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At the same time, science and common sense (a rare commodity these days) tells us that people working a lot have decreased overall productivity, hence working hard is about the most stupid thing you can do or require your underlings to do.

You took working a lot, and made it the same thing as working hard.

The two are not even the same thing. Allow me to explain.

Our ex-neighbor's daughter is a tad lazy. They would give her a job, like raking the leaves in the yard, and she would moan and whine, act all put upon, and end up taking an entire day to do a two hour job. She definitely worked long - taking 8 or 9 hours to do the job. She certainly thought she was working hard.

Now in my own case, I put in a lot of hours, and I enjoyed fixing problems to the point where it hardly seemed like work at all. Productivity was getting the job done, and getting it done well. People who in their minds thought that they worked hard enough were home watching X-factor, or somesuch, I was enjoying getting a problem fixed. Some were annoyed that I was making them "look bad", but usually had to abandon that idea the third or fourth time I saved their ass.

So there you have a person who takes 8+ hours to do a 2 hour job, and considering the bitching and moaning, there's no doubt she was convinced she was working really really hard, and you have a person who is enjoying what they are doing, and taking many hours, but getting a job done that normal people would just give up on. How's that productivity measured? Hell, I dreamed answers to my work problems all the time. Obsessed? I guess it depends on how you look at it. Maybe I'm obsessed with fixing problems. Maybe others are obsessed with maximizing the amount of time spent watching Swamp loggers

You are probably thinking of these studies:

http://www.economist.com/blogs...

The problem is of course, that things like making munitions translates to assembly line work, not so much to present day activities.

A cynical paen to the corrupt, established order if there ever was one.

People who fight corruption are often corrupted themselves once they get into power. For example, Imelda Marcos and son are trying to reclaim the presidency in the Philippines after a generation of the "People Power" revolution petered out into corruption.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/banyan/2013/08/corruption-philippines

[...] the writer of the lyric has a net worth of $105 million.

In short, anyone who is rich because of their hard work must be corrupt.

Interestingly, electrification is now proceeding as an appliances service. Phone, light and radio come with solar and battery. Don't pay your bill? The devices won't work. http://www.economist.com/news/...

You mean Japan looks for ways to COVER UP for people. Japan is one fucked up country. The treatment of women is one of the worst among industrial nations. Technologically progressive but socially backwards. Case in point:

"If the country’s “baby-making machines”, as a former LDP health minister put it, stayed at home then they would produce more babies, and thus more workers." http://www.economist.com/news/...

Wow. Just wow.

Excessive regulation can and does hurt the little guy. I expect that isn't something you've really looked into or thought much about.

Regulations can serve as a barrier to entry to both individuals and businesses. It isn't unknown for large companies to lobby or otherwise influence the nature of regulations to make it more difficult for small companies to form, or challenge them.

Some food for thought:

An Economy Buried by Regulations

Another unintended consequence is the stifling of entrepreneurship. Regulations can create barriers to people interested in selling goods or services or starting a small business. For example, 17 states require an individual to earn a license to do hair braiding. To obtain a license in Pennsylvania, you have to train for 300 hours, pass a practical and theoretical exam and then pay a fee. Barriers such as these give consumers fewer choices, and with fewer practitioners offering their services in a particular field, customers may face higher prices.

Over-regulated America

But red tape in America is no laughing matter. The problem is not the rules that are self-evidently absurd. It is the ones that sound reasonable on their own but impose a huge burden collectively. America is meant to be the home of laissez-faire. Unlike Europeans, whose lives have long been circumscribed by meddling governments and diktats from Brussels, Americans are supposed to be free to choose, for better or for worse. Yet for some time America has been straying from this ideal.

Consider the Dodd-Frank law of 2010. Its aim was noble: to prevent another financial crisis. Its strategy was sensible, too: improve transparency, stop banks from taking excessive risks, prevent abusive financial practices and end âoetoo big to failâ by authorising regulators to seize any big, tottering financial firm and wind it down. This newspaper supported these goals at the time, and we still do. But Dodd-Frank is far too complex, and becoming more so. At 848 pages, it is 23 times longer than Glass-Steagall, the reform that followed the Wall Street crash of 1929. Worse, every other page demands that regulators fill in further detail. Some of these clarifications are hundreds of pages long. Just one bit, the âoeVolcker ruleâ, which aims to curb risky proprietary trading by banks, includes 383 questions that break down into 1,420 subquestions. . . .

Dodd-Frank is part of a wider trend. Governments of both parties keep adding stacks of rules, few of which are ever rescinded. Republicans write rules to thwart terrorists, which make flying in America an ordeal and prompt legions of brainy migrants to move to Canada instead. Democrats write rules to expand the welfare state. Barack Obama's health-care reform of 2010 had many virtues, especially its attempt to make health insurance universal. But it does little to reduce the system's staggering and increasing complexity. Every hour spent treating a patient in America creates at least 30 minutes of paperwork, and often a whole hour. Next year the number of federally mandated categories of illness and injury for which hospitals may claim reimbursement will rise from 18,000 to 140,000. There are nine codes relating to injuries caused by parrots, and three relating to burns from flaming water-skis.

