well, for one, the last major terrorist attack would not be 9/11. and it wouldn't be the one after that, either.
You have absloutely no evidence of that. This is just more right-wing spin that somehow liberals are weak on defence and terrorism, which has no basis in fact.
Saddam would still be in control of iraq.
That might be true, and 750 American soldiers would still be alive today and Saddam would STILL not have had any WMD and STILL would be hated by al queda. Saddam in power in Iraq - so what!
the economy would have continued to go down in the 24 months directly after 9/11.
What kind of alternate universe do you live in where the economy has improved since 2000!?
I know in your zealotry you will never be persuaded by mere facts and truth, but your assertions are nonsense.
I'm not going to look it up, but the US Government Printing Office has a very good booklet (about 20 pages and free or very cheap) about these balloons with plenty of illustrations, photos and a good discussion of the theory of operation. As a weapon of war they were not very effective. I ordered one of the booklets many years ago and still remember it.
Notice that cars are not bilaterally symmetrical. for example the batteries on cars are usually on the right to partly offset the weight of the driver. Gas tanks are often not located in the center of the vehicle but are offset to the right. Stock car racing started in the 30's and believe me no one back then was thinking of the weight of the driver and its effect on cornering. Stock cars probably began racing on CCW tracks because that was the direction horses raced.
Most people are sheep and blindly follow "the directions," even when those directions result in nonfunctioning items.
Sometimes people are not very creative, but as a blanket theory about humans your idea just doesn't hold up to common experience. Just as people can be blind to different ways to do something they can be just as extreme in the other direction - using things in ways they were never designes to be used. Just think of the millions of uses paper clips and coat hangers have been put to over the years rather than clipping papers and hanging coats.
Are there millions who blindly follow directions - yes. Are there millions who seldom read or follow directions - yes. Your generalization about human behavior doesn't hold water.
They blame the nonfunctionality on themselves, rather than on the design.
What planet are you from again? In my experience people almost never take the blame for things that do not work - they almost always blame the item, the design, or someone else.
You are right, $200,000 is not rich - but it is certainly well off. $200,000 however SEEMS stinking rich to someone making $455/week. It also seems stinking rich to the majority of Americans.
Being STINKING RICH means paying $227,000 and $280,000 in TAXES like Bush and Cheney did in 2003. Bush and Cheney make more in a day than someone making $455/week makes in a month - and now they want to cut overtime pay for the poor schmucks who need the extra pay to survive.
There is nothing wrong with making money, but when you use the power gained by that money to steal it from the paychecks of hard-working Americans who need it, then THAT is stinking, fucking, obscenely rich.
Wake up. First, the rule does NOT say IT workers get overtime pay if they make less than $455/week, it says they don;t get overtime AT ALL because their job does not involve manual labor. So unless your primary responsibility job is stringing cables or the like you will not get overtime pay.
Secondly, there are LOTS of people who make more than a pitiful $23,600 per year who make overtime pay (and $23,600 is what $455/week translates into).
Bush made SEVEN HUNDRED THOUSAND dollars last year, while his buddy Cheney made EIGHT hundred thousand. I don;t have a problem with people making a lot of money, but i don;t want them making rules that take it away from people who are just barely surviving. These guys made more in a day than the poor jerks who make $455/week made in an entire MONTH - and now they want to stop their overtime pay!!!
Bush, Cheney, rove, Wolfowitz, and Runsfeld are all multi-millionaires who want to make sure all the money comes to them and their fat cat cronies. Now he wants to keep the poor slobs who make a fucking pitifull $23,000 an year from getting overtime pay. It is all about greed and power. It is about Enron and Halliburton and oil and the Saudi royal family and money, money, money. Wake the fuck up.
There are lots of problems with the objectivity and quality of this self-described "landmark study". First, it is not an independent scientific or academic study but a commercially prepared document that is for sale. In itself that does not invalidate its conclusions, but add the fact that IDC does consulting work in this area and the objectivity of the study becomes a factor. There are clearly financial benefits for IDC in the paper's conclusions. I have no evidence that it is not completely objective, but there are definately some clues about its poor technical quality.
