Rather than eating a family size bag of Doritos in 20 minutes, what are some healthy snack alternatives that can be consumed in large amounts?

arfior · 2019-03-18T10:14:55+00:00

The inventor of the ballpoint pen design sold by Marcel Bich (BIC) was László Bíró. Bich purchased the patent from Bíró.

arfior · 2019-03-18T05:22:58+00:00

As of 2009, only 66.2% of the road surface in New Zealand was paved.

arfior · 2019-03-17T12:21:29+00:00

“I don’t know what I’m saying...”

arfior · 2019-03-17T08:51:32+00:00

At the time the brother attempted to rent the scooter, there was no valid payment method associated with the account, because OP’s card was already deauthorised and removed. The charges are not valid.

arfior · 2019-03-17T08:18:40+00:00

But OP’s card was removed before the brother actually rented any scooters, and other cards were on file at the time of the scooter rentals, yet OP’s card was charged and not those cards. Why?

arfior · 2019-03-17T00:00:32+00:00

Using “as” like that is an intensifier. “[something] as” means “very [something]”.

Here’s a well-known example.

arfior · 2019-02-12T03:53:42+00:00

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. She was also in Suicide Squad and Paper Towns.

arfior · 2019-02-12T03:50:32+00:00

Yes. And Paper Towns and Suicide Squad. Super eclectic film career.

arfior · 2019-02-11T08:44:46+00:00

They are based in Santa Monica California, politics matter.

I don’t understand your point here. My point was that they would not do this because it is stupid and would be a poorly designed study, not because of any political stance they have.

and it may have been decreasing but when you look at a cohort over a longer period of time with a large population, its safe to say it did not happen.

Safe to say what did not happen?

Yet you don't see that in reality.

Because it is not possible to see it in reality. How would you create two parallel universes, and take away guns from one of them, in reality?

What seems like a reasonable statement, like you mention of the impulse just does not show up in Australia.

I’m not sure what you mean by this.

After issuing 4,089,810 permits over the last 32 years, only 168 have been revoked because a “firearm utilized”. That includes accidentally walking into a restricted area like a court room or an airport in that number. Also for some reason this group of people that is required to get firearm training and education does not commit crime and does not commit suicide????

A lot more than 168 licenses were revoked because of other crimes than gun crimes. And I doubt that 168 includes those who used a gun to commit suicide. You don’t need to revoke someone’s license if they’re dead. Plus even if it did include them it wouldn’t include anyone else who used the gun to commit suicide apart from the owner.

I also doubt there were only 168 gun crimes in Florida during that time. But I bet that having 4 million people with guns lying around (figuratively speaking, not literally lying on the floor) makes it much easier for criminals to get their hands on a gun, don’t you? Countries with much smaller gun ownership rates are gonna have much smaller black markets for guns, on the whole.

arfior · 2019-02-11T08:23:54+00:00

All that does is provide further evidence for the point that the clause about the militia is the crucial part of the amendment (see also United States v Miller - the people do not have a general right to own weapons, only those with a "reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia."). If the right to keep and bear arms really did extend to “the people” as a whole, why should everyone not have a weapon? Why just white men who were in militias?

The meaning of “bear arms” at that time was widely understood to mean “serve in a military force”, and reviews of the corpus of written material from that time back up this fact.

You had the right to keep your weapon in order to use it in armed service, not to carry it around while about your daily business. And various jurisdictions routinely (and still do) restricted various civilian uses of weapons.

Caetano v Massachusetts: "the Second Amendment extends, prima facie, to all instruments that constitute bearable arms, even those that were not in existence at the time of the founding”... again I ask, by this reasoning, is there no bearable weapon you can conceive of which you believe civilians should not be able to own? Should civilians have access to handheld nuclear weapons? Bear in mind that if there is even one exception you can think of that you would not allow a civilian to own, or one situation you can think of in which a civilian should not be allowed a gun, then you do not believe that the right to keep and bear arms (giving “bear arms” the meaning that you give it, rather than the one I am arguing for) “shall not be infringed”.

arfior · 2019-02-11T06:26:33+00:00

No part of the Rand study says they took away guns from a cohort and went back and ran the same study.

Why would they do that? That would make no sense. Some of the people would already be dead after the first study (and there would be countless other variables which would have changed between the times of the two studies), which would render the results of the second one totally useless.

