how are different laws going to affect the people that don't obey the law to begin with?
Supply and demand. If the supply of machine guns is limited, their cost will be high. Note how GP said the M16 costs about $20k now due to the low supply.
Does it stop people from using machine guns to commit crime? No.
Does it minimize the number of crimes committed with machine guns? Yes.
On the individual level, if you die by a firearm, chances are you had some sort of control over it. You went to the ghetto, for instance, so it's no surprise you got mugged and shot. They didn't properly secure their weapon so someone ended up shooting themselves. It's a sort of Just World hypothesis.
These massacres are beyond control, though. They happen to people going to school. They happen to people watching a movie in a theater. These people didn't do anything wrong. This violates the Just World hypothesis, and so it causes people to panic.
not a single one of the new regulations being proposed would have stopped any of these mass shootings
The argument isn't that the new regulations (like banning high cap mags) would stop or prevent mass shootings. The argument is that the regulations would reduce the body count at the end of the day.
So you're telling me that gun registration has never, ever helped solve a crime by identifying where a gun originated and allowing the police to whittle down a list of suspects? Not once, in the entire history of gun registration?
I'm begging you, please stop with the confiscation straw man. The US government will never confiscate everyone's firearms. Period. I'm so confident that I will bet you US$1000 that the government will never confiscate weapons.
Lots of people want to have a real discussion about reasonable gun control measures that make everyone happy, but we can't have such a discussion if everyone is freaking out over the impossible.
Because good guys and innocents usually outnumber bad guys. This makes it easier for a bad guy to exhaust all his ammo, and makes it harder for a good guy to exhaust all his ammo. Once the good guy shoots the bad guy, the good guy stops shooting. Once the bad guy shoots a good guy, the bad guy picks a new target.
I know some hunters and if any of them needed more than 10 bullets to put a deer down, they'd hang up their rifle and quit.
Would any of the potential gun control measures being discussed have prevented that woman from owning the weapon she used to defend herself? If the answer to that question is no, then your story is a pure red herring.
Believe it or not, it's actually not that simple. The government did not merely ask Megaupload to not delete evidence - they asked Megaupload to avoid doing anything that might alert anyone that there was even an investigation. Actually, the government asked Carpathia to ask Megaupload. Go figure...
So all of the chemicals are known, then? There aren't any "trade secrets" or "proprietary chemicals" which allow companies to avoid disclosing at least one chemical present in the mixture? So I guess section 322 of the Energy Policy Act of 2005 (the so-called "Halliburton Loophole") is just an imaginary or unnecessary piece of legislation that does not bear the signature of a President?
I guess it depends on how you define "known". I mean, in PA, there's a law that says a doctor can file a request with a company that requires them to disclose the identity and amount of any chemicals used in fracking. So I guess it is "known" by that regard.
However, if these chemicals are so "known", then why did the PA legislature pass a law last year which essentially placed a gag order on physicians, preventing them from even telling the patient what has made them sick? (I gave you Google so you can pick and choose which media outlet you prefer, so that I can avoid being called "biased" based on the source provided) Only chemicals which are not "trade secrets" will be publicly available. In order to have access to the "trade secret" chemicals, you need to sign an NDA - which means you can't even tell the patient about the chemicals.
I grew up on a farm and we owned a few horses. In western PA, no less. I've shoveled my fair share of horse poop, so I know what it smells and looks like - and this isn't it.
No, we want a world in which prosecutors charge people for the crimes they committed, instead of trumping up charges.
Swartz was (allegedly) guilty of misdemeanor trespassing. That's it. Nothing more. Misdemeanor trespassing in MA is typically 30 days and/or $100 fine. Compare that to up to 35 years, plus being labeled a felon for the rest of his life.
The whole computer fraud thing was total bullshit, the campus is an open campus and Swartz was authorized to use the computers - he also gave all the articles back to JSTOR without reprinting any of them, and JSTOR even asked the Feds to drop their case against him. Prosecutors who intentionally trump up charges for victimless misdemeanors into felonies SHOULD be punished for their over-reach.
