I personally consider the war on drugs to be a colossal failure and there tends to be widespread agreement that the War on Drugs was somewhat effective at enabling enforcement, but ineffective or counterproductive at eliminating drugs or reducing long-term harm.
What America continues to ignore, intentionally or not, is the root cause of drug addiction which tends to be a more complicated and nuanced
Well, now the war on drug is over and we see that the harms from _not_ doing it are worse. In 2023, overdoses overtook gun and traffic deaths _combined_.
Surrendering to the drugs was a mistake.
Yeah, we should have changed tactics. Zero-tolerance policies were terrible nonsense, long prison terms were not helpful, and we should have clamped on prescription pills way sooner.
> but ineffective or counterproductive at eliminating drugs
It was effective in _controlling_ their level. And alternative approaches are just not working.
It seems like you've already made up your mind what to believe. In particular you've failed to critically analyze the broader context in which overdose deaths went up and I also have to question your suggestion that the war on drugs in the US ever ended.
Sure, marijuana is largely accepted at this point. Most other things you still buy from gangsters on a street corner or via the darknet and will still be arrested for having, frequently losing your job as a side effect.
To overdose deaths, those largely correlate to the Sacklers (ie medical professionals inappropriately pushing product with a veneer of legitimacy) and to fentanyl. The latter is particularly deadly due to the combination of accessibility to amateurs with the inherent difficulty of safely compounding such a potent chemical as part of a clandestine operation.
The prescription pills epidemic was largely over by 2018. And yes, then fentanyl started picking up speed.
> suggestion that the war on drugs in the US ever ended.
It has not happened evenly across the country, but it happened on the Pacific coast. Drug use stopped being punished, with people openly consuming drugs in front of the police. Oregon even made that official.
This is an important point. Drug enforcement operations did not stop, because no large-scale bureaucratic system can stop at once. But they became a futile theater.
Curtailing cocaine/opium traffic was hard, but not impossible. Cocaine had to flow from growers high up in the mountains, through multiple countries and transportation modes. Each step increased the price for the end-consumers. And cocaine/opiates are relatively bulky, so smugglers couldn't just do one high-risk operation, they had to build a robust supply chain.
Fentanyl upended that. It can be cooked in a lab in Mexico just outside of the US border. The precursors aren't particularly expensive either. It's also highly potent, so that one milk jug of pure fentanyl powder can supply a large-ish state in the US for a year. So high-risk high-reward one-off smuggling operations are much more feasible.
They're not. In 2023 the overdose deaths were more than 100k. They have gone down a bit since then, for a very grim reason: they killed enough people to affect the statistics.
I think this time is different. I’m not Gen Z, yet once my kids are out of school, I’m planning to leave tech behind as much as possible.
When I started in tech, at the dawn of the internet, it was an exciting field full of hope and the promise to empower and enrich the lives of people. Tech now is largely the opposite.
Enshitification is making things progressively worse. tech companies are creating systems and tools with dark patterns abound to ensure you no longer own anything, are under constant surveillance, and populations at large are manipulated through the magic of propaganda and illusory truth. Even the productivity gains are perversely used to not give people more time through fewer work days/hours but to instead give them more work. People are losing their connection to others and the world around them.
Everyone tends to focus on Orwell’s 1984, but I find Fahrenheit 451 to be the more prescient book. I used to be annoyed by the book people’s choice to leave society and wait for it to collapse so they could help rebuild. In my mind, they should have been mounting an resistance. Fair to say I understand the book people’s perspective so much more now.
Speaking as someone who has gotten dirty looks and questioned by mothers who wanted to know who I was, why I was at the playground, and which children were mine, it does happen or at least it did years ago when my kids were much younger.
It’s a frustrating experience that changed how I interacted with other kids on the playground that weren’t mine. It made me more careful about whether I would let another kid join our game of tag or push the kid in the swing next to us when they asked. Sad really, and truly hope things have changed.
I’m curious if you looked into the industry to see how much water and power modern data centers actually use or whether you’re just blindly accepting the popular narrative?
I’ve seen a lot of verifiably false claims being thrown around data centers.
Like what? And are you trying to say they're not harmful? I'd love to hear your reasoning. For me, 10 seconds of googling shows verifiably true claims of data centers having all sorts of negative impacts.
While I don’t disagree, the problem I often have with medical professionals is that they tend to be arrogant and unable to take in new information to adapt and evolve their frameworks.
I was married to a doctor, helped them study for board exams, etc and was surrounded by other doctors within our social circle. What most people don’t realize, and most doctors themselves refuse to acknowledge, is how limited by specialization their knowledge can be and how the education of most doctors stops after med school and residency. Nutrition, for example, is barely covered at all.
