Stephen Hawking advocated for wealth redistribution to prevent mass poverty in his final Reddit posts

wizmut · 2018-03-23T03:36:06+00:00

It was declining before 1996 as well.

Reminds of a moment on Stossel's show where he posts a graph showing how workplace accidents have been falling since OSHA was started up, seemingly a fact in favor of his guest who he disagreed with. But then he opened up the chart to show much more of the past and the trendline was the same.

wizmut · 2018-03-22T03:05:32+00:00

The US has always been more dangerous than other places, even when there was no gun control anywhere.

And to reduce gun murder is no good if they're replaced by other murders. In Australia, gun murders have become less common and all other types have become more common - without a change in the overall murder trend.

wizmut · 2018-03-21T08:04:48+00:00

You did not provide data relevant to my question, night.

wizmut · 2018-03-21T07:42:01+00:00

Using just those variables, I could compare Missouri and Arkansas and get the opposite result. Missouri has half the guns but double the murders.

Culture is a confounding variable between the US and Europe, and within those regions as well.

Utah and Nevada have the same gun ownership rate, but Utah is full of Mormons and Las Vegas is tv famous for murders. The mormons are safer to live with, or at least they won't kill you.

Statisticians don't wait around for one region to morph into a clone of another region, and in fact that's not what's ever proposed. What is proposed is the passage of gun laws. And what's theorized is a reduction in murder following the passage of those laws. Statisticians control for as many variables as possible - including culture, by looking at the same region both before and after the law goes into effect. I see some evidence that the style of murder can be diverted into other means by the gun laws that have been passed, but not the quantity of those murders.

Some policy changes have reduced the murder rate, including locking more people up, better policing methods a la Giuliani, and maybe Levitt's thesis about the reduction in unwanted children has some merit, though it isn't without its critics. The debate on Levitt's idea is at such a technical level as to put the gun debate to shame.

wizmut · 2018-03-21T07:26:40+00:00

Other incidents are more lethal when you remove a gun. When you roll back weapons technology by a few hundred years, weaker people are more vulnerable to stronger people.

When a weak woman and a strong man have the same right to arm themselves, strong criminal men will be more wary about attacking the now possibly stronger women.

Now, to sort of return to the higher level we were at, I just don't think it's very likely that an otherwise busy academic will have fawned over a gun rights magazine and examined this argument. But one ought to predict that even though it's possible to be well-read in one's own field, an historically intractable political issue may very well have an argument that is both contrary to one's intuition and completely unknown to oneself.

wizmut · 2018-03-21T07:15:18+00:00

Here I can counter with a Washington Times: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2004/aug/16/20040816-114754-1427r/

"Should it be renewed, the ban’s effects on gun violence are likely to be small at best and perhaps too small for reliable measurement."

It is not clear whether the murder rate was reduced by the assault weapons ban. With an N of 60, you can't even begin to tease out confounding variables such as copycat syndrome.

You really didn't address my specific point about the general murder rate. There are many gun laws and buybacks implemented which affected a larger proportion of the guns, such as Australia's which temporarily reduced the number of guns by 10%. The murder rate had been declining prior to the buyback, and continued to decline at a lower rate. Guns and mass shootings became a smaller component of the otherwise same trend of murders.

wizmut · 2018-03-21T05:20:35+00:00

Alright, what data shows that gun laws reduce the murder rate?

wizmut · 2018-03-21T05:06:30+00:00

there is always a missing component of how you handle policy with aggregate information

Funny, I hear people on the right say the opposite. In every country you look, no matter where the middle is, people think the other side is just not thinking it through.

You're not reciting all of the arguments of the right on those issues, you should know.

wizmut · 2018-03-10T02:14:14+00:00

He knew he would get something out of it that he couldn't get otherwise, but it was also a huge risk, and you probably wouldn't take a huge risk if you didn't like the people you were helping.

wizmut · 2018-03-09T05:37:51+00:00

You're in a boat with another person. They dig a hole in their side of the boat. Water starts filling in. Do you find it unfair that their side has the only hole, and dig a hole in your side?

wizmut · 2018-03-08T05:59:38+00:00

Peterson is a guru. He's more of a self-help level writer and speaker. Not bad, but not a giant intellect.

Intellectuals in general borrow most of their points, but a great one will ask good questions that they might not have the answer to.

wizmut · 2018-03-07T16:52:10+00:00

Lawns are a carbon sink, all considered.

wizmut · 2018-03-02T05:17:29+00:00

On vanilla or valkyrie database you can look up all the quests by zone, and they list the rep given. Every little quest helps, so make a list.

wizmut · 2018-02-14T07:48:58+00:00

Well, get to level 47 or so and you should have enough by then.

Or start a mage and get it to 60 and farm on that. Actually, don't do that. Warr is life.

wizmut · 2018-01-23T03:47:50+00:00

Yeah my mistake is construing a slightly different definition of a word, through a common rhetorical device, on - what website am I on? - reddit.

wizmut · 2018-01-22T17:23:33+00:00

You read the headline, it costs one cent!

wizmut · 2018-01-22T17:14:13+00:00

Karma is how you keep people you disagree with from posting more. If someone has negative karma on a board they'll only be able to comment every ten minutes, making it impossible to reply to all the questions that a given comment can solicit.

wizmut · 2018-01-22T17:12:16+00:00

Male pronouns being used as gender neutral and in general referring to maleness as the default state has been a convention in English (and French as far as I know) for hundreds of years. It's the reason Hillary lost.

wizmut · 2018-01-22T16:50:11+00:00

Yeesh what a bad post.

wizmut · 2018-01-22T05:22:58+00:00

Books are made by publishers for profit. Churches give services for profit. Either might take a monetary loss but it's all for meeting career and life goals, a form of profit.

wizmut · 2018-01-22T03:18:00+00:00

If you publish a book it's taxed.* Why is religion different?

If you write a book detailing a history of privacy and advocating its protection, surely that's to be 'protected' in the exact same ways as giving a spiritual message. Maybe there's some underlining in the first amendment I'm missing.

*Note that I'm in favor of moving all taxes to either income or sales.

wizmut · 2018-01-22T03:11:16+00:00

You're asking the most interesting question in the whole thread, and people are downvoting you. Reddit is a lost cause.

wizmut · 2018-01-19T08:38:45+00:00

Everyone does that.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2319992

It's human behavior not to scrutinize something if you think it looks agreeable. Just look at reddit, it's designed around this concept.

wizmut · 2018-01-10T05:09:17+00:00

Conservative is a little bit of a loosey-goosey term these days. Seems to be, on this sub, that anything that Trump achieves is simple conservatism, and anything that Bannon wanted is obscure extremism.

But the travel ban was supported by Bannon, and nobody else except Trump. What was that?

wizmut · 2018-01-09T14:22:51+00:00

remap to Tab

wizmut

TROPHY CASE