Unreal that schools have active shooter training and no one seems to even care. The fact that there is a non-zero chance your kid might be shot at school is completely absurd.
I think active shooter training time would be better spent on counseling, therapy, PE, recess, or just literally letting kids fuck off and hang out with their friends for an hour.
Unclear the portion that is suicides but homicides are the fastest growing segment beyond unintentional poisonings
> Although the new data are consistent with other evidence that firearm violence has increased during the Covid-19 pandemic,5 the reasons for the increase are unclear,
Seems like there is a pretty obvious candidate for that, lockdowns.
Still, only time will tell, as they go on to say with the rest of that quote:
> and it cannot be assumed that firearm-related mortality will later revert to prepandemic levels.
When most people say "gun violence" they do not mean gun-as-tool-used-in-suicide, they mean nonconsensual use of a firearm against someone.
Suicides are way up. Gun murders are up too, but they're still pretty low in the scheme of things. They're "safe to completely ignore" low if you're not in one of a few specific counties in the US where gang violence causes 70-90% of the gun murders.
The movie plot/evening news gun violence stuff that you hear about is so rare as to be safely ignored in all parts of the US.
> The consensus among public health experts is that there is strong evidence that reducing firearm suicides in contexts where more-lethal means of attempting suicide are unavailable will result in reductions in the total suicide rate (see, for example, Office of the Surgeon General and National Action Alliance for Suicide Prevention, 2012; World Health Organization, 2014; for review, see Azrael and Miller, 2016).
[1] https://www.rand.org/research/gun-policy/analysis/suicide.ht...
It shows there is zero correlation.
For example, imagine we find that higher speed limits increase the rate of automobile accidents in a given area. That finding doesn't preclude that poorly maintained roads might also increase the rate of accidents. So just the existence of an area with a high level of car accidents and very low speed limits doesn't necessarily mean that there is no correlation or causal link between speed limits and automobile accidents. It may just mean that the area suffers greatly from other causes (like poorly maintained roads).
Similarly, I think it is fairly intuitive to assume that there are probably a host of causal factors in suicide rates. For sure, means isn't the only factor but it is an important one.
There's been research into means reduction, and it does seem to have an effect on reducing suicide. The hypothesis is fairly intuitive: many suicides are a response to a crisis, and a human in crisis-mode is not always a great problem solver; lack of an obvious means sometimes gives people some extra time to reconsider.
You can read a high level summary of some of the research here: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/means-matter/means-matter/risk/
This doesn't happen anywhere else on the planet outside of war-torn countries. Saying that "actually kids are more likely to kill themselves" is just about peak cope.
A binary analysis would lead us to conclude that gun regulations are completely bereft of any benefit whatsoever, given that gun violence, even mass shootings/spree killings, happen in countries with quite strict gun control - I mean, the former PM of Japan was killed via firearm just this month! But that is not the case. There is a clear gradient of occurrence and effectiveness of regulation. So, we need to move into the realm of statistics.
And the statistics are that over the course of the decade from 2010 to 2019 ~350 kids were killed in school shootings, and ~26000 took their own lives.
My assertion is that given these numbers, an inordinate amount of resources, political capital, and conversational bandwidth is being spent on what is actually a rather rare occurrence and that this is largely a waste compared to what we could be spending said resources, political capital, and conversational bandwidth on - namely, solving the problems that affect broad swathes of the populace and that I, and others, believe actually drive people to commit such violence in the first place.
Or, we can spend the next century fretting about a statistically vanishingly rare occurrence, keeping the blue and red tribes divided, making little to no progress on the existential problems that we as a country, culture, society, and species face, as the world becomes increasingly uninhabitable.
They absolutely do not, not even remotely close to the scale and frequency in the United States. At least not in countries with equivalent socio-economic metrics as the US (El Salvador does not count).
I thought we weren't analyzing gun violence statistically?
But since you walked down the statistical path anyway, the least you can do is not be completely wrong about it.
I compared the rate of school shooting deaths to suicide deaths for the purpose of pointing out the outsized amount of resources the issue takes up.
You claimed that it is wrong to analyze gun violence statistically.
I, for the purpose of demonstrating the absurdity of such an assertion, analyzed gun violence using a non-statistical and binary approach.
You then took exception to me conceding your point for the purpose of argument and using said non-statistical approach by then bringing statistics back into the mix and arguing that the frequency of gun violence is much higher in the US than other places.
