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The Swiss have been pretty good at advertising themselves as a privacy heaven for decades. Except they aren't one at all, not even for money, since they signed the OECD agreements against tax evasion (i.e., your swiss bank account and the value of its balance are communicated to your government automatically every year). There aren't many "privacy rankings" for countries, the most respected is usually this one from Privacy International. It dates back to 2007, but privacy legislation hasn't changed much: http://chartsbin.com/view/by8

It looks like Greece is actually the best for privacy. Switzerland is only 17th. It is unbelievable how much PR can sometimes pay off undeservedly.

Ain't no shortage of rag-heads proudly wasting water in the United Ayrahb Emirates.

http://chartsbin.com/view/1455

UAE - 916.1 m3/year/capita
USA - 1,550

Let's compare with some 3rd world shitholes like
Sweden - 285.6
Denmark - 120.9
Finland - 309.3

But methane has an incredibly short life in the atmosphere

http://chartsbin.com/view/2407

This concludes the interruption you may now go back to your regularly scheduled doom.

The stillbirth rate is higher in China. http://chartsbin.com/view/1445 Perhaps there is a different way of counting owing to different neonatal procedures.

I don't know where you get your figures from, but this well referenced wikipedia page has different stats: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Geez, please read the page you are pointing to: Please consider that car is different from road motor vehicle as the latter includes automobiles, SUVs, trucks, vans, buses, commercial vehicles and freight motor road vehicles. I was talking about passenger cars. http://chartsbin.com/view/1113

Note that this makes sense because the US is considerably more urbanized than Switzerland.

Yes, the train journey did take twice as long (when there is no traffic) for my specific commute.

Yes, and that is quite typical.

Often, between major cities it is much faster taking the train, between Bern and Zurich it takes 1 h 34 min by car (without traffic), by train it's always 55 minutes. It's great for business meetings, you prepare on the way there, and relax on the way back.

Bern to Zurich is probably the best case scenario, and even there the numbers don't work out because you're comparing apples to oranges: the train ride is station-to-station, while the car is origin-to-destination.

Citations? Here're mine:

USA uses about 1500 m3/capita/year, which is similar to New Zealand (1200 m3/capita/year) and Canada (1400 m3/capita/year). Compare with California alone, we're at 178 gallons/capita/day which is 245 m3/capita/year. That's lower than most countries.

Look, dude...

Your 1st link is total consumption. Agricultural + municipal + industrial.

In your 2nd link, the "178 gallons/day" figure is for municipal use only.

Pro-tip: when you get such massive discrepancies (1 to 6 !) between two similar populations, especially when one includes the other, it's worth checking it up a bit more carefully.

Citations? Here're mine:

USA uses about 1500 m3/capita/year, which is similar to New Zealand (1200 m3/capita/year) and Canada (1400 m3/capita/year). Compare with California alone, we're at 178 gallons/capita/day which is 245 m3/capita/year. That's lower than most countries.

From TFA, "As it turns out, we live almost in the Goldilocks case, with just a tiny bit of dark energy thrown in the mix ...

Umm...70+% of the universe is "just a tiny bit"?

still found 100,000 incidents per year. That says a lot.

Indeed it is, and much more than I had expected.

It's very difficult to compare across countries

That is true. However, since cultural and data differences between western countries are not that massive, we can exclude gun ownership as a dramatic factor. Maybe it makes a difference, maybe not, but if it does, the difference is smaller than whatever effect those other factors have.

The topic is certainly complex and doesn't yield to easy answers, else we would have much more agreement between different POVs.

But since you mentioned homicide:

http://chartsbin.com/view/1454

USA: 5.22 per 100,000
nearest western country: Liechtenstein (2.81) - it's so tiny that it could be a statistical fluke, with 40k people, that 2.81 per 100,000 is one homicide.
so nearest realistic western countries: Finland (2.49), then Scotland (2.16) and every other western country is below 2.0

More than twice the homicide rate of other western countries. If that's a cultural thing, I don't like your culture. :-)

fun fact: Afghanistan less fewer homicides (3.44 per 100,000)

But of course, you are right, it is difficult to compare. Could be due to race issues (most murder victims are young black, murdered by other young black, if I recall correctly) - but France also has a considerable population of young, poor black people living in low-income urban sprawls.

It is tricky. Especially because change is tricky. In my country, strict gun control works, because it means guns are really hard to come by, and have been for decades, even if you don't care if it's legal or not. In the US, if you guys introduced strict gun control tomorrow, then all the criminals would have guns and the honest people wouldn't.

being armed is actually a strong psychological counterweight to anger and violence.

That's true. I've held and fired a couple different guns in my life, and knowing you hold a deadly weapon in your hand does make you more alert.

But that is you and me. Psychological effects are by their nature subjective.

Certainly I was not playing games. This is the first time I've been accused of using a straw man argument, but I suspect you may be correct about it. I always thought that logical fallacies were more of a debating tactic, but now I guess they are usually just made in error. Oops. :-)

Anyway, I think my reasoning and arguments have so far been rather poor, perhaps mostly because I've been flailing around in the fog of my own opinions: something that I'm sure is more likely if you don't put enough effort into listening (or in this case reading) what is actually being said. Again, my bad.

I'll give it another try. In your first reply to me you were very clear and there was no need for me to search for analogies: "Compare parts of the US to parts of the US if you want to talk about the US statistics. You cannot compare states across national lines with any credibility." That was your apples and oranges argument all along and and I should have recognized it immediately. My apologies for the lengthy and unnecessary digression.