I have not read the study since I am not about to pay good money for the privilege, but from IDC's own press release the most obvious problem is that the writers don't seem to be able to differentiate between spam "sent" and spam "received". This is basic stuff. The writers state that 32% of email sent in North America is spam, but what they really mean is 32% of email received in North America is spam. [They only know "received" spam because all their data came from questionaires sent to companies that receive spam]. That is a big difference, particularly since a sizable percentage of spam sent is either filtered out before receipt or is addressed to non-working email addresses. I suspect that the amount of spam sent is many times greater than the amount of spam received and is significanly greater than indicated in this so-called study.
Their incorrect assumption that email received in North America came from North America is another indication of the poor quality of this self-described "landmark study". I am no spam expert, but even I know my email can come from anywhere. This is a basic error that does not speak well for the competency of the report's writers.
That list only tells us the distribution of spamming individuals throughout countries, it says nothing about how much spam any of them send. One or two of these spammers may send 99.99% of all the spam sent in the world, and they may be located in Bora Bora for all we know. Inferring that the ratio of spam sent from any one country is the same as the ratio of spammers living there is logically incorrect.
But I really think it's only a matter of habit. I believe if an American lived in Sweden for a while (a country with one of the highest mobile phone penetration rates), they would quickly get used to hearing phones ringing and people talking on them all the time, without feeling necessarily annoyed.
I live in Manhattan and let me assure you that the density of cell phones has little to do with the annoyance level. I spend a lot of time in Europe and it is obvious to me that Americans tend to talk more loudly on their phones than do Europeans. There are exceptions - that annoying Lufthansa pilot on the train from Berlin to Frankfurt comes to mind as a homicide candidate to this day.
Amtrak does this, but people sometimes STILL use their cellphones there. Also, there is only one "quiet car" in the entire train (usually the first car), so it is always full.
Re:Are the real logisitics of this being considere
on
Listen to the Sky
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Do you have no imagination whatsoever? Its ART for cryin' out loud. Its not a scientific experiment.
Your theories on the law are from a parallel universe at best.
What he has done would be the equal to telling somebody that he found your door unlocked on your car and sent you a picture of him with the door open to prove it.
Except for the fact that he used the credit card he found in your locked car to buy $300,000 of gas.
Making things that no one uses is a waste, even if people get paid to do it.
Your assumption is wrong. These things [a-bombs and missles] WERE used. Rockets were not fired and A-bombs weren't ignited, but they were nevertheless used. They were used as a deterrent. Just because it is difficult to measure the dollar benefit of deterence do not think there was not one.
Also your argument is rather circular. You argue that the military is a net loss because it doesn't get to use all the things it makes and at the same time you argue that the military a net loss because it sometimes uses the things it makes. Which is it?
Just because the ultimate objective goal of the military does not include turning a profit (i.e. finished goods for sale are not made on military bases), it does not follow that the path to acheiving their goal is not economically beneficial. The construction of the pyramids employed hundreds of thousands of Egyptians for decades (they were not slaves as once thought) in what was really a pointless endeavor. In building them, great advances were made in the arts of engineering and astronomy to build what in the end turned out to be just worthless piles of rocks. We went to the moon in the 60's and so what? In the end the footprints on the moon are worth exactly zero, yet the act of getting there employed millions and advanced technology far beyond what it would have been had there been no manned space program. So be it with the military whose research into the destructive arts provide us with economic benefits in jobs and technology while, I hope, turning into metaphorical footprints and rock piles.
The military is no different in creating jobs than any other organization. They employ cooks, cleaners, grounds keepers, technicians, mathemeticians, accountants, nurses, etc, etc. The military of any democracy is not there to destroy but to be a deterrent to destruction. Its job is to protect capital.
