It's for scientists to convince the populace that nuclear proliferation is an issue worth bothering about.
Politicians who care about it are also making a lousy case. I distinctly remember one of the Bush-Kerry debates back in 2004, when as the final question the moderator asked each candidate what they thought the most important issue of the day was. Kerry responded with nuclear proliferation, and everyone looked at him like he had 3 heads or something.
That said, the way the world has been responding (or more exactly, not responding) to issues of global warming, I'm not sure how much longer nuclear proliferation will matter.
Yes. A couple of examples: 1. Gabrielle Gifford shooting: Several of the people at the scene took cover until Loughner stopped to reload, and then charged in and took him down. One of the civilians who was involved in this was a former Marine, with a handgun, who decided not to draw his weapon because of concerns about hitting other innocent people.
2. Knoxville Church shooting: The shooter killed one person who blocked the initial shot with his body, then hit several parishioners, and was tackled as he stopped to reload.
And I should point out that the numbers I was using were for the average person. Healthy people and trained people would be able to react faster than that.
Oh yeah, I love Canadian mythology: "And then the Mountie did gaze upon the loon, and having sneaketh upon it, slit its throat with a knife, which stained his furs red. He then returneth to Moose Jaw, where the onlookers decreed that from this day forth all Mounties would wear red shirts. And in honor of the loon, which hath given its life for this great marker, all currency would bear its visage as the Mountie saw it."
The reason it comes up is that in mass shootings, it's frequently when the shooter has to stop long enough to reload that unarmed citizens are able to tackle and disarm him. For example, a defender starting from 5 meters away could reasonably notice the shooter has stopped to reload (0.2 seconds, human reaction time), run the 5m (0.75 seconds, based on an average human running speed of 6.7 m/s), and do something to disrupt the shooter in the remaining 0.05 seconds.
You're right, anyone could build what they need to spread murder and mayhem.
Here's my counterargument: Why don't they then? I mean, we supposedly have a bunch of terrorists in our midst, we have drug dealers and pimps all trying to carve out territory, and we have just plain crazy people who would love to blow things up or dose everyone with mustard gas. Surely, some of them would be enterprising enough to build and use these weapons on a regular basis. But in fact, napalm attacks don't happen.
Some reasons I can think of: - It's hard to make those kinds of things just on the spur of the moment. Someone who's trying to make a shrapnel bomb has to carefully plan ahead, think things through, etc. By contrast, many shootings are where somebody's snapped and not really capable of doing that kind of planning.
- There's significant risk of screwing up when building such weapons and injuring / killing yourself. Most mass murderers aren't the sort of people that have learned how to properly handle explosives or chemical munitions. Even bad guys who have reason to know what they're doing have problems - there are cases of terrorists having their bomb blow up as they're driving to the Israeli border, for example.
- These weapons are all less portable and concealable than,say, a 9mm.
- Building these weapons takes considerably more brains than firing a gun. I grant you, the brains required are something along the lines of "Google it and follow the instructions", but there are a lot of people who can't handle that but can handle "point gun at target, squeeze trigger".
How about the background check requirements? Do you think those accomplish anything, or not? The reason I ask is that in recent polling, a majority of gun owners support increased use of background checks to allow law-abiding and sane citizens to obtain guns more easily than criminals or insane people. It's obviously far from perfect, but there's a chance it would help reduce the body count.
Also, how about the smaller magazine requirements? Do those do anything to reduce the number of murders (the idea being reduce the number of shots fired before a shooter has to reload or switch weapons)?
Now, finding rare earth deposits with almost no thorium in them is a real feat, and getting the US government to find ways to store thorium would a world-class miracle.
Are you saying that the issue is that there's no way of storing thorium acceptable to the regulators, or that you want to have the government responsible for handling the cost of storage? Because those are very different things: The first case is legitimately the regulator's fault, but the second case is businesses just trying to make the taxpayers pay their costs of doing business.
I'm not a pothead, I've never smoked pot (or anything else) and never been interested in doing so.
Here's my question: Your college buddy, did he ever hurt anybody? Did he ever punch or shoot someone that he otherwise wouldn't have? Did he have a hard time maintaining relationships with his family? Did he mistreat any significant others he had? Because the only drawback you've stated is that you didn't like him anymore, and that it changed him in some ways. You also said he graduated with a 4.0, which hardly sounds like he destroyed himself.
