So your examples of deep-time resilient technology... are both less than a century old. Dinosaurs could have had more than 8000 years of our technology without either of those existing ! If we had lasted a mere century less than we have neither would have. Not to mention it is utterly silly to assume that another species in a different environment would have similar technologies to us. The challenges they would wish to face and resources to apply would be massively different. Is a wheel even useful to a quadroped that has never seen anything he considered "heavy" ?
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence - Carl Sagan.
Claiming that in over 350 million years no species of dinosaur could possibly have developed technology is far more extraordinary a claim than suggesting it may have happened along the way. The entire point of the rest of my post is that if this had happened it almost certainly would NOT have left any technology to be found. The minimum survival time you're talking about 65 million years - and that's for the very last dinosaurs, if an advanced species had lived halfway through the dinosaur ages, that's over 200 million years. You realize that there were dinosaurs who WALKED from where Cape Town is now to where Rio is now without touching water ?
>To get a technological head start and a head start out in space an alien species would been part of an evolutionary process that skipped whatever their equivalent of dinosaurs would have been and gone directly to intelligent life capable of technology.
Firstly - why not ? We have no proof that there were NOT technologically advanced dinosaurs, at best we have strong reason to doubt there were spacefaring dinosaurs. You are underestimating just how massive an amount of deep time 65-million years was. Dinosaurs could have built cities five times bigger than New York and not a shred would have survived for us to find. If we go extinct tomorrow, it's unlikely that in 10-million years there will be any evidence whatsoever that we existed - except maybe a few primate fossils, even our best mummies can't make it that far. A hundred million ? Not a chance, by that point even our satelites would have decayed and crashed. The last evidence of our existence that may be around would be the bits of junk Apollo left on the moon and any future paleontologists (whether evolved here or elsewhere) that found that evidence would mostly wonder what the hell a Richard M. Nixon was... think about it, they would not even be sure whether it was left there by an earth-born species that reached the moon - or a long-lost lunar species that had a great council to end a war at that spot.
Secondly - your argument is flawed because that's not how time works, time is relative and doesn't happen at a constant rate. Planets that rotate their stars slower have physically existed longer than ones that move slower. So two planets around the same star, in different orbits, which orbit in the same timeframe, that formed together at the same time - the outer one will be significantly younger because time slows down as you speed up. It may be a matter of seconds per rotation - but there's been many billions of rotations for those to add up. And planets around more massive stars are regardless of when they formed relative to the big-bang, have had less time pass on them than those around smaller stars - because time slows down near bigger gravity wells.
The amount of "time" that passed on the surface of a planet is only very vaguely connected to the age of the universe and even to the age of that planet (which we measure relative to the age of the universe). The one decidedly does not offer any indications of the other. The only reason they happen to be the same on earth is because we happen to measure "years" by the time it takes our planet to rotate, but Jupiter formed at the same time as Earth did - and quite a lot less time has passed on Jupiter than on Earth. Even less have passed on the sun. This is, actually, one reason why - if there is life on Io or Europa - that life is likely to be "bacterial" rather than fishes - those moons circle a massive planet, any life there has had significantly less time to evolve than life on earth has had. No, I don't feel like doing the math to figure out how much.
My personal theory is that the most likely thing for any intelligent and technologically capable alien race to be doing is exactly what *we* are doing. Listen, and with a small budget - so only listening to a very small part of the spectrum from a tiny part of the sky. That golden record on voyager 1 is about the last major attempt we made at sending anything and it wasn't a very sensible one.
But if that was what economics led to here, why would we assume it would have other outcomes elsewhere ? Literally the only experimental sample of a technologically capable space-faring race we have - did this one.
So it's perfectly likely that there dozens of alien races within easy communications range of us all making a half-hearted attempt at listening and waiting for one of the others to talk first. All of them, in fact, hoping the outsource the expense of sending high-powered signals into a void where you don't know if anybody is listening, don't know if anybody who was listening would be able to understand it and don't even know in which direction to aim - to one of the others.
Exactly because sending messages is so incredibly difficult technically, and expensive, they may all have opted to just listen instead and, like us, hope that one of the others will figure out transmission first so they can justify the budget to build a transmitter to reply with.
Much as I would generally agree with you - I don't think it would solve this problem, because the problem is international. Unless you can get the compulsory license to be a WIPO treaty, you're still going to get screwed.
Actually Netflix is deploying the only sollution they can - and this is not it. This is the delaying tactic they use until the real solution is ready. Their real answer is to create more and more content themselves that they own and can stream where-ever they want and to produce better quality content than the old content companies are. Already shows like DareDevil and Jessica Jones and house of cards have set a huge new standard for television - and the old dinosaurs aren't keeping up. As that library grows, they will be ever less dependent on licensing from the dinosaurs and thus they will be more able to set the licensing terms to what they want as the dinosaurs grow more desperate.
