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[martinuzz]

My point is, they didn't make it legal. There were no organized crime syndicates in the Netherlands before they legalized selling 5 grammes of weed but forgot to legalize growing weed or selling more than 5 grammes to retailers.
Full legalisation would have prevented that.
You're right though that legalizing it now will not magically disband the organized crime, they will just find another market.
It will strike a huge gap in their budget though.

You're wrong to think that legalizing cannot prevent crime. But then you'd have to do it right, and legalize the full chain instead of creating a illegal grower's paradise.
Or in the US' case, as reelya rightfully pointed out, legalize it in one state yet not in the state nextdoors.
Rotterdam being Europe's main drug import capital has little, or rather, nothing to do with legalizing weed (except that organized crime has a bigger budget to do stuff thanks to growing and selling weed inside the Netherlands for decades). It has to do with it being the largest and busiest port in Europe. That, and the fact that we still have some colonies right nextdoor to South America's cocain plantations.

[Reelya]

They will simply reorient their organization to another income stream, be it protection rackets or child prostitution.

This is a ridiculous argument. Cartels already maximize their impact on things like child prostitution, to whatever capacity those markets will make a profit. Cartels are already saturating all illegal markets to the limits of what those markets will bear, simply because if someone moves into a new market, they don't need to have a shoot-out with other cartels over it. So it's ridiculous to hypothesize an increase in child prostitution due to pot being legalized.

Also with protection rackets, the same deal: there's no reason that pot stores would be exceptionally profitable after pot became legal nation-wide (market forces will drive profits towards "average"). And cartels are only interested in where they can maximize their returns for the minimum work. So, they're just as likely to run protection rackets against e.g. cigarette sellers or jewelry stores. But the thing is, it's the same as the child prostitution argument now. If there's some extra profit to be made from shaking down tobacconists and jewelry stores, then someone would already be doing that, since they could have expanded into that area already without coming into conflict with other cartels.

[Kagus]

RE: Australia, to be fair, boat people have historically been a pretty big disruptive force for the native population.

I mean, just look at what happened to the aborigines.

[wierd]

About the most the cartels could do, would be to try to increase distribution of cocaine, and increase its attractivenss.

Difficult to do in the face of stronger domestically produced drugs, like Ecstasy and Meth.

It is possible they might be able to expand their supply lines by mass producing meth and pals, and flooding the US market with it. (since it would be much easier to obtain the precursors to the drug in their countries than here domestically) That would severely undercut the domestic production's profitability, and thus reduce its domestic availability. (Why risk being a cook, when you can get it for pennies per ounce--- At least at first.)

It would require a significant change in the trends of enforcement, and would switch the major busts back toward people peddling actual poison, rather than people peddling at most a mildly addictive nuisance (like pot.)


......

The really sick part, is I think the drug cartels could probably make MORE money by skipping the dangerous pharmaceuticals completely, and instead selling black market medicinals instead.  They would have a much larger client base than foolish people who hate their lives; The costs of medicine and healthcare in the US are astronomical, and the unmet needs of the public is at epidemic levels.  They could make more money selling Hep-C cure than they could selling cocaine.

[Sheb]

And its strange, every page is saying the border crossings are at an uptick but at a historic multi-decade low. But I don't know. 100,000 less is still 100,000 less. Then again, he's also deporting.

My first link had date going back to the Bush year. There has been a massive fall in immigration under Obama, but then a lot of that is due to the 2008 financial crisis too. But looking at the rate of change, it's hard to see any Trump effect, apart from maybe a drop right around the inauguration that has seen disappeared.

And who's talking about Mexicans? MS13's members are from El Salvador and formed in LA. I don't know why Nanci Pelosi is talking about the divine spark in MS13 murderers and rapists but wants full term abortion. I mean, when does that divine spark enter the body? After you kill someone with a machete?

I'm going to need sources for those claims. Especially since full-term abortions doesn't seem to be a real thing, but just some made up conservative word.

[Reelya]

The context is that Trump called some people animals, they were pretty bad people though, from MS-13 and other gangs. But then he called more people animals, e.g. the entire US illegal immigrant population of 11 million people got called subhuman "animals". and Nancy Pelosi basically said it's wrong to dehumanize anyone by calling them an "animal". So now the right-wing is having a field day that Nancy Pelosi is in love with MS-13.

But the underlying context of what Trump really meant is clear: singling out some non-white people and loudly called them animals, e.g. "subhuman", or "untermensch" if you will. And I'm not really stretching it that far: as well as Trump's one-off, we have an official White house document calling MS-13 them "violent animals" in the heading, and also using the term "animals" 7 more times in the text. But it's defended because hey, MS-13 are bad motherfuckers, thus do they even deserve to be considered human beings?

