Yes, look up the words "amortization" and "depletion" in the dictionary. Then look up "subsidy". In their report, they are calling depletion (recognizing that you've used up your supply) a "subsidy".
It's just like the sites listing all of the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide (water). If you know what the words mean, their report is laughable, it reads like a parody of MDSolar.
That article, or summary really, is based on a report from an advocacy group which is frankly lying to you.
The largest component that they are calling a "subsidy" is when a government owns a profitable energy company, so the government is getting paid. Their primary example is one making very healthly 14% return on investment . When the government is making a lot of money from a socialized company, that's kinda the opposite of subsidy.
In the US, their top two "subsidies" are that oil companies use the exact same correct accounting as every other company, recording revenue and costs of that revenue in the same period. (Called Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) . Your advocacy group, Oil Change International, breaks that down into two components. First, amortization of capital investment. Suppose your business has $2 million on Monday, and no other assets, so it's worth $2 million. On Tuesday, you buy a $1 million oil rig, which is producing as expected. So now you have $1 million cash plus a $1 million oil rig. How has the total value of the business changed? It hasn't. You still have $2 million worth of stuff. Buying an asset that will last a long time isn't the same as throwing money away, so you don't deduct the $1 million cost all in one year. Fast forward 10 years. The oil rig equipment is getting old and worn out. You could sell it for $200,000. You still have the same $1 million cash, plus you have an oil rig that's now worth $200,000. You didn't make any money selling oil, so all the company has is $1 million cash and $200,000 worth of equipment. How much is the business worth now? It's worth $1.2 million, $800,000 less than before. That's amortization- recognizing that equipment gets less valuable as it gets old and worn out, so you spread the cost over the useful life of the asset.
You WANT companies to correctly amortize the assets on their books. If they don't, they are LYING to investors, primarily people who are saving for retirement. When they don't amortize costs correctly you get Enron.
Depletion is the same thing, but for assets that "run out" rather than "wear out". Suppose you start with $100 million. Your company has $100 million cash and nothing else, so it's worth $100 million. You spend that $100 million dollars to set up operations on an oil field which has ten years worth of oil underground. Now how much is the company worth? Still $100 million, because it owns the $100 oil field operation. Go forward five years. You've used up half the oil. How much is the oil field worth now? Half the oil is gone, so it's worth half as much. That's depletion. That's correct, standard accounting in any industry; most industries call it "inventory". There's no subsidy there, simply correctly writing down what things are actually worth, then paying taxes based on those correct numbers.
Projectiles are not hollowed out to be lighter in order to be the same as some other projectile. That would of course be stupid. So you've pointed out that if you did something stupid and pointless, it wouldn't work well.
Which is more dangerous, a car with a drunk driver, or a rat?
Obviously the drunk driver is more likely to kill someone. Oh but IF the car weighed only as much as a rat it wouldn't be dangerous, therefore drunk driving is not dangerous, right?
The SQL front end used by Facebook that uses Hadoop is Presto.
I brought up MySQL as a comparison to explain it since you'd be more likely to have some familiarity with MySQL storage engines.
> he company uses Hadoop for large scale data processing. > And use MySQL on that same data for querying. Which I doubt.
I'm not sure where they're currently using MYsql - they used to use it for everything. They use Presto SQL for ad-hoc and lower-concurrency queries over petabytes of data. As an example, suppose they want to know what percentage of users have read, but not posted, in the last 7 days, or the median number of photos posted by people with more than 50 friends. Those types of queries are a good match to be expressed relationally, in SQL. On the other hand, "get the user's profile picture " is a very simple operation run tens of millions of times per day. That's a good candidate to optimize by taking the one-time expense of coding direct access, skipping any flexible query engine.
> That MySQL can use Hadoop, raises the question: for what? As a block storage like a file in a file system? Or is there some mapping between 'datatypes' stored in Hadoop to MySQL types?
MySQL (and Presto) use it somewhere in between a dumb block device and a the strongly-typed datum that the SQL side uses (which may have triggers, domains, etc attached). Typically, the backend provides primarily a key-value store (storing rows), and often indexing. So the storage engine stores rows, rather than bytes (simple) or complex types like datetime and ip_address . That's the typical primary job of the storage engine - MySQL can use very dumb storage engines and very smart storage engines.
