> The "anonymity and privacy inherent in the cryptocurrency system are what draw individuals, particularly those with illicit intentions, towards its use,"
1) people vastly overestimate how much “anonymity and privacy” cryptocurrency gives them (spoiler: far less than using paper money)
2) I’ve never liked this line of reasoning because it’s the same argument for why encryption should have government backdoors.
the irony is that temperance did (and obviously didn't) work. It reduced levels of alcoholism, increased women's safety, decreased domestic violence, increased health, increased the average family's wealth and increased workers productivity.
Obviously and needless to say it also increased organized crime too, and regular people hated it, etc etc, but in terms of what it set out to do, it worked!
Health is the one issue that might get people treading more carefully again, between alcohol and drugs the US death toll is tremendous and it is leading to numerous problems on all fronts.
Of course if you could kill demand for this stuff that would be the ideal solution, if nobody uses it then there's no problem at all. But poor mental health and people working a full time job and still needing welfare cheques means this isn't something any politicians will even bother trying to overcome earnestly. Its just absolutely ridiculous that the US population is collapsing without immigration and yet so many people in the US are dying like this. Its like a bad comedy.
Oregon and Washington (and California) have clumpy/non-uniform population distributions. Each has a geographically small, dense, blue, city population surrounded by a geographically large, low density, red, rural region.
And even if I grant that you mean "recreational drug", any discussion that doesn't distinguish between pot, LSD, heroin etc is just pointless. There are huge differences in health impact, addiction potential, social effects and so on.
People who have had some experience with it are their strongest opponents.
The context here is clear. It is not about medicinal "drugs" which should be obvious. If you have need to split terminological hairs then you does not understand the context, and if you do then this makes your argument unhonest and invalid.
> any discussion that doesn't distinguish between pot, LSD, heroin etc is just pointless.
No, that is any discussion that calls for general drug legalization because "some of them are not that bad".
> People who have had some experience with it are their strongest opponents.
Rather depends what you mean by "it". I've know many addicts and I've known many people who have enjoyed drugs recreationally with no long-term ill effects. And plenty of people in-between the two extremes.
> Any drug with side effects should be, of course, criminalized, if we want healthy individuals and a functioning society.
This is a bizarre statement, even ignoring my pedantry about your use of the word "drug".
Any recreational drug?
Any side effects?
It's hard to understand what you really mean because taken literally this would be a really odd stance to take. So I presume you don't mean what you seem to be saying. Therefore I don't really know what you're saying.
For all the panics about shoplifting or stores claiming they’re closing because of retail loss (spoiler: that’s not the truth) it’s a drop in the bucket compared to wage theft
At a Winco there was a box fan full of tools and parts parked at the end of the parking lot with a hundred or so carts in front of it. It was a repairman going through every cart, took several days as he made his way through all the carts at the store. Had never seen that before.
Reminds me of summers spent working for the school district, replacing the glides on the feet of the metal tubed classroom chairs so the broken ones wouldn’t wobble or tear up the linoleum tiles.
https://www.allglides.com/metalbase.html
All part of the hidden world of keeping shit working I guess
I know a business that fix shopping carts. They don't repair at the store, they load up the broken ones onto a truck and take it to the repair shop. The repair shop is a part of large industrial parts store. It's very expensive for the shopping store to repair because it's typically a repair man who has some welding skills that fixes these things. Not sure why other people in this thread would think there is a specific person at each store who is going to fix these things.
The fan thing also fooled me, but I came here expecting the story to be about web shopping carts. In recent year's I've been prevented from ordering something by a broken web site far more than I've been frustrated by physical shopping cart. The real thing is far more reliable in my experience, and finding another physical cart is so much easier than invoking the web debugger to get past a broken site.
The real story was well worth the read, but I only read it once I twigged what the fan had to do with the story.
1) people vastly overestimate how much “anonymity and privacy” cryptocurrency gives them (spoiler: far less than using paper money)
2) I’ve never liked this line of reasoning because it’s the same argument for why encryption should have government backdoors.