Sure but what degree of influence is actually “radicalising” or a point of concern?

We like to pretend that by banning extreme communities we are saving civilisation from them. But the fact is that extreme groups are already rejected by society. If your ideas are not actually somewhat adjacent to already held beliefs, you can’t just force people to accept them.

I think a good example of this was the “fall” of Richard Spencer. All the leftist communities (of which I was semi-active in at the time) credited his decline with the punch he received and apparently assumed that it was the act of punching that resulted in his decline, and used it to justify more violent actions. The reality is that Spencer just had a clique of friends that the left (and Spencer himself) interpreted as wide support and when he was punched the greater public didn’t care because they never cared about him.

“A deradicalising effect”

I’m sorry what? The idea that smaller communities are somehow less radical is absurd.

I think you are unaware (or much more likely willfully ignoring) that communities are primarily dominated by a few active users, and simply viewed with a varying degree of support by non-engaging users.

If they never valued communities enough to stay with them, then they never really cared about the cause to begin with. These aren’t the radicals you need to be concerned about.

“And those people diffuse back into the general population”

Because that doesn’t happen to a greater degree when exposed to the “general population” on the same website?

You’re literally on a platform that was created to harbor extremist groups. Look at who Dessalines is, (aka u/parentis-shotgun) and their self-proclaimed motivation for writing LemmyNet. When you ban people from a website, they just move to another place, they are not stupid it’s pretty easy to create websites. It’s purely optical, you’re not saving civilisation from harmful ideas, just preventing yourself from seeing it.

If you’ve spent any time on the “dark web” this is super-obvious. They all love encryption, and most software developers are completely incompetent when it comes to encryption so backdooring an app is trivial. Hell, even well-known crypto libraries have implementations that rely on clearly false assumptions.

I’ve personally seen little evidence of her being a crank. I’ve seen many claims and they mostly tie to her running a sort of consultation company, but no evidence of her or her firm promoting objectionable ideas. Sure she might oversimplify some topics, particularly economics and sociology. But I think her main critique in the trans video holds up… a lot of the research is poor quality and while not directly the fault of the researchers (although many of them do promote it) it is used to support hypotheses that were never tested.

I think you are severely overstating the level of knowledge of most journalists. Most science reporting to the public goes like this: journalist hears something, contacts a single scientist in the field, or is contacted by a single scientist. They talk to that person for a few minutes, then write their article. That’s being generous, many simply copy press releases and add their own interpretation.

There are only a handful of decent scientific reporting agencies targeting the public that actually do a good job.

Deuterium is pretty common, and tritium can be produced by lithium irradiation. They are finite resources, but still much larger than pretty much any existing resource.

It is true that fusion equipment suffers from neutron radiation, however this is a potential for breeding tritium.

This is actually something that people are intended to understand by design.

We can imagine as much as we like. The technology and manufacturing processes simply didn’t exist back then.

If this was truly what Carter envisioned, then he was an unbelievable moron. “Sunsats”, are not practical or environmentally efficient. The mere fact that you have to place and maintain them via spacelaunch is a huge penalty, then you have to account for radiation loss to the atmosphere.

“Instead of positioning themselves as research leaders”

Why would they? If researching new ways of replacing oil is in everyone’s benefit then why does it fall on oil companies to do it? And not also everyone else?

If you want consolation, you would more than likely be left to die. Children were extremely disposable up until the last few thousand years. Often subjects of cannibalism.

This claim comes from 2 people, I would be a little more cautious about broadly embracing there claims of systemic discrimination, without actually knowing the corpus of research on the topic.

Also there claim of endurance being an important factor is suspect. Women have better endurance in that there performance drops more slowly than men, however the drop isn’t significant enough to result in any total advantage. Which is why women still lose in endurance competitions.

It’s fair to say that women probably weren’t significantly disadvantaged in hunting (especially smaller animals), but it’s quite misleading to argue that their endurance added some additional advantage.

Without looking at the numbers, gross profit is before expenditures, so it’s not like Ford has 24 billion in surplus money.

“I assume that there is some cooking of the books”

Or maybe there is stronger competition and profit margins have fallen?

You realise that most encryption can be decrypted by third-party? Many cryptography libraries have huge flaws, even the Handbook of Applied Cryptography was encouraging using Damgard et al’s parameters for prime selection even though the original authors never claimed the accuracy that others assumed (without basis). Even now, can you guess how many cryptography libraries would be broken if someone found a BPSW pseudoprime? And we have arguments that they probably exist, but crypto developers just ignore it either out of ignorance or laziness.

In summary, it’s all theatre, you just want to deny access to enough parties that it makes you comfortable.

Encryption only works if certain parties can’t decrypt it. Strong encryption means that the parties are everyone except the intended recipient, weak encryption still works even if 1 percent of the eavesdroppers can decrypt it.

I agree to a point. However I think that decriminalisation fails to recognise that drug courts are quite effective at rehabilitation. It’s important to minimise the effects of imprisonment and criminal record for drug offences that way individuals always have an opportunity to higher income careers. (Although from my experience, competitive jobs markets ignore drug felonies and sometimes even violent felonies). The solution isn’t to completely defang the state and just hope that people decide to quit drugs while dealing with all the problems they cause along the way. States need to have some ability to pressure individuals to rehabilitation.

The latter part of your comment is just leftist conspiracism. The percentage of false arrests is heavily out weighed by guilty parties getting away. You can easily find this by both reading papers on it or just going to your local homeless shelter and talking to people. An encounter with police is much more likely to involve you getting away with a crime than falsely accused.

Prison labor is also not profitable, the majority of prisons are publicly run. The idea that high incarceration rates are because the state somehow makes money by enslaving people is completely false.

It’s a global thing. Everyone repurposes side products of a process. Coca-Cola isn’t allowed to have cocaine in the final product so it is extracted out and sold. (Coca-Cola doesn’t actually do this their coca leaf supplier Stepan Company does).

This doesn’t matter. The question is whether a ban constitutes a greater social harm than legalisation. The fact that people can evade the ban doesn’t matter, after all murder is illegal but people still do it (at a much lower rate).

So the fact that we already have one awful policy (legal tobacco) is not sufficient to justify implementing another one. Marijuana seems to have roughly the same or slightly lower impact on lung cancer as tobacco (hard to measure since most people smoke both). Of course it has other harder to measure effects like long-term brain damage, and DUI risk, or even loss of economic productivity and workplace accidents.

The US (and most of the world) has been triumphantly marching towards banning smoking and yet we seem to be normalising the use of another substance that isn’t any better. It seems likely that we will be in the same place with marijuana in a few decades as we are with tobacco.

Edit: I realise that you may have not read my connected comment. Taxing tobacco doesn’t make the government money, lung cancer from tobacco smoking directly costs Medicare 4x the total tax revenue from all tobacco products. So that is my basis for “taxing legal tobacco is a poor policy” and by extension marijuana will be as well.