The summary claims that pork pork is the primary goal for NASA. Perhaps, but NASA Administrator Charles Bolden says the foremost priority is something else:
"When I became the NASA administrator, he (President Obama) charged me with three things. One, he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math; he wanted me to expand our international relationships; and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good"
> an SQL query processor that uses Hadoop as storage That does not really make sense.
Would it make more sense to say "an SQL query processor which uses ext3 as storage"? The SQL side needs to get and put bytes. Some ways to get and put bytes include: ext3 NFS SMB S3 Hadoop DB2 Some other relational database.
MySQL/Maria is a SQL client, a library, a SQL parser, a query optimizer, an a network server. MySQL is NOT a data-storage format. Rather, MySQL stores data in any of many available storage engines. One storage engine you are probably familiar with is DB2, one of the best known key-value stores (which also has it's own relational front-end). MySQL can also use CSV to store it's data, deferate to another relational database, or any number of other storage engines, documented here:
It may seem strange that MySQL would use key-value storage or anything other than some custom-made binary format, but if you think about it even if MySQL had it's own required file format, that format lives on ext3, or ext4, or ReiserFS, or... MySQL doesn't know how it's actually stored. After the filesystem does whatever it does with the data, it's eventually stored in arbitrary flash cells, or phonograph^H^H^H^H^H^H disk tracks, or somewhere else, and MySQL doesn't know which chunk of data ends up where. MySQL chooses to abstract away storage one level higher than the filesystem - it has no required file format. It calls get() and put(), whatever is doing the storage handles things from there.
Presto (https://prestodb.io/) is similar. Presto handles SQL queries. Presto can get it's data bytes from Hadoop to be stored, and can send bytes to Hadoop, just as you might imagine it sending bytes to a disk file.
By using Hadoop as the underlying storage, Facebook can use multiple front ends. Just as a plain text file can be read and changed by Notepad.exe, vim, or MS Word, a Hadoop data store can be accessed from a SQL front end like Presto, as a file system, via MapReduce, or other methods. They can use the right tool for each specific job, with the same underlying data being accessed.
Facebook doesn't use Cassandra much anymore. They their Cassandra DB helped jumpstart the NoSQL craze, Facebook soon realized they were wrong - Codd and Date had it right the first time, with the relational model. Now mostly Facebook uses Apache Presto, an SQL query processor that uses Hadoop as storage (much like MariaDB uses various storage engines). Another thing they use Hadoop for is to store backups of their MySQL/MariaDB databases.
So yeah you said four sentences and two are factually incorrect, making the third and fourth sound rather silly. Facebook uses relational databases AND they are open source.
I haven't purchased from Oracle and I don't plan to. Besides this case, I just don't think the cost/benefit ratio is there.
Some will say that you have to pay big bucks if you have a lot of data or a lot of transactions, but Facebook used MySQL (aka MariaDB) to scale pretty large, and they now use Hadoop and Presto to process more than a terabyte each day.
If open source databases handle Facebook and Google , I think they'll be enough for my needs.
That said, Oracle has $170 billion, based on market valuation. It seems they are quite a way from bankruptcy.
You're fortunate to have Century Link. In many (all?) of the areas they cover, they aren't a legally- enforced monopoly. Instead they are competing with the old monopoly providers, much like Google fiber does. They provide better service at better prices than the providers who are guaranteed a monopoly under the law. (Or virtually guaranteed. In some places, it's legal to provide service, but it's not legal to run the cables required to offer internet service.)
We rent a movie once or twice per month. We could stream it instead of renting on DVD.
> How low is your monthly data cap?
I didn't say we could ONLY stream once or twice per month. I don't actually recall what the soft cap is, but I've hit it before, so our typical usage isn't too far from the (soft) cap.
> Do you browse the Web without images or what?
An image might be 10 KB or so (depending on the image). A Netflix movie is about 3,800,000 KB. So one movie is the equivalent of 380,000 images. Streaming HD video is orders of magnitude more bandwidth/data intensive than other uses of the internet.
My family rents a Redbox video maybe twice per month, meaning we spend about $3-$4. Netflix is $9 for the service itself, so just on that Netflix costs more.
In addition, although faster internet with higher caps is certainly available, we have no reason to pay for it since we don't stream movies. Upgrading the internet would be another $20 per month or whatever. So really Netflix would cost us $29/month, if we used to more than a couple times per month.