So, which is it? Can we, or can we not use statistics to analyze gun violence? If we can, then we can compare the statistics across regulatory regimes and social, economic, and cultural contexts and show that gun violence can be affected in degree by those factors. If we cannot, then we cannot show that regulation is effective, since gun violence still happens in highly varied regulatory regimes and social, economic, and cultural contexts.
I would argue that statistics is an appropriate approach since, in my opinion, it allows us to come to a better reckoning of reality. Ultimately, your view is up to you. But you can't have your cake and eat it too here - you have to either admit that the use of statistics is appropriate, or that aforementioned factors are irrelevant to gun violence occurring. They are simply mutually incompatible views.
In this one sentence you betray yourself as uninterested in debate, and instead just like to hear yourself talk. The person you are responding to offered an interesting comparison, that of stats from the US versus other countries (and, I might add, they gamely came to your turf, which you subsequently tried to dismiss). Instead of doing the hard work of revising your views in the face of a potentially fruitful comparison, you dismiss it out of hand and assert your self-righteousness.
They did the exact opposite of this. They asserted that it is wrong to examine this issue statistically.
Spaceman posted > rbj challenged that stats should be used > spaceman answered, alluding to stats widely searchable > rbj dismissed the use of stats.
Edit: Re-reading through all posts, I see I am incorrect in this summary.
Classic. They're not having trouble following your argument. They just disagree.
This reads as appalling smug. Whether spaceman_2020 made a good argument or not, you are quibbling over ultimately unimportant figures when the situation remains that mass shootings of children in their schools are orders of magnitude more common in the US than other developed countries.
You should also be appalled by the adolescent suicide rate involving firearms - that's also not normal.
I just think that, given the status quo, the best approach to reducing all forms of gun violence is to just generally make life better for everyone, and that the resources spent on trying to wrench guns from the hands of the citizenry are much better spent on just about anything else.
Can't really hear your argument, if any, over the smug.
This is not an argument against gun control, but against spending so much time and effort fighting for that gun control at the cost of letting slip the lower hanging fruit that could prevent more deaths.
Statistics deals in degrees; violence against children is something that is sufficiently cognized in absolutes.
This is the only moral choice when dealing with absolutes.
A cute rhetorical parlor trick.
Principle 1: Children should not be victims of arbitrary violence
Principle 2: Children should be educated
These are compatible principles. Your proposal (one of many potential proposals) is to undermine principle two rather than addressing the source of the issue which is violent third parties.
And to forestall any further swiss-cheese a priori logic: this is not something fantastical. There are other societies with have honored both principles one and two, and have experienced zero, as in ABSOLUTELY zero acts of mass violence in educational settings.
To do otherwise is to be biased one way or another.
Um, I don’t know maybe morally? As in, it is morally abhorrent and unconscionable for children to be preyed upon in school, one of the places they should safe by definition.
I agree that kids should not be preyed upon in schools.
Now what?
This is ultimately my point - we have a lot of other avenues to address the problem rather than this, IMO, fruitless attempt to deal with the guns.
And just because it's difficult doesn't mean it's impossible. If one side can stack the Supreme Court with people who suddenly realize there's no constitutional right to privacy, the other side can find some judges to suddenly notice the "well-regulated militia" part of the second amendment, and act accordingly.
Gun-control opponents... generally choose to ignore the first clause altogether, hoping that no one notices that there was never an unabridged right to gun ownership.[1]
The solution to the gun-control issue and, perhaps, to some of the lawlessness in our communities is for the states to invoke the Second Amendment and require gun owners to join a militia.[1)
The 2nd Amendment says well-regulated militia shall not be infringed, it's the right of the people. Gun owners should be drafted into militia and whipped into shape. Whether regulation works or not is incidental because the 2nd requires it.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1987/08/22/t...
I understand your perspective, and I believe I understand how you arrived at it. I even largely share your concern - but I don’t think you fully realize just how repugnant it is to many people.
Have you considered how many lives your proposal would cost, or how likely it would be to succeed in any measurable way?
This is not a rhetorical question. I would definitely consider myself part of “American gun culture.” I would resist disarmament with lethal force if necessary. That statement may be somewhat shocking in this context it wouldn’t so much as raise an eyebrow amongst gun owners.
