No one cares how bad it was 100 years ago. The only question is why is it getting worse when we have been doing well to drive it to zero, and more importantly how are we going to fix it.
Well, I care how bad it was 100 years ago.
And whatever makes you think we've been driving suicide rates to zero? The data shows that, over the long term, suicide rates are essentially unchanged - they fluctuate from year to year, and the noise allows people to write about how much worse it was since xxxx (where xxxx is picked to make it look like we have a crisis in the making now)....
Life was shit, social mobility was practically non-existent, the poor had to work insanely hard and had no rights while rich people had all the rights and only got richer, and there was basically no social security at all beyond what you and your family could provide. You know, the kind of dystopia we seem to be headed for with the speed of light today? The dream age of every libertard out there.
And yet, before that peak 110-odd years back, suicide rate was lower than now (roughly comparable to 1999 levels). And afterwards, likewise.
What changed to cause that peak? What changed to cause that peak to go away?
A quick check of older data shows that suicide rates, even though up 30% since the turn of the century, are about the same as a century ago.
And well below the peak 90 years ago.
Well below where it was 110 years ago, for that matter.
Note that the previous peak corresponded with the beginning of the Great Depression. Not really sure what was happening 110 or so years ago to cause a bounce in suicide rates - it overlapped with WW1, but got started well before then....
Instead of relying on the FCC using a shakey legal foundation to enforce net neutrality, Congress should pass an actual law laying out exactly what should and shouldn't occur, and assign an agency to oversee.
Just so.
Note that one good thing about Trump as President is that it MIGHT make Congress stop abdicating its responsibilities to the Executive Branch. They've given the Executive the power to wage war, and entirely too damn much power to (effectively) make laws over the last half century or so. About time they reclaimed some of the Legislative powers they've given away....
Your head (if upright) is further from the center of the Earth, so it's traveling faster than your feet. Should it not age more slowly?
Yes. And, according to Relativity, it does. By an infinitesimal amount (on the order of 1E-25 - in other words, all else being equal, your feet, over the period since the beginning of the Universe, will be as much as 0.03 microseconds older than your head). Note that there's a much larger (though still infinitesimal) difference between you and your parents, assuming your parents don't live at the same latitude you do, of course.
Barring extinction by some event before then, I have little doubt we will be a fully interstellar species before the next turn of the millennium.
It would be a pretty depressing thing if we weren't interplanetary by 2118. Interstellar? That's a different order of magnitude and impossible to guess when we might even come close to that.
Umm, "before the turn of the millennium" means "before 3000AD", not before 2118....
Abandonware means there's no owner anymore so there's nobody to "steal" from.
No, abandonware is IGNORED (as in: not supported) by its owner. If the owner suddenly sees some money to be made from it, he'll start paying attention....
Kennedy couldn't have been in office by the end of the decade even if he hadn't been assassinated. He proposed a literal moon-shot and it happened.
Would it have happened if he had NOT been shot, though? That's the question. Even if he wanted to do so, would Congress have agreed with him enough to spend money hand-over-fist to do so?
Barrier to entry is really the only reason renewables aren't preferred.
No, lack of acreage is really the only reason renewables aren't preferred. Admittedly, they're getting some free new acreage right now, but that probably isn't going to continue long enough....
Any future law automatically supersedes existing law. So they're making themselves look good, without actually imposing any immediate changes.
When the time for real change comes along, if it turns out to be too expensive, the then legislators will be on the hook for changing things (including taxes) that the current legislators carefully skipped in the process of writing a bill to make themselves look good without actually doing anything.
when you're on chemo you have to give up on the concept of nutrition and hope that the cancer dies before you starve to death.
Interesting notion.
I should note that not a single one of the doctors who did my chemotherapy (including the last time, which was designed to kill off all of my bone marrow) mentioned this. Nor did I have any particular problem eating (and staying overweight) till that last go, and that last go was more due to me being too sick to eat (was touch and go for a while whether the new bone marrow would take hold, of course).
i'm not sure where you get 2.8, because the actual number spent on welfare is about 1.2
If you'd read the post carefully before deciding I was wrong, you might have noticed the word "entitlements". Which I used for a reason.