The military does more creating than destroying. For example spy satellite technology, a militay technology, is now used for city planning, agricultural and environmental purposes that greatly benefit the economy - not to mention that the industry to produce those civilian satellites is there at all only because of the military.
Most weapons and weapons systems in the military never destroy anything because they are never used. Even though they are not used there is still benefit in their production. The billions we have spent in ICBMs and nuclear warheads since WWII are a perfect example - they have not destroyed so much as a doghouse but have created many jobs in the private sector (as well as keeping our highways free of invading armies). The military pays real money to real people to do real work. How anyone could think those jobs are smoke and mirrors is beyond me.
Your mistake is confusing the military's *potential* destructiveness with its *actual* destructiveness.
Drop that "1-2 gigs" of storage back in time to yourself ten years ago and tell me it's not "real storage".
But we live today, not ten years ago. Even twenty MB was "real storage" 20 years ago, one MB was real storage 30 years ago, and a few hundred KB was real storage 40 years ago! Everyone who read the original post should be able to figure out that "real" storage to that poster is storage equivalent to current electro-mechanical storage systems.
1-2 gigs holds damn near everything of interest to me in my life...all the digital photos I have...clocks in at around 300 MB...etc
Just because you seem to not need much storage does not mean others don't need it. Myself, I have individual images that are more than 300 MB each.
I did not say you were wrong about your career choice. I said you were a fool to dismiss all things not "scientific" as useless, unimportant, and immature. I stand by that assessment.
Which statement do you think conveys the most information: "Behold! I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." or "I estimate about 100 kilotons"? One expresses the width and depth and humanity of the creation of the atomic bomb, the other a technician's worthless yack. You think the education that allowed Oppenheimer to offer that profound quote from the Bhagavad Gita was worthless - I do not. Without humanity and philosophy science is a sterile plain without reference points.
I'm a bigot? How did you arrive at that conclusion? Was it because I dared to criticized you and you have an asian moniker? What kind of logic is that?
I have foolish pride? Again, why do you say that? Unless 'foolish pride' has a specific cultural meaning of which I am not aware, it doesn't make much logical sense to me in this context.
You have not made reasoned arguements, which, coming from the person who worships pure science and logic, seems strange indeed.
One way to slow these ads down is to contact the advertiser and tell them you don;t appreciate having your web browser hijacked for their ad.
i recently contacted Saab because of an incredibly intrusive full-page 15-second ad on the NYTimes that I had to look at 10 or 20 times a day. Even though I could click through it, I was sick, sick, sick of that ad very quickly. I received a reply from Saab saying they were sorry I didn't like their ad, but NO ONE ELSE [emphasis mine] had complained about it.
So complain folks. Send the the advertisers an email and politely tell them you don't like their intrusive ads and won't buy their products if they continue. It may be an empty threat, but if a company gets even one hundred complaints from consumers about an ad campaign they will seriously think about doing it differently the next time.
What about a week's worth of groceries? How do you take them on the bus? There's a reason why no one cooks in new york... they can't get their groceries home.
No one takes groceries on the subways or buses - we have them delivered, free! But the problem is not how to get groceries onto the subway, but where to put them in the miniscule apartments once we get them here.
Seriously, except for the big new internet-based FreshDirect outfit that uses trucks, deliveries of groceries are often made on special bicycles (actually tricycles) with large metal containers. Other times they are made by a guy pulling a hand truck.
The solution to many of these problems is to stop cramming people into high rise buildings where they live and bussing them to high rise building where they work. That model fails to produce quality of life wherever it has been tried worldwide.
Excuse me? You know not of which you speak. I live in Manhattan and the quality of life here is superb. (I know I'll get a lot of knee-jerk comments about bad old NYC, but they'll mostly come from people who only know about NYC from movies and TV.)
Your idea that people in suburbs don't breath polluted air is wrong. Entire regions of the country have poor air quality, most of it coming from those millions of economy cars you talk about and regional power plants.