With our current internet we can stream once or twice per month, so we'll stream Redbox if it's the same $1-$2 price range.
The above post is my (small) understanding of the issue. I'm sure node.js fans will point out a detail that I missed. I'm no expert on Node.js because as someone else pointed out, you use Javascript in the browser, despite it's many flaws, because you have no choice. On the server side, there are several much better options, so it would seem that only people too lazy to learn a server-side language would use Javascript on the server (or maybe some other special case).
I don't think this is really applicable to any other language. With any other language, since roughly the 1950s, standard practice has been to test code, often in two or three steps, THEN deploy it to production after your developers and your QA team have signed off on it.
With Javascript and node.js, you declare the name of some external package you'll use and it constantly fetches the newest version, with the newest bugs, directly onto production. You never see, never mind test, the code before it runs on your production systems. With any other language, you'd upgrade production to a known, vetted version only occasionally. If there was an issue the community hadn't already caught, hopefully you would catch problems in testing.
We saw a similar problem last week - somebody removed their package from the repository and that broke everyone's production systems.
I worded it poorly when I said you "decided to start with the lowest number as the first number, in order to create an upward trend". That sounds like it was intentional, which isn't necessarily the case.
By picking a local minimum as the starting point, that will always create the appearance of an upward trend. Whether or not you realized that when you chose a local minimum as your starting point I don't know. But that is of course the definition of a local minimum - that if you start at that point, you'll definitely go up from there. In other words, starting at a local minimum will ALWAYS make it appear as if the trend is upward.
Regarding your point #2, as you mentioned they reported both ways for a couple of years specifically in order to see how much effect the new reporting would have. The new numbers are about 30% higher than the old. Remember that number - the new rules account for a 30% increase, based on the numbers you posted. (Home Office says a 14% increase, but it turns out that it doesn't matter). In the five years prior, 1.2 million violent crimes were reported. After the ban took effect, there were over 5 million violent crimes in the following five years. That's WAY more than the 30% increase attributable to the change in reporting.
> You mentioned the 5 years before and after the ban
I've found that for me to get at the truth of things, rather than simply finding ways to support my preconceived guess, it's best for me to FIRST define the measurements that seem reasonable, THEN look at the numbers. If I look at the numbers and start selecting some after I know what they are, I'll select ones that I "like", for conscious or subconscious reasons.
> but I'm going to widen that range a bit, from 1981 (chosen because it represents a local minimum) up to 2014/15.... I realize that I only chose one column, but I didn't cherry pick
You did, however, cherry pick the years - you looked at the data first, then decided to start with the lowest number as the first number, in order to create an upward trend.
> In the entire decade from 2003 to 2013, there was no significant increase in TSO.
So crime didn't keep on increasing more and more forever. That tells us that it's not that crime keeps going up every year, no matter what. Rather, it increased around the time the gun laws were passed, then remained at that (higher) level.
> the fact that even in the US, only 0.64% of violent crime victims defended defended themselves with firearms
Not exactly. What that says is that 0.64% of the time, even after the criminal saw that the "victim" was armed, the crime continued and it was reported to police. When I'm out and about, late and night or in a rough section of the city, nobody messes with me because they can see a) my sidearm b) body language, and sometimes c) my badge. How many of the instances ion which someone chose not to accost me are in those crime reports? Zero, of course. If someone sketchy looking is approaching me in a manner that suggests they could eb a threat and I push my jacklet aside and place my hand on my weapon, they go away, and there's no crime reported. Over 90% of the time that a gun is involved in self-defense, it completely prevents any crime from occurring, and nothing is reported. We don't know the exact percentage, but it's clearly more than 90%.
> if it takes firearms to act as a primary deterrent to assault
The results in Texas do seem to indicate that public awareness (through advertising, in the Texas instance) that women may be armed does in fact have the desired effect on the thugs behavior. The law by itself was less effective before the promotional campaign. Perhaps thugs don't carefully read statistics about how many law-abiding citizens carry, or perhaps they VERY much don't want to have new holes put in their bodies.
> there is something very, very wrong with society
There may indeed be something very wrong with certain members of society.
