Crowdsourcing the Department of Public Works 143
blackbearnh writes "Usually, Gov 2.0 deals mainly with outward transparency of government to the citizens. But SeeClickFix is trying to drive data in the other direction, letting citizens report and track neighborhood problems as mundane as potholes, and as serious as drug dealers. In a recent interview, co-founder Jeff Blasius talked about how cities such as New Haven and Tucson are using SeeClickFix to involve their citizens in identifying and fixing problems with city infrastructure. 'We have thousands of potholes fixed across the country, thousands of pieces of graffiti repaired, streetlights turned on, catch basins cleared, all of that basic, broken-windows kind of stuff. We've seen neighborhood groups form based around issues reported on the site. We've seen people get new streetlights for their neighborhood, pedestrian improvements in many different cities, and all-terrain vehicles taken off of city streets. There was also one case of an arrest. The New Haven Police Department attributed initial reports on SeeClickFix to a sting operation that led to an arrest of two drug dealers selling heroin in front of a grammar school.'"
If left up the crowd (Score:3, Funny)
they might fill the drug dealers with asphalt and chase the potholes out of the neighborhood.
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Both are fine with me. And more amusing than the alternative.
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The crowd overwhelmingly seems to support drug dealers who sell to adults.
Especially pot... which should be legalized.
But also cocaine (which could be argued either way).
Probably not meth.
my point is that there are drug dealers and there are drug dealers. Depending on their target market (kids vs adults) and their product (pot, cocaine, heroin, hash, crystal meth, crank, crack). Your local drug dealer could be a dangerously crazy type or it could be someone's nice grandmother.
Cigarettes and alchohol are a
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But what happens when it rains? They get all wet again, and we're back to square one.
I suggest we mummify them using plasticizing resin. We could force them into the pothole while the resin is setting, then just trim them down to the road surface level once they're hard.
How is this news? Oh, its on the web!!! (Score:2)
3rd party aggregation of complaints (Score:4, Insightful)
If you email or call the city, it's between you and the city.
If you use this site, it's among you, the city, and everyone else using the city. So whereas now the city would just ignore you cause they don't give a shit (like where I live), this might just provide sufficient public shame to get something accomplished.
I'm not naive enough to assume the magic of the intertubes will fix everything, but as ideas go, this isn't a bad one and has some potential as a responsiveness check on municipal government.
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Re:3rd party aggregation of complaints (Score:4, Insightful)
"Shame" or not, I don't think its surprising that people are more likely to do the job that they are being paid to do if their performance (or lack thereof) is more visible to the people that are paying them to do it.
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"the city might use some (possibly random) method of prioritizing repairs that is still doing something but might be less immediately useful to the population."
Random? You mean like "everybody hand me a random amount of money, and whoever hands me the most gets their problem fixed"? Or random like "I will randomly prioritize these issues according to how close I am with somebody directly affected by it"? Those seem to be the two most popular "random selection" methods I've seen.
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A call or email, even a polite one with grammar and everything, is largely unstructured information. A human has to interpret it, parse the actual data out of it, and pass it on to the right person. If they have to do that manually, they'll fuck up some percentage of the time, even if they actually care about what they are doing, and more often if they don't(y'know the game "Telephone"?)
If, on the other hand, through the use of web technologies(and, as time goes
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If you email or call the city, it's between you and the city.
If you use this site, it's among you, the city, and everyone else using the city. So whereas now the city would just ignore you cause they don't give a shit (like where I live), this might just provide sufficient public shame to get something accomplished.
I'm not naive enough to assume the magic of the intertubes will fix everything, but as ideas go, this isn't a bad one and has some potential as a responsiveness check on municipal government.
Politicians do not like to be embarrassed.
Many newspaper writers are bereft of local story ideas.
Convenient place to post info helpful to your community.
Match made in Heaven for the public.
