Actually, you might want to check that. I've heard that trains can actually be worse than cars, and a plane on a long trip is much more efficient than a car. While a short hop flight isn't too efficient, a plane at cruising altitude is actually quite efficient.
Then again, if you can design a high speed rail line to be both efficient(light?) and fast, it would be extremely efficient.
Though this tends to say rail is quite efficient, though using the estimater for the plane shows that the emmisions drop down to half that of the car, solo driver, with a long trip.
A critical point of this estimate might be occupation - the rail estimate assumes 50 passangers per car. Now, I haven't ever used commercial rail, so I have no idea if it's 100% capacity, or 25%. I think 50% might be it.
If you start up a cross-continental rail service and get 50% less occupancy on average, you'd be competing with planes for efficiency.
The occupancy rate is actually to the advantage of the plane, I think.
Don't take me wrong - I think that we NEED high speed passanger rail, not to mention something like a PRT system in the cities(and probably even running between them). Still, I think that a east coast line, west coast line, then two cross continentals would be a very good idea.
Took me a bit to figure out where the briefcase came in, because my links were to statistics.
Personally, gun in briefcase isn't an optimal carrying position, nor is a purse. Kinda like how the military doesn't like mixing classified documents, weapons, and other valuables in a safe or other storage container.
Briefcases and purses are frequently targets for theft, for one thing.
You do realize that I'm a libertarian, right? Abstinence only education is stupid as far as I'm concerned. I AM concerned about teaching kids how to survive in the big bad world.
That includes a lot of things schools don't necessarily touch. How to drive, Sex Ed as a part of basic health. How to eat healthy(cause many parent's don't, unfortunately). Firearm safety, how to swim. Basic first aid. Basic accounting and budgeting. Why buying that 42" TV at $28.84 a week for 2 years is a bad idea when wallyworld is selling them for $1k. Basic cooking, cleaning, etc...
My understanding is that it includes all discharges towards people.
I was going by my memory of the study that most sounded like yours that was promptly debunked.
It's kinda like how Brady used to trumpet 'child' firearm death rates that included 24 year old gang bangers shot by police when you looked at the actual statistics.
What makes you people think that if someone takes over it's going to be crystal clear and everyone is going to be on the same side? That's ridiculous historically it happens by creating divisions and courting groups of people.
I don't, that's why I mentioned the military splitting up - It doesn't take even a 50-50 split to royally FUBAR the despot's plan.
Go by some history and stuff, I figure it'd be more like a third each way - a third fighting him, a third fighting for him, and a third sitting out.
Maybe, Maybe 1% of the population will engage in hostilities - but you have to remember that that's still 3 million combatants at this point. That's ~3X the number of the military
Or we could reduce the deficit, slowing/halting the slide of the USD, reduce taxes, etc...
Heck, I'd say fund education if it wasn't for the fact that I think that education is already very well funded, and more money wouldn't help(I think that bad schools need procedural/staff change more than more money).
E) After getting the money the 3rd strike felon shoots you anyways to 'eliminate witnesses'. F) The Mugger, feeling brave, forces you to take him to his house, where he proceeds to beat, torture, and rape you, your wife, and your kid, etc...
Note, my default action would be to hand over the money - but if I think it's going to go beyond mugging I'm going for the gun.
just because a robbery doesn't end up in a gunfight doesn't make it profitable.
Many/most people engaging in robbery today have a messed up risk/reward evaluation ability. There's far too many people who've been convicted of multiple robberies, arrested for robbery hours/days after getting out of jail. As for 'works quite well', well, I don't think it works when there's huge numbers of individuals with dozens of robbery convictions, and as many jail or prison visits.
England, Canada, and Australia often have higher violent crime rates, except in murder, than the USA.
We got quite competent police and quite a lot if not most robberies gets solved
I think that the robbery clear rate is well under 50%. Can't find a source at the moment, lost a link to a great statistics site.
As I said to the sibling, if you are truly so narrow minded and vengeful I feel sorry for you and hope you seek help, you are definitely not helping your society by spreading false fear.
Just to be clear, as I'm not the poster of the parent, I don't advocate vigilantism. I don't advocate seeking vengence. I advocate stopping the crime on the spot. Of defending yourself, and others.
Only if you include suicide and disclude any incident where there's not a fatality. i.e. It's more 'Gun owning households are more likely to lose a member to suicide by gun than to kill an intruder'.
Personally, my studies make me believe that suicide has a near 100% substitution rate - people will simply use a different method to kill themselves if a gun isn't available.
