While there seems to be controversy over the specific numbers there is a general consensus that a gun flow exists.
The numbers seem muddied by the data availible for consideration. NPR ran a story in 2005 which noted that
The ATF conducted about 1,800 successful traces last year of crime guns recovered in Mexico. Ninety to 95 percent of those led to American gun dealers according to Javier Ortiz. In October 2003, ATF traced seven assault weapons belonging to a murdered associate of drug lord Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman to Simon's Trading Post(ph) in Pasadena, Texas. The dealer, Simon Garza, pled guilty last year to selling weapons to prohibited individuals. His punishment? Five years probation, a $100 fine and he lost his license to sell firearms. That was one of the few traces that led to a conviction. Fewer than half of all traces are successful and only a fraction of those lead to the most recent purchaser
While it is impossible to know how many firearms are illegally smuggled into Mexico in a given year, about 87% of the firearms seized by Mexican authorities and traced in the last five years originated in the U.S., according to data from Dept. of Justice’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. According to U.S. and Mexican officials, these firearms have been increasingly more powerful and lethal in recent years
Fox challenged the selection bias of the numbers, finding that "83 percent of the guns found at crime scenes in Mexico could not be traced to the U.S." I should probably have done a little more digging for a better source than Fox but if you're interested some google mining should uncover something more reliable.
Thats the underlying idea of Silverglate's "Three Felonies a Day". I haven't read the book yet myself but the general points he makes in his discussion seems well founded. There's a youtube vid if you feel like a general overview - the Wall Street Journal has a brief summary as well.
I did some more digging and found the original study from which that government report gets its numbers. If you want to look it up yourself it's the "U.S. National Center for Health Statistics, Advance Data, No. 362; Sexual Behavior and Selected Health Measures:
Men and Women 15–44 Years of Age, United States, 2002" and can be found here. The study notes that different questions were used with male and female subjects - the authors note that
Among women 15–44 years of age in 2002, 11 percent answered yes when asked, ‘‘Have you ever had any sexual experience of any kind with another female?’’ (The wording of this question was less restrictive and less specific than the questions about men having oral or anal sex with men.)
.
They also threw a little light on those bisexual responses
Approximately 1 percent of men and 3 percent of women 15–44 years of age have had both male and female sexual partners in the last 12 months (table B). Among females, 5.8 percent of teens and
4.8 percent of females 20–24 years of age had had both male and female partners in the last 12 months; percentages were lower at ages 25–44. Among men, about 1 percent had had both male and female partners in the last 12 months at each age
.
That only applies to the previous 12 months though so its a little hard to tease out a full answer.
Give the reports a look, they really are quite interesting.
I probably shouldn't have included the same-sex experience numbers, while I thought they were interesting the report makes it clear that there are a few methodological issues with using them. That being said - women 24-29 claim 14.1% same sex experience. The entire area is just ripe for some really interesting analysis.
If you're interested in the rest:
Women 25-29
97.5% have had an opposite sex partner, 14.1% a same sex sexual contact
22.5% had 1 contact
11.7% had 2
31.3 had 3 to 6
20.3 had 7 to 14
and 11.9 had 15 or more
Median: 3.5
The 30-34 numbers are pretty similar but with a greater concentration in the 3 to 6 catagory (38.8) and the median shifted to 3.8.
Uh may as well make that a multiple posting buddy...the number as stated was 95.2% (more if you assume some of the opposite sex contact doesn't overlap). So at least we knew they were right about it making you go blind....
I assumed it meant that there were a few heavily sexually active women who were pushing the numbers up for the guys. Or, as is always a danger, perhaps a little social pressure encouraged men to overstate and women to understate. Or the men were going going overseas for sex? Whatever it comes down to it makes for some fascinating social insight.
