"Almost none"? Not even remotely true. Not the majority but we certainly contribute plenty. We are in the top 20 [earthday.org] as far as plastic polluting countries go
We can agree that 1% is "not the majority," but I'm with OP that 1% is a lot closer to "almost none" then it is "plenty."
Looking at the actual numbers in your link, the U.S. generated about.28 million metric tons of plastic waste out of a total of roughly 26.5 million metric tons across the top 20 countries. That's about 1%. The U.S. share of marine debris given in the chart is also about 1%.
Secondly, the AVERAGE murder sentence is 40.6 years
Yet somehow the MEDIAN murder sentence (on the first page of your link) is less than 14 years, far closer to OP's estimate than your supposed statistic.
And this is different from driving... how? . . . So either get vaccinated and get fined very single day (because you're a menace to society every time you go out in public), or go live in the woods isolated from everyone else who is rationale [sic].
I understand that Slashdotters vie to distill everything down to a bad car analogy, but come on. There are plenty of ways to fully participate in society without driving (and, indeed, many pride themselves in doing so). If that's really the best parallel you can come up with, maybe it's time to reconsider your position.
Antibiotics are required to get over sinus infections (without waiting over a month in misery), which I get almost every time I get a cold.
Thank you for so aptly proving my point. Sinus infections are one of the classic overuse scenarios, since in most cases they're viral and thus antibiotics are utterly useless. (Oh, and by the way, you generally can't tell for sure whether you have one of the fairly rare bacterially-driven sinus infections until about 10 days in, at which point most cases are on the verge of clearing up on their own.)
Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is recognized as one of the greatest threats to human health worldwide. Just one organism, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), kills more Americans every year than emphysema, HIV/AIDS, Parkinson’s disease and homicide combined.
So -- are we ready to take "one of the greatest threats to human health worldwide" head on, classify antibiotics as a controlled substance, criminalize misuse, and go door to door making sure people aren't taking them on the sly? Yeah, didn't think so. Once again, the current flap over vaccination is an astoundingly hypocritical, transparent excuse for exercising what would otherwise be considered an unacceptable degree of power and control over currently disfavored groups/mindsets.
It's repugnant to think that humanity will be stuck with these diseases for all time because someone demands that their "right" to be paranoid/stupid isn't infringed.
When you're ready to start heavily fining/criminalizing/imprisoning people for stupid things that, as opposed to putting a few dozen people in the hospital in a population of 300+ million, are actually on the verge of causing genuine, massive, intractable problems -- like going to their doctor and demanding (and the doctor for giving in and prescribing) an antibiotic that will be utterly useless against the head cold they have -- let's talk. Until then, this whole subject strikes me as cherry-picked sanctimony that's rapidly becoming a proxy for the currently-acceptable brand of otherism.
Personally, I think it should be $1000 per person per day until you get yourself and your kids vaccinated.
Because just throwing them in prison would be a step too far? Good grief. Maybe "jackbooted" was too kind of a term.
Again, step back and think about how this will go when it's not your pet issue. As you may recall, there's only one step left in the poem after "then they came for the Jews...."
Joking aside, that has to be a weird feeling for the pilots to be so far away from the centerline of the plane. Not that you're going to fly anything this (amazingly, incredibly) massive by the seat of your pants anyway, but still.
I think you may be mixing up percentage driving under the influence with percentage involved in fatal crashes. From the study in the first link in your Google search:
The proportion of persons driving under the influence of alcohol is estimated at 2.1% (95% CI: 1.4–2.8) and under the influence of cannabis at 3.4% (2.9%-3.9%). Drivers under the influence of alcohol are 17.8 times (12.1–26.1) more likely to be responsible for a fatal accident, and the proportion of fatal accidents which would be prevented if no drivers ever exceeded the legal limit for alcohol is estimated at 27.7% (26.0%-29.4%). Drivers under the influence of cannabis multiply their risk of being responsible for causing a fatal accident by 1.65 (1.16–2.34), and the proportion of fatal accidents which would be prevented if no drivers ever drove under the influence of cannabis is estimated at 4.2% (3.7%-4.8%).
Everyone who either has a copy of your childhood vaccination records or knows where to go to find them (and can reasonably expect a copy still exists, can get one on a timely basis, etc.), raise your hand. For the rest of us, are the choices to accept a needle in the arm right now, or be branded a criminal and fork over $1k (and how does the latter accomplish anything useful other than to help subsidize the campaign)?
