Alcohol or marijuana?

Alcohol or marijuana?  A pediatrician considers which he'd rather his children used.  A worthwhile read, especially for anyone who still thinks marijuana is more dangerous than alcohol.

A few years ago a friend asked me what provoked my advocacy for decriminalizing drugs.  He was puzzled by it, as he knew that I wasn't a user of any illegal drugs.  I had to think about it for a while, but realized it was the conjunction of these things:

• My increasing awareness over time of the irrationality of many political decisions, resulting in policies that were indefensible on any rational basis.  The U.S. drug policy fits quite nicely into that category.
• My reading of history, which led to the (then surprising to me) discovery that for most of U.S. history there were no illegal drugs.  We survived anyway.
• My growing circle of friends and colleagues, many of whom I discovered were regular users of illegal drugs (most commonly marijuana, but also including LSD, peyote, cocaine, etc.).  My own experiences with these people showed me that the drugs didn't destroy their intellect or their ambition, nor were they addicted any more than I am to Cabernet.  On the other hand, I've known several people whose lives were utterly destroyed by their alcoholism.
• My solidifying libertarian position on personal freedom.  I take the simple position that personal behavior that does not harm others should not be outlawed.  Personal use of so-called “recreational drugs” (including alcohol) usually doesn't harm others – but even when it does, the harmful behavior should be outlawed, not the drug use.  For the most part, that is exactly how we regulate alcohol use today.
• My growing understanding of the systemic damage caused by the war on drugs, which I've written about many times before.

Add all that up, and you've got the source of my advocacy...

A stunning measure of change...

A stunning measure of change...  The graph at right shows the result of a relatively simple calculation: for each plotted year, it shows the percentage of market capitalization represented by intangible assets, for all the companies on the S&P 500 list.  To make this calculation, the authors simply subtracted the companies' tangible assets from their market caps; these are both readily available numbers straight from the companies' quarterly reports.

In the thirty years since 1975, those intangible assets have gone from around 17% of market cap to over 80% of market cap.  What does this mean?  Well, let's make up an example.  Suppose that in 1975, the market cap of an S&P 500 component company was $1B.  If it was an average company, about $830m of that value would be in the form of tangible assets: cash, buildings, equipment, etc.  But the same company in 2015, with the same $1B market cap, would have only about $160m in tangible assets.  What's the rest of the value?  It's those intangible things, mainly an expectation of growth because of the intellectual property value held by the company.

This reflects the enormous shift in American (and worldwide) industry in the information age.  Much of the value of a company is now in the designs that it has made, code that it has written, patents that it owns, and expertise that it possesses – intangible assets that are the drivers for future growth.  Some of the value is simply in market expectations – Amazon and Apple are two good examples of this phenomenon.

The more I think about the changes documented in this graph, the more it sinks in just how profoundly our world has been changed by IT...

You'd be well-advised...

You'd be well-advised ... to stay far away from me today.  Especially if you're a politician, or anything even remotely close to that.  Why?  Today I start on my tax return.  That's guaranteed to get me thinking about things like politicians, waterboarding, high velocity lead, rope, branding irons, and so forth, in various pleasing combinations.

It will wear off in a month or two, but I'll resurrect this emotional state on election day...

The SETI folks are excited...

The SETI folks are excited...  Radio astronomers are observing fast radio bursts with discrete steps in their dispersion function that are hard to explain by natural mechanisms.  In other words, they look like something produced by an intelligent being.  There's some definite suspicion that the signals are man-made, though: the discrete steps are awfully close to round numbers of seconds.  Since seconds are an entirely arbitrary measure of time used by humans on Earth, it seems unlikely that an alien source would come up with the same thing...