Those numbers don't match others I've seen although, as with all thing numeric online, it's best to assume a little healthy exaggeration. I did some digging and found that the US Census Bureau's 2010 Statistical Abstract includes a section on sexual activity. The full table (94 for those keeping track) is on page 19 of the report. For Males 25 to 29
95.2% have had an opposite sex partner, 5.7% a same sex sexual contact
10% had 1 contact
8.8% had 2
29.4 had 3 to 6
23.2 had 7 to 14
and 23.8 had 15 or more
Median was 5.9
For Males 30 to 34
97.2% have had an opposite sex partner,
10.7% had 1 contact
6.9% had
28.5 had 3 to 6
21.9 had 7 to 14
and 29.2 had 15 or more
Median was 6.4
There are differences based on race - Latinos have a median of 4.5 and African Americans of 8.3 - and sex: a quick glance at the numbers shows that a much greater percentage of women have had 1 partner (25-29 being 22.5% and 20-24 at 20.5%) than their male peers.
It's part of the general insanity of US immigration. I have friends that attended elite American universities and earned graduate degrees in the hard sciences - mechanics, biological sciences, physics and so on - and struggled to be allowed to stay in the US. These are people who have invested huge amounts in the American economy, provided skilled intellectual labour during their time in the country, and threw themselves into politcal and charitable volunteerism. Most spent 8 years in the country and were invited to leave as soon as possible after graduation - or perhaps after a year of work experience training. That's madness.
Interesting portion of the article
H-1B visa fees can add up. There are a number of other add-on fees as well: a $500 antifraud fee that is required for any new H-1B and L-1 visa user, and a fee for training U.S. workers that scales from $750 to $1,500, depending on the size of the company applying for a visa.
Many companies also pay $1,000 extra for what's called premium processing to accelerate handling of the visa. And legal fees can run as high as $2,000.
and
The H-1B fee increase is going to cover only a fraction of the $600 million the Senate wants for border security. The largest H-1B user in 2008 was Infosys, which accounted for 4,500 visas that year. A $2,000 fee increase would have added about $9 million to its visa bill.
That’s because B&N are competing with the likes of Amazon and Costco who can exploit their strengths and easily outcompete. Amazon doesn’t pay sales tax in large portions of the US, maintains a smaller inventory, doesn’t pay for stores, has a tiny staff, and offers a huge range of goods through which to earn money. It doesn’t hurt that they’ve been supported by investors for the who were willing to see consistent annual losses with the hope of eventual stellar profits. Costco stocks a tiny portion of available titles, specifically those targeted at mass the mass audience, and sidesteps the problem of placing anything with questionable star-potential on its shelves.
A little digging suggests that a book selling at its list price will give the retailer approximately 45% profit.
Based on a list price of $27.95
$3.55 - Pre-production - This amount covers editors, graphic designers, and the like
$2.83 - Printing - Ink, glue, paper, etc
$2.00 - Marketing - Book tour, NYT Book Review ad, printing and shipping galleys to journalists
$2.80 - Wholesaler - The take of the middlemen who handle distribution for publishers
$4.19 - Author Royalties - A bestseller like Grisham will net about 15% in royalties, lesser known authors get less. Also the author will be paying a slice of this pie piece to his agent, publicist, etc.
This leaves $12.58, Money magazine calls this the profit margin for the retailer, however when was the last time you saw a bestselling novel sold at its cover price.
Assuming the previous is correct, your local Barnes and Noble has to stretch that money to cover all those incidental costs of running a physical, specialist store – rent, local taxes, utilities, sales taxes, staffing costs, benefits, insurance, stocking cost, inventory and so on. Their prices are a real kick in the pocketbook but I don’t think they’re exactly swimming in profits either. Indeed, a quick look at their wikinvest page reveals that
company-wide operating margin fell from 2.8% to 1.3% in FY2010
. My econ’ tends to be on the weak side, and correct me if I’m wrong, but that means they’re making a profit of approximately 1c on every dollar sold (couldn't find the figure for Amazon but it looks like Apple has an operating margin of 29.1% and Microsoft has 39%).
Think of your average Hollywood blockbuster, cd release, or Apple product. They ship out the production to the cheapest manufacturers so as to maximize their profit at home. Your $200 Rolex doesn't cost $200 to make, far from it. While it's components cost X and assembly, shipping, advertising, insurance, tax et al cost Y you can be sure that X+Y200 by a fair amount. The difference there goes back to the company of origin and therefore the economy of the company's country of origin. Whenever an Ipod gets sold anywhere in the world Apple takes a large slice. That slice in turn ends up in the American economy - be it as wages, deposits in a bank, investments in the stock market, as liquid funds, office rental, taxes, health, whatever.
