Correlation != Causation. The states with the most rigorous CC laws also have the highest populations, and higher population means more crime both in "real" numbers and proportionally.
Man, you're not supposed to agree, you're supposed to start telling me that tariffs are the answer! Then I can rip you up for forcing the poor consumer to pay more, etc, etc.
Oh well, there goes my economics flamewar.
Agree that it sucks that other countries have to suffer through the same mistakes we did. I don't know how we could help them get past it though.
The problem with sending foreign aid is that it gets stuck at the top, and the poor never reap enough benefit to coalesce into the sort of middle class structure that is a requirement for real change.
In my mind it's more about fair working conditions rather than western wages, but, again that goes to the individual countries labor laws, and too many of them are only too glad to sell out their citizens to bring in foreign investment.
(Aside: I hold this same view regarding immigrant labor in the US; no minimum wage, but give them the same OSHA protections and ability to sue that american workers get...It'll enforce ethical treatment, while allowing local companies to benefit from cheap, willing labor. Of course, this always brings the job protectionists out of the woodwork...God forbid the dirty Mexicans steal our x-mas tree cutting and chicken processing jobs).
And I'm solidly opposed to "legislating morality" in the form of requiring businesses to adhere to this or that business practice; those sorts of laws almost always end up causing more trouble than good.
It was that way where I was (in the US); doesn't help that I'm a wordy bastard either. I used to resort to writing in script because my cursive is more legible than the bastard hybrid of print and cursive I normally write in.
That's relative though. I had a prof complain about the cursive, so I switched to my "default" handwriting, and then he complained about that, despite my habit of writing the uppercase and lowercase alphabet on the top of the first page of every blue book, as a decryption key. The only thing my writing has going for it is that my default font size is about 16pt, so at least it's big.
Where do you work that anyone can throw whatever garbage queries that they want to run on production hardware? I've been working with databases out here in the real world for a decade, and I've never dealt with that sort of situation anywhere else.
Yes and no. It's like coal power; sure it's cheap electricity, but it's cheap mainly because the costs in terms of pollution and illness are unaccounted for.
China is a great example of the dangers of ignoring the environment; hell, there is still an article on the front page of/. about it. Ftfa 16 of the top 20 most polluted cities in the world are in China. Sure, they produce cheap plastic crap cheaper than anyone else, but those costs will catch up with them and they will have to be paid.
And so when local labor costs are legislated to a level that is higher than the market will bear, and the work gets sent elsewhere, how is that helping the people who can't get jobs?
Yea, overseas labor exploitation sucks, but, you know what? The jobs that they'd be doing otherwise suck just as bad. You think they're dragging people kicking and screaming off their subsistence farms to force them to work in factories?
In the long run, that money that gets pumped into the economies of those countries make it possible for the sort of liberalism that you're espousing to take root there. And that provides better conditions for them in the long run than misguided attempts to force conditions on labor markets in other countries.
I always hated that crap. University hardware is always overutilized, and forcing me to use their machines and their environment when I have equal or better equipment at home is absurd.
I had a RDMS class where we were required to do all the work on this POS server; can you imagine working on databases with a bunch of amateurs crushing the machine with the most hideously malformed SQL imaginable?
My stuff was readily apparent because I tended to get bored with student level coding and add "easter eggs" for the auto-tester.
Basically the way it worked was you submitted your program, and they ran a piece of test code that threw data at it and checked the responses. It tried various combinations of data to see if your program worked to parameters, and threw the right errors with bad data.
What I did was add a random factor to my error handling so that after a certain number of failed tests it would throw an occasional curveball, which wouldn't be reproducable to the automation, so it would flag it for a TA, who would then add a snide remark and knock off a point or two if they were in a bad mood. (As an example, One of the early stupid programs was to build a simulated "Tamagotchi" and they were supposed to starve to death if you didn't feed them; 9 times in 10 mine would, but the 10th time they would have a cage match (if there was more than 1) and the winner would eat the loser. The death match code was 8 times as long as the rest of the program.)
The testing program also checked for cheating, by parsing the code and checking it against all other submitted code. The one time I got flagged for cheating (someone swiped my code off a printer, and wasn't smart enough to notice my widgets) my traditional wonky output was "proof" enough for the prof to clear me with only a couple of questions.
Anyway, can you imagine handwritten assignments in Comp sci? Have you seen the handwriting of the average CS geek?
My wierd liberal-arty background puts me in the top tier of CS handwriting (erratic but occasionally legible) but the fast majority of my peers fall into the average bracket (incomprehensible scrawl), and there are plenty who sink to the darkest depths (febrile 2 year old, epileptic with dyslexia) from whence no meaning can be derived.
