| Author | Message | ||
     Sifo |
It's not as easy as just having a test. It's having the test proven... Legally. Also setting the legal limits. No doubt, it will all be challenged in courts. I don't think any of this has been looked by any states yet. It wasn't that long ago that some states still allowed different limits on alcohol in the blood. I think they all agree on .08 now. Of course, even that's different for a CDL, even in your private car. | ||
| Aesquire |
They didn't "agree" on .08. It was obey or lose Federal road & transportation money. Extortion. Pure & simple. And based on no science, at all. I'm a lightweight, drink very little, very seldom. If I'm at .08, I'm not a drunk driver, I'm comatose. Bob, the hypothetical alky over there, is pretty coherent at .06, where I can't find my car. And Takahashi, who I work with, is useless 2 beers in. It's amazing what you learn with a bar breathalyzer. Genetics and practice. I'll assume the famous stoner actor can write a screenplay and give a good performance after a smoke display worthy of Cheech & Chong. After all, he posts his new bongs & their use on Youtube. You? Maybe one drag on a joint, & you should park your butt for a pizza & a ride home. Individual reaction to drugs is real & well known, except where politicians want to make money and rule you. | ||
| Sifo |
They didn't "agree" on .08. It was obey or lose Federal road & transportation money. Extortion. Pure & simple. I didn't know that. I can't say that I'm surprised. The rest of what you had to say, I can't really argue against. Solutions? | ||
| Hootowl |
Just like the 55mph speed limit. Impose it or else. | ||
| H0gwash |
Here in CA the police advertise that you can be cited for DUI even if you are "only" on prescription drugs. It's not any specific drug that can get you pulled over, it's the bad driving. There is some new evidence that pot is more addictive than alcohol for young people, maybe the public will decide 21 years old is still too young for pot? All will be revealed. I have found that now that I'm over 45 I have to limit my pot smoking to the weekends and it's always been after I'm done driving or riding for the day. It's better on the wallet and you get more of the euphoric/creative buzz of pot. Much more than that and I'm just zombified, which simply is a waste of money and time. | ||
| Aesquire |
Solutions? As unlikely as angelic intervention, common sense works. Almost all cop cars have cameras, so weaving and missing traffic signals is easily documented. The quantization of intoxication for legal punishment purposes really isn't that necessary. As the .08 limit shows, nothing short of death or actually being in prison stops drunk driving. I worked for years in a convenience store on the midnight shift, and the boss had a police scanner to listen to the show. 3 am. Blue laws, locally. Last call. By 3:30 am. Every drunk pulled over was a repeat offender. I even got to recognize the names. Occasionally you'd get a good one, like the guy who tried to escape by cutting across the Kmart under construction while it was just foundation excavation. "He's rabbiting! (Laughter) He just cut across the Kmart construction site! There it goes! ( oh! That's broken!) He's on foot! Annnnnd, he just fell in a hole. ( Laughter ) We need an ambulance at the Kmart construction site on Clay. He's crawling! Go cuff him before he kills himself! ( muffled laughter, car door slam ) Dispatch, you're not going to believe this one. I need a traffic photo team to document this. ( foot crunch noises, indistinct shouting ) Hey! Think this is a record? ( faintly, "that's one f%&$ed up Honda" ) Followed by half an hour of procedural traffic. | ||
| Aesquire |
Pot was a gateway drug because it was illegal, and thus you had to go to the criminal world to get it. Retail salesman might have a varied selection. Let's not forget the '80s when Cocaine was so common that the Mayor of D.C. could get busted with Cocaine & hookers & be a hero. Iirc the Clinton years ended that, as enforcement and property theft by accusation ( war on drugs, cops steal your car and house and not bother to go to court to convict ) reduced the glamour. Who else remembers the White House doctor fired for refusing to shoot up Bill with Bill's private, unmarked, stash? Quite a contrast to the last White House doctor fired for being the Candyman. You might reflect on who those doctors were inherited from. The false claims of a wonderful increase in taxes, which always are less & cost more, from legalization seem like a good thing to point out. As each State uses tax revenue as an excuse, someone honest really should point out it's the same lie over and over. Like Lizzie Warren, Seriously White Girl, promoting a casino backed by foreign investors. | ||
| Sifo |