This was the first I heard of this site. I joined for my community and have already successfully encouraged several friends in other communities in the US to participate. I am waiting to hear the critique from my friend who is extra careful about privacy issues, however, but I don't really care who knows I reported a poth
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Where do you live that allows your neighbourhood to have a 50 person conference call with a city official or an email service that allows you to check up on the status of an individual request without pestering a single official?
Your response is akin to "Social Networking? Bah! We've had email and phones for ages!"
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The London Borough of Barnet, which partnered with FixMyStreet.com [fixmystreet.com] to provide exactly what this US website has done, but for the UK.
(FixMyStreet.com provide the service for the whole UK, Barnet display a subsection of it under barnet.FixMyStreet.com)
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Guess what? We've had that for decades BEFORE the Internet - it's called the monthly town council meeting. Complete with media coverage. Much more effective than yet another web site. They know that if one person shows up, there are probably 100 more who are p***ed off, and that the one showing up may very well end up running against them next election ,,,
THAT is how you get things done, from changi
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There is a huge difference between being lazy and not having time. If I have to wait a month and reschedule my plans around a council meeting, it sure doesn't get things resolved quickly or efficiently.
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People problems can't be solved by technical solutions. Otherwise, we wouldn't have people clicking on spam, we wouldn't have viruses and trojans, and we'd already have the "Year of the linux desktop" (which, btw, will never happen, unfortunately - at least not until CrapUbuntu is killed off).
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Yeah, stop using technology to make it easier to get involved. That would be wrong, for some reason.
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There - fixed it for you.
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Yeah, using communications technology to communicate with people! Who thought that up?! ~~
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After deciding that it was hopeless dealing with my neighbor, I went to call city hall. I left something like five different messages with the department that I presumed was responsible. At some point, while waiting on hold and getting different answers about what I could do,...
And what was touched on is that it's public
After that, make sure someone is receiving an alert. If you go to your neighborhood or city, you can click the "Who's Watching" tab and you can see if your mayor or your public works department is already receiving alerts. And if not, you can sign them up. The last step is just reporting issues.
NPR reported on this about a month ago.
It's pretty embarrassing to the bureaucrats when their incompetence is publicly visible.
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And should you copy the lat/lon by hand off your GPS into your email address? Or be forced to talk to someone and hope they record everything properly. This is news because it shows that if you make something dramatically cheaper, faster, easier, and more accurate by using new technology it can redefine the community-government relationship. It brings us closer to Democracy.
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There's nothing easier than phoning or sending an email to city hall saying "there's a loose sewer cover / burned out street lights / whatever". They generally send someone to take care of it within 24 hours.
Then again, we have a VERY good mayor and a very effective town council. TRY to find a pothole - the mayor has a contest every year, and he offers to pay $10 to each person who reports one - out of his own pocket. He never has to pay, because he keeps on top of things.
I compare that to the surroun
Re:How is this news? Oh, its on the web!!! (Score:5, Informative)
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It's not so effective from the other side of the fence. It depends of course on what systems the individual council has put in place but for those that have gone to the trouble of developing a GIS based system that automatically creates enquires in their works management system having e-mails turn up from random 3rd party websites isn't especially efficient.
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Then a web site won't help them, and they'll fix it themselves anyways, and tell you to get off their lawn
Old News... (Score:2)
This was reported [govtech.com] back in Dec of '09 with an iPhone App. There's even an wiki [open311.org] dedicated to Open311. In the US the app was created by CitySourced [citysourced.com].
Tech help (Score:2)
I guess most users heard about them, but there are a few iPhone/iPad apps that help in reporting these issues, also taking advantage of the devices' geolocation.
The biggest problem that neighborhoods have ... (Score:3, Insightful)
... are probably their own local governments.
"Click here to have your corrupt mayor tarred and feathered, and ridden out of town on a rail."
. . . or . . .
"Click here to endorse a public works program, which nobody wants, because nobody needs . . . Monorail!"
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"Click here to have your corrupt mayor tarred and feathered, and ridden out of town on a rail."