While he probably wasn't going to get the max, any conviction was going to make him a felon. Being labeled a felon gets you screwed pretty hard in today's society. Perpetrators of victimless crimes should never be made into felons.
The other thing is that you ask "what's with the timing?" There are things that you are not privy to. Perhaps he was just about to run out of savings to pay for lawyer's fees - and the trial hasn't even started. Perhaps it was the 2-year anniversary of his arrest last week. It's merely speculation about his motives, but until you can rule all of that out, you yourself are speculating that there was no "event" that triggered his decision.
Yet another way of looking at it is that increased inequality comes with significant benefits for our society
Uh...got a citation for that? I can understand how some inequality can provide the incentive to achieve your true potential by rewarding such achievements appropriately, but increased inequality?
Do you feel that there is a limit to the increase in inequality? A tipping point after which further increase will be detrimental to society?
For example, consider economies of scale. When inequality reaches a certain threshold, the middle class will be unable to purchase consumer goods, such as an HDTV. When there is only a small middle class with such purchasing power, then the number of HDTVs that can be sold is smaller, and so all of the R&D costs must be amortized across a smaller number of units, leading to significantly higher prices. With fewer people owning HDTVs, the cable company has less incentive to provide HD content, because there aren't as many customers to amortize the costs over. If the cable company isn't providing any HD content, then many manufacturers may just decide that HDTVs aren't even worth it because they won't be able to recoup their upfront capital requirements.
I know that TV is a trivial example compared to life expectancy, but the general theory extrapolates to the rest of society. How many MRI magnets would there be in the world if there wasn't a large number of people who needed to be scanned? How many prescription drugs could be made if there wasn't a large number of people to consume them?
You're right that income inequality, in and of itself, does not reduce life expectancy. However, the consequences at the individual level that arise from large income inequality are profound. The red herring answer of "shooting the top 10%" barks up the wrong tree. The right answer is to reward the middle class for their reasonable contributions to society (teaching, fire fighting, policing, etc) by giving them a fair wage, and then allowing economies of scale to kick in and benefit the upper class. Call it "trickle up".
High inequality leads to large groups of people who live below the poverty line who are unable to provide adequate care for themselves or their family. Let's say this segment of the population has some chance of catching a nasty disease due to the inadequate care. This disease can spread through society and eventually hit those who do care for themselves as they interact with society, which inevitably contains some of those below-poverty-line folks, especially as this group gets larger.
In a more equal society, everyone can afford to take better care of themselves, so the number of people catching these nasty diseases decreases. People are also less desperate, their lives are more stable, and they have more to live for, so they are less likely to go batshit crazy due to stress and anxiety.
It's not that inequality itself is a mystical force. You prosper when your neighbor prospers. It's a positive feedback loop.
A heavy Democratic party vote in a couple of large states could easily result in an aggregate house vote count nationally for Democrats well above that for Republicans, but that is meaningless nationally since each district votes to elect its own representative. A million to 1 Democratic votes in San Francisco, California, doesn't help a Democrat running in Reno, Nevada.
The implication of your last sentence is that the results wouldn't be manipulated at the state level. But state level manipulation of congressional districts is very easy to demonstrate.
Let us take PA (just because I happen to live there and know a lot about it)
About 2.7 million people (50.2%) voted for Democrats, while 2.6 million (48.8%) voted for Republicans. This was actually lower than the general election, where 52% voted for Obama and 46.6% voted for Romney. So you might think that PA was split roughly evenly between red and blue from these totals, right? All the same state, after all...
Except the GOP controls 13/18 House seats, or about 72% of them. Losing the popular vote at the state level, and getting less than half of the popular vote overall, yet they control more than 2/3 of the House seats?