If it weren't for keyboards, none of us would be able to convey our ideas in written form.
No offense or anything but the day I buy an email migration tool...I think a lot of people feel the same way. 50 million paying users for an email migration tool? That many people haven't sprung for WinZip in its entire history, and winzip is vastly more useful.
I think they are dramatically overestimating the amount of marketshare that they could have captured.
I checked the I-95 tolls before I posted. There are two tolls in Delaware, and then three more in Maryland, though you have your choice between the tunnels, so you only have to pay two tolls total in MD.
Then there is the Jersey Turnpike. Then the GWB. Basically that stretch is toll hell.
Yea, well sorry I didn't respond sooner, because I was out jogging three miles and eating a hummus and tomato sammich. I'm currently 32, and I don't smoke, I drink in moderation, and I exercise.
Therefore, you sir, are barking up the wrong tree, and when you're creaking and groaning at 65, you can watch me popping in my dentures to scarf down some cheeseburgers, and shooting heroin into my eyeballs, because frankly, unless they cure old age (and I think that, if such a thing does become possible it'll still happen way too late for me) my definition of a quality life will dictate that I kick over before I become too old to properly take a piss.
I have no desire to be a frail 90 year old wreck with nothing to live for but the possibility of a successful bowel movement and a good crossword puzzle.
No way; it takes at least a half hour, because of all the damn tolls! Between Delaware and Baltimore, I started driving down 81, because it was cheaper to drive out of my way than to pay 15 dollars in tolls.
Sibling poster is right about forestry being limited, and I'll tell you, it's rife with politicing as well...Any field that depends on the gov't for money is going to be rife with it.
And economics? Jesus. If you wanted to go into brokerage or something, maybe, but pure economics is an extremely limited niche field where people dismiss you if you don't say what they want to hear. Or you could teach.
It's all a generalization. I do "IT" and my current niche is perfect for my weird ass brain; I have different stuff to do all the time. I get to code, I get to work with hardware infrastructure and crazy high-end hardware. I get disaster recovery and security auditing and hardening. Minimal supervision, and a purchasing card with a daily limit so high I could buy myself a car.
It's more about the job than anything else. My primary field of study was cognitive science, which deals with computers only peripherally. You get some skills, and then you find a job that you want to do, that uses those skills. Or one that you want to do that requires a non-specific degree, whatever.
Shit, I wish my job was boring. When something breaks it gets so exciting I worry that I'm going to keel over dead.
Anyway, the damn snowflakes need to suck it up. What entry level job isn't boring? You put in your crappy dues, so that you get a better job down the road. I've worked all kinds of jobs, and they're pretty much all boring, even things you wouldn't think would be boring. I did a stint doing wildlife tagging, where I got to roam around on a four wheeler shooting things with a tranq gun, and that was astoundingly boring...99% of the time you just sat and waited and let the mosquitos gorge themselves on your blood.
I haven't provided any data, merely a link an article about a study. You may dispute it at your leisure.
Though I do call your premise into question. Smoking and obesity are thought to reduce your average lifespan by ~12 years. Since the average lifespan is 78-81 in the US, that means that smokers and obese people tend to kick off "young" which is to say in their 60s and early 70s, which is around retirement age in this country. So they work the majority of their lives and then kick over dead when they become a drain on society, as opposed to a person who may live an extra 10+ years in non-productive retirement.
Of course there are no guarantees. I lost both my parents and both my inlaws (all from non-smoking/obesity related causes) and the oldest was only 62, while the youngest was 32 (accident/bone cancer/aneurysm/brain cancer). That being the case, I find the anti-smoking/anti-obesity obsession to be self-serving at best.
I ran cross country, and I assure you that while those numbers are low, they are far from atypical. You run 15-25 miles a day for months at a time, and there isn't much fat left, regardless of how much you eat.
It is a model in the same sense that most studies are. They grabbed a random sampling of people, and drew conclusions from their available data. If you're saying that the study isn't a magical 100% true fact, I agree, but I would also point out that no study is 100% fact; they are all extrapolation from a sample set.
You missed the entire point of the article, as evidenced by the fact that you only cited figures based on health problems. At no point did the article deny that many health problems were caused by smoking and obesity; they merely pointed out that smokers and obese people tended to have more dramatic, life-ending health problems earlier and that that tendency saved money over the long run, as compared with people who lived long enough to fall prey to the chronic health problems of old age.
Sure, lung cancer and heart disease treatment is expensive, but so is spending a decade in a nursing home.
Are all ACs trolls? I'll respond to your little strawman, however.
