HN user
I'd guess that there isn't one single person at google who knows all of it. They do base a lot of their stuff on LSA (I think probably more generally just NLP), but they have so many filters and minor adjustments that the whole thing is like a really complex ball of string.
I doubt there's one person who knows how the whole thing is exactly put together.
You present a false choice. You're trying to compare "If I caught someone high on the job," with someone skydiving on their own time.
Nobody is suggesting that you can't fire someone who shows up high. But you'd also fire someone who showed up drunk, or who skydived (skydove?) and crashed through the roof of your building every day.
I just appears really, really, really, disingenuous and intellectually dishonest that you are focused on the concept of workers coming in high. I smoke a lot. But I don't go to work high. Just like people drink a lot, but don't go to work drunk.
My inner armchair psychologist tells me that you're experiencing a lot of cognitive dissonance because you somehow think cannabis is more immoral than these other lifestyle choices. And you're having a difficult time reconciling your beliefs with the evidence put in front of you.
In the absence of a strong reason (your "banks not hiring felons" is an edge case, so let's not pretend it's the same thing as hiring a programmer who smokes cannabis outside of work in his personal time), I don't think business owners should be able to dictate a single freaking thing I do in my spare time. If I want to smoke pot, or have sex with my own gender, or skydive, or drive fast, it is not one single bit of your nosy business, mr businessman. Unless it affects my work performance.
I don't normally buy into the whole "corporate slavery" thing. However, with health care usually linked to employment, the issue is a little less clear. Without a job, I'm actually risking my life because I won't be able to afford health care. To me, that inches a little closer to slavery -- "you must work here or you will die" (hyperbole mine).
The two examples I'd bring forth to suggest that nullification (I'm assuming nullification = legalization) would work are America's Prohibition (banning alcohol only worsened the problem, http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/04/what-can-pr...) and Portugal's recent legalization (a resounding success; http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=portugal-dr... and http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1893946,00.ht...)
Or did you mean something else by nullification that I missed?
That was always my problem with the DEA (and the war on drugs, etc.): it completely ignores the fact that the basic building block of government is supposed to be the states, not the fed. It's as if their backers never heard of the tenth amendment.
So you also don't hire people that drink alcohol, correct? (Throwaway account for obvious reasons).