The devil is in the details... The devil lurking in this study is... just exactly how do they define "child"?
Checking the article and following the link to the study, I find exactly what I expect to find in a study like this that has numbers that seem too high to be believable:
"Child" is under 18. So they're including teenagers up to 17.
From the same American Academy of Pediatrics article, reading down a ways, they admit that over 90% of that statistic is in the 13-17 age group.
Not exactly representative of the anecdotes about the 3rd grader and the 6-year-old that CNN chose to "make representative", though they did admit to the "90% over 13" bit near the end of the article.
At least they cut it off at 18. Some studies in the past (maybe they're still trying this scam) have defined "child" as under 21, or even up into mid-20s.
You don't use Snopes to fact check the news-- there are sites like factcheck and politifact for that. You use Snopes for debunking those god-damned "memes" that fly around like mosquitoes, like (the front page on Snopes today) the photo of a whale in a Venice canal, or don't buy Kelloggs Bran flakes because they contain dried ground-up cow dung, or that Donald Trump married Madonna in a secret ceremony in Utah.
This. Snopes is invaluable for a quick "That is not true" link for that kind of stuff.
For political stuff... it's a maybe. If they debunk some slanderous rumor about a conservative or Republican, that's pretty definitive. Slanderous rumors about liberals or Democrats... maybe still useful; read the article carefully and check their sources. I've found that though they have a bias, they aren't liars. (At least, I haven't caught them in a lie.)
Example I recall from way back when -- there was some utterly idiotic rumor that Ashcroft was terrified of calico cats because he thought they were minions of the Devil or some such. At first, Snopes marked that one "unconfirmed", though they did report that Ashcroft laughed out loud when asked about it. A week or so later, it had been improved to "False".
I very strongly suspect a rumor of similar stupidity about a Democrat would have been stamped "False" from the very beginning.
Somebody in Georgia thinks my Yahoo address is his. I've gotten musician newsletters, Olan Mills photography appointment reminders, grocery store and GameStop rewards accounts, emails from his daughter, various sports/gaming sites that don't have a reputation for spamming, and a Fedex delivery confirmation.
Yeah, "Fedex delivery confirmation" is one of the most common phishing scams on the Internet, but this one was legit; from Fedex IP addresses, and an actual delivery of specific merchandise to a specific address. Not "Print the attached notice and bring it to your local FedEx office". (How to people think that could even work, anyway?) I put a printout of that in an envelope and mailed it to him, since his snail-mail address was on the delivery notice.
The "email from his daughter" ones, looked very grammar-school, kids at school calling her names, things a third-grader might be expected to email her dad. Those, I just replied to with a "This is not your father's email address. Let him know; I have other email of his that I can forward to him." Never got a response that addressed the content of my replies in any way. Maybe "she" was an FBI agent trolling for pedophiles? No clue there, but after half a dozen or so of those, they stopped.
Anything that looks legit, I've unsubscribed, or sent them an email saying they have the wrong email address.
Whoever it is, they have never responded to any of my attempts to get in touch with them.
You'd think these people would have a clue that there are going to be powerful people with a great deal of resources doing everything possible to track them down. Perhaps some sort of impairment was involved?
Oh, well, to quote Law Dog, "Are you listening? Quit guinea-pigging the product. Seriously."
... I would like to see a tax swap between corporations and individuals. It would work like this:
Reduce or eliminate corporate tax
Dramatically increase the tax rates on the upper most individual income tax brackets
Tax dividends and capital gains at the same rate as regular income
Good thoughts. End the corporate income tax and then normal income tax rate on dividends would no longer be double taxation.
As for capital gains... I could go along with taxing long-term capital gains at the same rate **IF** the "gains" are adjusted to take inflation over the time of the investment into account. I think an inflation adjustment should be applied to all interest income, too. Not to mention those tax brackets. Give Congress a steeply progressive set of tax brackets, and the McDonald's' hamburger flipper is going to find his minimum wage inflated into the 50% bracket.
Those "inflation" numbers need to be based on something reliable, though. If the inflation for the past 8 years has been essentially zero, as we keep getting told, how come the price of a loaf of bread has gone up 50% in that time? Somebody's been playing fast and loose with the numbers.
Agree that we should be replacing fossil fuels (especially coal) with all possible speed, starting about 40 years ago.
Citation needed on the anti-nukes being funded by the fossil fuel industry, though. Most (virtually all, near as I can tell) of the vehement anti-nukes are just as vehement in their opposition to fossil fuels. (And any other energy source that risks making it possible to continue to have an industrial civilization.)