Oh, but it gets better. The GOP at the state level did an excellent job with their gerrymandering. They packed so many Democrats into blue districts that they would win their district by an average of 52% (Democrats won PA-1 and PA-2 by 70% and 80%, respectively). The GOP won their districts by an average of 18%. Only one district was competitive in any way, PA-12, which the GOP won by 3%. Every other district in PA was won by double digits by the designated party.
Will you consider Social Security an entitlement after you retire and bark loudly about how you paid into SS and now it's your turn? SS is a benefit, not an entitlement, by law it cannot add to the deficit.
Next, nobody gets free housing and free utilities. They get subsidies. Sometimes the subsidies are large, other times it's not. But you should perhaps try the Food Stamp Challenge - $4/person/day, that's about what you get from SNAP. It's surprisingly hard to live on that much.
As far as "I don't get anything out of etc etc" - sure you do. When people have nothing, they're so desperate they'll do anything, up to and including loot/rape/pillage, they'll sleep in the streets or maybe even freeze to death, etc. So you get lower crime. You also get better economies of scale when there are more potential customers for things like food, which lowers the price of food for you too. And maybe your parents are on SS now, and they have low income so they're on some utility subsidy. These subsidies offset the amount of money you will need to spend to support your parents in their twilight years, which directly benefits you.
Gerrymandering is not a phenomenon that happens at the national level, but the state level. The same pattern holds true for various states as well, such as PA and OH.
Did population density crash once lead was removed from gasoline? Because if population density was the source of the correlation, the removal of lead from gasoline should have no effect on violent crime, since most major cities are still major cities today...
If it were, we would have reverted back to pre 1950's crime levels.
Only if all those people exposed to lead suddenly died and we were left only with those who had not been exposed. However, if they're still hanging around, they will raise the level above the pre-1950's.
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DC vs. Heller
Sorry to tell you this, but it's not getting smacked down. Mentally ill people and felons have no second amendment rights.
how are different laws going to affect the people that don't obey the law to begin with?
Supply and demand. If the supply of machine guns is limited, their cost will be high. Note how GP said the M16 costs about $20k now due to the low supply.
Does it stop people from using machine guns to commit crime? No.
Does it minimize the number of crimes committed with machine guns? Yes.
On the individual level, if you die by a firearm, chances are you had some sort of control over it. You went to the ghetto, for instance, so it's no surprise you got mugged and shot. They didn't properly secure their weapon so someone ended up shooting themselves. It's a sort of Just World hypothesis.
These massacres are beyond control, though. They happen to people going to school. They happen to people watching a movie in a theater. These people didn't do anything wrong. This violates the Just World hypothesis, and so it causes people to panic.
The argument isn't that the new regulations (like banning high cap mags) would stop or prevent mass shootings. The argument is that the regulations would reduce the body count at the end of the day.
Cho had 15-round mags in his Glock.
Now let's say there's one bad guys with a gun, and 10 good guys with a gun. Can all the good guys identify the other good guys?
Now let's say there are three bad guys with a gun and 12 good guys with a gun. Will all the good guys be able to identify all the bad guys?
Actually the Weimar republic had completely banned guns before the Nazis took power, and the Nazis deregulated gun controls from there.
So you're telling me that gun registration has never, ever helped solve a crime by identifying where a gun originated and allowing the police to whittle down a list of suspects? Not once, in the entire history of gun registration?
I'm begging you, please stop with the confiscation straw man. The US government will never confiscate everyone's firearms. Period. I'm so confident that I will bet you US$1000 that the government will never confiscate weapons.
Lots of people want to have a real discussion about reasonable gun control measures that make everyone happy, but we can't have such a discussion if everyone is freaking out over the impossible.
Because good guys and innocents usually outnumber bad guys. This makes it easier for a bad guy to exhaust all his ammo, and makes it harder for a good guy to exhaust all his ammo. Once the good guy shoots the bad guy, the good guy stops shooting. Once the bad guy shoots a good guy, the bad guy picks a new target.
