Saturday, March 2, 2013
My Life As A Professional Cannabis Baker
I was reluctant because I knew that if I was going to do it, I had to go all out. I couldn't hide it from my family, and I didn't want to hide it from my family. I've been around marijuana and smoking for years, but I kept it private. I was going to step out of a closet in a way, and that was something I struggled with for a while. It took a little bit of courage. But my family was very supportive.
As soon as my daughter was old enough that I had a little more time, I started baking with marijuana, alongside my friend. At first, I would bake huge batches, but sometimes my cookies could sit around for weeks before they went anywhere. I knew I could develop a niche for myself by using fresh, quality ingredients (like freshly squeezed organic lemons from my mom's garden). Now I bake everything to order and deliver the goods fresh to a handful of medical marijuana clubs in my neighborhood.
For now, I sell only sweets. I have five cookies and bars: peanut butter oatmeal cookies, snickerdoodle cookies, lemon bars, brownies, and peanut butter brownies. The cakes are red velvet with cream cheese glaze cake, triple chocolate cake, carrot cake, lemon cake, and ginger cake. I just finalized a recipe for a Rice Krispie treat, and people love it, so I'll add that to the menu soon.
I make extractions using both butter and oil, so that I can have flexibility, depending on the recipe. The psychoactive ingredient in marijuana is THC, and that's what's getting into the butter and the oil when I do the extraction. Eating these is different than smoking pot, because the THC gets into your blood stream through your digestive system, which means it takes a little bit longer to hit you. When it does, you get an all-body high and it's very relaxing.
The oil I make takes nearly 24 hours all said and done, and I do it in a Crock-Pot — it's three cycles of heating on low for three hours, and then cooling for nine hours. The butter requires a little more babysitting. I use marijuana trim, which are the plant's small leaves and stems that the dispensaries trim away from the buds. I boil the trim in water first, because butter can't get hot enough on its own. After I add the butter, it's the same heating and cooling process as the oil on the stovetop. When the process is done, I strain out the leaves and let the let the mixture cool, allowing the butter to separate from the water. (...)
I donate my edibles to medical marijuana clubs for a recommended donation price to recoup my cost and be reimbursed for my time. To be a member and buy goods at a club, you need a recommendation from a doctor, which has to be renewed annually. The clubs offer my baked goods to their members for another recommended price, which is often double what they give me for them. My recommended donation is $5 or $6 for a package of three cookies; the members donate $10 or $12 for that same package. Baking edibles has been my only source of income for the last three years, but it took some time to build up the business. I like to barter as much as I can to get the cannabis. I need nearly half a pound of trim to make 6 pounds of butter or 10 cups of oil, and I was spending like $300 a pound for trim. Now I bake marijuana edibles in exchange for the marijuana. So yeah, I bake a lot.
These days, I bake 20 to 30 hours per week, and I can make maybe 15 dozen pastries. At my busiest, I was working 11-hour days. My husband and my mom had to help. Honestly, I'm not sure if I want to get back to that point. I'd like to find a happy medium.
Image by Joshua Ballinger
Coal Is History. Or Is It?
Taking the place of coal will be clean-burning natural gas and clean, green solar and wind power.
Glancing at the headlines you might really think that this fantasy was coming to pass.
Why just today the Sierra Club is out with an announcement that its Beyond Coal campaign is halfway to its goal of shutting down a third of U.S. coal plants. Wow!
With 12,000 megawatts of new wind power last year and 30% growth in solar power, U.S. carbon dioxide emissions fell 3.7% in 2012.
President Obama in his State of the Union address said that he would “direct my cabinet to come up with executive actions we can take, now and in the future, to reduce pollution, prepare our communities for the consequences of climate change, and speed the transition to more sustainable sources of energy” — most likely by continuing to tighten emissions controls, regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant and effectively banning any new coal-fired power plants.
Earlier this week the giant power utility AEP announced that, in a settlement with the EPA and several states, it was shuttering three coal-fired plants in Indiana, Ohio and Kentucky with 2,000 megawatts of generation capacity. AEP will also be investing $5 billion to install new emissions reduction technology at some of its other coal plants. And to help replace the coal power it will build 200 mw of wind and solar installations. The Sierra Club called it a “major victory.”
