Category: The Dish

Jacob Sullum reports on its persistence:

“The black-market prices are definitely lower than recreational prices,” says Michael Elliott, executive director of Colorado’s Marijuana Industry Group. “The taxes are a big reason why, the new testing requirements, the packaging requirements, and basically this whole hurdle of the extraordinary expenses people have had to go through to open these businesses. Another reason is that the businesses have had limited supply.”

But, as prices fall, the black-market is going to shrink:

Kayvan Khalatbari, co-owner of Denver Relief, a medical dispensary that started serving recreational consumers in July, says after-tax prices in that market average $50 to $60 per eighth. He expects those prices to plummet by next year, however, as growers ramp up production and new suppliers enter the market. As of October 1, dispensaries no longer have to grow 70 percent of their inventory, and businesses dedicated to cultivation will be allowed.

“I would not be surprised, given the flood that’s going to happen, if we see $10 and $15 eighths by early next year,” Khalatbari says. “I would believe that. I could see ounces being sold for $50. I truly see that happening, because there is going to be so much competition [and] people are becoming so efficient in their production. They’re automating much more. We’re seeing best practices settle in. There’s less risk in operating because people are operating at a higher level. I think we’re going to become a very efficient industry very quickly. We’re going to see competition, and we’re going to see prices hit rock bottom early next year.” At that point, he predicts, the black market will dwindle away.

Criminologist Scott Bonn concludes that “the image of the evil genius serial killer is mostly a Hollywood invention”:

Hollywood has established a number of brilliant homicidal maniacs like John Doe in the acclaimed 1995 film Se7en. Doe personifies the stereotype of the evil genius serial killer who outsmarts law enforcement authorities, avoids justice and succeeds in his diabolical plan. … Real serial killers generally do not possess unique or exceptional intellectual skills. The reality is that most serial killers who have had their IQ tested score between borderline and above average intelligence. This is very consistent with the general population. Contrary to mythology, it is not high intelligence that makes serial killers successful. Instead, it is obsession, meticulous planning and a cold-blooded, often psychopathic personality that enable serial killers to operate over long periods of time without detection.

One famous example of less-than-brilliant planning:

David Berkowitz is one of the most infamous serial killers of all time, though he is more commonly referred to as the Son of Sam. In the 1970’s, the Son of Sam terrorized the people of New York City, murdering six people and prompting a police operation known as Operation Omega, comprised of 200 detectives trying to stop him before he could kill again.

So how did they finally catch the infamous murderer? A parking ticket. Berkowitz had parked his car in front of a fire hydrant before heading off to get his murder on, and a woman witnessed him tearing up the parking ticket and later reported it to the police. Just think about the fact that the Son of Sam may very well never have been caught were it not for his easily avoidable mistake of parking in front of a fire hydrant.

(Photo of Berkowitz via Wiki)

Brian Merchant flags a study claiming that salt degradation “has caused tens of billions of dollars worth of damage, mars an area of cropland the size of Manhattan every week, and has hit nearly one-fifth of the world’s farmland so far”:

“Salts have damaging effects whether they are in excess amounts in the human body or in agricultural lands,” Manzoor Qadir, the lead author of an eye-opening new study on the subject, published by the United Nations’ Institute for Water, Environment and Health, told me in an email conversation. “If salt degradation goes on unchecked, more and more land will be highly degraded leading to wasteland,” he said. “Restoring such lands will not be economically feasible at all.”

Alison Bruzek provides more details:

Rainfall and irrigation systems designed for lots of drainage usually keep salt from building up in the soil. But as climate patterns shift and more farmers irrigate without sufficient drainage, evaporated salt is crusting on top dirt clumps around the world — especially in places like Central Asia. Normally, soil has anywhere from zero to 175 milligrams of salt per liter. Once that level exceeds 3,500 milligrams per liter, it’s next to impossible to grow anything, including major crops like corn, beans, rice, sugarcane and cotton. …

No one had really studied the economic impacts of salt-damaged land, says Qadir. But now that the UN Food and Agriculture Organization has projected that we need to produce 70 percent more food by 2050, the salinity problem is becoming a much higher priority issue. On the 1-to-10 scale of land sustainability problems, “erosion is an 8 … high-saline soils is a 2 problem,” Chuck Benbrook, research professor at the Center for Sustaining Agriculture and Natural Resources at Washington State University, tells The Salt in an email.

https://twitter.com/Paste_Design/status/526825773991079936

Hillary Kelly muses on an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum:

Mourning clothes—along with other facets of grief—were highly regimented in Victorian England and nineteenth-century America. As the curator’s note explains, “Mourning through sartorial display, a duty chiefly assumed by women, followed a series of stages marked by changes in fabrics and colors.” Exacting codes defined which fabrics and colors were acceptable at particular stages of grief: For the first months after a death, only “lusterless” black dresses were acceptable. As time passed—and for a widow one expected to wear mourning clothes for a full two years—the strictures slowly loosened, and the severity of the attire deceased.

The loss of such traditions has its drawbacks:

The mourning period is a nebulous and tricky thing to navigate in modern life. The boyfriend of a very close friend died in an accident the summer after our freshman year of college. The most agonizing conversations I remember having with her revolved around the expectations others placed on her grief rather than the death itself: When would she “get over it”? How long was she going to remain single? Did she ever think she’d get married? When she began dating another person, she confronted all kinds of unkind judgment from those who thought she’d “moved on” too quickly and wondered (yes, out loud) if she’d really loved the boyfriend who had died.

Would mourning clothes have helped her or hindered her? So often we think of the strictures of the Victorians as constraining, but there is a sense in which their very formal propriety feels appropriate and even comforting. If you exclude certain religious traditions—sitting shiva, for example—in which the processes immediately following death are heavily prescribed and demand an explicit and relatively lengthy interruption of everyday life, modern grief is missing a sense of etiquette and deliberateness—a set of outward signs for the bereaved to use as signals.

Sarah Varney covers Mississippi’s experience with Obamacare:

“There are wide swaths of Mississippi where the Affordable Care Act is not a reality,” Conner Reeves, who led Obamacare enrollment at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, told me when we met in the state capital of Jackson. Of the nearly 300,000 people who could have gained coverage in Mississippi in the first year of enrollment, just 61,494—some 20 percent—did so. When all was said and done, Mississippi would be the only state in the union where the percentage of uninsured residents has gone up, not down.

Why has the law been such a flop in a state that had so much to gain from it? When I traveled across Mississippi this summer, from Delta towns to the Tennessee border to the Piney Woods to the Gulf Coast, what I found was a series of cascading problems: bumbling errors and misinformation; ignorance and disorganization; a haunting racial divide; and, above all, the unyielding ideological imperative of conservative politics. This, I found, was a story about the Tea Party and its influence over a state Republican Party in transition, where a public feud between Governor Phil Bryant and the elected insurance commissioner forced the state to shut down its own insurance marketplace, even as the Obama administration in Washington refused to step into the fray. By the time the federal government offered the required coverage on its balky HealthCare.gov website, 70 percent of Mississippians confessed they knew almost nothing about it.

Beutler finds it “all the more galling when you recognize that, for the time being at least, Mississippi is actually paying for this outcome”:

For the next couple years, the Medicaid expansion would cost Mississippi $0. … The combined effects of non-expansion are striking. State spending on Medicaid will grow faster next year in states that declined the expansion than in states that accepted it. As Kevin Drum wrote for Mother Jones on Monday, non-expansion states “actually prefer spending more money if the alternative is spending less but helping their own poor with medical coverage.”