I know some hunters and if any of them needed more than 10 bullets to put a deer down, they'd hang up their rifle and quit.
Would any of the potential gun control measures being discussed have prevented that woman from owning the weapon she used to defend herself? If the answer to that question is no, then your story is a pure red herring.
My take on comments:
Write the comments first, describing the overall goal, inputs and outputs.
Then write the actual code that implements the comments.
Believe it or not, it's actually not that simple. The government did not merely ask Megaupload to not delete evidence - they asked Megaupload to avoid doing anything that might alert anyone that there was even an investigation. Actually, the government asked Carpathia to ask Megaupload. Go figure...
So all of the chemicals are known, then? There aren't any "trade secrets" or "proprietary chemicals" which allow companies to avoid disclosing at least one chemical present in the mixture? So I guess section 322 of the Energy Policy Act of 2005 (the so-called "Halliburton Loophole") is just an imaginary or unnecessary piece of legislation that does not bear the signature of a President?
I guess it depends on how you define "known". I mean, in PA, there's a law that says a doctor can file a request with a company that requires them to disclose the identity and amount of any chemicals used in fracking. So I guess it is "known" by that regard.
However, if these chemicals are so "known", then why did the PA legislature pass a law last year which essentially placed a gag order on physicians, preventing them from even telling the patient what has made them sick? (I gave you Google so you can pick and choose which media outlet you prefer, so that I can avoid being called "biased" based on the source provided) Only chemicals which are not "trade secrets" will be publicly available. In order to have access to the "trade secret" chemicals, you need to sign an NDA - which means you can't even tell the patient about the chemicals.
I grew up on a farm and we owned a few horses. In western PA, no less. I've shoveled my fair share of horse poop, so I know what it smells and looks like - and this isn't it.
No, we want a world in which prosecutors charge people for the crimes they committed, instead of trumping up charges.
Swartz was (allegedly) guilty of misdemeanor trespassing. That's it. Nothing more. Misdemeanor trespassing in MA is typically 30 days and/or $100 fine. Compare that to up to 35 years, plus being labeled a felon for the rest of his life.
The whole computer fraud thing was total bullshit, the campus is an open campus and Swartz was authorized to use the computers - he also gave all the articles back to JSTOR without reprinting any of them, and JSTOR even asked the Feds to drop their case against him. Prosecutors who intentionally trump up charges for victimless misdemeanors into felonies SHOULD be punished for their over-reach.
10 years might not be unbearable, but having to wear the label of felon for the rest of your life would be.
Two things.
While he probably wasn't going to get the max, any conviction was going to make him a felon. Being labeled a felon gets you screwed pretty hard in today's society. Perpetrators of victimless crimes should never be made into felons.
The other thing is that you ask "what's with the timing?" There are things that you are not privy to. Perhaps he was just about to run out of savings to pay for lawyer's fees - and the trial hasn't even started. Perhaps it was the 2-year anniversary of his arrest last week. It's merely speculation about his motives, but until you can rule all of that out, you yourself are speculating that there was no "event" that triggered his decision.
And you don't have to work in the Ethics department to understand that trespassing doesn't normally get prosecuted like this.
Uh...got a citation for that? I can understand how some inequality can provide the incentive to achieve your true potential by rewarding such achievements appropriately, but increased inequality?
Do you feel that there is a limit to the increase in inequality? A tipping point after which further increase will be detrimental to society?
For example, consider economies of scale. When inequality reaches a certain threshold, the middle class will be unable to purchase consumer goods, such as an HDTV. When there is only a small middle class with such purchasing power, then the number of HDTVs that can be sold is smaller, and so all of the R&D costs must be amortized across a smaller number of units, leading to significantly higher prices. With fewer people owning HDTVs, the cable company has less incentive to provide HD content, because there aren't as many customers to amortize the costs over. If the cable company isn't providing any HD content, then many manufacturers may just decide that HDTVs aren't even worth it because they won't be able to recoup their upfront capital requirements.