Already they are in that position with the smaller ones, the AMC shows like walking dead, and CW shows like arrow and flash are all on the international catalogue because AMC doesn't have the muscle to refuse a licensing deal with international coverage and doesn't have a lot of exclusive deals with various broadcasters in other countries that they have to comply with. If anything the netflix deals have massively increased the audience for these smaller producers - and made a new business model for small channels to make expensive, high quality shows at a rate of a few per year and still be highly profitable because they can avoid the sausage-factory conditions that you need to be profitable when you're NBC.
Their real vision is to simply get to the point where, ultimately, nobody cares about getting around the geoblocks anymore because all the good stuff is on every catalog anyway. Once they are there, the big companies either play THEIR game or die.
And it's exactly what they used to do - and pretty much every non-US subscriber who doesn't want a tiny stunted netflix library already have done the work to get around that. I wonder if UNESCO in new york has gotten any snailmail as a result (I know several people who use their postal address on their netflix accounts because it comes up very early if you google 'postal address in New York'.
Even that has never been particularly accurate. There is a farmer at the address closest to the exact center of the United States who has received endless hatemail and death threats because when geolocation software can't get closer than "country" it points at that farm... and guess how many scammers, spammers and identify thieves have IP's that aren't easy to geolocate ?
And this is the grand irony of their approach to these things... in a desperate bid to maintain the old "sell the same thing many times to many companies in many countries" they are actually making it more convenient to use complicated technology to get the things unpaid for than to use a paid for and legal service to watch things.
Which can only cost them revenue. The old "exclusive broadcasting" deals business model is simply dying, and they need to realize that and shift to a new model before they are completely obsolete. I don't have high hopes though.
So your argument is that the science is wrong because it is hard to count the number of times people used a gun to threaten off an attacker without firing it ?
Maybe. That would probably be significant if crime by strangers happened to a statistically significant degree. Since however the people most likely to attack anybody is their own family. The gun an attacker is most likely yo use is your own because almost every attacker in the real world has legitimate access to your guns. 4 out of 5 women ever killed were shot by a husband or boyfriend... so frankly just about the most suicidal thing a woman can ever do is live with a man with a gun in the house. It does not much matter which one of them bought it. It does not matter if a gun is effective against an armed intruder because armed intruders are extremely rare. Deliberate and accidental shootings by family members however are exceedingly common.
Ps. Japan's suicide rate is a lie. The Japanese police claim a near 100% case resolution rate for murder. That is statistically impossible. Its been investigated multiple times and consistently explained by simple corruption: only solve the easy ones. Any complicated murder without an instantly obvious suspect is ruled a suicide because there are no performance penalties for unsolved suicides. The actual murder rate is much higher than reported (though far lower than the US) and the actual suicide rate much lower (just slightly more than the US). Unless you think its likely that people commit suicide regularly with three bullets to the back of the skull... Excellent refference on specifically this Japanese situation and the incentives that led to it can be found in Stephen J. Levitt's book 'freakonomics'.
I didn't say the absense of a gun makes suicide less likely. It does make surviving the attempt more likely but that is an aside. The point was what impact does a gun have on your personal safety ? It absolutely and massively reduces it. A well educated and scientiffically minded society would be devoid of guns even if it did not have a single gun control law. Smart people makes decisions based on science. Science trumps common sense (which is, of course, neither). Science says guns only create danger and cannot mitigate it.
Gun-nuts always brings up that argument... the worst one ever because 1) Such events are so exceedingly rare in the real world that the continious risks just from having a gun outweigh them a million times over. 2) Even when they do occur, a gun is generally the WORST thing to use to try and defend yourself with.
So you're massively INCREASING your risk of dying from a gunshot, and you're not EVEN reducing the risk you have to be a tinfoil hat paranoid person to be afraid of in the first place but actually making that risk MORE likely.
If you really want to protect yourself from that 'crazed individual or government' - scientifically there is one thing that will do far more than anything else to achieve that: disarm the cops. Disarming citizens is the second best thing one can do to achieve that.
Crazy stranger crimes are virtually non-existent. They happen but not nearly enough to base any decisions on - ever. Nearly all violent crimes are committed by people you know, the vast majority by people you know intimately. Most women 4 out of 5 female murder victims are killed by husbands or boyfriends for example. In other words - the crazed indvidual most likely to attack you is ALSO among the people who know where you keep your gun and will use your own gun to do it with.
I also consider individual liberty to be primary and more important than the state of society, that's why I mentioned that first.