People change all the time, for all sorts of reasons. Alcohol, tobacco, heroin, cocaine, etc have easily documented harmful effects that far outweigh anything you've described, so if your friends' pot use is as serious a problem as you claim you should also be able to point to some actual impacts.
If we're putting laws in place, we should have a demonstrable harm that we're protecting the public from, and that harm should be greater than the harm of enforcing the law. On that basis, outlawing PCP makes total sense, because people on angel dust pose extreme risks to people around them, but outlawing pot has not been demonstrated to be useful.
... people would die, while the con artist who did it would funnel the money away and find ways to hide behind the legal system.
It doesn't even have to be a con artist who causes people to die. It could even be a well-meaning developer who's trying to get a patch out quickly to fix a bug they've discovered, combined with a testing staff that failed to run Test 34C(iv) correctly. In other words, malice is not required, only human stupidity.
Isn't it fun to do that when you're on the private equity firm side? There's no risk whatsoever, and you get nice fat consulting fees and management fees and bonuses.
Also, typically the management that sold to the private equity firm takes home a nice big paycheck as part of the deal.
No, now we're dealing with entrepreneur worship, the belief that everything that happens that's awesome anywhere is the result of some entrepreneur trying to make money, and that all entrepreneurs are successful. The particular image that's making the business press go gaga is that of the college student who drops out of school to start a business and makes a ton of cash due to hard work and a great idea.
Of course, what actually happens is that a very tiny minority of entrepreneurs are ridiculously successful and become the darlings of Wall Street, a bunch are moderately successful and create profitable businesses, and the vast majority are complete and utter failures.
How would you advertise : "Our registers have "hidden" functionality to help you skip on your taxes."
My guess is that this would be the sort of verbal promise made by the salespeople of a dodgy cash register company. And it would be attractive to the kinds of businesses that are also pretty dodgy, e.g. bottom-feeder bars or strip joints.
Because killing civilians a few at a time is so much work. As Eddie Izzard put it:
Someone's killed 100,000 people. We're almost going, "Well done! You killed 100,000 people? You must get up very early in the morning! I can't even get down the gym. Your diary must look odd: 'Get up in the morning, death, death, death, death, death, death, death – lunch – death, death, death – afternoon tea – death, death, death – quick shower ' "
US banks caught stealing billions from unsuspecting depositors, borrowers, investors, municipal governments, and the US treasury, had investigations of their activity closed out with nobody indicted or arrested.
Seems like it'd be more efficient to fire the useless people.
Surprisingly, not always. Fear of "unlawful termination" lawsuit, fear of firing somebody who's a pal of a higher-up, red tape with the HR department, etc.
No, not at all. Remember the Dilbert Principle: The dumbest people in your organization should be promoted to where they do the least damage, i.e. management.
Lawrence J Peter described the same phenomenon as "Percussive Sublimation", and mentioned one film company that practiced this on a grand scale: They built a new Head Office, hundreds of miles from any studio or camera, and promoted all the useless people to work in the Head Office, where they busily ran around conferring with one another and otherwise wasting time, while the useful people happily worked in the studios making films.
So that's the point of management: Remove useless people from the code repo.
I'm guessing you're in the US where the role of unions seems a little more unhelpful. I get the impression over there they're all about protecting lazyness and wierd working practices.
Let me tell you a recent union-related story, and the public perception of it: 1. Management goes to the union and says "We need to cut your wages 30% in order to keep the company afloat." 2. Union agrees. 3. Management celebrates by giving themselves large bonuses. 4. 2 years later, management goes to the union and says "We need to cut your wages 50% in order to keep the company afloat." 5. Union threatens to strike. 6. Company bankrupt. At least half the public blames the union.
Slashdot Mirror
It's for scientists to convince the populace that nuclear proliferation is an issue worth bothering about.
Politicians who care about it are also making a lousy case. I distinctly remember one of the Bush-Kerry debates back in 2004, when as the final question the moderator asked each candidate what they thought the most important issue of the day was. Kerry responded with nuclear proliferation, and everyone looked at him like he had 3 heads or something.