Two forces make American laws too complex. One is hubris. Many lawmakers seem to believe that they can lay down rules to govern every eventuality. Examples range from the merely annoying (eg, a proposed code for nurseries in Colorado that specifies how many crayons each box must contain) to the delusional (eg, the conceit of Dodd-Frank that you can anticipate and ban every nasty trick financiers will dream up in the future). Far from preventing abuses, complexity creates loopholes that the

Let us also not forget that percentages lie quite handily. Let's say you got a 5% raise every year for a decade.
Well, if you were making $150k/year, you'd be up to about $240k/year. Overall you've gone up nearly 100 grand per year. That's not too bad, and while you're not up with overall "inflation" one should keep in mind that a lot of those prices are loaded at the bottom end for things like groceries and gas, stuff that at $150k you're probably not going too bad for.

Now if you're making only $30k/year. Congratulations, after slugging it out you've not made it up to near 49k/year. You've got up about $19,000. Except at $49k, the cost of those student loans, groceries, mortgages and car payments still hurt *a lot*

Now the median US income is about $52,000. That's per household though, so you and your spouse would have had to nail those 5% raises each and every year to get from there to $81,500... an increase of $31,000. It's not bad, but you'd still better hope those loans were paid off early and you don't need a new car.

Realistically though, you didn't get those raises. The median household income 10 years ago was $46,000. Now it's about $52,000 so all those happy people got the rough equivalent of a yearly 1.1% raise over the last decade.

The good news is that if you saved up to buy a house now... *that* is possibly a bit cheaper than in 2006.

Of course if you bought 10 years ago, that was at the top of the bubble and you've lost value while paying a nice mortgage rate of 6.4% (4.45% after a 5yr renewal). That means on a $200k mortgage you would have paid nearly $100k in just interest alone already. Ouch

Same here. I was born elsewhere and have lived in 4 countries on 3 continents, and traveled to dozens of others. Australia ticks more boxes than any other for my requirements (climate, quality of life, high standards of living, income, low crime, friendly people, casual approach to everything etc).
And it doesn't seem to be just our opinion, Australia has 3 cities in the top ten for most livable cities http://www.economist.com/blogs...

I mean, the reality is that if you were paying 10% on cash trapped in your account, you would more than likely just go out each week and spend all your money, even if you don't really want anything you are buying.

I'm not sure this is true. Eroding your purchasing power at 10% per year is just like inflation at 10%. We've had that. People will likely borrow more. But also, people will draw down their spending in an attempt to preserve whatever purchasing power they've got. People still need to eat, pay rent, pay for gas, buy clothes.

I think it could radically inflate debt-based purchases though. However, I don't know what the housing market did during the inflationary/stagflationary episode of the late 70s/early 80s. We can see just how people react with inflation of 10%.

Most impactfully, inflation costs politicians their jobs. And the central bank is a political animal.

Larry Fucking Summers is one of the guys very near the top of the list of people responsible for the economic collapse of 2008. He's never been right about anything.

http://www.economist.com/blogs...

Most other violent socialist factions "just" slaughter people who disagree with the new government.

There are three informative works that are worth looking into, or at least to be aware of.

The first is the documentary The Soviet Story. (on demand) Its creation was supported by a committee of the European Parliament, among others. Review is below, and here is a trailer. I suggest watching the entire documentary some time.

Telling the Soviet story - A new film about Nazi-Soviet links

The film is gripping, audacious and uncompromising. Though it starts by telling the story of the murder of 7m Ukrainians in 1933, it is no mere catalogue of atrocities. The main aim of the film is to show the close connections—philosophical, political and organisational—between the Nazi and Soviet systems.

As Françoise Thom (one of many anti-communist luminaries appearing in the film) puts it: “Nazism was based on false biology; Marxism was based on false sociology”. The Marxist dream of the “new man”, for example, mirrored the Nazi idea of racial superiority. The Nazis murdered chiefly on racial grounds, while the Soviets concentrated on class. But mass murder is mass murder

Those who keep a soft spot for Marxism may flinch to hear that the sage of Highgate referred to backward societies as Völkerabfälle (racial trash) who must “perish in the revolutionary holocaust”. Or that the Nazi party in its early days idolised Lenin (Josef Goebbels said he was second only to Adolf Hitler in greatness).

Perhaps the best sequence in the film shows pairs of posters using almost identical designs: muscular workers strike heroic attitudes in support of the party and the state, blonde little girls beam, fists smash enemies, hammers break chains. Without the swastika and hammer and sickle as clues, it would be hard to know which is which.

The illustration of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact is compelling: Soviet radio transmitters guided German bombers in their attacks on Poland. A Soviet naval base near Murmansk helped the Nazi attack on Norway. The Soviet secret police helped train the Gestapo and discussed how to deal with the “Jewish question” in occupied Poland. . . . Read the whole thing

The second work is, The Black Book of Communism
There are multiple reviews at the link for the book, but this is also informative: So, how many did Communism kill?

The third work is this book: Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Change

We find in it a great deal of history that people would like us to forget, including how fascism was admired by many, how progressives influenced and were influenced by fascist movements in Europe, and how common threads of ideas and values continue to influence events today.

And since we have a self-described socialist running for office:

Communist Party USA Chairman Vows Cooperation With Democratic Party

Most other violent socialist factions "just" slaughter people who disagree with the new government.

