Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"It's not widely publicized by the U.S. Agriculture Department, but marijuana is America's largest cash crop--topping the value of corn and wheat combined. A 2005 analysis by Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron found that legalization would generate $7.7 billion a year in enforcement savings for local, state, and federal taxpayers, while producing annual tax revenues of $6.2 billion." -- Jim Hightower, 2009-11-23 [thanks to Penguirl for linking to it.]

(That the next available spot in the quotes-queue when I added this was also the anniversary of the repeal of the 18th Amendment (Prohibition), was a lucky accident.)

My computer crashed last night, so I reloaded a bunch of browser tabs I'd had open before the crash. On one LiveJournal entry, when I went to that tab for the first time after the reload, a Best Buy ad showed up blocking my view of 95% of the window (with the rest greyed out), a jingle started playing, and the "close this and continue" button had a message saying I could only close it after it had played at least four seconds.

I was logged in already at the time.

A banner ad here, a margin ad there, I can skip over even if they do annoy me when I notice them. This trend of popping up ads that block my view of the content of the page is something I've been meaning to rant about (it gives me the message, "we really don't want you to read what's on this page," or possibly, "our webmaster fucked up").

Showing ads to other people, on my content, without paying me for doing so, was the reason I stopped posting complete entries on LJ and started posting fake-cut-tags linking to whole entries elsewhere (mostly Dreamwidth, also InsaneJournal and others). Paying LJ not to show my ads to my readers would've been an option if the reason I'd reverted to a free account in the first place hadn't been in protest of other policies I wanted to see changed before I gave them more money. This most recent tactic, if it persists, may finally be enough to chase me away from reading LJ (and reinforces my opinion that taking my content elsewhere was wiser than subjecting my readers to ads LJ serves). Seeing a banner ad before the comments when reading an entry by a user with a 'Plus' account is one thing. Stopping me from even seeing the entry until I've turned off my speakers and waited four seconds (at least in the browser I'm using at the moment, the clock starts ticking when I make that tab current, not as soon as the page finishes loading in the background) goes too far. I realize that the whole point is that banner ads are too easy to ignore, but here's the thing: if you make the ad foreground instead of background, its effectiveness goes from not-as-positive-as-you'd-like, to negative, or at best zero: you don't get me to pay more attention, you convince me to go read something else.

And yes, this ad did piss me off enough to warrant taking the time to write five paragraphs about it and to make an exception to my links-on-LJ-text-goes-elsewhere policy because I want to make sure my friends who only bother to lick those links when they look especially interesting (there must be a few, at least) see this too. But the basic idea is quite simple regardless of temper: make it sufficiently annoying or inconvenient to read, and I'll find something else to read instead. It's a big web; I'll find something else to read.

Read this / comment on it at blurty insanejournal crazylife journalfen livejournal scribbld

When the weather forecast calls for only one to three inches of snow, the question I really want them to answer for me is: will it take long enough to melt that I need to take my pain meds and go clear the sidewalk, or will it melt quickly enough that I can ignore it in good conscience and save the pills for another day?

Today the answer was easy: when I looked outside, the sidewalk was wet, not white (snow stuck to parked cars but not to pavement), and it looks like the Winter Weather Event (aka French toast emergency) is nearly over, so I may want to sprinkle some salt now that the sun has gone down, but I don't need to sweep or shovel anything, so I'll probably get away with just ibuprofen.