Great, sign me up for that system. I'll take care of my own healthcare expenses and in return waive the government's obligation to protect me from myself.
In 1998 alcohol abuse and addiction cost US taxpayers $148 billion (much more than all other hard drugs put together). You can only (logically) use this argument to support prohibition if you also support alcohol prohibition.
I'm all for less government involvement, but since the majority of the population are not, I'm sure the $42 billion per year cannabis prohibition costs US taxpayers would go a long way towards helping addicts with physicians rather than prison guards.
It is a benefit - decreased price means addicts must commit less crime to fund their habit. As I pointed out with the Netherlands/USA comparison, legal status makes very little difference to demand. Another benefit is that it gives people who may otherwise abuse hard drugs a readily available and cheap supply of safer alternatives.
Also don't forget, we already have a massive supply of the deadliest (and nearly most addictive) drugs - alcohol and tobacco. Safer alternatives will benefit the abusers of these substances also, and relieve the healthcare costs.
Why should it be any different to allowing alcohol and nicotine addicts? Why should responsible adults live in a bubble-wrapped world so that the irresponsible don't hurt themselves? Why don't we just make everything that can be abused illegal?
Knowledge of their unjust laws doesn't make it any less of a kidnapping. Anyone who believes all laws should always be obeyed would have made a fine slave catcher.
Much of the reason pharmaceuticals are expensive is because their supply is protected by patents. Not sure about in the US, but over here legal party pills and synthetic weed have been fairly cheap (and not manufactured by big pharmaceutical companies). Without the cost of the risks associated with operating in a largely gang controlled black market, manufacturing expenses will decrease, supply will likely increase, resulting in a cheaper retail price for the consumer.
Addicts not having to commit as much crime in order to fund their habit is a large benefit to axing prohibition.
I have no interest in trying heroin, but I'm not convinced that just because some people will abuse it, the rest of the responsible adults sharing the planet with them, who may want to use it, should do so under the threat of armed kidnapping. Alcohol and tobacco destroy far more lives than heroin, many currently illegal drugs are safer to use, where/how should we draw the line at where the state will decrease freedoms for the purposes of protecting irresponsible people from themselves? I want the state to extract revenge from me only if I harm others, is that too much to ask?
You sound like a responsible adult who doesn't need to be protected from himself via the threat of violent kidnapping.
I agree with you, Mike (with charities providing for those who can't pay their own way, coupled with lower taxes). Obviously you also include tobacco and alcohol in your definition of drugs, as these two have a much, much higher social cost than all the illegal drugs put together.
Also consider:
Netherlands Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport, Drug Policy in the Netherlands: Progress Report September 1997-September 1999, (The Hague: Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport, November 1999), pp. 7-8.
Even if meth (and/or other drugs) were legalized, hordes of people are unlikely to be rushing out to find a substitute to their booze and smokes on a Saturday night (which is unfortunate, due to the numerous choices of safer drugs available).
As for krokodil, this is just another case of prohibition causing great harm to society rather than reducing harm. Obviously without prohibition cheap, safe alternatives would be readily available and almost no one would use krokodil. Prohibition also alows for (cheaper) dangerous impurities/bulking to find their way into safer substances, such as MDMA.
Prohibition does very little to influence usage rates, yet amplifies the social cost associated with certain substances. What good is it?
If demand for hard drugs exists, that demand will certainly be met. If the demand is going to be met, corporations operating within the law offer these production advantages over the Mexican cartels:
-Profits aren't reinvested for the purposes of committing heinous crimes.
-Corporations wouldn't murder people in the process of manufacture and distribution.
-Quality control (combined with non-black-market pricing) means harmful impurities to bulk up the weight would not be used.
-Money via taxes is redistributed to the community and can be used to help fund harm reduction programs.
I can see no advantages in allowing the cartels to dominate the production and enjoy profits generated from artificially inflated prices.
Here's one from early last century.
But in all seriousness, ending prohibition doesn't mean they will be permitted to advertise any more than tobacco companies.
I disagree.
-That is what happens at the moment, after they discover how great cannabis is and that they've been lied to their whole life about it being harmful. They suddenly wonder what else is a lie and might be worth trying.
-Prohibition makes it easier for teenagers to purchase illegal drugs than legal drugs (dealers don't check ID).
-Alcohol is a drug (and a fairly hard one at that). Yet nobody is trying alcohol and thinking "this is great, I wonder what meth is like!"
Do you mean you would be a meth user or merely know where to buy it?
Addiction is better treated by physicians than prison guards. Making criminals out of people who have harmed no one does nothing but increase the harm of their usage. Attempting to impose a certain lifestyle on people by threatening them with kidnap does not work, and IMO is actually pretty sick. There are far better ways to help addicts than with violence.
Prohibition generally decreases supply while demand remains approximately the same (compare Netherlands usage rates) and thus increases prices and gang profits. The Cartels would never make more profits from drug sales than they currently enjoy if forced to compete with efficient corporations.
And yet, as a free adult (who considers heroin to be a terrible drug), I would prefer to make my own decisions about what I put in my body and do not feel the need to be protected from myself under the threat of kidnapping and being locked in a cage. Arrest me if I harm others, don't initiate violence against me for victimless "crimes."
I'd also argue that most dangerous drugs, especially crack, would be less used if safer alternatives were cheaply and readily available.
