35 years for 18 days of being stoned

The Tyler TX story: 35 years or so for a little over 4 ounces (let's say 120g) of cannabis.

Drug science yearly consumption guesstimate:
25 - 41 m users 25-41 x 10^6
9 - 21 k metric tons 9-21 x 10^6 kg
roughly 1-4 kg/person/year - let's make it 2.4 to make numbers easier

2400 grams per year
120 grams is 1/20 of a year or 18 days

4 ounces seems like an awful amount of weed to go through in less than 3 weeks.
Consumption is crazy to estimate at large scales. Production estimates are based on assumptions that 10% of imported weed is confiscated. So divide the legal theft of imports by .1 and then double that number to include domestic production.
Of course all that is sinsimilla bud, right? What? No? Gotta take out seeds, stems, dirt, baggies, bugs, water-weights, can't-finds, and so on. Fed estimate around 1k metric ton actual usable product which is something like an ounce and a half per year for each user.
24-40 grams per person per year seems way low.

So if each joint weighs around .75 grams and a person smokes 2 joints in the morning time, then 2 at night, then another 2 in the afternoon that person will feel alright. 2 joints per day = 1.5grams x 365 is around 550g of usable product per year. Production is around 2400g so looking at 20% efficiency which seems just about right. 1 pound per year per moderate user; 5-6 excellent plants, 24 or more shitty ones. This all assumes no parties; no sharing.

facebook

Your facebook profile is the 'real' you.  [update 3/17/2010] But others that you don't know personally may be phonies and agent provocateurs.

It is used for data mining:
aggregators like Rapleaf Inc. will collate information about individuals and sell it to companies that want to learn about those customers and what they do online.
Entities such as airlines, politicians, and even non-profits can use this data for finding new customers or targeting products to existing ones.

How much longer before the same credentials that log you onto facebook will be acceptable as a federal id?

tribes

Tribal affiliation when it is useful for the individual.
Tribal affiliation can be denied, ignored, even criticized by the individual. The right for the tribe to exist is always defended by the individual. (The best defense is a good offense - lead the opposition, always point out that others want to destroy the tribe).
Tribes are composed of smaller groups which themselves are made up of individuals aligned by ideologies rather than geographies.

Tribal mechanics are natural for humans. If a person realizes another is also a member, a natural affinity between them occur.

Currency - buy into the tribal vote by purchase of a token. These tokens are exchanged within the the tribe as barter. These tokens may have geographical constraints especially where competing currencies are aggressively defended.

ukraze

Many microbiologists murdered.
Baxter keeps sending out contaminated products.
Moshe claims on Republic radio.
Ukraine outbreak.