For example, if you look at Japan, they manage to have a Suicide rate so high that it exceeds our murder rate & suicide rate combined - and hardly any of it is by guns.
The most famous example I can thing of was the Warsaw Ghetto uprising - with which a minimally armed jewish population managed to hold up a large amount of Nazi troops for four months.
Now imagine every John, Dick, and Harry hanging around with their deer rifle - a significant threat even to a body armored SWAT member. Their helmets aren't proof from a headshot.
Ultimately the police and military are outnumbered. While no tanks might be lost in a conflict, An Abrams can last only a few hours without fuel support. What happens when the fuel trucks are ambushed?
This is all discounting, of course, that significant amounts of the military don't rebel. After all, part of the oath of enlistment is to 'uphold and defend the constitution of the United States'.
Compare this with the US, where guns do not need to be registered, most people can legally purchase handguns without licensing, and (in some states at least) most people can easily get concealed carry licenses.
The only problem with this is that the more rural Canadian provinces tend to follow those laws about as much as Americans follow the speed limit.
There are entire provinces declining to participate in the registration scheme as a waste of money.
Open question: How is registration supposed to prevent violent crime? How is it supposed to prevent violent crime in a more economical fashion than other potential methods?
I agree fully. A large part of the problem is the question of who's hands they're in. In the USA, the majority of the guns are in the hands of law abiding citizens. In places like Somalia they're mostly in the hands of thugs.
For those worrying about vigilantism*, consider that 48 states have CCW permits of one sort or another. That in 2 states you don't even need a permit.
I'd much rather see a gun in the hands of a law abiding citizen than a thug - unfortuantly we haven't discovered a working method to disarm thugs, only law abiding citizens.
Arm willing citizens, ensuring that they have a minimum of safety and operating experience/training.
*Not so much here, but I saw a lot when I browsed the comments of DC stories on it.
you could open up ten police forces the size of the NYPD.
Not necessarily a good option. While I'm sure there are areas that could use more police protection, there are already a good amount where additional police would simply result in more speeding tickets(because they're easy).
No, my solution would be to legalize, regulate, and tax the currently illegal drugs. Killing the illegal drug trade would drop our violence levels to near european levels overnight.
ND doesn't require a NICS for a private sale, and as a point of fact, private individuals aren't allowed to perform a NICS check.
Otherwise I could find out the criminal status of anybody I can get full name and address for, much less the social(though having the SSN makes it more accurate).
Better yet, have gun safety education in the schools. Much like sex and driver's ed, teach children the proper and safe usage of firearms, to include an actual course.
More likely to save lives than quizes, training, background checks in order to purchase a firearm.
Or the local religious leaders come out with a statement that the food is either prepared with forbidden products(like pig), or contain stuff like birth control - which is why we STILL have polio around in the wild. The local religious leaders came out that the shots were really birth control, so nobody got them, so the disease is still around.
It's actually cheaper to not do the self addressed stamped envelope today.
It takes more labor to deal with non standard envelopes* than to simply enter all the information into a computer, print out the checks with the addresses on them and stuff them into envelopes with the clear plastic address section. Or even the ones where you use a pressure/heat/UV printing process on already sealed envelopes that you rip open to expose the checks. I do agree with the hand filled form.
That way you can print them in the presorted order and save all sorts of money on the postage. Enough that, like I said, dealing with the non-standard letters is more expensive even if you don't have to pay postage.
*Yes, I know 95% of them would be one of two sizes, but you still have the fun of dealing with various sealing methods between the two - you have paste, self sealing where you pull the protective cover off to expose the adhesive. Various weights, etc...
It's estimated that ladders cost $25 more than they should because of the tort tax.
Heck, look at the price difference between a drug marketed for humans and the same drug, made in the same facility, put in the same bottle, just labeled for animals - a lot of the price difference is the tort cost.
Generics don't have to worry as much, as do drugs that have been out for a long time.
I think that they should put a $50 or so deductible on cases like this - per person. Sure, it'd encourage some companies to try to screw every customer out of $50. But, I wouldn't have the deductible count in small claims court(IE not brought by big lawyer firm), or in cases where people were pursuing independent action. Of course, under $50, most people would be in small claims anyways.
But I tend to dislike the cases where they claim some company screwed people out of money or whatever without them knowing. When I bought some money from crucial - then later received paperwork from some lawyer firm for a class action, I didn't bother pursuing it - because I had paid what I felt was a fair price.