In terms of self defense however - you are just plain wrong. It's a scientific fact. If anything, owning a gun makes you LESS likely to survive an attack by a criminal. By far the most likely result of owning a gun is that you use it to kill yourself, the second most likely outcome is that somebody else (perhaps a criminal, perhaps an accident) shoots you with your own gun. Shooting a criminal isn't even in the top-5 most likely results, and that's for guns specific bought to be able to do that with. It's simply a scientific fact that having a gun does not help you defend yourself, it mostly helps criminals kill you - and it also ensures they WILL kill you. You having a gun automatically escalates ANY encounter with a criminal to lethal force, while in fact the vast majority of crimes are not violent otherwise.
And just who decides when peaceful democratic means of protest have been exhausted ? The revolutionaries were rising up against a monarchy whom they did not get to elect and who did not heed their protests. History has proven time and again that those who wish to rise up in protest can and *will* find weapons - no gun control laws have ever in the least reduced that (indeed - by definition those who are rising up against a government no longer respect it's laws, so why would they respect it's gun-control laws ?) Every story you heard to the contrary is a myth. Like the one Herman Cain told about how Hitler first disarmed the population. No, he didn't. The very premise of the story is false - Germany didn't have gun control under the NAZIs. Not to mention that it is extremely insulting to the Jewish people to claim they did not resist the NAZI forces and the holocaust. They did - there was a massive armed resistance movement by the Jews fighting the NAZIs inside Germany - and they were well armed, they were just outnumbered.
You gave an interesting suggestion for a possible metric of when armed revolt may be justified - when the majority of people sincerely believes the government is no longer legitimate. I can live with that. I will also state that it is absolutely and abundantly clear that this is not the case in the USA. The armed-militia types and the oregon-rednecks are a fringe group that is regarded as insane by almost the entire population.
Finally - even when armed revolt is justified, it is not always wise. Sometimes it is actually more effective to use other forms of resistance. Ghandi did it successfully against the British empire. Marthin Luther-King Junior did something very similar in the USA against extremely unjust laws that absolutely DID make the government illegitimate over him. He also didn't have a majority - and since only a minority were subject to these deligitimizing laws and the majority actually supported them, he wasn't going to get one. A peaceful resistance succeeded where armed revolt would have been guaranteed to fail.
In South Africa the racist government actually offered to enter into negotiations 8 years before they started - but on condition of the ANC foreswearing further violence. The ANC did not believe that such negotiations would yield what they wanted - full and equal rights (especially voting rights) for all, and refused the offer. But it is at least theoretically possible that they were wrong - that, in fact, if they had accepted the offer and the condition - the scourge of apartheid could have been removed nearly a decade sooner. Oh - and the ANC was not only a banned organisation but every single one of their members was prohibited from owning weapons (a right preserved for white people at the time).
That sure didn't stop them.
So the entire argument is really a red herring - no gun control would ever stop legitimate revolt, which is not necessarily best approached violently in the first place. The only questions that are actually RELEVANT is whether guns are actually effective for self defence purposes (they are not) and whether an armed citizenry produces a more ordered, safe and peaceful society (it doesn't).
So replace H-Bomb with "Bazooka", "Sherman Tank", "Rocket Propelled Grenade" - the list goes on. There are hundreds of weapons now which the government has at it's disposal which would be utterly impractical for personal self defence and without which actually "defending yourselves against the government" would be an absolutely futile attempt.
Not to mention, it seems rather unlikely the founding father ever actually intended this - despite how it is always claimed they did - considering that this is a mere amendment while right in the constitution proper the very action you are saying they wanted to ensure you could take is one of the few things explicitly prohibited to citizens. Specifically one of the few crimes defined in the constitution is the crime of treason - which is committed in one of several ways, the most important of which is: "to make war, or attempt to make war, on the government of the united states". Somebody should have told those idiots up in Oregon that sorry, no, the constitution explicitely prohibits people from doing what they did, they were not "defending" it, they were flagrantly violating it. The vast majority of the US constitution only prohibits the government from doing things, almost nothing in there constitutes a limitation on what citizens can do - hardly any citizen crimes are created in the constitution (quite unusual for a law) - this alone means that the few it DOES create were things the founding fathers considered ESPECIALLY egregious. And you can see the evidence of that all around. Hell Thomas Jefferson quite frankly felt that if somebody committed treason he gave up the right to due process - became an enemy combatant and as commander in chief of the armed forces the president was empowered to perform a summary execution of him. Doubt that ? The man actually did that once. He shot a man, with no trial, on the white house lawn for treason.
Why am I an asshole ? I support this idea. 8 supported it even though I had no knowledge of Biden's son dying of cancer ? I just know what the rabid right has been like and they already proved me right. The thread is filled with people declaring the horror of letting the federal government have a DNA database. Nevermind that they have had one for years.
