Did you read the article? Because the "exact" correlation also applies to other cultures, corresponding to the time they phased out lead. Did all cultures phase out DDT/asbestos/CFCs at the same time as they phased out lead?
Or perhaps the simpler explanation is that the specific risks and effects of TEL were unknown at the time.
The specific risks and effects of TEL were known as early as 1923, when the inventor took a prolonged vacation to cure lead poisoning. Here are excerpts from the wikipedia article for Thomas Midgley, Jr. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley,_Jr.
[...] In December 1921, while working under the direction of Kettering at Dayton Research Laboratories, a subsidiary of General Motors, Midgley discovered that the addition of TEL to gasoline prevented "knocking" in internal combustion engines.
[...] In 1923, Midgley took a prolonged vacation to cure himself of lead poisoning. "After about a year's work in organic lead," he wrote in January 1923, "I find that my lungs have been affected and that it is necessary to drop all work and get a large supply of fresh air." He went to Miami, Florida for convalescence.
[...] However, after two deaths and several cases of lead poisoning at the TEL prototype plant in Dayton, Ohio, the staff at Dayton was said in 1924 to be "depressed to the point of considering giving up the whole tetraethyl lead program." Over the course of the next year, eight more people would die at DuPont's Deepwater, New Jersey plant.
[...] On October 30, 1924, Midgley participated in a press conference to demonstrate the apparent safety of TEL. In this demonstration, he poured TEL over his hands, then placed a bottle of the chemical under his nose and inhaled its vapor for sixty seconds, declaring that he could do this every day without succumbing to any problems whatsoever. However, the State of New Jersey ordered the Bayway plant to be closed a few days later, and Jersey Standard was forbidden to manufacture TEL there again without state permission. Midgley himself was careful to avoid mentioning to the press that he required nearly a year to recover from the lead poisoning brought on by his demonstration at the press conference.
I keep seeing people say that this gun map is meant to intimidate people.
Can you please quote any part of the article accompanying the map to support the claim that this is meant to intimidate people?
It seems that one's opinion on whether this is intimidation depends on whether one is a gun person or not. Gun people don't like other people knowing they're gun people, so they think it's intimidation. Gunless people don't know just how prevalent guns are, so they consider this enlightening.
I am in the latter camp, which is why I don't see the intimidation factor. Of course, I also read the article, which may have contributed to how I perceive the gun map and the authors' intentions. So that is why I ask for some sort of source to back up the idea that this is meant to intimidate owners of pistols.
I read the newspaper article in its entirety. There was nothing in it that demonized anyone. The authors merely wanted to show people who don't own firearms how many of them are all around them, because the wealth of firearms all across this nation may not be obvious to people who live day-to-day without guns. This is patently clear from reading the article, they included several quotes from pro-gun sources without any sort of weasel words. The true irony is that the newspaper is being demonized for exercising their own rights to publish publicly available information.
If you feel ashamed that people know you are just "exercising your rights", that's your own personal problem.
The general populace *is* armed. In the US, there are 90 guns for every 100 people. We have 30% of the guns worldwide despite having less than 5% of the world's population! And yet shootings still happen, en masse and in public. There were even armed guards at Columbine but that didn't prevent it.
Sure, people with guns could stop a shooter sooner - but to think that no one will die is foolish. But being armed won't prevent mass shootings the way that keeping air in your tires will prevent your tire from blowing out, or how not playing football will prevent you from getting a degenerative brain disease as a result of multiple concussions. And that was my entire point - mass shootings are terrifying precisely because we can't take any actions personally to prevent them, all we can do is mitigate the damage once it has begun.
And there's one major flaw with your plan. What about convicted felons? They are by law required to be unarmed at all times. So every felon in the US is by definition neglecting their own personal safety?
Note how the parent was very specific about income tax. Why do the top 10% pay a greater share of federal income taxes? Because of Republican initiatives like the Earned Income Tax Credit, which allow a great many working poor to have negative federal income tax liability.
Take a look at payroll taxes. They are capped at about $106k. So for me and many other 95%ers, we are paying the full payroll tax liability. And yet anyone in that top 5% or so is paying a lower payroll tax rate than me. Whereas those taxes are usually about 6% of my income, for a really wealth individual they may be 0.6% or even less.