You make a good point. However, the Supreme Court doesn't make the law. When SCOTUS makes a decision, not based on a new law passed by legislature, they are decreeing what the correct interpretation of the (old) law is. In other words, they ARE saying that any decisions to the contrary were wrong. There just wasn't a clear way to KNOW they were wrong until SCOTUS said so.
In another post in this same thread, someone disagreeing with me linked to some Australia data. In my reply I pointed out that the numbers on the site he linked to show sexual assault increased about 20% after the Australia law was passed. Again that's based on number linked from an anti-gun person trying to prove me wrong.
Another of the more clear examples was the UK gun ban. Official crime rate data (linked below) indicates that in the five years prior to the ban, 1.2 million violent crimes were reported. After the ban took effect, there were over 5 million violent crimes in the following five years. Home Office data shows that rape went from 27,000 to nearly 47,000 when potential attackers were assured there was no risk that a law-abiding woman might defend herself with a firearm. Other serious crimes show the same pattern. Total sex offenses increased from 158,000 to over 245,00.
For more examples, analysis, and a pair of laws (with accompanying advertising campaigns) which did work, see this analysis: https://docs.google.com/docume...
One of the more clear examples was the UK gun ban. Official crime rate data (linked below) indicates that in the five years prior to the ban, 1.2 million violent crimes were reported. After the ban took effect, there were over 5 million violent crimes in the following five years. Home Office data shows that rape went from 27,000 to nearly 47,000 when potential attackers were assured there was no risk that a law-abiding woman might defend herself with a firearm. Other serious crimes show the same pattern. Total sex offenses increased from 158,000 to over 245,00.
For more examples and analysis ( and accompanying advertising campaigns) which did work, see this analysis: https://docs.google.com/docume...
Let's look at numbers before and after the change. In the chart you linked to, all the crimes are on the same chart, so the scale in such that you can't see most of the crime categories at all. Here are the numbers in tabular form, linked from the page you linked to:
We see that in the three years before (1993-1995), there were 38,007 sexual assaults. In the three years after, 43,741. So 5,734 more women sexually assaulted. Do you think that's a good thing, or a bad thing? Personally, I prefer that women NOT be raped, so I support policies that decrease, not increase, rapes.
I too kind am kinda moderate about guns. On the one hand, I've done my research. Various gun laws have been enacted in various places, and we have the statistics to see what the results are. We don't have to predict what the results might be, we have the numbers. The facts show, unequivocally, that gun bans and strict gun laws are correlated with an increase in violent crimes, and a large increase in sexual assault and rape. That's just a fact- when politicians remove womens' ability protect themselves, many more women get raped. (I can provide a link to full statistics from official government sources , and further explanation, upon request) .
On the other hand, at one time in my life I decided that it would be best for me to not have handguns in my house. Mostly because I had two curious young children in the house, and we lived in a safe neighborhood.
The Constitution guarantees me ten essential rights and the right to make that choice about guns is one of them.
As far as laws go, I did find one thing that was proven effective ; actually a combination of two things. First, Texas added a minimum mandatory sentence for using a weapon in the commission of a felony, then they ADVERTISED it widely, with ads on city busses, billboards, etc. Word got around that robbery would get you five years, having a gun on you when you got caught would get you an additional ten years in the slammer. That worked.
After that was successful, Texas ran a similar advertising campaign about their concealed carry law. Law-abiding citizens might now shoot back, the ads warned. Thinking of robbing a store? You don't know which of the customers behind you is packing a.45. That also worked, though probably not as well as advertising the mandatory sentence for using a weapon in the commission of a felony.
If you think about it, it makes sense. Billions of dollars have been spent figuring out how to create ads which effectively influence people's behavior. If you want to influence the behavior of thugs in your city, it makes sense to leverage that knowledge.
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Yes, look up the words "amortization" and "depletion" in the dictionary. Then look up "subsidy". In their report, they are calling depletion (recognizing that you've used up your supply) a "subsidy".
It's just like the sites listing all of the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide (water). If you know what the words mean, their report is laughable, it reads like a parody of MDSolar.
That article, or summary really, is based on a report from an advocacy group which is frankly lying to you.
The largest component that they are calling a "subsidy" is when a government owns a profitable energy company, so the government is getting paid. Their primary example is one making very healthly 14% return on investment . When the government is making a lot of money from a socialized company, that's kinda the opposite of subsidy.