The story sounds even better at the TennesseeValley Authority, which in 2012 reduced its coal consumption by 16% to about 30 million tons. It’s in the midst of retiring 2,000 mw of coal capacity by 2017. Last year it completed a new 1,000 mw gas-fired plant in Tennessee to help replace the four coal units retired at the same site. For the first time in memory TVA got less than half of its power from coal.
Thanks to natural gas prices (brought about by the boom in fracking) hitting a low of $1.85 per MMBtu last April, in 2012 generators switched a bunch of their electricity generation from coal to natural gas. Nationwide that switching amounted to an uptick of some 8 billion cubic feet a day of gas consumption, offsetting millions of tons of coal.
As a result, coal’s contribution to nationwide power generation fell to 37% in 2012 down from 49% in 2007. That’s a precipitous drop for an industry that operates on such a massive scale. Natural gas accounts for 30% of power generation fuel.
So we’re on our way to getting rid of coal, right?
Not at all.
by Christopher Helman, Forbes | Read more:
Photo: Wikipedia
The Dangerous Logic of the Bradley Manning Case
[ed. See also: Bradley Manning: the face of heroism]
After 1,000 days in pretrial detention, Private Bradley Manning yesterday offered a modified guilty plea for passing classified materials to WikiLeaks. But his case is far from over—not for Manning, and not for the rest of the country. To understand what is still at stake, consider an exchange that took place in a military courtroom in Maryland in January.
The judge, Col. Denise Lind, asked the prosecutors a brief but revealing question: Would you have pressed the same charges if Manning had given the documents not to WikiLeaks but directly to the New York Times?
The prosecutor’s answer was simple: “Yes Ma'am.”
The question was crisp and meaningful, not courtroom banter. The answer, in turn, was dead serious. I should know. I was the expert witness whose prospective testimony they were debating. The judge will apparently allow my testimony, so if the prosecution decides to pursue the more serious charges to which Manning did not plead guilty, I will explain at trial why someone in Manning's shoes in 2010 would have thought of WikiLeaks as a small, hard-hitting, new media journalism outfit—a journalistic “Little Engine that Could” that, for purposes of press freedom, was no different from the New York Times. The prosecutor's “Yes Ma'am,” essentially conceded that core point of my testimony in order to keep it out of the trial. That's not a concession any lawyer makes lightly.
But that “Yes Ma'am” does something else: It makes the Manning prosecution a clear and present danger to journalism in the national security arena. The guilty plea Manning offered could subject him to twenty years in prison—more than enough to deter future whistleblowers. But the prosecutors seem bent on using this case to push a novel and aggressive interpretation of the law that would arm the government with a much bigger stick to prosecute vaguely-defined national security leaks, a big stick that could threaten not just members of the military, but civilians too.
A country's constitutional culture is made up of the stories we tell each other about the kind of nation we are. When we tell ourselves how strong our commitment to free speech is, we grit our teeth and tell of Nazis marching through Skokie. And when we think of how much we value our watchdog press, we tell the story of Daniel Ellsberg. Decades later, we sometimes forget that Ellsberg was prosecuted, smeared, and harassed. Instead, we express pride in a man's willingness to brave the odds, a newspaper’s willingness to take the risk of publishing, and a Supreme Court’s ability to tell an overbearing White House that no, you cannot shut up your opponents.
Whistleblowers play a critical constitutional role in our system of government, particularly in the area of national security. And they do so at great personal cost. The executive branch has enormous powers over national security and the exercise of that power is not fully transparent. Judicial doctrines like the “state secrets” doctrine allow an administration to limit judicial oversight. Congress’ oversight committees have also tended to leave the executive relatively free of constraints. Because the materials they see are classified, there remains little public oversight. Consider the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on the interrogation torture practices during the immediate post 9/11 years: Its six thousand pages, according to Senator Dianne Feinstein, are “one of the most significant oversight efforts in the history of the United States Senate.” But they are unavailable to the public.
Freedom of the press is anchored in our constitution because it reflects our fundamental belief that no institution can be its own watchdog. The government is full of well-intentioned and quite powerful inspectors general and similar internal accountability mechanisms. But like all big organizations, the national security branches of government include some people who aren't purely selfless public servants. Secrecy is necessary and justified in many cases. But as hard-earned experience has shown us time and again, it can be—and often is—used to cover up failure, avarice, or actions that simply will not survive that best of disinfectants, sunlight.
