Tag: Premium

Residents are smoking a lot of pot:

Six months into marijuana legalization, the Colorado Department of Revenue has issued a new report outlining findings about the size of the newly legal market. It turns out that the demand for marijuana far exceeds earlier estimates; according to the report, statewide demand is at a whopping 121.4 tons per year. That’s 31 percent higher than a previous Department of Revenue estimate and 89 percent higher than an oft-cited study by the Colorado Futures Center. And while the vast majority of the increase is the result of resident smokers consuming more than expected, the growth of the retail market — particularly among tourists — is a promising sign for the success of legalization.

Colorado makes substantially more money from taxes on recreational marijuana than medical marijuana. So the success of recreational legalization can be measured by the state’s ability to make loads of money from pot taxes. For advocates, Colorado (so far) appears to be a first victory and may become proof of concept. If Colorado is able to rake in a substantial amount of tax revenue, legalization advocates’ pitches to legislatures in Oregon, Massachusetts and Alaska become that much easier.

Niraj Chokshi looks at who is toking up exactly:

Adult residents either smoke pot (relatively) few times a month or nearly every day—there are few in the middle. More than half of all adult resident users consume the drug in some form fewer than six times a month. (More than 1 in 4 consume less than once a month.) At the same time, about 1 in 5 users are near or at daily consumption. While those roughly daily users account for just a fifth of the user population, they consume fully two thirds of the product.

Jon Walker highlights other details:

A particularly interesting finding is where most of the new retail consumers are coming from. Because of the low tax rate on medical marijuana and greater number of medical marijuana stores, most existing patients are not switching their buying outlets for now.

The report finds, “Using the latest retail marijuana tax statistics from the Department of Revenue, we also found that conversions from medical to retail consumption is relatively low. Instead, retail supply of marijuana is growing, while medical marijuana is relatively constant. This may indicate that medical consumers would rather pay the medical registration fees as opposed to the higher tax rates, or that there are currently relatively few retail outlets compared to medical centers. Therefore, the retail demand is derived primarily from out-of-state visitors and from consumers who previously purchased from the Colorado black and gray markets.”

For example, in Denver it is estimated that 44 percent of recreational marijuana sales are to visitors and the rate is even higher in some ski towns. Clearly, many people are coming the Colorado to enjoy the new freedom.

Laverne Cox recently became the first openly transgender woman to receive an Emmy nod. Jos Truitt applauds the news:

Cox is certainly deserving of the nomination: she brings a depth and humanity to the role that is more than what’s in the script. Sophia’s interactions with her wife and fight to get the medical care she needed were powerful moments, and it’s fantastic to see the Emmys take notice.

Cox’s celebrity has been met with some bigoted responses. So, given the occasional fool in the media, like Kevin D Williamson who still thinks that Cox’s gender should be up for debate, it’s nice to see the Emmys committee underscore that Cox is a woman nominated as an actress, full stop.

Parker Molloy considers how far the film industry has come:

In the early 1980s, Caroline Cossey tried to follow up what was at the time a successful modeling career by taking on some acting work. After appearing as an uncredited featured extra in the 1981 James Bond movie For Your Eyes Only, Cossey was outed by the tabloid News of the World when they ran a headline proclaiming “Bond Girl Was Born a Boy.” As she later recounted, the experience not only destroyed her career, but nearly drove her to suicide.

What we’re seeing now is a world in which being transgender is not necessarily the career-killer it once was. These gains – of Laverne Cox scooping an Emmy nomination, Candis Cayne appearing on shows like Elementary and Dirty, Sexy Money, and Jamie Clayton finding herself cast in a recurring role in an upcoming TV show—may be small, but they are a true sign of progress.

Meanwhile, Esther Breger wonders what the full field of nominations says about TV today:

Despite all the silliness, [yesterday] morning’s nominations – the glaring omissions and the boring deja vu – do indicate a larger cultural shift. When the Emmys overlooked The Sopranos‘ first season in 1999, awarding best drama to David E. Kelley’s campy legal procedural, The Practice, instead, the awards show was widely derided for being out of touch, unwilling to recognize cable shows that seemed unfamiliar. Fifteen years later, HBO is racking up 99 nominations, more than any other channel.

But just as shows like The Practice once crowded out innovative shows, the dominance of HBO and HBO-lite can overshadow the actually exciting TV being made today, across all channels. “Quality television is now platform-agnostic,” the TV Academy’s chief said [yesterday] morning, referring to services like Netflix. And he’s right. The defining character of this post-“Golden Age” TV era is plenty; cable, broadcast, and online streaming services all have brilliant shows and boring ones – and the great ones are as likely to look like pulpy fluff as gritty crime drama. Some of them will even have clones.

