Friday, May 17, 2013

Toronto Crack City!

Alright! Rob Ford is keepin' it real biatches
 
So the staunch arch conservative hangs out with Somalis and smokes crack. This is the 987,654,321st piece of evidence that the Drug War (TM) is a fucking joke.

His lawyers are claiming you can't tell what exactly he's doing or smoking... But: "Throughout the video Ford’s eyes are half-closed. He lolls back in his chair, sometimes waving his arms around erratically. He raises a lighter in his hand at several points and moves it in a circle motion beneath the glass bowl of the pipe, then inhales deeply." Yep, he was smoking crack for sure (1).
I wonder if he goes States side and chills with Marion Barry... I wonder if he'll get his job back?

And, Rob Ford is calling the allegations ridiculous without actually denying it. Hmmm. He's supposed to be a straight talker; why doesn't he just come out and say "Yeah, I like to smoke some rock on my day off. Mind your own fucking business."

This is one of those areas where I'm a total libertarian. I mean, who really gives a shit if the mayor likes to hit the pipe a little on the weekend? And FYI all those scare stories about how anyone who comes within a 100 mile radius of crack becoming an instant addict is nothing but DEA propaganda. None of the other drugs are any more addictive than alcohol. 


I'd like to see Rob Ford and Marion Barry hold a joint press conference where they take a big hit off the pipe and blow it in the journalists' faces. It'd be like a crackhead "Ebony and Ivory".



 

1. Crack is nothing more than cocaine and baking soda. The "rock" is made through the extremely complicated process of putting them both in water and heating it up to evaporate off the water leaving a clumpy brownish substance. And in fact crack is considerably less potent than "freebase" which is made by heating cocaine powder in ammonia (or ether but this is considerably more dangerous due to ether's highly flammable nature) to take out all the impurities and leaving a translucent crystallized "rock". When you smoke the stuff (freebase or crack) it doesn't burn but melts. So the best way to do it is to turn the pipe upside down and heat it up to make a vapor that you then inhale. Don't ask how I know this (Oh OK, I did a lot of drugs when I was teenager. Happy?)
  

Saturday, May 11, 2013

Mo Money No Conscience?



So, Mark Thoma links to an interesting article. Although, I have to say I'm not surprised by the result. In my professional experience people quite regularly throw their morals right out the window to make money on a regular basis. I know I've done it. And Felix Salmon points out that in some industries it's even a business model.

To give an example, quite moral people do shoddy and unsafe work all the time in the construction industry. Those walls in your office might not hold up as well as you hope when the big mother earth quake comes... I have a friend in Seattle who was working on a job when an earth quake struck and he said the walls were flopping around like a flag in the wind. And this was a minor quake; it just happened that the building he was in was right on the fault line. When the big one hits I wouldn't be surprised to hear that people were injured by sheetrock that was literally popping of the walls and hitting them on the head. 

And to give a personal example, I remember working on a church and participating in cutting some corners on work that is concerned with fire safety issues. Nothing major, just a little fast and dirty on the workmanship and, unfortunately, very common in the industry. Now, I'm agnostic so I don't care that it was a church. It could have an abortion clinic for all I care. I've just always felt a little uneasy about doing work that poses a potential safety issue for others. And I hate to think that people are sitting there thinking they're perfectly safe when they're actually just pretty safe...

But what could I do? If I didn't do the work for union wages and benefits it's almost certain that some scab would come along and do it for less. So, I went ahead and did it. 

But the kicker to this story is that I groused to the foreman - as, to my credit, I always did - that what we were doing was pretty assholic. And he told me that he totally agreed and that the worst part about it was that the church was where the boss of the company (who told us to do the work that way) goes with his family every Sunday... Think about it. People will not only put the safety of strangers at risk to make a little more money but also the safety of their own family! 

 Markets in everything! Sell your kids! Sell your wife! It's only someone's life!