That’s where whistleblowers come in. They offer a pressure valve, constrained by the personal risk whistleblowers take, and fueled by whatever moral courage they can muster. Manning's statement in court yesterday showed that, at least in his motives, he was part of that long-respected tradition. But that’s also where the Manning prosecution comes in, too. The prosecution case seems designed, quite simply, to terrorize future national security whistleblowers. The charges against Manning are different from those that have been brought against other whistleblowers. “Aiding the enemy” is punishable by death. And although the prosecutors in this case are not seeking the death penalty against Manning, the precedent they are seeking to establish does not depend on the penalty. It establishes the act as a capital offense, regardless of whether prosecutors in their discretion decide to seek the death penalty in any particular case.
After 1,000 days in pretrial detention, Private Bradley Manning yesterday offered a modified guilty plea for passing classified materials to WikiLeaks. But his case is far from over—not for Manning, and not for the rest of the country. To understand what is still at stake, consider an exchange that took place in a military courtroom in Maryland in January.
The judge, Col. Denise Lind, asked the prosecutors a brief but revealing question: Would you have pressed the same charges if Manning had given the documents not to WikiLeaks but directly to the New York Times?The prosecutor’s answer was simple: “Yes Ma'am.”
The question was crisp and meaningful, not courtroom banter. The answer, in turn, was dead serious. I should know. I was the expert witness whose prospective testimony they were debating. The judge will apparently allow my testimony, so if the prosecution decides to pursue the more serious charges to which Manning did not plead guilty, I will explain at trial why someone in Manning's shoes in 2010 would have thought of WikiLeaks as a small, hard-hitting, new media journalism outfit—a journalistic “Little Engine that Could” that, for purposes of press freedom, was no different from the New York Times. The prosecutor's “Yes Ma'am,” essentially conceded that core point of my testimony in order to keep it out of the trial. That's not a concession any lawyer makes lightly.
But that “Yes Ma'am” does something else: It makes the Manning prosecution a clear and present danger to journalism in the national security arena. The guilty plea Manning offered could subject him to twenty years in prison—more than enough to deter future whistleblowers. But the prosecutors seem bent on using this case to push a novel and aggressive interpretation of the law that would arm the government with a much bigger stick to prosecute vaguely-defined national security leaks, a big stick that could threaten not just members of the military, but civilians too.
A country's constitutional culture is made up of the stories we tell each other about the kind of nation we are. When we tell ourselves how strong our commitment to free speech is, we grit our teeth and tell of Nazis marching through Skokie. And when we think of how much we value our watchdog press, we tell the story of Daniel Ellsberg. Decades later, we sometimes forget that Ellsberg was prosecuted, smeared, and harassed. Instead, we express pride in a man's willingness to brave the odds, a newspaper’s willingness to take the risk of publishing, and a Supreme Court’s ability to tell an overbearing White House that no, you cannot shut up your opponents.
Whistleblowers play a critical constitutional role in our system of government, particularly in the area of national security. And they do so at great personal cost. The executive branch has enormous powers over national security and the exercise of that power is not fully transparent. Judicial doctrines like the “state secrets” doctrine allow an administration to limit judicial oversight. Congress’ oversight committees have also tended to leave the executive relatively free of constraints. Because the materials they see are classified, there remains little public oversight. Consider the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on the interrogation torture practices during the immediate post 9/11 years: Its six thousand pages, according to Senator Dianne Feinstein, are “one of the most significant oversight efforts in the history of the United States Senate.” But they are unavailable to the public.
Freedom of the press is anchored in our constitution because it reflects our fundamental belief that no institution can be its own watchdog. The government is full of well-intentioned and quite powerful inspectors general and similar internal accountability mechanisms. But like all big organizations, the national security branches of government include some people who aren't purely selfless public servants. Secrecy is necessary and justified in many cases. But as hard-earned experience has shown us time and again, it can be—and often is—used to cover up failure, avarice, or actions that simply will not survive that best of disinfectants, sunlight.
