rkbabang

Shark Attacks

One of the things this article mentioned is a question I had already. With Playboy going non-nude, will it be more of a direct competitor to Maxim? Even with the nude pictures Playboy was classier than Maxim, now it will be no contest. Someone might read Playboy for the articles, but why would you read Maxim at all? I have to wonder what Biglari thought this could become? I don't see it turning out anything but bad.

Magazine capacity bans only effect defensive uses and not offencive uses of firearms. It takes less than 2 seconds to change a magazine. If you are planning an offencive use of your firearm you can carry as many magazines as you think you will use. If you are carrying a firearm for defensive purposes on a daily basis you are not likely to carry any extras. Also if you grab your gun in the middle of the night in an emergency, you might not even be wearing anything which has pockets to put a spare magazine, where the attacker(s) may carry many extras. You limit a person's ability to defend themselves and others, without effecting a criminal planning an attack in any way. The point of all of this was that school shootings are a small problem of which there isn't much we can do anything about and there are much larger problems for which there are solutions (car deaths, hospital infections, etc) which no one thinks about, cares about, or worries about. It has obviously gone off the rails to focus entirely on gun control, so I'll stop here.

Just rent a U-Haul truck, park in a remote location, and cook hamburgers over charcoal in a Weber in the back with the rear door closed. Search on Google for indoor BBQ carbon monoxide poisoning -- it's surprising how many people accidentally kill themselves and others this way. So it's very effective. And if it doesn't work, at least you have burgers. BTW: In 2005 even Canada had a higher suicide rate than the US. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/world/suiciderate.html I intentionally separated out homicides vs suicides expecting you to have the brains to use the homicide number. Guess you are too dumb to do that. The car accidents include everything from distracted driving to drunk/reckless driving, rain/ice/potholes, design defects/tire blowouts and a few dozen other not all of which can be avoided by autonomous cars. Would you like to adjust the 30,000 number down to deaths that can be avoided by autonomous cars and compare that to homicides? You also have no idea if autonomous cars cause their own set of problems. Since you've got no answer to 11,000 homicides vs 30,000 accidents feel free to focus on the suicide and ignore the homicides. The issue with homicides is about the same as suicides. It is cultural. How do you stop people from wanting to kill themselves or others? Taking away their guns isn't solving the problem. 100 years ago when neither country had any guns laws to speak of, London was a much, much safer place than NYC. Now that isn't as much the case. What changed? If anything there are much fewer guns in London than there were. You are trying to make these issues black and white when they aren't.

Just rent a U-Haul truck, park in a remote location, and cook hamburgers over charcoal in a Weber in the back with the rear door closed. Search on Google for indoor BBQ carbon monoxide poisoning -- it's surprising how many people accidentally kill themselves and others this way. So it's very effective. And if it doesn't work, at least you have burgers. BTW: In 2005 even Canada had a higher suicide rate than the US. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/world/suiciderate.html

Which is so strange. It seems a lot more appealing to put a garden hose in the tailpipe of a car (or just run the car with the garage door closed if you have a garage). Why do people use guns? Be careful about correlation and causation errors in that chart in the story. Studies of limited data-sets or of short time frames may show strange things ( you could make the case that it would be a safer country if the Miss America pageant was limited to women under 20 years of age). Also sometimes things are related but both caused by a third variable not studied. Many of the high suicide states are also the most economically depressed states and I would love to see a chart with number of veterans living in a state vs suicide rates or active military families living in a state vs suicide rates. There are many causes of suicide and many ways to do it. Besides, if you do not want to kill yourself (as I do not) then no law in the world will make you any more or less safe from suicide. Many people probably use guns for suicide, because it is quick and effective. But a look at the numbers shows that at least half do not use guns, so some people are obviously turned off by the messyness. Also the problem with the garage method is that a family member will probably be the one to find you. I know someone who found his father in the garage in this way as a teenager, it would have been much better on his son if he had driven somewhere else and used a gun. Finding a stranger doesn't have the same emotional impact as finding a family member. There are problems with all the other methods as well, hanging can be long and painful if you don't do it right and you can survive with brain damage or other disabilities, drugs can take a long time and someone can find you and revive you, jumping from a high place is something a lot of people just can't do (and what if by some "miracle" you survive? You'll be a mess). Really if it is logical to use the best tool for any job, it really it is surprising that more people don't use guns if they are available to them. Guns may have some small effect on the success rate and on the marginal cases, but guns don't cause suicide any more than bridges, rope, or tall buildings. And besides you can always use a gun to kill yourself even if civilian gun ownership is outlawed. Go to Home Depot, buy a machete (an 8-inch chefs knife will also work, maybe even a baseball bat in a pinch), hold it high above your head, open your eyes as wide as they can go, and run towards the first cop you see screaming the word "die" over and over. Make sure you start from some distance away to give him plenty of time to react. Suicide rates are also very culturally dependant. It is more culturally acceptable to kill oneself in some cultures rather than others, and this can change over time within a culture. If you look at suicide rates by country the US has lower rates than some other countries with far fewer civilian guns, such as Japan, France, Finland, Belgium, Poland, South Korea, etc. If guns caused suicide you'd expect the US to top the list with Japan way at the bottom. There are cultural differences between the different regions of the US as well. If you look at the chart on the story above you can see many of the states grouped together are also in the same regions of the country and may have similar cultures. EDIT: Here's a good one. Stop the science, stop the slaughter! http://www.tylervigen.com/correlation_project/correlation_images/us-spending-on-science-space-and-technology_suicides-by-hanging-strangulation-and-suffocation.png

