People who think that the goal of hoarding money is to have more money as time passes are loonies. Seriously, think about it, why would a society think that having large amount of some counters representing value immobilised somewhere is Good?
It is neither moral, nor makes economic sense. Loonies.
No, he is right. For all intents and purposes, spending and investing are the same. In aggregate, the money put into the system in exchange for is used to produce more goods and services.
It is a bizarre illusion that some transfer of money between two parties is "spending" and some of it is "investing". In the end, it doesn't matter: money gets transformed into goods and services. When you spend your money in a restaurant, you are allowing this restaurant to stay in business. And you are ensuring that you can continue to go eat there.
Money is just a convenient way to exchange goods and services. But in the end, it is only that. There is no particular value of having lots of it stored somewhere, unused.
No. He says that investing in what is pretty much blue-sky development takes a lot of ressources.
The government should absolutely bankroll such ventures: if you invest enough in enough of them for long enough, it will pay off. And only states typically have the ressources and patience (they do, look at CERN, or the moonshot, or the Manhattan project) do do that on a significant scale.
But an electric car on a 500 000 $ budget is magical thinking. Almost as dumb as "tax cuts will help the budget balance". Only almost because there is actually a minusucle chance it might have worked. Unlike the cut thing.
Actually, according to UN projection, the population should stabilise at around 9 billions. If the so-called first world is any indication, the population will then start to decrease.
Uhhh, what does his health insurance cover? Retirement? And converage is not forever.
Some people will elect to stay unemployed. This is not necessarilly bad. First, it gives them more time to get a better fitting job, which is both to their and their employer's benefit. Second, it forces employers to make more attractive offers than they would have, especially in a depressed economy. Finally, it is better to have people on benefits than on the streets. In general, even if the unemployments benefits are high, people will still try to find a job, simply because it is more rewarding.
Unemployment benefits are probably the best stimulus for a depressed economy.
f you stop paying your employees, this is a default. And it will be understood as such by the quotation agencies. Then the US loses its AAA rating, and many large bondholder become forced to sell US bonds. Then the interest rates go up (whereas now they are so low, only incredibly thick stupidity makes congress not borrow more).
And the debt situation becomes worse as it rolls over. But hey, the tea party is working so hard to make the US a third world country, why not let it?
Debt-to GDP ratio of the US is low. Interests are amazingly low.
On the other hand, the infrastructure is in not-so good shape, and employment terrible.
So since the world is so ready to give you money (because the US can borrow at nearly below-inflation levels) borrow! Invest! Build the future!
In fact, were it not for the debt ceiling, and the competition between politicians to say the most moronic thing, the US should, at this point in time, borrow tremendous amounts and invest. But noooo, rather, their seems to be a consensus to pander to the most idiotic notions.
"The debt increases! we are taking about TRILLIONS!". Idiots. The economy increases. Only relative amounts matter. "The US must be like a well managed family, and not have debt". Morons. The US is not a family: it has an army and mints its money. Historically, families which had both turned into states. Your credit rating (rates on bonds) is at an all-time high (rates are amazingly low). This means you can borrow however much is needed. Also, if you have a mortgage, your debt-to-gdp ratio is wayyy worse than that of the US, so even if the US were a family, it is not nearly at unacceptable debt levels. "Rich people will not invest when taxed". Cretins: they are currently essentially untaxed and sitting on piles of money. Clearly taxing them less will not put this already not working money to work. On the contrary.
There pretty much is no can to kick down the road in the first place. If the current policies of tax decreases and contractionary policy continue, then yes, there will be a problem. "Entitlements are bad!". Entitlements are better than people starving to death, or roaming bands of pillagers.
No, taxes work also as an incentive to invest. How? Easy, if taxes are low, it is tempting to have your money piled up with some of it invested in stocks as a hedge against sluggish growth/losses.
If taxes are high, your cash is best employed hiring staff and developing products. And indeed, currently, taxes are low and corporations are awash with cash. Yet they are not hiring.
Because low taxes makes that a bad business decision.
To have a successful start-up, you need a good product, to convince people that your product is good, and to sell it for a profit.
To have a successful industry, you need to do that repeatedly. This means realising that you must also invent the next good product, the next-next and be ready for the next big technological shift.
This means that your engineers, are your most valuable medium-turn asset, and your research department, with engineers-scientists you most valuable long-term asset. Of course sales and marketing are your most valuable short-term asset.
