Jay Marcyes

The basics of this great post by Stevey Yegge is that people who are for the legalization of Marijuana haven't thought about all the questions that are associated with making it legal, and that it is much harder a problem than it looks on the surface.

As soon as I saw the high comment count I was pretty sure I knew what most of the comments were going to say, and I was spot on. The comments are littered with, "actually, legalization would be super easy" (it wouldn't) and, "you are making it way harder than it needs to be" (he wasn't). And on, and on.

But the most prevalent comment gist was "just because it's hard, doesn't mean we shouldn't try." Sure it does, if the perceived benefit isn't outweighed by the perceived costs associated with making it a reality.

I happen to agree with Stevey here. I think legalization of Marijuana would be tons more difficult, with way less pay off, then most pro-legalization people would have you believe. And personally, I feel that the vast majority of people that smoke marijuana wouldn't benefit from legalization anyway since they are under 21 years old and any legalization would most likely be for 21 and over.

Now, for some of the quotes I liked from the post. The first part of the article talked about complexity, to highlight how complex a problem like the legalization of marijuana might be, by highlighting how hard it was to make a change at Amazon.com (where he used to work):

anything you try to do at Amazon these days involves touching a thousand systems, all of which are processing gazillions of transactions a second, and you want to completely redo the database schema [...] I suppose I should think of it as a valuable experience. If nothing else, I understand Complexity in a way most people will, mercifully, never have to.

Stevey then describes what most management, most of the commenters on the internet, and every armchair programmer, armchair activist, and armchair politician have in common:

[they] have what my brother Mike refers to as "Shit's Easy Syndrome".

You know. As in, shit's easy. If it's easy to imagine, then it's easy to implement. Programming is just turning imagination into reality. You can churn through shit as fast as the conscious mind can envision it. Any programmer who can't keep up is an underperformer who needs to be "topgraded" to make room for incredible new college hires who can make it happen, no matter what "it" happens to be, even if they have to work 27 hours a day [...] Shit's Easy syndrome is, well, pretty easy to acquire. Heck, you don't even have to be a VP. Directors sometimes get it if they stay away from the code for too long.

Sadly, most of the people that suffer from this syndrome have made their way onto the internet, and they love telling people what they want. They don't care if the majority of the population doesn't want the same thing, or care at all for that matter. All that really matters is they want it, so everyone needs to accommodate them. after all, their request is easy, right?

But what I love most about these people is they can't be wrong, despite often times not having any real data to back up their position. And they don't hesitate to attack your character if you offer a differing opinion.

The great thing about the internet is that anybody can voice their opinion. The bad thing about the internet is that anybody can voice their opinion.