IMHO, governments would improve greatly if citizens could vote to do that to representatives that fail to serve their constituent's interests. Just give people a choice of "Yay", "Nay", or abstain (i.e. for the non-voters), and ensure there's no way to delay the tarring/feathering or force a re-vote. I don't think we'd see too many more secrete copyright treaties, or politicians being bought by corporate interests.
Modern technology allows us to effectively live in a true democracy. Of course, this isn'
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Au contraire... What we need is to improve education so the average person has a lot of clues of what the government ought to be doing. And then in the elections they wouldn't vote whoever has the better publicist or promises the best snake oil. How do you "ensure that our representatives are actually actin on our behalf rather than their own" instead? Without education, the "way to ensure..." would be for the politics the same that elections (wait! the elections already are one of those "way to ensure...")
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Most people act in their own self interest.
Politicians self-interest is not the same as the public's interest. There may be coincidental overlap, but they are not the same.
Politicians have proven themselves clueless on many issues that they get to vote on.
Your statement seems to rely on (what I believe to be a false) premise that those that we elect are our
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... are probably their own local governments.
p>"Click here to endorse a public works program, which nobody wants, because nobody needs . . . Monorail!"
hat boondoggle is referred to as "Light Rail" in Norfolk, VA. Significantly over budget (will probably become the most expensive-per-mile system in the US), no rational justification other than "nice to have" and which has been rejected in a public referendum, but "we can't let those matching Federal dollars go to waste". Even the shamed and discredited transportation director who let the budget go to Hell is still on full salary but doesn't have to report to work anymore. The inmates not only run the asylu
Awwhhh... (Score:5, Funny)
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And now you have a means of finding as much of both as you can stand.
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Ohhhhh, so that's where the ho's at...
Tucson... (Score:3, Funny)
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That's why we should legalize all drugs and have them sold in drugstores (also called pharmacies). Make it illegal to sell to underage children and make it illegal to drive/work under the influence of any drug. This would take care of violent drug cartels whom are only fueled by the high prices the underground trading commands. Making it legal takes the risk out of it, drops the prices and leaves those drug dealers out of a job.
People will get high somehow, people will kill themselves with it just as they d
Sounds like a good system (Score:5, Interesting)
The more civic functions that we are able to move online, the better. I live in Long Beach, CA and the city has a graffiti hotline. The one time I used it, the graffiti that I reported was cleaned up less than 24 hours later. The system involves having to leave a voice mail, and the recording time is way too short. It would be much easier to be able to upload digital pictures, or even click the relative location on a map and type in a short description. It would make dispatching the tickets easier too on the city's end.
I'm sure that there will be some who decry the big brother potential of the system. They will worry about nosey neighbors and the spectre of authoritarianism intruding into their lives. I wonder how many of those people actually live in neighborhoods that are right on the border between "nice" and "not so nice". In those neighborhoods, community activism and participation are key in reversing the slide toward the "not so nice" end of the spectrum. All it takes for a neighborhood to decay is for the residents to remain apathetic for long enough. Soon enough all of the "little" things start to add up.
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I lived in two of those nice neighborhoods in Colorado Springs in 1998. At the time I was a Java developer for MCI working on their Local Care system. In one house I lived alone, and in the second house I had three hot goth girls as roommates. I'm 6'4" (190cm) tall, have long hair and tattoos, dress in all black w/ combat boots, ride a loud motorcycle, and at the time had a sports car with a loud audio system installed. On two separate occasions the police were dispatched to my house by anonymous tips f
Different plan (Score:2)
I have a completely different plan to crowdsource the DPW.
"Welcome, welcome to the intersection of Cedar and Ash streets. Thank you all for responding to my tweet about giving away a new Apple iPad. There is of course a little catch, before the giveaway." (... Hands out the shovels ...)
The weird part is, that when you account for full lifetime pensions after 20 years, having three guys watch one guy dig, and govt wages far higher than private wages, its probably cheaper to give away Apple products than to
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The weird part is, that when you account for full lifetime pensions after 20 years, having three guys watch one guy dig, and govt wages far higher than private wages, its probably cheaper to give away Apple products than to pay DPW to do it for you...
