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Actually, it should make a HUGE difference.
NY is a fairly tiny state. It is in the bottom 1/2 (almost bottom 1/3) and only around 47,000 sq miles. However, HUGE population. There are almost 9 million in NYC ALONE, vs 20M in the New York state. So, adding in the surrounding areas of NYC and you are looking at 1/2 of the state being in NYC area (SWAG). Even though most of the ppl outside of NYC will have further to drive, they are mostly SHORT SHORT distances (here in Colorado, I used to drive >200 miles / day just to get to/from work). So, I would say, it is safe to assume that at least 1/2 of the gasoline consumed there is in the city. New York is 4th largest consumer of fuel in America.
Note that this one has CA off by a magnitude. It is #1, so NY moves down to 4 This indicates around 129K barrels for 2016 So, giving half, that would be around 64K barrels of gas, which does not include the diesel or the commercial stuff. So, with 42 gal/barrel that would give ~ 2688000 gal of gas. Note that it is about 20 lbs / gal of gas, which is around 27K tons of CO2 / year.
That is just the gas portion for regular cars. It does not include the diesel, which is even worse.

One nice thing about NY is that they have a varied electricity matrix. Basically, Hydro, Nuke, and nat gas. And they are working towards killing off most of their nat gas. So, if they kill the nat gas electricity AND kill the ICE, they will be one of the cleanest population in terms of CO2.

These reports seem to be a bit old (from 2011 or so), but here are a couple:

http://graphics.latimes.com/usmap-autism-rates-state/

http://www.statemaster.com/graph/hea_aut_num_of_chi_wit_aut_percap-autism-number-children-per-capita

In both, Mississippi's autism rates seem much lower than other states. However, this could be because of lack of testing or resources for parents of autistic kids. So autism incidences don't get reported and autism seems rate in the state. Better detection and resources are the main reason for the autism "spike", not vaccines or some mysterious "toxin."

Full disclosure: My son was diagnosed on the spectrum - Asperger's Syndrome. I'm also likely autistic, though undiagnosed. (Getting a diagnosis for me now won't help me - I've developed my own coping mechanisms - or my son so there's no reason to pay for the diagnosis.)

As single event upsets (SEU) are caused by cosmic particles which create alpha particles. It makes sense that equipment higher in the rack would absorb more of the alpha particles and block them from systems lower in the rack, but I am not a physicist. Alpha particles are relatively easy to block with shielding.

http://www.statemaster.com/encyclopedia/Single_event-upset

As the link said, this was first theorized in 1978 and supercomputer companies have been designing systems with this in mind for decades.

Yep. Money spent w/ a local Mom-and-Pop store will turn over 5 times in a local community on average --- money spent at Wal-Mart immediately goes over-seas to the Chinese manufacturers, into the Walton family pockets, or into the brokerage accounts of people who own stock (minus what their broker pockets).

It's not sustainable. Look at:

http://www.statemaster.com/graph/lif_wal_sto_num_of_sup_percap-stores-number-supercenters-per-capita

and compare it w/ how well local economies are doing. I know, correlation != causation, but at the least, it merits more thought.

http://www.statemaster.com/graph/ene_pet_pro-energy-oil-production

Texas and Louisiana produce a little less than 30% of US domestic oil production. That does not count the offshore wells in federal water. It only counts land based wells. How about chemical plants and refineries?

Look at a map. Does not the Mississippi River enter the Gulf of Mexico in Louisiana? How would that work out for you?

So, what makes both California and DC different from Massachusetts?

That's an easy one. Geography, mostly. Because of all the agriculture resulting from its climate, California has a lot of immigrants (both legal and illegal) coming from Mexico who do not speak English very well when they get here. In particular, the percentge of illegal immigrants (by definition, first-generation) per capital is higher in California than any other state in the U.S., and by a very sizable margin. (Hover over each state's raw number to see the per capita figure.) Therefore, the number of children who are simultaneously learning science while still learning English is higher than anywhere else in the U.S. As a result, there are more kids struggling, who need more individual attention, which means the schools cost more while producing lower test scores.

It's not willful blindness but rather it's recognizing facts.

So lets look here:
http://www.missingkids.com/en_US/documents/sex-offender-map.pdf

So for some arm chair math.. lets say you have (what seems to be the upper but of the mid block) and keep it round.. and say worst case is 300 per 100,000 people.

so 0.3% of the pollution is a sex offender, keep in mind this list does not filter only for pedos but also has rapists and people of that nature.