But Trump also wrote this:

We have people coming into the country, or trying to come in, and we’re stopping a lot of them, but we’re taking people out of the country. You wouldn’t believe how bad these people are. These aren’t people. These are animals.

e.g. anyone they have deported, or wish to deport, which is really the entirety of the 11 million American residents who aren't citizens, "aren't people" and are "animals" whom you "wouldn't believe how bad these people are". The optics on that are pretty bad, especially when a national leader says it, e.g. literal Hitler type bad, which is what Nancy Pelosi was calling him out on.

[Bumber]

edit: also a closer look at the original EP "study", and then running some rough maths myself based on their statements:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

http://environmentalprogress.org/big-news/2017/6/21/are-we-headed-for-a-solar-waste-crisis

Solar panels create 300 times more toxic waste per unit of energy than do nuclear power plants.

Okay, fair enough. Now, how does the article define "toxic waste" then?

The study defines as toxic waste the spent fuel assemblies from nuclear plants and the solar panels themselves, which contain similar heavy metals and toxins as other electronics, such as computers and smartphones.

e.g. they're equating spent nuclear fuel rods with the entire mass of the "solar panels themselves", not the quantity of heavy metals contained therein. It's just noted that they contain heavy metals, but the heavy metals aren't what they're weighing. Solar panels actually consist of less than 0.1% heavy metals, e.g. they're out by a factor of 3000, and that's going off their own numbers.

EDIT e.g. I looked up their footnotes and found that they used this panel as their basis
http://static.trinasolar.com/sites/default/files/PS-M-0474%20A%20Datasheet_Duomax_PEG5.XX_US_Feb_2017_A.pdf
and

EP estimated that a typical 1 GW nuclear reactor produces 27 tonnes of waste annually.

1GW of nuclear would make 365*24 = 8760 GWh per year. So, it makes 27,000 kg of nuclear waste for each 8760 GWh produced. e.g. the rate of waste for nuclear according to their study is 3 kg of waste per 1 GWh.

Ok, lets see how much power the cited panels should make and how much they weigh. Each panel is 24 kg, and there are 60 panels. The whole system is rated as a 270 Watt system.

Google states that a 1000 Watt system will make ~500 KWh per year. So 270 W * 500/1000 = 135 KWh per year. But, let's also assume that by 25 years the panels have worn out, e.g. they're at zero% left, which means we halve the average output, meaning ~70 KWh per year. This means over 25 years it make 1750 KWh, or 1.75 GWh. Dividing the weight by the amount of energy produced and we get 822 tons of solar panels for each GWh produced, which is right on top of their "300 times" figure. e.g. what they're classifying as "toxic waste" here is obviously the entire mass of the solar panels.

But here's the big "but". I had to make a big error to get the figure to work out like theirs: I needed to assume that the 24 kg was per-cell, not per-panel. If you take that assumption out, then the weight of the entire panel goes down by a factor of 60. Meaning their entire math only works out if you make a huge math error, inflating the weight of the panels by a factor of 60, while also assuming that the panels degrade quickly and/or have a very low conversion rate of power.

Running some proper maths, a 23.5 kg panel consisting of 60 cells generates 270 Watts. Assuming 1% deterioration per year and that they're replaced at 25 years, then you have ~90% power, and the conversion factor that 1 KW of capacity generates about 500 KWh per year. Meaning you expect 270 * 500/1000 * 0.90 * 25 = 3037 KWh ( e.g. 3 GWh) of power for a 25 year lifespan panel weighing 23.5 kg. The total kg per GWh is therefore about 8 kg, not 800. And then, if you want to calculate the "toxic" part, you actually need to divide by 3000, meaning about 3 grams of toxic materials per GWh vs the 3 kg of the same for a nuclear plant, plus the stuff that comes out of nuclear plants is worse. Meaning that they were probably out by an actual factor of 300,000, not 3000

tl;dr - complete bullshit from the master bullshit artists.

Sorry to bring this subject back up, but why are you using mass in those calculations? The units given in the chart are cubic meters per TWh. Of course spent fuel assemblies are heavier! They're metal tubes containing dense UO₂ pellets!

Waste is stored by volume, not weight. We care about the volume of the whole panel, because that is what has to be stored, pending recycling. We care about the volume of the fuel assembly, because that is what is stored in spent fuel pools, pending reprocessing or dry cask storage.

