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Putin dies and goes to hell, but after a while, he is given a day off for good behavior. So he goes to Moscow, enters a bar, orders a drink, and asks the bartender: -Is Crimea ours? -Yes, it is. -And the Donbas? -Also ours. -And Kyiv? -We got that too. Satisfied, Putin drinks, and asks: -Thanks, how much do I owe you? -5 euros.

I spent the middle third of my 60 years on mostly cannabis and amphetamines. The only time I've had black eyes or social strife is on excess alcohol. The saddest people I've ever seen are alcoholics by a wide margin, it knocks all the other drugs into the second division for the mess it causes. AFAIK one cannot safely withdraw from a full-on alcohol addiction without medical assistance... the physical addiction is real.... as I'm sure you know. Not sure about meth, but all the others are about a two week withdrawal for the physical side of the addiction. Obviously, the psychological side takes longer to overcome, but one is passed the physical aspect of the addiction after that time. Not so with barbiturates and alcohol. I've had many conversations with a UK Social Services substance misuse team, whose care I was under for a couple of years under a voluntary admission. Their sources are based on evidence.

Nobody is saying that it is harmless, and mention of medical benefits is an irrelevant distraction. It is not a supporting factor for recreational use or a means to lessen perceived harm. It has harms, but the social, medical and financial burden of recreational cannabis use pales in comparison to alcohol.

Notice he calls illicit drug users 'abusers'. If they are abusers, so are drinkers. Being legal changes nothing; they are all drugs. Being legal instils a false sense of toxicological safety and personal virtue relative to illicit drugs...

Meanwhile, even before legalization cannabis-related crimes were mostly related to possession and import. After legalization obviously those rates dropped. While impaired driving under drug but no alcohol influence increased a bit, it is still only 8% of the rate of alcohol-related impaired driving. And in contrast to alcohol there are no robust associations with violence or other crimes connected to cannabis. I.e. if one wanted to allow only one drug, it would be safer to keep cannabis and ditch alcohol. This is likely also going to be the case for things like psilocybin. It is clear that the case for legalizing only alcohol is not (entirely) based on risk, public health or similar assessments.

ForcesofDarkness - those factions dedicated to a return to medieval social hierarchy.

Being from south-central Italy, I love fresh figs. Imagine my horror when I found out all figs contain 'digested' wasp remnants. Then, the disgust when I found out honey is actually bee 'puke'. I got over it.

You first have to have evidence that God created life, before moving to your question.

Female castration is a religious requirement in some parts of the world. It does not become law when they immigrate to America. As a matter of fact, this should have nothing to do with Religion. Our laws are based on rights, and the only consideration for an abortion is the rights of the fetus vs. the rights of the mother ( and possibly, father ). We can all agree on the rights of the mother ( and possibly father, responsible for support after birth ); what is the sticking point are the rights of the fetus, and when exactly those rights are aquired, further complicated by the fact that medical science keeps that goalpost moving. My nephew's partner had a severe medical condition that required her baby to be removed prematurely. She was barely two pounds and fit on one hand when born on Jan 2nd, but is now a beatiful, 7.5 pound, full-term baby girl.

The rights you choose to allow it, has more to do with your opinion than pain suffered; unless you're a vegan...

Exactly. Even with increased use, cannabis-related events are nowhere near alcohol-related ones. Another comparison with a legal drug could be tobacco. Highly addictive, not a lot of acute events, little social burden, but very high long-term health burden. A reason why despite legal status there are efforts to restrict use of tobacco. Despite consumed similarly tobacco health risks are also much higher than for cannabis. But I remember that we also had a thread discussing the numerous risks associated with cannabis. Perhaps interestingly, many adverse events involving cannabis, often also involve alcohol, further highlighting how prevalent the latter is. Especially among youths, tobacco and alcohol are the most common gateway drugs which are associated with cannabis and other drug consumption later in life.

I see where that's not so easy. Do we have any statistics on the breakdown of hard-drug related offenses? How many are for possession and trafficking (directly because the drug is illegal, for which there are no counterparts for legal alcohol). How many for property crimes in order to get money to acquire the drug on which the user is dependent? (Indirectly because the drug is illegal - while alcoholics who hold up liquor stores are not counted as junkies) . How many are actions taken under the influence of a hard drug? Comparisons are not always straightforward: all we have is statistics compiled under the same system of legal disparity, by people with the same bias.

Why not compare like with like ? You are comparing alcoholics, who are abusers /addicts of alcohol, to social users of Cannabis. Only a minority of alcohol users become dependent, and have/cause problems; but there are an awful lot of users. Why not compare alcoholics to the perma-stoned users of cannabis ? The fact that a lot of alcohol users are not addicts/abusers, but simply have one or two drinks a day, is skewed by how you choose to define 'alcoholic'. I am reminded of going to my yearly medical, and being asked by the doctor how many drinks I'd have per week. To which I replied between 7 and 14. He then said that if I need a drink or two every day, I'm considered an alcoholic. To which I replied that I just drank on Saturday nights. And I won't even get into abusers of the 'harder; drugs.