So then we look here:
http://www.statemaster.com/graph/edu_ele_sec_tot_tea_percap-secondary-total-teachers-per-capita#source

Pretty much the average is at least 1% of the population are teachers of some type.

If given that ALL sex offenders where also teachers and all sex offenders where pedos you could in theory have 1 in 3 teachers be a pedo. But i'd have to say you'd have to be extremely paranoid to think that.

There is also this whole train of thought about how do you prevent things from happening by analyzing what is going on, that i believe is completely missing from this rational of though/policy.. If a teacher makes a student a friend or not will not effect the decision by the student to or not to "groom" the student, and if they are going to do it this will not stop them, might make it harder but will not stop them. The trade off comes down to the value of "making it harder" and the lost benefits/constraints placed on people. And in this case you are now declaring that ONLY pedo's would do this action and there for if you are doing it we can't trust you, and honestly i doubt that is a good way of looking at it. I'd be hard pressed to believe that if a teach where to "friend" a student on face book and then groom them through that, that it would be the only method or sign that they are doing it, and i highly doubt that it would be the most obvious one either.

To that point i think they would be better off leaving it be and then monitoring the other "signs" what ever they are and then use the data we all know is stored and never lost on face book as source of evidence to investigate and hopefully convict the few actual pedos out there.

Again it's not "willful blindness" it's recognizing facts and coming to terms with reality..

With an average death rate compared with other states, the Castle Doctrine doesn't appear to be making much of difference.

Nice law though - invite someone into your home, and blow their head off. Claim they had broken in. Profit!

Texas has a stand-your-ground law, like the one involving the Trayvon case.

No need to invite anyone into your house. Just follow them around while talking to 911, then approach them, then realize you're getting your ass beat, then shoot them and claim it was self-defense.

-AI

Btw, I am NOT against Castle or Stand your ground... but I am against dumb asses causing so much politically charged news cause they couldn't mind their own damn business, or at least couldn't bring themselves to act as a proxy and eyes for law enforcement without taking physical actions.

Just make sure that they are black and you are white, then you will have the support of the entire republican party (who secretly wish it was Obama who was shot)

With an average death rate compared with other states, the Castle Doctrine doesn't appear to be making much of difference.

Nice law though - invite someone into your home, and blow their head off. Claim they had broken in. Profit!

Texas has a stand-your-ground law, like the one involving the Trayvon case.

No need to invite anyone into your house. Just follow them around while talking
to 911, then approach them, then realize you're getting your ass beat, then shoot
them and claim it was self-defense.

-AI

Btw, I am NOT against Castle or Stand your ground... but I am against dumb
asses causing so much politically charged news cause they couldn't mind their
own damn business, or at least couldn't bring themselves to act as a proxy and
eyes for law enforcement without taking physical actions.

With an average death rate compared with other states, the Castle Doctrine doesn't appear to be making much of difference.

Inability to comprehend statistics along with.. wait for it:

Nice law though - invite someone into your home, and blow their head off. Claim they had broken in. Profit!

no critical reasoning skills (actually, that may not be true; I think you're just being an asshole). Nice straw man though.

With an average death rate compared with other states, the Castle Doctrine doesn't appear to be making much of difference.

Nice law though - invite someone into your home, and blow their head off. Claim they had broken in. Profit!

Um, just because there are less women than men, doesn't mean that men can't get laid. Wyoming has nearly a 2:1 ratio of men to women.

Dude, get a clue. How could you even post something that so badly fails the laugh test?
Seems clear to me that you have zero critical thinking ability.

Wyoming's sex ratio is 50.2% male to 49.8% female.

Stop thinking like a raging heterosexual.

Blow me.

California electricity consumption:
http://www.statemaster.com/graph/ene_tot_ele_con-energy-total-electricity-consumption

The link provided prior shows a plant on just over 7 acres that puts out 5mw constant. AFAIK the figures published are not 'peak' but rather sustained average -- the figures that people would expect to see when making calculations, etc.

http://www.statemaster.com/graph/eco_tot_tax_bur-total-tax-burden-per-capita

What "liberals" just don't get is that raising taxes does not necessarily mean raising revenue. California doesn't have revenue problem, it has a spending problem.

