No, just the sometimes harsh math of the policy wonk...I have no idea how to weigh saving one person's life against costing another's, so I settle for second best and try to accurately count them. The OP's point was that this (or really any safety lock) will cost lives, my reply was that under even unreasonable assumptions, it will save more lives than it costs. That in no way devalues the lives lost. Since any gun policy (including no change from current laws) is going to involve some trade off of innocent lives, I don't see how we can be squeemish about counting deaths.
To your second point, I agree, safety locks do nothing to prevent premeditated murder. It's the unknown number of unplanned killings that may be reduced. And, of course, there's no real chance that something like this goes into wide enough use to really make any difference.
Well, if the thing can be easily flashed, the whole concept is pretty pointless. As far as simply using another means of suicide, people who try to commit suicide with guns are far more successful than those who use other means. This article has data on suicide success rates, and guns are much more lethal than other suicide methods. Personally, I've known people who attempted suicide with guns, and now they're dead, and I know people who tried with other means, and they've recovered and gone on to live full lives.
Are minors ever authorized to use guns unsupervised? Honest question--I thought in most states you had to be over 18 or 21 to own a gun, and that minors have to be supervised. For example, even Utah, a pretty gun-friendly state, has pretty strict restrictions on when kids can be alone with guns.
So, shouldn't someone under 18 always be under some sort of temporary use permission? i.e., "Junior and I are going to the range/hunting/whatever, he's good for 6 hours" sort of thing.
For whatever reason, the suicide stats that I can find use 15-24 years old as an age rage, so I couldn't' easily see how many minors used guns to commit suicide. From a quick google ~4000 people in that age range commit suicide per year, and about half use guns. So, guesstimate that around 1000 underage people use guns to kill themselves per year. Even if the only effect of this system was to reduce that number, it would be more than all the justifiable homicides by both police and civilians.
Couldn't find anything on how often the person who commits suicide is the gun owner, but even the common-sense step of taking family members who have recently expressed suicidal thoughts off the 'gun access list' would probably save hundreds or thousands of lives per year.
There were also 393 shootings by cops; I don't know enough about law enforcement to have any opinion if this is a good idea there. I wasn't able to find the needed stats about how many of the shooters were unauthorized. I am aware that ~20k were suicides, and think this does apply to suicides as well as homicides, as the person committing suicide is not necessarily the authorized user of the gun.
I have a vague memory of reading that the most likely lethal use of a privately owned gun is for a family member to kill him/herself. Grim statistic, if true.
Because sensible regulation works better than banning. We've been working on car safety for 50+ years, and the number of people killed by cars has been steadily dropping.
Why do gun people insist on turning every conversation about gun safety into an emotional confrontation? This isn't really about your precious guns, it's about the tens of thousands of people who are shot to death every year. Discussing that it might be nice if fewer people were shot to death doesn't immediately mean that we're going to ban guns.
In personal life, people who inappropriate emotionally escalate conversations are usually trying to avoid something they'd rather not talk about. Can't help thinking that's what's going on here.
I have no idea about millitary or law enforcement use of this, but in the civilian world this something like this doesn't have to work very well at all to save lives.
In 2011, 32,163 people were shot to death in the United States. 260 of those were justifiable homicides by private citizens (e.g., self-defense). Even if this technology failed and locked out the owner 100% of the time, and 100% of those failures lead to the death of the owner, it would only have to block less than 1% of the other uses to be a net positive. I can't find any stats on what percent of non-self-defense gun killings are done by people using a gun they weren't supposed to use, but even if it's a pretty small percent, this will save a lot of lives.
By "Ruby Ridge crowd" I didn't mean the people at Ruby Ridge in 1992, but the people who emulate/idolize them. I've heard a surprising number of people lately say things like "If the government ever comes for me, it will be another Ruby Ridge." I was using Ruby Ridge crowd as shorthand for the political subculture in the U.S. that seems to think hunkering down with a bunch of guns lets them defy the government.
It's a pretty funny story, but hard to figure out what was going on there. Maybe the Dutch are more easygoing about this sort of thing, but the team's action doesn't seem like they were actually ordered to get in. You're right though, I guess there is an intermediate case where they're enough of a nuisance to provoke half-hearted action.