Instead, I should have immediately pointed out to you that I see nothing scientifically wrong with making numerical comparisons like that between countries; something that is in fact done all the time. Here are more than a dozen examples:

• List of countries by HIV/AIDS adult prevalence rate
• List of countries by traffic-related death rate
• The 15 Countries With the Highest Smartphone Penetration
• List of countries by electricity production from renewable sources
• Countries with the Highest / Lowest Average IQ
• Obesity country comparison
• Cancer rates: see how countries compare worldwide
• Paid Vacation Around the World
• Average temperature in the countries of the world
• List of countries by rail transport network size
• Highways > Total (per capita) (most recent) by country
• Total Water Use per capita by Country
• List of countries by suicide rate
• List of countries by incarceration rate
• Drug Use Death Rate Per 100,000
• Teenage pregnancy (most recent) by country
• Snakebite in The Americas

Why would it be unscientific to make comparisons like these? As long as the numbers are always collected in the same way, then they are just numbers and don't attempt to explain anything about differences that may be cultural, legal, socioeconomic, etc. In all cases it's left up to the reader to explain the differences ("it's a police state", "it's probably a poor country", "perhaps they

I was referring to the following sentence we so very often on Slashdot:

"I only buy games during Steam sales... I paid $5 $X game."

Yes, there are full price games on Steam, just like there are $5 games on PSN....but it seems most steam aficionados on Slashdot are the "wait till it's 5 bucks" consumers....who then wonder why developers treat the PC as an after thought.

And did I hit a little close to home on the Euro-pirate thing?

http://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2013/05/15/finally-some-objective-figures-on-games-piracy/

http://chartsbin.com/view/1188

It's been that way for decades.

Perhaps Skyrim is a bad example, but how is it losing when we see the following sentence so often on Slashdot:

"I only buy games during Steam sales... I paid $5 $X game."

For being cheap - check out games like Skyrim, still 40-30â (not cheap dollars lol) and still consistently in the top 10 best selling.

I strike a little too close to the target, Euro-gamer? We all know that Europe, especially Eastern Europe is a pirate haven.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2013/05/15/finally-some-objective-figures-on-games-piracy/

http://chartsbin.com/view/1188

The US Savings bonds remain the safest bonds in the world. They're also the only bonds worth buying. * * * There's still plenty of funds available to service the debt.

First, while there are too few of them, there are a number of countries in the world without debt problems. The US is one of the countries that is worst off, especially if you add in all of the unfunded pension liabilities (which the government generally avoids). Any country colored green, yellow or even orange in that map has its debt under control. Cross-reference for a trustworthy government, and you still have quite a selection of countries whose bonds are a much better choice than US Savings Bonds.

The only source of "funds" to pay off this massive debt are called "printing presses". While printing more money is, in fact, probably what will eventually happen, this will destroy private saving, cause massive inflation, and completely undermine the position of the dollar in the international markets.

tldr; The US is not the whole world. Have a look around, much of the rest of the world is doing a lot better than the US nowadays...

> But more similar to the US, China has shown a willingness and ability to go after activists and journalists who dislike how things are run

China has the largest number of journalists in the world in prison. The US at present has no journalists in its jails except perhaps transiently.

http://chartsbin.com/view/1679

The US has the strongest institution of free press in the world, China one of the weakest.

> but the US only has two

Baloney. The US has many political parties. The Greens, Socialists, Libertarians etc. and they all put candidates on the ballot. Some even get elected. For example there is a Socialist Party senator.

> and look what their bickering has turned your country into.

The freest country in human history? Sorry but bickering is the very essence of free expression and democracy. It's perhaps been THE core aspect of democracy in America for 240 years. Read the Federalist Paper #10 by James Madison.

China of course doesn't have bickering.

Yes, lets us individual cases and build argument on biased emotions. That will solve everything. Idiot.

And your examples is fraught with the logical fallacy that she could have stopped them with a gun. That is a very broad assumption.

"Statistics show taking guns away causes an increase in violent crime... See Australia and England
Statistics show that allowing for more lawful firearm posession (concealed carry) tends to reduce violent crime... See Florida, Texas etc."

OMG. You are an idiot. Florida and Texas has some of the HIGHEST rates.

http://chartsbin.com/view/1203
http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2010/crime-in-the-u.s.-2010/tables/10tbl04.xls
http://www2.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2009/data/table_05.html

You can not have serious discussion when you LIE.

Of course looking tat the numbers have shown, over and over again, more guns = more violent crime.

It's so well documented, you should be embarrassed to bring it up. IT makes it look like you are grasping at straws.

We have the right to firearms, not the right to lie about firearms.

http://chartsbin.com/view/pdd

And apparently 14th in fat.

I life in Germany and we have the problem today, that the sewer system was created for much more water usage http://www.hydrologie.uni-oldenburg.de/ein-bit/12045.html (german). As you can see: After re-industrialization (1975) the consumption growed steadily until 1990. This was more or less the time when it became common in Germany that wasting water, especially drinking water is a stupid idea. In http://www.me-vermitteln.de/Portals/0/Redaktion/grafiken/umwelt/Entwicklung%20Wasserverbrau%20pro%20Person_g.jpg you can see that the current trend is still pointing downwards.

For comparission of water usage per person world wide: http://chartsbin.com/view/1455

Oil is not really running out, reserves to production ratio has been constant at around 40 for the past two decades. http://chartsbin.com/view/t3t . Additionally North American unconventional sources (shale, tar), are estimated to be greater than the entire world-wide reserves.

iq by country http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_and_Global_Inequality height by country https://www.targetmap.com/viewer.aspx?reportId=5744 BMI by country http://chartsbin.com/view/577

Yes, but Finland has a suicide rate slightly higher than that found in France ... and France is also a strong proponent of nuclear power.

Sweden's rate? It's lower than both.

Coincidence? I think not!

Clearly there is a correlation between the use of nuclear power and suicide rates!