While we're busting this "federal income tax" myth, capital gains are not subject to income tax. It is actually the case that about six of the top 400 households in terms of income actually paid no federal income tax, either. It's my belief that capital gains should be taxed as ordinary income, because the person actually creating the wealth shouldn't pay more taxes than the person who merely fronts the money - especially when the person fronting the money isn't actually on the hook for any risk because the government will bail them out.
I'd be willing to wager quite a lot that most of these spending cuts won't amount to much for the majority of the population
It will take some time, but it will amount to much, I think.
Part of the problem is that we have too many people and not enough valuable work for them to do. A lot of the "government largesse" is actually unemployment compensation where we pay someone to essentially watch paint dry or some other useless thing. You may think we're cutting fat off the meat by getting rid of these useless people, but that's going to make our "too many people and not enough valuable work" problem worse. (so will raising the Social Security retirement age)
Outside of the outrageous fringe stuff, the large-ish scale protests were engaged in many-weeks-long non-violent protest in public areas, with generally small-ish scale protests outside the actual businesses themselves.
It's one thing to be prepared, but I would hope that the police force would prioritize threats better. I honestly think most of the money spent dealing with OWS (such as police overtime) could have generally been reduced by 90% without the general outcome changing, and that money could have been spent on better things like fighting Mexican drug lords instead - you know, dealing with people who actually engage in criminal and terrorist behavior - or even (gasp) not being taken from the taxpayers in the first place?
I have often thought something similar. Really, I see Democrat, Republican, Tea Party, and Occupy Wall Street as a grid of left/right and corporate/public. Generally, people see OWS and Dems as "left" while TP and GOP as "right" (columns of the grid). However, Dem and GOP represent corporate America, and in turn OWS and TP represent public America (rows of the grid).
I want both OWS and TP to succeed at the expense of corporate parties. I think that public America needs more support right now. One great way that they can synergize is the focus on small businesses; fewer CEOs with massive compensation, not too big to fail, profit stays in the local economy instead of being shipped out-of-state, smaller companies have a harder time buying politicians...I mean what's not to like about e.g. patronizing your local grocery store instead of Wal-Mart? (case in point: the owners of Wal-Mart have as much combined wealth as the bottom 40% of Americans)
I can identify with the best parts of each camp, but I also cringe at the worst parts of each camp, people calling for free shit (come on guys this shit costs real money) or people trying to enforce their religious views on me. These worst parts are then exploited by corporate parties to get the public fighting amongst themselves because when it really comes down to it, most people will be more offended by one camp's worst than the other's and this fact will be exploited by corporate parties to keep the public camps from realizing what they have in common.
My wife was on 1200 calories/day and 1 hour of intense exercise per day. She cut out sugar and all processed food, went to wheat bread, fruits. She was barely able to maintain her weight.
She switched to high-protein diet 6 days a week, high carb on the 7th day. No longer counts calories. No more intense exercise. She's losing a consistent 1 to 1.5 pounds per week.
Call me crazy, but the "fat diet" that she found actually works. It works for her, it works for her uncle, and it works for my mother (weight down, blood pressure down, cholesterol down).
It's not that high-protein diets are hard on you. It's that ketosis is hard on you, and you enter ketosis if you don't consume enough carbs. Rather, you should be saying it's the low-carb diet that's hard on you, which is why the best diet I have seen recommends a weekly cheat day where you consume MASSIVE amounts of carbs to prevent your body from going into ketosis during the rest of the week when carbs are severely restricted.
As a bonus, this weekly Thanksgiving also prevents your metabolism from going into equilibrium, so you continue to lose weight for a long time, albeit slowly.
My wife had a similar problem, ate reasonably, exercised a lot, wouldn't lose weight. I know you said you tried to control carbs, but the 4 hour body diet worked for her, so maybe it would work for you.
Six days a week, high-protein, mid-fat, very very low carb. Try to zero out carbs if you can (two glasses of dry red wine are as close as you should get to carbohydrates of any sort). However, on the seventh day ("cheat day")...very high carb, mid-fat, low-protein. This tricks your body out to prevent it from going into equilibrium. It's like a weekly Thanksgiving, sorta. Also, eat at least 30g of protein every morning (including cheat day) within 30 minutes of waking up - that is a hard and fast deadline, you MUST eat at LEAST 30g of protein and it MUST be within 30 minutes of gaining consciousness.