That's one of the reasons countries trying to modernise their economies tend to put a focus on IP creation - it leads to a large influx of cash for a long, long time. Same goes for moving away from a primarily extraction-based economy.
BBC ran a story on that a couple of days ago actually - the summary above links to a different article which doesn't lay out the facts quite as cleanly.
Its analysis of broadband speeds in the UK shows that, for some services, 97% of consumers do not get the advertised speed."The gap between the average headline speed and actual speed has increased in this period even though the actual speed has risen," he said.
In 2009, he said, when actual speeds for broadband were 4.1mbps, the average that those services were being advertised for stood at 7.1Mbps. In 2010, when people are generally getting 5.2Mbps out of their broadband, ISPs are claiming they will support speeds up to 11.5Mbps
For example, the survey found that on DSL services advertised as being "up to" 20Mbps, only 2% of customers got speeds in the range of 14-20Mbps. Of the others, 32% were getting a 8-14Mbps service and 65%, 8Mbps or less.
.
Check out the BBC write-up - there's a great graph there which really drives the point home.
Why not just get a multi-region DVD player? They're reasonably priced and pretty easily obtained. On the other hand there are good reasons to want to not have to bother - hassle, cost, space and so on - but you raise an interesting question. Would a multi-region player fall foul to the same standard? They're manufactured by mainstream producers and are hardly under the radar but I've never heard of any legal action taken against them.
As to the DVDs themselves, on the whole isn't it understandable that media producers don't want customers being able to ship in DVDs from India or China for a tenth of the cost? Isn't regional encoding fundamentally about stopping Western markets from being flooded with unsustainably cheap DVDs?
It’s impressive what a little selective quoting can do. The ruling in full reads
One such suggested lawful use is for home-made games. However, such use will still circumvent the ETM, or otherwise the game will not play. The mere fact that the device can be used for a non-infringing purpose is not a defence, provided one of the conditions in section 296ZD(1)(b) (considered below) is satisfied.
The judge goes into a nuanced consideration of the law as it stands, the snippet that’s being quoted is a taken out of context and ignores that huge modifier at the end there. The section in question states:
"(1) This section applies where –
(a) a technical device has been applied to a computer program; and
(b) a person (A) knowing or having reason to believe that it will be used to make infringing copies -
(i) manufactures for sale or hire, imports, distributes, sells or lets for hire, offers or exposes for sale or hire, advertises for sale or hire or has in his possession for commercial purposes any means the sole intended purpose of which is to facilitate the unauthorised removal or circumvention of the technical device; or
(ii) publishes information intended to enable or assist persons to remove or circumvent the technical device.
(2) The following persons have the same rights against A as a copyright owner has in respect of an infringement of copyright –
(a) a person –
(i) issuing to the public copies of, or
(ii) communicating to the public,
the computer program to which the technical device has been applied;
(b) the copyright owner or his exclusive licensee, if he is not the person specified in paragraph (a);
(c) the owner or exclusive licensee of any intellectual property right in the technical device applied to the computer program
(6) In this section references to a technical device in relation to a computer program are to any device intended to prevent or restrict acts that are not authorised by the copyright owner of that computer program and are restricted by copyright.
(8) Expressions used in this section which are defined for the purposes of Part 1 of this Act (copyright) have the same meaning as in that Part."
The judge then goes on to establish the multi-stepped test required for a finding
a claimant under s.296 needs to show the following things:
(a) that there is a "technical device" which has been applied to a computer program;
(b) that the defendant:
(i) has manufactured, imported, distributed, sold etc, means the sole intended purpose of which is to facilitate the unauthorised removal or circumvention of the technical device;
(ii) knows or has reason to believe that that means will be used to make infringing copies of the computer program.
(c) that the claimant has standing to bring their claims because:
(i) it is a person issuing to the public copies of, or communicating to the public, the computer program to which the technical device has been applied, or, if not such person, it is the owner of the copyright in the computer program, or his exclusive licensee; and/or
(ii) it owns or holds an exclusive license to any intellectual property right in the technical device applied to the computer program
Hardly the kind of extremist reasoning thats being suggested.