I know that TV is a trivial example compared to life expectancy, but the general theory extrapolates to the rest of society. How many MRI magnets would there be in the world if there wasn't a large number of people who needed to be scanned? How many prescription drugs could be made if there wasn't a large number of people to consume them?
You're right that income inequality, in and of itself, does not reduce life expectancy. However, the consequences at the individual level that arise from large income inequality are profound. The red herring answer of "shooting the top 10%" barks up the wrong tree. The right answer is to reward the middle class for their reasonable contributions to society (teaching, fire fighting, policing, etc) by giving them a fair wage, and then allowing economies of scale to kick in and benefit the upper class. Call it "trickle up".
High inequality leads to large groups of people who live below the poverty line who are unable to provide adequate care for themselves or their family. Let's say this segment of the population has some chance of catching a nasty disease due to the inadequate care. This disease can spread through society and eventually hit those who do care for themselves as they interact with society, which inevitably contains some of those below-poverty-line folks, especially as this group gets larger.
In a more equal society, everyone can afford to take better care of themselves, so the number of people catching these nasty diseases decreases. People are also less desperate, their lives are more stable, and they have more to live for, so they are less likely to go batshit crazy due to stress and anxiety.
It's not that inequality itself is a mystical force. You prosper when your neighbor prospers. It's a positive feedback loop.
The implication of your last sentence is that the results wouldn't be manipulated at the state level. But state level manipulation of congressional districts is very easy to demonstrate.
Let us take PA (just because I happen to live there and know a lot about it)
About 2.7 million people (50.2%) voted for Democrats, while 2.6 million (48.8%) voted for Republicans. This was actually lower than the general election, where 52% voted for Obama and 46.6% voted for Romney. So you might think that PA was split roughly evenly between red and blue from these totals, right? All the same state, after all...
Except the GOP controls 13/18 House seats, or about 72% of them. Losing the popular vote at the state level, and getting less than half of the popular vote overall, yet they control more than 2/3 of the House seats?
Oh, but it gets better. The GOP at the state level did an excellent job with their gerrymandering. They packed so many Democrats into blue districts that they would win their district by an average of 52% (Democrats won PA-1 and PA-2 by 70% and 80%, respectively). The GOP won their districts by an average of 18%. Only one district was competitive in any way, PA-12, which the GOP won by 3%. Every other district in PA was won by double digits by the designated party.
A similar analysis can be done for OH and VA.
Will you consider Social Security an entitlement after you retire and bark loudly about how you paid into SS and now it's your turn? SS is a benefit, not an entitlement, by law it cannot add to the deficit.
Next, nobody gets free housing and free utilities. They get subsidies. Sometimes the subsidies are large, other times it's not. But you should perhaps try the Food Stamp Challenge - $4/person/day, that's about what you get from SNAP. It's surprisingly hard to live on that much.
As far as "I don't get anything out of etc etc" - sure you do. When people have nothing, they're so desperate they'll do anything, up to and including loot/rape/pillage, they'll sleep in the streets or maybe even freeze to death, etc. So you get lower crime. You also get better economies of scale when there are more potential customers for things like food, which lowers the price of food for you too. And maybe your parents are on SS now, and they have low income so they're on some utility subsidy. These subsidies offset the amount of money you will need to spend to support your parents in their twilight years, which directly benefits you.
You do well when your neighbor does well, too.
Gerrymandering is not a phenomenon that happens at the national level, but the state level. The same pattern holds true for various states as well, such as PA and OH.
AIG was not giving AIG a choice. Had they not messed up so badly, they wouldn't have needed an emergency loan.
Did population density crash once lead was removed from gasoline? Because if population density was the source of the correlation, the removal of lead from gasoline should have no effect on violent crime, since most major cities are still major cities today...
Only if all those people exposed to lead suddenly died and we were left only with those who had not been exposed. However, if they're still hanging around, they will raise the level above the pre-1950's.