Just to be clear that is 300 school MURDERS in the last 30 years vs 30,000 deaths from car "ACCIDENTS" in the last year. I know the difference, one is a huge problem the other isn't nearly as large. Also I'd like to take issue with your term "ACCIDENTS", because most traffic deaths aren't any such thing. We might refer to them as such, but anyone that has ever driven in the US knows that the vast majority of accidents are the result of someone doing something they shouldn't have and that they know they shouldn't have done. This negligent misuse of a 2 ton hunk of metal driven at high speeds causing a death should be called negligent homicide or manslaughter, but we (as a society) prefer to say that the guy who tailgates someone and causes a death has caused an "accident" and not charge him with a crime. If you misuse a gun and someone dies, you can be sure that you will be charged with manslaughter and no one will call it an "accident". The same should be true for car crashes as well. The only time people are actually properly charged is when they are drunk, but aggressive drivers, speeders, tailgaters, people who don't pay attention, people who don't yield when they are supposed to, or do yield when they aren't supposed to, or those who are prone to road rage all get away scott free when they kill someone. The number of actually unavoidable accidents on our roads that lead to death is very tiny. 30,000 people die every year mostly from either their own or someone else's negligence. Both internationally and between the states there is no positive correlation between suicide rates and either gun ownership nor gun laws. Look at the suicide rates in Japan for an extreme example. Yes in the US people choose to use a firearm when they kill themselves, whereas in Japan they use other methods, but suicide isn't a gun problem, it is a person who wants to end his own life problem. And murder, depending on the study you look at either has no coorelation to gun ownership or a very slight negative correlation. This is why gun-control advocates always say "gun-violence" not "violence" or "suicide by gun" rather than just talk about "suicides" in total. If you wan't to save A LOT of lives, even more than solving the car-crash issue, convince doctors to properly wash their hands.

Depends on where you live. For most places in USA and developed countries, you are right. Well, yes, I was under the assumption most of the people here live in the developed world.

Do you have children? Your lack of pathos suggests that you do not. You can use statistics to argue for a lot of things, but to suggest that school children being murdered in class is 'no big deal' because we need self driving cars is being almost laughably callous. I do, 2 teenagers. And I know that driving is far more dangerous for them than attending school. EDIT: If anyone here has children and are more worried about them being shot in school than you are about them sitting in the seat of a moving automobile you are insane, completely 100% insane. I'm sorry if that sounds callous, but it is true.

In terms of number of victims you are correct. But having experienced the loss of colleagues and students in car accidents, and being in a building where a student was shot and stabbed to death, the effect on everyone is quite different and by orders of magnitude. None of us will ever be the same, and by varying degrees, because of the shooting. I am in this photo, https://purduecco.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/purdue-vigil.jpg I'm sorry that you had to go through that, but it is difficult to enumerate all the ways your comments are wrong. For one, the number killed in car crashes so far outnumber the number killed in school shootings that even if the lives of those killed in school shootings where 100 times more important than those slaughtered on the roads and highways as you are implying, it still would do far, far, more good to solve the road carnage issue. I really don't think when someone loses a child to a car accident, or a drunk driver, or a road rage incident, that they sit down and think "thank god she wasn't shot or stabbed at school". And finally there are many things we can do to reduce the incidence of death on our roads simply by getting the government out of the way (reducing regulations/bans on Uber and Lyft for one will have an impact on drunk driving deaths, allowing companies to develop, test, and market autonomous cars will have an impact on accident/road rage deaths, developing drone delivery will get more trucks off the road and eventually lead to passenger drones, Audi isn't allowed to use its laser headlight system in the US because regulations require a certain type of lamp, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, on and on and on...). There is nothing you can do however to prevent the occasional lone nut (or small group of nuts) from deciding to kill people.

