There's a slight negative correlation at the level of countries between gun ownership and homicide. The correlation is a little more pronounced when you take out the US. I wouldn't call it a smoking gun.
That would have happened anyway, since in China (until recently, anyway) and other third world countries, labor is dirt-cheap.
Ah, yes, the "we didn't need that industry anyway" argument. The US will continue to see such things because supporting foreign technology development is more important than having a future.
Democrats were only able to pass it when they had control of the Presidency and Congress, with a super-majority in the Senate. Even then, it took a year of political wrangling and caused the rest of the President's legislative agenda to be dead-on-arrival.
Only due to grossly incompetent leadership. Lyndon B. Johnson wouldn't have had such trouble for example.
Look, understanding the problem is the best way to make sure you aren't a part of it, so even if you plan to do nothing about it you could at least listen. Reading your posts it's clear that you haven't even done that, and worse still object to other people talking about it (no-one forced you to read/watch or comment), which means that you ARE part of the problem.
Well, I suppose I can't expect you to understand my viewpoint when I didn't say what it was. But given that over 56% and growing portion of the incoming US college class are female (with somewhat greater graduation rates as well), if those women aren't going into a particular field (particularly with the host of incentives out there) at the approved rate, then I can't be bothered to care.
If you don't want to be involved, fine, but the rest of us would like to have this conversation.
It's not the conversation that bothers me. After all, crazy people might have conversations about lizards ruling the world without disturbing me or my society in the least. I'm concerned because you're going to want to do something as a result of your "conversation" which will harm my society without any indication you have a clue what you're doing.
There's way too much conversation about giving females additional and ample opportunities at the expense of males even in the face of superior opportunities at present and too little about equal treatment of the sexes.
Ensuring that said genocide actually solves your problem is complicated.
Everything is complicated on this scale. But some things are far less complicated. For example, the US and Russia could work together to eliminate 90% of the world's population in oh, a couple of hours by nuking developing world population centers. The complexity has already been paid through by development of a nuclear weapons infrastructure.
They also probably have bioweapons (with vaccines) that they could use to kill off people on that scale. Again, it's complexity that is mostly paid for.
It's worth noting that most massacres and genocides aren't conducted to solve "overpopulation". Overpopulation is the problem of having too many people, but most massacres are about killing the "wrong type" of people (wrong skin color, wrong gender, wrong religion, wrong social class, etc)
Why would that matter? Even if it remains true, there are plenty of wrong people out there.
Finally, who really thinks that killing off 90% of the human population is somehow going to be harder than growing the population to 10 or 11 billion while trying to aggressively mitigate global warming and giving a better than current developed world standard of living to most of the world? Given how messed up current AGW mitigation efforts have been, I don't see this latest unicorn delivery system being as simple as advertised.
But it isn't over population that is causing this, it is greed. The planet could support up to 40 billion humans if we lived just for our needs, but only 2 billion people that indulge like the typical American.
40 billion is not even an order of magnitude greater than present population. Meanwhile if we dropped an order of magnitude in population, we would be under your "typical American" threshold by a factor of 2. In other words, the global warming problem goes away if you reduce population permanently by an order of magnitude even in the presence of so-called "greed".
And who really wants to live in a world where you live for your needs? It's not a viable endstate.
Hence, why I said "Earth orbit" which is effectively what "near Earth's gravity" means. I bet one could separate the oxygen/metal reaction from the propellant for a modest loss of ISP and mass fraction, eliminating the spew.
US trash collectors are actually 90% male. You don't hear a lot of complaining about that gender imbalance. By the same link, US high tech workers and managers are both roughly a quarter female which is much better than you claim.
Just covering your ears and going "la la la it's perfect" isn't really a solution.
Actually, it is. A key step you are missing here is a demonstration that there is a solution that we can take here which is better than doing nothing about the problem.
Using killing as a solution is actually pretty complicated.