I understand people have strong feelings about this subject, but try to envision how you would feel about this jackbooted of an enforcement mechanism over something you don't feel as strongly about, or even oppose. I fear we may ultimately regret setting this precedent.
An ideal font in my view is one that essentially gets out of the way and lets your brain focus on the actual content, and this one misses that mark. Looking at samples of actual blocks of text, there are two visibly different baselines: one for letters made of generally straight strokes like i, f, t, and v, and a slightly lower one for letters containing a loop like a, b, e, g, and s. It's just a pixel or two, but more than enough to be a distraction. Unclear if it might become less noticeable over time, but I don't get what useful purpose it could serve.
OP was asking for context (which I've provided here, btw). Simply providing a completely different out-of-context measure doesn't move the ball forward.
I guess nothing sounds impressive if you compare it to something else that's much bigger.
As you know, I'm not comparing it to "something else" -- I'm comparing it to the entirety of exactly the same substance that TFA implies is being lost at a catastrophic rate by throwing around big-sounding numbers in a vacuum.
So, conservatively ignoring that TFS includes "snow loss" (wut?) and says most of the ice loss was from glaciers in Alaska: 390 / 29,400,000 = (whips out slide rule) 0.0013%.
But that wouldn't make for nearly as scary of a headline.
Trade tariffs? Market distortion. $457 million in federal grants to Boeing? Market distortion. Federal loans, loan guarantees and bailout assistance (not including repayments) $50,346,920,000 for General Motors? Market distortion.
And people around here regularly bitch about every single one of these examples. But in those discussions, posts along the lines of "dude, distortions and corruption are everywhere... shut up or go live in the bush" get modded all the way down, not all the way up. Fascinating, isn't it? It's enough to make one think the real issue is not that people really want less-distorted markets, but that people just want the distortions to be directed to their team rather than others'.
[Speaking of distortions, maybe Slashdot should bow to the times and add a "-1, Wrongspeak" option so the mods can stop twisting the existing categories?]
That also describes Tesla now since they are still maintaining sales even though tax credits have mostly evaporated for the cars they sell.
Again, quite the opposite: this is yet another external revenue stream, just like the tax credits, that Tesla is using to fund operations precisely because it cannot do so solely with the dollars consumers are willing to pay for the products Tesla produces. The market remains distorted.
What is also true is a bunch of that money is in fact shifting to Tesla, a company that not that long ago it was claimed was not viable.
I think most reasonable people would understand a "viable" business to be one that is able to sustain itself in an undistorted market. This is actually yet another data point in the opposite direction.
The summary says Toyota is offering free access through 2030, so I suspect a material part of the portfolio extends past that. It's not like there has been zero technological advancement since the first Prius.
And here come the -1, TruthHurts mods, right on schedule. I wonder how many are from Karen Rei's sock puppet accounts now that she doesn't seem to [be allowed to? be paid to?] comment on Tesla anymore and so doesn't have to burn the mod points jacking up her own posts.
It's completely insane that the value of the company stock is based not on analysis and solid numbers, but on the perception of numbers. The stock doesn't go up or down based on whether they make a profit - it goes up or down based on whether it meets or exceeds *expectations* of profit.
Well, yeah. If you expected your retirement fund to make 20% in a given year and it only made 3%, would you be giddy that it still "made a profit"?
Stock is priced based on a lot of assumptions about current and future performance. If it comes to light that some of those assumptions were off, the price adjusts to reflect the new information. We can and often do debate whether the price adjustment is proportionate or disproportionate to the change in the underlying assumptions, but the concept shouldn't be controversial.
Slashdot Mirror
"Almost none"? Not even remotely true. Not the majority but we certainly contribute plenty. We are in the top 20 [earthday.org] as far as plastic polluting countries go
We can agree that 1% is "not the majority," but I'm with OP that 1% is a lot closer to "almost none" then it is "plenty."
Looking at the actual numbers in your link, the U.S. generated about .28 million metric tons of plastic waste out of a total of roughly 26.5 million metric tons across the top 20 countries. That's about 1%. The U.S. share of marine debris given in the chart is also about 1%.
"Top 20" is a meaningless statistic in a vacuum.
The first page is not showing the sentence length, it is showing time spent in prison before first release.
Right, the amount of time spent in prison, which was OP's point. Learn to think.
I'll take a link to bjs.gov over SlaveToTheGrind's opinion
Opinion? One more time:
Yet somehow the MEDIAN murder sentence (on the first page of your link) is less than 14 years
Reading comprehension is an increasingly lost art.