So, here's a list of violent crime by state. Note the top 5 are: California, Florida, Texas, New York, and Illinois. So of the most violent states the highest has very middle of the road gun control laws (somewhat more strict than average), two have very lax gun control laws, and two have some of the most strict gun control laws in the country. Notice the strong correlation? Neither do I.

Frankly, if you're looking for causative factors for violent crime and murder, gun control laws are a red herring. There is little or no correlation demonstrated scientifically either regionally or nationally. Trying to fight violent crime with gun control laws is like trying to fight syphilis with prayer in public elementary schools. Everyone will have an opinion, get mad, and politicians will love it... but no matter what happens it's not going to help the problem significantly. Real solutions have worked other places though, reducing wealth disparity, social safety nets, decriminalizing narcotic use and personal possession, free addiction treatment programs, educational initiatives, socialized healthcare... all can be shown to have demonstrable effect in reducing violent crime. Of course they're also harder and expensive and not as easy of political targets.

No, California's economic problems stem from a number of factors:

• The largest percentage of illegal immigrants (most of whom don't pay taxes) of any state in the U.S. (Source: statemaster.com)
• One of the largest homeless populations per capita of any state in the U.S. (due principally to climate)
• A history of significant imbalance between dollars sent to the federal government and dollars gotten back. (Source: taxfoundation.org) Note that the state is doing better than break-even this year, as is every other state, but decades of losses add up.
• A massively broken U.S. health care system that is causing every state in the nation to bleed.
• Severe unemployment in historically strong sectors.
• The bursting of much bigger housing bubbles than nearly anywhere else in the country, resulting in a sudden and dramatic drop in property tax revenues.
• Over-reliance on sales tax revenue that took a dive due to the recession.
• Decades of stupid politicians with no financial sense who spent every penny the state brought in. This is basically a fundamental problem with having 90% of your government officials be lawyers; most lawyers have never dealt with tough economic times, so most do not know how to live within their means.

There are probably plenty of other things that I'm not thinking of right now. Notice that none of these have much, if anything, to do with California's constitution.

Amazon has centers around the U.S. because they need to be able to ship something to you quickly no matter where in the U.S. you are.

Traditional stores can easily have product in just one warehouse, possibly even overseas, because deliveries to stores is more regular and far simpler.

Not really. Every major retail chain has regional distribution centers about the size of Amazon's and about just as many(if not more). Just a couple of examples of their competitors:

• Target
• Wal-Mart

Thanks. The US expenditures is a joke. What a waste.

Compare http://www.statemaster.com/graph/mil_cos_of_the_mil_percap-military-cost-per-capita

with

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/mil_exp_dol_fig_percap-expenditures-dollar-figure-per-capita

where you can the at the Nationmaster list is topped by Israel, understandably. That would rank them as the 25th state in expendures in the US.

Norway, the 3rd on the list spends $883 per person and year. That would give them rank 43rd in the US.

The formerly glorious United Kingdom would be second last among the US states...

Why not make the economy stronger? China will win this race within a one hundred year, but not because of a stronger army...

Washington State is one of the few states in the US without a personal income tax (the sales taxes here are very high to make up for the revenue deficiency).

According to Wikipedia, Washington sales tax is only 6.2% (plus local). You are very lucky: here in California we have 8.25% (plus local), and we also have income tax.

According to this chart, Washington is right next to California in per-capita taxes, so I'm guessing you have higher property tax to make up for it.

The irony of the total cost of nuclear weapons by the USA is that it is about enough money (by one estimate I read) to tear down and rebuild every building in the USA twice...

California has money problems right now -- a shortfall of, what, US$20 billion? According to here:
    http://www.statemaster.com/graph/mil_cos_of_nuc_wea-military-cost-of-nuclear-weapons
a total of US$2,139,150,000.00 has been spent on just California's behalf on nuclear weapons in the past.

What are we really defending here?
    http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm

That sure would come in handy for CA right now, to have an extra two trillion dollars in their budget reserve (not to mention interest).

As Albert Einstein said, with the advent of understanding the power of the atom, everything has changed but our way of thinking. Thus my sig below about the irony of such advanced ultra-powerful tools of abundance in the hands of those obsessed with fighting over perceived scarcity.
    http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html

That the GDP of Afghanistan is ~13 billion.

By way of comparison the State of Vermont has a gross state product of $22 billion.....

Its not a permit process, its a background check.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Instant_Criminal_Background_Check_System

I'm in Alaska, there are no permits needed here unless I want to carry a concealed firearm, same as when I was in Oregon before that.

