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It's cool that artists can tag their work now and you can find them easily online. Unfortunately I wasn't paying enough attention when I took the pictures and I didn't get all their links.
"One year of legal pot sales and California doesn’t have the bustling industry it expected. Here’s why"
"But as the first year of licensed sales comes to a close, California’s legal market hasn’t performed as state officials and the cannabis industry had hoped. Retailers and growers say they’ve been stunted by complex regulations, high taxes and decisions by most cities to ban cannabis shops. At the same time, many residents are going to city halls and courts to fight pot businesses they see as nuisances, and police chiefs are raising concerns about crime triggered by the marijuana trade."
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Chart from LA Times article |
"With nearly a tenth of the population of California, that state has more licensed cannabis shops — 601. On a per capita basis, Alaska has also approved more pot shop licenses than California, — 94 so far. The state imposes a tax on cultivation, but there is no retail excise tax on pot."First, Alaska approved pot in 2014, it went into effect in February 2015 and the first pot shop opened in October 2016.
"We have spent more money in Afghanistan than we did in the Marshall Plan and continue to spend more than $40 billion each year."The Marshall Plan helped Western Europe rebuild after the destruction of WW II. It help lift their economy so Western Europe could help us defend against the Soviet Union as the Cold War ramped up and so they could buy American products, which helped repay what we spent.
"The U.S. military is the largest institutional consumer of oil in the world. Every year, our armed forces consume more than 100 million barrels of oil to power ships, vehicles, aircraft, and ground operations—enough for over 4 million trips around the Earth, assuming 25 mpg."According to Wired, $40 billion a year is only 2/3 of what's needed to rebuild our infrastructure.
" $1 trillion sounds great, but it ain't enough, not if the country wants to keeping fixing roads ten years down the line. According a US Department of Transportation report, just maintaining current highways and bridges through 2030 will cost a cool $65.3 billion—per year. That’s being conservative."
SUMMARY*I say 'unleashed' because the US forces didn't kill all these civilians, but the wars we've engaged in have.
- Over 480,000 have died due to direct war violence, and several times as many indirectly
- Over 244,000 civilians have been killed as a result of the fighting
- 21 million — the number of war refugees and displaced persons
- The US federal price tag for the post-9/11 wars is over $5.9 trillion dollars
- The US government is conducting counterterror activities in 76 countries
READ ALL FINDINGS
- The wars have been accompanied by violations of human rights and civil liberties, in the US and abroad
An invasion to overthrow Saddam Hussein would likely cost the United States about $50 billion, though it could plausibly range from $25 billion to $75 billion or so, with likely annual U.S. costs of maintaining order in Iraq ranging from $5 billion to $20 billion for a number of years thereafter. The latter costs of winning the peace, and associated wear and tear on American military personnel, may actually turn out to be a greater concern than the one-time cost of winning the war.If only it had been so 'cheap.'
"The case of Joel Chandler Harris is particularly relevant in this regard. A lifelong southerner and an Atlanta newspaper editor (and incidentally a friend of Twain’s), Harris was probably as enlightened as a white person could be in his time and place. If you read his Uncle Remus stories, you’ll see that to Harris, Uncle Remus was a hero. He’s certainly the smartest and kindest person, black or white, in the narrative that frames the folk tales collected by the author from former slaves.He's not as kind to Disney's Song of the South, from which this clip was taken.
More important, had Harris not collected those folktales, we almost surely would have missed much of a vast trove of oral storytelling (“our most precious piece of stolen goods,” Twain called them—so that’s what we were getting away with!), because before Harris, no one else had the sense to realize how wonderful those stories were, much less that they should be recorded for posterity. Whatever sins he may have been guilty of, Harris knew at least that much. James Weldon Johnson called the 185 stories published by Harris 'the greatest body of folklore America has produced.'”