The lead exposures you incorrectly attribute to cities comes mostly from lead in paint and lead in old pipes. These problems are not specific to cities, but also occur in houses built prior to the 1970's. Lead exposure would have been a better arguement 20 years ago when cars used leaded gas, making atmospheric levels of lead higher in city centers, but not today.
But that doesn't stop people from saying data-free things like "if more people would just use mass transit, things would be so much better".
It is your thinking is data-free. In NYC, London, Paris and Moscow (for example), where lots of people use mass transit 24 hours a day the mass transit systems run 24 hours a day. The scheduling of mass transit systems are dependent on ridership. Admittedly, scheduling is something of a chicken or egg situation but people who laud mass transit are not working data-free.
Most of these systems run at a loss. They almost all were built on a model that said they could run profitably if ridership were "X" and now in most cases ridership is "2X" or more.
So what? That is what government is for - to provide services we could not otherwise afford. The bottom line of a balance sheets has nothing to do with the value of a service to the community. The fire department doesn't make a profit, highways don't generally make a profit. The military doesn't make a profit.
Perhaps you could close on the person with the stun gun, but you would be fore-warned, motivated, prepared, and aware that it would cause no long-term damage to your body. These are not things a surprised mugger would have or know.
Of the commonly available "stun" weapons, the Tazer is indeed the best, but they aren't reliable stoppers.
It is true that for many years Tasers had stopping problems with highly motivated attackers, but the latest generation Tasers are *much* more effective. Perhaps your anecdotal evidence comes from the earlier models. For years Tasers were not popular with police departments because of this, but the recent Taser models are being purchased by police and military as fast Taser can make them. I think you might not be able to overcome a newer Taser no matter how motivated you were, but this is just a guess - I have no access to test results.
really disabling the nervous system is also capable of stopping the heart and killing the attacker
That is why this class of weapons is now called "less lethal" rather than "non-lethal".
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well, for one, the last major terrorist attack would not be 9/11. and it wouldn't be the one after that, either.
You have absloutely no evidence of that. This is just more right-wing spin that somehow liberals are weak on defence and terrorism, which has no basis in fact.
Saddam would still be in control of iraq.
That might be true, and 750 American soldiers would still be alive today and Saddam would STILL not have had any WMD and STILL would be hated by al queda. Saddam in power in Iraq - so what!
the economy would have continued to go down in the 24 months directly after 9/11.
What kind of alternate universe do you live in where the economy has improved since 2000!?
I know in your zealotry you will never be persuaded by mere facts and truth, but your assertions are nonsense.
I'm not going to look it up, but the US Government Printing Office has a very good booklet (about 20 pages and free or very cheap) about these balloons with plenty of illustrations, photos and a good discussion of the theory of operation. As a weapon of war they were not very effective. I ordered one of the booklets many years ago and still remember it.
Notice that cars are not bilaterally symmetrical. for example the batteries on cars are usually on the right to partly offset the weight of the driver. Gas tanks are often not located in the center of the vehicle but are offset to the right. Stock car racing started in the 30's and believe me no one back then was thinking of the weight of the driver and its effect on cornering. Stock cars probably began racing on CCW tracks because that was the direction horses raced.
Most people are sheep and blindly follow "the directions," even when those directions result in nonfunctioning items.
Sometimes people are not very creative, but as a blanket theory about humans your idea just doesn't hold up to common experience. Just as people can be blind to different ways to do something they can be just as extreme in the other direction - using things in ways they were never designes to be used. Just think of the millions of uses paper clips and coat hangers have been put to over the years rather than clipping papers and hanging coats.
Are there millions who blindly follow directions - yes. Are there millions who seldom read or follow directions - yes. Your generalization about human behavior doesn't hold water.
They blame the nonfunctionality on themselves, rather than on the design.
What planet are you from again? In my experience people almost never take the blame for things that do not work - they almost always blame the item, the design, or someone else.
You are right, $200,000 is not rich - but it is certainly well off. $200,000 however SEEMS stinking rich to someone making $455/week. It also seems stinking rich to the majority of Americans.