There are three informative works that are worth looking into, or at least to be aware of.

The first is the documentary The Soviet Story. (on demand) Its creation was supported by a committee of the European Parliament, among others. Review is below, and here is a trailer. I suggest watching the entire documentary some time.

Telling the Soviet story - A new film about Nazi-Soviet links

The film is gripping, audacious and uncompromising. Though it starts by telling the story of the murder of 7m Ukrainians in 1933, it is no mere catalogue of atrocities. The main aim of the film is to show the close connections—philosophical, political and organisational—between the Nazi and Soviet systems.

As Françoise Thom (one of many anti-communist luminaries appearing in the film) puts it: “Nazism was based on false biology; Marxism was based on false sociology”. The Marxist dream of the “new man”, for example, mirrored the Nazi idea of racial superiority. The Nazis murdered chiefly on racial grounds, while the Soviets concentrated on class. But mass murder is mass murder

Those who keep a soft spot for Marxism may flinch to hear that the sage of Highgate referred to backward societies as Völkerabfälle (racial trash) who must “perish in the revolutionary holocaust”. Or that the Nazi party in its early days idolised Lenin (Josef Goebbels said he was second only to Adolf Hitler in greatness).

Perhaps the best sequence in the film shows pairs of posters using almost identical designs: muscular workers strike heroic attitudes in support of the party and the state, blonde little girls beam, fists smash enemies, hammers break chains. Without the swastika and hammer and sickle as clues, it would be hard to know which is which.

The illustration of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact is compelling: Soviet radio transmitters guided German bombers in their attacks on Poland. A Soviet naval base near Murmansk helped the Nazi attack on Norway. The Soviet secret police helped train the Gestapo and discussed how to deal with the “Jewish question” in occupied Poland. . . . Read the whole thing

The second work is, The Black Book of Communism
There are multiple reviews at the link for the book, but this is also informative: So, how many did Communism kill?

The third work is this book: Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Change

We find in it a great deal of history that people would like us to forget, including how fascism was admired by many, how progressives influenced and were influenced by fascist movements in Europe, and how common threads of ideas and values continue to influence events today.

And since we have a self-described socialist running for office:

Communist Party USA Chairman Vows Cooperation With Democratic Party

If only we could get some decent peer review. Maybe it was different back then?

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm...
http://www.economist.com/news/...
http://www.wsj.com/articles/ha...
http://retractionwatch.com/201...
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/21s...
https://www.theguardian.com/sc...

Not really... In the US it's a hard rule, in the UK it's not a hard rule but collective nouns are singular 99% of the time.

"I love the mental gymnastics Americans perform in order to justify why they are entitled to carry a weapon that kills people."

Actually, I understood this in 5th grade, when the Second Amendment was read in its entirety. Two years later I carried a .410 shotgun to hunt with my family, two years after that graduating to the .30-30. Then, a year later, my American History teacher indulged us in a deeper study of the Second Amendment, which left no doubt in my mind of the intent and effect of that Amendment, and the radical nature of our Constitution. People from other nations have largely been taught nothing about that, for what should be obvious reasons.

The world hates freedom.

If I have to pay to park at a mall, I'm likely to spend less time inside

Unfortunately we don't have much choice in many Australian suburbs.
Public transport is often crap, and street parking is congested and even more expensive than shopping centre (mall) parking!

All levels of our governments (local, state, federal) are lapping-up the benefits of increased population density, expecting the ill-effects to be borne by future political parties. (Gotta love democracy.)
    - local governments: approving high-density housing and getting additional council rates (however they're not building any more schools for the extra families)
    - state governments: massive jump in stamp duty (but they're not building anywhere near the hospitals / roads we need to accommodate the increased population)
    - federal government: extra tax revenue, temporary "kick" to the economy from population boost (again, not spending near enough of infrastructure, and life is getting ridiculously expensive)

And don't even get me started about what the influx of foreign buyers has done to real-estate prices in Australia.
See this chart by The Economist, clicking on the tab "Prices against average income" ... Australia tops the list.

(Finishing my long rant) ... and that is why we pay so much for mall (shopping centre) parking in Australia.

See subject: Over 500 sites were infected by them delivering malware http://digiday.com/publishers/... even major sites like the Economist http://www.economist.com/help/...

APK

P.S.=> It's why I created my hosts file program... apk

Sorry. It's a bit buried.
You have to go to The Economist article and look at the comments where voting is discussed.
http://www.economist.com/node/...

The prisoners are there because they were at one point believed to be terrorists and unlawful combatants.

Agreed.

How many cases can someone find of people moved to Gitmo who did not fit those conditions? I'm willing to learn something.

That depends on how we parse your question. If the question is, "How many people were take to Gitmo for confinement that were known at the time to have no involvement with al Qaida, its affiliates, or terrorism?" the answer is zero to the best of my recollection. If the question is, "How many people were taken to Gitmo for confinement due to suspicion of involvement with al Qaida, its affiliates, or terrorism, but were later thought to be innocent of it?", as I recall the answer is on the order of a couple of hundred of the approximately 800 that were ever held there, with a caveat. Of the people that were claimed to be "totally innocent" of involvement with terrorism and released, something like 20-30% of them were found back on the battlefield involved with al Qaida, the Taliban, or other extremists. It seems many of them were able to either hide their involvement or explain away things to the point they were released. Then there is the case of the Ulighars who were involved with militant groups, but directed at the oppression of the People's Republic of China and considered not to be a threat to the US. The problem for them was where to send them? It was considered impossible to send them back to China where it was expected they would be arrested and tortured. So in summary there is no chance Assange will end up there unless there is some significant and direct involvement with terrorism that we don't know about.