Combining all these requires good management. Management is the secret sauce: it must understand that long, medium and short term are all important. A clever way of making this work is to have management not part of the structure, but rather a service: you have a project, get a manager from the managing department: he is there to listen, prioritise, smooth differences among coworkers, understand how to get assistance/support from the other department. At the end of the project, he goes back to the pool.
Who would "run" such a company? I don't know. A board of directors, I expect, picked to represent all divisions and services. A bunch of C*O to give the general direction. The point is, however, a company does not really need to be run: I expect people would come to work in such an organisation because they would get to do what they do best and be happy about it. Without countless layers of management, pay would be better than average, and the "top" would be close enough to the "bottom" to understand what is going on.
Right. The EP is undemocratic. Says a Brit whose system of vote is first-past-the post (you vote is not diluted, it just doesn't count) and a house of lords. There are 500 000 000 citizens of the EU. They all count.
Also "no-one has any idea who chooses and writes the laws" is not just a stupid argument. It is the ultimate "I am entitled to my ignorance and my point of view" point which completely invalidates anything you might say. Go read WP or something. It is just not that complicated.
Finally, please, do yourself (and the rest of us) a favour. Don't drink and post.
See, if the rate is 100%, you will get no taxes. At 0%, you get no taxes. Thus, there must be some optimal amounts of taxes which maximises revenue.
Now clearly, the US is closer to the 0 bound, so increases taxes increases revenue: proof comes from Bush, lowering taxes lowered revenue. During a bubble. Thus, the right course of action is to increase taxes.
Why would you want to maximise revenue? Because it is a proxy for economic output: good tax structure leads to healthy economy.
This is crazy thinking. If the project has merit, fund it.
The reason projects are over budget is that the people making the decisions always go for cheap. Not good or useful or necessary, but cheap. So if you believe in your project, you will lie about it. Because otherwise, it will never get a chance, never mind its actual merits.
To change this, you need to punish not the guys making the proposition, but the morons who accept clearly impossible projects. The guilty party here is not NASA: they are playing the game by the rules _congress_ has set. Instead of saying "the incompetents are over budget", say "who let the clueless moron give the go-ahead to an impossible plan?".
See, this is wrong. "the gubmint is always less efficient" is an inane opinion. Basically because the government is run not-for-profit, so it only need to be more efficient than a corporation with no margins, and no marketing. Also in many cases that lead inevitably to market failures (roads, railways, utilities) it only need to be more efficient (for the consumer) than a for-profit monopoly...
So even if the government were in fact systematically less efficient (it is not), it would still always be the preferable option in many cases. The case for public health care is notably extremely strong: countries with public, nationalised, health care all have much lower cost and better outcomes than the US.
Another thing for which the government is much better than corporations is very long term investment, blue sky research and the like. These very long odds always are good in the long run (no major scientific discovery of a fundamental nature ever came from a private for-profit research venture) but almost never in the short run.
for konqueror, I am not sure what you want. I don't remember a NeXT-like column view ever being available. If you mean the splitting of the interface recursively, it is still there.
new tab for konsole? just double-click on a free area of the tab bar.
Reintegrate file browsing into konqueror? Uh? type any local URL in the location bar, and you are browsing your files.
As for the desktop and panel right-click... Are you sure you are not confusing gnome and KDE. 'cause I can add any service menu to the right click. In fact the desktop and panel of KDE4 are way more configurable than the ones from KDE3.
But clearly, you must be an amazingly anal person to consider that the whole desktop is incomplete because you basically would like a button instead of a double-click. Seriously. Get some perspective.
Seriously. This generation of 30-year-old gamers is the least criminal, the most altruistic there is. Unlike their parents, they played civilization, and they know what happens to empires with no research and no roads... They grew up without internet and know, much more deeply than their parents, what it means to be connected. They know of the passions, travails and interests of all everywhere. And they know how it was before.
They are not hungry, because they can see how wrong their hungry parents were. The pox that is suburbia. The obsession of ownership. The small-mindedness of the symbols of success. And the failure of it all to bring security or satisfaction. And now, we have reached peak oil, and there is no infrastructure to cope. They know there is no contentedness to be reached in following their parent's footsteps.
They know that the one thing that brings improvement is knowledge. And they know it is a double-edged sword. And they see how their hungry parents are defunding education and research to pay for the retirements they can't afford -- because they won't pay taxes. Yes, the GP is right: Reagan was a calamity. Not so much because of his policies, but because he made legitimate a deeply wrong view of the World.