I don't see that actually. If one looks at the massacres and genocides of the past, they were complex, but relatively easy and quick to pull off as long as the other side were completely overpowered.
NASA has their own inflation rate used for budgeting long-term projects, and it trends much higher than the US national inflation rate. The reason is obvious when you think about it: back in the 1950s, many common commercial products were handmade, with domestic labour, but are now mass-produced with cheap overseas labor and advanced labor-saving technologies (depending on the type of product). But just like in the 1950s, NASA still builds things largely by hand, generally in small numbers, and with a highly skilled domestic workforce.
The reason is obvious: they used their inflation rate as a key part of computing the costing of the next iteration of contracts. This created a feedback which greatly increased the cost of contracts and the resulting computed inflation rate over time.
This has led to wildly overpriced contracts. For example, a NASA group computed (see discussion of the "appendix") the traditional costing for a hypothetical NASA contract which would have built the Falcon 9 (including development of the Falcon I and three rocket engine designs). They arrived at a figure of $4.0 billion (this is for the bid, we're not even to cost overruns that occur after a contract is awarded). The actual SpaceX development cost as vetted by a NASA audit? $390 million.
My take at this time is that NASA's inflation index (the New Start Inflation Index is unintentionally pure fiction as part of a feedback dynamic that has greatly increased the cost of NASA activities.
Obama isn't a bad leader (in general, the world hates the US far less now than they did back in 2003-2005), but he has spent his life in an ivory tower, so tends to be like European leaders -- erring on the side of Chamberlain.
Yay for low expectations. "Erring on the side of Chamberlain" is quite the backhanded foreign policy compliment.
Whether you believe in God or climate change, and I'm not certain why the two are typically mutually exclusive, it has to occur to you that change is inevitable. Tangible evidence exists that the World's weather is different now, and it doesn't take a wild leap of imagination to infer that eight billion humans probably have something to do with it.
The sacrifice required now to right the ship is minimal compared to what it will become in a decade... and past a certain tipping point, there will be no remedy. Buy some land where it's presently very cold.
The only simple solution is to kill a bunch of people. Nothing else "solves" overpopulation in a simple way. And if the chicken littles are correct, then it'll be much easier to solve that problem in ten years.
The shuttle's misuse as a payload delivery platform was not a technical failure of the vehicle. You are right, it was a terrible cargo vehicle, but would have been an excellent vehicle on which to operate longer-duration special missions that required the equipment to be launched and returned in one configuration.
Utility > capability. Capability is just a technology demonstration in the absence of further usefulness.
Inflation isn't that high but there are lots of costs associated with such projects.
Of course, there are. The thing here is that they'd still cost $15 billion even in the absence of the "tech" because the cost driver is corruption and inefficiency not the tech.
The developed world already had clean water and air. That's not something that changes when you reduce CO2 emissions. The developing world in exchange for these measures becomes poorer which tends to correlate with population growth and more pollution.
Oddly, it was a Slashdot poster who gave me this challenge.
It's not odd at all. This is a common ruse on Slashdot. Read this 800+ page report and only then shall you know enough to agree with me. But oddly enough, the person laying down this ridiculous challenge usually hasn't done that task either.
It's a profoundly ignorant stance, both of the economic consequences of screwing with the world's energy and transportation infrastructure, and of hopelessly misunderstanding the opposition to climate change mitigation.
Even stopped clocks are right twice a day, but we don't count on them to tell time. Life is more than condescending plots ripped from low budget movies. Show global warming is a problem requiring our urgent attention rather than spin fantasy about how your genius gets ignored.
Slashdot Mirror
Banning gun worked for all country that tried it.
There's a slight negative correlation at the level of countries between gun ownership and homicide. The correlation is a little more pronounced when you take out the US. I wouldn't call it a smoking gun.
It is often easy to tell when someone is voting against their own interest. For example, they vote democrat or republican.
And I can easy tell from the way you write that you voted for Kang.
