I recall in 70s/80s Denmark and Netherlands made pot legal in parts of Amsterdam and Copenhagen. The areas quickly turned into dumps. I'm fine with Slab City but do we wan't this for all of US?
Amsterdam is very far from being a dump. Sure, the (very small) red light district might not be the kind of place you take your mother-in-law, but outside that it's a wonderful, picturesque, friendly, vibrant city.
Yes, yes we do. We want to be able to fund our schools, or fix our roads, or simply avoid the cost of incarcerating people who possess it while hurting no one but themselves (if you demand to buy into reefer madness).
You're leaving out that most of Colorado has prohibited dispensaries or greatly marginalized them. Legalization is mostly in Denver. This is anecdote, but I've heard both from Denver-area residents and visitors that burnouts with few prospects have been drawn to Denver like moths to a flame, and that it has in no uncertain terms had a deleterious effect on the city.
> You're leaving out that most of Colorado has prohibited dispensaries or greatly marginalized them. Legalization is mostly in Denver.
The site I linked to clearly shows that there are cannabis shops all over Colorado, not just in Denver: Boulder, Durango, Pagosa Springs, etc. etc. So I'm not putting any words in your mouth, just quoting you directly and then showing that the data contradicts your statements.
Elsewhere in these comments you blindly accused me of being in favor of prohibition. You can't set the rules and then flaunt them. Which is why I rolled my eyes at your talk of "discourse" and "assertions." Give me a break. That you couldn't even connect those dots speaks for itself.
I'm not on the same wavelength as retired people who complain about boredom. If I retired today, I literally have a >5000-line list of ideas, topics and activities I want to pursue, most of them inexpensive or even free to pursue financially for developers, but time-consuming.
You could develop software to largely automate the municipal bureaucracy of a village in your nation. It takes a surprising amount of paperwork, and manual labor, to perform even the minimal amount of compliance work to maintain a village.
You could work with leaders in each tax levying jurisdiction to agree to publish tax data in a standard online format.
You could develop a backyard automated chicken coop, Creative Commons the plans and see what improvements everyone else comes up with.
You could develop a vanadium redox battery-powered lawn light, and save landfills from the garbage disposable lights the big box stores inflict upon us today.
There is simply an endless sea of opportunities to imbue life around you with increased cognitive density.
My head fills with an idea or two every day (usually about improving something I run across in daily life), that acts like an earworm, which I have to write down to "purge out of my mind". It got much "worse" with the advent of search engines; when I was "stuck" with school/university libraries, I would often run into dead ends researching ideas, and could quell the earworms with the thought that I gave an honest effort to run down a thread of an idea. I thought everyone thought like this, but was just better at focusing upon the task at hand and banishing these idle thoughts. I much prefer the situation today with search engines: I'm much faster at running down enough of an idea and putting it into writing to purge it out than before.
I too have a to-do list that I will never drain. The 24 hours in a day are an immutable tyrant governing all of our choices. Ask anyone who has taken a sabbatical for a month or two...most people spend the year leading up to sabbatical dreaming of all the hobbies, back-burnered side projects, house repairs, travel, etc. they will tackle during their sabbatical. Then reality hits and you only get 1/4 of them done before having to go back to the grind.
I think there's a reason lots of famous billionaires keep working. I've been hearing from my parents how boring retirement is, and from my own experiences of extended vacations I've come to the conclusion we evolved to work.
"Man's Search for Meaning" by Frankl graphically illustrates the importance of having a sense of purpose, which I think a lot of people lack when they retire to live the dream of doing nothing.
I think the key is to be able to choose not to have to work for some asshole boss, or do work you don't generally enjoy.
I've become very disillusioned by the dream of insane wealth and the ability to retire early. Instead, I want to work on something I feel will make a difference and that interests me for the foreseeable future.
The sickening thing this election, and elections prior, was the use of fake news by the Democrats and by the Republicans, in a media industry that gets paid by political campaigns to mass-influence audiences with pre-strategized series of stories.
The entire information industry is sick. It's extremely efficient at serving it's customers. It's customers are a maelstrom/cacaphony of interests trying to make broad base emotional and misrepresentative appeals to purposefully uninformed audiences.
The information industry does NOT provide a paid service to customers seeking to understand the world. The information industry provides a paid service to industries and parties seeking to influence the world.
Trying to run a partisan political line, blaming one political party (who spend incredibly SMALL amounts compared to the other strategically politicizing news) is looking perpendicular to the problem, and falling prey to its continuance.
Fake news? The Iraq War justifications. The Jessica Lynch stories. The fake army letters sent by Bush Administration PR firms. The echo chamber from the Obama Administration on the Iran Deal that they've BRAGGED about. The horribly inaccurate coverage of the Syria proxy war. The whitewashing of politically sensitive topics, like the genocide by our allies in Bahrain. Conspiracy theories about Putin and hogwash misinformation like "Putin and Trump are best friends." US coverage of the Chinese economy ("Will China fall?!") while they were slated, instead, to be welcomed into the Special Economic Basket at the IMF. The fake news coverage about the Snowden Documents.
It's just... so frustrating to see people promulgate on HN one-sided, politicized and irresponsible finger-pointing, as though propaganda and mass-media disinformation were a partisan issue.