I don't know..I'm not a combat engineer, but I don't think any bunker can last long if determined professionals are allowed to freely operate outside it. "nuclear bunker" means certain things about tolerance to over pressure, shock, contaminated air, etc., but doesn't do all that much against people with jackhammers and drills. The wikipedia page says the cyberbunker has 5 meter thick reinforced concrete walls, which would probably keep you and me out, but I'm sure can be defeated in time with civil engineering equipment. Beyond that, if you've got guys who know what they're doing poking around outside the bunker, there's whole worlds of things they can do.
These Danish cyberbunker people seem to share a mindset with the U.S. Ruby Ridge crowd, and they're both wrong. Making yourself an immobile target and defying state power in a developed nation really only has two outcomes: either you're not enough of a nuisance to provoke action, or you get crushed.
So the top of the article has a picture of a building that looked like someone'd been going at the walls with a sledgehammer for a while. Anyone else see this and think "Man, they gotta make that thing a little lighter..."
Existing laws seem not to be very effective. I don't know if that's a problem with the laws or with enforcement. Given that dozens of malware attacks arrive in my inbox every day, I'm surmising that our current legal framework isn't up to the task.
In general, the innovators will always be ahead of the regulators. In this case, the innovators happen to be criminals.
As I read the wikipedia article and the linked FAS paper, the CFAA seems to only protect government and bank computers. Is that true? What law does someone spamming malware as e-mail attachments break?
Strengthening your point, I think labor is a distant third. The #2 cost is the airplane itself. A new 747 costs $352 million. A major airline should be able to borrow money at 5-6%, so the mortgage on the plane will cost about $20 million/year. The aircraft is probably good for 30 years, so that's about $12 million/year in depreciation. It's costing the airline something like $32 million a year just to own the airplane.
They should get around 3000 flight hours out of it per year (10-12 hrs/day x 6 days/week x 48 weeks/year), so add $10k or so per flight hour to your estimates. This also makes it obvious why fast turnaround is so important--Southwest pretty much revolutionized the industry by being able to flip a plane in 15-30 minutes. That extra hour of flight time each day is huge when you're looking at tens of thousands of dollars in fixed costs.
Next time you board an aircraft, take a look to the left. If the cockpit door is open, there's probably a small plaque there telling you who the bank is that actually owns the plane.
According to this, 16.7EBq of Xenon was released by Fukushima, and plugging that into the forumla wikipedia gives to convert Bequerels to grams says that about 2.4kg of Xe-133 was released. Haven't seen anything that says Xe-136 was released, but I didn't look that hard.
That's why I provided sources. These are far from uncontrolled statistics. Both articles go into great length on how they avoid the so-called "confounding variables." To the "people that are about to commit suicide go out and buy a gun":
There were no significant differences between those with only handguns in the home and those with only long guns or both handguns and long guns, those with two or more guns, and those having one gun in the household; and between those who stored one or more guns unlocked and those who stored all guns locked (table 6).
The suicide rate wasn't lower for people with multiple guns or for people who kept their guns locked, so I don't think the data supports the hypothesis that the suicide weapon was purchased for the purpose of suicide.
To the "people who live in bad neighborhoods get guns" most of the second article is about that point and how to disentangle all the different predictive factors behind getting shot. I'm sure there's some truth to "people who are planning on entering a dangerous situation carry", but there's also some truth to "if you try and draw while you're getting mugged, you're gonna get shot." In support of that, note that having a gun increases your risk of geting shot even more for "assaults where the victim had at least some chance to resist"
Sad truth is that if you try to resist a crime, you generally place yourself in more danger than if you passively submit. I'm not saying that recommends any particular course of action. Personally, I hope to act bravely, even if it puts me in danger, though my soon-to-arrive child might change that opinion. We shouldn't let the ethical question of how to respond to violence obscure the fact that going for your gun does not make you safer. Escalating a robbery to a gunfight is a risky move--why does stating that fairly obvious fact upset people?
The odds of my being killed by a gun have almost no relationship to whether I own one myself.