Isn't an organization just a collection of individuals? Don't their individual dignities, their individual rights to privacy, combine when they chose to unite as a collective? If a bunch of college women come together and decide, as a collective, to read poetry together whilst symbolically burning heather or some such thing - don't they have the right to do that without having to explain it to the world? We're not talking about a multinational organization here, they lack political and financial power, and it seems odd that we can demand to know the finer details of anything people choose to do behind closed doors.
Hypothetically speaking - if I were a member of a swingers club should I expect my clubs rules and regulations to be broadcast to the world? Should I go to work knowing that my boss can infer my activities based on my membership of said group and assume that the sections referring to mass-orgies, frottage, scatophilia, and cross-dressing are all related to me and mine? At what point do we draw the line and establish that something can be kept private?
My honour societies all had secret initation ceremonies - ceremonies that derived personal significance from their secrecy. There are many good reasons to promote secrecy which have nothing to do with conspiracies or nefarious activities - group bonding for one - and it seems that this logic of mandatory revelation strips some of the mystery from the world, makes it a little colder, a little less magical. I don't know what I'm getting at but I know I feel uncomfortable with the idea that everything should be on the table.
That sorority is 111 years old, its of fair size, few notable graduates, not involved in anything of significance. What interest is there in exposing their rituals? By the standard I think you're advocating, pretty much everything should be put up for review if it could be of interest to anyone at all. Why do you think they should have their private activities broadcast to the world? Do we live in a society in which nothing can be secret? Should the Vatican publish the minutes of their discussion in electing a Pope? Should the admissions board at Harvard release the logic behind their rejections? How about the hockey team - should their initiation ceremony get plastered on the web? I'm just struggling to see the end point.
Your second paragraph isn't correct though. I linked to an article which discusses examples of wikileaks just putting everything out there - the rituals of a bunch of college sorority girls hardly counts as politically or historically interesting. Indeed those catagories are so nebulous that they hardly limit anything at all - anything at any time could be rightly classified as each depending on the person doing the sorting.
I'm finding myself more and more conflicted in my thoughts regarding wiki-leaks. On the one hand a democracy can only thrive when an informed populace can make choices grounded in reliable facts. The increase in secrecy and the rush to classify and obscure data therefore undermines the functioning of democracy. This isn’t good, we can all agree on that but I’m just not sure if wikileaks is going about things in the right way. Worse, I don’t know what better way there is.
Over at Gawker there’s a quick reminder of the media-savvy that underpins the way wiki-leaks works – as they point out,
Assange has a long history of making vague conspiratorial claims of harassment that don't stand up to scrutiny
Similarly a New Yorker piece commented on the leaked video and noted that
These pieces of missing information are not just inherent limitations in video. The producers themselves have chosen not to provide them. There appears to be a purpose to the omissions, which is underlined by the Orwell quote at the start, the prefatory explanation, the quotes and dedication at the end, even the way the helicopter crew’s cruel remarks are edited in a few places for effect. Although the producers identify the camera of the Reuters journalist who, along with his assistant, will be killed by Apache cannon fire, they don’t point to the AK-47 or the RPG launcher carried by other men with whom the journalists are walking in a group. Stripped of much context and weighted with commentary, this video is both an important document of the war, courageously leaked after the military had steadily refused to release it, and, in its way, a propaganda film
Last year, for example, WikiLeaks published the “secret ritual” of a college women’s sorority called Alpha Sigma Tau. Now Alpha Sigma Tau (like several other sororities “exposed” by WikiLeaks) is not known to have engaged in any form of misconduct, and WikiLeaks does not allege that it has. Rather, WikiLeaks chose to publish the group’s confidential ritual just because it could. This is not whistleblowing and it is not journalism. It is a kind of information vandalism.
In fact, WikiLeaks routinely tramples on the privacy of non-governmental, non-corporate groups for no valid public policy reason. It has published private rites of Masons, Mormons and other groups that cultivate confidential relations among their members. Most or all of these groups are defenseless against WikiLeaks’ intrusions. The only weapon they have is public contempt for WikiLeaks’ ruthless violation of their freedom of association, and even that has mostly been swept away in a wave of uncritical and even adulatory reporting about the brave “open government,” “whistleblower” site.
