dislike of CNN aside, as you'd see that they are very open about the quote being contested (No surprise, given the sensitivity), but given the fact that Nixon contested pretty much all the things that we DO have on tape of him saying, (Some of which is in this exact vein, e.g. [1]) and that the end result of their policies WAS exactly as the quote describes, I find your disbelief somewhat surprising. (ESPECIALLY given Ehrlichman's role in watergate)
Nonwithstanding, I'm pretty sure the original source was via Dan Baum here [0], but given the preponderance of evidence towards an occams razor interpretation of Nixon's policy and the lack of any meaningful evidence to the contrary, it seems extremely reasonable to accept this as legitimate.
Drug laws can be selectively enforced to give criminal records to people of color. Then the state can refuse to give people with criminal records the right to vote. There's no immediate gain for a politician to reform these laws (the people affected can't or don't vote), the other legal drugs already have huge lobbies to pay the politician, and the law and order crowd has a sizeable popularity that is hard to budge with any sort of non punitive solution until it affects them directly and personally.
Not sure why you're being downvoted as I think the empiric evidence supports the position that drug laws (and many others) are selectively enforced on the basis of socioeconomic status and race.
Cocaine is a schedule 3 stuff. Cannabis and crack cocaine are schedule 1.
As further suggestive evidence of this, watch the correlation between donors/friends of those same old white guys entering the MJ business, and the rapid "evolution" of the willingness to switch stances on legality.
You can even evaluate this without malice: Some say MJ is dangerous, and some say it's great. The status quo is that it is banned. Changing that creates the risk that it is bad and the change will be blamed on you, but legalizing will not bring you much glory, so you support the status quo until you have sufficient incentive (most likely $$$, but a strong push from the public instead of "meh" would also count).
That said, I find a mix of opportunism and greed to be the most likely explanation.
Further support is the fact that most politicians support punitive action against people with drug possession charges, rather than mandating treatment. There's solid evidence that drug crisis can be solved in the long term by access to treatment, and more evidence that punitive measures increase crime and continue the poverty cycle.
The only reason to support the current drug laws is literally because you want more crime and drug use.
I dug into campaign finance when a single state representstive tabled a bill to allow on-site sales at local breweries (the rep had received >$19,000 from AB-InBev over the past 10 years) and one of the things I noticed was that EVERYONE got pharma money. Lots of it. You can say campaign contributions don’t buy votes til you’re blue in the face, and then I’ll sell you a bridge.
edit: I should clarify that medicinal herbs one can grow oneself scare the profit-hungry pharmaceutical industry, and they will (and do) spend money to keep such plants illegal. There is also money from private prison companies who earn profit on the incarceration of citizens who stand to lose money if marijuana is fully decriminalized (I’m not going to pull a number out of thin air, but I believe it is a majority of inmates who are locked up for victimless drug crimes). State and local police departments love to receive federal grants to keep on fighting the war on drugs. There is so much money and effort against the legalization of a f’ing plant, and from so many sides, that even a well-meaning politician can look at the “evidence” and believe the public, as a whole, wants to keep Mother Nature illegal.
This is fact, so I'm curious why it's being downvoted.
>Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Did I maybe miss a supreme Court case where that bit of it was neutered?
It's probably getting downvoted because they're trying to evoke an emotional reaction by comparing forced labor as part of a prison sentence with literally keeping people as your personal property. If we're going to call any instance of the government forcing you to do a job you don't want "slavery", then here's a list of countries where the majority of the population has been forced into "slavery" without even being found guilty of a crime. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_service#Countries_wit...
Well, yes, I would agree that forced conscription is a form of slavery. Obviously it's not as horrible a situation as say early American black slavery, but slavery nonetheless. I'm happy to be challenged on this.
1) Trials are increasingly rare, most criminals in prison never had one, they made a plea deal
2) The difference between a maximum sentence and a plea deal can be an order of magnitude (2 years instead of 20)
3) Dark skinned people
can rationally expect that they won’t receive a fair trial, given bias in police investigations, DA practices, and juries.
... That adds up to a lot of innocent dark skinned people in prison, who quite rationally traded their civic rights for a smaller variability in their risk profile.
I guess what’s “better” about that than chattel slavery is that person had a possibility of release. So instead of 100% chance of incarceration and loss of civil rights, they had only an 80% chance of incarceration. Is that your position?
Personally, that doesn’t feel like a qualitative difference. Seems like the same situation just moved to a different psychic plane. But, interested in your thoughts.
I was talking about forced military conscription, i.e. what Taiwanese and Korean citizens undergo, not the American prison system.
These systems aren't as bad as chattel slavery because there is a strict legal requirement of when they must end (usually within a year), the citizen remains a citizen (albeit a military one as well) and thus still gets due process (outside of military punishments for, say, defecting or pointing a gun at a superior officer), the citizen can own property while doing their service, they get to do whatever they want with their own money, etc etc etc.