Communists and fascists have some surface resemblances, but in ideology are far different, as is much of the practice. That they are close is just a bunch of ignorant right-wing propaganda.

On the contrary, they are from the same part of the political spectrum (Left/Progressive), have many similar goals, and in the past have formed alliances and worked together. There are significant areas of overlap in their practice, and in terms of ideology there is very much a certain "different side of the same coin" aspect to them. Whereas Nazis exterminated by race, Communists exterminated by class, and the little known fact is that Marx and Engels called for extermination by both class and race. Whereas Communists tend to be internationalist socialists the fascists tend towards nationalist socialism.

Have you heard of the documentary, "The Soviet Story"? It's creation was supported by a group in the European Parliament. It would be well worth your time to view it as it exposes a lot of little known history that is quite revealing. I believe you can watch it on itunes or Amazon video for a modest fee if your library doesn't have it. It can be found on Youtube, but ususally not with English subtitles for foreign language sections. Although you do miss things without the subtitles it can still be worth watching if you can't find it anywhere else and can't pay to watch the localized version. Please, by all means watch it!

Telling the Soviet story - A new film about Nazi-Soviet links

The Soviet Story 1 of 9

You might also find the book (discussed below) Liberal Fascism informative even if it is written in an American context. (Aspects of it might be a bit disorienting since the American political spectrum labeling is a bit different than Europe and the rest of the Anglosphere.) There are other books that discuss these ideas as well.

Liberal Fascism

Benito Mussolini was a socialist and earned the title “Il Duce” as the leader of the socialists in Italy. When he founded the fas

AFAICT, you said: 1) we have more cops now than ever before, and 2) we have less crime than ever before, which leads you to postulate 3) more cops leads to more crime.

This does not follow.

Not every jurisdiction has increased the number of police, and not every jurisdiction has experienced the same fall in crime. If you look at individual cities and counties, there is a delayed correlation between adding cops and seeing crime go up (or at least decline less than other jurisdictions).

This week's Economist has an article about cops in schools. Schools that add cops to their staff tend to use those cops to enforce classroom discipline and criminalize unruly behavior. So kids that would otherwise get detention, or a parent-teacher conference, instead get taken to jail, and sucked into the juvenile justice system, which turns them into permanent delinquents, that cause more trouble in the school and the surrounding neighborhood, sucking more kids into trouble as the system spirals downward. So how does the system respond? MORE COPS!!!!

"Over the past four decades, depending on which of their measures one uses, the amount of time that working-age Americans are devoting to leisure activities has risen by 4-8 hours a week. (For somebody working 40 hours a week, that is equivalent to 5-10 weeks of extra holiday a year.) Nearly every category of American has more spare time: single or married, with or without children, both men and women. The only twist is that less educated (and thus poorer) Americans have done relatively better than more educated ones (see chart). And that is not just because unemployed high-school drop-outs have more free time on their hands. Less educated Americans with jobs - the overstretched middle class of political lore - do very well."

(From this article in 2006.)

I'm glad that you are so happy with the cost of electricity. However, I keep reading magazine articles about what a disaster the energy policy in Germany has been, and your one data point does not convince me.

The Economist wrote:

The simultaneous dash to renewables and new fossil-fuel power plants resulted in overcapacity and caused wholesale prices to tumble, which has battered the utilities' profits.

At the same time, the prices paid by consumers have been rising. This is because of the above-market prices guaranteed for renewable energy.

[...]

This means that traditional utilities have turned instead to much more climate-damaging coal for generation. The result is that prices have gone up and the use of renewable sources has expanded, but Germans have ended up emitting more carbon dioxide as a result of the extra coal...

But it gives me no happiness to think that the energy plan in Germany is failing. I hope that it will work out eventually.

What Germany really needs, what everyone really needs, to make renewable energy work is storage. I am hoping for new storage technologies to make grid-level storage practical... the liquid metal batteries from Ambri, or pumped electrolyte batteries, or whatever. The only currently practical technology is pumped hydro, and the energy policy in Germany has led to pumped hydro facilities shutting down. If your energy policy leads to coal plants continuing to operate and pumped hydro shutting down, You're Doing It Wrong.

On the other hand, I am also reading that that companies in Germany are planning to build more pumped storage within a decade despite the current economic disincentives, and coal use is going down. Perhaps it will work out in the future.

"During all the time I'm here, I haven't met a single person who would say corruption had waned since the times of Yanukovich," Saakashvili noted. "What's more, I'm hearing now and then that the fees today are much higher. I haven't spoken to a single small or medium-sized business owner who wouldn't tell me the situation at present is as bad as it ever was under Kuchma or the 'orange' government or Yanukovich,"

Note: It's also funny that, Saakashvili is 'gray' as well:
http://www.day.kiev.ua/en/arti...

