It's extremely rare for any part of government to have that as an intended purpose.

But it's extremely common, unfortunately, for people involved to be willing to accept that as a side effect in pursuing whatever their goals are - whether that's gaining funding for their police department, or raising political donations from the owners of a private prison, or keeping poor people away from their beautiful upper middle class neighbourhood, or environment-ruining chemical company, or... whatever.

But fuck current drug policy. If someone is high on cannabis, or MDMA, or even "harder" drugs like cocaine and heroin, as long as it's not causing them to be violent or to commit other crimes such as theft then why should that become a legal problem for them any more than if they were intoxicated from spending a few hours drinking beers? And with the odd exception like keeping existing "driving under the influence" laws, we don't need dedicated "violent because of drugs" or "theft because of drugs" legislation, those crime should be treated the same regardless of whether drugs were involved or not.

The current "war on drugs" has been a failure at preventing people from buying and using recreational drugs, and it's been a failure at protecting society and members of society from themselves and from others, because evidence and experts all points towards better results coming from investing in being able to offer medical treatment services (rehab, therapy, etc) than policing and prison services.

I very much think there will come a time in the future, if we haven't accidentally killed our species by then, that we look back on this time the same way as most of us currently look at historic types of slavery, or stoning homosexuals to death, as both idiotic and incredible immoral. I hope we reach that point in the coming years/decades, rather than needing centuries.

(To be clear, I wrote "historic slavery" not to imply there are some forms of modern slavery that I think are OK; but because sadly there is still modern slavery ongoing all around the world, so we can't say that it's a universally condemned thing of the past. Hopefully one day it will be, too.)

P.S. Or get it free when buying my $499 "how to make money selling people how to make money guides" guide!

(/s. I generally think HN comments should avoid jokes unless they're genuinely really cleverly funny, which this comment isn't - I only justified it to myself by the fact that the sort of people selling these trashy guides are the same people doing what you're talking about, and I feel they deserve mockery and shaming.)

It's a lot harder / more expensive to produce, as it needs (at least before AI, and I guess still to some extent even using AI for now) to be written by someone on the team who genuinely understands the company's technology/product/whatever well enough to educate other people about it in an interesting way, rather than it being written by low wage SEO writers who just need a list of keywords to include in the drivel that is the sort of content you're talking about. So it makes sense that most companies go with the cheap option, but it's always nice to come across ones who produce actual interesting articles.

(It's what I've always opted for when I've overseen marketing budgets, and I think the ROI is usually worth it since balancing the extra cost is the fact that the benefits go from just SEO, to SEO + word of mouth of people sharing the interesting article they read, and the awareness of the brand that comes with it. So I recommend anyone who normally chooses lazy, low quality content for SEO to consider the upgrade!)

I'm curious, and hope you or somebody else might be able to answer this: is it a single adjustment for each thing, where they just set it to always adjust by X ratio, or does it vary (enough to matter) as it orbits, such that the adjustment needs to be constantly varying slightly?

In this case the consensus (that I agree with) certainly seems to be that they're similar enough to be considered a dupe. Though that doesn't force the moderators to have to treat it like a dupe and merge comments.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47529291

But speaking as a random HN reader, I appreciate comments pointing out previous discussions :) (Though I don't think it's always a negative to have a dupe on a different day)

I was just surprised this time since it seemed too pointless for human judgement to have been involved, yet too slow (4 hours later than my noticing it and searching for the thread I remembered seeing days before) to be a bot...

For example, even when speed was extremely important and everyone was trying to get Covid vaccines out as fast as possible a few years ago, they still ran large randomised placebo-controlled trials (in places with high infection rates so they could get good comparison data relatively quickly).

So please stop spreading false claims about this stuff / spend time actually learning the facts. Claims like these do real harm by undermining trust in vaccines and helping fuel avoidable outbreaks of diseases like measles.

(But it's a big enough story that I'm glad to see it on front page again.)

Are you suggesting it's not intuitively obvious that the town 'Towcester' should be pronounced the same as a "toaster" for toasting bread?