I had my doubts, but this diet has worked miracles for my wife, and she didn't even need to exercise anymore. She no longer counts calories, either. It's also working miracles for my mom; she's losing weight, blood pressure and cholesterol are down...doctor told her "whatever you're doing keep doing it!!" Doctors used to say that fat was the source of evil calories but I really think that carbs are the real evil calories.
That's why you eat super-low-carb for six days a week, and then super-high carb on the 7th day ("cheat day"). It prevents your metabolism from adjusting by essentially giving you a weekly Thanksgiving. My wife has been on this diet for over a year, and she loses a consistent 1-to-1.5 pounds per week (except when she takes a "cheat week" and then she gains about 2 pounds per day)
The trick is called calorie cycling. Low-to-zero carbs for 6 days of the week. Very very high carb on the 7th day of the week (call it "cheat day").
If you permanently remove carbs from your diet, your body goes into long-term ketosis, which is hard on the kidneys (some kids with epilepsy go on such diets to reduce their seizures, but they end up getting kidney stones). Your body also goes into "starvation mode" and starts trying to save every carb that it can.
In contrast, going high carb once a week "resets" the body so it thinks it's not starving. Think of it as a weekly Thanksgiving.
This also lets you have your bread still, you just have to wait until your cheat day.
Groklaw is referring to an erroneous instruction given by the jury foreman to the other jurors. He (wrongly) told them that software claiming to be prior art to features on the iPhone were only relevant if the code would run on the iPhone. Since all of the code submitted as prior art runs on other systems and thus doesn't run on the iPhone, he told the jury they could dismiss all the prior art claims out of hand without even having to look at it. So the jury never looked at the software prior art which was submitted at trial. Groklaw is just saying they should have.
That never actually happened, though. You're reading a few statements of Hogan out of context and putting them together to create a scenario that never occurred. It also doesn't explain why the patents and publications in the reexamination weren't before the jury.
"The software on the Apple side could not be placed into the processor on the prior art and vice versa. That means they are not interchangeable. That changed everything right there."
(note he actually starts this sentence at 3:13, but I included the 26 seconds before it for context)
I get where you're coming from, but there's a difference.
The football player is destroying his brain on his own volition. He can stop any time he wants.
An idiot driver who doesn't keep his tires inflated and the tire bursts when he gets on the highway wrecked of his own volition. He could have kept the air in his tires.
In contrast, there's nothing you can really do to stop a mass shooting. That's the really terrifying part. You can do everything right and be extra careful and give 10 seconds of following distance between cars and avoid sports altogether and some psycho can still walk into a movie theater and shoot you dead. It is a small risk, but it's a risk that we have no direct ability to mitigate - and I believe that is the source of the hysteria.
Spoken like someone who has never participated in the creation of a new product for the market.
We have this part of the design process, you see, and it's called "Design Failure Mode and Effects Analysis", or DFMEA. It's a part of the design process that ISO-certified shops have to follow. DFMEA forces manufacturers to examine potential failure modes of their products and what the associated risk is, and consider mitigation techniques to reduce the failure rate or risk to acceptable levels.
Consider a laser device. Risk: a living being could get blinded by the laser (only feasible if it's class 4 but meh). Mitigation technique: an emission indicator, so that the operator of the device knows that it is emitting a laser beam. Failure modes: the emission indicator burns out. That's a single point failure and you need to design around it; the typical way is to use two separate LEDs for an emission indicator, so if one LED/resistor fails the other one still works. You also don't want the emission indicator to be on the same side of the device as the laser aperture, otherwise you risk blinding yourself when you try to determine whether the beam is on. You ALSO want the emission indicator to be of a different wavelength than the beam itself, so that an operator wearing safety goggles that block the wavelength of the beam can still see the emission indicator (e.g. use a green emission indicator if you're using a red laser beam)
As someone who doesn't smoke and doesn't want to smell smoke or deal with the effects of second-hand smoke, I like smoke-free workplaces and smoke-free public places. Your right to inhale carcinogens ends at my lungs, buddy. Smoke in your own home where you slowly kill your own family.
As far as those new health care policies, you have your free market to blame for that. The market priced the cost of tobacco use into insurance. There is no problem with the market doing that. Some employers have decided that means those employees are too expensive to insure. It's my opinion that they should be able to pay a higher premium to cover the difference in insurance costs...and maybe if you had a union then they could negotiate such a deal.
