At first glance, this looks pretty similar to the Bob Lee murder last year. I find it interesting and a little surprising how different the reaction and coverage has been
This reminds me more of Chris Dorner. The manifesto is shorter, but this sense of injustice felt by the perpetrator is similar.
Back in the days, mainstream media had enough control over the narrative to water down the "manifesto" part and avoid copycats. This time, "rogue" social medias are much more prevalent, so there's not much of a barrier to prevent the perpetrator from becoming a hero. We can think that copycats will emerge.
I guess that billionaires around the world are dusting off their "apocalypse bunker" protocol...
And, in case we all need a reminder: Chris Dorner was an actual monster, and his brief casting as a cause celebre a pretty big embarrassment in retrospect.
His two first victims, chosen deliberately, were completely innocent people. He selected them because one was the daughter of a police officer he'd had dealings with before. I don't think there's a rhetorical way out for you here.
The article claims that the daylight savings transition happens at 11pm in pacific time. However, my understanding is that this transition should happen at 2 am for all us time zones. Where is 11pm coming from?
Right, the transition to daylight savings at 2AM in the Eastern time zone occurs at 11PM in the Pacific time zone; there is one less hour's difference between the time zones until the Pacific time zone also springs forward three hours later.
It turns out that the Pacific Time Zone is the only one where the bug caused a user visible difference because:
1. Daylight saving time starting or ending changes the time zone offset by just one hour.
2. The bug only has an effect when the difference in the number of hours goes from less than a day to at least a day, or vice versa (e.g. 23 to 24 or 24 to 23).
The only hour of the day that satisfies those two conditions is 11:00pm, and the only time zone where daylight saving time starts and ends at 11:00pm is the Pacific Time Zone.
The article may state it, but it's not true. US DST starts and ends at 2am in every time zone. It doesn't start at 2am in the east, 1 central, 12 west, 11 pacific.
Yeah, even the Wikipedia article the article links to claims that the transition's at 2AM:
> North America coordination of the clock change differs, in that each jurisdiction changes at each local clock's 02:00, which temporarily creates an imbalance with the next time zone (until it adjusts its clock, one hour later, at 2 am there).
My main takeaway is that you can easily 3D print a small device that converts a semiautomatic gun into a fully automatic gun, and apparently having one of these devices (a “switch”) has become a status symbol
The section on marijuana is particularly interesting. You are apparently allowed to deduct ordinary business expenses, even if the business in question is illegal. However, Congress has explicitly disallowed these deductions in the case of illegal drug trafficking. Since marijuana is illegal federally, the courts have ruled that medical and recreational marijuana businesses that are legal under state law may not deduct any of their ordinary business expenses from their federal taxes.
I wonder if that passed the 14th amendment’s equal protection clause. Curious how Congress’ exception is written. Maybe if they tied it to anything on the scheduled substances list then it would pass the 14th amendment.
Edit:
> if such trade or business (or the activities which comprise such trade or business) consists of trafficking in controlled substances (within the meaning of schedule I and II of the Controlled Substances Act) which is prohibited by Federal law
It would be interesting to see this challenged for the case where interstate commerce isn't involved. I know the federal government has regularly asserted jurisdiction under the premise that drugs that don't cross state lines still affect interstate prices. I doubt it would be successfully challenged, but it would still be interesting to see it challenged. (I'm not a lawyer. This is not legal advice.)
What would be the challenge to affirm, the right to take a tax deduction on purely intrastate commerce? The feds might like that case because it furtheraffirms their ability to tax anyway they seem fit on purely intrastate commerce too.
I think it relies on you taking the deductions to begin with and the IRS saying “heyyy waaait a minute, some of these deductions in the trafficking of scheduled substances violate Section 230E, the others good though!” Which .. isnt really that farfetched but aside from the tax court case you could be facing a defrauding the US government criminal charge, and other stuff actual lawyers might be more aware of.
The legal pot industry will have good profit boost once its economic model is legalized. People in Congress have been trying for over a decade and momentum is building.
I'm not sure. In Canada it's legal and so much money was invested prices plummeted in terms of the cost of marijuana. Maybe not surprising since you can easy grow more than demand.
Once enough producers and retailers go under then you'll probably find some nice equilibrium, but margins will be very small.
Yes, it’s brutal. With the Tax Cut and Jobs Act you can incorporate more expenses in to indirect COGS but sales, marketing, opex, admin are non-deductible.
Slight but important correction. These business are not legal at the state level, their products are decriminalized. Since, as you noted, they are illegal federally, the best states can do is decriminalize. They cannot override the fed status.
Has that actually been decided? The businesses are legal under state law, and if they aren't selling across lines then it's starting to get into gray areas on what enforcement power the feds actually have. Which is probably why they haven't really pushed the issue, because they have reason to believe it wouldn't go their way.
So long as Wickard v. Filburn remains precedent, it is really quite settled. The only question is if it will be enforced. Since the states had voted to legalize it, it is obviously politically unpopular to clamp down on them, but they will likely continue to make the operational aspects of these business very difficult (banking, credit card processing, etc).
At the risk of exposing just how much I am not a lawyer, doesn't that decision rely on the interpretation that the farmer's activities did have a plausible effect on the wider market? Wouldn't that be a tougher sell in the case of cannabis, where there is no national market?