I still think they're wrong, for many reasons, but also because I don't believe there should be militaries designed for human-human conflict.
The guilty plea system is pretty much used to intimidate defendants into waiving their right to a fair trial. Far, far, from every person serving time in a prison has been convicted by a jury in a court of law.
> It's probably getting downvoted because they're trying to evoke an emotional reaction by comparing forced labor as part of a prison sentence with literally keeping people as your personal property.
What I stated was a fact. Too bad, that you don't like facts, or that you try to dismiss the fact that it is slavery by comparing it to chattel slavery.
This isnt some bigoted law in some Southern state legislature. This is enshrined as federal constitutional law, and is also why the USA is not a signatory to numerous anti-slave treaties.
> If we're going to call any instance of the government forcing you to do a job you don't want "slavery", then here's a list of countries where the majority of the population has been forced into "slavery" without even being found guilty of a crime.
No, "I" didn't call it slavery. The 13th amendment did. Too bad the constitution isnt enough of a authoritative source. And then, you dismiss it with whataboutism. I live in the USA, and am dscussing USA constitutional law; Im not discussing your whataboutism of countries I dont live in.
You probably serve your (IMO just) argument well by learning to discuss controversial topics with at least some semblance of respect for those who disagree with you.
So I should "respect" those who accept and advocate slavery? No.
We can discuss controversial subjects. Happens quite often. But you're wanting me to respect the fact that people are OK with slavery. Put it this way: I have ethics, and this is beyond the pale.
This "argument" is nothing more than a decorum complaint. Slavery, in all its forms, is Wrong. Anybody who supports slavery is Wrong. No ifs, ands, or buts.
And we fought a war over this very issue, and the 'compromise' was that criminals could be enslaved. Who'da thought that the majority of those who were chattel slaves would end up as "criminals", and back where they started? Its high time we excise that criminals part from the 13th.
Yet, in the same breath, those same people condemn punitive labour camps in communist countries.
You can't really have it both ways. Forced labour in prison creates a colossal conflict of interest for the state, even in a world where the law is just, and is applied fairly. (We don't really live in that world.)
It de facto does. If the government is running off one interpretation of a piece of the Constitution and the supreme Court rules that that interpretation is incorrect, it's been neutered
I feel this way, but apply it to the whole country. A vast majority of people who grew up in the mid to late 90s act like cannabis was created by the devil himself. But why? I get that most people dislike it because it's been illegal all their life, so they look down on it. I like to use Red from that 70s show as a good example. Look how much he hated it, he hated it with his entire being. Why though? It never did anything to him, never affected him in a negative way, why does he have such an ingrained pure hatred for it?
> I do not partake of cannabis. This is just a topic that interests me.
Now I understand that the hatred for it in modern politics in large comes from a financial perspective. You get into the whole war on drugs, how it's a talking point for potential candidates, how the funding for it is padding pockets, etc. This hatred goes beyond that though, people despised weed way before it become a common symbol of degeneracy.
It's not just cannabis though. This whole ideology can be applied to many topics. Where older people grew up being taught to hate it, while younger generations seem to be more rational and open to understanding that these taboo subjects may not be as bad as society wants you think. Some other topics that fall into this category include abortion, female workers/pay, war.
It's easy to buy into propaganda when you have no first-hand experience with something. Access to information was much more limited back then and censorship was much easier. It's not like most libraries would have a cannabis section in the 60s.
If I were constantly told by a number of authority figures that Argentina was a war-torn shithole with rampant poverty and violence, I'd likely believe it. I've never been there, I don't know anyone from there, and I have no reason to suspect those who I trust are liars.
Because they're fearful and they have support from fearful people who want to punish drug users for no reason. Moral panics are some of the worst things in existence. Leads to absolute garbage like the Convention on Psychotropic Substances.
I'm astounded that psilocybin mushrooms, mescaline, and LSD are all scheduled so harshly.
I would suspect you get downvoted because you imply that it's mostly "older white men" who are deranged. Is Rodrigo Duterte a white man? Is Prayut Chan-o-cha a white man? In fact, it seems that most of the countries where it's legal in one form or another are lead by white men. [0]
Personally I'm anti drug use because of how many friends and family members I've seen turn their lives to shit after starting weed etc. I know there's a lot of fine users but so many of my friends turned to weed to cope and then from there went onto harder stuff like crack/cocaine.
And really, I don't support people altering their mind states through the use of recreational drugs, alcohol included. It saddens me to see that no one can see any reason against drug use besides "it locks up black people in prison" because for me at least, that has nothing to do with marijuana legislation at all.
Can we not agree, though, that scare tactics around victimless crimes (in the sense that the victim is also the perpetrator) are demonstrably ineffectual? Abstinence-only sex education, for example, correlates positively with teen pregnancy rates [1], whereas opioid overdose education is shown to decrease opioid death rates [2].