That would have happened anyway, since in China (until recently, anyway) and other third world countries, labor is dirt-cheap.
Ah, yes, the "we didn't need that industry anyway" argument. The US will continue to see such things because supporting foreign technology development is more important than having a future.
And since "Pro-gun" doesn't have any alternative solution, the outcome is that the US doesn't do anything.
There's no need to actually have a solution, much less a solution that doesn't work.
and all the businesses were screaming
And we have since seen 50 years of industry move to China and elsewhere. I guess there was something to that screaming after all.
Democrats were only able to pass it when they had control of the Presidency and Congress, with a super-majority in the Senate. Even then, it took a year of political wrangling and caused the rest of the President's legislative agenda to be dead-on-arrival.
Only due to grossly incompetent leadership. Lyndon B. Johnson wouldn't have had such trouble for example.
Look, understanding the problem is the best way to make sure you aren't a part of it, so even if you plan to do nothing about it you could at least listen. Reading your posts it's clear that you haven't even done that, and worse still object to other people talking about it (no-one forced you to read/watch or comment), which means that you ARE part of the problem.
Well, I suppose I can't expect you to understand my viewpoint when I didn't say what it was. But given that over 56% and growing portion of the incoming US college class are female (with somewhat greater graduation rates as well), if those women aren't going into a particular field (particularly with the host of incentives out there) at the approved rate, then I can't be bothered to care.
If you don't want to be involved, fine, but the rest of us would like to have this conversation.
It's not the conversation that bothers me. After all, crazy people might have conversations about lizards ruling the world without disturbing me or my society in the least. I'm concerned because you're going to want to do something as a result of your "conversation" which will harm my society without any indication you have a clue what you're doing.
There's way too much conversation about giving females additional and ample opportunities at the expense of males even in the face of superior opportunities at present and too little about equal treatment of the sexes.
Ensuring that said genocide actually solves your problem is complicated.
Everything is complicated on this scale. But some things are far less complicated. For example, the US and Russia could work together to eliminate 90% of the world's population in oh, a couple of hours by nuking developing world population centers. The complexity has already been paid through by development of a nuclear weapons infrastructure.
They also probably have bioweapons (with vaccines) that they could use to kill off people on that scale. Again, it's complexity that is mostly paid for.
It's worth noting that most massacres and genocides aren't conducted to solve "overpopulation". Overpopulation is the problem of having too many people, but most massacres are about killing the "wrong type" of people (wrong skin color, wrong gender, wrong religion, wrong social class, etc)
Why would that matter? Even if it remains true, there are plenty of wrong people out there.
Finally, who really thinks that killing off 90% of the human population is somehow going to be harder than growing the population to 10 or 11 billion while trying to aggressively mitigate global warming and giving a better than current developed world standard of living to most of the world? Given how messed up current AGW mitigation efforts have been, I don't see this latest unicorn delivery system being as simple as advertised.
But it isn't over population that is causing this, it is greed. The planet could support up to 40 billion humans if we lived just for our needs, but only 2 billion people that indulge like the typical American.
40 billion is not even an order of magnitude greater than present population. Meanwhile if we dropped an order of magnitude in population, we would be under your "typical American" threshold by a factor of 2. In other words, the global warming problem goes away if you reduce population permanently by an order of magnitude even in the presence of so-called "greed".
And who really wants to live in a world where you live for your needs? It's not a viable endstate.
Hence, why I said "Earth orbit" which is effectively what "near Earth's gravity" means. I bet one could separate the oxygen/metal reaction from the propellant for a modest loss of ISP and mass fraction, eliminating the spew.
Just covering your ears and going "la la la it's perfect" isn't really a solution.
Actually, it is. A key step you are missing here is a demonstration that there is a solution that we can take here which is better than doing nothing about the problem.
Using killing as a solution is actually pretty complicated.
