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jbrackett

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My interpretation is that they trying to make the point that it's not just the "War on Drugs" that is causing this massive spike in prison population but is instead being driven by increasing penalties across the board, including increasing the number serving life, stated or otherwise, without possibility of parole.

They make this point while acknowledging that the "War on Drugs" does disproportionately affect African Americans and women.

Throughout the article they make several statements that indicate to me they think there should be more discretion allowed on deciding which punitive actions should be taken.

"...but there's an absolute ban on importing ivory to the US."

This is not true even for African Elephant ivory, at least not yet. [1] There is also legal ivory trade in Mammoth and other animals such as wart hog that can easily be found at gem shows, knife and gun shows, etc.

I talked to a guy from the Ukraine at a knife show who was selling Mammoth tusks recovered from Russia and apparently had quite a time at the airport but he was able to bring in his supplies for sale.

[1] http://www.fws.gov/international/travel-and-trade/ivory-ban-...

I went into the article thinking it was going to be about some way of renaming functions or something. Probably just my limited internal definition of the word refactor. After reading I would say Go has a cool built in way of using the adapter pattern. More interesting than renaming functions.

You should take a look at http://www.gradle.org/ if you haven't already. I worked on an ant project and decided we needed to convert to a better build system. I started down the path of Maven, but Gradle changed my mind because of the conciseness.

It uses the groovy language so hopefully it doesn't fall into the same trap as described in the post.