Sure but what degree of influence is actually “radicalising” or a point of concern?

We like to pretend that by banning extreme communities we are saving civilisation from them. But the fact is that extreme groups are already rejected by society. If your ideas are not actually somewhat adjacent to already held beliefs, you can’t just force people to accept them.

I think a good example of this was the “fall” of Richard Spencer. All the leftist communities (of which I was semi-active in at the time) credited his decline with the punch he received and apparently assumed that it was the act of punching that resulted in his decline, and used it to justify more violent actions. The reality is that Spencer just had a clique of friends that the left (and Spencer himself) interpreted as wide support and when he was punched the greater public didn’t care because they never cared about him.

“A deradicalising effect”

I’m sorry what? The idea that smaller communities are somehow less radical is absurd.

I think you are unaware (or much more likely willfully ignoring) that communities are primarily dominated by a few active users, and simply viewed with a varying degree of support by non-engaging users.

If they never valued communities enough to stay with them, then they never really cared about the cause to begin with. These aren’t the radicals you need to be concerned about.

“And those people diffuse back into the general population”

Because that doesn’t happen to a greater degree when exposed to the “general population” on the same website?

You’re literally on a platform that was created to harbor extremist groups. Look at who Dessalines is, (aka u/parentis-shotgun) and their self-proclaimed motivation for writing LemmyNet. When you ban people from a website, they just move to another place, they are not stupid it’s pretty easy to create websites. It’s purely optical, you’re not saving civilisation from harmful ideas, just preventing yourself from seeing it.

It’s okay. The thing is when running an attack are you going to permutate through every combination of characters, or are you going to use words from a dictionary first? correcthorsebatterystaple (not a dictionary word) is better than antidisestablishmentarianism (a dictionary word) but in a realistic attack concatenating dictionary words is going to be the next step.

Without looking at the numbers, gross profit is before expenditures, so it’s not like Ford has 24 billion in surplus money.

“I assume that there is some cooking of the books”

Or maybe there is stronger competition and profit margins have fallen?

Sure but, this isn’t about the actual language. For instance I like Ada, there isn’t a lot of public support for it and you’re mostly left with the RM and GNAT manuals. But none of this is relevant to Ada as a language. Which was really all I was saying, you should probably split complaints about the ecosystem and the actual language affecting viability.

Pretty sure syntax is the only one that is even related to what a language is. All the rest are just ecosystem development primarily effected by popularity.

I agree to a point. However I think that decriminalisation fails to recognise that drug courts are quite effective at rehabilitation. It’s important to minimise the effects of imprisonment and criminal record for drug offences that way individuals always have an opportunity to higher income careers. (Although from my experience, competitive jobs markets ignore drug felonies and sometimes even violent felonies). The solution isn’t to completely defang the state and just hope that people decide to quit drugs while dealing with all the problems they cause along the way. States need to have some ability to pressure individuals to rehabilitation.

The latter part of your comment is just leftist conspiracism. The percentage of false arrests is heavily out weighed by guilty parties getting away. You can easily find this by both reading papers on it or just going to your local homeless shelter and talking to people. An encounter with police is much more likely to involve you getting away with a crime than falsely accused.

Prison labor is also not profitable, the majority of prisons are publicly run. The idea that high incarceration rates are because the state somehow makes money by enslaving people is completely false.

It’s a global thing. Everyone repurposes side products of a process. Coca-Cola isn’t allowed to have cocaine in the final product so it is extracted out and sold. (Coca-Cola doesn’t actually do this their coca leaf supplier Stepan Company does).

This doesn’t matter. The question is whether a ban constitutes a greater social harm than legalisation. The fact that people can evade the ban doesn’t matter, after all murder is illegal but people still do it (at a much lower rate).

So the fact that we already have one awful policy (legal tobacco) is not sufficient to justify implementing another one. Marijuana seems to have roughly the same or slightly lower impact on lung cancer as tobacco (hard to measure since most people smoke both). Of course it has other harder to measure effects like long-term brain damage, and DUI risk, or even loss of economic productivity and workplace accidents.

The US (and most of the world) has been triumphantly marching towards banning smoking and yet we seem to be normalising the use of another substance that isn’t any better. It seems likely that we will be in the same place with marijuana in a few decades as we are with tobacco.

Edit: I realise that you may have not read my connected comment. Taxing tobacco doesn’t make the government money, lung cancer from tobacco smoking directly costs Medicare 4x the total tax revenue from all tobacco products. So that is my basis for “taxing legal tobacco is a poor policy” and by extension marijuana will be as well.

“taxation on cigarettes offsets the direct cost caused by smoking”.

By about 25 percent. I calculated it a few years back combining the total US taxes on tobacco (state, federal and local) and comparing it to the Medicare expenditures on treating the percentage of lung cancer caused by tobacco smoking. This is actually pretty skewed against my claims since tobacco isn’t always smoked so the tax from smoking is smaller than the total tobacco tax revenue, Medicare only pays for a portion of the lung cancer treatments (since not everyone uses Medicare but the private insurance data isn’t as available), and this is only one albeit expensive aliment caused by tobacco smoking. So 25 percent is a generous estimate.

Long story short “sin taxes” don’t actually pay for anything, it’s a complete myth mostly promoted by people who want to use the product.

“the overall societal cost is high”

Just like every other drug. Everyone wants to legalise marijuana, ostensibly for the tax money (but not really), and yet it has far greater social costs than tax will recover. Even the states that legalise it (and consequently becoming tourist destinations) are not actually benefiting from it even though the “Las Vegas effect” means that they should disproportionately benefit from it.