After the incident, Saakashvili immediately gave a press conference at the Presidential Administration, where he said: “From the first minute of his speech, Avakov began to say that I was not speaking emotionally, unlike in a TV show. He insulted me and raised the question of Uralkhim. I do not know this oligarch, I do not know what Uralkhim is, and I have never met this oligarch [although later the Ministry of Interior published a video of Saakashvili meeting with the Russian oligarch Dmitry Mazepin. – Author]

At least, under Yanukovich, there were some 'democracy', parties supported him and others against him. After the 'activists' forced oppositions resigned and/or beat them, the 'lustration' law becomes reality, which bans all the officials under old government participate in the new one to 'clean' the corruption (of course, not the 'revolution' leaders) WITHOUT any judgment. Now all against them be named 'FSB agents'.

After years of propaganda in the media, such as 'President v oligarch', it likely that the West can't stand with their 'chosen' people: Corruption in Ukraine is so bad, a Nigerian prince would be embarrassed, Poroshenko, Yatseniuk, Avakov... all are even worse than Yanukovich before. Here is just a snippet:

Poroshenko is the only one of Ukraine’s 10 richest people to see his net worth actually increase in the past year, and his bank continues to expand while others lose their licenses. One of his industrial compa

You ought to click through and read the comments.

"This article has gone haywire in its estimation of the the supposed costs. Tobin's calculation is based on national income. The article's first mistake is confusing national income with average income. We read that "Paying for a basic income worth 20% of the average income requires average taxes to be 20 percentage points higher, at 45%." No, that's the effect of paying 20% of National Income. Think it through: even if all GNI is allocated equally to individuals, the median income must be less than 50% of income received and 20% of the average income must therefore be less than 10% of GNI. It is actually much less than 10% because (a) GNI is not held exclusively by individuals and (b) people in the top half get more income share than the bottom half. The income share of the bottom half in the UK is just under a quarter of personal income, which means that the cost of a Basic Income at 20% of median income would be about 5% of total personal income.
Then there is the assumption that paying 60% of median income is equivalent to paying 60% of GNI. As the median income level is close to 25% of all personal income, 60% of the median ought to be about 15% of total personal income, not 60%. The actual cost would depend on the design of the benefit. Costs should be offset against social security reductions (which is one of the key reservations to make about Basic Income schemes)and the abolition of tax allowances."

Or this one: "Yes, the analysis full of errors. Most significant: (1) assumes payment of full basic income amount to all, regardless of current income, (2) conflates median and average.
In 2010, US household income median was about $50K, average was about $70K. To top up low-income households to 60% of median income ($30K) would require additional tax averaging about $4200 per household (all households), or a little less than 6% of average household income. (Source: commenter's spreadsheet using 2010 US census data)
It's bewildering and dismaying that the Economist would print a piece of such obvious poor quality."

http://www.economist.com/news/...

It's important to note that for people who are working, getting $800 from their job vs. $800 from the state are not equivalent at all, because the $800 from the state requires higher taxation, and taxation disincentivizes economic activity. C.f. the "dead hand of the government".

Russia as a country has pretty much self-sufficient economy.

Yeah, and so does North Korea. Russia does not grow enough food of its own, it can not make its own cars — nor computers. Their sanctions do not support "local businesses" — maybe, they are helping Chinese firms. Russians are increasingly suffering and it will get worse.

But I was not talking about sanctions specifically. Even without the sanctions they would've been overstretched fighting several wars. Too overstretched for traveling to the Moon.

No. That's 0.00015 increase in people dying of cancer. That is for every million people who would normally die of cancer, there will instead be be 1,000,001.5 people dying.

And the number was taken from estimates based on the level of radiation. May have miscalculated my percentage, but the estimate is 6 deaths per year, assuming the risk scales linearly with radiation dose.

According to This article, there were more than 30000 terrorism victims last year.

I read the Gary Kleck piece and he seems to be pretty biased and actually narcissistic in his presentation.

Hmm, then I apologize for choosing a poor link to use. What I got out of that is "for two decades I have been hearing the same criticisms and none of them are invalid" and I guess what you got from it is "narcissistic".

Better then would be to read his actual book. http://www.amazon.com/Point-Blank-Guns-Violence-America/dp/020230762X The American Society of Criminology awarded Professor Kleck the Hindelang award for this book.

And the other URLs you gave are obviously from pro-gun sites so I didn't go there.

Perhaps you didn't realize it, but the Kellerman study was published in an obviously anti-gun publication.

Also, Arthur Kellerman has been a member of at least one anti-gun organization. (The latter link is to an obviously pro-gun web site, but it reproduces a letter to the editor published in a medical journal by a doctor. The doctor is an obviously pro-gun doctor, but he is providing evidence that Kellerman is an obviously anti-gun doctor, and I don't know how I would go about finding a completely unbiased source you would accept who has taken the trouble to research Kellerman and report on his membership in anti-gun organizations.)

Finally, here is a book I recommend: it thoroughly covers the statistics around violence and gun ownership. It concludes that cultural factors are much more important in violence than the number of available firearms. The Samurai, the Mountie, and the Cowboy

It's scientists trying to deal with an illness and its causes, rather than folks who started with a point and then used Polya's tactics to justify it.