In the US, their top two "subsidies" are that oil companies use the exact same correct accounting as every other company, recording revenue and costs of that revenue in the same period. (Called Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) . Your advocacy group, Oil Change International, breaks that down into two components. First, amortization of capital investment. Suppose your business has $2 million on Monday, and no other assets, so it's worth $2 million. On Tuesday, you buy a $1 million oil rig, which is producing as expected. So now you have $1 million cash plus a $1 million oil rig. How has the total value of the business changed? It hasn't. You still have $2 million worth of stuff. Buying an asset that will last a long time isn't the same as throwing money away, so you don't deduct the $1 million cost all in one year. Fast forward 10 years. The oil rig equipment is getting old and worn out. You could sell it for $200,000. You still have the same $1 million cash, plus you have an oil rig that's now worth $200,000. You didn't make any money selling oil, so all the company has is $1 million cash and $200,000 worth of equipment. How much is the business worth now? It's worth $1.2 million, $800,000 less than before. That's amortization- recognizing that equipment gets less valuable as it gets old and worn out, so you spread the cost over the useful life of the asset.
You WANT companies to correctly amortize the assets on their books. If they don't, they are LYING to investors, primarily people who are saving for retirement. When they don't amortize costs correctly you get Enron.
Depletion is the same thing, but for assets that "run out" rather than "wear out". Suppose you start with $100 million. Your company has $100 million cash and nothing else, so it's worth $100 million. You spend that $100 million dollars to set up operations on an oil field which has ten years worth of oil underground. Now how much is the company worth? Still $100 million, because it owns the $100 oil field operation. Go forward five years. You've used up half the oil. How much is the oil field worth now? Half the oil is gone, so it's worth half as much. That's depletion. That's correct, standard accounting in any industry; most industries call it "inventory". There's no subsidy there, simply correctly writing down what things are actually worth, then paying taxes based on those correct numbers.
Projectiles are not hollowed out to be lighter in order to be the same as some other projectile. That would of course be stupid. So you've pointed out that if you did something stupid and pointless, it wouldn't work well.
Which is more dangerous, a car with a drunk driver, or a rat?
Obviously the drunk driver is more likely to kill someone. Oh but IF the car weighed only as much as a rat it wouldn't be dangerous, therefore drunk driving is not dangerous, right?
The SQL front end used by Facebook that uses Hadoop is Presto.
I brought up MySQL as a comparison to explain it since you'd be more likely to have some familiarity with MySQL storage engines.
> he company uses Hadoop for large scale data processing.
> And use MySQL on that same data for querying. Which I doubt.
I'm not sure where they're currently using MYsql - they used to use it for everything. They use Presto SQL for ad-hoc and lower-concurrency queries over petabytes of data. As an example, suppose they want to know what percentage of users have read, but not posted, in the last 7 days, or the median number of photos posted by people with more than 50 friends. Those types of queries are a good match to be expressed relationally, in SQL. On the other hand, "get the user's profile picture " is a very simple operation run tens of millions of times per day. That's a good candidate to optimize by taking the one-time expense of coding direct access, skipping any flexible query engine.
> That MySQL can use Hadoop, raises the question: for what?
As a block storage like a file in a file system? Or is there some mapping between 'datatypes' stored in Hadoop to MySQL types?
MySQL (and Presto) use it somewhere in between a dumb block device and a the strongly-typed datum that the SQL side uses (which may have triggers, domains, etc attached). Typically, the backend provides primarily a key-value store (storing rows), and often indexing. So the storage engine stores rows, rather than bytes (simple) or complex types like datetime and ip_address . That's the typical primary job of the storage engine - MySQL can use very dumb storage engines and very smart storage engines.
The summary claims that pork pork is the primary goal for NASA. Perhaps, but NASA Administrator Charles Bolden says the foremost priority is something else:
"When I became the NASA administrator, he (President Obama) charged me with three things.
One, he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math;
he wanted me to expand our international relationships; and
third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good"
> an SQL query processor that uses Hadoop as storage That does not really make sense.
Would it make more sense to say "an SQL query processor which uses ext3 as storage"? The SQL side needs to get and put bytes. Some ways to get and put bytes include:
ext3
NFS
SMB
S3
Hadoop
DB2
Some other relational database.