> remains precedent
The current Supreme Court really seems willing to toss aside precedent. I wonder what direction they'd go on this issue.
In the case, the farmer was growing wheat for his own personal use. The justification was that by growing his own, he was opting out of the market, and therefore his actions fell under the commerce clause.
In the case of cannabis, these are literal businesses engaging in the act of buying and selling. Illinois and probably other states differentiate the amount that can be sold to a customer depending on whether or not they are residents or from a different state.
The notion of national market versus not is a red herring; markets are concepts, not tangible things, and the concept exists independent of the government itself. Making something illegal doesn't stop the sale of it, otherwise there would be no point in the DEA existing.
The product is Schedule 1 at the Fed level. That is still very much illegal no matter what the states do. But the state can choose not to pursue law enforcement and/or prosecution. And that is what decriminalization is.
The States are at the mercy of the Fed schedule. States can do a lot of things. Legalize is not one of them. The best a state can do is decriminalize.
Put another way, as we all know, these dispensaries are overflowing rich in cash. Why? Because they can't get bank accounts? Why? Because of a lack of true legalization. Again, this is the difference between legalization and decriminalization.
Federal drug enforcement has jurisdiction over the states which have passed bills legalizing these products, and it is the stated position of Federal drug enforcement that they will not pursue any enforcement related to these substances in these states.
Thus the products and the businesses are de facto legal, even if they are de jure not.
That's the point. The states aren't legalizing. They can't. Fed supercedes them. But at the state level they can't choose not to enforce state law, not to prosecute. And that's decriminalization.
What makes something illegal? Someone saying "this is illegal"? Or the ability and intent to enforce that statement?
There are plenty of states/cities with old laws on the books calling all sorts of random things illegal. A search for "old unenforced laws" will yield plenty of humorous examples. But the things these old, unenforced laws refer to are not things that are considered "illegal", except generally in the context of articles about old unenforced laws.
What's the difference between a law that says "this is illegal" but the authorities have no interest in actually pursuing, and a law that says "this is illegal" but the authorities have no interest in actually pursuing?
There's no difference between 'a law that says "this is illegal" but the authorities have no interest in actually pursuing' and 'a law that says "this is illegal" but the authorities have no interest in actually pursuing'.
My definition of "illegal" is "you can be arrested, charged, and convicted."
Intent and actors can change. A DA who says "I won't prosecute {x}" is under no obligation to continue, or even be consistent with, that policy, and the next DA is certainly not bound by it.
From the title I was expecting something about Op Sec, but the article is actually about “show, don’t tell” i.e. that it’s really hard to have people “get it” without letting them experience “it” for themselves
From the underlying paper[1], I found this excerpt:
“The photocurrent or the short-circuit current density (JSC) extracted from BTO is around 0.415 μA/cm2. … The JSC value from SBC555 is around 11.03 μA/cm2 and is about 25 times higher than measured in BTO. The open-circuit voltage (VOC) in the case of BTO was found to be around −0.007 V, as opposed to −0.058 V in SBC555.”
Here, BTO is the existing material and SBC555 is the new material from the paper. Multiplying JSC by VOC to get power density , we see that BTO yields 2.9 nW/cm^2, while SBC555 yields 639.74 nW/cm^2.
For reference, according to [2], we have that “typical external parameters of a crystalline silicon solar cell as shown are; Jsc ≈ 35 mA/cm2, Voc up to 0.65 V.” Notice the unit difference of mA/cm^2 here vs uA/cm^2 above. Multiplying these parameters yields 22,750,000 nW/cm^2. So we see that these cells are still approximately 100,000x worse at producing power than the current crystalline silicon cells.
Very surprising to see this headline (although I doubt it will come to pass). Given recent movements towards ending the war on drugs (e.g., legalizing Marijuana), it seems rather hypocritical to then try and ban cigarettes. Admittedly this is in the UK, and I’m not super familiar with their politics.
First, the number of marijuana users is likely not far away from the number of tobacco smokers in the US.
It still wouldn't be close. It's much more expensive to treat a single case of cancer (or lose a person's life) than it does to treat a single case of... whatever marijuana causes.
Just the fact that marijuana isn't known to dramatically increase fatalities in its tens of millions of users should tell us what we need to know.
...so far. But the sociatal cost of cigarettes is all about the cancer. Smoking weed has the same problem. Legalizing smoking weed was/will be a mistake. Other methods of ingesting are another story entirely.
Nobody is going to be smoking 20+ joints per day, every day. Cigarettes also have more carcinogenic chemicals per unit of inhaled smoke, so it's not a 1 to 1 comparison. Smoking weed also has anti-inflammatory effects, and other chemistry that counters some of the negative effects of combustion.
It's not great for you, but its level of harm is closer to vaping than to smoking cigarettes.
If someone does persistently smoke comparable amounts of marijuana per day, they're also likely to have a substance abuse issue. I don't think even Snoop or Willie do it like that.
Marijuana has other negative side effects especially when used by people under 18. I don't know about the long term evidence, but I would bet there are cognitive issues associated with regular use, such as short term memory loss.
It is also surprisingly common and socially accepted to drive while under the influence.