That’s where whistleblowers come in. They offer a pressure valve, constrained by the personal risk whistleblowers take, and fueled by whatever moral courage they can muster. Manning's statement in court yesterday showed that, at least in his motives, he was part of that long-respected tradition. But that’s also where the Manning prosecution comes in, too. The prosecution case seems designed, quite simply, to terrorize future national security whistleblowers. The charges against Manning are different from those that have been brought against other whistleblowers. “Aiding the enemy” is punishable by death. And although the prosecutors in this case are not seeking the death penalty against Manning, the precedent they are seeking to establish does not depend on the penalty. It establishes the act as a capital offense, regardless of whether prosecutors in their discretion decide to seek the death penalty in any particular case.
by Yochai Benkler, The New Republic | Read more:
Photograph: Mark Wilson/Getty Images
The Strange Game Theory of the Sequester
[ed. I suspect the only thing that will get Washington's attention is Wall Street.]
Barring the biggest Washington miracle since Dolly Madison ferreted paintings out of a burning White House in 1812, sequestration—the automatic, across-the-board cuts to defense, discretionary and certain health programs totaling $85 billion in the 2013 fiscal year, and $1.176 trillion over the next decade—will take effect March 1. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that these cuts will cost 750,000 jobs in 2013, and reduce gross domestic product for 2013 by up to 0.5%. The effects stand to be disastrous: that much is clear. But when it comes to the politics of the sequester—and the gamesmanship involved—very little is as it seems.
The White House has over the past month consistently given the impression that the president’s hands are tied, that the sequester—if not averted—will simply ripple through affected government agencies with no exceptions, and that the cuts will quickly hit hard in every state, with the administration powerless to stop the madness.
This isn’t quite true.
There are in fact measures that the president’s Office of Management and Budget could unilaterally take to at least mitigate the effects of the sequester in the near term. (More on this later.) But the agency is unlikely to take those measures. Why? Because making clear the impact of forced austerity may offer the best hope for discrediting and reversing it.
When faced with closures of national parks, shutdowns of government offices, delays in needed services like the disposition of federal benefits, and long lines at the airport due to a reduction in TSA personnel and air traffic controllers, the thinking goes, perhaps Congress will get moving on a less painful solution. “If they’re trying to put pressure on Congress, they’ll want the cuts to be felt pretty quickly,” says budget expert Stan Collender of Qorvis Communications.
So we have a cock-eyed scenario where the White House may well want to ramp up economy-strangling cuts quickly, in an inversion of the normal order. Unlike the Hippocratic oath, the watchword here is “first, do some harm.”
The question is, will it work? Can Obama—provided he decides not to hold the sequester’s pain at bay—make the pain come fast enough? Unfortunately for this plan, the picayune clockwork of government is likely to get in the way. A combination of complex budget rules, sequestration limits, and the ordinary instincts of agency heads may slow down the effects of the sequester and leave the public with thee mistaken impression—for a crucial couple of months—that austerity doesn’t really bite.
The White House has over the past month consistently given the impression that the president’s hands are tied, that the sequester—if not averted—will simply ripple through affected government agencies with no exceptions, and that the cuts will quickly hit hard in every state, with the administration powerless to stop the madness.
This isn’t quite true.
There are in fact measures that the president’s Office of Management and Budget could unilaterally take to at least mitigate the effects of the sequester in the near term. (More on this later.) But the agency is unlikely to take those measures. Why? Because making clear the impact of forced austerity may offer the best hope for discrediting and reversing it.
When faced with closures of national parks, shutdowns of government offices, delays in needed services like the disposition of federal benefits, and long lines at the airport due to a reduction in TSA personnel and air traffic controllers, the thinking goes, perhaps Congress will get moving on a less painful solution. “If they’re trying to put pressure on Congress, they’ll want the cuts to be felt pretty quickly,” says budget expert Stan Collender of Qorvis Communications.
So we have a cock-eyed scenario where the White House may well want to ramp up economy-strangling cuts quickly, in an inversion of the normal order. Unlike the Hippocratic oath, the watchword here is “first, do some harm.”