(Somebody's sure to reply with the inevitable "blah blah waste blah blah gadzillions of years blah blah" thing. I suggest they go to Google Earth. Search for "Sedan Crater". Scan south. That's what's already there in the general vicinity of Yucca Mountain. Explain how contained waste is within two orders of magnitude as much hazard as what's already there, uncontained, lining the bottoms of those craters.)
It is my considered opinion that the "monotone media" actively wanted Donald Trump to be the Republican nominee, because they wanted Hillary to win, and thought that Trump didn't stand a chance of winning.
See NBC News sitting on that "Grab The Cat" tape all through the primaries, when it might have done some good, so they could trot it out as an October Surprise.
I'm pretty astonished that Trump won, too. I thought he was the only one of the Republican nominees that couldn't beat Hillary.
Well, one of the local radio stations has a program I try to listen to every Saturday morning ("The Norman Bates Memorial Soundtrack Show") and the DJ on just before plays eclectic electronic music. One of the ones I've caught several times just at the end of her program is a piece that sounds for all the world like a flight of B17s in a WWII movie.
Maybe someone really likes the PC fan noise sound track?
Paul Ehrlich is also the person who, when it looked like Pons and Fleishmann were really on to something, and clean, nearly free fusion power was going to be running everything on the planet, wrote an article for the newspapers about how this was a complete disaster. In his words "Like giving a machine gun to a retarded child."
I have no use for completely anti-human "philosophers" like Ehrlich. He may know a lot about butterflies, but outside his narrow area of expertise, he's a moron.
On a personal note, I know plenty of Iranian women. Most of them I would argue are "uppity", but they also happily travel back to Iran every year or two on holidays.
I know one, who would dispute that, but she's Baha'i. If she went back to Iran, she'd be dead, like a good part of her family is.
The problem I see is similar to if you've ever seen a 65 year old try to use those touch screen Coke fountain drink machines that give you every combination on Earth. Old people won't like them.
As a 60-something "old people", I like the touch screen "every combination on Earth" soda machines.
“Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.” -- Douglas Adams.
Do actual Native Americans care? Apparently, the overwhelming majority do not.
It's just virtue signaling by mostly white people of a certain political bent getting Very Very Offending on behalf of a group with plenty of legitimate other grievances which really doesn't care about this issue.
In a conversation that included an actual Native American, she asserted that only "Professional Indians" (her term, spoken with rolling of the eyes) cared. At all.
Near me, there's a chain of "Sprouts" stores, lower prices than Whole Foods and half the... ideology.
I do hit Whole Foods occasionally for their economy-size bottle of stevia extract. Their store brand balsamic vinegar is pretty good, too.
WF does annoy me fairly often. My biggest annoyance is that they sell big bags of xylitol as a sweetener, with no warning whatsoever that if your dog eats anything containing even a small amount of xylitol... It. Will. Die. The stuff is perfectly wholesome for humans, but it causes a dog's blood sugar to crash to lethally low levels. (I have no problem with them selling it, in fact, I might buy a bag. But really... It should have a warning.)
The "pepper-spraying incident", as described by one of the pepper-sprayed in an interview by Amy Goodman on the "Democracy Now!" web page, was when the protesters who got sprayed were blocking the police from retreating from a situation they had become alarmed by. The person being interviewed outright gloated about how they were blocking the police from retreating.
Amy Goodman/Democracy Now! is not a right-wing conspiracy site. Conspiracy site, yeah, but definitely not right-wing.
Slashdot Mirror
Nice. Kind of like my modest proposal:
If law enforcement at any level can have the weapon, the average citizen can have it. Period, no exceptions.
If the average citizen can not have the weapon, no law enforcement at any level can have it. No exceptions, period.
The devil is in the details... The devil lurking in this study is ... just exactly how do they define "child"?
Checking the article and following the link to the study, I find exactly what I expect to find in a study like this that has numbers that seem too high to be believable:
"Child" is under 18. So they're including teenagers up to 17.
From the same American Academy of Pediatrics article, reading down a ways, they admit that over 90% of that statistic is in the 13-17 age group.
Not exactly representative of the anecdotes about the 3rd grader and the 6-year-old that CNN chose to "make representative", though they did admit to the "90% over 13" bit near the end of the article.
At least they cut it off at 18. Some studies in the past (maybe they're still trying this scam) have defined "child" as under 21, or even up into mid-20s.
