Was busy yesterday, so I couldn’t reply. More anecdotes does not make a more convincing argument. I am not saying that there aren’t people who waste their time and potential because of smoking weed, but I have never seen data or a convincing argument that the impact from weed is any worse than that of alcohol or any other drug. Some people just want to fuck themselves up and will do so in whatever way possible.
To ignore the fact that many if not most potheads are unmotivated to the point of dysfunction is to ignore a pretty big part of the evidence
This is not a fact, nor is it evidence. There are far more high functioning daily users in society than you imagine, many of whom make the things you like.
But I’ll say that for me personally, if I smoke a bunch of pot, I find it really hard to motivate to do unpleasant tasks for a good week or so.
I am the opposite, but then I have 4 cats and they make a lot of shit. I’d prefer to clean blazed and I prefer to code web things when blazed. Weed is very good for some people in executing menial, repetitive tasks.
without a law explicitly prohibiting driving while stoned, we’ll get a lot more people driving while stoned. And personally I’m not convinced that that’s a good thing.
If there’s more people driving stoned, there may be less people driving drunk. Since the data suggests drinking and driving within the legal limit is more dangerous could this not result in less accidents? It’s impossible to know, but in any case I think the double standard being applied in the meantime is ridiculous.
That’s basically my entire point. That there’s something about pot that makes some consumers of it incredibly unmotivated and unambitious. And I’ve seen people stop pot for awhile and get their drive back.
And note that I’m not saying that people shouldn’t be allowed to make a personal decision to smoke all they want (as long as they’re not driving), just disagreeing strongly with this statement of yours:
I hope we get some studies on it now that the long-standing restrictions have presumably been removed from marijuana studies in the U.S.
Anyway, back on topic:
Ha! Replacement therapy!
Its a good point. Personally I suspect that the reason for it is that BAC is so easy to measure, while pot intoxication isn’t as far as I know. And furthermore pot has been illegal almost everywhere until very recently so its been easy to have a non nuanced zero tolerance approach to it. I wonder if that will change now that the cat is rapidly escaping from the bag.
This calls and begs and cries for a genetic study, finding the correlation between genome features and the response to pot (and caffeine and other substances). So people would know in advance what will work the best for them and what to avoid.
Except that the 5-10 years ago we did not have quite-working prototypes roaming the test polygons.
I always call for moderation, whether it is drugs or alcohol (or anything else) (with, in some cases, an exception for an occasional binge, but those also in moderation). I have friends who are moderate users who are pretty well functional; some worked in my IT dept, for others I subcontract occasionally.
Your sample may be quite skewed by not knowing how many of your non-unmotivated peers are pot smokers. It is a thing quite easy to miss if they don’t advertise it themselves.
It’s like with drinking. You have moderates who are just okay, binges that are mostly just okay, and heavy users who are all but okay. (And then you have the abstinence-preacher killjoys.)
We’ve got Google cars roaming around with drivers ready to assist at any point, and whilst they are driving many hundreds of miles autonomously, they’re still relying on intervention regularly. Most importantly they still well and truly struggle when anything unforeseen crosses their path, i.e. temporary traffic signs, pedestrians, a bit of crumpled up paper… Then of course there’s the fact that these cars rely on a huge amount of programming about their surrounds before they go anywhere. Their routes are carefully planned, they’re programmed to know all the speed limits, what type of intersections they are approaching, etc.
I wouldn’t be so soul-crushingly pessimistic. There are quite some mini-breakthroughs out there in data processing and the technologies from rangefinders to 3d imaging and scene reconstructions are also not getting any worse.
Plus there are the vehicle-to-vehicle standards being proposed. I can imagine them as mandatory in a decade. That itself, coupled with transponders in the temporary signage, can alleviate many of the problems you listed.
If autonomous cars never make it, it won’t be for want of tech. It’ll be because of fear, uncertainty and doubt combined with people believing in ethics that require blame.
They may make it in some regions, where lawyers aren’t roaming in herds, and where the insurance companies realize that the machines can be quite safer than humans.
It will be a gradual process.
And it will take quite a long time in some areas, exactly because someone has to be blamed.