All you need is a computer with a cellular nic. Offering wireless in the car(presumably tied in through the onstar system), the most likely effect is simply to increase signal strength and therefore bandwidth.
If it's like onstar, then the rates for the service are going to be high enough(at least initially) that 99% of people won't take it. Why? The cellular NIC plan would be much cheaper, and available everywhere, not just in the car.
I say we cap the legal fees at 50% of the final settlement - IE for each $5 'settlement' received they get $5.
So instead of $1.3M, at the moment they've 'earned' ~$12k.
It'd stop some of the stupider lawsuits. I still remember getting a settlement offer for some memory I bought from crucial years ago - as far as I was concerned, I paid a fair price for it. Crucial sold me quality memory at a price seen more for shady chips.
Before I ever started going after the profit margin on computer chips I'd take a look at the jewelry industry.
I figure that most of the <3k individuals are just after a buck(five-thirty five).
On my end, if I was the judge or jury(don't know how it was decided), I'd have thrown out the case from the sheer fact that you had to download a mod to enable the content. Might as well sue 3DRealms for the mod to Duke Nukem that put actual porno on the movie screens, made the strippers actually strip(sorta), and all around more explicit. Don't mention the fact that it was a straight image swap with the more explicit stuff.
Heck, 'Hot Coffee' has made the value of the first edition of the game(before new disks were issued) more valuable!
That shows deliberate work on the part of the player. Like others have said, they could have as easily downloaded far more explicit porn, not to mention outright sex games about as easily.
My grandmother had one of these for a while. I was still a bit hesitant, a cell phone is a much more complex piece of technology than a fire extinguisher, and with no plan for usage other than in an emergency I'd be afraid of finding the thing dead.
Then again, makes me wonder if there might be a small market for 911 only cells powered by non-rechargable lithium batteries for the 10 year shelf life.
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Actually, you might want to check that. I've heard that trains can actually be worse than cars, and a plane on a long trip is much more efficient than a car. While a short hop flight isn't too efficient, a plane at cruising altitude is actually quite efficient.
Then again, if you can design a high speed rail line to be both efficient(light?) and fast, it would be extremely efficient.
Though this tends to say rail is quite efficient, though using the estimater for the plane shows that the emmisions drop down to half that of the car, solo driver, with a long trip.
A critical point of this estimate might be occupation - the rail estimate assumes 50 passangers per car. Now, I haven't ever used commercial rail, so I have no idea if it's 100% capacity, or 25%. I think 50% might be it.
If you start up a cross-continental rail service and get 50% less occupancy on average, you'd be competing with planes for efficiency.
The occupancy rate is actually to the advantage of the plane, I think.
Don't take me wrong - I think that we NEED high speed passanger rail, not to mention something like a PRT system in the cities(and probably even running between them). Still, I think that a east coast line, west coast line, then two cross continentals would be a very good idea.
I think that you replied to the wrong thread...
Took me a bit to figure out where the briefcase came in, because my links were to statistics.
Personally, gun in briefcase isn't an optimal carrying position, nor is a purse. Kinda like how the military doesn't like mixing classified documents, weapons, and other valuables in a safe or other storage container.
Briefcases and purses are frequently targets for theft, for one thing.
The drug lords wouldn't like that ... the War On Drugs being what keeps drug prices in the U.S. artificially high in the first place.
Well, I think they'd fight it a bit, but it's rather difficult to fight legalization. Thus, I figure they'd go 'straight' so fast heads would spin.
It's not like the cocaine growers will go out of business overnight.
*scratches head in puzzlement...
Oh, I think I get it...
You do realize that I'm a libertarian, right? Abstinence only education is stupid as far as I'm concerned. I AM concerned about teaching kids how to survive in the big bad world.
That includes a lot of things schools don't necessarily touch. How to drive, Sex Ed as a part of basic health. How to eat healthy(cause many parent's don't, unfortunately). Firearm safety, how to swim. Basic first aid. Basic accounting and budgeting. Why buying that 42" TV at $28.84 a week for 2 years is a bad idea when wallyworld is selling them for $1k. Basic cooking, cleaning, etc...
My understanding is that it includes all discharges towards people.
I was going by my memory of the study that most sounded like yours that was promptly debunked.
It's kinda like how Brady used to trumpet 'child' firearm death rates that included 24 year old gang bangers shot by police when you looked at the actual statistics.
What makes you people think that if someone takes over it's going to be crystal clear and everyone is going to be on the same side? That's ridiculous historically it happens by creating divisions and courting groups of people.