I don't see that actually. If one looks at the massacres and genocides of the past, they were complex, but relatively easy and quick to pull off as long as the other side were completely overpowered.
I graciously accept your surrender.
NASA has their own inflation rate used for budgeting long-term projects, and it trends much higher than the US national inflation rate. The reason is obvious when you think about it: back in the 1950s, many common commercial products were handmade, with domestic labour, but are now mass-produced with cheap overseas labor and advanced labor-saving technologies (depending on the type of product). But just like in the 1950s, NASA still builds things largely by hand, generally in small numbers, and with a highly skilled domestic workforce.
The reason is obvious: they used their inflation rate as a key part of computing the costing of the next iteration of contracts. This created a feedback which greatly increased the cost of contracts and the resulting computed inflation rate over time.
This has led to wildly overpriced contracts. For example, a NASA group computed (see discussion of the "appendix") the traditional costing for a hypothetical NASA contract which would have built the Falcon 9 (including development of the Falcon I and three rocket engine designs). They arrived at a figure of $4.0 billion (this is for the bid, we're not even to cost overruns that occur after a contract is awarded). The actual SpaceX development cost as vetted by a NASA audit? $390 million.
My take at this time is that NASA's inflation index (the New Start Inflation Index is unintentionally pure fiction as part of a feedback dynamic that has greatly increased the cost of NASA activities.
Obama isn't a bad leader (in general, the world hates the US far less now than they did back in 2003-2005), but he has spent his life in an ivory tower, so tends to be like European leaders -- erring on the side of Chamberlain.
Yay for low expectations. "Erring on the side of Chamberlain" is quite the backhanded foreign policy compliment.
They live in a place that has NEVER flooded until the seventies.
Yea, right. They just never had a place they could leave to until the 70s.
Whether you believe in God or climate change, and I'm not certain why the two are typically mutually exclusive, it has to occur to you that change is inevitable. Tangible evidence exists that the World's weather is different now, and it doesn't take a wild leap of imagination to infer that eight billion humans probably have something to do with it.
The sacrifice required now to right the ship is minimal compared to what it will become in a decade... and past a certain tipping point, there will be no remedy. Buy some land where it's presently very cold.
The only simple solution is to kill a bunch of people. Nothing else "solves" overpopulation in a simple way. And if the chicken littles are correct, then it'll be much easier to solve that problem in ten years.
Plus, chain immigration is how most ancestors of US residents got there in the first place.
The shuttle's misuse as a payload delivery platform was not a technical failure of the vehicle. You are right, it was a terrible cargo vehicle, but would have been an excellent vehicle on which to operate longer-duration special missions that required the equipment to be launched and returned in one configuration.
Utility > capability. Capability is just a technology demonstration in the absence of further usefulness.
Inflation isn't that high but there are lots of costs associated with such projects.
Of course, there are. The thing here is that they'd still cost $15 billion even in the absence of the "tech" because the cost driver is corruption and inefficiency not the tech.
The developed world already had clean water and air. That's not something that changes when you reduce CO2 emissions. The developing world in exchange for these measures becomes poorer which tends to correlate with population growth and more pollution.
Oddly, it was a Slashdot poster who gave me this challenge.
It's not odd at all. This is a common ruse on Slashdot. Read this 800+ page report and only then shall you know enough to agree with me. But oddly enough, the person laying down this ridiculous challenge usually hasn't done that task either.
Yea, I doubt you'll be punished as much for simply not having a belief as you would for having the wrong belief.
As for the climate change issue, I think this is a pretty good stance: http://www.gocomics.com/joelpe...
It's a profoundly ignorant stance, both of the economic consequences of screwing with the world's energy and transportation infrastructure, and of hopelessly misunderstanding the opposition to climate change mitigation.
Even stopped clocks are right twice a day, but we don't count on them to tell time. Life is more than condescending plots ripped from low budget movies. Show global warming is a problem requiring our urgent attention rather than spin fantasy about how your genius gets ignored.