On occasion, WikiLeaks has engaged in overtly unethical behavior. Last year, without permission, it published the full text of the highly regarded 2009 book about corruption in Kenya called “It’s Our Turn to Eat” by investigative reporter Michela Wrong (as first reported by Chris McGreal in The Guardian on April 9). By posting a pirated version of the book and making it freely available, WikiLeaks almost certainly disrupted sales of the book and made it harder for Ms. Wrong and other anti-corruption reporters to perform their important work and to get it published. Repeated protests and pleas from the author were required before WikiLeaks (to its credit) finally took the book offline.
“Soon enough,” observed Raffi Khatchadourian in a long profile of WikiLeaks
Thanks, I can't claim I understood all of that but it raises certainly raises some concerns. It would be helpful if the studies were available for examination but, as ever, that's a pipe-dream. Keep us informed about your study - it sounds like it could provide a rigerous counter-point.
Check out the actual numbers - it's rather interesting. Eurogamer's 2009 ratings end with an average score of 6.8 over 405 reviews - the mode is 8 (113 reviews) followed closely by 7 (105). There were 88 games rated as under 5 and 43 as over 9. The site is quite fun to play around with, especially when comparing writers.
Slashdot Mirror
The numbers seem muddied by the data availible for consideration. NPR ran a story in 2005 which noted that
In the Firearms Trafficking Report the American Government Accountability Office stated that
Fox challenged the selection bias of the numbers, finding that "83 percent of the guns found at crime scenes in Mexico could not be traced to the U.S." I should probably have done a little more digging for a better source than Fox but if you're interested some google mining should uncover something more reliable.
Isn't that how our great culture works? Everything gets reduced to a (bad)wanking joke given the fullness of time?
Ahhh directories - every lad of a certain age's favorite offering, made one hand surfing all the easier...just don't forget to clear the history.
You know sodomy doesn't include beating off right?
Thats the underlying idea of Silverglate's "Three Felonies a Day". I haven't read the book yet myself but the general points he makes in his discussion seems well founded. There's a youtube vid if you feel like a general overview - the Wall Street Journal has a brief summary as well.
None of the really hip companies, they all shave.
. They also threw a little light on those bisexual responses
. That only applies to the previous 12 months though so its a little hard to tease out a full answer.
Give the reports a look, they really are quite interesting.
If you're interested in the rest:
Women 25-29
The 30-34 numbers are pretty similar but with a greater concentration in the 3 to 6 catagory (38.8) and the median shifted to 3.8.
Uh may as well make that a multiple posting buddy...the number as stated was 95.2% (more if you assume some of the opposite sex contact doesn't overlap). So at least we knew they were right about it making you go blind....
I assumed it meant that there were a few heavily sexually active women who were pushing the numbers up for the guys. Or, as is always a danger, perhaps a little social pressure encouraged men to overstate and women to understate. Or the men were going going overseas for sex? Whatever it comes down to it makes for some fascinating social insight.
For Males 25 to 29
For Males 30 to 34
There are differences based on race - Latinos have a median of 4.5 and African Americans of 8.3 - and sex: a quick glance at the numbers shows that a much greater percentage of women have had 1 partner (25-29 being 22.5% and 20-24 at 20.5%) than their male peers.
Interesting portion of the article
and
A little digging suggests that a book selling at its list price will give the retailer approximately 45% profit.
Assuming the previous is correct, your local Barnes and Noble has to stretch that money to cover all those incidental costs of running a physical, specialist store – rent, local taxes, utilities, sales taxes, staffing costs, benefits, insurance, stocking cost, inventory and so on. Their prices are a real kick in the pocketbook but I don’t think they’re exactly swimming in profits either. Indeed, a quick look at their wikinvest page reveals that
. My econ’ tends to be on the weak side, and correct me if I’m wrong, but that means they’re making a profit of approximately 1c on every dollar sold (couldn't find the figure for Amazon but it looks like Apple has an operating margin of 29.1% and Microsoft has 39%).
