Category: Pondering

Regulation of marijuana sales in Washington State – 2

This is the second in a series of posts providing background on regulation of recreational marijuana sales.

An article in The Telegraph provides more info – Dopeless in Seattle:  legalised cannabis prompts pot shortage.

Focus of the article is on small number of shops opened on the first day of legal sales and the limited supply. That is a transition issue that will quickly resolve itself. This post will look at some comments in the article on the regulatory requirements.

The article describes the rules as

…a labyrinthine licensing system…

Continue reading “Regulation of marijuana sales in Washington State – 2”

For-profit college, Corinthian, pushed into closing by feds

I’ve been trying to sort out the situation with Corinthian Colleges. Under pressure from the Department of Education, the business agreed to sell off all its schools and close its doors. Here’s some articles and a few thoughts as I process.

7/4 – New York Times – College Group Run for Profit Looks to Close Or Sell Schools – Corinthian Colleges, which owns 100 different schools, will be winding down over the next six months.

Continue reading “For-profit college, Corinthian, pushed into closing by feds”

Regulation of marijuana sales in Washington State – 1

I’ve been following the state-legal, federal-illegal sales of marijuana in Washington and Colorado. I’m looking at legalization in those two states as a natural experiment in the heavy hand of regulation.

So you know my perspective and can filter my comments accordingly, my hypothesis is the heavy regulation imposed in each state will severely restrain, if not cripple, the new industry of legally selling banned pot. The legal infrastructure for sales is developing as regulators outline what is required.

Update:  Full disclosure is a good thing. That should even apply to the opinions of journalists writing articles. That is the reason I just described my perspective. You know where I’m coming from so you can filter my comments and coverage accordingly. I sincerely recommend you do the same thing with every news article and opinion piece you ever read.

You can see my posts in the regulation experiment tag. My very first post on Washington was here.

I’ll look at three articles in this series.  The first, from The Seattle Times on 7/5/14: State’s retail pot gets rolling Tuesday, provides a summary of regulation in Washington State and some indicators of prices.

A few tidbits on regulation:

Continue reading “Regulation of marijuana sales in Washington State – 1”

“If tragedy strikes, don’t lose hope. Transform it into an opportunity to make things better.”

The quote is attributed to Dalai Lama in an article at Philosiblog.

If you have not been hit by a horrible tragedy in your life, you are a rare person and I am happy for you.

In the Bible, Jesus says “in this world you will have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.”

We will leave for another time the long discussion of how Jesus overcame the world. Today, look at the first part of the sentence – if you are alive you will have trouble and problems and tribulation in life. It is inevitable.

What is not inevitable is how we respond. The quote from Dalai Lama and discussion by Philosiblog reminds us we have a choice to make after we finish grieving the tragedy.

Continue reading ““If tragedy strikes, don’t lose hope. Transform it into an opportunity to make things better.””

Harm to wildlife from plastic bags is a fraction of what we have been told

Bans on plastic bags at the grocery store and tremendous hoopla advocating reusable bags is all because the massively huge amount of plastic in the oceans kills massively huge numbers of birds and marine mammals.

Well…..

Maybe there isn’t even a fraction of the harm to wildlife we’ve been told about.

Article at SFGate explains Garbage-patch tale as flimsy as a single-use plastic bag.

Continue reading “Harm to wildlife from plastic bags is a fraction of what we have been told”

Pondering the 4th of July makes me wish everyone on the planet enjoyed economic, religious, and political freedom

Been pondering today how thrilled I am to have:

  • the political freedom to write five blogs,
  • the economic freedom to run my own company the way I wish and see as much success as my effort, skills, & drive can create independent of the income level of my father when I was born or where his parents came from, and
  • the religious freedom to worship as I see the bible suggests worship should be conducted, in a church where the preacher preaches the word as we in my fellowship believe it ought to be preached, and I can teach the bible as we believe it is meant to be taught.

That freedom is a rarity on the earth today and unheard of for all of history until around, oh, say 300 years ago.

Oh how I wish that everyone on the planet could be blessed with that economic, political, and religious freedom.

Continue reading “Pondering the 4th of July makes me wish everyone on the planet enjoyed economic, religious, and political freedom”

Drone pilots and more background on drones

Article in the Economist discusses the pressures on drone pilots – Drone pilots:  Dilbert at war. Article in WSJ gives more background on the range of drones in operation today. First up, the Economist article.

There are serious pressures from being in a war zone for an 8 or 10 hour shift then going home to have dinner with your family in your own home/apartment. You can’t get a brew at the on-base club and decompress with the other crews who also have nothing else to do except hang out with you. Classification levels and operational security requirements mean you can’t discuss anything outside a secure area.

Continue reading “Drone pilots and more background on drones”

More good stuff on the open frontiers – 6/25

I read the news and see wide open frontiers in the worlds of publishing, technology, space, and energy. In terms of opportunities and growth, this reminds me of the wild west and homesteading days in the late 1800s.

Here’s a few of the articles that stretched my understanding of this amazing world we live in.