It started working when I typed /insim=29999 to get AONIO going. Not sure if it's working as intended, but I was under the impression that the latest version was independent of insim and outgauge. For some reason it can't read the RPM memory until this point?
People who can't get theirs working should try this method as it also worked for two of my teammates.
I'm not running any firewall and tried again with avast turned off (same result).
I'm using DXTweak2.exe to compensate for spiking logitech pedals. Result is the same when values are set back to default, program is deleted and PC rebooted.
No other mods or tweaks (apart from textures and sounds).
The Sauber team skype a message of support to Vettel shortly after his retirement from the Abu Dhabi GP. Esteban Gutiérrez can be seen playing two of the worlds smallest violins.
The propaganda machine really is in full swing up there. There is no rational reason to feel unsafe and at risk of a terror attack while living in the US or UK. Unless of course you are even more fearful of the thought of driving over to McDondald's to pick up lunch.
19. Their leader wanted to share the wealth by introducing a gold currency (which is arguably worth more than a bit of paper in an economic collapse).
20. Their leader wanted to start selling oil in the new currency, rather than in USD.
19 and 20 obviously have nothing to do with the NATO intervention. The NATO intervention was due to the completely true points 16-18. Keep watching your television for more unbiased representations of said country's living conditions and quality of life. Also just forget about Saddam planning to sell oil for Euros rather than USDs in 2000. It IS just a coincidence that his dictatorship happened to be the most evil in the world at the time, just as the Gaddafi dictatorship was obviously the most evil of recent times (and thus worthy of intervention), what with their free electricity and cheap bread.
For most of us setting the FOV is a compromise between realistic perspectives and practicality. More monitor real estate allows for more immersive perspectives while maintaining the same level of practicality. Most people would be able to pick up a used second monitor for dirt cheap. It can even have different vertical and horizontal resolutions to the primary monitor and with a bit of setting up displays perfectly.
I am aware you did not start this thread and I didn't once assume you did. Read my previous reply to you again with that in mind.
Hijacking a thread implies the original topic was still being hotly discussed. Expanding on the topic to areas some people find interesting in the dying stages of a thread (how many pages does it take to establish EVs in LFS are a waste of dev resources?) is not hijacking a thread.
I am sorry that other people getting into spin-off discussions after the main theme of the thread has died annoys you, but I am not going to withdraw from the interesting conversation I have been having just to cater to your irrational annoyance. I am also not going to start a new thread for the purposes of our conversation just to cater to your annoyance of conversation extending slightly beyond the original topic of the thread. My advice on preventing this annoyance of yours is to either stop taking life (and internet forums) so seriously, or simply choose to refrain from reading posts which you think are likely to sway too far from the original topic and hence annoy you.
It somewhat amuses me that you keep coming back to this thread hoping to see furthered debate over whether development resources should be directed towards implementing electric cars in LFS, only to be disappointed upon discovering that after 6 pages a spin-off conversation has emerged which is not directly helping to resolve the seemingly very important issue to you of electric cars in LFS.
Do you always tell other people how to live? Are we getting in the way of all the raging debate over the merits of electric vehicles in LFS? Also interesting is that you would like us to give you a rest. May I suggest either not returning to this thread (hint: there are better things to spend LFS development resources on than EVs), or simply skipping over the posts made by those of us debating the future of personal transportation (though I'm not sure what posts you would be left with).
Yes it is ghastly, but the point was that it is an example of the technology being already more economical than internal combustion engines.
I too would much prefer to see hydrogen become the future of motoring rather than electric vehicles, but so far it is EVs being brought to the market place en mass.
Most of the major manufacturers who are producing half decent models are around the 8 hour mark these days.
England has highly productive offshore wind farms and Texas has ideal conditions for wind farms.
Hybrids are terrible. People buy them because they want to appear environmentally friendly, not because they want to be environmentally friendly. To say electric vehicles are not very good is ignoring that the i-MiEV is more energy efficient than nearly any other private passenger car on the market.
No. 230 years of supply (including predicted future discoveries) at the current rate of consumption (significantly less if accounting for increasing energy demands) is not a viable long term sustainable energy supply.
Mitsubishi i-MiEV. Especially for US customers.
Although I don't disagree that hydrogen may also be a viable solution. When it is not produced via fossil fuels it is essentially like a battery electric vehicle with a more practical energy storage system and cooler engine. The problem of generating huge amounts of sustainable electricity (to produce hydrogen sustainably) remains.
Wee bit of an exaggeration if considering the current level of technology.
But the efficiency/emissions when run on fossil fueled generated electricity is still far greater than for internal combustion engines. Many countries generate mostly sustainable electricity though.
I was talking about using nuclear to generate the electricity which charges the batteries in electric vehicles...
A one million strong fleet of battery electric vehicles could be powered by the equivalent energy produced by less than 200 current generation wind turbines (in countries with fairly high and consistent winds), with wind turbine efficiency continuing to increase and costs (currently the most prohibitive factor) continuing to decrease.
I wouldn't call it far greater. It is not great enough that it is a viable long-term alternative to fossil fueled energy. Electric cars will likely be the future when oil starts peaking (they are already economically competitive) but long term electricity supply will have to be met with a sustainable source other than uranium, as it will barely outlast oil, especially if large fleets of vehicles start being powered by it.
Offshore wind has potential, as do thorium reactors (although the dirty nuclear industry has proven it is not forthcoming to the public with negative effects of nuclear energy).