glenra

67 ms·

481.
by glenra 13y ago
I should have clarified, I meant kidnapping for money , like the Lindbergh situation. Taking a little kid and leaving a ransom note, hoping to get money from the parents. That almost never happens in the US today, in large part due to th
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by glenra 13y ago
> But one thing doesn't change -- the shocking number of people who are starving at any given time. But that one thing DOES change! It improves! In what sense is the vast improvement since the 1990s not change ? > we aren't
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by glenra 13y ago
> Honestly. I say population is increasing. No. What you said was that population was increasing without constraint . It's that last bit I was responding to. The fact that the rate of growth is declining does suggest the presence o
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by glenra 13y ago
> If you sample on the interval 1990 to the present, crime appears to have gone down. If you sample from 1960 or any longer intervals to the present, per capita crime has certainly increased. How about instead of SAMPLING, and without pe
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by glenra 13y ago
>> ... the fact that humans are known to greatly increase the prevalence of all of those species ... > Not only is that not a fact, but the opposite is the truth. Humans are wiping out other species at an incredible rate. Okay, now
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by glenra 13y ago
[I apologize in advance for having to go "meta" on this one; given the rest of the discussion I don't think it can be helped.] lutusp: Do you care whether the statements you make are true? Or do you just want to not seem wron
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by glenra 13y ago
>> "rate" means per capita per year. >That's by no means the only meaning of "rate". It is the standard definition when talking about a CRIME rate. Googling "define crime rate" returns things like
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by glenra 13y ago
>> You are the one that said things are worse compared to 1932. > And they are -- much worse. More incidents in an absolute sense, and more incidents per capita Except that there are almost certainly fewer incidents per capita
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by glenra 13y ago
> To make that claim, you need to define "rate". "rate" means per capita per year. By "a century ago" I meant around 1913; 1800 would be TWO centuries ago. The murder rate in the US has been in the general b
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by glenra 13y ago
Um, can you give any example of these "too common" events? Kidnapping is essentially nonexistent in the US today. And I'm really struggling to think of anybody as famous as Lindberg, but if somebody ever kidnapped for ransom
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by glenra 13y ago
> My point is still valid. WHAT point? Dude, you need to spend some time with gapminders.org . Follow the links below and press the "play" button beneath the charts. India and Bangladesh have in the last few decades had a rapid
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by glenra 13y ago
In the case of murder, the murder rate today is no higher than it was a century ago and much less than it was 30 years ago. So how big an interval do YOU think is appropriate to look at for the murder rate? Go back too far and you get into
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by glenra 13y ago
The population density of Fremont, CA is about the same as the population density of Bangladesh, and it's not a bad place to live. The population density of Hong Kong is much higher still, and it's also a pretty nice place to live
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by glenra 13y ago
The rate of both mass killings and individual killings is WAY down from what it's been historically. One interesting thing about news coverage is it covers NEWS - stuff that is new or that happens rarely. Once you've seen somethin
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by glenra 13y ago
> The placebo effect is sometimes stronger than any antibiotic. When it comes to depression, the primary factor isn't really a "placebo effect". It's true that most of the treatments do no better than a fake pill, but
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by glenra 13y ago
FWIW, the last time my 4S screen broke, I got the whole phone replaced at an Apple Store for $200. What's more, they recently started replacing just the screens in-store for $150. http://9to5mac.com/2013/06/06
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by glenra 13y ago
Those hypothetical cars and trucks would wear out twice as fast and consequently need to be replaced twice as often as before.
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by glenra 13y ago
> The end of the Oil Interval is the most interesting, possibly the ONLY interesting historical event that will take place in our lifetimes. That seems like a bizarre thing to believe. When humanity switched from wood to coal for heati
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by glenra 13y ago
THey made the shirt because they didn't see the first comic as offensive. They thought a "dickwolf" was a funny idea. Raping is not (to them) an essential/defining characteristic of a dickwolf any more than "mauli
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by glenra 13y ago
One nice natural experiment is drivers. People who drive in the US get more sun on the left side of their face and their left arm. People who drive in Australia get more sun on the right side of their face and their right arm. If you measur
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by glenra 13y ago
Is there a name for having that sort of agenda ? If not, can we call it "railing"? Does the person with the agenda explicitly SAY "I have this agenda and want to only talk about X and want you to say Y about it", or is
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by glenra 13y ago
"derailing" is a very strange concept. In a conversation, you generally don't get to declare all your premises off-limits, nor do you get to determine unilaterally what the other participants will find most interesting to tal
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by glenra 13y ago
> everyone "needs" police protection (and it surely can't be provided via free market) Police protection certainly can be provided privately via the free market - and it often is even today, in the sense that there a
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by glenra 13y ago
Wow, is that a dumb idea. This might be a good time to re-read hurricane expert Chris Landsea's 2005 resignation letter from the IPCC: http://cstpr.colorado.edu/prometheus/archives/science_policy... Quote: &q
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by glenra 13y ago
Right, that's why they do a search. Amd if it's hidden so well you won't find it in a search, it'll be hidden that well tomorrow too - where is the sense in pestering this guy for hours and sending him home to get on a
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by glenra 13y ago
It's not untenable in the sense that it's possible to get that amount of work done, but that doesn't make it worth doing. TSA is fundamentally trying to solve an unsolvable problem. No matter how many resources they throw at
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by glenra 13y ago
> Poverty usually isn't a way to increase life expectancy. One must presume they're doing something right. Poverty actually can be a way to increase "life expectancy", depending on how it's calculated. If a bab
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by glenra 13y ago
It's not just the high false positive rate, it's the combination of a high false positive rate with a really low base rate. (If there were a lot more terrorists, the test might be worth doing!) The combination of those two fac
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by glenra 13y ago
> I'm curious -- are these formulae available for purchase by anyone? I have this for breakfast every morning. It's designed to be nutritious, convenient and filling to aid weight loss: http://www.idealshape.com&#x
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by glenra 13y ago
> Completely skimming it, the test sites had false positive rates of 0.6 - 1.8%. In other words, the test is almost completely useless. Given how low the base rate of terrorists sneaking through bombs is, a positive test result on one

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