>1. People paid $1000 to reserve car without really knowing what final product or cost will be. But they can get it back if they don't like the specs as they become clearer. >2. There are less batteries, which, reduce the total driving range to unusable limit for many people. That doesn't follow. The range is not *only* a factor of the number of batteries. It is also influenced by the weight of the car, the storage capacity of the batteries, the efficiency of the engine, the amount of other electrical devices in the car etc. etc. etc. It is quite possible that the model 3 - being the low-price model with less features will end up with a range close to or comparable to the model S despite having fewer batteries, simply because it has less things draining the batteries, will have access to newer battery technologies and probably weigh less. Frankly we just don't know yet. >3. It was called the model 3 so when you put all the Tesla models together you get s3x. Which, would be funny if I were 12. I'm 36 and I think it's funny. Not in the guffaw way it would have been 24 years ago, but certainly in a "I wonder if that was on purpose" way. >4. And this goes to the kind of company Tesla is at heart. Tesla had 3 months of operating expenses on hand when it went out collecting $1000 deposits, which, didn't extend its lifeline beyond 3 additional months. That isn't enough to ensure Tesla survives long enough to deliver on promise. Kind of crappy move. So ? Either they deliver the car or people get their money back. Paying a small bit upfront to be first in line helped make it more likely Tessla can deliver the car. If they can get the model 3 out the door their viable market-size expands hugely, and that could be the turn-around to make them a long-term sustainable business. Sure it's a gamble but all business is as risk, there's always a gamble and especially if you're trailblazing a new kind of product that risk goes up, the rewards go up to. If nobody thought the risk was worth taking, we would still be hunting dinner with heavy rocks. >5. While Tesla pretends to be green, by letting people drive cars using energy from coal burning power plants, Which is, in fact, green. It's true that coal power plants still pollute but the maths do not support the assertion that it's the same as driving a gas or diesel powered car. The reason is that the energy efficiency rate of the engines differ hugely. Even the best internal combustion engines peak at about 25%. The electrical engine in a Tessla is more than 50% efficient (highly conservative estimate - the real number is likely well over 70%). But even at 50% - it means that, per mile travelled, the Tessla charged from coal is producing barely half as much CO2 as the ICE produced to travel the same mile.
>EM's other company burns huge amounts of rocket fuel to land, instead of using a "green" (or white) parachute. Most rocket fuels do not produce CO2. Generally this is only a factor in first stage boosters (which usually burn ethanol or kerosene). The falcon 9 burns kerosene. The main reason for this is that many other rocket fuels produce severely toxic gasses when burned. In space that's not a problem but for a launch rocket it is - since there's a bunch of people down below and you don't want to kill all your ground staff when launching. That said it's hardly a fair comparison since rocket launches are fairly infrequent events. The total CO2 ever produced by spacex was pretty much offset by the first Model-S by the third month it was driven. Landing the boosters in-tact with just parachutes is a serious logistical and engineering problem - you can't steer parachutes much and nobody want's a rocket booster landing on their roof. Using a fuel-burn to land it is more reliable and makes the landing spot highly predictable and - importantly, by making the booster reusable hugely cuts down on manufacturing costs. That includes the energy used for manufacturing. In fact the reusable boosters save far more CO2 in reduced manufacturing than they put out burning their landing fuel.
>To protect all the rights the Second Amendment was meant to protect, the people's right to keep and bear arms that are equivalent to those possessed by the government must not be infringed.
So what exactly are you arguing for ? The right for citizens to own H-bombs or the right for citizens to dismantle the H-bombs owned by the government ?
As a non-American, I've asked that question before... I got a lot of long diatribes about why gun rights are important but nobody has ever actually answered that yet. Apparently the line can be read to justify anybody have any amount of any weapon they want anywhere they want, but it sure can't be read as saying it's essential that this process be, in any way, regulated.
Speedbumps are dangerous and don't help much. Raised intersections work better, with less damage to cars and far less risk of causing accidents - and actually slow people down.
Though I admit my only evidence of this is personal observation.
And I found it... the horror of the federal government having a database of DNA... because spying on the dying is totally something they would care about, and somehow ignoring the fact that a federal database of DNA has been around for decades that IS actually used for law enforcement purposes and administered by the FBI. Oh but that once can't possibly be abused right, seeing as it was created under a republican administration.... except that there was that major scandal last year when it turns out FBI techs have routinely committed perjury for years by massively inflating the probabilities from DNA tests in court. The great fear is already a reality, and it's already as bad as it gets. A database of cancer DNA won't change anything in that regard.
Mind you, that same database has also been a major thorn in the side of government as well - the innocence project has relied on it extensively to get hundreds of wrongfully convicted death-row inmates released.
Seriously if, you're going to find something to be tin-foil-hat about, find something which has not helped citizens against the government MORE than it is has helped government against the citizens.
Slashdot Mirror
So your examples of deep-time resilient technology ... are both less than a century old. Dinosaurs could have had more than 8000 years of our technology without either of those existing !
If we had lasted a mere century less than we have neither would have.
Not to mention it is utterly silly to assume that another species in a different environment would have similar technologies to us. The challenges they would wish to face and resources to apply would be massively different.