Cameron Tung believes that former is less psychologically involving than the latter:

In 2006, researchers at the University of Guelph published a paper in which they concluded that a specific type of casino design was best for stoking people’s desire to gamble.The study’s authors collected the emotional and psychological responses of subjects to the “playground” model of casinos – distinguished by warm colors, “the presence of accessible green space and moving water” – and the Friedman-design model, in which the “gambling equipment should be the dominant decorative feature in a casino, and décor should be used only to highlight and enhance the equipment layout.”

The researchers determined that the playground model elicited higher responses of pleasure as well as mental restoration, a quality they found to be linked to a person’s willingness to gamble. Appearing to validate these conclusions are the financial reports of the Roger Thomas-designed Bellagio and Wynn hotel-casinos in Las Vegas, which contain extreme archetypes of the playground-style gaming floor and have trounced many of their Friedman-style competitors. One of the authors of the University of Guelph study, Karen Finlay, told the New Yorker that “gamblers in a playground casino will stay longer, feel better, and bet more. Although they come away with bigger losses, they’re more likely to return.”

In other words, it’s possible that many gamblers are not actually seeking the most convenient or efficient place to win money, but the most comfortable space in which to lose it.

Freddie responds to Danielle Kurtzleben on the supposed shortage of workers trained in science, technology, engineering, and math:

[I]t’s very frustrating that Kurtzleben, and essentially our entire elite policy media, doesn’t go a step further: trying to predict what particular set of discrete and limited skills will be useful in the future is a mug’s game. It’s a fundamentally risky way for an individual to behave, and for policy decisions that are supposed to be based on the most good for the most people, it’s incoherent strategy.

Jobs in petrochemical engineering have been exploding, because of a largely-unpredictable boom in American fossil fuel reserves. Becoming a contracting engineer for a construction firm was a great idea in 1999, but by 2005, was a very risky proposition. Going to law school was the epitome of mercenary self-interest until, suddenly, it was the epitome of laughable, deluded foolishness. Teaching kids how to code Python now, when they’ll be hitting the job market 20 years from now, is ludicrous, especially in a world where there’s every reason to think that tech firms will continue to have very low employee to market cap ratios and where computers might take over the bulk of coding. Individuals can navigate the markets, if they’re smart, privileged, and lucky. But great masses of people never can. If you’re telling me that you know what every freshman should start studying in 2014 so that s/he can get a good job in 2019, I think you’re full of it.

Last weekend was a veritable bloodbath in Chicago, with 82 shootings and 14 deaths, including two armed teenagers shot by police. Tara Long takes a look at how the Windy City got to be so violent:

Noting that the Chicago PD has come under scrutiny for underreporting violent crime, Josh Voorhees adds that while the murder rate is falling overall, it remains terrifyingly high in the city’s toughest neighborhoods:

Even if a portion of the recent drop in crime numbers is due to a statistical sleight of hand, most observers agree that violent crime is indeed falling in Chicago, as it is in most major cities. But the overall numbers obscure the fact that Chicago is a city of neighborhoods, and much of the violence has been sequestered in poor, predominantly black areas of the city where gang violence goes largely unnoticed unless it comes in bunches, as it did this past weekend. After crunching the homicide numbers for 2000 through 2010, Yale University sociologist Andrew Papachristos found that the murder rate was about 3.1 per 100,000 residents living in the Northwest side’s Jefferson Park. Less than 10 miles away in West Garfield Park, the rate was more than 20 times that, a staggering 64 per 100,000, or roughly in line with the casualty rate for civilians in Iraq at the height of the last war. When people describe parts of Chicago as urban war zones, it is not hyperbole.

Beutler isn’t impressed with the details of Boehner’s lawsuit against Obama, which came out yesterday:

It turns out Obama’s vast and indisputable misconduct is limited to one act of enforcement discretion: his decision to delay implementation of an Affordable Care Act’s requirement (one Republicans despise) that businesses with more than 50 employees provide their workers health insurance or pay a penalty. …

[T]he GOP has spent weeks and weeks accusing Obama of unbridled lawlessness, when they didn’t really have the goods. That it unfolded against a backdrop of Republicans demanding Obama fix a child-migrant crisis at the border without providing him the legislative means to do so only underscores the point. Boehner desperately wants to avoid getting ensnared in another maximalist showdown with Obama, just to satisfy the hardliners in his conference. Some of them want to impeach a president they’ve dubbed an outlaw. So he set out to address their grievances in a different way. But in so doing, he actually just refuted them.