[Trekkin]

Again, its this slightly under-evolved lizard brain of mine but words like "barbarian" start welling up from the genetic memories of an English nobleman who protected his God-and-King entrusted vassals in a tall, encircling fence-like structure that served as a defensible obstacle to axe-wielding Danes and Northmen bent on rape and slaughter.

A. Triune brain isn't a thing, remember?
B. "genetic memory" isn't a thing. There's no mechanism for directly making newly acquired information heritable with enough storage capacity or specificity.
C. Actually, vikings (to use the most commonly understood if deeply polyphyletic vernacular) were not, per the historical records of the day, any more prone to rape than other armies of the time, and a good many of the Scandinavians who came to England were actually pretty peaceful. Thus how we have bishops complaining about them tempting women with their scandalously frequent bathing and so forth, and thus why they ended up minting English currency for a while. Those walls were as much to protect against other Englishmen as against the Danes.

It turns out that most of the famous "barbarians" throughout history weren't anything like as barbarous as they're described; they were just living on the other side of the wall from the people writing history down, and that makes it easy to generalize in order to justify the wall. There's a lesson in that about the self-reinforcing nature of xenophobia, I think.

[Starver]

Then there's zenophobia. The fear of being attacked by a tortoise that you can't run away from nor shoot at with an arrow!

[Reelya]

Sorry to bring this subject back up, but why are you using mass in those calculations? The units given in the chart are cubic meters per TWh. Of course spent fuel assemblies are heavier! They're metal tubes containing dense UO₂ pellets!

Waste is stored by volume, not weight. We care about the volume of the whole panel, because that is what has to be stored, pending recycling. We care about the volume of the fuel assembly, because that is what is stored in spent fuel pools, pending reprocessing or dry cask storage.

Referring back to the article i was citing.

They wrote "EP estimated that a typical 1 GW nuclear reactor produces 27 tonnes of waste annually".

I worked out the solar waste in tonnes per GWh, because they provided the nuclear waste figures in tonnes per GWh. However, i should have realized that they adjusted for density, and that they did this purely because it makes the solar seem like more. e.g. you need to knock a factor of 10 off the solar number to account for density, to get comparative mass, then almost all the remaining bulk is inert glass and silicon. When you then boil it down to the stuff that's actually a potential toxin such as trace amounts of lead and stuff, there's much less of that than the actual nuclear waste. And wr can deal with lead much better than nuclear waste. The lead levels aren't going to be that high compared to traditional lead exposure.

[Kagus]

Again, its this slightly under-evolved lizard brain of mine but words like "barbarian" start welling up from the genetic memories of an English nobleman who protected his God-and-King entrusted vassals in a tall, encircling fence-like structure that served as a defensible obstacle to axe-wielding Danes and Northmen bent on rape and slaughter.

A. Triune brain isn't a thing, remember?
B. "genetic memory" isn't a thing. There's no mechanism for directly making newly acquired information heritable with enough storage capacity or specificity.
C. Actually, vikings (to use the most commonly understood if deeply polyphyletic vernacular) were not, per the historical records of the day, any more prone to rape than other armies of the time, and a good many of the Scandinavians who came to England were actually pretty peaceful. Thus how we have bishops complaining about them tempting women with their scandalously frequent bathing and so forth, and thus why they ended up minting English currency for a while. Those walls were as much to protect against other Englishmen as against the Danes.

It turns out that most of the famous "barbarians" throughout history weren't anything like as barbarous as they're described; they were just living on the other side of the wall from the people writing history down, and that makes it easy to generalize in order to justify the wall. There's a lesson in that about the self-reinforcing nature of xenophobia, I think.

But what about the Blood Eagle??

As an aside, were they actually any more prone to bathing than the usual citizen of those times? I don't remember reading about any particular significance placed on bathing, like with the early Indus cultures (for example). And, I mean... It gets pretty fucking cold up here.

[Trekkin]

As an aside, were they actually any more prone to bathing than the usual citizen of those times? I don't remember reading about any particular significance placed on bathing, like with the early Indus cultures (for example). And, I mean... It gets pretty fucking cold up here.

Well, no, depending on the standards you use, just apparently more prone to bathing than the Anglo-Saxons. I was referring to this from John of Wallingford, Abbot of St. Albans (not a bishop. Mea culpa.):
"The Danes, thanks to their habit of combing their hair every day, of bathing every Saturday and regularly changing their clothes, were able to undermine the virtue of married women and even seduce the daughters of nobles to be their mistresses."

As complaints about barbarians go, "damn their seductively superior hygiene" seems an oddly tsundere thing to complain about if they were really all raiders.

