Double Blind

I’m currently in Los Angeles right now, or rather a suburb approximately 30 miles east of LAX airport. I find it very amusing how they geographically divide all the cities in the area when it’s just one large suburbia. Of course, some areas are worse than others (don’t get caught in Compton, a.k.a. “Rodney King Riot Neighbourhood”), but otherwise it’s just miles and miles of civilization in all directions. The other hellish facts are that it doesn’t rain here and it’s too hot in the afternoon unless if you live in a trillion-dollar beach mansion on the coastline breathing fresh ocean air.

As far as I can tell, the only good thing that this area of the world has to offer is not Disneyland, but rather miles and miles of freeway. The good thing about these freeways is that they enable you to get out of the city. The ability for people to get to one place to another here is incredible, providing that you avoid major choke points in rush hour. I find it amazing that even though most of the road network was planned in advance, you still find plenty of areas where 10-lane freeways don’t get the job done getting commuters from A to B in a continuous fashion. Ultimately, the transportation planning was a victim of its own success – more people decided they could save money on expensive property values by moving further east into the desert and thus this causes a larger volume of commuters on the roads. The 91 freeway, connecting Riverside and Orange Counties, is particularly a nightmarish sort of hell to drive through rush hour.

If somebody is unfortunate to end up moving to Los Angeles or surrounding area, I have a few pieces of advice for them. One is that if you are uncomfortable driving at 120 kilometers per hour in 6 lanes of condensed traffic while attempting to move 4 lanes to your right within 30 seconds to make your exit, then you shouldn’t be driving here. So if you’re not a good driver, you better be living very close to your workplace. Number two is that you absolutely need a car – this city was built under the assumption that everybody would have access to one. Third, your car should have a V6 engine. Anything less and your car will die an early death on the roads, not to mention suffer from any accelerating power on the freeways. Anything more and you’ll consume too much gasoline. Six cylinders in an engine is perfect.

Getting on the issue of cars, Justin has pointed out on his September 22 article an interesting looking enclosed motorbike that can go 325 km/h – or over twice the speed limit on the I-5. The cost (“88.5000″) most likely has a typo – the extra zero is probably incorrect. Also, Europeans like to reverse the dots and commas in their numbers for some weird reason. At 88,500 swiss francs, that’s approximately $90k CAD, which is expensive stuff. But it would sure be nice driving in one of those at night over here, providing that you could figure out a way how not to go airborne with all the bumps in the roads here…

Ever needed a glass of fresh cold water instead of stodgy tap water? Most hotels have ice machines. Fill a bucket with ice. Then get a glass and dump as much ice as it can carry. Get a sink and fill it up with hot water. Place the glass inside the hot water and allow the ice cubes to melt. Voila, fresh filtered water.

This depends on the ice that the ice machine produces being clean, but more often than not, it’s filtered. This procedure is also incredibly energy inefficient, but then again, it’s the hotel paying for it.

The Da Kine Smoke and Beverage Shop is on Commercial Drive in Vancouver. It was a place (and probably still is as of the time of this writing) where you could fill out some forms, and obtain marijuana for “medical purposes”, approximately one gram for $10. There was also a room where you could smoke it. This store was busted by the police on September 10th and there has been a relatively large uproar by its users.

My take on the situation is that the store should have been shut down the moment that it started to sell marijuana illegally. The reason is that the process the store’s owners have taken to sell marijuana would give them an unfair competitive advantage over any other potential businesses that were intending to do the same thing if the laws were changed to allow people to purchase and smoke pot for medical purposes without a medical certification.

Let’s not mistake the facts here – a typical person did not need a prescription from a doctor to receive access to marijuana from Da Kine. They just had to claim that they had a medical need for it and they could get it. Under this basis, Da Kine is clearly distriburing marijuana illegally. A BC provincial court decision in 2003 concerning simple possession of marijuana illustrates the regulations concerning the legal consumption of marijuana (paragraph 22). A little more digging on the internet will find you the marijuana exemption in Canada’s Food and Drug Act. This, in turn, says that Marijuana is exempt from the act if it is produced under contract from the government of Canada, or under license according to the Marihuana Medical Access Regulations.

Da Kine came nowhere close to abiding with these regulations. Look at section 4 as an example – people with category 1, 2 or 3 symptoms have to provide a medical declaration by a doctor or specialist, and given the conditions in section 6 (i.e. all other reasonable attempts have been exhausted to alleviate the pain).

It’s clear from how the legislation was structured that the government was not intending businesses to get into the wholesale production and sale of marijuana. What if I wanted to open a business selling marijuana legitimately to people that comply with the Food and Drug act, only to be facing competition with a business that is acting illegally? It’s clear that Da Kine’s owners should be thrown into jail for contravention of the Food and Drug act. The customers that were caught in the crossfire should be let go as jailing them proves nothing as their crime is relatively minor and victimless. Da Kine’s crime, however, is acting illegally to gain a competitive advantage over other potential distributors of medical marijuana.