Actually, they do. People with guns in the home are around twice as likely to be murdered and 10 times as likely do die of suicide as people without guns (source). People carrying guns are about 5 times as likely to get shot as people who aren't carying guns (source). This is not even considering accidental shootings. You say you're "not the sort of idiot who is likely enough to shoot myself by accident," and I hope you're right, but I doubt many accidental shooters thought they were either.
I work in this industry, and think you're misunderstanding a lot of things about deregulation.
Electricity deregulation affected power plants, power purchases, and to some extent, the high-voltage transmission system. The local distribution system, which is what this storm seems to have hit, is still very much traditionally regulated in nearly all areas. The "EDC" (electricity delivery company, what most people think of as their utility) owns the wires. EDCs still operate under rates that are generally set by state government, and trust me, they are always under scrutiny. Also, an EDC doesn't really have much of a profit motive here: anything they spend on extra maintenance will be passed on to ratepayers, and anything they save by shirking maintenance will end up going back to ratepayers.
Coops and Municipal utilities are nearly entirely exempted from deregulation, and run much the same as they did in the 1930s.
In any event, this storm is a good natural test of your hypothesis: some of the affected states (Pennsylvania, Maryland, New Jersey) are entirely deregulated, and some (West Virginia, Tennessee, the Carolina) are traditionally regulated. Virginia is somewhere in the middle.
Sea level rise has been directly measured by satellite since 1992. The data's pretty solid. I'm tempted to add something sarcastic, but I guess the right thing to do is de-escalate. Measurements are measurements, throwing around unwarranted accusations of bias IMHO does nothing but help our society's decay into superstitious tribalism. I kind of like the scientific era and would like it to last.
No, I think 'sea level' is actually different around the world (relative to what, I'm not sure maybe the geoid). Odd bit of trivia is that the Pacific end of the Panama canal is about 20cm higher than the Atlantic end. (http://www.psmsl.org/train_and_info/faqs/
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Nice thought! Have you read Surface Detail?
No, just the sometimes harsh math of the policy wonk...I have no idea how to weigh saving one person's life against costing another's, so I settle for second best and try to accurately count them. The OP's point was that this (or really any safety lock) will cost lives, my reply was that under even unreasonable assumptions, it will save more lives than it costs. That in no way devalues the lives lost. Since any gun policy (including no change from current laws) is going to involve some trade off of innocent lives, I don't see how we can be squeemish about counting deaths.
To your second point, I agree, safety locks do nothing to prevent premeditated murder. It's the unknown number of unplanned killings that may be reduced. And, of course, there's no real chance that something like this goes into wide enough use to really make any difference.
Well, if the thing can be easily flashed, the whole concept is pretty pointless. As far as simply using another means of suicide, people who try to commit suicide with guns are far more successful than those who use other means. This article has data on suicide success rates, and guns are much more lethal than other suicide methods. Personally, I've known people who attempted suicide with guns, and now they're dead, and I know people who tried with other means, and they've recovered and gone on to live full lives.
Are minors ever authorized to use guns unsupervised? Honest question--I thought in most states you had to be over 18 or 21 to own a gun, and that minors have to be supervised. For example, even Utah, a pretty gun-friendly state, has pretty strict restrictions on when kids can be alone with guns. So, shouldn't someone under 18 always be under some sort of temporary use permission? i.e., "Junior and I are going to the range/hunting/whatever, he's good for 6 hours" sort of thing.
For whatever reason, the suicide stats that I can find use 15-24 years old as an age rage, so I couldn't' easily see how many minors used guns to commit suicide. From a quick google ~4000 people in that age range commit suicide per year, and about half use guns. So, guesstimate that around 1000 underage people use guns to kill themselves per year. Even if the only effect of this system was to reduce that number, it would be more than all the justifiable homicides by both police and civilians.
Couldn't find anything on how often the person who commits suicide is the gun owner, but even the common-sense step of taking family members who have recently expressed suicidal thoughts off the 'gun access list' would probably save hundreds or thousands of lives per year.