I don't, that's why I mentioned the military splitting up - It doesn't take even a 50-50 split to royally FUBAR the despot's plan.
Go by some history and stuff, I figure it'd be more like a third each way - a third fighting him, a third fighting for him, and a third sitting out.
Maybe, Maybe 1% of the population will engage in hostilities - but you have to remember that that's still 3 million combatants at this point. That's ~3X the number of the military
Or we could reduce the deficit, slowing/halting the slide of the USD, reduce taxes, etc...
Heck, I'd say fund education if it wasn't for the fact that I think that education is already very well funded, and more money wouldn't help(I think that bad schools need procedural/staff change more than more money).
E) After getting the money the 3rd strike felon shoots you anyways to 'eliminate witnesses'.
F) The Mugger, feeling brave, forces you to take him to his house, where he proceeds to beat, torture, and rape you, your wife, and your kid, etc...
Note, my default action would be to hand over the money - but if I think it's going to go beyond mugging I'm going for the gun.
just because a robbery doesn't end up in a gunfight doesn't make it profitable.
Many/most people engaging in robbery today have a messed up risk/reward evaluation ability. There's far too many people who've been convicted of multiple robberies, arrested for robbery hours/days after getting out of jail. As for 'works quite well', well, I don't think it works when there's huge numbers of individuals with dozens of robbery convictions, and as many jail or prison visits.
How's the self defense tool ban helping England?
How about Australia?
England, Canada, and Australia often have higher violent crime rates, except in murder, than the USA.
We got quite competent police and quite a lot if not most robberies gets solved
I think that the robbery clear rate is well under 50%. Can't find a source at the moment, lost a link to a great statistics site.
As I said to the sibling, if you are truly so narrow minded and vengeful I feel sorry for you and hope you seek help, you are definitely not helping your society by spreading false fear.
Just to be clear, as I'm not the poster of the parent, I don't advocate vigilantism. I don't advocate seeking vengence. I advocate stopping the crime on the spot. Of defending yourself, and others.
Only if you include suicide and disclude any incident where there's not a fatality. i.e. It's more 'Gun owning households are more likely to lose a member to suicide by gun than to kill an intruder'.
Personally, my studies make me believe that suicide has a near 100% substitution rate - people will simply use a different method to kill themselves if a gun isn't available.
For example, if you look at Japan, they manage to have a Suicide rate so high that it exceeds our murder rate & suicide rate combined - and hardly any of it is by guns.
The most famous example I can thing of was the Warsaw Ghetto uprising - with which a minimally armed jewish population managed to hold up a large amount of Nazi troops for four months.
Now imagine every John, Dick, and Harry hanging around with their deer rifle - a significant threat even to a body armored SWAT member. Their helmets aren't proof from a headshot.
Ultimately the police and military are outnumbered. While no tanks might be lost in a conflict, An Abrams can last only a few hours without fuel support. What happens when the fuel trucks are ambushed?
This is all discounting, of course, that significant amounts of the military don't rebel. After all, part of the oath of enlistment is to 'uphold and defend the constitution of the United States'.
Compare this with the US, where guns do not need to be registered, most people can legally purchase handguns without licensing, and (in some states at least) most people can easily get concealed carry licenses.
The only problem with this is that the more rural Canadian provinces tend to follow those laws about as much as Americans follow the speed limit.
There are entire provinces declining to participate in the registration scheme as a waste of money.
Open question:
How is registration supposed to prevent violent crime? How is it supposed to prevent violent crime in a more economical fashion than other potential methods?
I agree fully. A large part of the problem is the question of who's hands they're in. In the USA, the majority of the guns are in the hands of law abiding citizens. In places like Somalia they're mostly in the hands of thugs.
For those worrying about vigilantism*, consider that 48 states have CCW permits of one sort or another. That in 2 states you don't even need a permit.
I'd much rather see a gun in the hands of a law abiding citizen than a thug - unfortuantly we haven't discovered a working method to disarm thugs, only law abiding citizens.
Arm willing citizens, ensuring that they have a minimum of safety and operating experience/training.
*Not so much here, but I saw a lot when I browsed the comments of DC stories on it.
you could open up ten police forces the size of the NYPD.
Not necessarily a good option. While I'm sure there are areas that could use more police protection, there are already a good amount where additional police would simply result in more speeding tickets(because they're easy).
No, my solution would be to legalize, regulate, and tax the currently illegal drugs. Killing the illegal drug trade would drop our violence levels to near european levels overnight.