But I can open carry without a permit, I just need to not be dinged on the background check or to buy a firearm from someone else.

http://www.statemaster.com/graph/gov_gun_law_per-government-gun-laws-permits

http://www.opencarry.org/ak.html

The Princeston WordNet has the same definition, presumably because of its common usage.

Anyway, have a look at http://www.statemaster.com/encyclopedia/Irony#Usage_controversy . Even the modernly accepted version of irony doesn't always follow the pure meaning of the original word.. words change over time, annoying as it is for those of us who know the real meaning behind words and phrases (I usually do, though I was taught the meaning of irony by what is obviously a rather confused world).

So they don't really fly at night.

They often don't fly at night, but since a record was set in 1952 for a 56h 15m flight, I don't quite think you can say they can't stay aloft after dark (although I suspect Messr. Atger was probably using ridge lift rather than convection to keep airborne during the night).

Do Americans really live in this permanent state of fear?

I just hope I can live my entire life in a country that is safe enough that I will never even have to think about owning a weapon as self defence mechanism.

In general I'd argue that the USA's weapon's laws make is less safe than similar more restrictive countries.
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_mur_wit_fir_percap-crime-murders-firearms-per-capita

Murders with firearms:
United States: 0.0279271 per 1,000 people
Canada: 0.00502972 per 1,000 people
United Kingdom: 0.00102579 per 1,000 people

Unfortunately this one doesn't show the more civilized countries:
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_gun_vio_hom_fir_hom_rat_per_100_pop-rate-per-100-000-pop

My country (The Netherlands) isn't entirely safe, but according to the statistics bureau (www.cbs.nl) about 60 people a year die from firearms. Compare this with the state of New York, which has about 750 and has a similar number of inhabitants and population density. With numbers more than ten times higher than in my country, it ranks #46 on the list of USA states:
http://www.statemaster.com/graph/cri_mur_wit_fir-death-rate-per-100-000

With those numbers I'd argue that having a gun might make you feel more safe, but actually has the opposite effect if everyone has one.

That one is obvious, and in the article. The carbon dioxide reduction policies are a economic threat to Utah. They produce the coal for the power plants that the carbon dioxide reduction policies are trying to eliminate.

Nothing much to see here, just a legislature passing a "Don't take our juuurbs!" statement.

Yeah, I didn't quite understand that. What I read in the article:

But it does offer a view of state politicians' concerns in Utah which is a major oil and coal producing state.

Unless it's changed drastically since 2008, Utah is very low in the rankings with 18 working coal mines providing about two thousand jobs. Compare this to 600 working mines in Kentucky, 438 in West Virginia and 361 in Pennsylvania. Wouldn't these states be passing this resolution first and foremost if that was the sole motivating factor of state governments? In oil production, Utah is 13th. I'm not sure what 'major' constituted to the Guardian but apparently they know something about Utah that I don't. Does it traffic coal and oil? Process and refine it from other states? I'm not aware of these industries in the state if they exist.

Regardless of his inaccuracies, perceived or real... fact is, every nuclear weapon on the planet barely manage one tenth the destructive force of Yellowstone's 2.2 million or 640,000 year ago eruption.

Megaton Comparisons

You will note that the 640,000 year ago eruption was ten times more powerful than all of the world's nukes COMBINED.

You do realize that at least two of Yellowstone's previous eruptions are more powerful than every nuclear weapon we have times TEN. Or a "measly" 875,000 Megatons...

Check this out for some great comparisons of the relative power of volcanoes, nukes, bombs, etc...

A megaton (of TNT) is 4.184 × 1015 joules = 4.184 petajoules . You average Hydrogen bomb has about one megaton. The world has only about 70,000 nuclear bombs (rough estimate, USSR has about 16,000, the USA has about 33,000 - and most are much less powerful than an Hydrogen bomb). So the previous eruption was equal to more than 10 times ALL the existing nuclear bombs.

Oh, well... languages that use ** for exponentiation?

Ada, Bash, Fortran*, FoxPro, Perl, Python, Ruby, SAS, ABAP, and Haskell**, I suppose...

according to google and http://www.statemaster.com/encyclopedia/Exponentiation

* hold it- you mean there are other languages than fortran IV ?
**(for floating-point exponents)

That's because there's an assload of taxes lost/avoided in Utah due to tithing (10% off the bat), LDS churches and stake houses *everywhere* occupying prime otherwise-taxable real estate, and the fact that the chain of Deseret Industries thrift stores counts as a double whammy (no sales tax on the goods *and* a way for people to deduct "donations" by offloading their garbage). Never mind the above average family size, which means more kids and thus more child credits and deductions.