The question is, will it work? Can Obama—provided he decides not to hold the sequester’s pain at bay—make the pain come fast enough? Unfortunately for this plan, the picayune clockwork of government is likely to get in the way. A combination of complex budget rules, sequestration limits, and the ordinary instincts of agency heads may slow down the effects of the sequester and leave the public with thee mistaken impression—for a crucial couple of months—that austerity doesn’t really bite.
by David Dayen, Pacific Standard | Read more:
Photo: Alex Brandon/AP via NPR
Friday, March 1, 2013
The Google Glass Featue No One is Talking About
Google Glass might change your life, but not in the way you think. There’s something else Google Glass makes possible that no one – no one – has talked about yet, and so today I’m writing this blog post to describe it.
To read the raving accounts of tech journalists who Google commissioned for demos, you’d think Glass was something between a jetpack and a magic wand: something so cool, so sleek, so irresistible that it must inevitably replace that fading, pitifully out-of-date device called the smartphone.Sergey Brin himself said as much yesterday, observing that it is “emasculating” to use a smartphone, “rubbing this featureless piece of glass.” His solution to that piece of glass, of course, is called Glass. And his solution to that emasculation is – well, as VentureBeat put it, “Sergey Brin calls smartphones ‘emasculating’ – but dorky Google Glass [is] A-OK.”
Like every other shiny innovation these days, Google Glass will live or die solely on the experience it creates for people. The immediate, most visible problem in the Glass experience is how dorky the user looks while wearing it. No one wants to be the only person in the bar dressed like a cyborg from a 1992 virtual-reality movie. It’s embarrassing. Early adopters will abandon Google Glass if they don’t sense the social approval they seek while wearing it.
Google seems to have calculated this already and recently announced a partnership with Warby Parker, known for its designer glasses favored by the all-important younger demographic. (My own proposal, posted the day before, jokingly suggested that Google look into monocles.)
Except for the awkward physical design, the experience of using Google Glass has won high praise from reviewers. Seeing your bitstreams floating in the air in front of you, it would seem, is an ecstatic experience. Weather! Directions! Social network requests! Email overload! All floating in front of you, never out of your sight! For people who delight in a deluge of digital distractions, this is much more exciting than a smartphone, which forces you back to the boring offline world, every so often, when you put the phone away. Glass promises never to do that. In fact, in a feat of considerable chutzpah, Google is attempting to pitch Glass as an antidote to distraction, since users don’t have to look down at a phone. Right, because now the distractions are all conveniently placed directly into your eyeball! (For a more accurate exploration of Glass-enabled distraction, see this darkly comic parody video. Even edgier is this parody – warning, some spicy language.)
As if all that wasn’t enough, Google Glass comes with yet another, even more important feature: lifebits, the ability to record video of the people, places, and events around you, at all times. Veteran readers will remember that I predicted this six years ago in my book Bit Literacy. From Chapter 13:
The life bitstream will raise new and important issues. Should it be socially acceptable, for example, to record a private conversation with a friend? How will anyone be sure they’re not being recorded, in public or private? … Corporations, police, even friends with ‘life recorders’ will capture the actions and utterances of everyone in sight, whether they like it or not.Today, finally, that future has arrived: a major company offering the ability to record your life, store it, and share it – all with a simple voice command.
And this is where our story takes a turn, toward a ramification that dwarfs every other issue raised so far on Google Glass. Yes, the glasses look dorky – Google will fix that. And sure, Glass forces users to be permanently plugged-in to Google’s digital world – that’s hardly a concern for the company or, for that matter, most users out there. No. The real issue raised by Google Glass, which will either cause the project to fail or create certain outcomes you may not want (which I’ll describe), has to do with the lifebits. Once again, it’s an issue of experience.
by Mark Hurst, Creative Good | Read more:
Image: Bloomberg via: Bizjournal
First Direct Brain-to-Brain Interface Between Two Animals
They even brain-linked two animals thousands of miles apart — one in Durham, North Carolina and one in Natal, Brazil.
The researchers think linking multiple brains could form the first “organic computer.”
“Our previous studies with brain-machine interfaces had convinced us that the brain was much more plastic than we had thought,” said Duke University Medical Center neurobiologist Miguel Nicolelis .
“In those experiments, the brain was able to adapt easily to accept input from devices outside the body and even learn how to process invisible infrared light generated by an artificial sensor.
“So, the question we asked was: if the brain could assimilate signals from artificial sensors, could it also assimilate information input from sensors from a different body?”