You don't use Snopes to fact check the news-- there are sites like factcheck and politifact for that. You use Snopes for debunking those god-damned "memes" that fly around like mosquitoes, like (the front page on Snopes today) the photo of a whale in a Venice canal, or don't buy Kelloggs Bran flakes because they contain dried ground-up cow dung, or that Donald Trump married Madonna in a secret ceremony in Utah.
This. Snopes is invaluable for a quick "That is not true" link for that kind of stuff.
For political stuff... it's a maybe. If they debunk some slanderous rumor about a conservative or Republican, that's pretty definitive. Slanderous rumors about liberals or Democrats... maybe still useful; read the article carefully and check their sources. I've found that though they have a bias, they aren't liars. (At least, I haven't caught them in a lie.)
Example I recall from way back when -- there was some utterly idiotic rumor that Ashcroft was terrified of calico cats because he thought they were minions of the Devil or some such. At first, Snopes marked that one "unconfirmed", though they did report that Ashcroft laughed out loud when asked about it. A week or so later, it had been improved to "False".
I very strongly suspect a rumor of similar stupidity about a Democrat would have been stamped "False" from the very beginning.
Somebody in Georgia thinks my Yahoo address is his. I've gotten musician newsletters, Olan Mills photography appointment reminders, grocery store and GameStop rewards accounts, emails from his daughter, various sports/gaming sites that don't have a reputation for spamming, and a Fedex delivery confirmation.
Yeah, "Fedex delivery confirmation" is one of the most common phishing scams on the Internet, but this one was legit; from Fedex IP addresses, and an actual delivery of specific merchandise to a specific address. Not "Print the attached notice and bring it to your local FedEx office". (How to people think that could even work, anyway?) I put a printout of that in an envelope and mailed it to him, since his snail-mail address was on the delivery notice.
The "email from his daughter" ones, looked very grammar-school, kids at school calling her names, things a third-grader might be expected to email her dad. Those, I just replied to with a "This is not your father's email address. Let him know; I have other email of his that I can forward to him." Never got a response that addressed the content of my replies in any way. Maybe "she" was an FBI agent trolling for pedophiles? No clue there, but after half a dozen or so of those, they stopped.
Anything that looks legit, I've unsubscribed, or sent them an email saying they have the wrong email address.
Whoever it is, they have never responded to any of my attempts to get in touch with them.
You'd think these people would have a clue that there are going to be powerful people with a great deal of resources doing everything possible to track them down. Perhaps some sort of impairment was involved?
Oh, well, to quote Law Dog, "Are you listening? Quit guinea-pigging the product. Seriously."
... I would like to see a tax swap between corporations and individuals. It would work like this:
Good thoughts. End the corporate income tax and then normal income tax rate on dividends would no longer be double taxation.
As for capital gains... I could go along with taxing long-term capital gains at the same rate **IF** the "gains" are adjusted to take inflation over the time of the investment into account. I think an inflation adjustment should be applied to all interest income, too. Not to mention those tax brackets. Give Congress a steeply progressive set of tax brackets, and the McDonald's' hamburger flipper is going to find his minimum wage inflated into the 50% bracket.
Those "inflation" numbers need to be based on something reliable, though. If the inflation for the past 8 years has been essentially zero, as we keep getting told, how come the price of a loaf of bread has gone up 50% in that time? Somebody's been playing fast and loose with the numbers.
So, you unlock with your "rude gesture" finger. Thumb or forefinger irretrievably wipes the device. "Hey, you forced me to put my finger there."
Of course nuclear fission is the answer. The world's leading climate scientists have called it the only viable path forward on climate change. The political reasons generally involve huge amounts fossil fuel industry money spent on anti-nuclear propaganda. Not only do I think nuclear is the least worst option available, I think it is actually a good option.
Agree that we should be replacing fossil fuels (especially coal) with all possible speed, starting about 40 years ago.
Citation needed on the anti-nukes being funded by the fossil fuel industry, though. Most (virtually all, near as I can tell) of the vehement anti-nukes are just as vehement in their opposition to fossil fuels. (And any other energy source that risks making it possible to continue to have an industrial civilization.)
(Somebody's sure to reply with the inevitable "blah blah waste blah blah gadzillions of years blah blah" thing. I suggest they go to Google Earth. Search for "Sedan Crater". Scan south. That's what's already there in the general vicinity of Yucca Mountain. Explain how contained waste is within two orders of magnitude as much hazard as what's already there, uncontained, lining the bottoms of those craters.)