Your link for William Janklow says he was accused of rape. He was accused, yes, but given his age and how out of shape he was - from his photos - the gal in question could probably have beat him to a pulp.
The victim was a 15-year old girl against a 26-year old adult male at the time of the rape.
Please consider that Wikipedia will say what the last person to edit it wants it to say.
Incorrect, Wikipedia has a history that can show you everything that was ever on the article, so it says everything that every person ever edited it to say. If you think there have been malicious edits made recently to his entry, you should check that history and you can revert it back.
Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts had a car accident in which Mary Jo Kopechne was killed. Does that make him a murderer, too?
Janklow was convicted of manslaughter. I agree that "murderer" is the wrong term for someone with that conviction. However, Janklow was doing 70 in a 55 and ran a stop sign. In contrast, Kennedy was doing 20 on an unlit dirt road with no guard rail when he drove off the bridge and into the water. Kennedy also claimed to have tried at least seven times to dive down to the car. Kennedy was convicted of leaving the scene of an accident.
Millimeter wave does not use ionizing radiation and therefore does not increase your risk of cancer. The energy per photon is lower than the visible light photons emitted from your monitor. Assuming he wasn't lying about what type of machine it was, the only reason to opt out of mm wave is because of privacy.
So what if my clip can only hold 10 rounds if clips cost $5 and I can carry 5 clips on me?
Many shooters are finally stopped because they had to take several precious seconds to reload their gun. The bigger the clip, the more people who get hurt or killed before having a chance to stop the shooter.
What reasonable people want is for high-capacity magazines to be outlawed. There's no reason you need 15/30/100 (!) in a clip. I personally know hunters and if any of them needed that many bullets to put a deer down, they'd quit hunting.
Every major shooting - Cho, Holmes, Loughner, Lanza, etc etc - all had high capacity magazines. How many fewer people would be dead if those shooters could have been stopped while they were reloading?
Slashdot Mirror
Did you read the article? Because the "exact" correlation also applies to other cultures, corresponding to the time they phased out lead. Did all cultures phase out DDT/asbestos/CFCs at the same time as they phased out lead?
The specific risks and effects of TEL were known as early as 1923, when the inventor took a prolonged vacation to cure lead poisoning. Here are excerpts from the wikipedia article for Thomas Midgley, Jr. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley,_Jr.
[...] In December 1921, while working under the direction of Kettering at Dayton Research Laboratories, a subsidiary of General Motors, Midgley discovered that the addition of TEL to gasoline prevented "knocking" in internal combustion engines.
[...] In 1923, Midgley took a prolonged vacation to cure himself of lead poisoning. "After about a year's work in organic lead," he wrote in January 1923, "I find that my lungs have been affected and that it is necessary to drop all work and get a large supply of fresh air." He went to Miami, Florida for convalescence.
[...] However, after two deaths and several cases of lead poisoning at the TEL prototype plant in Dayton, Ohio, the staff at Dayton was said in 1924 to be "depressed to the point of considering giving up the whole tetraethyl lead program." Over the course of the next year, eight more people would die at DuPont's Deepwater, New Jersey plant.
[...] On October 30, 1924, Midgley participated in a press conference to demonstrate the apparent safety of TEL. In this demonstration, he poured TEL over his hands, then placed a bottle of the chemical under his nose and inhaled its vapor for sixty seconds, declaring that he could do this every day without succumbing to any problems whatsoever. However, the State of New Jersey ordered the Bayway plant to be closed a few days later, and Jersey Standard was forbidden to manufacture TEL there again without state permission. Midgley himself was careful to avoid mentioning to the press that he required nearly a year to recover from the lead poisoning brought on by his demonstration at the press conference.
Why would the state require registration of cars?
Could you please quote the original gun map article where the authors say "you don't need guns"?
I keep seeing people say that this gun map is meant to intimidate people.
Can you please quote any part of the article accompanying the map to support the claim that this is meant to intimidate people?
It seems that one's opinion on whether this is intimidation depends on whether one is a gun person or not. Gun people don't like other people knowing they're gun people, so they think it's intimidation. Gunless people don't know just how prevalent guns are, so they consider this enlightening.