Well if you are not prepared to ban coverage than the next most rational thing is to just forget about it. Stop concerning yourself about it and treat it as an inevitable fact of life. Its basically the same approach as when you have trouble sleeping. In these cases, ignoring the problem is the best way to stop it from happening because worrying about the problem is exactly what makes it worse. The truth is that school shootings really are no big deal and it makes zero sense to treat it as a major policy issue. The loss of lives from the absence of autonomous cars due to over-regulation would be like multiple mass school-shooting every single day for the whole year. 30000 people die every year in car accidents. 300 people total have died from school shootings since 1980. We REALLY should be doing something to get autonomous cars on the road and we really should be ignoring school shootings. Yet our approach is the exact opposite. +100

Huh? I would think press freedom and free speech advocates would have to reevaluate their views. Its obvious that banning coverage of school shootings would enormously reduce their frequency. Next we will talk about removing some words from the dictionary as it gives ideas. Suddenly the year will reset to 1984. Yea. I think suppression of the press has far more dangerous implications to it than suppression of firearms. That being said, I'm currently pro- both freedom of speech and private gun ownership but something does need to be done to help reduce the frequency of, and the potential damage of, mass shootings. I don't know what the solution is, but this article suggests that they'll only get more frequent. Anyways, I don't really want to start, or participate in, a political debate. More just concerned about what this means for humanity as a whole if it were true. What it means? It means that every once in awhile some nutjob is going to kill a lot of people, with guns, bombs, vehicles, knives, or one at a time with their bare hands or a length of rope. Human violence against other humans is going down and that has been the trend for centuries, but we will never rid ourselves of mass murderers nor serial killers completely. I for one don't want to live in a society that has been turned into nerf-ville like the UK is trying to do (banning all pointy objects), nor a society that tries to limit speech, information, or the press. Freedom is what makes life worth living, otherwise you'd be much safer locking yourself and your children in a padded room and never coming out.

The implications of this are truly frightening. As a gun-rights supporter, I'd have totally re-evaluate my views if there was more data supporting that this was the way things actually worked. Simply raising safety standards, record keeping, and customer screening wouldn't solve the problem. Then again, it doesn't necessarily seem that banning hand guns would either since some of these guys are actually building some pretty sophisticated explosives too... See Ericopoly's last post in the TSLA thread. Won't it be just grand when having an explosive laden autonomous vehicle blow kids up in school parking lots becomes a thing and people start worshiping/emulating the first one to do it? There is still way too much herd mentality in humanity for my tastes. EDIT: When you live in a world where any teenager can buy gasoline by the gallon no questions asked, it is pretty absurd to worry about gun control.

Isn't this one of the oldest economic fallacies in the book? How are humans using more machines than at any point in human history with more people employed than at any point in human history? There isn't a finite amount of work to do. If a machine replaces a human, the human is then freed to create values higher up the chain- values that were previously not considered important enough on a relative scale. It's already possible to only work 25% of the time while maintaining a higher standard of living than was available to people throughout 99% of human history. I agree, and that trend would be able to continue almost indefinitely if we never have strong AI. We are almost at the point where humans are not really needed for their labor anymore. Any labor which isn't done by machine now almost certainly will be in the near future. But once humans are no longer needed for their intelligence and creativity either it will be a different world. I'm not sure what it will look like. Maybe there will always be some things that machines can't do and we will all stay busy. Or maybe there will be some reason why enough machines can't be built and the law of comparative advantage will keep us all busy. Maybe we will just live lives of 100% leisure time while the machines do and decide everything.... or maybe the machines will decide that we aren't necessary for their pursuit of happiness.

I am happy that you have this vision of future. I'd like to believe this will be the case too. There's a small wrinkle in the fact that supporting 80-90% unemployed people is not something that a lot people can accept. ;) I'll be the first to admit that I have no idea what a post AI/nanotech world will look like. This is why some people refer to it as a (the) singularity, there is no visibility to the other side from here. I think the world of 100 years from now will be as different from today as the world of 10000 years ago is from now. And it may or may not include humans.

Yes 100-200 years from now 80-90% of people will be unemployed and will enjoy longer healthier lives than we do, more leisure time than we do, easier/better transportation and communication than we do, more comfortable/luxurious dwellings, than we do, entertainment options and conveniences that we can't even imagine, and most of them will still be bitching about those 10% who have more than they do. Cry me a river.

I prefer companies that figure out how to use their workforce for growth and improvement of the company instead of taking an axe and acting as if that's some kind of smart move. Great leadership and management is not about firing a bunch of employees because a part of business is "inefficient". Great leadership is finding a way to transform that part of the business while engaging and retraining employees for the benefit of employees, customers and shareholders. Say you start your own company and you find out that you need 10 employees. Would it be to anyone's benefit for you to hire 1000 employees and "figure out how to use your workforce for growth and improvement of the company"? No, unless you really do have a viable plan to need that many people in short order it is only a win-win situation if you hire only exactly the amount of people that you need. Now picture you own a company and due to market changes over the years you find yourself in a situation where you need 10 employees, but you have 1000. Isn't it the same situation? Unless you really do have a viable plan to need that many people in short order it is only a win-win situation if you only keep exactly the number of people which you actually need.