Being STINKING RICH means paying $227,000 and $280,000 in TAXES like Bush and Cheney did in 2003. Bush and Cheney make more in a day than someone making $455/week makes in a month - and now they want to cut overtime pay for the poor schmucks who need the extra pay to survive.
There is nothing wrong with making money, but when you use the power gained by that money to steal it from the paychecks of hard-working Americans who need it, then THAT is stinking, fucking, obscenely rich.
...and they can't fire us ALL!!!
That used to be true, but today they can outsource to India or China and pay someone else ten cents on the dollar for your work-product.
Wake up. First, the rule does NOT say IT workers get overtime pay if they make less than $455/week, it says they don;t get overtime AT ALL because their job does not involve manual labor. So unless your primary responsibility job is stringing cables or the like you will not get overtime pay.
Secondly, there are LOTS of people who make more than a pitiful $23,600 per year who make overtime pay (and $23,600 is what $455/week translates into).
Bush made SEVEN HUNDRED THOUSAND dollars last year, while his buddy Cheney made EIGHT hundred thousand. I don;t have a problem with people making a lot of money, but i don;t want them making rules that take it away from people who are just barely surviving. These guys made more in a day than the poor jerks who make $455/week made in an entire MONTH - and now they want to stop their overtime pay!!!
Bush, Cheney, rove, Wolfowitz, and Runsfeld are all multi-millionaires who want to make sure all the money comes to them and their fat cat cronies. Now he wants to keep the poor slobs who make a fucking pitifull $23,000 an year from getting overtime pay. It is all about greed and power. It is about Enron and Halliburton and oil and the Saudi royal family and money, money, money. Wake the fuck up.
There are lots of problems with the objectivity and quality of this self-described "landmark study". First, it is not an independent scientific or academic study but a commercially prepared document that is for sale. In itself that does not invalidate its conclusions, but add the fact that IDC does consulting work in this area and the objectivity of the study becomes a factor. There are clearly financial benefits for IDC in the paper's conclusions. I have no evidence that it is not completely objective, but there are definately some clues about its poor technical quality.
I have not read the study since I am not about to pay good money for the privilege, but from IDC's own press release the most obvious problem is that the writers don't seem to be able to differentiate between spam "sent" and spam "received". This is basic stuff. The writers state that 32% of email sent in North America is spam, but what they really mean is 32% of email received in North America is spam. [They only know "received" spam because all their data came from questionaires sent to companies that receive spam]. That is a big difference, particularly since a sizable percentage of spam sent is either filtered out before receipt or is addressed to non-working email addresses. I suspect that the amount of spam sent is many times greater than the amount of spam received and is significanly greater than indicated in this so-called study.
Their incorrect assumption that email received in North America came from North America is another indication of the poor quality of this self-described "landmark study". I am no spam expert, but even I know my email can come from anywhere. This is a basic error that does not speak well for the competency of the report's writers.
That list only tells us the distribution of spamming individuals throughout countries, it says nothing about how much spam any of them send. One or two of these spammers may send 99.99% of all the spam sent in the world, and they may be located in Bora Bora for all we know. Inferring that the ratio of spam sent from any one country is the same as the ratio of spammers living there is logically incorrect.
But I really think it's only a matter of habit. I believe if an American lived in Sweden for a while (a country with one of the highest mobile phone penetration rates), they would quickly get used to hearing phones ringing and people talking on them all the time, without feeling necessarily annoyed.
I live in Manhattan and let me assure you that the density of cell phones has little to do with the annoyance level. I spend a lot of time in Europe and it is obvious to me that Americans tend to talk more loudly on their phones than do Europeans. There are exceptions - that annoying Lufthansa pilot on the train from Berlin to Frankfurt comes to mind as a homicide candidate to this day.
Amtrak does this, but people sometimes STILL use their cellphones there. Also, there is only one "quiet car" in the entire train (usually the first car), so it is always full.
Do you have no imagination whatsoever? Its ART for cryin' out loud. Its not a scientific experiment.
