Legalization may provide a net health benefit for Mexican gang members. Whether legalization will provide a net health benefit for American citizens is still a point of contention.
The war of drugs has been done badly. Of course it's ridiculous that people's homes get raided because they have some pot. That doesn't mean legislation needs to jump to the other end of the spectrum. You can forbid trade of cannabis and at the same time NOT put users in jail.
Wait - what are the health effects of prison? I remember reading somewhere that prisoners are some of the fittest people around, and you shouldn't pick a fight with one...
A lot of health dis-benefits are a result of criminalisation.
Some people who call for decriminalisation are calling for drug use to be treated as the health problem that it is.
With criminalisation we see drives to stronger forms of the drug (EG: bootleggers were mostly not selling beer, but spirits). Decriminalisation and legalisation would allow people to grow and actively market weaker forms of the drug.
Criminalisation pushes people towards unhealthier forms of drug taking because it's legally tricky to provide harm reduction information or harm reduction devices. Most people smoke cannabis; and most people mix it with tobacco. That's a pretty unhealthy way to take it. Legally being allowed to sell vaporisers would help.
>> Whether legalization will provide a net health benefit for American citizens is still a point of contention.
Might end up with a few less killed violently.
Might end up with more money to spend on social programs instead of militarised police.
Might end up with much more tax from economic activity brought out of the black market.
Might end up with less contaminated produce.
All of these could end up being better for the health of American citizens.
And even if not you're bringing your problems in-house rather than shipping them off to poorer places and causing suffering there.
Generally there is not much happiness in software development. More often than not the job is little more than prostituting your brain for some cause that you don't really care about. That's why many people have shitty attitudes, in spite of their royal paychecks.
At some point you got to wonder whether the practice of programming itself can make people unhappy. Maybe it's just not natural to put your mind into that straightjacket of formal thinking for 8+ hours a day.
More precisely: Let's assume that pi is absolutely normal and we use a 256 letters alphabet (ascii, ¿latin-1?).
I'm almost sure that if we have a "book" with N characters, in average, the number of (decimal) digits of the index of that string in pi is N * log(256) / log(10). (I'm too lazy to write the proof now, so perhaps I'm making a mistake.) This is (esencially) equivalent to that the expected position is 256^N. (But I'm taking averages willy-nilly.)
If this is correct, the position increase exponentially with the book length, but the numbers of digits in the position increase linearly.
> Likewise, if someone fails to use intoxicants or other recreational drugs responsibly and develops a debilitating habit, it makes more sense to do as we do for people who want to quit drinking or smoking, not as we do for people who rape and murder.
Does your scheme involve coercion of any kind? If not, then why is not working already? People are already free to seek help for their drug addiction.
I'm not sure history can be repeated so easily. Back in the eighties you were impressed when a program managed to change the screen from blue to green. With today's kids playing Counter Strike on high end computers, it's not likely they're gonne be very impressed with what they see, much less motivated.
For my kids, Scratch from MIT was the thing that finally got them programming. It gives immediate rewards and every program can be shared on the site and modified ("remixed") by other users. So all the kids are building on each other's code and learning from what they see. The language features are limited, but it's more than just the language, since you can see what everyone else is creating and directly play with code you find neat.
The games they create are not slick but they're sophisticated enough that the kids are learning how to work through real programming problems on their own resources. And the kids evidently find this very rewarding and addictive.
Compared to that they find even Lego Mindstorms kind of dull. The social aspect of Scratch is a brilliant touch.
that is a concern... tho I'm hoping the 'Look! I made it do that!' effect will win over and lead to the next Elite & Counter Strike in the decades to come.
It's funny how many people recommend exercise or meditation as if this is going to make you forget that you hate your job. If anything, meditation is only going to make this more clear. Hating your job is a pretty big problem that you will only solve by changing the circumstances of your employment. You don't owe anybody unhappiness, not even your wife or kids.
The problem is that when you hire the services of a prostitute, you will probably have no idea about the situation of that person. Maybe this person is in charge of his/her life and is making a well-informed choice. But maybe this person is coerced into prostitution. In that case you will be financially supporting a very wrong thing, and you have no way of knowing. I think the question whether prostitution should be legal is much less important than the conclusion that being a customer is morally indefensible.
Exactly, johns should be penalized. We sanction entire countries because of the conditions of the workers in manufacturing industries, don't we? But we simply can't touch the sex industry because that would be restricting "free choice"...
Farming in California is built on trafficked, essentially slave, labor, but I guess the much smaller problems in prostitution are a more romantic target.
Frequency of piecework? I bet there are a lot more instances of "picking a fruit" per year by trafficked farm worker than there are instances of sex by a trafficked sex worker.
Why are you referring to rape as "sex"? Rape is a violent crime every time it happens. I think we can recognize one issue as valuable without putting down the other.
Rape is non-consensual sexual activity. If you want to establish a convention where "sex" only means consensual sex and "rape" only means non-consensual sexual activity, then I'll consent to that. There are far more intellectually honest ways of establishing such a convention than this sort of sideways putting words into someone's mouth.
By this logic prostitution is no different than any economic transaction. Goods are made by people who are virtually, if not in fact, slaves. Does that mean you refuse to buy anything you didn't make with your own hands?
It's not realistic, though. You can't possibly research the povenance of every garment, food item, piece of electronics, drop of oil, shelter, and building material you buy. It's impossible.