Cities are starting to outsource things. Where I live, the city outsourced graffiti removal to a sub-contractor. The response time is great and because there is competition in the market, it encourages the contractor to do a good job. It is only a matter of
In the UK... (Score:3, Informative)
We have a similar thing in the UK, called Fix My Street [fixmystreet.com]. I used it once. I got a form email after a couple of days, followed promptly by nothing at all. They finally got around to fixing the problem I reported after a few months, but never bothered to reply to say so. Zero human communication. I guess what I'm trying to say is that it's all very well setting something like this up, but the government has to be committed to the project for it to work. Setting up a website is only the small part, getting them to actually follow up is another matter. It's all too easy for a politician to pay lip service to ideas like this, but fail to adequately support the effort after the headlines have been made.
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That's because you filled out a form 11-b, when you should have filled out an 11/b. It's your own fault for not taking more interest in your local government.
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That's because you filled out a form 11-b, when you should have filled out an 11/b. It's your own fault for not taking more interest in your local government.
And for that, you are made redundant. Thank you for your participation in our community. Close the gate as you depart.
Great News! (Score:2)
Cynical Sam says "Oh this is truly great news. Grandma will be able to complain 24/7! Now if we can just get this for Home Owners Associations."
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Too many cranky phone calls?
Switch to email.
Emails getting overwhelming?
Web interface time.
Too many busybodies with WebTV>
Aggressive adoption of pre-standard HTML5 features, that'll keep 'em out.
Younger family members set them up with Chrome?
If your report isn't on twitter, we didn't hear it.
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Every time the volume of complaints from whiny old people with too much time on their hands, change the interface to rely on an even more esoteric Web(N+1).0 fad.
If your report isn't on twitter, we didn't hear it.
Mr. Mayor, is that you?
Portland (Score:2, Informative)
Citizen Reports is a direct result of Mayor Adams and the City of Portland’s call for more open data and interactions with the citizens of Portland. Citizen Reports is used by citizens to report and request service calls to city assets an
In Soviet Russia.. oh wait (Score:3, Interesting)
Locals repair roads!
http://englishrussia.com/index.php/2010/04/07/vladivostok-road-repair-flashmob/ [englishrussia.com]
Go, Russia!
Uh oh (Score:2)
Usually, Gov 2.0 deals mainly with outward transparency of government to the citizens.
Posts from a different, less corrupt universe are leaking through again. I thought they patched that?
sounds like adhocracy (Score:2)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adhocracy [wikipedia.org]. For extra kicks and grins, read Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom [craphound.com] about a society based on this concept, plus using online reputation instead of currency.
Re:Heroin? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'll just take this time to point out that I've never heard of anyone selling liquor in front of an elementary school. If you want to get heroin off the streets, put it in well regulated stores instead.
Re:Heroin? (Score:5, Interesting)
Alcohol's a cross between not-that-bad and impossible to regulate.
We seem to be doing a better job of it than heroin.
Heroin is pretty fucking toxic.
Heroin is actually quite non-toxic. If your breathing is supported, you can survive pretty much any level of an opiate. It's not toxic to the liver, or pretty much any other organ.
We're talking a chemical with no benefit, that makes you literally need it all the time to even stay on a normal level once you're hooked
But it's worth mentioning that with dependence comes tolerance. When an opiate addict is maintained on the dose they need, they can carry out an otherwise normal life. Dr. William Halsted, for instance, had a brilliant surgical career and co-founded Johns Hopkins while maintaining himself on morphine. That doesn't happen with alcoholics.
if you cut it off completely after a certain point, you die from withdrawal.
That is simply not true. Unless your health is already seriously compromised it is not possible to die from opiate withdrawal.
Heroin will do it way easy; and the natural course of exposure is to tend towards that addiction, strongly. It's also much easier to overdose.
