... I was giving them away

I personally don’t endorse the use of marijuana, probably because of my strict upbringing and the negative impacts I’ve seen it had on some people’s lives. But, I also know plenty of people that use it occasionally with no worse effects than alcohol.

I’ve also sat through a day of District Court in Durham, NC and watched as at least 3 out of 4 cases were charges of less than an ounce of marijuana. These cases were entirely made up of low-income black males. These men were being put through the system and given a record for the same charges I’ve seen every white person I know get expunged from their records. This is institutional racism.

I’m sure no one intends for this disparity to happen, but when the actual enforcement of a law has such a disparity between black and white there is a structural bias. This needs to change.

It’s interesting to see that the people at the Turbo Tax blog created the above graphic highlighting the tax benefits of legalizing and taxing marijuana. I’m mostly curious though at what effect this would have on preventing young black males from entering the jail system and creating cycles of poverty. I realize this blog post comes across as patriarchal, but shouldn’t everyone be able to have such a charge expunged from their record, and not just those that can afford a lawyer?

via Turbo Tax

Aug 06

My New HD

I just purchased and installed in my old macbook a new 500gb Seagate Solid State Hybrid Drive. It’s mostly a standard HDD but it also contains 4gb of solid state flash storage, which if I understand it correctly kind of acts like additional RAM. In addition to that it’s a 72000 RPM drive with 32mb of cache.

This drive has made a big improvement in my computers performance. Start-up is faster, and everything seems snappier. Most importantly though is that Spotlight search is lightning fast now. I rely on Spotlight to find files because I’m a bit of a hoarder and don’t use folders all that well for projects. Mostly because many of the projects I do bleed into one another, so that .pdf of a study of what makes a neighborhood walkable doesn’t belong in just one folder.

Anyway, if you’re in the market for a new hard drive, I highly recommend the Seagate Momentus® XT Solid State Hybrid Drive. It’s made a huge difference in my computer performance.

Aug 03

“Fossil Fuel Subsidies Are 12 Times Support for Renewables” —

Governments last year gave $43 billion to $46 billion in support of renewable energy compared to $557 billion spent to subsidize fossil fuels in 2008. In many cases I believe the public’s perception of subsidies is skewed like this. Though I had no idea subsidies skewed so far towards fossil fuels.

As a nation in the midst of a recession we need to be subsidizing green technology so as to create jobs in a burgeoning new industry. If we don’t, China will, and we’ll lose out on thousands of good jobs.

Click the Bloomberg link to read the full story on the report Bloomberg New Energy Finance did.

Bloomberg via Inhabitat

Aug 02

szymon:

I love the idea. Stoplight indicator by Damjan Stanković

This will be perfect for wannabe dragsters. Can’t wait for the sound of squealing wheels.