That said, the way the world has been responding (or more exactly, not responding) to issues of global warming, I'm not sure how much longer nuclear proliferation will matter.
there was an article in Scientific American decades ago which explained the evidence and statistics
Citation please? And I don't ask that because I doubt you, I ask that because I'd be curious to read it, and any followups that have been done since.
Has it ever happened in real life?
Yes. A couple of examples:
1. Gabrielle Gifford shooting: Several of the people at the scene took cover until Loughner stopped to reload, and then charged in and took him down. One of the civilians who was involved in this was a former Marine, with a handgun, who decided not to draw his weapon because of concerns about hitting other innocent people.
2. Knoxville Church shooting: The shooter killed one person who blocked the initial shot with his body, then hit several parishioners, and was tackled as he stopped to reload.
And I should point out that the numbers I was using were for the average person. Healthy people and trained people would be able to react faster than that.
Oh yeah, I love Canadian mythology:
"And then the Mountie did gaze upon the loon, and having sneaketh upon it, slit its throat with a knife, which stained his furs red. He then returneth to Moose Jaw, where the onlookers decreed that from this day forth all Mounties would wear red shirts. And in honor of the loon, which hath given its life for this great marker, all currency would bear its visage as the Mountie saw it."
The reason it comes up is that in mass shootings, it's frequently when the shooter has to stop long enough to reload that unarmed citizens are able to tackle and disarm him. For example, a defender starting from 5 meters away could reasonably notice the shooter has stopped to reload (0.2 seconds, human reaction time), run the 5m (0.75 seconds, based on an average human running speed of 6.7 m/s), and do something to disrupt the shooter in the remaining 0.05 seconds.
You're right, anyone could build what they need to spread murder and mayhem.
Here's my counterargument: Why don't they then? I mean, we supposedly have a bunch of terrorists in our midst, we have drug dealers and pimps all trying to carve out territory, and we have just plain crazy people who would love to blow things up or dose everyone with mustard gas. Surely, some of them would be enterprising enough to build and use these weapons on a regular basis. But in fact, napalm attacks don't happen.
Some reasons I can think of:
- It's hard to make those kinds of things just on the spur of the moment. Someone who's trying to make a shrapnel bomb has to carefully plan ahead, think things through, etc. By contrast, many shootings are where somebody's snapped and not really capable of doing that kind of planning.
- There's significant risk of screwing up when building such weapons and injuring / killing yourself. Most mass murderers aren't the sort of people that have learned how to properly handle explosives or chemical munitions. Even bad guys who have reason to know what they're doing have problems - there are cases of terrorists having their bomb blow up as they're driving to the Israeli border, for example.
- These weapons are all less portable and concealable than,say, a 9mm.
- Building these weapons takes considerably more brains than firing a gun. I grant you, the brains required are something along the lines of "Google it and follow the instructions", but there are a lot of people who can't handle that but can handle "point gun at target, squeeze trigger".
How about the background check requirements? Do you think those accomplish anything, or not? The reason I ask is that in recent polling, a majority of gun owners support increased use of background checks to allow law-abiding and sane citizens to obtain guns more easily than criminals or insane people. It's obviously far from perfect, but there's a chance it would help reduce the body count.
Also, how about the smaller magazine requirements? Do those do anything to reduce the number of murders (the idea being reduce the number of shots fired before a shooter has to reload or switch weapons)?
Now, finding rare earth deposits with almost no thorium in them is a real feat, and getting the US government to find ways to store thorium would a world-class miracle.
Are you saying that the issue is that there's no way of storing thorium acceptable to the regulators, or that you want to have the government responsible for handling the cost of storage? Because those are very different things: The first case is legitimately the regulator's fault, but the second case is businesses just trying to make the taxpayers pay their costs of doing business.
I'm not a pothead, I've never smoked pot (or anything else) and never been interested in doing so.
Here's my question: Your college buddy, did he ever hurt anybody? Did he ever punch or shoot someone that he otherwise wouldn't have? Did he have a hard time maintaining relationships with his family? Did he mistreat any significant others he had? Because the only drawback you've stated is that you didn't like him anymore, and that it changed him in some ways. You also said he graduated with a 4.0, which hardly sounds like he destroyed himself.