There were also 393 shootings by cops; I don't know enough about law enforcement to have any opinion if this is a good idea there. I wasn't able to find the needed stats about how many of the shooters were unauthorized. I am aware that ~20k were suicides, and think this does apply to suicides as well as homicides, as the person committing suicide is not necessarily the authorized user of the gun.
I have a vague memory of reading that the most likely lethal use of a privately owned gun is for a family member to kill him/herself. Grim statistic, if true.
Because sensible regulation works better than banning. We've been working on car safety for 50+ years, and the number of people killed by cars has been steadily dropping.
Why do gun people insist on turning every conversation about gun safety into an emotional confrontation? This isn't really about your precious guns, it's about the tens of thousands of people who are shot to death every year. Discussing that it might be nice if fewer people were shot to death doesn't immediately mean that we're going to ban guns.
In personal life, people who inappropriate emotionally escalate conversations are usually trying to avoid something they'd rather not talk about. Can't help thinking that's what's going on here.
I have no idea about millitary or law enforcement use of this, but in the civilian world this something like this doesn't have to work very well at all to save lives.
In 2011, 32,163 people were shot to death in the United States. 260 of those were justifiable homicides by private citizens (e.g., self-defense). Even if this technology failed and locked out the owner 100% of the time, and 100% of those failures lead to the death of the owner, it would only have to block less than 1% of the other uses to be a net positive. I can't find any stats on what percent of non-self-defense gun killings are done by people using a gun they weren't supposed to use, but even if it's a pretty small percent, this will save a lot of lives.
That cooperative threat reduction is basically helping the FSU keep track of and dismantle their nukes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nunn%E2%80%93Lugar_Cooperative_Threat_Reduction
By "Ruby Ridge crowd" I didn't mean the people at Ruby Ridge in 1992, but the people who emulate/idolize them. I've heard a surprising number of people lately say things like "If the government ever comes for me, it will be another Ruby Ridge." I was using Ruby Ridge crowd as shorthand for the political subculture in the U.S. that seems to think hunkering down with a bunch of guns lets them defy the government.
It's a pretty funny story, but hard to figure out what was going on there. Maybe the Dutch are more easygoing about this sort of thing, but the team's action doesn't seem like they were actually ordered to get in. You're right though, I guess there is an intermediate case where they're enough of a nuisance to provoke half-hearted action.
I don't know..I'm not a combat engineer, but I don't think any bunker can last long if determined professionals are allowed to freely operate outside it. "nuclear bunker" means certain things about tolerance to over pressure, shock, contaminated air, etc., but doesn't do all that much against people with jackhammers and drills. The wikipedia page says the cyberbunker has 5 meter thick reinforced concrete walls, which would probably keep you and me out, but I'm sure can be defeated in time with civil engineering equipment. Beyond that, if you've got guys who know what they're doing poking around outside the bunker, there's whole worlds of things they can do.
These Danish cyberbunker people seem to share a mindset with the U.S. Ruby Ridge crowd, and they're both wrong. Making yourself an immobile target and defying state power in a developed nation really only has two outcomes: either you're not enough of a nuisance to provoke action, or you get crushed.
Because that does nothing for the innocent people harmed by the idiots?
So the top of the article has a picture of a building that looked like someone'd been going at the walls with a sledgehammer for a while. Anyone else see this and think "Man, they gotta make that thing a little lighter..."
you forgot 3. If it goes crazy and starts trying to kill everyone, it looses power after a few feet.
If I had mod points, +1 funny for "Cinderblock throwing have never really been any industry metric..."
Existing laws seem not to be very effective. I don't know if that's a problem with the laws or with enforcement. Given that dozens of malware attacks arrive in my inbox every day, I'm surmising that our current legal framework isn't up to the task.
In general, the innovators will always be ahead of the regulators. In this case, the innovators happen to be criminals.
As I read the wikipedia article and the linked FAS paper, the CFAA seems to only protect government and bank computers. Is that true? What law does someone spamming malware as e-mail attachments break?
...the Global Malware Authors Guild announced the formation of a new super-PAC...
Strengthening your point, I think labor is a distant third. The #2 cost is the airplane itself. A new 747 costs $352 million. A major airline should be able to borrow money at 5-6%, so the mortgage on the plane will cost about $20 million/year. The aircraft is probably good for 30 years, so that's about $12 million/year in depreciation. It's costing the airline something like $32 million a year just to own the airplane.