Where I live we get fresh water by reverse osmosis powered by wind turbines.

The Sydney Desalination Plant also known as the Kurnell Desalination Plant is a potable drinking water desalination plant that forms part of the water supply system of Greater Metropolitan Sydney. The plant is located in the Kurnell industrial estate, in Southern Sydney in the Australian state of New South Wales. The plant uses reverse osmosis filtration membranes to remove salt from seawater and is powered using renewable energy, supplied to the national power grid from the Infigen Energy–owned Capital Wind Farm located at Bungendore. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney_Desalination_Plant

You can stick your pity in your bum.

You two remind me of a married couple, and not a loving one.

Consider the following NaOH Ca(OH)2 HCl H2SO4 One molecule of sodium hydroxide will neutralise one molecule of hydrochloric acid in an acid - base reaction. But it takes two molecules of sodium hydroxide to neutralise one molecule of sulphuric acid. So in some sense the sulphuric acid has twice the neutralising power of hydrochloric acid. The equivalent mass or equivalent weight is an old fashioned method of recognising this fact and we say that the equivalent weight of sulphuric acid is half its molecular weight. By the same token we say that the equivalent weight of hydrochloric acid is equal to its molecular weight. Or we say that the molecular weight of hydrochloric acid contains one 'equivalent' and the molecular weight of sulphuric acid contains two 'equivalents'. This method of 'equivalents' tells us how much of a given acid we need to neutralise a given quantity of sodium hydroxide. The same thing goes the other way when we consider calcium hydroxide, as compared to sodium hydroxide. It takes twice as much acid to neutralise the calcium hydroxide as for the sodium hydroxide. So the molecular weight of sodium hydroxide contains one equivalent and the molecular weight of calcium hydroxide contains two equivalents. Does this help ?

https://www.vice.com/en/article/akvm5b/scientists-discover-method-to-break-down-plastic-in-one-week-not-centuries If this is scalable, it could be a game-changer. Of course, we still need to get the plastic waste into recycle bins. So it would help if the enzyme also acted rapidly on human stupidity and laziness.

Just to add "cautionary tales of evolution" to what @Phi for All said, The male praying mantis is, in terms of evolution, very successful. Yet, he does it by providing the female with a delicious romantic dinner after sex in which he is the main and only course. Think about the implications of this. Evolution only cares about reproductive success. Doing well for yourself doesn't necessarily matter so much. Fig wasps are an even more extreme example. There are more examples of reproductive champion = individual loser in Nature. In tournament species, successful males are tipically short-lived.

Red hair is more correlated with very low melanin than other shades. Redheads are most prone to melanoma and other kinds of skin cancer (basal cell carcinoma, squamous, etc.) and sunburn very easily. The only way I can see values of attractiveness attached to this would be in cultures where people favor men looking outdoorsy and tanned and thus where more melanin would help to having that look. There was more tolerance for women having pale skin and culturally embedded steps for them to avoid sun - divisions of labor, sun bonnets and other protective hat fashions, parasols, etc. So a redheaded female would fare better, than a male who due to his very pale skin would spend a lot of time looking parboiled and peeling. At higher latitudes, however, this UV tolerance factor could flip over, as redheads can better absorb vitamin D from the weak sunlight and would be less likely to burn or have cancers. Also, redheads have a slightly higher pain tolerance, which might be of more use to men in traditional cultures. Here's a clip from wiki on that interesting link... The unexpected relationship of hair color to pain tolerance appears to exist because redheads have a mutation in a hormone receptor that can apparently respond to at least two types of hormones: the pigmentation-driving melanocyte-stimulating hormone (MSH), and the pain-relieving endorphins. (Both derive from the same precursor molecule, POMC, and are structurally similar.) Specifically, redheads have a mutated melanocortin-1 receptor (MC1R) gene that produces an altered receptor for MSH.[64] Melanocytes, the cells that produce pigment in skin and hair, use the MC1R to recognize and respond to MSH from the anterior pituitary gland. Melanocyte-stimulating hormone normally stimulates melanocytes to make black eumelanin, but if the melanocytes have a mutated receptor, they will make reddish pheomelanin instead. MC1R also occurs in the brain, where it is one of a large set of POMC-related receptors that are apparently involved not only in responding to MSH, but also in responses to endorphins and possibly other POMC-derived hormones.[64] Though the details are not clearly understood, it appears that there is some crosstalk between the POMC hormones; this may explain the link between red hair and pain tolerance.

How certain are you of its inadvertence?

Inadvertent humor from the Hallmark greeting card company....