Your theories on the law are from a parallel universe at best.
What he has done would be the equal to telling somebody that he found your door unlocked on your car and sent you a picture of him with the door open to prove it.
Except for the fact that he used the credit card he found in your locked car to buy $300,000 of gas.
Making things that no one uses is a waste, even if people get paid to do it.
Your assumption is wrong. These things [a-bombs and missles] WERE used. Rockets were not fired and A-bombs weren't ignited, but they were nevertheless used. They were used as a deterrent. Just because it is difficult to measure the dollar benefit of deterence do not think there was not one.
Also your argument is rather circular. You argue that the military is a net loss because it doesn't get to use all the things it makes and at the same time you argue that the military a net loss because it sometimes uses the things it makes. Which is it?
Just because the ultimate objective goal of the military does not include turning a profit (i.e. finished goods for sale are not made on military bases), it does not follow that the path to acheiving their goal is not economically beneficial. The construction of the pyramids employed hundreds of thousands of Egyptians for decades (they were not slaves as once thought) in what was really a pointless endeavor. In building them, great advances were made in the arts of engineering and astronomy to build what in the end turned out to be just worthless piles of rocks. We went to the moon in the 60's and so what? In the end the footprints on the moon are worth exactly zero, yet the act of getting there employed millions and advanced technology far beyond what it would have been had there been no manned space program. So be it with the military whose research into the destructive arts provide us with economic benefits in jobs and technology while, I hope, turning into metaphorical footprints and rock piles.
The military is no different in creating jobs than any other organization. They employ cooks, cleaners, grounds keepers, technicians, mathemeticians, accountants, nurses, etc, etc. The military of any democracy is not there to destroy but to be a deterrent to destruction. Its job is to protect capital.
The military does more creating than destroying. For example spy satellite technology, a militay technology, is now used for city planning, agricultural and environmental purposes that greatly benefit the economy - not to mention that the industry to produce those civilian satellites is there at all only because of the military.
Most weapons and weapons systems in the military never destroy anything because they are never used. Even though they are not used there is still benefit in their production. The billions we have spent in ICBMs and nuclear warheads since WWII are a perfect example - they have not destroyed so much as a doghouse but have created many jobs in the private sector (as well as keeping our highways free of invading armies). The military pays real money to real people to do real work. How anyone could think those jobs are smoke and mirrors is beyond me.
Your mistake is confusing the military's *potential* destructiveness with its *actual* destructiveness.
Drop that "1-2 gigs" of storage back in time to yourself ten years ago and tell me it's not "real storage".
But we live today, not ten years ago. Even twenty MB was "real storage" 20 years ago, one MB was real storage 30 years ago, and a few hundred KB was real storage 40 years ago! Everyone who read the original post should be able to figure out that "real" storage to that poster is storage equivalent to current electro-mechanical storage systems.
1-2 gigs holds damn near everything of interest to me in my life...all the digital photos I have...clocks in at around 300 MB...etc
Just because you seem to not need much storage does not mean others don't need it. Myself, I have individual images that are more than 300 MB each.
I did not say you were wrong about your career choice. I said you were a fool to dismiss all things not "scientific" as useless, unimportant, and immature. I stand by that assessment.
Which statement do you think conveys the most information: "Behold! I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." or "I estimate about 100 kilotons"? One expresses the width and depth and humanity of the creation of the atomic bomb, the other a technician's worthless yack. You think the education that allowed Oppenheimer to offer that profound quote from the Bhagavad Gita was worthless - I do not. Without humanity and philosophy science is a sterile plain without reference points.
I'm a bigot? How did you arrive at that conclusion? Was it because I dared to criticized you and you have an asian moniker? What kind of logic is that?
I have foolish pride? Again, why do you say that? Unless 'foolish pride' has a specific cultural meaning of which I am not aware, it doesn't make much logical sense to me in this context.
You have not made reasoned arguements, which, coming from the person who worships pure science and logic, seems strange indeed.
