Month: January 2024

I’ve recently come to the conclusion that I don’t want to live someplace where pot is legal.

I really don’t like the smell. Here in the neighborhood there’s a number of folks who smoke it all the dang time and even with their houses closed up for the winter, I can still smell the stuff.

That’s bad enough but it’s rather like someone smoking cigarettes or drinking in their own home, it’s their deal and who am I to judge.

Recently, I’ve noticed that I can’t go anywhere anymore without smelling pot. Sitting in traffic at a stop light, in parking lots, and near office buildings.

I can’t help but notice that some of these places I couldn’t light up a Marlboro, but someone smoking pot is oakey dokey.

Unlike cigarettes pot is an intoxicant. Pot is more like alcohol, but people are smoking pot while driving just like we old farts used to smoke cigarettes. This concerns me, and I think might be one of the reasons that driving in California has gotten so damn bad. More people than ever before are essentially drunk driving.

Sitting in traffic with my windows down, I’m getting hotboxed too. Why should I have to keep my windows up and the A/C running because you guys want to smoke pot in traffic? Furthermore why can’t I go back to smoking Marlboros?

Oh Right… Smoking cigarettes is bad for you, but smoking pot is healthy. So the effects of second hand pot smoke aren’t bad? How about second hand intoxication? What about the children riding with mommy and daddy smoking pot in the car?

Today people gasp in shock and horror when they realize people in my generation were trapped in cars with our parents smoking cigarettes. But there’s no similar outrage with pot? Talk about a double standard!

Is it any surprise that jobs aren’t getting done well?  How many fast food orders have you had screwed up? How many places have you been shopping only to find there is no organization to the merchandise?

I’ve been noticing it. I’d been pondering it until I was sitting at a traffic light with three cars around me reeking of pot.

Then watching these folks drive and thinking they were drunk, everything clicked in my head.

They were in fact intoxicated. They shouldn’t have been driving. This was midday on a weekday, I couldn’t help but wonder where these people worked.

Then I thought about the quality of the work they’d be doing.

These are the same people who are appalled that in addition to my having an ashtray on my desk at work, I’d sometimes have a beer at lunch then go back to work. At the time, I was a bench technician and my workstation had a soldering iron. The rosin in the solder was probably worse for me than my Marlboro smoldering in the ashtray.

Please notice, I said “A Beer” not a six pack.

The funny thing is that a joint might fuck you up. A single beer probably won’t impair you at all. These days, your company will say you’re not allowed to have a beer at lunch under threat of immediate termination. But they’ll say nothing about that “Medicinal” joint at lunch.

I’ve got another datapoint to work with when it comes to moving. The list is growing…

Four Seasons but with only decorative snow. I’m over 2 – 10 feet of snow falling in one storm. I like the fall change of leaves and gentle snowfall with accumulation that doesn’t last too long.
No State tax.
No Legalized Pot
Low Auto Registration, $500 a year to register a car? Really?
Generally homogeneous demographics, I’m over “Diversity”. California making me feel like I should speak Spanish instead of English has burned through my diversity quota.
Low Property Taxes.
Good Law Enforcement.
Strong constitutional beliefs. In other words no monkey shines with The Constitution when some activist group gets all mouthy about how they think we should live. I am totally over  being told that I have to live my life to spare someone else’s feelings.
I might be content with someplace that looks a lot like Mayberry. That might be a little too boring, but I’d be willing to give it a try for a while.

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As an aside,

Trying to find out about Marlboros is stupidly difficult. Finding pictures of the logo and various boxes is more or less easy but there are a bunch of new packages so since I was a Marlboro smoker I was curious. MY GOD!!! I never did get to just identifying what these new packages were. They want your to register, and then answer a bunch of legal shit, then agree to be on their mailing list, then verify your age, then make sure that you’re in a country where they can send you information.

FUCK!!!!

On the other hand, I can tell you anything at all about pot.

The one thing I was able to determine is that California charges an excise tax of $2.87 on every pack of smokes and that the feds charge $1.01. so $3.88 of every pack of smokes is excise taxes which doesn’t include the sales tax in whatever county you’re in. It looks like California s charging 22% on pot.

Obviously since pot is still illegal on a federal level there isn’t any federal tax on pot. California is making a killing!

Not being able to just look something up annoys the shit out of me. This registration and age and double secret handshake crap is simply designed to make people not want to ask questions.

Asking about cigarettes doesn’t mean you’re going to start smoking. It means that you had a question. It’s not technically censorship but it’s damn close. Apparently Phillip Morris makes e-cigs but they’re only in Europe and therefore the web sites redirect you to a page saying “NO NO NO YOU NAUGHTY PERSON” you’re not allowed to see this. Which is censorship…

VPNs with servers in Europe make that a nothing barrier. Nothing aside from annoyance and reminding us that surprise! We’re not actually free.

I don’t recall voting for any censorship on the internet at all, so why is it there?