Is a wheel even useful to a quadroped that has never seen anything he considered "heavy" ?
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence - Carl Sagan.
Claiming that in over 350 million years no species of dinosaur could possibly have developed technology is far more extraordinary a claim than suggesting it may have happened along the way. The entire point of the rest of my post is that if this had happened it almost certainly would NOT have left any technology to be found.
The minimum survival time you're talking about 65 million years - and that's for the very last dinosaurs, if an advanced species had lived halfway through the dinosaur ages, that's over 200 million years.
You realize that there were dinosaurs who WALKED from where Cape Town is now to where Rio is now without touching water ?
>To get a technological head start and a head start out in space an alien species would been part of an evolutionary process that skipped whatever their equivalent of dinosaurs would have been and gone directly to intelligent life capable of technology.
Firstly - why not ? We have no proof that there were NOT technologically advanced dinosaurs, at best we have strong reason to doubt there were spacefaring dinosaurs. You are underestimating just how massive an amount of deep time 65-million years was. Dinosaurs could have built cities five times bigger than New York and not a shred would have survived for us to find. If we go extinct tomorrow, it's unlikely that in 10-million years there will be any evidence whatsoever that we existed - except maybe a few primate fossils, even our best mummies can't make it that far. A hundred million ? Not a chance, by that point even our satelites would have decayed and crashed. The last evidence of our existence that may be around would be the bits of junk Apollo left on the moon and any future paleontologists (whether evolved here or elsewhere) that found that evidence would mostly wonder what the hell a Richard M. Nixon was... think about it, they would not even be sure whether it was left there by an earth-born species that reached the moon - or a long-lost lunar species that had a great council to end a war at that spot.
Secondly - your argument is flawed because that's not how time works, time is relative and doesn't happen at a constant rate. Planets that rotate their stars slower have physically existed longer than ones that move slower. So two planets around the same star, in different orbits, which orbit in the same timeframe, that formed together at the same time - the outer one will be significantly younger because time slows down as you speed up. It may be a matter of seconds per rotation - but there's been many billions of rotations for those to add up. And planets around more massive stars are regardless of when they formed relative to the big-bang, have had less time pass on them than those around smaller stars - because time slows down near bigger gravity wells.
The amount of "time" that passed on the surface of a planet is only very vaguely connected to the age of the universe and even to the age of that planet (which we measure relative to the age of the universe). The one decidedly does not offer any indications of the other. The only reason they happen to be the same on earth is because we happen to measure "years" by the time it takes our planet to rotate, but Jupiter formed at the same time as Earth did - and quite a lot less time has passed on Jupiter than on Earth. Even less have passed on the sun.
This is, actually, one reason why - if there is life on Io or Europa - that life is likely to be "bacterial" rather than fishes - those moons circle a massive planet, any life there has had significantly less time to evolve than life on earth has had. No, I don't feel like doing the math to figure out how much.
My personal theory is that the most likely thing for any intelligent and technologically capable alien race to be doing is exactly what *we* are doing. Listen, and with a small budget - so only listening to a very small part of the spectrum from a tiny part of the sky. That golden record on voyager 1 is about the last major attempt we made at sending anything and it wasn't a very sensible one.
But if that was what economics led to here, why would we assume it would have other outcomes elsewhere ? Literally the only experimental sample of a technologically capable space-faring race we have - did this one.
So it's perfectly likely that there dozens of alien races within easy communications range of us all making a half-hearted attempt at listening and waiting for one of the others to talk first. All of them, in fact, hoping the outsource the expense of sending high-powered signals into a void where you don't know if anybody is listening, don't know if anybody who was listening would be able to understand it and don't even know in which direction to aim - to one of the others.
Exactly because sending messages is so incredibly difficult technically, and expensive, they may all have opted to just listen instead and, like us, hope that one of the others will figure out transmission first so they can justify the budget to build a transmitter to reply with.
Yes, when it kicks in, it does not kick in for allowed content.
My daughter loves MLP. It occasionally hits us - but then only from season 3 onwards, the first two they apparently have a global license for.
Much as I would generally agree with you - I don't think it would solve this problem, because the problem is international. Unless you can get the compulsory license to be a WIPO treaty, you're still going to get screwed.
Actually Netflix is deploying the only sollution they can - and this is not it. This is the delaying tactic they use until the real solution is ready. Their real answer is to create more and more content themselves that they own and can stream where-ever they want and to produce better quality content than the old content companies are.
Already shows like DareDevil and Jessica Jones and house of cards have set a huge new standard for television - and the old dinosaurs aren't keeping up. As that library grows, they will be ever less dependent on licensing from the dinosaurs and thus they will be more able to set the licensing terms to what they want as the dinosaurs grow more desperate.
