The article has so little to do with ancient history it's staggering. It's the "conceptual drought modelling" equivalent of a woodworker trying to drum up attention for his range of kitchen cabinets by saying "they're the kinds of cabinet I think Justin Bieber would like".
Some guy in a fedora and freebsd t-shirt hanging around sleazy bars downtown waiting for his flipped FBI agent to come around and drop him some new juicy goss on the latest... TF2 hat update? Sounds legit
You have some very strange and unfounded beliefs on all this.
There is no evidence to suggest medical costs will increase as a result of legalisation. In every instance of drug legalisation or decriminalisation recorded, drug use has spiked in the short term and then fallen back down to either pre-change levels, or actually seen a long-term drop. Deaths and serious illnesses will decrease massively as a result of increased ability to provide care and safe usage conditions for drug users, as well as controlling drug quality and dosage.
You'll get a whole bunch of people out of the overcrowded and SUPREMELY expensive prison system. It's not just the cells and food while they're there, it's the lost productivity from that person while they're in prison, and it's the exorbitant administrative cost of arresting, prosecuting, and imprisoning a citizen.
Why would medicare providers test you for legal drug use when healthcare costs do not scale for soft drink consumption, obesity, smoking, exercise, or any one of a thousand legal things that could affect your health? Should office workers pay more for medical care considering the adverse health effects of their living conditions?
I can't respond to any of the rest of your post because I didn't really understand it. That might be my fault, I apologise that I failed to comprehend it. I took a look at some of your other posts on this matter and it doesn't look like a once off so we may be coming at this from fundamentally incommunicable positions.
I built this free, online, no-registration tool to practise verb conjugations in French, Latin, and Italian. It is designed to replace pen-and-paper conjugation tables and to track your performance.
It is a work in progress (I want to expand to German and maybe Spanish) but the system is pretty much done, all it's missing is a few tweaks to the language sets (to better reflect current teaching practices) and some extra features for greater customisation. I also intend to add more detailed statistics tracking, such as your performance for specific verbs.
This is a one-man project and I would love any and all feedback, not just on the implementation but on the concept as well. To my mind it is a study aid for students and independent learners - if you have thoughts on why you would or wouldn't use it over the long term, I'd love to hear them.
One thing that really sucks still is the conversion of PDFs (for e.g. journal articles) into formats suitable for e-ink readers. I've tinkered with its heuristic processing and regex formatting, but I'd never considered manually touching up the final .epub as it comes. If their ebook editor is any good I might start reading journal articles again.
The burden of that argument is that you'd never be able to 'own' photos of strangers or anybody who doesn't sign a release, or stranger's pets, or any piece of art or architecture, because the scene or object that gives the photos its essence was actually created largely by other people. You have to tie photo ownership to the physical act of taking them, and this one was not taken by him. He hadn't even intended to give the monkey his camera or tried to arrange for it - it was pure fluke, unless you count the agency of the monkey. Which here almost seems more legitimate.
I've been dreaming of doing this for years and I've been considering doing something quite similar to what you're talking about for my next project. The only problem, as another poster said, was investment. I was planning on doing a web-based text-based game, which would obviously turn a lot of people off ("that's not a real game!") but open it up to greater variation and modularity.
I've used numbeo before and I had a look at this, comparing about 10 or so different cities. The format and function is pretty much the same and I use them both for the same purpose -- a simple comparison of aggregate data on different cities using the same metric. I moved to Rome a year ago and in another year I'll be moving to some German-speaking country, so I'm comparing different cities now. It's not important to me whether the rental estimates are 100% correct or slightly high/low, what's important is that the data is collected the same way for both cities under comparison. I want a broader view to narrow the search, and then I will go elsewhere to get more accurate info -- apartment searches in the respective cities, for example. If you get enough data from varied enough sources to minimise biases (e.g. expats might live in the more expensive parts of the city and not know the local tricks, or most of your contributors might only be from a certain subset of expats) then I don't need to know the comparison of a hundred different types of little things because I can get more exact information elsewhere. What I'd recommend doing instead of narrowing your data selection is to actually broaden the scope of your comparison -- compare aggregated measures of quality of life, average temperatures/rainfall, hours of sunlight per day, number of bars or gyms per capita, etc. If I know what city I'm looking at, I can easily find a list of apartments for rent and get direct information that way. What I can't do as easily is compare the general perspective of life satisfaction or public transport penetration, crime stats, etc.