I drank beer before I smoked pot. It can easily be argued that beer is a gateway drug. Many have had legal pain killer prescriptions that have been their gateway drug down a very dark path. I'm not convinced that is ever going to be a convincing argument to many people. Alcohol can be spotted on the roadway because it effects your motor skills, leading to swerving from your lane. Pot can leave you with fairly good motor skills, but have a real degradation of your judgement. The YouTube skit you posted about the Canadian pot test was pretty much right on. It had nothing to do with motor skills, but how they reacted poorly due to bad judgement of their surroundings. It's funny because it has a level of truth to it. Even with drugs that can be spotted with impaired driving, what can a cop do? They do a roadside test, to justify requiring you to take an approved test that can quantify your intoxication. As you've pointed out, it's very imperfect, but legally accepted. Typically a breathalyzer. If your impairment is something other than alcohol, and you won't admit to being impaired, the cop is left with limited options. Even smelling pot in the car will likely not stand up in court. It's easy to smell of pot from being around others smoking it. You need a quantifiable test for legal purposes. Just like smelling alcohol justifies a quantifiable breathalyzer test. | ||
| Aesquire |
Like, can't we all just get along, man? Milk is the gateway drug. All that sugar, mind altering! Then, the hard stuff. Ice cream. Shakes. MALTEDS! Next they go for bubble tea & root beer floats. Madness!  Seriously, roadside intoxication testing will be invented if there is a profit. Already exists, imperfectly, apparently, just hasn't been purchased with our tax dollars, yet, everywhere. Some drugs simply don't have enough exhaled by products for a cheap test. Deadly, murder drugs like anti- depressants or anxiety mood levelers. And since they aren't illegal to drive on, aren't worth taking you in for blood draw & testing. Some just get metabolized but still have effects, like LSD, that is basically undetectable, but affects the user for many hours after ingestion. Or the above mentioned prescription mood drugs that can cause weird behavior a week after discontinuing use. I'm not condemning any of the drugs as a class, because.... Individual reaction. They can be a real help to one person & a nightmare to another. The real problem today seems to be Chinese narcoterrorism, with vast quantities of fentanyl of varying super potency being imported to the U.S. That's pretty obviously a Red Chinese Army operation, just like the ship loads of type 56 assault rifles sent to California during the Clinton administration. ( ak-47 ) After all, we might have leaders too stupid to see, or actually complicit with the destruction of Western civilization, but their leaders have never forgotten the ongoing war. | ||
| Ratbuell |
aren't worth taking you in for blood draw & testing. And perhaps therein lies the answer - start issuing a form of diabetes-stickers that can prick a fingertip, release a drop or two, and have a field-test chem set in the officers' toolkit. | ||
| Aesquire |
How intrusive do you want the police to be? How important is intoxicated driving vs. Personal privacy? I'm leaning towards worth a lot of government power to control, but not absolute loss of freedom. We did prohibition, and it had horrible side effects. We are in Prohibition The Sequel, now, and the death toll is horrific. See Chicago, that murder rate isn't all domestic violence. This argument is in the Science thread for a reason. Alcohol effects, despite my complaints about accuracy, are moderately successful with a number. Bob the boozer might seem to function well at .08 but is for sure, too drunk to drive. Pot? High variability and persistence of detectable levels, means it's possible to be sober and show intoxication? How long to metabolize vs. How long impaired? We need better science & more studies. Thus we need Congress to remove pot from it's current, Federal classification to allow scientific studies. The current mix of laws guarantees bad results. There's an old pilot saying, 8 hours bottle to throttle. When I flew gliders I followed that for any recreational drug.... Or 24 hours for safety. I feel I need to be 100% when the landing gear comes up. Because I can't park & take a breather. | ||
| Sifo |