… and this is about banning one kind of weapon. One kind. An ill-defined class of firearms that are used in a tiny fraction of crimes. How many deaths would be worthwhile to make that happen?
> But when the patient is bleeding out, you first STOP THE BLEEDING.
Attempting to disarm the US may or may not “stop the bleeding” - but I’m extremely confident that it would create many times more patients.
There hasn’t been an “assault rifle” used in a school shooting for decades. “Assault rifles” are highly regulated— it’s nearly impossible to own one. There have been a fair number of sporting semi-auto rifles used in mass shootings.
Can we please stop describing these weapons as something they are not? The “AR” in AR-15 means “ArmaLite Rifle”. ArmaLite being the company that originally developed the weapon.
Respectfully, aren't these definitions just semantics about firing capability?
My understanding is the mass-shooter weapon of choice, the AR-15 is semi-automatic-only (ie not an assault rifle [0]) as they do not have select-fire capability, meaning the capability of a weapon to be adjusted to fire in semi-automatic, multi-short burst, and/or automatic firing mode. Semi-automatic fire means that one shot is fired upon each depression of the trigger. [1]
Regardless of firing capability, there is "overwhelming evidence that the AR-15 could bring more firepower to bear than the M14" [2] battle rifle [3].
This evidence is borne out in our schools [4]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assault_rifle
[1] http://www.weaponslaw.org/glossary/selective-fire
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assault_rifle#M16
Statements like "ban all assault rifles" require semantics, and the entire discussion around "which weapons to ban" is entirely semantics. If this person genuinely means "assault rifle", then you already can't own these as a civilian (generally, unless it was made before 1986 and you pay a ton of money for it). If this person means "assault weapon", then we're talking about a poorly defined class of weapons, which are largely based on cosmetic features.
> My understanding is the mass-shooter weapon of choice, the AR-15
The AR-15 is the most common rifle in the country. It's a popular rifle because it can do everything. It's cheap, you can hunt with it if you want (larger magazines are popular for hunting feral hogs, which are infesting the south), you can shoot sporting competitions with it. If you want to shoot a different caliber, for example to change to .22 for cheap target shooting, you can pop two pins, swap to a second upper, and go ahead and plink away at your soda cans. With it being the most popular platform of rifle in the US, of course it pops up in mass shootings. Wanting to ban the AR-15 is like wanting to ban RAM 2500s because they're the "truck of choice for drunk drivers" [1].
> "overwhelming evidence that the AR-15 could bring more firepower to bear than the M14" [2]
A potential, but never materialized, military AR-15 that they're talking about here, would have been select-fire. Then that military AR-15 would be an assault rifle. This has no bearing on semi-automatic AR-15s not being an assault rifle.
This is the third uninformed comment from you that I've needed to respond to today, loaded with more sources but lacking comprehension.
[1] https://insurify.com/insights/car-models-most-duis-2020/
...
Around _400_[1]. That's ALL rifles. Hunting rifles, bolt action, "assault weapons", whatever, in a country with ~300M-1B guns and a population of 330M. While we should look at why these deaths happening, banning the tool used to commit such an incredibly low number of crimes is just silly. I'd compare it to trying to ban swimming pools because 390 people drown in them per year [2]. "No one NEEDS a swimming pool, ban them all!"
People like you that want to go off and "ban everything" while being completely uninformed and refusing to do any kind of simple research are the worst kind of voters / citizens.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/195325/murder-victims-in...
[2] https://www.edgarsnyder.com/statistics/swimming-pool-statist...
Not saying I agree with this line of thinking, but that is a common retort.
My understanding is that it is up to the courts (ultimately the US Supreme Court) to interpret the Constitution, and define things like "Arms", "security", etc..
> I can’t own a nuclear weapon
Careful what you wish for. If personal nuclear weapons ever become a thing, they too may be "Arms" "necessary to the security of a free State". It is hard to understand some rulings of the Supreme Court.
At the time of writing the 2nd Amendment (December 15, 1791), the accepted "Arm" was a musket, with a muzzle velocity between 1425 fps (434 m/s) and 1700 fps (518 m/s) with a ¾” (19.05 mm) diameter ball (. 640 caliber), and an approximate weight of .9 oz (25.5 g) [1]. Today the court accepts that an ArmaLite AR-15 is an "Arm", with a muzzle velocity of 3,300 ft/s (1,006 m/s) using a .223 Remington cartridge with a 55 g FMJ bullet [2].