I am in the latter camp, which is why I don't see the intimidation factor. Of course, I also read the article, which may have contributed to how I perceive the gun map and the authors' intentions. So that is why I ask for some sort of source to back up the idea that this is meant to intimidate owners of pistols.
I read the newspaper article in its entirety. There was nothing in it that demonized anyone. The authors merely wanted to show people who don't own firearms how many of them are all around them, because the wealth of firearms all across this nation may not be obvious to people who live day-to-day without guns. This is patently clear from reading the article, they included several quotes from pro-gun sources without any sort of weasel words. The true irony is that the newspaper is being demonized for exercising their own rights to publish publicly available information.
If you feel ashamed that people know you are just "exercising your rights", that's your own personal problem.
The general populace *is* armed. In the US, there are 90 guns for every 100 people. We have 30% of the guns worldwide despite having less than 5% of the world's population! And yet shootings still happen, en masse and in public. There were even armed guards at Columbine but that didn't prevent it.
Sure, people with guns could stop a shooter sooner - but to think that no one will die is foolish. But being armed won't prevent mass shootings the way that keeping air in your tires will prevent your tire from blowing out, or how not playing football will prevent you from getting a degenerative brain disease as a result of multiple concussions. And that was my entire point - mass shootings are terrifying precisely because we can't take any actions personally to prevent them, all we can do is mitigate the damage once it has begun.
And there's one major flaw with your plan. What about convicted felons? They are by law required to be unarmed at all times. So every felon in the US is by definition neglecting their own personal safety?
Note how the parent was very specific about income tax. Why do the top 10% pay a greater share of federal income taxes? Because of Republican initiatives like the Earned Income Tax Credit, which allow a great many working poor to have negative federal income tax liability.
Take a look at payroll taxes. They are capped at about $106k. So for me and many other 95%ers, we are paying the full payroll tax liability. And yet anyone in that top 5% or so is paying a lower payroll tax rate than me. Whereas those taxes are usually about 6% of my income, for a really wealth individual they may be 0.6% or even less.
While we're busting this "federal income tax" myth, capital gains are not subject to income tax. It is actually the case that about six of the top 400 households in terms of income actually paid no federal income tax, either. It's my belief that capital gains should be taxed as ordinary income, because the person actually creating the wealth shouldn't pay more taxes than the person who merely fronts the money - especially when the person fronting the money isn't actually on the hook for any risk because the government will bail them out.
It will take some time, but it will amount to much, I think.
Part of the problem is that we have too many people and not enough valuable work for them to do. A lot of the "government largesse" is actually unemployment compensation where we pay someone to essentially watch paint dry or some other useless thing. You may think we're cutting fat off the meat by getting rid of these useless people, but that's going to make our "too many people and not enough valuable work" problem worse. (so will raising the Social Security retirement age)
Outside of the outrageous fringe stuff, the large-ish scale protests were engaged in many-weeks-long non-violent protest in public areas, with generally small-ish scale protests outside the actual businesses themselves.
It's one thing to be prepared, but I would hope that the police force would prioritize threats better. I honestly think most of the money spent dealing with OWS (such as police overtime) could have generally been reduced by 90% without the general outcome changing, and that money could have been spent on better things like fighting Mexican drug lords instead - you know, dealing with people who actually engage in criminal and terrorist behavior - or even (gasp) not being taken from the taxpayers in the first place?
I have often thought something similar. Really, I see Democrat, Republican, Tea Party, and Occupy Wall Street as a grid of left/right and corporate/public. Generally, people see OWS and Dems as "left" while TP and GOP as "right" (columns of the grid). However, Dem and GOP represent corporate America, and in turn OWS and TP represent public America (rows of the grid).
I want both OWS and TP to succeed at the expense of corporate parties. I think that public America needs more support right now. One great way that they can synergize is the focus on small businesses; fewer CEOs with massive compensation, not too big to fail, profit stays in the local economy instead of being shipped out-of-state, smaller companies have a harder time buying politicians...I mean what's not to like about e.g. patronizing your local grocery store instead of Wal-Mart? (case in point: the owners of Wal-Mart have as much combined wealth as the bottom 40% of Americans)
I can identify with the best parts of each camp, but I also cringe at the worst parts of each camp, people calling for free shit (come on guys this shit costs real money) or people trying to enforce their religious views on me. These worst parts are then exploited by corporate parties to get the public fighting amongst themselves because when it really comes down to it, most people will be more offended by one camp's worst than the other's and this fact will be exploited by corporate parties to keep the public camps from realizing what they have in common.