People change all the time, for all sorts of reasons. Alcohol, tobacco, heroin, cocaine, etc have easily documented harmful effects that far outweigh anything you've described, so if your friends' pot use is as serious a problem as you claim you should also be able to point to some actual impacts.
If we're putting laws in place, we should have a demonstrable harm that we're protecting the public from, and that harm should be greater than the harm of enforcing the law. On that basis, outlawing PCP makes total sense, because people on angel dust pose extreme risks to people around them, but outlawing pot has not been demonstrated to be useful.
... people would die, while the con artist who did it would funnel the money away and find ways to hide behind the legal system.
It doesn't even have to be a con artist who causes people to die. It could even be a well-meaning developer who's trying to get a patch out quickly to fix a bug they've discovered, combined with a testing staff that failed to run Test 34C(iv) correctly. In other words, malice is not required, only human stupidity.
How do you get away with that?
It's amazing what you can accomplish with a simple sledgehammer.
Not necessarily: The best human chess players can beat the not-best computer chess programs.
Isn't it fun to do that when you're on the private equity firm side? There's no risk whatsoever, and you get nice fat consulting fees and management fees and bonuses.
Also, typically the management that sold to the private equity firm takes home a nice big paycheck as part of the deal.
No, this is also about shutting down somebody else's annoying phone.
Which I can do, too - it's amazing what you can accomplish with a simple sledgehammer.
As Dean Martin once explained, you're not drunk if you can lie on the floor without hanging on for dear life. That seems like a good test to me.
No, now we're dealing with entrepreneur worship, the belief that everything that happens that's awesome anywhere is the result of some entrepreneur trying to make money, and that all entrepreneurs are successful. The particular image that's making the business press go gaga is that of the college student who drops out of school to start a business and makes a ton of cash due to hard work and a great idea.
Of course, what actually happens is that a very tiny minority of entrepreneurs are ridiculously successful and become the darlings of Wall Street, a bunch are moderately successful and create profitable businesses, and the vast majority are complete and utter failures.
How would you advertise : "Our registers have "hidden" functionality to help you skip on your taxes."
My guess is that this would be the sort of verbal promise made by the salespeople of a dodgy cash register company. And it would be attractive to the kinds of businesses that are also pretty dodgy, e.g. bottom-feeder bars or strip joints.
In other words, fine precedent, lousy president!
(And in case anyone is curious, in my opinion Mitt Romney would have been even worse)
Because killing civilians a few at a time is so much work. As Eddie Izzard put it:
Someone's killed 100,000 people. We're almost going, "Well done! You killed 100,000 people? You must get up very early in the morning! I can't even get down the gym. Your diary must look odd: 'Get up in the morning, death, death, death, death, death, death, death – lunch – death, death, death – afternoon tea – death, death, death – quick shower ' "
US banks caught stealing billions from unsuspecting depositors, borrowers, investors, municipal governments, and the US treasury, had investigations of their activity closed out with nobody indicted or arrested.
Seems like it'd be more efficient to fire the useless people.
Surprisingly, not always. Fear of "unlawful termination" lawsuit, fear of firing somebody who's a pal of a higher-up, red tape with the HR department, etc.
No, not at all. Remember the Dilbert Principle: The dumbest people in your organization should be promoted to where they do the least damage, i.e. management.
Lawrence J Peter described the same phenomenon as "Percussive Sublimation", and mentioned one film company that practiced this on a grand scale: They built a new Head Office, hundreds of miles from any studio or camera, and promoted all the useless people to work in the Head Office, where they busily ran around conferring with one another and otherwise wasting time, while the useful people happily worked in the studios making films.
So that's the point of management: Remove useless people from the code repo.
I'm guessing you're in the US where the role of unions seems a little more unhelpful. I get the impression over there they're all about protecting lazyness and wierd working practices.
Let me tell you a recent union-related story, and the public perception of it:
1. Management goes to the union and says "We need to cut your wages 30% in order to keep the company afloat."
2. Union agrees.
3. Management celebrates by giving themselves large bonuses.
4. 2 years later, management goes to the union and says "We need to cut your wages 50% in order to keep the company afloat."
5. Union threatens to strike.
6. Company bankrupt. At least half the public blames the union.
Thats no planet ... that's yo momma!
And also Marvin the Paranoid Android for some reason.