The source of all real insight is, of course, divinity. True understanding is not generated by the brain but rather received in the Plexus Solaris and then works it's way up to the brain, where it is turned into action, language or memory.

> I'm sure I would gain a lot by being able to shut my mind up at times

There is nothing much more to understand. The single best piece of advice I ever got came from an Indian guru named Muktananda who said "Meditation is not very difficult and meditation is not very easy". That is, you need to find a balance between trying too hard and not trying hard enough.

I'm wondering how many people in favor of legalization would actually like to see a pot shop in their own street. From my own experience in the Netherlands, these kinds of shops attract a sort of crowd that you would much rather avoid.

I dunno. We have a nice neighborhood pub on our street and it's great. I can stop in for a bite or a few beers and once in a while, yep...I have a few more with my neighbors/friends and we get a bit tipsy and are glad to be able to walk a block to get home instead of taking a cab.

There are also some other bars in town that "attract a sort of crowd that (I) would much rather avoid". So that's basically what I do. I don't hang out at bars that attract a bunch of tough guys looking to pick fights or pick up drunk women.

That still doesn't mean I think bars should be illegal or that people (even drunks and alcoholics) should be thrown in jail for whatever issues they have with drug (alcohol) abuse.

All other arguments about the relative benefits of alcohol or cannabis or anything else aside, that's what it comes down to for me. I just don't think the possession and consumption of anything should be enough to land you in prison. As with alcohol you must be held accountable for your actions whether sober or under the influence. And if you accidentally cause damage to person or property while under the influence, you can be held liable due to your own negligence in not managing your behavior properly.

But the idea that your diet can be considered "criminal" is frankly ridiculous to me. Either it's a relatively harmless vice where you occasionally engage in an activity with potential health risks in exchange for altering your mood/perception or you're self-medicating and habituated to something and could use help with withdrawal and with addressing the issues that led you to use intoxication as an escape or a coping mechanism.

Neither scenario is something I'd consider worth of criminal punishment. Crimes at their most basic should be situations where one person infringes the rights of another, not situations where one person makes potentially unhealthy decisions.

I believe you completely, but I bet that if their were more pot shops, that unsavory element would just frequent the shops in their own neighborhoods. The Netherlands in general seem to get all the yahoo's that would just as well stay home and smoke up if they could buy legally in their home nations.

There are a ton of shops in Boulder. They are very chill, safe, and full of normal citizens. They close before 7 so it's not like people are hanging out there later at night, bein seedy.

We* have them all over the place. I'm not aware of any problems.

* former CO resident, current CA resident.

My gut reaction is to tell you that you're wrong and look for evidence of that, and blame the worst problems of cannabis supply on its current illegality. The illegatity pushes the price up; that high price and illegality attracts criminal gangs who use violence and human exploitation to supply the drug. Making it legal would reduce the cost of the drug and allow suppliers to market themselves as ethical ("free range" / "fair trade" / "organic" etc).

But looking at cigarretes in the UK we see criminal gangs are still involved in the production of dangerous[1] counterfeits and supply of those counterfeits or of smuggled cigarretes from lower tax areas.

> The illegality pushes the price up;

You make it sound as if this is a bad thing. I'm having a hard time imagining what benefit will result from making a potent and fairly addictive narcotic cheaper and more available.

It's a bad thing because it leaves space for criminal gangs to make money and does nothing to tackle any harms that result from drug use.

Most people who use cannabis will experience no ill-effects. Many of the harms are reducible - use a vaporiser at the correct temperature rather than burning the plant material for example. A few people will experience ill-effects. Providing help to those people through public health measures is more effective and cheaper than targeting them through criminal justice systems.

> fairly addictive

Citation needed, unless you're misusing "addiction" to mean "habit". Cannabis is not physically addicting and the psychological addiction appears to be weak. There is some element of habit associated with it though.

The way you conflate these metaphors makes the truth of your statement seem self-evident, but it is not so.

Ignoring the whole "potent narcotic" thing for a second (since it's not really either), I personally don't ingest cannabis but I have in the past and frankly it's like alcohol in that you can have a little (and feel a bit relaxed) or a lot (and feel really intoxicated). Either way, I'm focused on decriminalization because the concept of throwing someone in prison for their diet is abhorrent to me.