Yes, there are continuing education requirements and countless journals but most doctors do the bare minimum and don’t keep up. I’d even argue that most physician knowledge tends to be updated more often through drug and instrumentation reps promoting their products by taking them out to dinner and entering them into referral programs, etc.
I wouldn't label that arrogance. In my experience outside the USA, my GP has been unaware of new research / advice / guidelines published by the MoH. They generally respond to new info from reputable sources when you print it out and bring it to them.
I would expect specialists to be subscribed to journals and reading the latest articles in their field. When I saw a specialist at UCSF this was definitely the case; while my GP still has gaps where their current knowledge on a specific subject is from their time at med school.
An equivalence would be a front-end engineer being naive to the happenings on the Linux kernel mailing list. They could likely understand what's going on if they took the time to read it, but that is not their focus.
The fact that there are advertisements for cancer medications make me think a hell of a lot of specialists don’t keep up. It’s one thing to advertise to consumers about a new medication for their chronic condition and they might not have seen their doctor in 3 years. It’s another entirely to have cancer patients need to ask about the new hotness.
Having built software distributed in clinics and troubleshooting with doctors has absolutely confirmed this for me. They are some of the worst clients to deal with. It’s not all that different from many “technologists” though when they casually suggest “easy solutions” outside their domain of expertise. How many ignorant HN posts have started with “why don’t they just”?
Yeah I can't with the "biology is orders of magnitude more complex than SE/CS or any other field for that matter" and then thinking he can explain to the techies how technology works. Just put the pills in the bag bro. Oh wait, we need to go to a pharmacist for that.
The med students I've known have been some of the most insufferable people I've met.
While I'm interested to see how they adapt Neuromancer to the screen, I get a sense that the author of the article never read the book nor took the time to understand Neuromancer's place in culture.
Likewise. Having read Neuromancer a good five years before The Matrix ever hit the cinemas, the two are well distinct in my mind in a manner in which they apparently aren’t to this author.
To start, there is a lot of misinformation out there and the NDAs that surround data center construction and operation don't help. People will cite water consumption as a huge problem when modern hyperscalers use substantially less water because they're now using closed loop cooling instead of evaporative cooling. You'll see people cite noise because they saw a video online of a crypto mining grifter who bought a bunch of shipping containers and haphazardly threw together air cooled mining rigs with 80mm fans screaming away. I even saw one video of a woman who claimed data centers gave her diabetes despite the fact that she was obese.
Amazon and other companies already have job training programs because they cannot find enough skilled labor to build and operate their data centers. The number of jobs commonly cited are comically lower than what is common to operate a modern hyperscaler. In my experience, hyperscalers often have at least 100-200 people on site to operate the data center and I've seen more than 1000 people on a site when the data center is under construction.
The real issue, as always, are the local governments and utilities that sellout out the citizens and fail to create and enforce building codes. The governments should be using the demand for data centers to partner with the companies and have them pay to modernize and fix the power grid. They should be using them to help subsidize green energy initiatives among other things and fund other projects to benefit the community.
The inconvenient truth is that the problem with data centers lies with the people in the communities who continue to elect politicians who, time and time again, make decisions counter to the best interests of their community. Data centers just happen to be the latest scapegoat to distract people from corrupt politicians and an community that is not civically engaged enough to hold their politicians accountable.
> the people in the communities who continue to elect politicians who, time and time again, make decisions counter to the best interests of their community.
I wonder where all the politicians are who would make decisions for their communities instead...
The core issue is that most Americans aren't civically engaged. They don't take the effort to track what's happening within their government which then means that they don't know and are unable to hold their elected officials accountable.
Communities can have more effective politicians, but that means voting out individuals who make bad decisions or decisions that are counter the will good of the community they serve.
Also worth noting that several studies have shown pay differentials to be highly correlated with women being less likely to negotiate compensation or ask for less.
Or it might simply be that there is a lot of unreported or unacknowledged mistreatment of men. I recall reading a study about harassment in the restaurant industry. Both genders were harassed but harassment towards men was largely ignored in the analysis because it didn't fit the focus or narrative of the authors.
As a man who has worked in a predominantly female workplace, my experience has taught me that harassment is less about gender and more about power. Those in power will always feel entitled to behave poorly, regardless of gender.
I saw more than one video about datacenter noise that were clearly crypto mining. There are some questionable designs leveraging shipping containers and what sound like a lot of 120mm fans.
What America continues to ignore, intentionally or not, is the root cause of drug addiction which tends to be a more complicated and nuanced
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