How intrusive do you want the police to be? That is part of the problem. We have spent decades trying to strike the right balance. Pot is going to upset that apple cart to some degree. We did prohibition, and it had horrible side effects. We are in Prohibition The Sequel, now, and the death toll is horrific. See Chicago, that murder rate isn't all domestic violence. Agree 100%. If you think legalizing pot will change the black trades, you are being very naive. There are reasons that this is a problem in certain neighborhoods of Chicago, but nowhere near the same problem in so many other places. It has much more to do with the local population and local government. Thus we need Congress to remove pot from it's current, Federal classification to allow scientific studies. The current mix of laws guarantees bad results. Agree 100% again. Imagine, our Congress being behind the ball on things. I'm shocked I tell you! SHOCKED! This isn't happening as a pendulum swings. This is going from one extreme to the other, with very little hard evidence of what we will be dealing with. We have a decades long foundation of ignorance because of bad laws. Let's fix that by tossing the barn doors into the fire pit! Honestly, I'll be thrilled if the long term problems are less than I anticipate (and I'm not anticipating the end of society as we know it from this), but I wouldn't be surprised if some serious issues come up that weren't expected. Time will tell. I sure wouldn't encourage your kids to start a pot habit. BTW, vaping pot products is already becoming a serious problem in High Schools and Middle Schools. Yes, even in states where it's currently illegal. Opening Pandora's box blah, blah, blah, blah...  | ||
| Aesquire |
One concern is, if the police can just pull you over, or walk up to you, and demand a blood sample, what can & will they do with that? No right to refuse? In NY, if you refuse a breathalyzer test, it's an automatic license suspension, an assumption of guilt, but not jail time. ( unless they get a court order ) https://dui.drivinglaws.org/resources/dui-refusal- blood-breath-urine-test/new-york.htm So if a cop can get a blood sample, where does it go and who gets the information? It's not just drug testing, it's DNA information, including genetic diseases and as we very slowly learn the codes, predisposition and ????? Can my insurance company get the information? Can they cancel me or raise my rates if I have certain genes? My DNA would be on file in a easily backed database. What can criminals do with it? Blackmail? Targeted advertising? And let's go full paranoid, or common sense, when Dems control your State or Federal government, can they declare you have a "marker" for antisocial personality, and choose to raid your home to take your guns? Or simply arrest you because of your genes to be sent to reeducation camp? Or worse? And sure, that won't happen this year.... Sure it won't, and Senators would never call for mobs to chase political enemies out of restaurants & off the streets. But that sample is in the database for the Science fiction future where Hyphen Cortez is President after making the Electoral College free. | ||
| Ratbuell |
My thought was more along the lines of a self-contained, no-radio, laser-printout, scan-for-certain-compounds type of analyzer. Drop-on-sample-pad and pitch the unmarked finger-prick into a hazmat bin that gets dumped every shift. Hit "analyze" button. Onboard laser printer spits out the resulting compound findings. Maybe attach DL numbers to the sample, but do not keep the sample and do not scan for other than "illegal" levels of certain compounds (alcohol, THC, etc). Just brainstorming, since there's no real "breath" test for some things that absolutely cause driving impairment. Can it be misused? Sure. Just like anything. You can kill someone with a salad fork, too. It's all a debate, I agree. Mass safety versus personal privacy, and the balance point is a moving target. | ||
| Aesquire |
I'd think hard about getting some patent protection for those ideas. Seriously. You just might have some real money making potential selling those ideas to the right people, even if you have no desire to build that kind of thing yourself. Mass safety versus personal privacy, and the balance point is a moving target. sums it up nicely. | ||
| Ratbuell |
You just might have some real money making potential selling those ideas to the right people I've also figured out how to totally eliminate range anxiety on electric vehicles. Just need someone well-versed in patent law  | ||
| Strokizator |
Yeah, kind of hard to patent an idea. "The invention itself has to be produced or a patent application containing the invention must be filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). While all inventions start with an idea, not every idea can be called an invention." - LegalZoom | ||
| Hootowl |
That’s some pig. https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/michael-guillen-it s-the-end-of-life-as-we-know-it | ||
| Sifo |
