Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle (2017) | Hacker News Reader

Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle (2017)

99percentinvisible.org

39 pointsHooke20 comments

So I saw the title and thought of something else. You see I own this book. It is from 1911. As a child in the 80s I read what was the third updated Tom Swift books. That lead me to the 1960s set and then to the original set from the 1910s. I have all of the 80s and 60s set and I own 9 of the ones from the 1910s and I am looking for the rest.

The most famous example of this is the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew series. They've been re-written 4 or 5 times, basically updated for each generation.

Franklin W. Dixon (Hardy Boys) and Carolyn Keene were pen names for a variety of authors. So they keep the title and author and mostly the plot but change the words to avoid anachronisms.

I read the 1960s versions of the Hardy Boys and The Nancy Drew when I was ~9. I still own most of them. My mother read everything. The house was full of books. At some point over the years having my own family and moving around a bit the books got cut down to only the old stuff from the 1960 that are collectables, stuff from my grandfathers childhood (things with dates ~1900) and hardbacks of non-fiction type things (science, music theory, math, biographies, the classics). This still covers 3 bookshelves. Everything else is pretty much only in digital form. In this lock down I have come to realize how much I miss the physical book.

That outfit, the Stratemeyer Syndicate, has had some good threads on HN over the years:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18534629 ("The Secret Syndicate Behind Nancy Drew")

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1705714 ("The Hardy Boys - The final chapter (1998)")

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolaser

I have high hopes for this, whenever someone decides to come out with a commercial handheld one

I recall hearing that in the absence of tasers baton use went up higher than firearms use. Even if tasers may be used unnecessary they still appear to be a net good

Sure there is no silver bullet, because it's not tasers that taser people....

Just as surely, hit by a taser is 99.9% better outcome than getting a bullet hole in your body.

Are there statistics that show taser use decreased the number of bullets fired/hitting civilians by the police? I find conflicting results. https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/police-use-force-impact-... (2011):

A new study suggests that less-lethal weapons decrease rates of officer and offender injuries

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/18/theres-no-evidence-tasers-re... (2018):

“We find no substitutions between Tasers and firearms,” Professor Jeffrey Grogger told CNBC. The study reviewed 36,112 use-of-force incidents in Chicago

Tasers do still kill people. And the threshold to using them is a lot lower than a gun.

any physical altercation carries the risk of death or serious injury. do tasers have an especially bad risk vs. use threshold?

The alternative to taser use is not necessarily physical altercation.

If you didn't have a taser you might be inclined to get really good at negotiating with people. You might be less inclined to try to dominate a situation.

a taser is just one point along the use of force continuum. police are trained to always maintain a tactical advantage when confronting someone, but to only go as far along the continuum as is necessary. obviously they don't always do this correctly, and they are granted a lot of leeway when they mess up. it's unclear to me how removing a midpoint along the continuum would reduce instances of excessive force, unless there's something specifically bad about the taser.

it seems to me that it would be better to focus on the negotiation skills themselves; people won't bet their life on skills they don't feel confident in. or better yet, raise the bar for what justifies a confrontation in the first place. the cops who killed freddie gray didn't even have a charge in mind when they decided to pursue him. they chased him just because he ran away.

>> it's unclear to me how removing a midpoint

No, remove everything beyond the taser too for the front line cop.

Your immediate reaction would surely be “that’s crazy”. Maybe. Maybe not. It’s not going to happen though so no point fretting the details.

The lesser of two evils is still evil.

We don't need kinder weapons. We need a way to stop using weapons so much.

Thinly veiled advertisements for Axon (makers of Taser!) only exploit concerns and don't fix the real problems.

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