Already they are in that position with the smaller ones, the AMC shows like walking dead, and CW shows like arrow and flash are all on the international catalogue because AMC doesn't have the muscle to refuse a licensing deal with international coverage and doesn't have a lot of exclusive deals with various broadcasters in other countries that they have to comply with. If anything the netflix deals have massively increased the audience for these smaller producers - and made a new business model for small channels to make expensive, high quality shows at a rate of a few per year and still be highly profitable because they can avoid the sausage-factory conditions that you need to be profitable when you're NBC.
Their real vision is to simply get to the point where, ultimately, nobody cares about getting around the geoblocks anymore because all the good stuff is on every catalog anyway. Once they are there, the big companies either play THEIR game or die.
And it's exactly what they used to do - and pretty much every non-US subscriber who doesn't want a tiny stunted netflix library already have done the work to get around that.
I wonder if UNESCO in new york has gotten any snailmail as a result (I know several people who use their postal address on their netflix accounts because it comes up very early if you google 'postal address in New York'.
Even that has never been particularly accurate. There is a farmer at the address closest to the exact center of the United States who has received endless hatemail and death threats because when geolocation software can't get closer than "country" it points at that farm... and guess how many scammers, spammers and identify thieves have IP's that aren't easy to geolocate ?
And this is the grand irony of their approach to these things... in a desperate bid to maintain the old "sell the same thing many times to many companies in many countries" they are actually making it more convenient to use complicated technology to get the things unpaid for than to use a paid for and legal service to watch things.
Which can only cost them revenue. The old "exclusive broadcasting" deals business model is simply dying, and they need to realize that and shift to a new model before they are completely obsolete. I don't have high hopes though.
So your argument is that the science is wrong because it is hard to count the number of times people used a gun to threaten off an attacker without firing it ?
Maybe. That would probably be significant if crime by strangers happened to a statistically significant degree. Since however the people most likely to attack anybody is their own family. The gun an attacker is most likely yo use is your own because almost every attacker in the real world has legitimate access to your guns.
4 out of 5 women ever killed were shot by a husband or boyfriend... so frankly just about the most suicidal thing a woman can ever do is live with a man with a gun in the house. It does not much matter which one of them bought it.
It does not matter if a gun is effective against an armed intruder because armed intruders are extremely rare. Deliberate and accidental shootings by family members however are exceedingly common.
Ps. Japan's suicide rate is a lie. The Japanese police claim a near 100% case resolution rate for murder. That is statistically impossible. Its been investigated multiple times and consistently explained by simple corruption: only solve the easy ones. Any complicated murder without an instantly obvious suspect is ruled a suicide because there are no performance penalties for unsolved suicides.
The actual murder rate is much higher than reported (though far lower than the US) and the actual suicide rate much lower (just slightly more than the US). Unless you think its likely that people commit suicide regularly with three bullets to the back of the skull...
Excellent refference on specifically this Japanese situation and the incentives that led to it can be found in Stephen J. Levitt's book 'freakonomics'.
I didn't say the absense of a gun makes suicide less likely. It does make surviving the attempt more likely but that is an aside. The point was what impact does a gun have on your personal safety ? It absolutely and massively reduces it.
A well educated and scientiffically minded society would be devoid of guns even if it did not have a single gun control law. Smart people makes decisions based on science. Science trumps common sense (which is, of course, neither). Science says guns only create danger and cannot mitigate it.
Gun-nuts always brings up that argument... the worst one ever because
1) Such events are so exceedingly rare in the real world that the continious risks just from having a gun outweigh them a million times over.
2) Even when they do occur, a gun is generally the WORST thing to use to try and defend yourself with.
So you're massively INCREASING your risk of dying from a gunshot, and you're not EVEN reducing the risk you have to be a tinfoil hat paranoid person to be afraid of in the first place but actually making that risk MORE likely.
If you really want to protect yourself from that 'crazed individual or government' - scientifically there is one thing that will do far more than anything else to achieve that: disarm the cops.
Disarming citizens is the second best thing one can do to achieve that.
Crazy stranger crimes are virtually non-existent. They happen but not nearly enough to base any decisions on - ever. Nearly all violent crimes are committed by people you know, the vast majority by people you know intimately. Most women 4 out of 5 female murder victims are killed by husbands or boyfriends for example. In other words - the crazed indvidual most likely to attack you is ALSO among the people who know where you keep your gun and will use your own gun to do it with.
I also consider individual liberty to be primary and more important than the state of society, that's why I mentioned that first.
In terms of self defense however - you are just plain wrong. It's a scientific fact. If anything, owning a gun makes you LESS likely to survive an attack by a criminal. By far the most likely result of owning a gun is that you use it to kill yourself, the second most likely outcome is that somebody else (perhaps a criminal, perhaps an accident) shoots you with your own gun. Shooting a criminal isn't even in the top-5 most likely results, and that's for guns specific bought to be able to do that with. It's simply a scientific fact that having a gun does not help you defend yourself, it mostly helps criminals kill you - and it also ensures they WILL kill you. You having a gun automatically escalates ANY encounter with a criminal to lethal force, while in fact the vast majority of crimes are not violent otherwise.