MySQL/Maria is a SQL client, a library, a SQL parser, a query optimizer, an a network server. MySQL is NOT a data-storage format. Rather, MySQL stores data in any of many available storage engines. One storage engine you are probably familiar with is DB2, one of the best known key-value stores (which also has it's own relational front-end). MySQL can also use CSV to store it's data, deferate to another relational database, or any number of other storage engines, documented here:
https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refm...
It may seem strange that MySQL would use key-value storage or anything other than some custom-made binary format, but if you think about it even if MySQL had it's own required file format, that format lives on ext3, or ext4, or ReiserFS, or ... MySQL doesn't know how it's actually stored. After the filesystem does whatever it does with the data, it's eventually stored in arbitrary flash cells, or phonograph^H^H^H^H^H^H disk tracks, or somewhere else, and MySQL doesn't know which chunk of data ends up where. MySQL chooses to abstract away storage one level higher than the filesystem - it has no required file format. It calls get() and put(), whatever is doing the storage handles things from there.
Presto (https://prestodb.io/) is similar. Presto handles SQL queries. Presto can get it's data bytes from Hadoop to be stored, and can send bytes to Hadoop, just as you might imagine it sending bytes to a disk file.
By using Hadoop as the underlying storage, Facebook can use multiple front ends. Just as a plain text file can be read and changed by Notepad.exe, vim, or MS Word, a Hadoop data store can be accessed from a SQL front end like Presto, as a file system, via MapReduce, or other methods. They can use the right tool for each specific job, with the same underlying data being accessed.
Facebook doesn't use Cassandra much anymore. They their Cassandra DB helped jumpstart the NoSQL craze, Facebook soon realized they were wrong - Codd and Date had it right the first time, with the relational model. Now mostly Facebook uses Apache Presto, an SQL query processor that uses Hadoop as storage (much like MariaDB uses various storage engines). Another thing they use Hadoop for is to store backups of their MySQL/MariaDB databases.
So yeah you said four sentences and two are factually incorrect, making the third and fourth sound rather silly. Facebook uses relational databases AND they are open source.
Apple uses Cassandra a bit, though.
Facebook doesn't use Cassandra much anymore:
http://www.wired.com/2014/08/d...
They have three database management systems, Hadoop, MySQL, and Cassandra. One thing they use Hadoop for is backups of their MySQL.
Facebook uses three database management systems, Hadoop, MySQL, and Cassandra. One thing they use Hadoop for is backups of their MySQL.
I haven't purchased from Oracle and I don't plan to. Besides this case, I just don't think the cost/benefit ratio is there.
Some will say that you have to pay big bucks if you have a lot of data or a lot of transactions, but Facebook used MySQL (aka MariaDB) to scale pretty large, and they now use Hadoop and Presto to process more than a terabyte each day.
If open source databases handle Facebook and Google , I think they'll be enough for my needs.
That said, Oracle has $170 billion, based on market valuation. It seems they are quite a way from bankruptcy.
You're fortunate to have Century Link. In many (all?) of the areas they cover, they aren't a legally- enforced monopoly. Instead they are competing with the old monopoly providers, much like Google fiber does. They provide better service at better prices than the providers who are guaranteed a monopoly under the law. (Or virtually guaranteed. In some places, it's legal to provide service, but it's not legal to run the cables required to offer internet service.)
> Stream once or twice per month?
We rent a movie once or twice per month. We could stream it instead of renting on DVD.
> How low is your monthly data cap?
I didn't say we could ONLY stream once or twice per month. I don't actually recall what the soft cap is, but I've hit it before, so our typical usage isn't too far from the (soft) cap.
> Do you browse the Web without images or what?
An image might be 10 KB or so (depending on the image). A Netflix movie is about 3,800,000 KB. So one movie is the equivalent of 380,000 images. Streaming HD video is orders of magnitude more bandwidth/data intensive than other uses of the internet.
My family rents a Redbox video maybe twice per month, meaning we spend about $3-$4. Netflix is $9 for the service itself, so just on that Netflix costs more.
In addition, although faster internet with higher caps is certainly available, we have no reason to pay for it since we don't stream movies. Upgrading the internet would be another $20 per month or whatever. So really Netflix would cost us $29/month, if we used to more than a couple times per month.