More power to the state of Utah for trying to get its fair share in taxes.

Personally, I opt for the "estimated" use tax option when filing. Since it's based on a percentage of income, I likely come out ahead since my income is low but I buy a huge amount online (even food). Besides, I don't keep records of much of anything, so it's not like I could come up with the actual numbers anyway.

Well, I am a bit confused. Plants do perspire and release water vapour but they also usually release heat (they have a metabolism and show on infrared).

It is a bit complicated. ;-)

It's true that plants give off IR radiation. But they also release water vapor, and the evaporation process is endothermic. This cools the plant tissues slightly, and conductance cools the air at the leaf surfaces. There's a lot of energy conversion and transfer going on around a functioning leaf. The "bottom line" of it all is that the air among masses of plant life is usually a few degrees cooler than the outside air, unless the air is cold, when the plants may somewhat warm the air. You can feel this when you walk into a clump of trees, even if you're still in the sunlight. Much of this effect is due to inefficiencies in the plants' techniques for controlling their own internal temperature.

It is interesting that plants can be giving off IR while being cooler than their surroundings. Part of the explanation is that the photosynthetic process involves a lot of frequency shifting. Photons are absorbed at one frequency, electrons bounce the absorbed energy around a bit, and another photon is radiated at a lower energy level. Most of this is significant to the plant's metabolism, but there are inefficiences. Thus, chlorophyll absorbs best in the green/blue part of the spectrum; a quick google found a graph at http://www.statemaster.com/encyclopedia/Chlorophyll. Note the complexity of the graph, with a lower peak in the red. To increase its absorbency, chloroplasts surround the chlorophyll with frequency-shifting molecules that absorb photons at other frequencies and reradiate the energy as photons that the chlorophyll prefers. But chlorophyll molecules don't intercept all these green/blue(/red) photons, explaining why leaves are greener than the incoming light. The whole process is impressively complex, and we're not very close to fully understanding it all. But much of the accidental reradiation is at low-energy frequencies, in the IR part of the spectrum.

Some interesting research reports a few years ago involved some tiny temperature sensors that could measure the temperature inside leaves. They reported that a wide variety of plants tested, over a wide range of atmospheric conditions, the internal leaf temperatures were close to 21 Celsius. This is somewhat cooler than our body temperature, and generally different from the air. The "higher" plants seem to have evolved some impressive temperature regulation methods, presumably because chemistry is simpler and cheaper if you can control the temperature. So at cooler temperatures, leaves tend to absorb lots of photons that they don't need for photosynthesis, but which function solely to warm the leaf to its operating temperature. The leakage from this process mostly loses low-energy photons, i.e., infrared. At higher temperatures, leaves can both radiate more energetic photons, and also release water vapor, which cools the tissues rapidly. In this case, most of the inefficiency is in heat absorbed from the surrounding warmer air, which is the main reason that clumps of plants are cool. But it's not really that the water was vaporized to cool the air. It was vaporized to cool the internal leaf tissues, and the air cooling is due to poor insulation at the leaf surface. The plants are trying to keep themselves at operating temperature, and cooling of surrounding warmer air is an inefficiency in this process.

Anyway, it's complex. And it's impressive how much control can be done by critters that have no muscles or nervous system and are stuck spending their whole life in one spot. It's almost entirely complex chemistry, including some very sophisticated control of photons and passing energy via electrons along chains of carbon atoms. Understanding what's known of it takes years of study. But you can find a lot of summaries by googling for someth

I'm afraid "anonymity" just can't work in the long run. Everyone likes to imagine brave Daniel Ellsbergs hiding from the fascists, but it works even better for the modern-day Goebbels of the world.

The NAZis and Fascists are exactly why anonymous speech must be preserved, there aren't many willing to risk a visitation by government paid jackbooted thugs for saying what the authorities disapprove of. German young even took risks listening to Jazz and Swing music, get caught and be sent to labor camps.

Falcon

Because it is cheaper to pay one guy who knows where to put the chalk mark than it is to pay numerous guys who don't.

