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Sunspot Activity Continues To Drop
slreboy writes "The sunspot cycle is behaving a little like the stock market. Just when you think it has hit bottom, it goes even lower. The year 2008 was a bear. There were no sunspots observed on 266 of the year's 366 days (73 percent). To find a year with more blank suns, you have to go all the way back to 1913, which had 311 spotless days. Prompted by these numbers, some observers suggested that the solar cycle had hit bottom in 2008. Maybe not. Sunspot counts for 2009 have dropped even lower. As of March 31st, there were no sunspots on 78 of the year's 90 days (87 percent)..."
The sun just needs to build up its reserve power before catastrophically attack the Earth in a fury of solar activity in 2012!
The musings of just another geek and his junk.
Right. Like the fact that as rates of legal gun ownership go up, gun violence goes down. Talk about in inconvenient truth.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
compared between the usa and say the uk
In the first case, you can't compare the US and the UK. Different cultures, different levels of violence -- even if you ignore guns.
It's also worth noting that the UK's level of violence -- both with and without guns -- has increased significantly since the UK's handgun ban. Do you have any evidence that it would have increased more without the ban?
i'd say just one of those deaths is worth more than 1,000 prevented muggings
Only if muggings never resulted in death, which isn't true as I'm sure you're well aware. If you need I can find numerous news articles about muggings gone bad. I'm not sure where to find statistics on that, though. Do you know? I'd like to see them.
and i can't imagine anyone with any grasp on reason or logic thinking that the number of deaths prevented by guns is anywhere near, by orders of magnitude, the number of pointless deaths committed with guns
A person with a "grasp on reason or logical thinking" would want to see actual numbers from studies, rather than just guessing.
Do you know how many deaths are "committed" with guns? If you remove from the statistics the people who were killed while engaging in criminal activities, it's around 7,000 per year in the US. That number includes accidental deaths, which are less than 400 per year.
and this is laughable:
"we can then balance appropriately against the limitation of human rights imposed by gun control"
i think a valid human right is the right to life
i think that right pretty much trumps any other right you are alluding to
The right of self-defense is a crucial part of the right to life. The 80 year-old man whose door is broken down by multiple 18 year-old assailants can preserve his right to life with a gun. Without it, he has no chance. (Not a hypothetical, BTW, I'm referring to an actual incident, and there are many similar).
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for the one metric we care about here in this analogy: less people drank
if you strictly control guns, less people will get them. ie, less senseless deaths will occur. this logic is flawless, i don't see how or why you would contest this
making something illegal or strictly controlly it doesn't stop anyone COMMITTED from getting that thing. but it does stop the casual yahoo. and that's the bulk of what we are talking about here
strict laws most definitely reduces the prevalency of that illicit material. for good reason or not. with marijuana, the limitation is not very morally valid. but the whole idea behind limiting guns is to limit senseless deaths: morally valid
you in fact understand this:
"Yes, it's obvious that if there were no guns they would be no gun crime. There would be other types of violent crime though, human nature being what is is. There would be 40k less deaths a year from cars if there were no cars, so we should make it really hard to get those too."
no one can pick up a knife and kill 13 people in a classroom in under a minute. the issue is that guns are a force multiplier. human violence will never go away, but we can easily reduce the number of force multiplies around. you wont stop all spree shootings, as germany with strict gun laws demonstrates. and you wont stop the truly evil committed criminals from getting guns. but you WILL stop the casual yahoos. you will stop the truly deranged who wouldn't pass review. you would remove the bulk of senseless deaths
less guns means less senseless killings. i dont understand why you cant see that this observation trumps every other observation you make or think you can make on the topic. less guns=less senseless deaths is a valid and easily reachable goal, and it trumps all other topics in play here. is there any human right that you can point out to me that trumps the human right to life?
in fact i believe that petty criminality will go up with less gun ownership. guns do deter petty crime. with less guns, there will be more muggings, for example
so what's the going rate on equivalency rate of muggings to senseless deaths? 1,000 muggings a life? this is absurd moral equivalency, but it works for me temporarily to make this point: if the usa has 10x less senseless deaths due to guns every year, with strict gun control laws, then i can easily put up with a 10,000x increase in petty crimes. why can't you?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
You can't put numbers to that. If you try to ignore the pig picture and frade a basic freedom for safety you might (but to date haven't, Dodge City was safer than D.C.) reduce crime in the short term but how do you put a number on a loss of the basis for civilization itself?
I agree, actually.
But, as it turns out, the numbers favor gun deregulation, and that's an easier argument to make with hoplophobes. Not that its necessarily a successful argument, since many of them leave rationality at the door (e.g. circletimessquare). Some of them, though, are willing to actually think, and with those the numbers argument is the doorway to getting them to re-evaluate their knee-jerk "common sense" reactions.
After they've come to accept the notion that guns aren't inherently evil, then you can start talking about the need of a populace to be able to defend itself against its own government -- so that it never has to.
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Re-read that sentence a couple of times.