This is generally the pro-free market response to challenges like this, and you can see how it is ineffective because it rests on the premise that the end goal of business is the well-being of everyone else. And so you get responses like this: In reality, everyone in a market is pursuing the betterment of their own lives, from consumers buying an iPhone to employees working for a living to 3G firing workers. In Aristotle's view this is a completely moral activity because the end goal of morality for an individual is not to sacrifice for others but to achieve flourishing and happiness. And it's no surprise that when you leave people free to pursue their life and happiness, you get a lot of happiness. IMO, the way to approach the workers is to tell them that this is no longer a win-win transaction. If they have any decency they won't regard shareholders as their servants. They should recognize that it is in their own interest to remove themselves from a lose-win situation, and for the sake of their own self-esteem, they should look to move into a situation where they are taking care of and supporting their own life at the expense of no one else. I don't see any difference between this and a personal relationship. If you find out your significant other is no longer receiving value from your relationship, it's fine to be upset. But it's not fine to claim a right to their love and chain them to you. A win-lose business relationship doesn't make any more sense for either party than a win-lose personal relationship does. +1. Well said. How many people are "stuck" in win-loose relationships of both types where they themselves are on the loosing end, but don't get out because they are afraid of change. You can imagine that it is even harder when you are in a win-loose relationship and you are on the win side to terminate the arrangement.

Volvo: We’ll take the blame if our self-driving cars crash "Volvo says “blame us” if any of its self-driving cars crashes when it’s in autonomous mode. The company hopes the assumption of liability takes away one concern of the public and spurs the development and adoption of self-driving cars. Volvo says self-driving cars will be here sooner than many believe..."

I just paid $1.99/gal for gas, the lowest I've seen in a long time. I found this article interesting, I've never heard of "oil intensity" before. The Real Price of Oil - You have to account not just for inflation but for what economists call “oil intensity” http://spectrum.ieee.org/img/numb-don-lie-oct15-1442523801491.jpg

FYI, There are some great online tools nowadays for such questions. :) http://lmgtfy.com/?q=prem+fairfax+financial

Yale University paid $27,000 for a bond that pays about $12/year in interest in perpetuity. As the article says "At this rate, it’ll take 2,115 years to turn a profit." But they probably didn't buy it for the interest payments. Yale University to receive interest payment on bond from 1648 written on goatskin

No, no no, it would be too difficult to go from truck to truck that way if it were on wheels. The autonomous refueling drone aircraft hovers above it matching its speed, attaches to it, and refuels it on the highway. Then moves on to the next truck. The road will be covered in solar panels with wireless charging stations imbedded in it at intervals which the truck will pass over keeping its battery charged without ever needing to slow down. It will be like hitting a power-up in Mario Kart. That's even better. Maybe the air will be filled with quadrillions nano-mites that power themselves from CO2 in the atmosphere and busy themselves breaking water molecules in the air up into H and O2 then carrying the H molecule by molecule to the fuel cells of every vehicle on the road. This might not work in dry climates without enough humidity to supply the necessary fuel though.

No, no no, it would be too difficult to go from truck to truck that way if it were on wheels. The autonomous refueling drone aircraft hovers above it matching its speed, attaches to it, and refuels it on the highway. Then moves on to the next truck.

Time is a big factor. While the driver is sleeping, eating, going to the bathroom, etc. The merchandise is sitting in the truck not going anywhere. Shipping would be quicker if done by robot vehicles. One obstacle I see is that you would need full service at truck stops and some way to guarantee payment, because there is no longer a driver to get out, swipe a credit card, and put the nozzle in the tank. I think you overcome that obstacle by paying somebody minimum wage to occupy the vehicle during the entire journey. His primary job is to swipe the credit card and put the nozzle in the gas tank when refueling mid-route. His secondary job is to be with the vehicle so that it doesn't get robbed. Sounds less complicated than clerking at 7-11. So it's minimum wage. No need for commercial vehicle drivers license. I doubt that is the long term solution. Truck stops will likely accommodate robotic trucks with some type of easy pay system and more minimum wage staff to pump gas. Afterall there are less refueling stations than there are tucks, this would be many times fewer people. Also removing humans from the tuck entirely releases the design constraints having a passenger cab puts on truck design. Trucks can be designed without cabs, mirrors, etc. The engine can be put in its best position for stability and fuel economy. The same with the design/shape of the exterior of the truck. Just not having huge mirrors on the outside will save fuel. Putting a person in the truck defeats many of the gains of having an autonomous truck. As far as not getting robbed, I'm sure there are solutions to fortify the cargo area against that short of robotic machine gun turrets. And besides the truck will be moving most of the time.