My wife was on 1200 calories/day and 1 hour of intense exercise per day. She cut out sugar and all processed food, went to wheat bread, fruits. She was barely able to maintain her weight.
She switched to high-protein diet 6 days a week, high carb on the 7th day. No longer counts calories. No more intense exercise. She's losing a consistent 1 to 1.5 pounds per week.
Call me crazy, but the "fat diet" that she found actually works. It works for her, it works for her uncle, and it works for my mother (weight down, blood pressure down, cholesterol down).
It's not that high-protein diets are hard on you. It's that ketosis is hard on you, and you enter ketosis if you don't consume enough carbs. Rather, you should be saying it's the low-carb diet that's hard on you, which is why the best diet I have seen recommends a weekly cheat day where you consume MASSIVE amounts of carbs to prevent your body from going into ketosis during the rest of the week when carbs are severely restricted.
As a bonus, this weekly Thanksgiving also prevents your metabolism from going into equilibrium, so you continue to lose weight for a long time, albeit slowly.
My wife had a similar problem, ate reasonably, exercised a lot, wouldn't lose weight. I know you said you tried to control carbs, but the 4 hour body diet worked for her, so maybe it would work for you.
Six days a week, high-protein, mid-fat, very very low carb. Try to zero out carbs if you can (two glasses of dry red wine are as close as you should get to carbohydrates of any sort). However, on the seventh day ("cheat day")...very high carb, mid-fat, low-protein. This tricks your body out to prevent it from going into equilibrium. It's like a weekly Thanksgiving, sorta. Also, eat at least 30g of protein every morning (including cheat day) within 30 minutes of waking up - that is a hard and fast deadline, you MUST eat at LEAST 30g of protein and it MUST be within 30 minutes of gaining consciousness.
I had my doubts, but this diet has worked miracles for my wife, and she didn't even need to exercise anymore. She no longer counts calories, either. It's also working miracles for my mom; she's losing weight, blood pressure and cholesterol are down...doctor told her "whatever you're doing keep doing it!!" Doctors used to say that fat was the source of evil calories but I really think that carbs are the real evil calories.
That's why you eat super-low-carb for six days a week, and then super-high carb on the 7th day ("cheat day"). It prevents your metabolism from adjusting by essentially giving you a weekly Thanksgiving. My wife has been on this diet for over a year, and she loses a consistent 1-to-1.5 pounds per week (except when she takes a "cheat week" and then she gains about 2 pounds per day)
The trick is called calorie cycling. Low-to-zero carbs for 6 days of the week. Very very high carb on the 7th day of the week (call it "cheat day").
If you permanently remove carbs from your diet, your body goes into long-term ketosis, which is hard on the kidneys (some kids with epilepsy go on such diets to reduce their seizures, but they end up getting kidney stones). Your body also goes into "starvation mode" and starts trying to save every carb that it can.
In contrast, going high carb once a week "resets" the body so it thinks it's not starving. Think of it as a weekly Thanksgiving.
This also lets you have your bread still, you just have to wait until your cheat day.
Groklaw is referring to an erroneous instruction given by the jury foreman to the other jurors. He (wrongly) told them that software claiming to be prior art to features on the iPhone were only relevant if the code would run on the iPhone. Since all of the code submitted as prior art runs on other systems and thus doesn't run on the iPhone, he told the jury they could dismiss all the prior art claims out of hand without even having to look at it. So the jury never looked at the software prior art which was submitted at trial. Groklaw is just saying they should have.
That never actually happened, though. You're reading a few statements of Hogan out of context and putting them together to create a scenario that never occurred. It also doesn't explain why the patents and publications in the reexamination weren't before the jury.
What was taken out of context?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9cnQcTC2JY#t=2m50s
"The software on the Apple side could not be placed into the processor on the prior art and vice versa. That means they are not interchangeable. That changed everything right there."
(note he actually starts this sentence at 3:13, but I included the 26 seconds before it for context)
I get where you're coming from, but there's a difference.
The football player is destroying his brain on his own volition. He can stop any time he wants.