With our current internet we can stream once or twice per month, so we'll stream Redbox if it's the same $1-$2 price range.
That's great.
The above post is my (small) understanding of the issue. I'm sure node.js fans will point out a detail that I missed. I'm no expert on Node.js because as someone else pointed out, you use Javascript in the browser, despite it's many flaws, because you have no choice. On the server side, there are several much better options, so it would seem that only people too lazy to learn a server-side language would use Javascript on the server (or maybe some other special case).
I don't think this is really applicable to any other language. With any other language, since roughly the 1950s, standard practice has been to test code, often in two or three steps, THEN deploy it to production after your developers and your QA team have signed off on it.
With Javascript and node.js, you declare the name of some external package you'll use and it constantly fetches the newest version, with the newest bugs, directly onto production. You never see, never mind test, the code before it runs on your production systems. With any other language, you'd upgrade production to a known, vetted version only occasionally. If there was an issue the community hadn't already caught, hopefully you would catch problems in testing.
We saw a similar problem last week - somebody removed their package from the repository and that broke everyone's production systems.
This approach may sound insane. Because it is.
I worded it poorly when I said you "decided to start with the lowest number as the first number, in order to create an upward trend". That sounds like it was intentional, which isn't necessarily the case.
By picking a local minimum as the starting point, that will always create the appearance of an upward trend. Whether or not you realized that when you chose a local minimum as your starting point I don't know. But that is of course the definition of a local minimum - that if you start at that point, you'll definitely go up from there. In other words, starting at a local minimum will ALWAYS make it appear as if the trend is upward.
Regarding your point #2, as you mentioned they reported both ways for a couple of years specifically in order to see how much effect the new reporting would have. The new numbers are about 30% higher than the old. Remember that number - the new rules account for a 30% increase, based on the numbers you posted. (Home Office says a 14% increase, but it turns out that it doesn't matter). In the five years prior, 1.2 million violent crimes were reported. After the ban took effect, there were over 5 million violent crimes in the following five years. That's WAY more than the 30% increase attributable to the change in reporting.
> You mentioned the 5 years before and after the ban
I've found that for me to get at the truth of things, rather than simply finding ways to support my preconceived guess, it's best for me to FIRST define the measurements that seem reasonable, THEN look at the numbers. If I look at the numbers and start selecting some after I know what they are, I'll select ones that I "like", for conscious or subconscious reasons.
> but I'm going to widen that range a bit, from 1981 (chosen because it represents a local minimum) up to 2014/15. ... I realize that I only chose one column, but I didn't cherry pick
You did, however, cherry pick the years - you looked at the data first, then decided to start with the lowest number as the first number, in order to create an upward trend.
> In the entire decade from 2003 to 2013, there was no significant increase in TSO.
So crime didn't keep on increasing more and more forever. That tells us that it's not that crime keeps going up every year, no matter what. Rather, it increased around the time the gun laws were passed, then remained at that (higher) level.
> the fact that even in the US, only 0.64% of violent crime victims defended defended themselves with firearms
Not exactly. What that says is that 0.64% of the time, even after the criminal saw that the "victim" was armed, the crime continued and it was reported to police. When I'm out and about, late and night or in a rough section of the city, nobody messes with me because they can see a) my sidearm b) body language, and sometimes c) my badge. How many of the instances ion which someone chose not to accost me are in those crime reports? Zero, of course. If someone sketchy looking is approaching me in a manner that suggests they could eb a threat and I push my jacklet aside and place my hand on my weapon, they go away, and there's no crime reported. Over 90% of the time that a gun is involved in self-defense, it completely prevents any crime from occurring, and nothing is reported. We don't know the exact percentage, but it's clearly more than 90%.
> if it takes firearms to act as a primary deterrent to assault
The results in Texas do seem to indicate that public awareness (through advertising, in the Texas instance) that women may be armed does in fact have the desired effect on the thugs behavior. The law by itself was less effective before the promotional campaign. Perhaps thugs don't carefully read statistics about how many law-abiding citizens carry, or perhaps they VERY much don't want to have new holes put in their bodies.
> there is something very, very wrong with society
There may indeed be something very wrong with certain members of society.
You make a good point. However, the Supreme Court doesn't make the law. When SCOTUS makes a decision, not based on a new law passed by legislature, they are decreeing what the correct interpretation of the (old) law is. In other words, they ARE saying that any decisions to the contrary were wrong. There just wasn't a clear way to KNOW they were wrong until SCOTUS said so.
