I think the issue isn't involuntary commitment always being dystopian, its what we do with involuntary commitment in terms of how the institutions are run and the access people have to get released from it. It's at least theoretically possible to have involuntary commitment that is humane.

I think most cities are seeing the results of what happens when we mostly can't involuntarily commit people -- drug addiction, homeless camps, and some dangerous behavior towards other people. Many of these people will reject any kind of voluntary treatment, and its a big problem. We're giving people who have mental health problems more agency than they actually have to reject treatment.

In the Kim Stanley Robinson novel Aurora they send a generation ship to Tau Ceti on a planned one way voyage and the ship only has 2000 people. It’s a complete biosphere system where they grow food and raise livestock.

It’s science fiction and there’s a bit of hand waving — 3D printers that can make complex things, including more 3D printers and an advanced ship AI.

But I’d say maybe at worst for Earth living it’s really only off by a couple of orders of magnitude if you’re willing to accept a more communal lifestyle and not something involving contemporary levels of false-choice consumption.

This logic makes sense but it doesn't.

Why not just make all the ports USB 3.1? Even if they are all used for USB 3.1 high bandwidth devices, the odds that all these devices will use maximum throughput at a rate to saturate their PCIe lane access is near zero outside of /r/homelab situations. And most will be low bandwidth (HIDs, etc) anyway.

If they were all 3.1, you'd at least have the convenience of always getting a 3.1 port and functionality (barring intensive oversubscription of the PCIe lane).

To me this argument reminds me of my electrical panel. I have 200 amp service, which means I should only have about thirteen 15 amp breakers. Less if I'm feeding the 30 amp AC compressor and have to subtract 2 to make up for it. It's not like I'm going to install 5 amp breakers to keep total load potential below the main feed rating of 200 amps and then I can only use that one 15a outlet for appliances in my kitchen.

IMHO, still including USB 2.0 ports is a dumb legacy design that has few real world benefits and creates user inconvenience. I'm sure there are niche applications (industrial PCs with bad USB devices that puke on 3.1 ports), but that's like making everyone use a cane because some people have mobility problems.

You're not wrong.

I mean, app-based remote start is sold SaS. I guess I might buy a similar service at a similar cost and timeline as remote start for app-based remote image retrieval.

I think if I'm buying the fucking dash camera hardware as part of an option/package, then basic access to my dashcam video ought to be free and not SaS. I guess I tolerate the remote start cost because it offsets some of the cost of the cellular modem in the car, and it was dirt cheap for a long time.

I'm glad I'm old enough to not see this economy in 25 years -- the capitalists will have everyone on a weekly rental plan and working at jobs that just pay the weekly rent.

It's surprising they're not integrated already. I think the problem isn't just providing a cleanly integrated camera, it's the user interface and access to the camera's storage/video footage that's also an engineering headache.

This seems like an obvious feature add for the infotainment system -- a screen that provides a camera UI. The head unit has access to the USB ports (Carplay and USB media playback), so writing to a USB stick for exporting footage shouldn't be a problem.

But I have little faith we'd ever see this on a Subaru unless Harmon decided that dashcam management was something they wanted to get into. Subaru seems to tolerate garbage from Harmon, so asking for more features seems unlikely.

Cameras with their own wifi or bluetooth access probably could bypass this, but there's still issues with getting a mobile device connected that would ultimately require some kind of UI functionality.

I always knew it referred to a second round of intercourse, made sloppy by the secretions of the first round.

I never thought (and maybe still don’t) that it required the sex partners to be different people for each round. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen it used in writing as if the sex partner was the same.

The reference I remember was some kind of comic take on dating and offering one’s date sloppy seconds as a kind of half-hearted show of interest and virility.

But it does add an extra dimension of crudeness to imply a second sex partner.

The funny thing about amphetamines is how they seem to be just fine to feed to kids with ADD. I know they kind of process them differently neurologically but still.

Some people manage maintenance doses of opiates for years, even decades without problems. But there’s segment of the population that will want continually escalating doses and end up overdosing.

Part of me wants to believe that that this would work and that there's some mix of rules and enforcement that would solve a diversion problem, but part of me also thinks that it could just devolve into a drug prohibition 2.0 cat and mouse game.

Probably a low barrier to entry for obtaining licensing would prevent a lot of diversion, basically excluding people considered too at risk (teens, mentally ill, etc). But there's always the risk of some meaningful number of people who are just non-cooperative with obtaining a license.

It's still an interesting idea.

I think it probably makes perfect sense. There's all kinds of dangerous things we want or need people to have access to and a common solution is a licensing process which controls access to the thing and tries to guarantee that such use is reasonable and responsible -- explosives, radioactive materials, dangerous chemicals. Even a lot of gun permit laws require some kind of classroom instruction on law and safety and a basic functional test of gun use.

I think the problem with a "drug user license" is avoiding the diversion risk. It would probably be tempting to get your license, buy the drug and resell it. It's way lower risk than reselling your sample of U-235 or blasting caps.

I also suspect that lumping together all drugs as catastrophically dangerous by anti-drug propaganda. A person consumes some cannabis and finds that its not dangerous and then begins to think that the dangers of other drugs must be grossly exaggerated as well.

Plus the fact that until fentanyl, most recreational drugs at common potency and doses could be sampled without much immediate risk. Heroin might be the asterisk to this statement, but I'd wager that more often than not it wasn't at a potency that posed a high overdose risk.

Of course this kind of discounting of risk didn't take into effect the cumulative consumption risks of addiction or tolerance, but that's generally not what the propaganda tried to spell out. Plus most people aren't instantly addicted with one or two initial doses of anything, so its easy to see people using coke a couple of times and thinking its not a big deal and not realizing maybe it is a big deal some many doses in the future when they find out they can't go without.

When I was in high school the demand for alcohol was broader than the demand for cannabis -- ie, more students were interested or willing to drink than they were interested in smoking pot.

What's curious, though, is that there wasn't really a black market for booze. As in, someone of legal age who bought booze specifically to sell it to underage high school kids. You can almost imagine some person with a couple of cases of half-pint vodka bottles and cases of beer who sells them off to high school kids, either direct consumers or as a wholesaler to some enterprising high school student.

Everyone seemed to have some inconsistent access to someone of age who would buy booze, but it was really inconsistent as I remember it. You mostly couldn't call them up and say you needed a hookup tonight. I even remember a couple of times where my circle of friends went through the motions trying but getting turned down by everyone.

Given Florida's huge tourism trade, I would kind of expect them to be able to justify some level of minimum wage increases as a pass-through tax on tourists that reduces the wage burden generally for non-tourism business sectors. I'd also maybe consider tourist businesses to support it to some degree if it improved labor availability.

I also wonder if they would get more bang for their buck by increasing affordable housing in terms of improving labor and limiting wage increases, since housing is expensive and often scarce in coastal areas. Better housing options could reduce wage demands as well as having a payoff throughout the life of the housing stock.