Oh, really? I have provided multiple links to you showing that Kellerman's study was structurally unsound. We cannot put error bars on its conclusions, it had a small sample size, and it only counted defensive uses of a firearm if they resulted in a dead body (which drastically under-counts defensive uses). Even if you believe that it was intended as an unbiased study, its flaws render its results useless.

Also, its predictions have not been borne out in the following two decades. I have provided evidence for you that the number of guns in the USA rose dramatically since the publication of the Kellerman study, while shootings of all kinds (accidental and intentional) declined dramatically. I am not going to claim that the drastic increase in guns caused the decline in shootings; but pretty clearly if a gun is 43 times more likely to hurt you than to be a benefit, the drastic increase in guns should have been correlated with a drastic increase in harm.

Here's a reference that presents these facts. This Economist article has graphs that show firearms deaths declining drastically since the early 1990s at the same time that the number of firearms in the USA dramatically increased. (By the way, the article ends with a sentence saying that the link between guns and violence "is obvious" despite the clear evidence to the contrary presented in the article. I doubt they cherry-picked any data to try to make firearms look less dangerous.)

Finally, if it is unbiased research you want, I recommend you read the Wright/Rossi/Daly book. The Carter administration funded research into gun control, and Wright and Rossi engaged in the research expecting to prove that gun control prevents violence. Their research showed the opposite, and changed their minds on the subject.

Go fuck yourself, shill.

Ouch, that is so hateful, so sad...

The only "reason" Sanders has for being allegedly-unelectable is that Hillary shills like you repeatedly assert that it's so

No, he is unelectable, because his rhetoric is indistinguishable from that of Hugo Chavez. And, though Americans are often accused of neither knowing nor caring, what is happening outside their country, the sorry fate of Venezuela is infamous enough.

Don't take my word for it — when I asked the good Senator's fans here on Slashdot, all I got was the customary avalanche of hate, but no discernible differences. The most useful response pointed out that, unlike the late El Presidente, Bernie Sanders is not an anti-Semite. But nothing relevant to the economy or foreign policy was identified...

we add a meter to the floodwall every century

The issue is the cost. In Miami alone they are spending between $400-$500 million over the next five years to keep up with the rising sea level which is already causing salt water incursions into streets and fresh water supplies during high tide. And the costs will only accelerate along with sea level rise. Economists agree that a revenue neutral carbon tax is the most cost efficient way forward.

Took two seconds to google these. I'm not alone on this.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm...
http://www.wsj.com/articles/ha...
http://www.economist.com/news/...
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/21s...

It's interesting to compare this with the C-130 which first flew a little later, 1954, and is still being built. The time interval over which they have been building them is longer than the time interval between the Wright Brothers, and the first C-130 flight.

This gives rise to the interesting thought that in certain niche areas (dropping insanely huge numbers of bombs, landing 10 tons of cargo on a remote dirt airstrip) we have reached "peak aeroplane" and did so decades ago. Essentially, spending a huge wodge of money on a clean sheet design to do those jobs will never result in benefits that justify the cost. Far better just to tweak the designs we have with a few incremental improvements.

Civil aircraft don't seem to have reached peak as there are still improvements (in running cost) to be made, which justify new designs. "The average amount of energy consumed per mile, per passenger, fell by 74% on domestic flights in America between 1970 and 2010", according to The Economist. But presumably that will also eventually peak out in the future, eventually making brand-new civil designs pointless.

The Economist sounded this exact alarm more than 10 years ago: http://www.economist.com/node/...

Probably not going to complain about "the descendants of the same ones that crucified Christ" dominating the world as Chavez did.

Probably. And he may even be nicer to Israel than Chavez was and than his own core constituency are. But that's not something, that has much bearing on economic and other internal policies... And it is those policies — not the anti-Semitism and not the anti-Israel denunciations — that stalled Venezuela's economy (even while oil was still expensive), destroyed its infrastructure, and quintupled the murder rate and other violent crime.

Who is going to hire someone out of prison with a record as a programmer.

Pro-tip: If you don't want a them to know you were in prison, then don't put it on your resume. Many companies don't do background checks, and often they don't do any fact checking at all. According to The Economist, a criminal record is not correlated with poor job performance for many jobs. You are better off filtering out people that use MSIE to complete their job application, or that write in all single case (either upper or lower). Those are both correlated with poor performance.

It is tough to get hired as a gardener with a record.

Gardeners have more opportunities to steal stuff.

The problem has been stated. The problem is that the only reason that corporations exist is for shareholder profit.

So Greenpeace or the United Auto Workers labor union exists only for shareholder profit?

UAW is not, as far as I can determine, a corporation.

Non profit entities such as Greenpeace certainly can exist for the general good but in many cases even non profit entities are used by the wealthy to shelter income from income, property and estate taxes. Ikea is my favorite example of this: http://www.economist.com/node/...

So yes, the occasional exception exists but it remains the exception, not the rule.

If corporations didn't make profit, they wouldn't have been created and they wouldn't continue to exist because no one would invest in them to start with.

That or there would be more not-for-profit public benefit corporations, whose earnings stay in the company's foundation. You might remember one that was created out of the BUCK FETA scandal on Slashdot: SoylentNews.