In another post in this same thread, someone disagreeing with me linked to some Australia data. In my reply I pointed out that the numbers on the site he linked to show sexual assault increased about 20% after the Australia law was passed. Again that's based on number linked from an anti-gun person trying to prove me wrong.
Another of the more clear examples was the UK gun ban. Official crime rate data (linked below) indicates that in the five years prior to the ban, 1.2 million violent crimes were reported. After the ban took effect, there were over 5 million violent crimes in the following five years. Home Office data shows that rape went from 27,000 to nearly 47,000 when potential attackers were assured there was no risk that a law-abiding woman might defend herself with a firearm. Other serious crimes show the same pattern. Total sex offenses increased from 158,000 to over 245,00.
For more examples, analysis, and a pair of laws (with accompanying advertising campaigns) which did work, see this analysis:
https://docs.google.com/docume...
Raw data:
UK Home Office. A summary of recorded crime data from 1898 to 2001/02.
https://www.gov.uk/government/...
UK Home Office. Recorded crime statistics for England and Wales 2002/03 - 2013/13.
https://www.gov.uk/government/...
One of the more clear examples was the UK gun ban. Official crime rate data (linked below) indicates that in the five years prior to the ban, 1.2 million violent crimes were reported. After the ban took effect, there were over 5 million violent crimes in the following five years. Home Office data shows that rape went from 27,000 to nearly 47,000 when potential attackers were assured there was no risk that a law-abiding woman might defend herself with a firearm. Other serious crimes show the same pattern. Total sex offenses increased from 158,000 to over 245,00.
For more examples and analysis ( and accompanying advertising campaigns) which did work, see this analysis:
https://docs.google.com/docume...
Raw data:
UK Home Office. A summary of recorded crime data from 1898 to 2001/02.
https://www.gov.uk/government/...
UK Home Office. Recorded crime statistics for England and Wales 2002/03 â" 2013/13.
https://www.gov.uk/government/...
Let's look at numbers before and after the change. In the chart you linked to, all the crimes are on the same chart, so the scale in such that you can't see most of the crime categories at all. Here are the numbers in tabular form, linked from the page you linked to:
http://www.aic.gov.au/dataTool...
We see that in the three years before (1993-1995), there were 38,007 sexual assaults. In the three years after, 43,741. So 5,734 more women sexually assaulted. Do you think that's a good thing, or a bad thing? Personally, I prefer that women NOT be raped, so I support policies that decrease, not increase, rapes.
Ps, what was the gun in the closet? A slug gun? An old 50 caliber smooth bore ball gun?
That was an interesting post.
I too kind am kinda moderate about guns. On the one hand, I've done my research. Various gun laws have been enacted in various places, and we have the statistics to see what the results are. We don't have to predict what the results might be, we have the numbers. The facts show, unequivocally, that gun bans and strict gun laws are correlated with an increase in violent crimes, and a large increase in sexual assault and rape. That's just a fact- when politicians remove womens' ability protect themselves, many more women get raped. (I can provide a link to full statistics from official government sources , and further explanation, upon request) .
On the other hand, at one time in my life I decided that it would be best for me to not have handguns in my house. Mostly because I had two curious young children in the house, and we lived in a safe neighborhood.
The Constitution guarantees me ten essential rights and the right to make that choice about guns is one of them.
As far as laws go, I did find one thing that was proven effective ; actually a combination of two things. First, Texas added a minimum mandatory sentence for using a weapon in the commission of a felony, then they ADVERTISED it widely, with ads on city busses, billboards, etc. Word got around that robbery would get you five years, having a gun on you when you got caught would get you an additional ten years in the slammer. That worked.
After that was successful, Texas ran a similar advertising campaign about their concealed carry law. Law-abiding citizens might now shoot back, the ads warned. Thinking of robbing a store? You don't know which of the customers behind you is packing a .45. That also worked, though probably not as well as advertising the mandatory sentence for using a weapon in the commission of a felony.
If you think about it, it makes sense. Billions of dollars have been spent figuring out how to create ads which effectively influence people's behavior. If you want to influence the behavior of thugs in your city, it makes sense to leverage that knowledge.