Logic is not arbitrary. Your pick of axiomatic system is -- provided it satisfies a set of criteria. And then you create your maths. But this process is not arbitrary: there are no systems where pi is 3, for example.
For the record, I am not a believer. But I don't mind believers, provided they can stay consistent in a logical sense. Now, this usually means that a take-all approach to religion is something I do mind: believing that your holy book is divinely inspired is OK, believing it is perfect (which translation? what became of context? errors? symbolism?) is crazy. It assumes that your interpretation of it is Divine. And that, I call having a God complex.
Also, believing that a benevolent being would send anyone to Hell is highly inconsistent: you are holding God to lower standards than humans!
Einstein never said E = mc. He said that E = mc^2 in the first order approximation. Also, Einstein's theories can be redeveloped in any sufficiently powerful axiomatic system. There is no need to believe in logic: it is. There is need to believe in science: it is wholly based on the assumption that the observable universe is how it is because of a set of immutable, fundamental laws. Let's face it, this is faith.
Collective guilt is very important as a concept: it covers the reality that although you are responsible for your actions, you are also part of a larger social organism, which you might not be able to measurably influence, but which is capable of actions which might be deemed guilty. Recognising this is important when discussing societies and values.
Seriously? an eternity in Hell as a just punishment for any crime -- say, even the destruction of a planet seems a tad on the excessive side? Is your "benevolent" god a sadistic bastard?
And no, there is such thing as collective responsibility. For example, you may live in a corrupt society. Mere survival requires you to buy in that corruption. You are not guilty of it, though, because you did not have a choice. However, the system perpetuates because everyone participates.
This is collective responsibility: your individual actions are negligible, but the result of the (slightly reprehensible, sometimes negligibly so) actions of everyone can be much more than the sum of individual actions. We might well burn (or at least be uncomfortably hot) because of such a process. Responsibility can be collective.
Justice should however only consider individual guilt -- but this is a completely different topic.
So 613 useless deaths. Many suicides which occurred only because the occasion was there. You get the same number of deaths by accident by 100 000 inhabitants than Australia has gun murders. This is terrible. You just proved how bad gun ownership is.
For the record, there are in the order of 30 000 total deaths related to guns. all of which are accounted for in your data.
Notice the conspicuous absence of the gun deaths where the rapist/burglar/murderer which got shot by the would-be victim. What about these? Because these are the ones which justify gun ownership, according to you. For the record, in 0.38% of the time is the gun used in self-defence. In a quarter of those cases, the victim actually shoots the aggressor. Let us be generous, they might hit a third of the time, and kill half the time (I am making up these two numbers last, they could be 1 and 1, or more likely.1 and.2, the numbers are from the 90s, but I do not expect them to have changed much). So about 2 (two) of these homicides are those where the gun actually helped the victim. Because I am generous. Against 600 accidents. Hell, even if the victims were all perfect shots, it would still be twelve. Against six hundred.
So I stand by my "it _never_ happens".
If only 20 suicides are prevented by not having guns around (out of 17300), banning guns is worth it!
As for drunk-driving deaths? yeah, I agree, less cars and more public transport would be good.
no, it's not. It is an essentially random process.
The coal particle get lodged into your lung, causing a tiny lesion. Cell growth is activated around it and the particle get encapsulated. This extra growth spurt might, or might not cause some of the cells to mutate. The mutation might, or might not, lead to cancer.
Some people are more susceptible, yes. But the development is random. Being healthy, or rich will not help you at all.
There is a reason there is a Justice system. There also is a reason why people are normally only convicted of crimes they have actually committed (or are though to have actually committed).
You may have fantasies of vigilante justice, but back in the real world, these only cause accidents and unnecessary deaths. It is not the case that preventing a single murder is good, it would be the case that the number of murders prevented was larger than the number of accidents. Which is not the case. Note also that the optimal outcome has neither the criminal nor the victim killed.
It never happens that a crime is prevented by some random guy shooting at a would-be murderer (oh, it will happen occasionally, but only in amazingly unlikely sets of circumstances). It happens quite frequently that a burglary becomes a tragedy or that a member of the family gets shot.
Slashdot Mirror
They are loonies!
People who think that the goal of hoarding money is to have more money as time passes are loonies. Seriously, think about it, why would a society think that having large amount of some counters representing value immobilised somewhere is Good?
It is neither moral, nor makes economic sense. Loonies.
No, he is right. For all intents and purposes, spending and investing are the same. In aggregate, the money put into the system in exchange for is used to produce more goods and services.
