Big Weed
Activists thought they could have the best of all worlds: regulate legal weed so thoroughly that you make it perfectly safe, bring in lots of tax dollars to the state, make entrepreneurs rich, eliminate the illegal weed market, and make the new system inclusive of the formerly illegal operators who suffered under criminal laws that are viewed by today’s lawmakers and citizens as unjustly harsh. Recreational legalization has brought none of the above, anywhere in North America.
Nate Hochman, Cannabusiness Goes to Pot, quoting Daniel Sumner and Robin Goldstein, Can Legal Weed Win?: The Blunt Realities of Cannabis Economics
On the other hand …
I commented the other day that Letitia James had made me very happy (by suing three or four Trumps). But the crypto-tribal Wall Street Journal has two points I can’t just wave off:
- “Ms. James ran for office promising to indict Mr. Trump, which is the opposite of the way justice should be done. You’re supposed to find a crime and then identify the perpetrator. Ms. James declared Mr. Trump could “be indicted for criminal offenses” and has hunted ever since for a crime to charge him with.”
- No one who has ever listened to Mr. Trump will be surprised if he hyped the value of his holdings in dealing with bankers. But then no one in New York finance would ever trust only what Mr. Trump claims before signing a document or lending him money … As far as we’ve seen, the lenders don’t seem to consider themselves victims. They made money on the loans, which didn’t default. The transactions were presumably scoured by auditors and bank due-diligence officers. There is enormous variability in real-estate valuations. The question Ms. James will have to prove is whether Mr. Trump’s claims amounted to intentional fraud.
I wonder if principled Democrats in New York feel about this the way I feel about most of the publicized antics of Indiana’s current Attorney General?
Schrödinger’s pandemic
President Biden apparently went off script in a 60 Minutes interview on Sunday, accidentally expressing the closest thing to a normie take on the pandemic: “We still have a problem with Covid,” he said. “We’re still doing a lot of work on it . . . but the pandemic is over. If you notice, no one’s wearing masks. Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape. And so I think it’s changing.”
This comment was met with a resounding “No shit!” by most Americans—except for the screeches of outrage from the folx who just aren’t ready to say goodbye. The actual screech was faintly muffled by the N95s they are still wearing everywhere, but their tweets were loud and clear …
Among those disagreeing with Biden is Anthony Fauci, who I thought was already retired and sipping piña coladas on a beach in a hazmat suit somewhere, but apparently not. At the same time, the White House said that Biden was just stating the obvious, so who knows. Perhaps the pandemic, like war, is over if you want it.
Not ready for Happy Acres
The biggest Election Night for my mother was 2008. She was 93. Dad was gone. We sat up late, TV on, looking at the big empty stage at Grant Park in Chicago, and then there was a roar from the crowd and Barack and Michelle and the two little girls walked out and Mother put her hands to her eyes, overwhelmed. With the appearance of that little family came the feeling that the country had cut loose from our dark racial past.
But it was too good to be true. The man set out to reform our wasteful, inefficient, infuriating health care system and he was expertly parried by McConnell and held to a draw and in 2016 Democrats nominated a woman for whom campaigning was a miserable chore and so in came the casino man who won reelection but was cheated out of it, despite what the courts said, and now we have Republican candidates refusing to say they will accept the results in November if they go the other way. This is the point at which we break with reality. Next stop is Happy Acres where we listen to the buzzing of the bees in the cigarette trees by a great big soda fountain. I’m not prepared to go there yet.
O, wad some Power the giftie gie us …
South Korean president overheard insulting U.S. Congress as ‘idiots’
Wordplay
Wastewater epidemiology
Interoperability
Interoperability — a fairly fundamental tenet of the Internet. Simply, it means that different applications and devices can share the same data with one another.
Keyword: Interoperability – Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure
(Via Denny Henke on Micro.blog)
[S]ubordinating truth to politics is a game which tyrants and bullies always win.
Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge
The Orthodox "phronema" [roughly, mind-set] cannot be programmitized or reduced to shibboleths.
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Tipsy Teetotaler ن 