One test machine I had heard of that Canada was looking used a saliva swab. Still has many of the same potential issues as a blood sample. I would assume, that like a breathalyzer, no physical evidence would be retained other than the reading the machine spits out. Big assumption on my part BTW. I think the assumption of guilt for refusing a breathalyzer is pretty common, if not universal. Still, if you know you are drunk, it's better than blowing. You still get your license suspended and pay through the nose, but the path to getting your license back is shorter. At least that's how it worked in IL. That's not intended to be legal advice. May not work in all states. Consult with your personal attorney before use. All of the stuff being discussed here is why I said in another thread a while back that it's all different problems with different solutions. There is little doubt that people will die because of states legalizing pot without thinking these things through. It's pretty clear that the concern about saving a single child's life is only about banning guns.  | ||
| Sifo |
That’s some pig. Interesting and a bit scary. They don't even get into the obvious cyborg development that is likely to happen. Robotics is advancing at an ever accelerating way. Combine that with a custom grown brain and... Well, we've all seen those movies... | ||
| Hootowl |
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| Aesquire |
You don't need a working model to get a patent. If you describe the arrangement of parts, and it is a new, unique concept, you can patent it. Smart folk do a patent search and cite other patents where smart. For example, if you use an existing sample system as part of your invention, you simply label it with the patent used and to be credited. Paying the company that owns that patent is a matter for the production company. Might even just buy the "bioguard 2000 sample box with disposable swabs" from them. You add the flux capacitor and cooling fins. That's an oversimplification, but basically, you don't reinvent the wheel unless that's the New part. Keyboards, swabs, pumps, whatever, that's already invented, you use. And.... You need a patent attorney company. End rant. Where genetic engineering goes is unknown. I'm not worried about pig men, more boosted mumps. Super flu. College level script kiddies ( hackers using existing viruses from the internet & tweaking the result ) already have access to DNA equipment undreamed of a few years ago. The mind boggles. "I'll take the bleed your guts out part of Ebola and stick it in the flu". And a dozen scarier than the last. | ||
| Aesquire |
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/10/deep_ blue_california_makes_itself_nations_pestilence_ca pital.html I expect the annual influenza plague from China. Like clockwork, the news starts the death counter, like it's just normal to have a wave of sickness and death flow out of hell. Because of modern transportation, crushing poverty, and The Party, a state religion that refuses to treat individuals as human beings, it IS normal. I expect tropical diseases to try and expand beyond the country villages into poverty stricken cities in Africa. You only hear about Ebola, because it's so colorful. ( but never shown on American tv to keep from freaking people out ) A chart you never see is how disease ridden countries are by how long Soviet supported governments ruled there. Or by what European countries had them as colonies. But I digress. I expect illegal immigrants to bring disease. It's only logical that Sanctuary cities are flea ridden pits of plague. If current trends continue, first your doctor is going to routinely ask if you've been to Africa or California, to perform the mandatory check for disease spread. Then, possibly by 2020, a border may be established to stop the spread of disease from California. With Army troops in MOPP gear. Federal law forbidding the restriction of travel of Congressmen, will apply, so Nancy Pelosi will be escorted past the burning piles of her constituents, in armored luxury SUVs, to Washington. | ||
| Aesquire |
Was that British newspaper enough? Or do I need more hysteria? | ||
| Aesquire |
https://www.dailywire.com/news/37382/ocasio-cortez -defeating-nazis-blueprint-defeating-ryan-saavedra Free tuition for the Electoral College! Now that the Maldive islands have sunk, Venice has drowned, the oceans have stopped producing oxygen, Al Gore's Malibu beach house is under water, and we are all dead, I suppose it's time to address the issue of environmental protection. The oceans are not oil covered slicks of dead algae and we are still breathing because people who care and actually understand how science works put a lot of effort into getting sane, good, environmental regulations to control the Capitalist society. There's still the Communist dictatorships ruining the planet at an astonishing rate, but us running dog lackeys are doing a fair job. There is more to do. First we have to recognize the importance of stopping the Leftist agenda to control life without limits to government power. The obvious and horrific effects of