One of many justifications for the moral health police is that people who live an unhealthy lifestyle "cost" more than people who are healthy. This study is evidence that that assumption is not to be taken as a given, but rather that, in fact, an unhealthy lifestyle may cost the average taxpayer less than a healthy lifestyle.
So for a government to make the argument from cost, as Japan is doing, it is very relevant to point out that, in this situation, your base premise is unsupportable.
This is simply a point of logic, and as such, it is unsurprising that a moronic AC would hop out of the woodwork to throw out the suggestion that allowing someone to choose an unhealthy lifestyle is the moral equivalent of active involuntary euthanasia for old people.
And women naturally have higher body fat percentages; I remember that from cross country, where the guys would all be in the 3-5% range, and the girls would all be in the 12-15% range. We were all equally painfully thin, but their body fat was higher.
Correlation != Causation. Most people in this country with big waists are fat and unhealthy, but that doesn't mean that having a big waist means you are fat and unhealthy.
Health is not something that can be measured by waist size alone.
Well, too much in this country is made about BMI. If you're 6 feet tall and weigh 200 pounds you can be a chubby guy or a really fit guy or somewhere in between, but regardless the government classifies you as "overweight". You need to set a standard for health that doesn't deal with weird metrics like "waist size" or "body mass index".
Well wow, that's just dumb. Didn't they read that smokers and fat people cost the government less thank skinny people?. The study was done by the Dutch, and their healthcare is mandatory private (like people are talking about for the US) supplemented by socialized healthcare for people who are elderly or unable to otherwise function, so I'd think they'd have a pretty good idea of what the costs are. _ Sure, the smokers and fat people have more health problems, but they have the decency to drop dead and not linger on the government dime, senile and incontinent, for a few extra decades. _ I try to keep healthy, but when I hit the point where I'm not enjoying life much any more, I'm eating whatever the hell I want, taking up heroin. I'll be mainlining viagra II, and having sex with the kind of scary women that'd have sex with me! You see these articles coming out of Florida about old guys getting arrested for trying to buy drugs, just for the hell of it, and I don't understand what the problem is. This society is so fricking weird; god forbid you threaten your own ability to live to 110. _ Life is one of those things where it's really about quality, not quantity.//Sorry about the stupid dashes. Goddamn system isn't taking my paragraph breaks.
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Correlation != Causation. The states with the most rigorous CC laws also have the highest populations, and higher population means more crime both in "real" numbers and proportionally.
Man, you're not supposed to agree, you're supposed to start telling me that tariffs are the answer! Then I can rip you up for forcing the poor consumer to pay more, etc, etc.
Oh well, there goes my economics flamewar.
Agree that it sucks that other countries have to suffer through the same mistakes we did. I don't know how we could help them get past it though.
The problem with sending foreign aid is that it gets stuck at the top, and the poor never reap enough benefit to coalesce into the sort of middle class structure that is a requirement for real change.
In my mind it's more about fair working conditions rather than western wages, but, again that goes to the individual countries labor laws, and too many of them are only too glad to sell out their citizens to bring in foreign investment.
(Aside: I hold this same view regarding immigrant labor in the US; no minimum wage, but give them the same OSHA protections and ability to sue that american workers get...It'll enforce ethical treatment, while allowing local companies to benefit from cheap, willing labor. Of course, this always brings the job protectionists out of the woodwork...God forbid the dirty Mexicans steal our x-mas tree cutting and chicken processing jobs).
And I'm solidly opposed to "legislating morality" in the form of requiring businesses to adhere to this or that business practice; those sorts of laws almost always end up causing more trouble than good.
It was that way where I was (in the US); doesn't help that I'm a wordy bastard either. I used to resort to writing in script because my cursive is more legible than the bastard hybrid of print and cursive I normally write in.
That's relative though. I had a prof complain about the cursive, so I switched to my "default" handwriting, and then he complained about that, despite my habit of writing the uppercase and lowercase alphabet on the top of the first page of every blue book, as a decryption key. The only thing my writing has going for it is that my default font size is about 16pt, so at least it's big.
Where do you work that anyone can throw whatever garbage queries that they want to run on production hardware? I've been working with databases out here in the real world for a decade, and I've never dealt with that sort of situation anywhere else.
Yes and no. It's like coal power; sure it's cheap electricity, but it's cheap mainly because the costs in terms of pollution and illness are unaccounted for.
China is a great example of the dangers of ignoring the environment; hell, there is still an article on the front page of /. about it. Ftfa 16 of the top 20 most polluted cities in the world are in China. Sure, they produce cheap plastic crap cheaper than anyone else, but those costs will catch up with them and they will have to be paid.