You are incorrect my friend. Perhaps you are drunk? http://www.statemaster.com/graph/hea_alc_con_bin_dri-health-alcohol-consumption-binge-drinkers

So has anyone ever gathered enough mass in a single place to have a detectable or measurable effect on gravity?

Yes: the Cavendish experiment. I vaguely remember doing a variation of this experiment in a high-school physics class, although in retrospect I doubt the experiment was controlled enough for stuff like electrostatics or air-dynamics to be meaningful. It has been performed properly enough for people to be pretty confident about its experimental results (at least in the Newtonian realm of gravity).

Surely if that was the case, you would weigh different on top of a mountain verses being in the deepest above water Vally.

You do (or at least a standardized weight does), and it has been measured.

There are also experiments based on monitoring the orbit of satellites very closely which use the variations in the satellites' orbits from expected "perfect" orbits to determine how much gravitational influence the Earth is exerting on the satellite at each moment (which can be translated into rough ideas of the density map of the Earth.)

Sounds to me like somebody is mis-repeating second-hand knowledge. The problem with something like Prop 13 is that property sold when the real estate market is in the tank won't generate the same kind of revenues it was before the collapse for many years. California won't have a Prop 13 issue for a while after the current recession is over, since it causes tax revenue to lag behind housing values.

Prop 13 will probably save California from having it even worse. Imagine if they had all that revenue from property at the bubble inflated values, rather than being forced to raise taxes slowly over time. They surely would have spent every penny of that too, and now would be even further in the hole.

Clearly, the problem in California is binding ballot initiatives. Their state budget is very high. They have plenty of money to spend on first-rate education. But they spend it on stupid crap that gets voted in instead. (And don't even get me started on the lack of correlation between dollars spent and overall quality of education.)

Does another state have a law making it impossible to raise taxes?

Massachusetts has a similar tax rule (Prop 2 1/2). The tax burden per-capita is almost identical to California. They frequently have the highest ranked public schools in the country.

Oops, the nationmaster link is to GDP PPP and the statemaster link is to GDP. Here's the links that point to the same economic measure (GDP). Sweden is between Illinois and Californa there. http://www.statemaster.com/graph/eco_gdp_percap-product-current-dollars-per-capita http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/eco_gdp_percap-economy-gdp-per-capita

And I guess the fact that Iceland was thinly populated ( I guess we could achieve this government-less utopia if we started by getting the worlds population density down to the level of Iceland in 1250. Roughly estimated, that would mean a reduction by a factor of 1/20. Any idea on how to achieve that in a reasonable time frame which doesn't involve violence, disease or famine?

If they left the European Union and joined the United States, they would be the poorest of our 51 states.

Oh yes. A truly unbiased source, with truly recent data. Stop drinking that KoolAid for a second and look at something that's a bit more up to date. Sweden would be roughly on par with Georgia. http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/eco_gdp_pur_pow_par_percap-purchasing-power-parity-per-capita http://www.statemaster.com/graph/eco_gdp_percap-product-current-dollars-per-capita

Here is some additional data, for those interested:

Binge Drinking by State
http://www.statemaster.com/graph/hea_alc_con_bin_dri-health-alcohol-consumption-binge-drinkers

DUI Laws by State - notice how the binge drinking states have lower fines
http://www.1800duilaws.com/forms/statesduilaws.asp

Drunk Driving Statistics - notice how the high binge drinking states do not correlate to high percentage of drunk driving fatalities
http://www.alcoholalert.com/drunk-driving-statistics.html

In states where people don't drink as much, there are more alcohol related fatalities! Why? Because they can neither drive nor handle their liquor! (ducks)

"Being in a relationship is not easy, more than half of all first marriages fail in this country. That statistic doesn't improve if you spend most of your time reading your favorite website and not tending to the needs of your family."

A coworker & I were discussing the alarming amount of people around us who are divorced. It's really crazy.

We bagan betting which state would have the highest divorce rate ... probably New York or California I had thought. We decided to look up the annual divorce rates by state and were shocked to see that some states in the bible belt states are relatively high. One of our most cherished institutions indeed!

We both had forgotten about Vegas! :)

These numbers look really low because it's yearly ... but as the decay continues for--say Ohio with 4%--you have a group of 100 couples over ten years ending up (exponential decay formula) with 33 divorced couples Our conversation continued to speculate what the hell has changed. We were wondering if it had to do with the fact that the world is getting smaller. I come into contact with way more people today than 20 years ago. Do I find a suitable mate and then find a more suitable mate later? Is it ebbing morals? Is it growing equality of the sexes? Is divorce rewarded in some way? Most importantly, I thought, there is less of a social stigma associated with it. Most likely it's influenced by all of these things.