It's pretty easy to avoid an overdose, if you know what dose you're taking. Problem is, black market heroin is un-measured. Someone who could drop into a pharmacy and pick up a premeasured dose of heroin would be very unlikely to die from overdose.
This is a different problem than liquor, just like carrying a small rocket launcher is a different problem than carrying a 6 bullet revolver.
It's different, but not altogether worse. Heroin is easier to get addicted to, but the addiction is not as bad. Alcohol makes people more violent. Heroin makes people very mellow. It's easier to overdose on heroin, but you don't see the same sort of chronic toxicity you do with alcohol. You can't objectively claim that one is worse than another.
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What??? No mention of tobacco?
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> Alcohol makes people more violent. Heroin makes people very mellow.
Wrong, and wrong. In many cultures, alcohol that makes people mellow, and sometimes there's something else that makes them aggressive. In one peculiar culture, imported western alcohol consumed in cities made people aggressive and traditional alcohol consumed in villages made them mellow.
Learned effects, people. We know it from comparative anthropology, and we know it from large, double blind studies performed in the sixties and seventi
Heroin cures alcohol? (Score:2)
Around the turn of the previous century, heroin was considered a reasonable treatment for alcoholism.
Alcohol gets you addicted, wrecks your health even if you don't OD on it, and ultimately makes you unable to function (keep a job, etc.) which produces costs to society (not to mention your family).
Doctors looked at this situation and many decided to substitute heroin for alcohol. Yes, heroin left their addiction patients still addicted. However, it didn't wreck their health unless they OD'd on it. With s
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To be fair, he did say "Alcohol will kill you from withdrawal too."
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Re:Heroin? (Score:4, Informative)
Alcohol regulation gets fucking stupid.
We have a (responsible!) liquor store chain in my town. They have a store that is ~1400ft (as the crow flies) from an elementary school. Never a record of the store ever selling to minors, and they've got a store policy of catching and reporting fake ID's to the police.
Last year, the idiot town council changed the limits on liquor licenses from 700ft to 1500 ft, and changed it from "shortest path" to "as the crow flies" measurement, then tried to get the store's liquor license retroactively revoked on the grounds that they didn't meet the new (illegally ex-post-facto) legal standard.
It's ridiculous. But then what do you expect when you live in a town dominated by "no drinking, no dancing, no fun, the-stick-up-our-ass-has-a-stick-up-its-ass" Southern Baptists?
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Changing the law like this is not in fact illegal. If they change the law to make dancing illegal, prosecuting you for dancing in the past would be illegal, but you better stop dancing right now.
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The fact that it's so addictive and harmful are reasons to regulate.
I've lost a few friends and family to heroin. It's already here. The $80B we spend trying to keep it away only puts helpless addicts into contact with unscrupulous armed drug dealers.
If there were pharmacies that were secure like banks where addicts could go and buy limited amounts, we'd be much better off. Does it totally fix the problem? Absolutely not, but I'd like to know that my local junkie can peaceably go down to the store and buy h
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Heroin is pretty fucking toxic. We're not talking Marijuana toxic here (I'd rather cigarettes and weed be gone too, though cigarettes are more like alcohol but with EVERYONE that drinks being a huge alcoholic drinking contaminated booze). We're talking a chemical with no benefit, that makes you literally need it all the time to even stay on a normal level once you're hooked; and if you cut it off completely after a certain point, you die from withdrawal.
Here's a good ranking of the relative danger levels of various drugs. In fact, it was so good that the guy who published it was forced to resign from his job as chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs in the UK because it didn't jibe with current politics.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/nov/02/david-nutt-dangerous-drug-list [guardian.co.uk]
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2D version of that list:
dependence v. physical harm [wikipedia.org]
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I have to say that's a pretty bad list. For instance, I've made good arguments here that heroin and alcohol are roughly equal in danger. Or at least, that there's no clear winner. Also, LSD being placed above Ecstacy and other stimulants. There's just no sense in that. LSD has never caused a death by overdose, and no neurotoxicity is known. That's not the case for stimulants.