And so when local labor costs are legislated to a level that is higher than the market will bear, and the work gets sent elsewhere, how is that helping the people who can't get jobs?
Yea, overseas labor exploitation sucks, but, you know what? The jobs that they'd be doing otherwise suck just as bad. You think they're dragging people kicking and screaming off their subsistence farms to force them to work in factories?
In the long run, that money that gets pumped into the economies of those countries make it possible for the sort of liberalism that you're espousing to take root there. And that provides better conditions for them in the long run than misguided attempts to force conditions on labor markets in other countries.
I always hated that crap. University hardware is always overutilized, and forcing me to use their machines and their environment when I have equal or better equipment at home is absurd.
I had a RDMS class where we were required to do all the work on this POS server; can you imagine working on databases with a bunch of amateurs crushing the machine with the most hideously malformed SQL imaginable?
My stuff was readily apparent because I tended to get bored with student level coding and add "easter eggs" for the auto-tester.
Basically the way it worked was you submitted your program, and they ran a piece of test code that threw data at it and checked the responses. It tried various combinations of data to see if your program worked to parameters, and threw the right errors with bad data.
What I did was add a random factor to my error handling so that after a certain number of failed tests it would throw an occasional curveball, which wouldn't be reproducable to the automation, so it would flag it for a TA, who would then add a snide remark and knock off a point or two if they were in a bad mood. (As an example, One of the early stupid programs was to build a simulated "Tamagotchi" and they were supposed to starve to death if you didn't feed them; 9 times in 10 mine would, but the 10th time they would have a cage match (if there was more than 1) and the winner would eat the loser. The death match code was 8 times as long as the rest of the program.)
The testing program also checked for cheating, by parsing the code and checking it against all other submitted code. The one time I got flagged for cheating (someone swiped my code off a printer, and wasn't smart enough to notice my widgets) my traditional wonky output was "proof" enough for the prof to clear me with only a couple of questions.
Anyway, can you imagine handwritten assignments in Comp sci? Have you seen the handwriting of the average CS geek?
My wierd liberal-arty background puts me in the top tier of CS handwriting (erratic but occasionally legible) but the fast majority of my peers fall into the average bracket (incomprehensible scrawl), and there are plenty who sink to the darkest depths (febrile 2 year old, epileptic with dyslexia) from whence no meaning can be derived.
If it weren't for keyboards, none of us would be able to convey our ideas in written form.
No offense or anything but the day I buy an email migration tool...I think a lot of people feel the same way. 50 million paying users for an email migration tool? That many people haven't sprung for WinZip in its entire history, and winzip is vastly more useful.
I think they are dramatically overestimating the amount of marketshare that they could have captured.
You failed at failing, I applaud your skillz.
I checked the I-95 tolls before I posted. There are two tolls in Delaware, and then three more in Maryland, though you have your choice between the tunnels, so you only have to pay two tolls total in MD.
Then there is the Jersey Turnpike. Then the GWB. Basically that stretch is toll hell.
Yea, well sorry I didn't respond sooner, because I was out jogging three miles and eating a hummus and tomato sammich. I'm currently 32, and I don't smoke, I drink in moderation, and I exercise.
Therefore, you sir, are barking up the wrong tree, and when you're creaking and groaning at 65, you can watch me popping in my dentures to scarf down some cheeseburgers, and shooting heroin into my eyeballs, because frankly, unless they cure old age (and I think that, if such a thing does become possible it'll still happen way too late for me) my definition of a quality life will dictate that I kick over before I become too old to properly take a piss.
I have no desire to be a frail 90 year old wreck with nothing to live for but the possibility of a successful bowel movement and a good crossword puzzle.
No way; it takes at least a half hour, because of all the damn tolls! Between Delaware and Baltimore, I started driving down 81, because it was cheaper to drive out of my way than to pay 15 dollars in tolls.
Of course, with the gas these days...
Sibling poster is right about forestry being limited, and I'll tell you, it's rife with politicing as well...Any field that depends on the gov't for money is going to be rife with it.
And economics? Jesus. If you wanted to go into brokerage or something, maybe, but pure economics is an extremely limited niche field where people dismiss you if you don't say what they want to hear. Or you could teach.
It's all a generalization. I do "IT" and my current niche is perfect for my weird ass brain; I have different stuff to do all the time. I get to code, I get to work with hardware infrastructure and crazy high-end hardware. I get disaster recovery and security auditing and hardening. Minimal supervision, and a purchasing card with a daily limit so high I could buy myself a car.
It's more about the job than anything else. My primary field of study was cognitive science, which deals with computers only peripherally. You get some skills, and then you find a job that you want to do, that uses those skills. Or one that you want to do that requires a non-specific degree, whatever.