And in case you're interested, it has a specific meaning in US law. Note that Welfare, Medicare, Medicaid, and several other things (plus State-level equivalents) come under the umbrella "entitlements". And those first three alone amount to ~$2.8T.
Why, that's about 3,500,000,000,000. (three point five trillion dollars)
Or just about our entire US budget, welfare, infrastructure, government, military, the whole show.
Quite so. However, it must be remembered that it replaces ALL the entitlements we currently have, at Federal & State levels.
Federal entitlements that would be replaced amount to around $2.8T, which cuts the net cost of such a program to around $700B per annum.
Not counting the costs saved at the State level. Which cuts another $200B off the net cost of such a program. So the net cost of such a program would be no higher than $500B.
Now, given that the Feds take in about $3.3T per year in taxes, we'd need about a 10% Federal tax increase to pay the full cost of such a program.
In other words, no, it wouldn't break the bank.
The tax increase wouldn't even put tax rates back to where they were pre-1980. And we'd be able to eliminate a fair amount of extra Federal spending on bureaucrats no longer needed to determine eligibility for the existing social programs being replaced. And State bureaucrats the same.
So, yeah, it's doable. Would take some work, since it would produce some profound changes in our society (and possibly in other nations, depending on whether they decided to follow suit or no), but still doable. Probably with less overall impact than WW2 had on our society....
The ideal is to make it very difficult or expensive to spy on people, so they only spy on the few people they need to be spying on.
Devil's Advocate Mode: Activated.
The problem with spying only on the "the few people they need to be spying on" is that you generally don't know who you need to be spying on till you've spied on them.
Devil's Advocate Mode: Off.
Which is not to suggest I approve of spying on the general population. Just that I can see why spy agencies gotta spy. And on as many people as they can get away with.
It's not like there are rare occurrences of unsolicited phone calls coming through, hitting people once in a lifetime.
Hmm, got to wonder what the difference in our situations is. I haven't gotten an unsolicited phone call in a very long time. Like, not since Obama was President (if that recently)....
Yeah, it's almost like my life is finite and reading legalese isn't what I want to do with it. I want it outsourced to a third party. You know, like making sure my hot dog won't kill me. What's that called... government regulators.
So, you don't trust your fellow man, but you DO trust "government regulators", who are, by and large, your fellow man?
Slashdot Mirror
Yeppers. And the process for developing & approving a new one takes longer than two years. MUCH longer than two years.
Public domain. Eminent domain is something else entirely....
The part that struck me as ludicrous was the "secret plans to develop a supersonic anti-ship missile for use on U.S. submarines by 2020".
You can't get a new stove approved for submarine use in two years, much less develop and certify a new missile....
Well, I care how bad it was 100 years ago.
And whatever makes you think we've been driving suicide rates to zero? The data shows that, over the long term, suicide rates are essentially unchanged - they fluctuate from year to year, and the noise allows people to write about how much worse it was since xxxx (where xxxx is picked to make it look like we have a crisis in the making now)....
I'm not taking anything into account. The data I looked at was suicides per 100K population in the USA....
And yet, before that peak 110-odd years back, suicide rate was lower than now (roughly comparable to 1999 levels). And afterwards, likewise.
What changed to cause that peak? What changed to cause that peak to go away?
The Navy uses three phase electricity aboard ship. Just requires a generator designed to produce it. Does NOT require three generators....
And well below the peak 90 years ago.
Well below where it was 110 years ago, for that matter.
Note that the previous peak corresponded with the beginning of the Great Depression. Not really sure what was happening 110 or so years ago to cause a bounce in suicide rates - it overlapped with WW1, but got started well before then....
Just so.