The proper process for businesses to take is to get the legislation changed first, and then start the business of selling marijuana without medical certifications. Legislation, in general, is written to ensure that businesses know the rules of the game – if one business decides to break the law, the book should be thrown at them no less than what’s happening right now to executives of Enron and Worldcom. In this case, Da Kine’s the one that is breaking the rules, and they deserved to be put in the penalty box until they properly screen their customers. As they operate right now, they are hurting legitimate businesses such as Island Harvest which comply with federal regulations.

Richard mentions that he would like to properly learn how to shoot a gun. While I haven’t been properly trained to shoot, I did shoot 50 rounds out of a 9mm Glock in Edmonton. It cost approximately CAD$50 for the gun rental, ammo, target, safety equipment and a small tutorial. An extra 50 rounds was CAD$15. The shot-up target is currently posted outside my cubicle at work.

I do have a couple observations from the article Richard linked to. One is that inserting the bullets into the gun magazine was relatively difficult – the spring pushing the bullets up required a lot of force to push down. It made my thumb sore. The other observation is that in the USA, if you are renting a gun, you need to shoot in groups of two or more. There was no such restriction in Edmonton.

I have no idea if there are similar facilities in British Columbia – the Richmond Rod and Gun Club had their shooting range decommissioned some time ago.

Did anybody watch the 6:00pm news when they did the live draw to see who would win the PNE Prize home? The mayor of Vancouver, Larry Campbell, drew the winning ticket from a big yellow barrel. Then they got him to sit next to a table with a telephone. The telephone was supposed to be rigged so that the audience would hear the voice of the person on the other side of the line, but there was no dial tone! After struggling to get a dial tone up on the telephone for a minute, the mayor finally had to use another news reporter’s cell phone to make the call.

How could something so critical be overlooked or untested by the PNE’s marketing department before they did the draw on freaking LIVE TELEVISION? If this is a demonstration of how competent the PNE executives are, I’m surprised they managed to keep it in Hastings Park for this long.

My favourite author on the internet, Steven Den Beste, has called it a day on his weblog. He hasn’t said that he’ll quit writing permanently, but that he will be taking a very long break from writing because he feels it’s a burden more than a pleasure to do so. I suspect that in a couple months, he’ll probably write in some fashion on the internet somewhere, out of the eye of the general public. Judging from all the crap that I’m assuming he gets in his inbox every day, I don’t blame him. When you have to face all the irrational driveling of fanatical supporters of political position X or alternative energy source Y, I’m surprised he was this patient before pulling the plug.

I think the beginning of the end was when he shut down his forum because it just began to be a platform for thick-skinned individuals to eventually degrade every discussion down to Bush vs. the rest of the world. It was either that or abortion. It’s unfortunate that he took down the discussion archives, since I would love to have linked to such threads where things just degenerated into a toilet bowl full of verbal diarrhea to demonstrate this point. I remember when there were about 50 users on the forum it was quite enjoyable to read (and I think I did post a couple times), but after it grew beyond that, it became very unreadable. I’m sure moderation was a pain in the ass.

I’ve been reading Den Beste back from the days when he used to write a lot of messages on the comp.os.os2.advocacy newsgroup on Usenet. He was one of the few guys on that group that realized that the OS/2′s days were numbered and continued to relentlessly drive home his point to all of the feverish supporters of the OS. Eventually he got fed up with people like David Tholen and wisely packed up shop and went to blogging. I recall there wasn’t a big “sign off” note as he gave to us here; he just left the newsgroup.

There’s a paradoxical element at play here – when people post articles and notes on the internet, they get a small following. Google, for example, used to refer most readers of the term “Buy cocaine” to my third article I posted here; I also get a few follow-throughs on the friends that have me linked to some stuff I write. Otherwise, I don’t get a lot of activity and up-to-date, I have not received any email. There is a power law concerning the number of people that read weblogs – 99% of the readers out there probably read 1% of the weblogs out there.

Den Beste used to start off small, but as he grew, his readership grew exponentially. With a large readership, he received lots of nit-picky emails from readers and this eventually grew on his nerves until he had to decide to pull the plug. Ultimately, he became a victim of his own success. I sincerely wish that this never happens to me, since I know exactly how I’d feel: Why the hell should I write for this group of ingrates that just bombard me with garbage, day in and day out? It’s really too bad that he didn’t remain an unknown person, since he’s probably the only person on the internet I’d actually pay to read his commentaries.

It’s kind of sad, in a way – it’s a demonstration on how the minority of the public can cause people to just quit and disengage themselves. I’m sure there are higher level abstractions like this in society – for example, if just 5% of us devoted our lives to crime and anarchy, would it be sufficient for society itself to collapse? What is the minimum amount of order required to maintain a functional society? Why can’t people just open up their own weblogs and post opposing commentary there instead of bombarding the author with ill-researched spam?

Den Beste going off the internet is just another example of this. Effectively the rest of the internet loses when we have its best people disengaging, leaving the rot and decay.