An idiot driver who doesn't keep his tires inflated and the tire bursts when he gets on the highway wrecked of his own volition. He could have kept the air in his tires.
In contrast, there's nothing you can really do to stop a mass shooting. That's the really terrifying part. You can do everything right and be extra careful and give 10 seconds of following distance between cars and avoid sports altogether and some psycho can still walk into a movie theater and shoot you dead. It is a small risk, but it's a risk that we have no direct ability to mitigate - and I believe that is the source of the hysteria.
Spoken like someone who has never participated in the creation of a new product for the market.
We have this part of the design process, you see, and it's called "Design Failure Mode and Effects Analysis", or DFMEA. It's a part of the design process that ISO-certified shops have to follow. DFMEA forces manufacturers to examine potential failure modes of their products and what the associated risk is, and consider mitigation techniques to reduce the failure rate or risk to acceptable levels.
Consider a laser device. Risk: a living being could get blinded by the laser (only feasible if it's class 4 but meh). Mitigation technique: an emission indicator, so that the operator of the device knows that it is emitting a laser beam. Failure modes: the emission indicator burns out. That's a single point failure and you need to design around it; the typical way is to use two separate LEDs for an emission indicator, so if one LED/resistor fails the other one still works. You also don't want the emission indicator to be on the same side of the device as the laser aperture, otherwise you risk blinding yourself when you try to determine whether the beam is on. You ALSO want the emission indicator to be of a different wavelength than the beam itself, so that an operator wearing safety goggles that block the wavelength of the beam can still see the emission indicator (e.g. use a green emission indicator if you're using a red laser beam)
As someone who doesn't smoke and doesn't want to smell smoke or deal with the effects of second-hand smoke, I like smoke-free workplaces and smoke-free public places. Your right to inhale carcinogens ends at my lungs, buddy. Smoke in your own home where you slowly kill your own family.
As far as those new health care policies, you have your free market to blame for that. The market priced the cost of tobacco use into insurance. There is no problem with the market doing that. Some employers have decided that means those employees are too expensive to insure. It's my opinion that they should be able to pay a higher premium to cover the difference in insurance costs...and maybe if you had a union then they could negotiate such a deal.
Your link for William Janklow says he was accused of rape. He was accused, yes, but given his age and how out of shape he was - from his photos - the gal in question could probably have beat him to a pulp.
The victim was a 15-year old girl against a 26-year old adult male at the time of the rape.
Please consider that Wikipedia will say what the last person to edit it wants it to say.
Incorrect, Wikipedia has a history that can show you everything that was ever on the article, so it says everything that every person ever edited it to say. If you think there have been malicious edits made recently to his entry, you should check that history and you can revert it back.
Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts had a car accident in which Mary Jo Kopechne was killed. Does that make him a murderer, too?
Janklow was convicted of manslaughter. I agree that "murderer" is the wrong term for someone with that conviction. However, Janklow was doing 70 in a 55 and ran a stop sign. In contrast, Kennedy was doing 20 on an unlit dirt road with no guard rail when he drove off the bridge and into the water. Kennedy also claimed to have tried at least seven times to dive down to the car. Kennedy was convicted of leaving the scene of an accident.
Millimeter wave does not use ionizing radiation and therefore does not increase your risk of cancer. The energy per photon is lower than the visible light photons emitted from your monitor. Assuming he wasn't lying about what type of machine it was, the only reason to opt out of mm wave is because of privacy.
So what if my clip can only hold 10 rounds if clips cost $5 and I can carry 5 clips on me?
Many shooters are finally stopped because they had to take several precious seconds to reload their gun. The bigger the clip, the more people who get hurt or killed before having a chance to stop the shooter.
Oh, please. No one is trying to seize firearms. Period. End of story.
http://thismodernworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/TMW2011-01-12acolorlowres-copy-2.jpg
What reasonable people want is for high-capacity magazines to be outlawed. There's no reason you need 15/30/100 (!) in a clip. I personally know hunters and if any of them needed that many bullets to put a deer down, they'd quit hunting.
Every major shooting - Cho, Holmes, Loughner, Lanza, etc etc - all had high capacity magazines. How many fewer people would be dead if those shooters could have been stopped while they were reloading?
Unless you have money, no one wants to help.
Adam's mom was getting $24k/month in alimony payments. They had money.