I think I read this paper when it came out. IIRC one major flaw is that they included addiction potential into the quantificatio
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Umm... dude... that's my ass you're scratching. I mean, we're all connected and part of the single cosmic organism, sure, but my ass is not your head, no matter how well connected we all are in the rhythmic cosmos. Would you please knock it off for a while?
=8)
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The list is at least partially empirical - based on the number of people showing up in the hospitals in britain because they ingested that drug.
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LSD has never caused a death by overdose, and no neurotoxicity is known.
Maybe, but you're unlikely to fuck your head up with Ecstasy the same way that you might with LSD.
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I've known a lot more E burnouts than LSD burnouts. E has this magic the first few times, lots of people end up chasing that. Popping several pills in a night, etc. And there's good reason to believe that it's neurotoxic to serotonergic neurons at high doses. LSD on the other hand is non-toxic. The rates of psychiatric reactions are no higher than the rates of psychosis in the general population, which leads me to believe that if you have a psychotic reaction to LSD you were crazy to begin with. It's
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Heroin is pretty fucking toxic. We're not talking Marijuana toxic
1. Define "Marijuana toxic". Be sure to cite scientific articles to back up your statements.
I make my own alcohol.
I'd rather cigarettes and weed be gone too
2. You brew your own alcohol, a substance known to kill thousands of people a year both directly (alcohol poisoning) and indirectly (drunk drivers). Yet you want weed to disappear, a substance which has never had a recorded death directly attributed only to itself without any other factors coming into play?
Very odd.
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Not odd at all, if you stop and think about human nature for a moment. What he's saying is, "My drugs aren't as bad as the drugs that I've rejected." Yes, I know that alcohol and tobacco kill more people than several other drugs combined. All the same, I like a little alcohol now and then, and I'm addicted to tobacco. Caffeine isn't even listed, but I'm also addicted to that.
I question the position they've given cocaine, though. They are certainly lumping white powder cocaine together with the rocks th
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Alcohol is not immediately toxic. The first ounce or two is actually good for you and helps prevent diabeetus and improve immune response in the long term, among other things. The way MOST people drink is, of course, damaging in the long term and not very beneficial in the short term.
Tobacco and marijuana are no good for you at all. Cigarettes however are garbage; smoking something rolled from good, clean tobacco that isn't contaminated with all kinds of toxic shit is not as bad. Compound this with the
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There have been MANY studies, however, that link cannabis with reduced cancer risk, reduced risk of alzheimer's, decreasing effects of depression, assisting AIDS and chemo patients in maintaining an appetite...keep in mind that you can ingest cannabis without smoking it. You can cook with it or vaporize it, both of which remove the harm incurred on your lungs from smoking.
Unlike the positive effects from alcohol, the positive effects associated with cannabis don't disappear as consumption increases. Obvio
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This is a different problem than liquor, just like carrying a small rocket launcher is a different problem than carrying a 6 bullet revolver.
Fortunately both are equally protected by the 2nd Amendment, if you're an American.
The question is not whether heroin or whatever is good or bad. The question is the appropriate public policy response to it. In particular, given the certain fact that some people will desire it, and others will meet that desire with supply, are we better off to legalize and regulate the trade and medicalize personal and social problems associated with use the way we do with alcohol; or do something insanely counter-product
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Fortunately both are equally protected by the 2nd Amendment, if you're an American.
Not really. A missile launcher would have been considered munitions by the founding fathers.
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Heroin is pretty fucking toxic. We're talking a chemical with no benefit, that makes you literally need it all the time to even stay on a normal level once you're hooked;
Heroin is often a better analgesic than morphine especially in the terminally ill in extreme pain. It metabolizes better and is more effective for certain diseases.
And if you are terminally ill, who gives a shit if you become addicted to heroin?
and if you cut it off completely after a certain point, you die from withdrawal.
Nonsense; your ignorance is showing. Ask any recovered heroin addict whether they are dead or not. Apparently, you would be surprised at their answer.