It is a bizarre illusion that some transfer of money between two parties is "spending" and some of it is "investing". In the end, it doesn't matter: money gets transformed into goods and services. When you spend your money in a restaurant, you are allowing this restaurant to stay in business. And you are ensuring that you can continue to go eat there.
Money is just a convenient way to exchange goods and services. But in the end, it is only that. There is no particular value of having lots of it stored somewhere, unused.
I dare you to go to you favourite shop, and buy a suit for an ounce of gold.
People will laugh at you.
Actually broadband is a good indicator of whether you in fact live in a backwater shithole.
No. He says that investing in what is pretty much blue-sky development takes a lot of ressources.
The government should absolutely bankroll such ventures: if you invest enough in enough of them for long enough, it will pay off. And only states typically have the ressources and patience (they do, look at CERN, or the moonshot, or the Manhattan project) do do that on a significant scale.
But an electric car on a 500 000 $ budget is magical thinking. Almost as dumb as "tax cuts will help the budget balance". Only almost because there is actually a minusucle chance it might have worked. Unlike the cut thing.
Actually, according to UN projection, the population should stabilise at around 9 billions. If the so-called first world is any indication, the population will then start to decrease.
http://www.gapminder.org/videos/reducing-child-mortality-a-moral-and-environmental-imperative/
Also, wars are no good to cull populations. Never were, never will be -- unless we all die.
9 billion, actually, according to projections. But yeah.
Uhhh, what does his health insurance cover? Retirement? And converage is not forever.
Some people will elect to stay unemployed. This is not necessarilly bad. First, it gives them more time to get a better fitting job, which is both to their and their employer's benefit. Second, it forces employers to make more attractive offers than they would have, especially in a depressed economy. Finally, it is better to have people on benefits than on the streets. In general, even if the unemployments benefits are high, people will still try to find a job, simply because it is more rewarding.
Unemployment benefits are probably the best stimulus for a depressed economy.
f you stop paying your employees, this is a default. And it will be understood as such by the quotation agencies. Then the US loses its AAA rating, and many large bondholder become forced to sell US bonds. Then the interest rates go up (whereas now they are so low, only incredibly thick stupidity makes congress not borrow more).
And the debt situation becomes worse as it rolls over. But hey, the tea party is working so hard to make the US a third world country, why not let it?
Debt-to GDP ratio of the US is low. Interests are amazingly low.
On the other hand, the infrastructure is in not-so good shape, and employment terrible.
So since the world is so ready to give you money (because the US can borrow at nearly below-inflation levels) borrow! Invest! Build the future!
In fact, were it not for the debt ceiling, and the competition between politicians to say the most moronic thing, the US should, at this point in time, borrow tremendous amounts and invest. But noooo, rather, their seems to be a consensus to pander to the most idiotic notions.
"The debt increases! we are taking about TRILLIONS!". Idiots. The economy increases. Only relative amounts matter.
"The US must be like a well managed family, and not have debt". Morons. The US is not a family: it has an army and mints its money. Historically, families which had both turned into states. Your credit rating (rates on bonds) is at an all-time high (rates are amazingly low). This means you can borrow however much is needed. Also, if you have a mortgage, your debt-to-gdp ratio is wayyy worse than that of the US, so even if the US were a family, it is not nearly at unacceptable debt levels.
"Rich people will not invest when taxed". Cretins: they are currently essentially untaxed and sitting on piles of money. Clearly taxing them less will not put this already not working money to work. On the contrary.
There pretty much is no can to kick down the road in the first place. If the current policies of tax decreases and contractionary policy continue, then yes, there will be a problem.
"Entitlements are bad!". Entitlements are better than people starving to death, or roaming bands of pillagers.
No, taxes work also as an incentive to invest. How? Easy, if taxes are low, it is tempting to have your money piled up with some of it invested in stocks as a hedge against sluggish growth/losses.
If taxes are high, your cash is best employed hiring staff and developing products. And indeed, currently, taxes are low and corporations are awash with cash. Yet they are not hiring.
Because low taxes makes that a bad business decision.
Demand higher taxes!
To have a successful start-up, you need a good product, to convince people that your product is good, and to sell it for a profit.
To have a successful industry, you need to do that repeatedly. This means realising that you must also invent the next good product, the next-next and be ready for the next big technological shift.
This means that your engineers, are your most valuable medium-turn asset, and your research department, with engineers-scientists you most valuable long-term asset. Of course sales and marketing are your most valuable short-term asset.