They should get around 3000 flight hours out of it per year (10-12 hrs/day x 6 days/week x 48 weeks/year), so add $10k or so per flight hour to your estimates. This also makes it obvious why fast turnaround is so important--Southwest pretty much revolutionized the industry by being able to flip a plane in 15-30 minutes. That extra hour of flight time each day is huge when you're looking at tens of thousands of dollars in fixed costs.
Next time you board an aircraft, take a look to the left. If the cockpit door is open, there's probably a small plaque there telling you who the bank is that actually owns the plane.
According to this, 16.7EBq of Xenon was released by Fukushima, and plugging that into the forumla wikipedia gives to convert Bequerels to grams says that about 2.4kg of Xe-133 was released. Haven't seen anything that says Xe-136 was released, but I didn't look that hard.
There were no significant differences between those with only handguns in the home and those with only long guns or both handguns and long guns, those with two or more guns, and those having one gun in the household; and between those who stored one or more guns unlocked and those who stored all guns locked (table 6).
The suicide rate wasn't lower for people with multiple guns or for people who kept their guns locked, so I don't think the data supports the hypothesis that the suicide weapon was purchased for the purpose of suicide.
To the "people who live in bad neighborhoods get guns" most of the second article is about that point and how to disentangle all the different predictive factors behind getting shot. I'm sure there's some truth to "people who are planning on entering a dangerous situation carry", but there's also some truth to "if you try and draw while you're getting mugged, you're gonna get shot." In support of that, note that having a gun increases your risk of geting shot even more for "assaults where the victim had at least some chance to resist"
Sad truth is that if you try to resist a crime, you generally place yourself in more danger than if you passively submit. I'm not saying that recommends any particular course of action. Personally, I hope to act bravely, even if it puts me in danger, though my soon-to-arrive child might change that opinion. We shouldn't let the ethical question of how to respond to violence obscure the fact that going for your gun does not make you safer. Escalating a robbery to a gunfight is a risky move--why does stating that fairly obvious fact upset people?
The odds of my being killed by a gun have almost no relationship to whether I own one myself.
Actually, they do. People with guns in the home are around twice as likely to be murdered and 10 times as likely do die of suicide as people without guns (source). People carrying guns are about 5 times as likely to get shot as people who aren't carying guns (source). This is not even considering accidental shootings. You say you're "not the sort of idiot who is likely enough to shoot myself by accident," and I hope you're right, but I doubt many accidental shooters thought they were either.
I work in this industry, and think you're misunderstanding a lot of things about deregulation. Electricity deregulation affected power plants, power purchases, and to some extent, the high-voltage transmission system. The local distribution system, which is what this storm seems to have hit, is still very much traditionally regulated in nearly all areas. The "EDC" (electricity delivery company, what most people think of as their utility) owns the wires. EDCs still operate under rates that are generally set by state government, and trust me, they are always under scrutiny. Also, an EDC doesn't really have much of a profit motive here: anything they spend on extra maintenance will be passed on to ratepayers, and anything they save by shirking maintenance will end up going back to ratepayers.
Coops and Municipal utilities are nearly entirely exempted from deregulation, and run much the same as they did in the 1930s.
In any event, this storm is a good natural test of your hypothesis: some of the affected states (Pennsylvania, Maryland, New Jersey) are entirely deregulated, and some (West Virginia, Tennessee, the Carolina) are traditionally regulated. Virginia is somewhere in the middle.
Sea level rise has been directly measured by satellite since 1992. The data's pretty solid. I'm tempted to add something sarcastic, but I guess the right thing to do is de-escalate. Measurements are measurements, throwing around unwarranted accusations of bias IMHO does nothing but help our society's decay into superstitious tribalism. I kind of like the scientific era and would like it to last.
No, I think 'sea level' is actually different around the world (relative to what, I'm not sure maybe the geoid). Odd bit of trivia is that the Pacific end of the Panama canal is about 20cm higher than the Atlantic end. (http://www.psmsl.org/train_and_info/faqs/