Shit, I wish my job was boring. When something breaks it gets so exciting I worry that I'm going to keel over dead.
Anyway, the damn snowflakes need to suck it up. What entry level job isn't boring? You put in your crappy dues, so that you get a better job down the road. I've worked all kinds of jobs, and they're pretty much all boring, even things you wouldn't think would be boring. I did a stint doing wildlife tagging, where I got to roam around on a four wheeler shooting things with a tranq gun, and that was astoundingly boring...99% of the time you just sat and waited and let the mosquitos gorge themselves on your blood.
I haven't provided any data, merely a link an article about a study. You may dispute it at your leisure.
Though I do call your premise into question. Smoking and obesity are thought to reduce your average lifespan by ~12 years. Since the average lifespan is 78-81 in the US, that means that smokers and obese people tend to kick off "young" which is to say in their 60s and early 70s, which is around retirement age in this country. So they work the majority of their lives and then kick over dead when they become a drain on society, as opposed to a person who may live an extra 10+ years in non-productive retirement.
Of course there are no guarantees. I lost both my parents and both my inlaws (all from non-smoking/obesity related causes) and the oldest was only 62, while the youngest was 32 (accident/bone cancer/aneurysm/brain cancer). That being the case, I find the anti-smoking/anti-obesity obsession to be self-serving at best.
I ran cross country, and I assure you that while those numbers are low, they are far from atypical. You run 15-25 miles a day for months at a time, and there isn't much fat left, regardless of how much you eat.
It is a model in the same sense that most studies are. They grabbed a random sampling of people, and drew conclusions from their available data. If you're saying that the study isn't a magical 100% true fact, I agree, but I would also point out that no study is 100% fact; they are all extrapolation from a sample set.
You missed the entire point of the article, as evidenced by the fact that you only cited figures based on health problems. At no point did the article deny that many health problems were caused by smoking and obesity; they merely pointed out that smokers and obese people tended to have more dramatic, life-ending health problems earlier and that that tendency saved money over the long run, as compared with people who lived long enough to fall prey to the chronic health problems of old age.
Sure, lung cancer and heart disease treatment is expensive, but so is spending a decade in a nursing home.
Are all ACs trolls? I'll respond to your little strawman, however.
One of many justifications for the moral health police is that people who live an unhealthy lifestyle "cost" more than people who are healthy. This study is evidence that that assumption is not to be taken as a given, but rather that, in fact, an unhealthy lifestyle may cost the average taxpayer less than a healthy lifestyle.
So for a government to make the argument from cost, as Japan is doing, it is very relevant to point out that, in this situation, your base premise is unsupportable.
This is simply a point of logic, and as such, it is unsurprising that a moronic AC would hop out of the woodwork to throw out the suggestion that allowing someone to choose an unhealthy lifestyle is the moral equivalent of active involuntary euthanasia for old people.
And women naturally have higher body fat percentages; I remember that from cross country, where the guys would all be in the 3-5% range, and the girls would all be in the 12-15% range. We were all equally painfully thin, but their body fat was higher.
Correlation != Causation. Most people in this country with big waists are fat and unhealthy, but that doesn't mean that having a big waist means you are fat and unhealthy.
Health is not something that can be measured by waist size alone.
Well, too much in this country is made about BMI. If you're 6 feet tall and weigh 200 pounds you can be a chubby guy or a really fit guy or somewhere in between, but regardless the government classifies you as "overweight". You need to set a standard for health that doesn't deal with weird metrics like "waist size" or "body mass index".
Well wow, that's just dumb. Didn't they read that smokers and fat people cost the government less thank skinny people?. The study was done by the Dutch, and their healthcare is mandatory private (like people are talking about for the US) supplemented by socialized healthcare for people who are elderly or unable to otherwise function, so I'd think they'd have a pretty good idea of what the costs are. //Sorry about the stupid dashes. Goddamn system isn't taking my paragraph breaks.
_
Sure, the smokers and fat people have more health problems, but they have the decency to drop dead and not linger on the government dime, senile and incontinent, for a few extra decades.
_
I try to keep healthy, but when I hit the point where I'm not enjoying life much any more, I'm eating whatever the hell I want, taking up heroin. I'll be mainlining viagra II, and having sex with the kind of scary women that'd have sex with me! You see these articles coming out of Florida about old guys getting arrested for trying to buy drugs, just for the hell of it, and I don't understand what the problem is. This society is so fricking weird; god forbid you threaten your own ability to live to 110.
_
Life is one of those things where it's really about quality, not quantity.