And just who decides when peaceful democratic means of protest have been exhausted ? The revolutionaries were rising up against a monarchy whom they did not get to elect and who did not heed their protests. History has proven time and again that those who wish to rise up in protest can and *will* find weapons - no gun control laws have ever in the least reduced that (indeed - by definition those who are rising up against a government no longer respect it's laws, so why would they respect it's gun-control laws ?)
Every story you heard to the contrary is a myth. Like the one Herman Cain told about how Hitler first disarmed the population. No, he didn't. The very premise of the story is false - Germany didn't have gun control under the NAZIs. Not to mention that it is extremely insulting to the Jewish people to claim they did not resist the NAZI forces and the holocaust. They did - there was a massive armed resistance movement by the Jews fighting the NAZIs inside Germany - and they were well armed, they were just outnumbered.
You gave an interesting suggestion for a possible metric of when armed revolt may be justified - when the majority of people sincerely believes the government is no longer legitimate. I can live with that. I will also state that it is absolutely and abundantly clear that this is not the case in the USA. The armed-militia types and the oregon-rednecks are a fringe group that is regarded as insane by almost the entire population.
Finally - even when armed revolt is justified, it is not always wise. Sometimes it is actually more effective to use other forms of resistance. Ghandi did it successfully against the British empire. Marthin Luther-King Junior did something very similar in the USA against extremely unjust laws that absolutely DID make the government illegitimate over him. He also didn't have a majority - and since only a minority were subject to these deligitimizing laws and the majority actually supported them, he wasn't going to get one. A peaceful resistance succeeded where armed revolt would have been guaranteed to fail.
In South Africa the racist government actually offered to enter into negotiations 8 years before they started - but on condition of the ANC foreswearing further violence. The ANC did not believe that such negotiations would yield what they wanted - full and equal rights (especially voting rights) for all, and refused the offer. But it is at least theoretically possible that they were wrong - that, in fact, if they had accepted the offer and the condition - the scourge of apartheid could have been removed nearly a decade sooner.
Oh - and the ANC was not only a banned organisation but every single one of their members was prohibited from owning weapons (a right preserved for white people at the time).
That sure didn't stop them.
So the entire argument is really a red herring - no gun control would ever stop legitimate revolt, which is not necessarily best approached violently in the first place. The only questions that are actually RELEVANT is whether guns are actually effective for self defence purposes (they are not) and whether an armed citizenry produces a more ordered, safe and peaceful society (it doesn't).
So replace H-Bomb with "Bazooka", "Sherman Tank", "Rocket Propelled Grenade" - the list goes on. There are hundreds of weapons now which the government has at it's disposal which would be utterly impractical for personal self defence and without which actually "defending yourselves against the government" would be an absolutely futile attempt.
Not to mention, it seems rather unlikely the founding father ever actually intended this - despite how it is always claimed they did - considering that this is a mere amendment while right in the constitution proper the very action you are saying they wanted to ensure you could take is one of the few things explicitly prohibited to citizens. Specifically one of the few crimes defined in the constitution is the crime of treason - which is committed in one of several ways, the most important of which is: "to make war, or attempt to make war, on the government of the united states".
Somebody should have told those idiots up in Oregon that sorry, no, the constitution explicitely prohibits people from doing what they did, they were not "defending" it, they were flagrantly violating it.
The vast majority of the US constitution only prohibits the government from doing things, almost nothing in there constitutes a limitation on what citizens can do - hardly any citizen crimes are created in the constitution (quite unusual for a law) - this alone means that the few it DOES create were things the founding fathers considered ESPECIALLY egregious.
And you can see the evidence of that all around. Hell Thomas Jefferson quite frankly felt that if somebody committed treason he gave up the right to due process - became an enemy combatant and as commander in chief of the armed forces the president was empowered to perform a summary execution of him. Doubt that ? The man actually did that once. He shot a man, with no trial, on the white house lawn for treason.
Why am I an asshole ? I support this idea. 8 supported it even though I had no knowledge of Biden's son dying of cancer ?
I just know what the rabid right has been like and they already proved me right. The thread is filled with people declaring the horror of letting the federal government have a DNA database. Nevermind that they have had one for years.
>1. People paid $1000 to reserve car without really knowing what final product or cost will be.
But they can get it back if they don't like the specs as they become clearer.
>2. There are less batteries, which, reduce the total driving range to unusable limit for many people.
That doesn't follow. The range is not *only* a factor of the number of batteries. It is also influenced by the weight of the car, the storage capacity of the batteries, the efficiency of the engine, the amount of other electrical devices in the car etc. etc. etc.