Secondly, the AVERAGE murder sentence is 40.6 years
Yet somehow the MEDIAN murder sentence (on the first page of your link) is less than 14 years, far closer to OP's estimate than your supposed statistic.
Sentences for particularly egregious murders tend to be tens or even hundreds of times longer than the murderer can be expected to live, which makes the concept of an "average" sentence fairly meaningless.
And this is different from driving... how? . . . So either get vaccinated and get fined very single day (because you're a menace to society every time you go out in public), or go live in the woods isolated from everyone else who is rationale [sic].
I understand that Slashdotters vie to distill everything down to a bad car analogy, but come on. There are plenty of ways to fully participate in society without driving (and, indeed, many pride themselves in doing so). If that's really the best parallel you can come up with, maybe it's time to reconsider your position.
Antibiotics are required to get over sinus infections (without waiting over a month in misery), which I get almost every time I get a cold.
Thank you for so aptly proving my point. Sinus infections are one of the classic overuse scenarios, since in most cases they're viral and thus antibiotics are utterly useless. (Oh, and by the way, you generally can't tell for sure whether you have one of the fairly rare bacterially-driven sinus infections until about 10 days in, at which point most cases are on the verge of clearing up on their own.)
Again, this is something you want instead of something you're against, so you basically just shrug it off, justify your own overuse, deny the well-understood and common-sense notion that antibiotic resistance in humans is driven by antibiotic overconsumption by humans, and ignore the mass of literature that quantifies exactly how serious the problem is getting:
Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is recognized as one of the greatest threats to human health worldwide. Just one organism, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), kills more Americans every year than emphysema, HIV/AIDS, Parkinson’s disease and homicide combined.
So -- are we ready to take "one of the greatest threats to human health worldwide" head on, classify antibiotics as a controlled substance, criminalize misuse, and go door to door making sure people aren't taking them on the sly? Yeah, didn't think so. Once again, the current flap over vaccination is an astoundingly hypocritical, transparent excuse for exercising what would otherwise be considered an unacceptable degree of power and control over currently disfavored groups/mindsets.
It's repugnant to think that humanity will be stuck with these diseases for all time because someone demands that their "right" to be paranoid/stupid isn't infringed.
When you're ready to start heavily fining/criminalizing/imprisoning people for stupid things that, as opposed to putting a few dozen people in the hospital in a population of 300+ million, are actually on the verge of causing genuine, massive, intractable problems -- like going to their doctor and demanding (and the doctor for giving in and prescribing) an antibiotic that will be utterly useless against the head cold they have -- let's talk. Until then, this whole subject strikes me as cherry-picked sanctimony that's rapidly becoming a proxy for the currently-acceptable brand of otherism.
Personally, I think it should be $1000 per person per day until you get yourself and your kids vaccinated.
Because just throwing them in prison would be a step too far? Good grief. Maybe "jackbooted" was too kind of a term.
Again, step back and think about how this will go when it's not your pet issue. As you may recall, there's only one step left in the poem after "then they came for the Jews...."
Joking aside, that has to be a weird feeling for the pilots to be so far away from the centerline of the plane. Not that you're going to fly anything this (amazingly, incredibly) massive by the seat of your pants anyway, but still.
I think you may be mixing up percentage driving under the influence with percentage involved in fatal crashes. From the study in the first link in your Google search:
The proportion of persons driving under the influence of alcohol is estimated at 2.1% (95% CI: 1.4–2.8) and under the influence of cannabis at 3.4% (2.9%-3.9%). Drivers under the influence of alcohol are 17.8 times (12.1–26.1) more likely to be responsible for a fatal accident , and the proportion of fatal accidents which would be prevented if no drivers ever exceeded the legal limit for alcohol is estimated at 27.7% (26.0%-29.4%). Drivers under the influence of cannabis multiply their risk of being responsible for causing a fatal accident by 1.65 (1.16–2.34) , and the proportion of fatal accidents which would be prevented if no drivers ever drove under the influence of cannabis is estimated at 4.2% (3.7%-4.8%).
Everyone who either has a copy of your childhood vaccination records or knows where to go to find them (and can reasonably expect a copy still exists, can get one on a timely basis, etc.), raise your hand. For the rest of us, are the choices to accept a needle in the arm right now, or be branded a criminal and fork over $1k (and how does the latter accomplish anything useful other than to help subsidize the campaign)?