Drum catches on to the Speaker’s game:

Boehner is suing over a provision of the law that’s been delayed until 2016. But a lawsuit like this takes a while.

It’ll take a while to file the documents, and then a while longer to get on the calendar of a district court. Then another while for a hearing and a ruling, and then yet another while for an appeal. Then yet another while if the White House asks for an en banc review. And then finally yet another while as it goes up to the Supreme Court.

How long altogether? I’d guess a minimum of a year and a half, and probably more like two years. So the best case for conservatives is that the Supreme Court takes it up in late 2015. By the time they’re ready to rule, it’s moot because the mandate has taken effect and Obama is out of office.

Boehner is smart enough to know all this perfectly well. In other words, he knows that this is purely a symbolic gesture. Not only does Obama not really care much about it, but it’s vanishingly unlikely that the Supreme Court will ever hear the case. That makes it an almost perfect piece of theater. Neither side cares much, and it will never be decided. Boehner gets to say he’s doing something, Obama gets some mileage out of mocking him, and that’s it. The real-world impact is literally zero.

But imagining that the lawsuit goes forward, Andrew Prokop considers “what will happen if the courts decide that the House does in fact have standing to sue the president”:

Overall, the power of the presidency would be weakened, and the power of Congress and especially the courts would be strengthened. In recent decades, conservatives have tended to be suspicious of loosening standing requirements, and have argued instead for restraining the judicial role. Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in a Supreme Court dissent last year that the consequences of loosening standing requirements could be vast. … But overall, those who think the president has grown too powerful and unchecked in recent years would probably be happy if the courts placed a new check on executive power. A favorable ruling for Boehner would likely make life somewhat more difficult for any president in power. For instance, one could imagine a Democratic Congress suing a Republican president for improperly implementing Obamacare, or for refusing to enforce environmental laws.

A reader gets a conversation going:

I just finished your Deep Dish podcast with Matthew Vines, and found it quite enlightening. More than anything, I found your enunciation of your Catholicism and its comparison to Matthew’s reformed Protestantism instructive in how I read the Dish and your response to evangelical Christianity.

As someone who is also a Presbyterian like Vines, I found his discussion with you on biblical inerrancy very helpful to the those uninitiated in the reformed/Calvinist traditions. While I am not the target audience of his book (I have oscillated between Mainline and conservative Presbyterianism), I unfortunately do not think his argument will get the job done. Remember, these are folks who split the denomination (in a most painful way) over Paul’s epistles and the issue of women’s ordination, preaching, and even Sunday school teaching.  While I am sympathetic to his cultural relativistic argument regarding Paul and his understanding of same-sex relationships, more conservative Christians will only see this as the camel sneaking further into the tent and the overall erosion of biblical authority.

On your ongoing dissents regarding the biblical view of marriage, I implore you and your readers to pick up Tim Keller’s book The Meaning of Marriage. Like Vines said, I think this book does a good job of the importance of marriage in modern society as well as the biblical rationale and goals of marriage. The book changed the way I look at my own marriage and motivations.

Your dissents also argue that “if only those churches were more accepting, they would have millennials rushing to the pews.” Bull. Shit.

As we are expecting our first child, my wife and I joined a new PC USA Church to ensure our son was raised in the same environment and community I was. The church just signed off on gay marriage, has allowed ordination of gay pastors for years but, despite this, still has a median age of 82 and an average hair hue somewhere between ivory and blue. There is no evident impending wave of millennials now that the last social/cultural barrier of marriage equality has been removed. If young people want to support these institutions that are opening their doors as broadly as possible to all people, from all walks, they can start by showing up on Sunday – but it simply is not happening.

I feel and fear the evangelicals may be right: liberalizing theology will not reinvigorate the church with young faces and energy; it will simply hasten the downward spiral of mainline Protestantism as people leave for more conservative mega churches/lightshows or the faith altogether. At least, that’s the view from my pew.

The reader, piggybacking on another thread, adds a “bonus: my never more relevant black beagle mutt, Kirk”:

My previous thoughts on the podcast are here. And don’t forget to check out Matthew’s remarkable new book, God and the Gay Christian: The Biblical Case in Support of Same-Sex Relationships.