Somebody please mod this dude down.
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Surely that invokes a bit of selection bias, no? I mean, if he wanted to survey heroin addicts to find out if they died during recovery, surely he'd want to also ask the ones that died, right?
If I wanted to find out if falling sixty stories was likely to cause my death or not, I wouldn't limit myself to as
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It's not that you raise bad points, because you're spot on in the gist of your post. But:
Surely that invokes a bit of selection bias, no? I mean, if he wanted to survey heroin addicts to find out if they died during recovery, surely he'd want to also ask the ones that died, right?
Well, I can see your point, but his argument was that death was the only possible outcome, hence my sarcastic characterization of his "surprise" at speaking with -living- people who had experienced heroin withdrawal. He came across as the kind of person who would then dispute that those people were ever heroin addicts to begin with (since they were not dead); I don't suspect him to be a stranger to circular logic. But that's just my read on the tenor of his comments.
BTW, isn't there some move afoot to use t
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That's a terrible idea, you ass. Then people might actually start to communicate effectively. ~
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and, coincidentally, Spanish exclamations and interrogatories
Good point. Figure out how to type an upside-down tilde and we'll go with it~
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My sarcasm detector is on the blink today, so ignore me if you were just being sarcastic.
Let's execute them. Haphazardly selling something seriously deadly for ingestion is akin to poisoning people.
You want the death penalty for brewers, distillers, tavern owners, bartenders, and liquor store owners and their sales clerks? More people die from alcohol overdose than overdose of all other drugs combined. Cigarettes kill almost all their users, too.
And if you want to kill yourself, or engage in risky behavior,
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I don't want the death penalty for them, but I realize that it's a fucking huge problem that brewers, distillers, tavern owners and liquor store owners profit from slowly killing people. It's perverse incentives. If we like free markets (and we do) we need to do something about it, or we'll be using the invisible hand to choke people to death in an exemplary efficient manner.
Alcohol consumption follows a log-normal distribution, it's skewed to the heavily drinking end. If the 20% heaviest drinkers suddenly
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"Government" is an abstract idea, run by people. And who gives birth to those people? Us. Who elects those people? Us.
Government isn't the problem. The people who run it and the people who put them there are the problem.
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In my city, Virginia Beach, VA, we have a City Manager form of government where a City Manager is hired to manage the city and the City Council is supposed to approve much of what he does. Our "mayor" has no special power other than to preside over council meetings. So we have a non-elected, contracted employee using mushroom management on the elected officials (keep them in the dark and feed them shit) and treating the city like a fifedom (he was observed tearing down political campaign signs of those who
Re:I don't care WHAT you call it. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's still government and it's still the source of everything that is wrong with this country.
I've heard tales of a mythical land called Somalia whee men are free to do as they please. Wait it is real, and it isn't a nice place to visit.
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I think you'll find that in Somalia, you're not as free to do as you please as you think. Somalia is ruled by warlords, which is just another form of government.
Re:I don't care WHAT you call it. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's like if there's an absence of a governmental power the most powerful will become the government...
And the powerful didn't get to be powerful by being Mr. Niceguy.
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Yes, when people that aren't constrained by an effective de jure government, those with more personal power set themselves up as a de facto government over whatever domain they can establish.
I think that was rather the point GP was making in response to the argument that the government is the source of everything wrong with the country -- that, in t
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Yeah well, if we go around listening to what the Romans had to say on logic pretty soon we'll end up with gladiators killing Christians in an arena.
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True... but use of fallacious arguments does not mean that the proposition is false...
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It's still government and it's still the source of everything that is wrong with this country.
I've heard tales of a mythical land called Somalia whee men are free to do as they please. Wait it is real, and it isn't a nice place to visit.
Meanwhile, outside the Land Of False Dichotomies...
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I love running and throwing claymores! I don't even mind if they're the supersized Scots sword instead of the explodey kind!
Thanks old man!
-Mitchell
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