Possibly, although such can still be misused as many 'not for profit' organizations are used by the wealthy to shelter income and avoid death taxes.
http://www.economist.com/node/...

at least Putin struck back decisively against ISIS/ISIL in Syria.

Putin's, peace be upon him, strikes against ISIS are, at best, half-hearted and at worst a sham. He is not fighting against ISIS, he is fighting for Assad — a decades-long client of the USSR/Russia. Because of Russia's strikes against anti-Assad fighters, ISIS was, actually, been able to gain ground in Syria on several occasions.

Considering the post-tragedy rise of Le Pen and other European nationalists, who tend to be Putin's, peace be upon him, clients themselves, one may argue, Putin had a hand in the Paris-attack himself. Whether that's true or not, the sentiment such as yours certainly illustrates, how he benefited from it.

I have no love the Nobel Peace Prize winner we are saddled with — his foreign policy is as destructive as the internal ones — but praising Putin seems outright dumb. Obama will be gone in a year, Putin will remain a menacing danger for as long as he lives — and the asshole is fit, hale and healthy...

This was true before that Russian airliner went down in the Sinai, and ISIS so helpfully claimed responsibility. Putin, as well as Beijing, back Assad b'cos that's their lone surviving customer for Soviet era weapons. Previously, Moscow had Saddam, Gadaffi and Assad all. First Saddam was toppled, then Gadaffi, and now both Russia and China risk losing their last customer of weaponry - Syria. Which is why they are fighting tooth and nail to save him.

However, ISIS is no ally of Russia, and in fact, Russia has a dim view of Sunni Jihadis - like the Chechens, the Islamic movement of Turkestan and other Jihadi movements in Russia, like the Tatars. So Russia is more than happy to take out ISIS. It's just that w/ al Nusra and the FSA being closer to Damascus than ISIS was, they were a higher priority for Putin, but now, w/ this Russian plane going down, ISIS kicked themselves up in the scheduler list.

at least Putin struck back decisively against ISIS/ISIL in Syria.

Putin's, peace be upon him, strikes against ISIS are, at best, half-hearted and at worst a sham. He is not fighting against ISIS, he is fighting for Assad — a decades-long client of the USSR/Russia. Because of Russia's strikes against anti-Assad fighters, ISIS was, actually, been able to gain ground in Syria on several occasions.

Considering the post-tragedy rise of Le Pen and other European nationalists, who tend to be Putin's, peace be upon him, clients themselves, one may argue, Putin had a hand in the Paris-attack himself. Whether that's true or not, the sentiment such as yours certainly illustrates, how he benefited from it.

I have no love the Nobel Peace Prize winner we are saddled with — his foreign policy is as destructive as the internal ones — but praising Putin seems outright dumb. Obama will be gone in a year, Putin will remain a menacing danger for as long as he lives — and the asshole is fit, hale and healthy...

Why not just cut back on fossil fuel burning? Oh no's, can't have that, can we?

Actually, no we cannot cut back all that much. Unless you are figuring on systematically reducing the world's population, or hell, just starving them to death. You see, petro-chemicals are used extensively to create fertilizer, and if you stop doing that with oil people are going to starve. Of course we can all just go back to horse and buggy, whale oil lamps and the supportable population of the world we can support with that technology, but somehow I don't figure that the third world is going to accept going backwards further....

Best we can hope for is to cut down *some* on fossil fuel use by developing other energy sources. Fusion comes to mind as a promising solution..... But that's decades out....Just figure that CO2 emissions are here to stay for your lifetime, because even if you are a baby, they are....

If we don't cut back population over the long term. we'll all starve to death. And let's be honest, oil is not an infinite resource. Even ignoring global warming, there comes a time when the well goes dry.

And the problem is not that far away 2050 projections:

NEW population forecasts from the United Nations point to a new world order in 2050. The number of people will grow from 7.3 billion to 9.7 billion in 2050, 100m more than was estimated in the UN's last report two years ago. More than half of this growth comes from Africa, where the population is set to double to 2.5 billion. Nigeria's population will reach 413m, overtaking America as the world's third most-populous country. Congo and Ethiopia will swell to more than 195m and 188m repectively, more than twice their current numbers. India will surpass China as the world's most populous country in 2022, six years earlier than was previously forecast. China's population will peak at 1.4 billion in 2028; India's four decades later at 1.75 billion. Changes in fertility make long-term projections hard, but by 2100 the planet’s population will be rising past 11.2 billion. It will also be much older. The median age of 30 will rise to 36 in 2050 and 42 in 2100—the median age of Europeans today. A quarter of Europe's people are already aged 60 or more; by 2050 deaths will outnumber births by 32m. The UN warns that only migration will prevent the region's population from shrinking further.

they would sign up for the military and go bust some rear

You're assuming that the military is actually busting some rear.

I am very much underwhelmed with the progress being made by our military.

As an example, I would like to know why it's only now that the US attacks the oil trucks smuggling oil out of IS held territory when we have known for at least a year that this is how they generate the majority of their revenue.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11...

Article from Jan 4 discussing the funding of IS:
http://www.economist.com/blogs...

Sadly, his manifesto would be endorsed by the majority of people even in the countries he hates for welcoming immigrants. We freely allow the migration of money, but, but not people. Jobs don't have to climb a border wall, cross a sea or desert or even get a visa before leaving their home country.