Think of your average Hollywood blockbuster, cd release, or Apple product. They ship out the production to the cheapest manufacturers so as to maximize their profit at home. Your $200 Rolex doesn't cost $200 to make, far from it. While it's components cost X and assembly, shipping, advertising, insurance, tax et al cost Y you can be sure that X+Y200 by a fair amount. The difference there goes back to the company of origin and therefore the economy of the company's country of origin. Whenever an Ipod gets sold anywhere in the world Apple takes a large slice. That slice in turn ends up in the American economy - be it as wages, deposits in a bank, investments in the stock market, as liquid funds, office rental, taxes, health, whatever.
That's one of the reasons countries trying to modernise their economies tend to put a focus on IP creation - it leads to a large influx of cash for a long, long time. Same goes for moving away from a primarily extraction-based economy.
. Check out the BBC write-up - there's a great graph there which really drives the point home.
Why not just get a multi-region DVD player? They're reasonably priced and pretty easily obtained. On the other hand there are good reasons to want to not have to bother - hassle, cost, space and so on - but you raise an interesting question. Would a multi-region player fall foul to the same standard? They're manufactured by mainstream producers and are hardly under the radar but I've never heard of any legal action taken against them.
As to the DVDs themselves, on the whole isn't it understandable that media producers don't want customers being able to ship in DVDs from India or China for a tenth of the cost? Isn't regional encoding fundamentally about stopping Western markets from being flooded with unsustainably cheap DVDs?
The judge goes into a nuanced consideration of the law as it stands, the snippet that’s being quoted is a taken out of context and ignores that huge modifier at the end there. The section in question states:
The judge then goes on to establish the multi-stepped test required for a finding
Hardly the kind of extremist reasoning thats being suggested.
Nope - whistleblower laws protect employees from their employers' retaliatory actions. As there was no employment relationship the whistleblower laws are inapplicable.
Isn't an organization just a collection of individuals? Don't their individual dignities, their individual rights to privacy, combine when they chose to unite as a collective? If a bunch of college women come together and decide, as a collective, to read poetry together whilst symbolically burning heather or some such thing - don't they have the right to do that without having to explain it to the world? We're not talking about a multinational organization here, they lack political and financial power, and it seems odd that we can demand to know the finer details of anything people choose to do behind closed doors.
Hypothetically speaking - if I were a member of a swingers club should I expect my clubs rules and regulations to be broadcast to the world? Should I go to work knowing that my boss can infer my activities based on my membership of said group and assume that the sections referring to mass-orgies, frottage, scatophilia, and cross-dressing are all related to me and mine? At what point do we draw the line and establish that something can be kept private?
My honour societies all had secret initation ceremonies - ceremonies that derived personal significance from their secrecy. There are many good reasons to promote secrecy which have nothing to do with conspiracies or nefarious activities - group bonding for one - and it seems that this logic of mandatory revelation strips some of the mystery from the world, makes it a little colder, a little less magical. I don't know what I'm getting at but I know I feel uncomfortable with the idea that everything should be on the table.
That sorority is 111 years old, its of fair size, few notable graduates, not involved in anything of significance. What interest is there in exposing their rituals? By the standard I think you're advocating, pretty much everything should be put up for review if it could be of interest to anyone at all. Why do you think they should have their private activities broadcast to the world? Do we live in a society in which nothing can be secret? Should the Vatican publish the minutes of their discussion in electing a Pope? Should the admissions board at Harvard release the logic behind their rejections? How about the hockey team - should their initiation ceremony get plastered on the web? I'm just struggling to see the end point.
For those wanting to read the complete study you can get it here
Your second paragraph isn't correct though. I linked to an article which discusses examples of wikileaks just putting everything out there - the rituals of a bunch of college sorority girls hardly counts as politically or historically interesting. Indeed those catagories are so nebulous that they hardly limit anything at all - anything at any time could be rightly classified as each depending on the person doing the sorting.
Similarly a New Yorker piece commented on the leaked video and noted that
Another article
Thanks, I can't claim I understood all of that but it raises certainly raises some concerns. It would be helpful if the studies were available for examination but, as ever, that's a pipe-dream. Keep us informed about your study - it sounds like it could provide a rigerous counter-point.
Check out the actual numbers - it's rather interesting. Eurogamer's 2009 ratings end with an average score of 6.8 over 405 reviews - the mode is 8 (113 reviews) followed closely by 7 (105). There were 88 games rated as under 5 and 43 as over 9. The site is quite fun to play around with, especially when comparing writers.