You are indeed a complete and utter fool. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
you are familiar with what's happened every single time a species was artifically transplanted unintentionally
Not "every single time" at all - just sometimes. We are only aware of the successful importations, not the unsuccessful ones.
Makes me glad we kicked your butt in '76.
One way to slow these ads down is to contact the advertiser and tell them you don;t appreciate having your web browser hijacked for their ad.
i recently contacted Saab because of an incredibly intrusive full-page 15-second ad on the NYTimes that I had to look at 10 or 20 times a day. Even though I could click through it, I was sick, sick, sick of that ad very quickly. I received a reply from Saab saying they were sorry I didn't like their ad, but NO ONE ELSE [emphasis mine] had complained about it.
So complain folks. Send the the advertisers an email and politely tell them you don't like their intrusive ads and won't buy their products if they continue. It may be an empty threat, but if a company gets even one hundred complaints from consumers about an ad campaign they will seriously think about doing it differently the next time.
What about a week's worth of groceries? How do you take them on the bus? There's a reason why no one cooks in new york... they can't get their groceries home.
No one takes groceries on the subways or buses - we have them delivered, free! But the problem is not how to get groceries onto the subway, but where to put them in the miniscule apartments once we get them here.
Seriously, except for the big new internet-based FreshDirect outfit that uses trucks, deliveries of groceries are often made on special bicycles (actually tricycles) with large metal containers. Other times they are made by a guy pulling a hand truck.
The solution to many of these problems is to stop cramming people into high rise buildings where they live and bussing them to high rise building where they work. That model fails to produce quality of life wherever it has been tried worldwide.
Excuse me? You know not of which you speak. I live in Manhattan and the quality of life here is superb. (I know I'll get a lot of knee-jerk comments about bad old NYC, but they'll mostly come from people who only know about NYC from movies and TV.)
Your idea that people in suburbs don't breath polluted air is wrong. Entire regions of the country have poor air quality, most of it coming from those millions of economy cars you talk about and regional power plants.
The lead exposures you incorrectly attribute to cities comes mostly from lead in paint and lead in old pipes. These problems are not specific to cities, but also occur in houses built prior to the 1970's. Lead exposure would have been a better arguement 20 years ago when cars used leaded gas, making atmospheric levels of lead higher in city centers, but not today.
But that doesn't stop people from saying data-free things like "if more people would just use mass transit, things would be so much better".
It is your thinking is data-free. In NYC, London, Paris and Moscow (for example), where lots of people use mass transit 24 hours a day the mass transit systems run 24 hours a day. The scheduling of mass transit systems are dependent on ridership. Admittedly, scheduling is something of a chicken or egg situation but people who laud mass transit are not working data-free.
Most of these systems run at a loss. They almost all were built on a model that said they could run profitably if ridership were "X" and now in most cases ridership is "2X" or more.
So what? That is what government is for - to provide services we could not otherwise afford. The bottom line of a balance sheets has nothing to do with the value of a service to the community. The fire department doesn't make a profit, highways don't generally make a profit. The military doesn't make a profit.
No problem, we'll just track you using the things you buy with that cash.
Perhaps you could close on the person with the stun gun, but you would be fore-warned, motivated, prepared, and aware that it would cause no long-term damage to your body. These are not things a surprised mugger would have or know.
Of the commonly available "stun" weapons, the Tazer is indeed the best, but they aren't reliable stoppers.
It is true that for many years Tasers had stopping problems with highly motivated attackers, but the latest generation Tasers are *much* more effective. Perhaps your anecdotal evidence comes from the earlier models. For years Tasers were not popular with police departments because of this, but the recent Taser models are being purchased by police and military as fast Taser can make them. I think you might not be able to overcome a newer Taser no matter how motivated you were, but this is just a guess - I have no access to test results.
really disabling the nervous system is also capable of stopping the heart and killing the attacker
That is why this class of weapons is now called "less lethal" rather than "non-lethal".