Perpetual Malthusian foolishness

4/25 – Wall Street Journal – The World’s Resources Aren’t Running Out – Ecologists worry that the world’s resources come in fixed amounts that will run out, but we have broken through such limits again and again – There are constant shouts of fright that we will run out of some resource in a decade or two. Maybe the day after tomorrow. Such predictions are as foolish as they are wrong. Matt Ridley points out that innovation, human creativity in other words, blasts through those limits over and over and over again.

Here is part of the blindness: Continue reading “More good stuff on the open frontiers – 6/25”

More good stuff on the open frontiers – 6/6

Just like the wild west and homesteading days in the late 1800s, the frontiers of publishing, technology and space are wide open. Here’s a few of the articles that stretched my understanding of this amazing world we live in.

Publishing

6/5 – Daily Beast – Amazon is NOT the Vladimir Putin of the Publishing World – Until now, I’ve not tried to sort out the spat between Amazon and Hachette. Who is Hachette, I hear you ask? They are one of the big publishing house. They are not an issue in my life because they would never, ever talk to a little bitty author with sub-microscopic level of sales like me.

The visible part of the dispute is Amazon posting a higher price on Hachette books, allegedly removing the ‘you can order weeks in advance’ button, shipping slower than arrive-first-thing-tomorrow-morning, and suggesting someone else on the ‘net may have a better price.

Article above explains Hachette wants you and me to pay more and Amazon wants you and me to pay less. What Amazon is doing as a negotiating strategy is offering books at the terms, availability, and prices Hachette wants.

The horrible, cruel, cut-throatedness of Amazon is amusingly described: Continue reading “More good stuff on the open frontiers – 6/6”

Appeals court says devastation from New Deal is still okay; We lost a hero who also suffered at the hands of the New Deal

Did you know the enlightened wizards of the New Deal worked out a plan that raisin producers had to turn over a percentage of their crop to the government and not get paid for the raisins?

Yes, that was actually a plan developed back in the ‘30s.

Did you know that plan is still in place? Eighty years later?

I discussed that a year ago – Economic destruction from the New Deal just keeps rolling on.

The lawsuit I mentioned back then involved farmers who were told to give 47% of their ’02 crop and 30% of their ’03 crop to the government without compensation.  The case went to the Supreme Court, which ruled the farmers did actually have standing to sue the government. The case went to the 9th Circuit Court for consideration of their claims.

Guess what?

Continue reading “Appeals court says devastation from New Deal is still okay; We lost a hero who also suffered at the hands of the New Deal”

“Luck is probability taken personally”

Philosiblog ponders that comment from Penn Jillette.

Do we assume that when something happens to us it was good luck? Or was it random, haphazard chance that helped us? Or was it our preparation applied to an opportunity?

Be careful of the assumption that the world is in your favor: Continue reading ““Luck is probability taken personally””

“29 Ways to Stay Creative” plus a few bonus ideas

Check out this video on how to stay creative:

 

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=-mlSrKo16D0]

 

A few more ideas:

30 – Read political, economic, and social opinions from people with a different worldview – Twitter is a superb for this.

31 – Read a book by an author you haven’t looked at before. I just did this and got an amazingly depressing view of post-reconstruction America while finding I enjoy someone whose work I’ve not read before.

32 – Write a blog. You will be amazed how much it stretches you.

Next post: there are times when we shouldn’t be creative.

Don’t pick a fight with someone who buys pixels by the terabyte and especially someone with 13,700 Twitter followers

There’s an old line from the newspaper era: Don’t pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel. If you do, tomorrow you will see 10,000 printed copies of the next step of the argument.

The internet equivalent is:

Don’t pick a fight with someone who buys pixels by the terabyte.

Today’s addendum is: especially when said person routinely prints 13,700 copies of tweets.

(Cross post from my other blog, Nonprofit Update.)

Francine McKenna got a threatening email from a guy who had a role in a failed company. You can read all about it: Benjamin Wey Sent Me A Threatening Email About AgFeed.

The company, AgFeed, is the recipient of litigation, a target of SEC investigation, and the subject of many news reports. Mr. Wey didn’t like Ms. McKenna’s coverage and threatened her with some sort of harm. I can’t quite tell what the harm will be (opinion), but there will be something. Continue reading “Don’t pick a fight with someone who buys pixels by the terabyte and especially someone with 13,700 Twitter followers”

What’s the disposal plan for the cadmium in solar panels? Solar #16

Cadmium is a heavy metal that can make humans quite sick. Cadmium is a major ingredient in one particular type of solar panel called cadmium telluride. Dangers of putting that into a few hundred thousand panels, risks of leakage into ground water, and lack of disposal plans 30 or 40 years from now might, just maybe, possibly, be worth considering today.

A few minutes of research starts to outline the issues. My learning points are in bold italics, with article for each idea, and my comments on the article.

  • Cadmium is bad stuff.

Continue reading “What’s the disposal plan for the cadmium in solar panels? Solar #16”