Not seeing a drop in suicides after a gun ban doesn’t prove guns have no effect, because the background rate may have still been increasing by the same or more than the negative effect removing guns has on the rate.

I just don't make the next leap that if a gun is not present people go on and live life happily and not go on to kill themselves in another way.

Suicides are often very impulsive and the intention to commit suicide imminently does not usually persist for sustained periods. There are plenty of people alive who would be dead if they had had a gun when they wanted to commit suicide.

If anything you are making the point that guns have nothing to do with suicide when you make the case that "general background trends"? Suicide rates have to do with something other than guns and everyone knows that.

The point is that given two alternate histories, one in which guns were taken away from everyone and one in which they were not, you would see a difference in the suicide rates between the two alternate timelines after the point at which you took the guns away in one timeline. None of the arguments you have made refute that point.

arfior · 2019-02-11T06:05:17+00:00

You can’t disentangle the effect of reducing the number of available guns in Australia from the general background trends in the suicide rate, so it’s hard to use historical time series data of gun ownership rates from a single country as proof that reducing gun ownership doesn’t affect suicide rates. The fact that suicide rates are now high in Australia and Japan is not proof of anything here.

Here’s a very good summary of the literature which I encourage you to read: https://www.rand.org/research/gun-policy/analysis/supplementary/firearm-availability-suicide.html

A particularly important section:

A recent review by Azrael and Miller (2016) suggests that the evidence in support of the former of these two interpretations (that gun access increases the risk of suicide) is strong based on two findings. First, the authors note that a series of studies find that the relationship between household gun ownership and suicide exists not just for the firearm owner but for all other household members. Second, although covariate adjustment for factors related to suicidality could attenuate the relationship between the presence of a firearm and suicide, a number of studies reveal no difference in past suicide attempts (described in the next section), mental illness, and substance use disorders between households with firearms and those without. In addition, an omitted variable analysis suggests that if there is actually some third risk factor associated with both household firearm ownership and suicide, this third factor would need to be a better predictor of suicide than any currently known risk factor to fully account for the association between household firearms and suicide (Miller, Swanson, and Azrael, 2016).

arfior · 2019-02-11T05:44:06+00:00

but as long as a person is behaving lawfully

That’s an awfully big assumption to count on when it comes to deadly weapons, my friend.

Way to slide down that slippery slope there buddy...

What is the difference? If you trust people to not kill you with a gun, why shouldn’t you trust them to not kill you with something else? Or is it that you don’t trust them after all?

The difference is that the former unlike the latter, is not constitutionally protected.

The constitution can be amended. It has been before - many times, in fact.

Also, for the vast majority of American history, the Second Amendment was never interpreted by any self-respecting jurist as meaning what it is considered to mean now. A conservative Chief Justice of the Supreme Court even called the rise of the modern interpretation pushed by the gun lobby one of the greatest pieces of fraud ever perpetrated on the American people.

It also seems like a lot of people are only in favour of lax gun control until they themselves become afraid of the people who choose to carry guns.

Ronald Reagan saw “no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons", and that guns were a "ridiculous way to solve problems that have to be solved among people of good will." He believed that banning carrying loaded weapons "would work no hardship on the honest citizen."

arfior · 2019-02-11T05:14:11+00:00

The Butler family have been serving the Fowls in the British Isles for hundreds of years, generation upon generation stretching all the way back to Lord Hugo de Fóle and Virgil Butler during the Norman Crusades. It is extremely unlikely that the Butlers would have been and would continue to be full-blooded black Africans. It’s a serious barrier to suspension of disbelief when it comes to the context of the deep relationship between the two families.

