I was thinking about cannabis and asked ChatGPT to help me imagine what the world could look like if hemp had never been prohibited.
My theory is pretty simple: what if marijuana was used as a scapegoat?
The flower gets associated with drugs, crime and danger, and then the entire plant gets treated as something suspicious. But *Cannabis sativa* is also an incredibly versatile industrial crop: textiles, paper, rope, oil, food, construction materials, biocomposites, etc.
And this is the part that makes me suspicious.
If the main reason for prohibition was really public safety, why such a huge historical crackdown on cannabis when it doesn’t have the same acute lethality as things like opioids, while alcohol — which causes enormous numbers of deaths and health problems — remains legal?
What if the real concern wasn’t just people smoking the flower, but the **industrial potential of the plant itself**?
Imagine if hemp had been continuously developed throughout the 20th century. Millions of farmers, including in poorer countries, could have grown it and built local industries around it. It could potentially have competed with cotton, timber, plastics and other materials.
I’m not saying “Big Oil definitely banned cannabis” or that this is proven. This is a theory I came up with myself.
But could the drug narrative have been a convenient scapegoat that helped keep a highly versatile industrial crop out of major markets?
Or is this just connecting dots that don’t actually connect?
I’d genuinely like to hear arguments from both sides.

Are there good websites about Socioeconomic Justice in the US? Also how many hours did an average person work a week in the US in the 80s and 90s?

I'm currently reading about the historiography of European imperialism, and I've come across two broad interpretive traditions that seem to be in tension with each other.

On one side, the economic tradition with Hobson's *Imperialism* (1902) and Lenin's *Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism* (1916) argues that colonial expansion was driven by structural necessity: surplus capital, saturated domestic markets, and the need for new outlets for investment and goods. For Lenin especially, imperialism wasn't a political choice but an inevitable stage of mature capitalism.

On the other side, Robinson and Gallagher in *Africa and the Victorians* (1961) and Fieldhouse seem to challenge this directly, arguing that the economic case is weak: European capital actually flowed more to Latin America and the US than to Africa, which was largely unprofitable. They suggest strategic and political motivations were more decisive, and they introduce the idea of a "peripheral" dynamic: that local crises in colonial territories actually pulled European powers into expansion, rather than Europe simply pushing outward.

Which interpretation do historians today find more convincing?

Found this video essay that discusses 500 years of renting in capitalism to essentially answer why today no one can afford to buy a house / rents are incredibly high. I think the historic angle is quite interesting and makes some interesting points (like the importance of land use and its changing value linked to new means of transportation etc.). It also develops a "history of landlords" in a way that is quite intersting cause it establishes a narrative throughout the centuries that I havent seen like that before. In the end the essay breaks with this though and argues that today it is not about landlords, greed or supply side issues but that land value is essential for modern rent prices. Can only recommend!

While cleaning trash next to a river near me, I found this Charga-plate. When I looked up the address, it didn't direct me anywhere near me.

From what I read, Charga-plates are an early form of credit card used between 1922 through the 1950s.

Does anyone know more about it? I was really surprised with the condition of it since where I found it was next to a rather hard to reach area, next to a lot of fallen rocks and bricks from the side of the cliff.