this cancer are seen in dead seas in the former Soviet Union, county sized areas soaked in biological and chemical weapons, ditto. The open pit garbage mines in India and China, and air pollution so bad you can see it from space. The feces strewn streets of San Francisco, ( not seen since sewers were installed ) all are from areas of a particular political religion. The Global Warming Con, the anti civilization movement, and the socialist utopians all are pushing for a controlled hive city dictatorship society. There would be no limits to the harm they would do outside the windowless boxes they would keep their slaves and their Socialist Media existence. The real ecological crisis is coming. And like a broken clock, the Greenies do have a few things right, but naturally have the solutions deliberately wrong. There is an impending population crisis. Idiocracy and reverse evolution is real. The demographics direction is clear. The cure is not. Fossil fuels will run out, soon, because of the incredible cost of diffuse energy collection get rich quick schemes. It's Flip this House with the planet. The answer is education and nuclear. It's up to the American voter. You can choose people that think that the Socialist Worker's Party is right wing and that they can pass laws to control the Sun. Or choose people that understand that you change the theory to fit the data, not the data to fit the theory. And follow the truth where it leads. | ||
| Strokizator |
Fossil fuels will run out, soon Please elucidate. How soon is soon? Should I fill my propane tank now even though it's still at 50%? | ||
| Aesquire |
Do you live where it snows, has storms, or think the price will rise in winter? Then yes. How soon? This century. Last century we drilled for the really easy oil. Then the harder oil. Went all over looking for more easy oil, and in the process enriched a bunch of Middle Eastern kings, and funded Jihad. Found oil in Cambodia etc. and the N.Vietnamese started the Vietnam war to steal it. There's still some easy oil, like where China is building artificial island fortresses and unsinkable air bases, off Malibu, etc. This century we are fracking the hard to get oil, then as demand rises with China, India, and the other poor nations want modern civilization, we'll have coal to gasoline plants supplying our needs. Might even mine that huge chunk of Utah that Clinton made a National no dig zone when he was bribed by Indonesian coal barons. The prices will rise over time, with fluctuations. The recent low may never be reached again, or it might, depending upon a coup in Iran or Venezuela. It's certain to rise with Russian investment in war in the middle east, ( they need high prices to pay for the socialist greed ) or other crisis. By mid century, conventional military will be mostly electric with portable nuclear to recharge tanks and jeeps, ( or robots and motor bikes ) and airplanes on bio fuel. Corn will be for eating again, once rational minds notice that it takes more fossil fuel than the alcohol replaces, and sewage treatment will resemble Mad Max, Beyond Thunderdome. ( methane production ) And that's the optimistic version. | ||
| Strokizator |
I pre-buy my propane to avoid midwinter price spikes. So back to your original statement, how soon is soon? I'll agree that the easy stuff has been pumped*. Back in the late 70's the only oil left in the Kern County fields was too thick to be easily recovered leading to the claims that the oil economy was dead. Someone came up with steam injection and the boom was on again. Pretty cool too. The steam generator was fueled by the crude oil coming out of the ground. Just add water and away you go. We were unable to harvest the oil and gas trapped in shale formations until recent developments in technology. Continuing developments will allow us to reach even further. Beneath every oil field there is a shale formation. How much more oil do the Saudis have once this is tapped? Every oil field worldwide? Battery powered battle tanks? Not unless you can find a charging station nearby. How far can a 68 ton M1 Abrams go on a charge? The best things about oil is that it's energy dense and easily portable. Nuclear? That seems like an unsecured use of uranium. Someday life will resemble a science fiction movie, just not any time "soon". * Should have said the easy stuff has been developed - it's still being pumped at an impressive rate (Message edited by Strokizator on October 21, 2018) | ||
| Ebutch |
Just went UpTown No Parking Spots Left !!!!     | ||
| Alchemy |
Ooops, it's only money. Maybe they are waiting on Mega Millions to help payoff their bet. https://www.nature.com/articles/436897a But then the results. https://julesandjames.blogspot.com/2018/10/the-bet -final-outcome.html So much for changes on solar activity.... Chalk one up for science! |