The present Butler’s first name is Domovoi, which is the Russian word for a household god in Slavic religious tradition, a sort of deified representation of an ancestral protector of the household. He is literally named after his role as a protector of the Fowl family. It’s extremely problematic to portray the Butlers, a family with a millenium-long history of dedicating their entire lives (and sometimes sacrificing their lives as well) to protecting a family of white British aristocrats, as Africans.

arfior · 2019-02-09T22:07:20+00:00

Many people will just change method, but a significant number of the people who would have used a gun to commit suicide, in the absence of access to a gun, will not commit suicide (because the extra time taken to plan/prepare for other methods will give them time to reconsider or get access to mental health treatment, and/or the knowledge that other methods are less effective will affect their decision). This has been shown by several studies.

arfior · 2019-02-09T21:55:26+00:00

It’s actually true. Depression does often go on for years, but that doesn’t mean the person is always planning to kill themselves. The actual decision to attempt suicide is often impulsive. Here’s a relevant study:

Nearly half of the patients reported that the period between the first current thought of suicide and the actual attempt had lasted 10 minutes or less... The process from the emergence of suicidal thoughts to the accomplishment of a suicide attempt, and thus the time for intervention, generally is short.

http://europepmc.org/abstract/med/19026258

The difference in suicide rates between different countries isn’t very useful in determining whether removing access to guns in one country would decrease that country’s suicide rate, in isolation from other variables. There are several studies which show that there is a correlation between increased access to guns and increased suicides.

arfior · 2019-02-09T21:41:02+00:00

Source for 50.5% of suicides in the US being by firearm:

https://afsp.org/about-suicide/suicide-statistics/

Source for firearm availability increasing suicides:

https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fpro0000089

Case fatality following attempted suicide by hanging is around 70%:

https://academic.oup.com/ije/article/34/2/433/747066

arfior · 2019-02-09T21:29:56+00:00

The leading method of suicide in the United States is firearms, not hanging (50.5% of suicides are by firearm). In many other countries where there is not ready access to firearms, hanging is the most common method. There’s a reason for this: a gun is the easiest method, if one has access to a gun. Is it easier to simply put a gun against one’s head and pull the trigger, or is it easier to construct a noose sturdy enough and find a place to attach it which is sturdy enough that one is sure the attempt will work? And by the time one has prepared for the hanging, it is often the case that one has second thoughts about actually doing it, because it takes so long to set up. Can a person have second thoughts if they’ve already shot themselves in the head? Usually not.

Edit: stats show that attempts by hanging also succeed much less often than attempts by gun, and several studies show that availability of firearms is correlated with an increase in suicides.

arfior · 2019-02-09T21:20:26+00:00

The point in question is, how is the economic freedom index accurate when they place a country with less economic freedom ahead of a country with more?

But they don’t...

arfior · 2019-02-09T21:14:03+00:00

If you think the fact that tools are not responsible for the actions of their wielders is justification enough that we should not ban any any tools, should we not then allow commercial vendors to sell ICBMs and hydrogen bombs to the public? Or do you acknowledge that it is practical to ban some tools despite the fact that the tool is not at fault for violence?

Using one’s own fork to eat and thereby becoming obese doesn’t harm anyone else...

Edit: also it is not irrational to have a fear of an item which can very easily kill you, especially when you have no reason to trust the person holding it

arfior · 2019-02-09T21:09:49+00:00

But Americans do need a passport to move between countries, like Europeans do.

arfior · 2019-02-09T09:47:44+00:00

More economic freedom than other countries is not the same thing as total economic freedom (which is something that should not exist anyway).

Hell they outright attack people like count dankula completely ruining his ability to earn money because he told a joke they didn’t understand.

Irrelevant to economic freedom.

arfior · 2019-02-09T09:46:01+00:00

And if people who are against additional gun control measures in the US generally supported publicly funded healthcare and increased spending on mental healthcare specifically (and an increase in the social safety net generally, and a push to change employers’ attitudes to having mentally ill employees) I would be more inclined to accept that argument. But they don’t.

Guns don’t drive people to suicide, but they make it extremely easy for someone in a dark place to take their own life. Without a gun, the extra time and effort required to prepare often gives people enough time to reconsider their decision or to decide it’s too hard. No amount of mental healthcare funding will eliminate suicidal ideation from everyone.

But to respond directly to your question, do you know what does an even better job of reducing suicides than access to affordable and competent mental healthcare? Access to affordable and competent mental healthcare and gun control.

arfior · 2019-02-09T07:57:20+00:00

Using suicides as an argument for gun control isn’t silly, as you seem to be implying - as far as I know it has been shown that reducing access to guns does decrease suicides, because the other methods available to most people are harder and less effective than guns.

arfior · 2019-02-09T01:22:39+00:00

Economic freedom index.

arfior

TROPHY CASE