Combining all these requires good management. Management is the secret sauce: it must understand that long, medium and short term are all important. A clever way of making this work is to have management not part of the structure, but rather a service: you have a project, get a manager from the managing department: he is there to listen, prioritise, smooth differences among coworkers, understand how to get assistance/support from the other department. At the end of the project, he goes back to the pool.
Who would "run" such a company? I don't know. A board of directors, I expect, picked to represent all divisions and services. A bunch of C*O to give the general direction. The point is, however, a company does not really need to be run: I expect people would come to work in such an organisation because they would get to do what they do best and be happy about it. Without countless layers of management, pay would be better than average, and the "top" would be close enough to the "bottom" to understand what is going on.
Right. The EP is undemocratic. Says a Brit whose system of vote is first-past-the post (you vote is not diluted, it just doesn't count) and a house of lords. There are 500 000 000 citizens of the EU. They all count.
Also "no-one has any idea who chooses and writes the laws" is not just a stupid argument. It is the ultimate "I am entitled to my ignorance and my point of view" point which completely invalidates anything you might say. Go read WP or something. It is just not that complicated.
Finally, please, do yourself (and the rest of us) a favour. Don't drink and post.
See, if the rate is 100%, you will get no taxes. At 0%, you get no taxes. Thus, there must be some optimal amounts of taxes which maximises revenue.
Now clearly, the US is closer to the 0 bound, so increases taxes increases revenue: proof comes from Bush, lowering taxes lowered revenue. During a bubble. Thus, the right course of action is to increase taxes.
Why would you want to maximise revenue? Because it is a proxy for economic output: good tax structure leads to healthy economy.
This is crazy thinking. If the project has merit, fund it.
The reason projects are over budget is that the people making the decisions always go for cheap. Not good or useful or necessary, but cheap. So if you believe in your project, you will lie about it. Because otherwise, it will never get a chance, never mind its actual merits.
To change this, you need to punish not the guys making the proposition, but the morons who accept clearly impossible projects. The guilty party here is not NASA: they are playing the game by the rules _congress_ has set. Instead of saying "the incompetents are over budget", say "who let the clueless moron give the go-ahead to an impossible plan?".
See also "war in Iraq".
The world actually has a huge (3-4 times) overcapacity in steel production. So it would not, in fact, be a problem :)
See, this is wrong. "the gubmint is always less efficient" is an inane opinion. Basically because the government is run not-for-profit, so it only need to be more efficient than a corporation with no margins, and no marketing. Also in many cases that lead inevitably to market failures (roads, railways, utilities) it only need to be more efficient (for the consumer) than a for-profit monopoly...
So even if the government were in fact systematically less efficient (it is not), it would still always be the preferable option in many cases. The case for public health care is notably extremely strong: countries with public, nationalised, health care all have much lower cost and better outcomes than the US.
Another thing for which the government is much better than corporations is very long term investment, blue sky research and the like. These very long odds always are good in the long run (no major scientific discovery of a fundamental nature ever came from a private for-profit research venture) but almost never in the short run.
Actually, you don't. Rates are high-ish, but capped by a EU directive...
for konqueror, I am not sure what you want. I don't remember a NeXT-like column view ever being available. If you mean the splitting of the interface recursively, it is still there.
new tab for konsole? just double-click on a free area of the tab bar.
Reintegrate file browsing into konqueror? Uh? type any local URL in the location bar, and you are browsing your files.
As for the desktop and panel right-click... Are you sure you are not confusing gnome and KDE. 'cause I can add any service menu to the right click. In fact the desktop and panel of KDE4 are way more configurable than the ones from KDE3.
But clearly, you must be an amazingly anal person to consider that the whole desktop is incomplete because you basically would like a button instead of a double-click. Seriously. Get some perspective.
Hmmm. How can I be polite... Nope. Can't.
So.
Fuck you.
Seriously. This generation of 30-year-old gamers is the least criminal, the most altruistic there is. Unlike their parents, they played civilization, and they know what happens to empires with no research and no roads... They grew up without internet and know, much more deeply than their parents, what it means to be connected. They know of the passions, travails and interests of all everywhere. And they know how it was before.
They are not hungry, because they can see how wrong their hungry parents were. The pox that is suburbia. The obsession of ownership. The small-mindedness of the symbols of success. And the failure of it all to bring security or satisfaction. And now, we have reached peak oil, and there is no infrastructure to cope. They know there is no contentedness to be reached in following their parent's footsteps.