It is quite possible that the model 3 - being the low-price model with less features will end up with a range close to or comparable to the model S despite having fewer batteries, simply because it has less things draining the batteries, will have access to newer battery technologies and probably weigh less. Frankly we just don't know yet.
>3. It was called the model 3 so when you put all the Tesla models together you get s3x. Which, would be funny if I were 12.
I'm 36 and I think it's funny. Not in the guffaw way it would have been 24 years ago, but certainly in a "I wonder if that was on purpose" way.
>4. And this goes to the kind of company Tesla is at heart. Tesla had 3 months of operating expenses on hand when it went out collecting $1000 deposits, which, didn't extend its lifeline beyond 3 additional months. That isn't enough to ensure Tesla survives long enough to deliver on promise. Kind of crappy move.
So ? Either they deliver the car or people get their money back. Paying a small bit upfront to be first in line helped make it more likely Tessla can deliver the car. If they can get the model 3 out the door their viable market-size expands hugely, and that could be the turn-around to make them a long-term sustainable business. Sure it's a gamble but all business is as risk, there's always a gamble and especially if you're trailblazing a new kind of product that risk goes up, the rewards go up to. If nobody thought the risk was worth taking, we would still be hunting dinner with heavy rocks.
>5. While Tesla pretends to be green, by letting people drive cars using energy from coal burning power plants,
Which is, in fact, green. It's true that coal power plants still pollute but the maths do not support the assertion that it's the same as driving a gas or diesel powered car. The reason is that the energy efficiency rate of the engines differ hugely. Even the best internal combustion engines peak at about 25%. The electrical engine in a Tessla is more than 50% efficient (highly conservative estimate - the real number is likely well over 70%). But even at 50% - it means that, per mile travelled, the Tessla charged from coal is producing barely half as much CO2 as the ICE produced to travel the same mile.
>EM's other company burns huge amounts of rocket fuel to land, instead of using a "green" (or white) parachute.
Most rocket fuels do not produce CO2. Generally this is only a factor in first stage boosters (which usually burn ethanol or kerosene). The falcon 9 burns kerosene. The main reason for this is that many other rocket fuels produce severely toxic gasses when burned. In space that's not a problem but for a launch rocket it is - since there's a bunch of people down below and you don't want to kill all your ground staff when launching. That said it's hardly a fair comparison since rocket launches are fairly infrequent events. The total CO2 ever produced by spacex was pretty much offset by the first Model-S by the third month it was driven. Landing the boosters in-tact with just parachutes is a serious logistical and engineering problem - you can't steer parachutes much and nobody want's a rocket booster landing on their roof. Using a fuel-burn to land it is more reliable and makes the landing spot highly predictable and - importantly, by making the booster reusable hugely cuts down on manufacturing costs. That includes the energy used for manufacturing. In fact the reusable boosters save far more CO2 in reduced manufacturing than they put out burning their landing fuel.
I guess he will lose his case though. He hasn't got a leg to stand on.
Obviously: the ball.
It's easy. Make frontal male nudity legal in the neighbourhood.
In homophobic America nobody will want to drive down a road where every pedestrian shows you their schlong.
And that will protect the kiddies from crazy traffic which, unlike the sight of a schlong, can actually hurt them.
Won't somebody think of the children ?
>To protect all the rights the Second Amendment was meant to protect, the people's right to keep and bear arms that are equivalent to those possessed by the government must not be infringed.
So what exactly are you arguing for ? The right for citizens to own H-bombs or the right for citizens to dismantle the H-bombs owned by the government ?
As a non-American, I've asked that question before... I got a lot of long diatribes about why gun rights are important but nobody has ever actually answered that yet. Apparently the line can be read to justify anybody have any amount of any weapon they want anywhere they want, but it sure can't be read as saying it's essential that this process be, in any way, regulated.
Speedbumps are dangerous and don't help much. Raised intersections work better, with less damage to cars and far less risk of causing accidents - and actually slow people down.
Though I admit my only evidence of this is personal observation.
And I found it... the horror of the federal government having a database of DNA... because spying on the dying is totally something they would care about, and somehow ignoring the fact that a federal database of DNA has been around for decades that IS actually used for law enforcement purposes and administered by the FBI. ... except that there was that major scandal last year when it turns out FBI techs have routinely committed perjury for years by massively inflating the probabilities from DNA tests in court. The great fear is already a reality, and it's already as bad as it gets. A database of cancer DNA won't change anything in that regard.
Oh but that once can't possibly be abused right, seeing as it was created under a republican administration.
Mind you, that same database has also been a major thorn in the side of government as well - the innocence project has relied on it extensively to get hundreds of wrongfully convicted death-row inmates released.
Seriously if, you're going to find something to be tin-foil-hat about, find something which has not helped citizens against the government MORE than it is has helped government against the citizens.