Countries such as the US treat corporations as people, except when it comes to national borders. We require a passport for living-breathing people but not for corporations. I've never heard of a corporation being held against its will for decades in a prison/refugee camp while its immigration status is being evaluated. Corporations needn't cross deserts or crowd onto rickety boats. They are seldom convicted of treason or Logan act violations regardless of the havoc and resentment they create as representatives of their homeland in other parts of the world.

We don't bat an eye when a wealthy businessman distorts a third-world economy with their holiday home or an expat REIT vulture fund managed by former US VP Dan Quayle acquires and ruthlessly forecloses on hundreds of properties in Northern Ireland's 6 counties. Your portfolio now "owns" land that the Irish have struggled over for generations.

Gangolf, I don't know what immigrants did to you to make you so angry. I am one of the 232 million people who live outside my birth country. If we were counted, 0th generation immigrants would be the 5th most populous country in the world, ahead of Brazil. But we are shunned and labelled as if refugee == immigrant == illegal. I'm truly surprised that you count the US as a country that is "too welcoming." As an insular isolationist, you might not be aware that US immigration policy has changed considerably since the waves of 19th and early 20th century immigrants. The US solved its 1990s boat people crisis by warehousing refugees at Gitmo. It's solving the central American crisis by building a wall and letting people die. "Illegal" is a good definition of these border policies which violate international law. Rest assured that I will never use your software until you understand more about the people who provide a convenient scapegoat for politicians and a convenient target for your hate.

H1-Bs and green card holders are still guests, not Citizens.

And yet, by your own logic, simply because they can not vote, they don't have to pay taxes nor obey other laws.

On this new topic you raised:

Residents of D.C. do deserve to vote and it's well past time to fix that.

No, they don't "deserve" to vote in the slightest — their physical proximity to the seat of government already gives them undue advantage over the political process.

Look at what happens every once in a while in countries, where capitals are regular cities, rather than ones created for the purpose of hosting the government (like in the US or Australia):

• Russia
• Ukraine
• Mexico
• Thailand

The physical proximity to the government allows residents of the capital to stage protests and demonstrations — if not outright coups/revolutions and assassinations — at far lower costs, than what residents of remote regions of the same country would have to bear. Disenfranchising capital-critters was a very wise decision by the Founding Fathers. No new arguments for "fixing it" have appeared since the founding of the Republic.

Doctor and Lawyer salaries are through the roof because those are two of very few jobs that can not be outsourced to a third world country. If Blue Cross could ship you to Haiti for a 40c an hour doctor you don't think they would?

Welcome to the "Global Economy". You have heard all about it I'm sure, and how great it is. A real Utopia where everyone benefits. Assuming of course you are already extremely wealthy, because the rest of the people are expendable. As long as a company can stay afloat using dirt cheap labor, they will. Zuckerberg won the lottery, nothing more. That is your shot to getting out of the cesspool we are creating by complacently watching the government be run by the same people profiteering.

History is cyclical, we have seen this all before. The same result will come eventually, because people never learn to learn from history.

Doctors are being outsourced:
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/6621...
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/1...

Lawyers are being outsourced:
http://www.americanbar.org/pub...
http://www.economist.com/node/...

Doctor and lawyer salaries are not high because they can't be outsourced (they can), but because of the fucked up healthcare and legal systems in America.

*Not necessarily _the_ Bitcoin blockchain. But one created along the same principles by election authorities.

The Economist magazine has a cover story this week on blockchain technology and how it can be used to create a trusted transaction between untrusting people. Some banks are already using blockchains to clear transactions in seconds that used to take days.

If by 'lost' you mean 'won' then yes you are right.
4 cities in the top 10 worldwide for liveability. Maybe your definition of winning needs to be reconsidered?

> The fact that something so debilitating, so damaging to the user's health, is sold over the counter while other less harmful drugs are strictly regulated says a lot about the true functioning of the FDA.

Wait, what, we're not talking about Alcohol ? :-)

* Hard to Others + Self

It's Cold War heritage. When saying Western, or the West, it does not mean 'the West' as cardinal point (e.g, Italy), so are the Eastern Europe. Now, when countries are in EU, they're mentioned as Europe, that what the medias have use to report.
Ayy, stop this pointless discussion!

OK, I agree my comment was flawed, that use ambiguous word. I update my comment:
The article did not mention Western Europe, Southern Europe, Scandinavia, so more precisely, U.S is better than Latin America, Asia or Eastern Europe.

Piketty tax should fix it.
http://worldif.economist.com/a...

Agreed that the refrigerator (along with birth control) is one of the most disruptive technologies in the past 100 years. However, this is not yet the case for the world at large. Only 27% of people in India own a refrigerator. In the West we take things like refrigeration and toilets for granted...

True, but what was India's most disruptive technologies in the past 100 years and how does it fit for the rest of the world?

Agreed that the refrigerator (along with birth control) is one of the most disruptive technologies in the past 100 years. However, this is not yet the case for the world at large. Only 27% of people in India own a refrigerator. In the West we take things like refrigeration and toilets for granted...

And the very fact that a refrigerator is a luxury item in India has a lot of bearing on how they can afford to come in and take over jobs for wages that would literally starve Americans.