25/02/09

Our helpdesk system has a service level target, for time taken to acknowlege a "new" case. Personally, I think that's rubbish. So I have therefore automated it - I have a little perl script which interfaces to our helpdesk application, and automatically does this.
It's a little thing, I know, but I am amused by it. I feel that in addition to ensuring our department is 100% on this target, it also serves to highlight quite _why_ it is a meaningless metric.

(This script's primary purpose is to actually serve to reformat and display our call list in a useful fashion, so it's not _all_ SLA abuse)

Drugggss

Al Capone taught us that prohibition doesn't work.

With a little thought, it's quite easy to see why - intoxication can be done in private, and harms no one else. As moral as you choose to be, you cannot easily impose that morality on others, without controlling every aspect of their lives.

And so right from the very beginning, when someone figured out that fermented fruit gave them a buzz, mankind have cultivated 'intoxicants'.

But you know, I don't actually see much of a difference between someone vegetating in front of the latest big brother, and deciding to spend an evening on 'recreational substances'.

I mean, where's the harm if someone's sat in their living room smoking a spliff, or even shooting up on heroine? If you use empirical assessment of substances for use/abuse then you'll find that the legal drugs - caffine, alchol, nicotine - actually end up scoring 'more druglike' than some of the illegal ones.

So anyway. Legalisation? Is it a bad idea?
Well, very simply there's two forms of 'harm' from ... shall we say
'recreational pharmaceuticals'.

The first is medical - most powerful chemicals have side effects. Addictions. Knock on stresses on organs. Increased likelyhood of things like dehydration, because the metabolism is screwed.
And the longer term consequences of use/abuse - white bloodcell counts get screwed over, and organ damage can result, leading to long term medical problems.

At the moment, these are a burden on our healthcare system - we provide
medical support for almost everyone, even those taking drugs. We would increase that burden by making it legal, but I don't think it would
be as linear - better care when someone is experimenting, and better quality of 'raw product' will reduce problems, and allow serious developing issues to be discovered earlier.

The second is social - the harm caused by long term drug use/abuse, and the harm caused by the crime related to the drug trade. Well, this one I think also diminishes if we legalise and regulate - the drug related crime drops drastically, as the reason that it happens at all is because of the huge profit margins involved. Drug dealers aren't stupid - they'll not take a high risk selling something illegal, if it wasn't insanely profitable. Legalise it, and you stop it being a 'gateway' into further criminality - there is now a reason for them to 'stay clean' as it were.

I think the 'drugs trade' will always be a problem, for as long as it's illict - and therefore profitable - and doesn't cause direct harm to others. Legalise, Legislate and educate. It's the only long term solution to the problem.

An idea

OK, so what if there was a portable 'thing' that incorporates the basics of a wireless router, and a lightweight webserver?

A portable module, that allowed someone to ... more or less carry their 'profile' with them, but also act as a more flexible peer to peer communication relay - and ideally each of these ... well, thingies should be able to latch onto a 'real' netlink, to serve as a gateway.

You'd end up with something not entirely dissimilar to the early internet, albeit with somewhat less static routes across it, and allow you to ... well, share much of the same things as people are sharing via stuff like twitter and blogs and stuff, but in a proximity oriented domain. Maybe you share some artwork with everyone in the room, or some kind of informational content - perhaps you do this with GPS co-ordinates and a static 'emplacement' that's tagged with a full entry about that picture on the wall.

Oh, and you'd get more flexibility in net access, as you'd be building a daisy-chain of sorts to the nearest public hotspot. Ideally though, you'd have to incorporate something a little more ... tolerant of outage. But hey, once upon at time, stuff like email was a store and forward protocol - mail servers would relay to each other as and when they could, because 'being online' required a modem and a phone line.

Is this awesome?