ND doesn't require a NICS for a private sale, and as a point of fact, private individuals aren't allowed to perform a NICS check.
Otherwise I could find out the criminal status of anybody I can get full name and address for, much less the social(though having the SSN makes it more accurate).
Better yet, have gun safety education in the schools. Much like sex and driver's ed, teach children the proper and safe usage of firearms, to include an actual course.
More likely to save lives than quizes, training, background checks in order to purchase a firearm.
Or the local religious leaders come out with a statement that the food is either prepared with forbidden products(like pig), or contain stuff like birth control - which is why we STILL have polio around in the wild. The local religious leaders came out that the shots were really birth control, so nobody got them, so the disease is still around.
no real increase in gas milage (hybrids aside, mine gets about 35 per gallon).
Arguably, given that your vehicle has AWD, mileage has decreased for your class of vehicles.
But yeah, the only thing that got me to 'upgrade' out of my car was having it totaled...
I need to hire an editor...
Yes, buy memory.
Because MSIE is the designated scapegoat on this board? ;)
(In case of true ignorance IE stands for "that is; in other words")
It's actually cheaper to not do the self addressed stamped envelope today.
It takes more labor to deal with non standard envelopes* than to simply enter all the information into a computer, print out the checks with the addresses on them and stuff them into envelopes with the clear plastic address section. Or even the ones where you use a pressure/heat/UV printing process on already sealed envelopes that you rip open to expose the checks. I do agree with the hand filled form.
That way you can print them in the presorted order and save all sorts of money on the postage. Enough that, like I said, dealing with the non-standard letters is more expensive even if you don't have to pay postage.
*Yes, I know 95% of them would be one of two sizes, but you still have the fun of dealing with various sealing methods between the two - you have paste, self sealing where you pull the protective cover off to expose the adhesive. Various weights, etc...
It's estimated that ladders cost $25 more than they should because of the tort tax.
Heck, look at the price difference between a drug marketed for humans and the same drug, made in the same facility, put in the same bottle, just labeled for animals - a lot of the price difference is the tort cost.
Generics don't have to worry as much, as do drugs that have been out for a long time.
I think that they should put a $50 or so deductible on cases like this - per person. Sure, it'd encourage some companies to try to screw every customer out of $50. But, I wouldn't have the deductible count in small claims court(IE not brought by big lawyer firm), or in cases where people were pursuing independent action. Of course, under $50, most people would be in small claims anyways.
But I tend to dislike the cases where they claim some company screwed people out of money or whatever without them knowing. When I bought some money from crucial - then later received paperwork from some lawyer firm for a class action, I didn't bother pursuing it - because I had paid what I felt was a fair price.
A very bad idea.
A very bad idea that's quite possible already.
All you need is a computer with a cellular nic. Offering wireless in the car(presumably tied in through the onstar system), the most likely effect is simply to increase signal strength and therefore bandwidth.
If it's like onstar, then the rates for the service are going to be high enough(at least initially) that 99% of people won't take it. Why? The cellular NIC plan would be much cheaper, and available everywhere, not just in the car.
I say we cap the legal fees at 50% of the final settlement - IE for each $5 'settlement' received they get $5.
So instead of $1.3M, at the moment they've 'earned' ~$12k.
It'd stop some of the stupider lawsuits. I still remember getting a settlement offer for some memory I bought from crucial years ago - as far as I was concerned, I paid a fair price for it. Crucial sold me quality memory at a price seen more for shady chips.
Before I ever started going after the profit margin on computer chips I'd take a look at the jewelry industry.
I figure that most of the <3k individuals are just after a buck(five-thirty five).
On my end, if I was the judge or jury(don't know how it was decided), I'd have thrown out the case from the sheer fact that you had to download a mod to enable the content. Might as well sue 3DRealms for the mod to Duke Nukem that put actual porno on the movie screens, made the strippers actually strip(sorta), and all around more explicit. Don't mention the fact that it was a straight image swap with the more explicit stuff.
Heck, 'Hot Coffee' has made the value of the first edition of the game(before new disks were issued) more valuable!
That shows deliberate work on the part of the player. Like others have said, they could have as easily downloaded far more explicit porn, not to mention outright sex games about as easily.
My grandmother had one of these for a while. I was still a bit hesitant, a cell phone is a much more complex piece of technology than a fire extinguisher, and with no plan for usage other than in an emergency I'd be afraid of finding the thing dead.
Then again, makes me wonder if there might be a small market for 911 only cells powered by non-rechargable lithium batteries for the 10 year shelf life.