[Bumber]

Sorry to bring this subject back up, but why are you using mass in those calculations? The units given in the chart are cubic meters per TWh. Of course spent fuel assemblies are heavier! They're metal tubes containing dense UO₂ pellets!

Waste is stored by volume, not weight. We care about the volume of the whole panel, because that is what has to be stored, pending recycling. We care about the volume of the fuel assembly, because that is what is stored in spent fuel pools, pending reprocessing or dry cask storage.

Referring back to the article i was citing.
[...]

The Materials Throughput chart is a separate thing from the 300x waste claim. From the comments section:

No, you are mixing two separate things.

Our calculation of total toxic solar waste is based simply on the panels.

People then asked about total building materials and fuel combined, and we published a separate chart on that, drawing on DOE Quadrennial Review and best available estimate of nuclear fuel per unit of energy.

The thing about measuring just the toxic content is that you actually have to go through the process of separating it out. If you can't do that quickly enough, you start drowning in solar panels.

[Max™]

As an aside, were they actually any more prone to bathing than the usual citizen of those times? I don't remember reading about any particular significance placed on bathing, like with the early Indus cultures (for example). And, I mean... It gets pretty fucking cold up here.

Well, no, depending on the standards you use, just apparently more prone to bathing than the Anglo-Saxons. I was referring to this from John of Wallingford, Abbot of St. Albans (not a bishop. Mea culpa.):
"The Danes, thanks to their habit of combing their hair every day, of bathing every Saturday and regularly changing their clothes, were able to undermine the virtue of married women and even seduce the daughters of nobles to be their mistresses."

As complaints about barbarians go, "damn their seductively superior hygiene" seems an oddly tsundere thing to complain about if they were really all raiders.

It's hilarious when you think about how the term is rumored to come from the norse languages hitting the roman ear as "bar bar bar" because a bunch of us were exposed to stuff like the muppets chef and they'd be called hergidergians or some shit now.

(Sheepishly points out that 3D printing with concrete is already a thing, so robots squirting concrete is indeed a real thing already... )

But the issue is as Reelya points out. A nuclear power plant has to be able to withstand decades of continuous operation to be of net benefit to the society that plans it, and it has to do that reliably and safely. A new construction method, such as robo-printing, needs to have extensive reliability studies done to be sure it is not going to crack out, leak, flake apart, crumble from being looked at, et al.  That of course, neatly negates any benefit to rapid deployment you can ascribe to it. You can't make short shrift of the actual realities of what it is you are building-- A device that is just a few safeguards away from being a bomb, or a very nasty public health issue. Treat it with the severity and diligence it deserves; you will find that doing so means you have to invest more than just cheap construction efforts into its initial build and to its maintenance, and that means oversight groups, agreements on waste processing, transport and disposal, and a bevy of other things.  All that takes time.

I'm saying a modern nuclear power plant is as bomblike as the pressure cooker in your kitchen, though it's arguably easier to make a pressure cooker blow up. The simple description is a container with hot rocks and water for the most common types, replace the water with molten salts or interesting gas mixtures for some of the newer designs.

Designing these things so they literally can't undergo a meltdown was a big selling point with the Gen 3 steamy rockboxes. Newer Gen 4 designs take it to absurd extremes like "ok suppose someone snuck in here, removed the control mechanisms entirely, chucked dynamite at the reactor vessel containment area, and THEN a plane hit the plant?" being "god, look at all this plane we gotta clean up now" type events.

Looking over the list of reactors which were actually completed, looks like you can go from breaking ground to operating and supplying electricity in 9 or 10 years, assuming the plant doesn't get cancelbashed halfway through and the area ends up building some coal or gas instead like a 12 year old playing Sim City.

The rest of the 20--or 30 or more--years between "we are sick of blackouts and want a new power plant here" and "yay my phone didn't get interrupted while charging last night thanks to that new steamy rockbox" is politics: licensing, protests, regulatory runaround, design fuckery, and so forth.

[Reelya]

The thing about measuring just the toxic content is that you actually have to go through the process of separating it out.

Yeah, i'm still going to be less worried about discarded glass than about nuclear waste. Glass isn't particularly "toxic". I'd only count the actually toxic bits as actually being an issue. e.g. it's the labeling of the entire panel as being "toxic" which is the issue. e.g. given the 300 times figure, adjusting for density, that's roughly ~33 times the mass give or take. But < 3% of a panel's weight is made up of any sort of chemicals, so on that basis, it's clear that there's more mass of what most people would call toxic waste created per unit of generation for nuclear.

e.g. if we put something that weight 1kg into landfill and 1 gram of toxic chemicals leak out, we don't normally called that "1kg of toxic waste".