I understand people have strong feelings about this subject, but try to envision how you would feel about this jackbooted of an enforcement mechanism over something you don't feel as strongly about, or even oppose. I fear we may ultimately regret setting this precedent.
An ideal font in my view is one that essentially gets out of the way and lets your brain focus on the actual content, and this one misses that mark. Looking at samples of actual blocks of text, there are two visibly different baselines: one for letters made of generally straight strokes like i, f, t, and v, and a slightly lower one for letters containing a loop like a, b, e, g, and s. It's just a pixel or two, but more than enough to be a distraction. Unclear if it might become less noticeable over time, but I don't get what useful purpose it could serve.
"On" is not capitalized the same. Interesting.
Great point. Maybe they should make IsThisaBrainDeadDupe() case-insensitive.
OP was asking for context (which I've provided here, btw). Simply providing a completely different out-of-context measure doesn't move the ball forward.
I guess nothing sounds impressive if you compare it to something else that's much bigger.
As you know, I'm not comparing it to "something else" -- I'm comparing it to the entirety of exactly the same substance that TFA implies is being lost at a catastrophic rate by throwing around big-sounding numbers in a vacuum.
That would be like me saying, "around 200 billion cells in your body are dying EACH DAY -- you'd best get your affairs in order."
Context matters.
Some representative estimates of just the two ice sheets:
- 26,500,000 gigatons in Antarctica
- 2,900,000 gigatons in Greenland
So, conservatively ignoring that TFS includes "snow loss" (wut?) and says most of the ice loss was from glaciers in Alaska: 390 / 29,400,000 = (whips out slide rule) 0.0013%.
But that wouldn't make for nearly as scary of a headline.
Trade tariffs? Market distortion. $457 million in federal grants to Boeing? Market distortion. Federal loans, loan guarantees and bailout assistance (not including repayments) $50,346,920,000 for General Motors? Market distortion.
And people around here regularly bitch about every single one of these examples. But in those discussions, posts along the lines of "dude, distortions and corruption are everywhere... shut up or go live in the bush" get modded all the way down, not all the way up. Fascinating, isn't it? It's enough to make one think the real issue is not that people really want less-distorted markets, but that people just want the distortions to be directed to their team rather than others'.
[Speaking of distortions, maybe Slashdot should bow to the times and add a "-1, Wrongspeak" option so the mods can stop twisting the existing categories?]
That also describes Tesla now since they are still maintaining sales even though tax credits have mostly evaporated for the cars they sell.
Again, quite the opposite: this is yet another external revenue stream, just like the tax credits, that Tesla is using to fund operations precisely because it cannot do so solely with the dollars consumers are willing to pay for the products Tesla produces. The market remains distorted.
What is also true is a bunch of that money is in fact shifting to Tesla, a company that not that long ago it was claimed was not viable.
I think most reasonable people would understand a "viable" business to be one that is able to sustain itself in an undistorted market. This is actually yet another data point in the opposite direction.
Those who were going to buy Teslas, bought Teslas.
Those who were going to buy Fiats, bought Fiats.
Fiat effectively paid a fine to Tesla instead of a larger fine to the government.
The "combined fleet" emitted exactly the same amount of CO2 both before and after the money changed hands.
Hooray?
The summary says Toyota is offering free access through 2030, so I suspect a material part of the portfolio extends past that. It's not like there has been zero technological advancement since the first Prius.
Oh. The. Truth. It. So. Hurts. Must. Squelch.
Keep it coming, cowards -- I have plenty of karma. The truth will remain the truth.
And here come the -1, TruthHurts mods, right on schedule. I wonder how many are from Karen Rei's sock puppet accounts now that she doesn't seem to [be allowed to? be paid to?] comment on Tesla anymore and so doesn't have to burn the mod points jacking up her own posts.
It's completely insane that the value of the company stock is based not on analysis and solid numbers, but on the perception of numbers. The stock doesn't go up or down based on whether they make a profit - it goes up or down based on whether it meets or exceeds *expectations* of profit.
Well, yeah. If you expected your retirement fund to make 20% in a given year and it only made 3%, would you be giddy that it still "made a profit"?
Stock is priced based on a lot of assumptions about current and future performance. If it comes to light that some of those assumptions were off, the price adjusts to reflect the new information. We can and often do debate whether the price adjustment is proportionate or disproportionate to the change in the underlying assumptions, but the concept shouldn't be controversial.