Without getting into the moral argument of whether or not people should be able to choose to alter their mental state through drugs (are we cool with coffee as well?), it seems clear to me that the best policy is one of education and harm reduction, not FUD and prohibition.
This article and the associated discussion thread you're contributing to here has zero to do with recreational use. Is this the core issue? People can't separate the two? Do people generally not realize that because of how it's scheduled there is no possibility for medical use and that this is starting to look like a really bad thing given the circumstances?
I’m with you, and I think this is an important part of the discussion so I hope people will make space for it. Pot, alcohol, even mushrooms can be dangerous psychologically. Society must address this.
However I don’t think this has any bearing on legalization. Whether something should be illegal is a different question than whether it is harmful.
If prohibition, in practice, will cause intolerable side effects, then it’s not a just policy. Even if we agree that the prohibited behavior is destructive.
It’s also not universally true that prohibition even decreases the prohibited behavior. Especially with teenagers it can sometimes have the opposite effect.
I am against abortion bans, not because I think abortion is harmless, but because I think prohibition has terrible effects.
Lastly, there are positive effects of a general culture of freedom. Freedom to make mistakes, not just freedom within a set of formally approved activities. We are able as a group to more effectively explore the space of safe activities if we allow personal exploration of unsafe activities to a degree.
This is why some people advocate not for prohibition of all harmful activities, but prohibition only of those that harm non-consensual participants. It’s illegal to hit your domestic partner. It’s legal to hit your sparring partner at the gym. That’s not because hitting is harmless (it’s not). It’s because many of us think the law is best suited to dampen harmful non-consensual activities, while other means (ministry, fellowship, etc) are more effective means to dampen consensual harmful activity.
I'm very pro weed, and as such have had a lot of conversations with non-smokers about its benefits. What I've come to realize is that a lot of more conservative people are really against any mind altering drug. Yes it's hypocritical that booze isn't classified as "mind altering" and is fully accepted.
If I'm totally honest with myself I have to appreciate where they are coming from to a degree. I in no way think that marijuana is bad and I think it's actually extremely beneficial in many ways, but it is, for lack of a better word: strong.
Getting drunk can make you act like an idiot and be life threatening but it doesn't really change how you think, it just sort of shuts down pieces of your brain. Weed in some sense changes who you are. I think this effect is what a lot of people are afraid of.
So in the end I don't think "older white men" are actually being racist (intentionally) but they are just conservatives who are really uncomfortable altering their state of consciousness. I don't agree with it, but I think it's often a good faith argument on their part.
Yeah, sometimes I've been wondering if there's a natural unconscious resistance or barrier in ourselves or in the ego programming, that is averse or even hostile to loosening up or the very idea of there being something beyond it that weed and plenty other drugs may come to show, because even when confronted with scientific studies and evidence to the contrary they can often double down or divert the conversation to some argument error or non sequiturs or nonsensical statements.
No one should be forced to do drugs of any kind but what is it with this 'baseline hostility' towards altered states?
Supporting the war on drugs because you need to differentiate yourself from the left is like supporting the patriot act because you hate terrorists. It's cutting off your nose to spite your face. Neither are legislation that stand on it's own merit once you look at it with the benefit of hindsight.
That said, the "counter culture" gave us the war on drugs, gun control, probably a couple other curtailments of personal freedom that I'm forgetting, they reduced public support for the civil rights movements of the time and provided an excuse for the three letter agencies to greatly increase their amount of domestic surveillance. In return we got out of 'nam a year, maybe two, earlier. I don't see why people romanticize the culture shifts of the 1960s. Their intentions were good but their methods flawed and their results worse.
In addition to blatant racism, I suspect much of it is due to the potential for cultural and spiritual revolution should marijuana (or psychedelics in general) become legal. We can look to the 60's for an example of what can happen when mind-altering substances become widely used recreationally. There were a lot of other factors at play then, but the growth of counterculture and subsequent pushback was the origin of many of today's political battles. I can see why conservatives are afraid of that rapid change - it will be incredibly disruptive to the established order. (I disagree with their fears).
Michael Pollan's "How To Change Your Mind" delves into this in some depth.
As someone who has found some actual relief from previously crippling anxiety using cannabidiol, I'm really hoping to see progress on this front. It's all upwards from here for me.
There are a lot of conspiracy theories in the replies to you, but IMO it is yet another example of the weird outcomes generated by an incredibly complex system which is heavily influenced by starting conditions and path dependency.
I think you're right, to a point. Let's not forget that we're talking about a country that amended its constitution to outlaw alcohol, and this state of governmental failure remained in place for over a decade. So there's more going on here than just preferring drugs that bolster amoral decision making.
Some linux installs come with perl/python installed. It is used by the system and is refered to as "system perl" or "system python" or "system ruby", etc.. and it is not recommended to make upgrade on those "system XXX". Only your system should upgrade the libraries it uses. That is why you should always use a local perl/python/ruby install.
If you didnt like it, its good you moved on.