Personally I think it's a shame but there's not a lot to be done about it.

Your grandparents had a lot less.

Interesting topic you brought up, according to this data our current ratio of physicians per 100,000 population is about 300, and according to this data for most of my grandparents childhood it would have been about half that. The really interesting trend in that historical data is that the ratio basically declined from 1850-1953, I wonder what the trend looked like from 1958-2008?

Meanwhile, the Iraq War has cost the average taxpayer about $12,000 each over the last five years.

If we assume a baseline 100M taxpayers, and an Iraq war cost of 100B a year, then, we're really talking only about $1000 a year on average. Notice, though, that 90% of the taxes in the USA are paid by people making over $250,000 a year, so really, we average stiffs are probably not even paying for the war at all.

Now, let's say that the Iraqis come through and increase their oil production to first 3m bbls/day, and then to 5m / bbls a day, and the benefits of this production increase result in additional 50 billion a year in profits to American companies, PLUS, a reduction in gasoline costs. We can calculate the ultimate profitability of the war based upon a reduction in the price of gasoline per person, knowing that in the USA the per capita consumption of gasoline is about 10 barrels per person per year. Source , and thus, about 30 barrels per taxpayer per year. So we say at 30 x 45 gets us about 1200 gallons of gas per year per taxpayer. We can thus calculate that if the war in Iraq is victorious, AND, nets a global price reduction of about a $1 / gallon, then, each taxpayer would come out ahead about $200 per year, even if the cost of continuing the war is born indefinitely. If, on the other hand, the USA wins the war and a stable semi-US-friendly government emerges and thus we can withdraw the troops, and Iraq still pumps enough to lower the price of gasoline by a $1 a gallon, then the war would basically pay for itself in about 5 years, and then after that, it would be pure profit for the USA. Hey, imperialism can be profitable, which is why countries do it!

Actually this is the gun violence chart the other one wasn't per capita. Which pretty much has no recognizable relationship between gun laws and gun violence. If you were to offset the population issues I don't think you'd get anything meaningful either. what a wash.

Actually you're right. But per capita comparisons of homicides seem dubious at best, it's not really a coincidence (in my opinion) that the top 4 on that list are the 4 most populous states in the union. Denser populations lead to more crime. I'd like to see some stats weighted for this fact.

Also, it seems states with less gun control laws have a spike in suicides/police shooings?

While I agree in principle with the decision, the argument that gun ownership restriction make the public less safe is ridiculous. It just isn't really supported by the numbers. Which show that aside from the few exceptions, in general states with more liberal gun ownership laws tend to have a significantly higher rate of gun deaths. But all of this is completely besides the point because the right to own a gun is stated clearly in the bill of rights and that should be enough. At least of the courage to stand by that fact and not make disingenuous arguments about how it's actually better for society on some vague level.

If he wanted to stamp out racism, he'd be better served leaning on his counterparts in California, Massachusetts, New York and New Jersey. Or any of the other 22 states that ranked higher in race motivated hate crime offense per the FBI. Or at least he'd be better served if he thought he could regulate thought.

California has more people.
California has more forcible rape, cars, whisky bought, etc etc etc. That's why, when people make comparisons, they use the per capita rate. That's the rate per person.
You'll notice, if you check that California comes 37th, as opposed to Alabama's 18th.

• 4th in tooth loss
• 7th in obesity.
• 3rd in gonorrhea rate.
• 6th in infant death rate.
• 45th in Gross State Product
• Last in Library visits per capita
• 3rd to last in % students above "basic" in grade 4 writing
• 1st in Diabetes.
• 5th in lynchings per capita.
• 46th in Bachelor's degree percentage
  
• 9th in Percent below poverty level
• 42nd in Income per capita
• 28th in Economic growth

• 4th in tooth loss
• 7th in obesity.
• 3rd in gonorrhea rate.
• 6th in infant death rate.
• 45th in Gross State Product
• Last in Library visits per capita
• 3rd to last in % students above "basic" in grade 4 writing
• 1st in Diabetes.
• 5th in lynchings per capita.
• 46th in Bachelor's degree percentage
  
• 9th in Percent below poverty level
• 42nd in Income per capita
• 28th in Economic growth