Note that one good thing about Trump as President is that it MIGHT make Congress stop abdicating its responsibilities to the Executive Branch. They've given the Executive the power to wage war, and entirely too damn much power to (effectively) make laws over the last half century or so. About time they reclaimed some of the Legislative powers they've given away....
Yes. And, according to Relativity, it does. By an infinitesimal amount (on the order of 1E-25 - in other words, all else being equal, your feet, over the period since the beginning of the Universe, will be as much as 0.03 microseconds older than your head). Note that there's a much larger (though still infinitesimal) difference between you and your parents, assuming your parents don't live at the same latitude you do, of course.
Umm, "before the turn of the millennium" means "before 3000AD", not before 2118....
No, abandonware is IGNORED (as in: not supported) by its owner. If the owner suddenly sees some money to be made from it, he'll start paying attention....
Would it have happened if he had NOT been shot, though? That's the question. Even if he wanted to do so, would Congress have agreed with him enough to spend money hand-over-fist to do so?
No, lack of acreage is really the only reason renewables aren't preferred. Admittedly, they're getting some free new acreage right now, but that probably isn't going to continue long enough....
It's meaningless.
Any future law automatically supersedes existing law. So they're making themselves look good, without actually imposing any immediate changes.
When the time for real change comes along, if it turns out to be too expensive, the then legislators will be on the hook for changing things (including taxes) that the current legislators carefully skipped in the process of writing a bill to make themselves look good without actually doing anything.
Interesting notion.
I should note that not a single one of the doctors who did my chemotherapy (including the last time, which was designed to kill off all of my bone marrow) mentioned this. Nor did I have any particular problem eating (and staying overweight) till that last go, and that last go was more due to me being too sick to eat (was touch and go for a while whether the new bone marrow would take hold, of course).
If you'd read the post carefully before deciding I was wrong, you might have noticed the word "entitlements". Which I used for a reason.
And in case you're interested, it has a specific meaning in US law. Note that Welfare, Medicare, Medicaid, and several other things (plus State-level equivalents) come under the umbrella "entitlements". And those first three alone amount to ~$2.8T.
Quite so. However, it must be remembered that it replaces ALL the entitlements we currently have, at Federal & State levels.
Federal entitlements that would be replaced amount to around $2.8T, which cuts the net cost of such a program to around $700B per annum.
Not counting the costs saved at the State level. Which cuts another $200B off the net cost of such a program. So the net cost of such a program would be no higher than $500B.
Now, given that the Feds take in about $3.3T per year in taxes, we'd need about a 10% Federal tax increase to pay the full cost of such a program.
In other words, no, it wouldn't break the bank.
The tax increase wouldn't even put tax rates back to where they were pre-1980. And we'd be able to eliminate a fair amount of extra Federal spending on bureaucrats no longer needed to determine eligibility for the existing social programs being replaced. And State bureaucrats the same.
So, yeah, it's doable. Would take some work, since it would produce some profound changes in our society (and possibly in other nations, depending on whether they decided to follow suit or no), but still doable. Probably with less overall impact than WW2 had on our society....
Coast. Fix your sig...
No, to influence mentally unstable people to vote for the mayor who is giving them free money....
Devil's Advocate Mode: Activated.
The problem with spying only on the "the few people they need to be spying on" is that you generally don't know who you need to be spying on till you've spied on them.
Devil's Advocate Mode: Off.
Which is not to suggest I approve of spying on the general population. Just that I can see why spy agencies gotta spy. And on as many people as they can get away with.
Complements. Compliments means something different.
Hmm, got to wonder what the difference in our situations is. I haven't gotten an unsolicited phone call in a very long time. Like, not since Obama was President (if that recently)....
So, you don't trust your fellow man, but you DO trust "government regulators", who are, by and large, your fellow man?
"I'm from the government, I'm here to help"....
Okay, just yelled that at the dinosaurs eating at the suet block I put out for them. They ignored me.
What, someone told you dinosaurs were extinct?? We shall politely assume they were misinformed....