> But he's the one who signed up to do a crap job for little pay, and keeps signing up to do it again every year. And that makes him part of the problem.

Quite the opposite. The problem is that there already too many assholes who make it their sole mission in life to maximize their monetary inflow. But the fact of the matter is that this world keeps running because millions are prepared to do their part for a very modest fee.

It's night and your driverless car is waiting in front of a red light. Suddenly you see a man with a shotgun walking up to your vehicle. How do you tell your driverless car to ignore the red light and get the hell out of there?

We already put ourselves in situations like that when we take mass transportation, sit in rooms with one exit, enter retail stores, and so on.

Also, consider that with enough driverless cars, the congestion at intersections should be reduced (many lights will no longer be needed, especially during low-traffic times like night.) The danger at congested stops would be equal to now, and it is nearly impossible to drive away from danger in a multi-lane column of stopped traffic.

That scenario is incredibly unlikely in the UK, but even then, you could have an emergency-call mechanism that could take control of the car remotely.

The entire point of driverless cars is that the software of the car is superior to the wetware of the human. Humans cannot be trusted to determine what the car does, directly, under any circumstances, even an emergency.

So the answer is, you don't. The sort of fine-grained, always on surveillance necessary for driverless cars to work would be applied outside the cars as well as inside. Pedestrians are dangerous, with or without a gun, and as soon as you walk outside and attempt to interact with the urban environment without the safety of a self-driving car, someone would be alerted. Your identity will be confirmed, you will be tracked and every self-driving car for miles will know about it.

So in your scenario, the proper authorities have been called before you were even aware of his presence, simply because there was a human near traffic.

Since this will never happen, while the thousands of deaths per year due to driver error is a reality, who cares?

considering in the uk the deaths caused by dangerous driving is 0.04% is it worth making everyone change to driverless cars? What happens if I want to drive my old reliable ford escort MK2? Do I not get to any more?

Yes, it is worth it. Initially we will provide tax rebates to driverless cars to encourage people to transition, then we add a "you are an anti-social luddite" tax to manual drive cars, then we make the latter illegal on public roads.

If you want to drive you old reliable fold escort you are free to do so on your own property, this has the added bonus that you can drive it as fast and as dangerously as you want (barring negligence regarding passengers or bystanders.) Once you enter the public thoroughfare we fine you and if the offense is egregious or leads to injury to others we put you in jail. Same response we give to someone who wants to drive 200kph.

I'm fairly doubtful that the present state of AI is able to deliver a driving program that equals the skill of a competent human driver. Moving around requires a lot more understanding than is generally believed.

Sadly, competent human drivers are rare. Humans are terrible at paying attention to boring things and accidents are too rare to keep people's attention. Worse it's the edge cases where someone is not paying attention that tends to lead to most accidents.

We had that book at home. I remember being totally daunted by the source code of the Star Trek program... that thing had literally HUNDREDS of lines of code!

I wish I could work myself up into some kind of indignation, but what I really believe is this: if you willingly submit yourself to the cesspits of human banality (i.e. Facebook, Tinder and all the likes), you pretty much deserve all the crap that will be unloaded on you.

So there's the dystopia. The humans become the nearly identical constantly replaceable consumable that the algorithms steer across a dozen generations, mating them and connecting them together to father the algorithms' own silicon ends whatever those happen to turn out to be.

I hope they don't like paperclips.

>identical constantly replaceable consumable that the algorithms steer across a dozen generations, mating them and connecting them together to father the algorithms' own silicon ends

Surprisingly precise description of life (up to sillicon / carbon substitution)

Richard Dawkins paints a similar picture in "The Blind Watchmaker".

In some way it's ironic that with all that effort we've spent on AI so far, simple evolution may yet beat us to the punch as far as AGI is concerned. Makes you wonder about how irrelevant humans are in the grand scheme of things.

Oh please. There was never a Divine Plan for your life, and there's never going to be a mash-up sub-intelligent algorithm that overrides your own direction over your own life. It takes other intelligent agents to do that, ie: people.

Crappy classification or regression algorithms being misapplied as cheap, stupid business ideas... are basically nothing like super-intelligent paper-clip maximizers.

With all due respect, I think this smacks of elitism.

The bigger problem IMHO is that spending too much time on those things (and perhaps here, or the Internet in general) leads to dopamine tolerance, aka "ADD". Which cannot be good for lasting relationships.