They know that the one thing that brings improvement is knowledge. And they know it is a double-edged sword. And they see how their hungry parents are defunding education and research to pay for the retirements they can't afford -- because they won't pay taxes. Yes, the GP is right: Reagan was a calamity. Not so much because of his policies, but because he made legitimate a deeply wrong view of the World.
Logic is not arbitrary. Your pick of axiomatic system is -- provided it satisfies a set of criteria. And then you create your maths. But this process is not arbitrary: there are no systems where pi is 3, for example.
For the record, I am not a believer. But I don't mind believers, provided they can stay consistent in a logical sense. Now, this usually means that a take-all approach to religion is something I do mind: believing that your holy book is divinely inspired is OK, believing it is perfect (which translation? what became of context? errors? symbolism?) is crazy. It assumes that your interpretation of it is Divine. And that, I call having a God complex.
Also, believing that a benevolent being would send anyone to Hell is highly inconsistent: you are holding God to lower standards than humans!
Einstein never said E = mc. He said that E = mc^2 in the first order approximation. Also, Einstein's theories can be redeveloped in any sufficiently powerful axiomatic system. There is no need to believe in logic: it is. There is need to believe in science: it is wholly based on the assumption that the observable universe is how it is because of a set of immutable, fundamental laws. Let's face it, this is faith.
Collective guilt is very important as a concept: it covers the reality that although you are responsible for your actions, you are also part of a larger social organism, which you might not be able to measurably influence, but which is capable of actions which might be deemed guilty. Recognising this is important when discussing societies and values.
Seriously? an eternity in Hell as a just punishment for any crime -- say, even the destruction of a planet seems a tad on the excessive side? Is your "benevolent" god a sadistic bastard?
And no, there is such thing as collective responsibility. For example, you may live in a corrupt society. Mere survival requires you to buy in that corruption. You are not guilty of it, though, because you did not have a choice. However, the system perpetuates because everyone participates.
This is collective responsibility: your individual actions are negligible, but the result of the (slightly reprehensible, sometimes negligibly so) actions of everyone can be much more than the sum of individual actions. We might well burn (or at least be uncomfortably hot) because of such a process. Responsibility can be collective.
Justice should however only consider individual guilt -- but this is a completely different topic.
So 613 useless deaths. Many suicides which occurred only because the occasion was there. You get the same number of deaths by accident by 100 000 inhabitants than Australia has gun murders. This is terrible. You just proved how bad gun ownership is.
For the record, there are in the order of 30 000 total deaths related to guns. all of which are accounted for in your data.
Notice the conspicuous absence of the gun deaths where the rapist/burglar/murderer which got shot by the would-be victim. What about these? Because these are the ones which justify gun ownership, according to you. For the record, in 0.38% of the time is the gun used in self-defence. In a quarter of those cases, the victim actually shoots the aggressor. Let us be generous, they might hit a third of the time, and kill half the time (I am making up these two numbers last, they could be 1 and 1, or more likely .1 and .2, the numbers are from the 90s, but I do not expect them to have changed much). So about 2 (two) of these homicides are those where the gun actually helped the victim. Because I am generous. Against 600 accidents. Hell, even if the victims were all perfect shots, it would still be twelve. Against six hundred.
So I stand by my "it _never_ happens".
If only 20 suicides are prevented by not having guns around (out of 17300), banning guns is worth it!
As for drunk-driving deaths? yeah, I agree, less cars and more public transport would be good.
no, it's not. It is an essentially random process.
The coal particle get lodged into your lung, causing a tiny lesion. Cell growth is activated around it and the particle get encapsulated. This extra growth spurt might, or might not cause some of the cells to mutate. The mutation might, or might not, lead to cancer.
Some people are more susceptible, yes. But the development is random. Being healthy, or rich will not help you at all.
There is a reason there is a Justice system. There also is a reason why people are normally only convicted of crimes they have actually committed (or are though to have actually committed).
You may have fantasies of vigilante justice, but back in the real world, these only cause accidents and unnecessary deaths. It is not the case that preventing a single murder is good, it would be the case that the number of murders prevented was larger than the number of accidents. Which is not the case. Note also that the optimal outcome has neither the criminal nor the victim killed.
It never happens that a crime is prevented by some random guy shooting at a would-be murderer (oh, it will happen occasionally, but only in amazingly unlikely sets of circumstances). It happens quite frequently that a burglary becomes a tragedy or that a member of the family gets shot.