To find out, the researchers first trained pairs of rats to solve a simple problem — to press the correct lever when an indicator light above the lever switched on, to obtain a sip of water. They next connected the two animals’ brains via arrays of microelectrodes inserted into the area of the cortex that processes touch information.
by Kurzweil Accelerating Intelligence | Read more:
Image: Duke University
Strapped: My Eight Years With a Gun
I also hate and fear guns. The .22 in my pocket had one purpose: to take a life. That reality was never far from my mind, and the thought that I might have to kill an attacker—or that an attacker might somehow take the gun away and use it to kill me—was deeply sobering. Then and now, it seemed almost absurd that it had taken me several months of study, practice, and testing before the State of Kentucky saw fit to give me a driver’s license, yet it had taken all of 30 minutes to pick out, purchase, and take possession of the gun I now carried in my pocket. A gun is as destructive in its own way as any automobile.
While organizations such as the National Rifle Association may see themselves as protectors of the Second Amendment, what America’s gun culture has cost in wasted human life is impossible to deny, even putting aside the horrors of events like the Sandy Hook shootings. According to the Centers for Disease Control, in 2008, 31,593 Americans were killed with a firearm, including 12,179 people who were murdered and 18,223 people who used a gun to commit suicide. The figures include 2,037 children and teens murdered with a gun, and 748 kids who used guns to kill themselves. In ten states—Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Indiana, Michigan, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Virginia and Washington—you are now more likely to die from a gunshot wound than in an automobile accident, according to figures from the Violence Policy Center, an advocacy group.
And while gun rights organizations are quick to trumpet anecdotal stories of gun owners who’ve successfully used a handgun to defend themselves or stop a crime, those numbers pale alongside the number of gun deaths. According to the FBI, between 2005 and 2009, only 975 deaths caused by civilians using firearms were justifiable homicides—killings in response to the commission of a felony. (...)
I discovered that in many ways life with a gun was more stressful than without. I quit reading on the subway, instead paying rapt attention to the other people in the car, looking to see who got on and off the train, and re-evaluating the threat level after every stop. There was also the ever-present fear that, in a moment of carelessness, the bulge of the revolver might be visible through a jacket pocket, or through the rear pouch of the small grey camera bag I used to carry it when the weather got warm.
The more I carried the RG, the more I also realized how little it afforded in terms of real protection. Carrying a handgun in your jacket pocket or your waistband on the streets of New York City is vastly different from keeping one for target shooting. Only the former poses the question: “Can you kill?”
This isn’t simply a question of whether you’re capable of taking a life and living with the ugly consequences. It’s a question of how well you understand the other implications, the hidden subtleties, inherent in the decision to carry a handgun. Can you read a situation quickly and accurately enough to gauge whether your life is truly in danger and whether drawing it is justified? Can you keep an assailant from taking your gun away and using it against you? Are you prepared to go about your everyday life unable to relax, scanning every face you see in the street or, in my case, in the subway, for any sign of danger?
The gun in my pocket was a declaration that the city had broken the social contract.
All police cadets are trained in the use of deadly force, especially how and when it can be avoided. The training often involves role-playing: other cops (or hired actors) play out scenes an officer will likely encounter in the line of duty, such as a violent family dispute or a car stop. A key purpose of these exercises is to convey to a trainee how complex and chaotic these situations usually are, and how vastly different from what he may be expecting. A drunken husband may be beating his wife, also drunk. As the officers pin the husband to the floor and try to handcuff him, the wife might try to grab a gun from a cop’s holster and draw down, screaming at the officers to leave her man alone.
In my personal experience, violent crime had come quickly and unexpectedly. Someone stuck his foot in an elevator door and began asking for directions; a few seconds later, a confederate stepped up behind him and pulled a revolver out of a shopping bag. Someone suddenly grabbed me from behind and pinned my arms while another man stepped in front of me and punched me in the face. There was always a moment of hesitation on my part before reality sank in, hesitation that gave my attackers control of the situation. I constantly asked myself whether having a gun on those occasions would have made a difference, whether I would have been able, both physically and psychologically, to draw the weapon and use it before events spun completely out of my control. I tried very hard to believe the answer was yes. The truth was there was no way to know.
by Hal Stucker, Boston Review | Read more:
Image: photobunny
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