It is my considered opinion that the "monotone media" actively wanted Donald Trump to be the Republican nominee, because they wanted Hillary to win, and thought that Trump didn't stand a chance of winning.
See NBC News sitting on that "Grab The Cat" tape all through the primaries, when it might have done some good, so they could trot it out as an October Surprise.
I'm pretty astonished that Trump won, too. I thought he was the only one of the Republican nominees that couldn't beat Hillary.
Well, one of the local radio stations has a program I try to listen to every Saturday morning ("The Norman Bates Memorial Soundtrack Show") and the DJ on just before plays eclectic electronic music. One of the ones I've caught several times just at the end of her program is a piece that sounds for all the world like a flight of B17s in a WWII movie.
Maybe someone really likes the PC fan noise sound track?
Paul Ehrlich is also the person who, when it looked like Pons and Fleishmann were really on to something, and clean, nearly free fusion power was going to be running everything on the planet, wrote an article for the newspapers about how this was a complete disaster. In his words "Like giving a machine gun to a retarded child."
I have no use for completely anti-human "philosophers" like Ehrlich. He may know a lot about butterflies, but outside his narrow area of expertise, he's a moron.
This is the kind of utter nonsense that's likely to get us a second Trump term, making everybody on the ant-Trump side look like complete morons.
(And no, I didn't vote for the SOB.)
I'm not ever going to see anything at popularmechanics.com, because they pop a "We refuse to show you a damn thing because you are blocking ads" page.
Lies. I do not block ads.
I block scripts.
I'll see every ad you feel like blasting at me If. They. Are. Not. Scripts.
But I'm not allowing every random malware creator on the planet who buys an ad slot on some random ad server to infect my PC. Period.
popularmechanics.com is dead to me.
See "Tremors II"... Through the graboid, through two buildings, and shattered the engine block of their only escape vehicle.
On a personal note, I know plenty of Iranian women. Most of them I would argue are "uppity", but they also happily travel back to Iran every year or two on holidays.
I know one, who would dispute that, but she's Baha'i. If she went back to Iran, she'd be dead, like a good part of her family is.
They're also hitting Russian infrastructure with this one. Speaking of the nuclear option, how about a sprinkle of polonium 210?
I'll take "Things That Make My Brain Hurt" for $2000, Alex.
The problem I see is similar to if you've ever seen a 65 year old try to use those touch screen Coke fountain drink machines that give you every combination on Earth. Old people won't like them.
As a 60-something "old people", I like the touch screen "every combination on Earth" soda machines.
As long as Diet Mountain Dew is an option.
“Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.” -- Douglas Adams.
Please note the polls referenced by Straif above.
Do actual Native Americans care? Apparently, the overwhelming majority do not.
It's just virtue signaling by mostly white people of a certain political bent getting Very Very Offending on behalf of a group with plenty of legitimate other grievances which really doesn't care about this issue.
If enough people are outraged by the Redskins...
In a conversation that included an actual Native American, she asserted that only "Professional Indians" (her term, spoken with rolling of the eyes) cared. At all.
Near me, there's a chain of "Sprouts" stores, lower prices than Whole Foods and half the ... ideology.
I do hit Whole Foods occasionally for their economy-size bottle of stevia extract. Their store brand balsamic vinegar is pretty good, too.
WF does annoy me fairly often. My biggest annoyance is that they sell big bags of xylitol as a sweetener, with no warning whatsoever that if your dog eats anything containing even a small amount of xylitol... It. Will. Die. The stuff is perfectly wholesome for humans, but it causes a dog's blood sugar to crash to lethally low levels. (I have no problem with them selling it, in fact, I might buy a bag. But really... It should have a warning.)
Uncle Martin? Are you there? Quit fooling around. Dang it, I hate when you do that invisibility thing.
A friend has a T-shirt: "Pay no attention to my search history. I'm a mystery writer, not a serial killer."
There's lots of innocent reasons someone might search for horrible things.
The "pepper-spraying incident", as described by one of the pepper-sprayed in an interview by Amy Goodman on the "Democracy Now!" web page, was when the protesters who got sprayed were blocking the police from retreating from a situation they had become alarmed by. The person being interviewed outright gloated about how they were blocking the police from retreating.
Amy Goodman/Democracy Now! is not a right-wing conspiracy site. Conspiracy site, yeah, but definitely not right-wing.