The momentum of the AR-15 round is therefore approx 55,330 gm/s compared to 13,209 gm/s for the musket ball (ie more than 4 times greater). Too many American shooters make the mistake of thinking these modern "lightweight" weapons translate into less lethality, but it is the increased momentum from higher muzzle velocities that does the devastating damage to soft tissue and bone.
Take a look at the X-ray of a leg showing a bullet wound delivered by an assault rifle used in combat compared to an X-ray of a leg that sustained a bullet wound from a low-energy bullet, inflicted by a weapon like a handgun in Philadelphia. [3]. The trauma surgeons of the 19 children killed in the Robb Elementary massacre reported "They were so pulverized, he said, that they could be identified only by their clothing." [4]
[0] https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-2/
[1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15740773.2019.16...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.223_Remington
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/04/health/parkland-shooting-...
[4] https://khn.org/news/article/trauma-surgeons-uvalde-mass-sho...
Why is it that political philosophy that hates constitutional originalism in every other case wants to try and selectively apply some weird quasi-originalist argument not to the amendment itself but to two individual words within it?
If the amendment was written before muskets were common would you argue in only applied to swords, bows, slings, and catapults? The amendment is about providing the populace with a mechanism to keep tyranny in check, its not about caliber and projectile ft/s.
Example: The US military just replaced the .223 with .277 Fury for exactly the reason that the .223 is _too fast_ and doesn't shed enough energy when hitting a target.
Furthermore, you're mixing grains (gr) and grams (g). A 55gr (grain) bullet is 3.56 grams. A 0.9oz musket ball is 25.5 grams. So your momentum calculations are (11'067-13'209) grams * m/s for a musket and 3'581 grams * m/s. So the musket actually has 3+ times more momentum than the .223 round.
Musket balls are absolutely huge, there are effectively zero modern rifles which shoot a .640 caliber round. The .223 is a very small rifle round.
https://www.quora.com/Would-it-be-worse-to-be-shot-with-a-mu...
Can you stop with the nonsense? You produce it faster than I can correct you.
I don't believe any of the points you make are drivers of violence at all. You perhaps failed to analyze the typical issues.
I do agree that a society might want to ban guns. Policing is much safer and there are a lot of other advantages. Fewer deaths too of course. But I heavily doubt the presence of guns is reason for an increase in violence among younger people. On the contrary, I think some people are well underway to create self-fulfilling prophecies. Security at schools is part of that.
There is a recent increase in crime but certainly to none of the factors you mentioned. I live happily in a country without access to assault rifles. But we probably disagree on what constitutes drivers of violence.
You could just limit sales of these guns to folks over 25 and make everyone much safer.
In fact, every single school shooter was white...
It seems like you want to say that broader mental health problems are more important than gun violence, but that's only more reason to restrict access to guns. Most other places in the world are able to recognise that mental illness and guns are a bad mix, and act accordingly. The US has had nearly one third of the mass shootings in the world since the 60s yet people like you continue to defend access to guns as though it's not a contributing factor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_shootings_in_the_United_S...). That alone seems to point to one of those broad problems affecting the populace. It doesn't have to be the only cause, to merit a treatment.
The rest of the world doesn't view gun access as a given, or even a good. It's earned and revered, or prevented, but never normalised. It's why Abe's assassin had to make his own gun, because Japanese laws didn't make things easier for him. It's why here in Australia, even gangsters don't even have guns, for the most part https://youtu.be/BYsXCnxbnj0?t=461
But we don't judge the effectiveness of these restrictions by some bogus standard of absolute zero gun violence. We judge them by assessing our rare incidents of gun violence, and whether we think we think we could or should have done more to prevent them from obtaining and using a firearm.
And when we look at the numbers of mass shootings in the US, particularly in sensitive places like schools, we wonder how in the world you can think you're doing enough.
Both are horrific, but the latter seems even more horrific because it includes not only death, but psychological torture before the death.
People need to quit embarrassing themselves trying to somehow reason away why the USA is an outlier via some kind of cope metric. It's the guns.
your 80:1 stat seems pretty dubious -- do you have a source for it?
Firearm related injuries are the #2 killer of children after automotive accidents[1]. The rate of firearm related deaths for young people went up nearly 14% between 2019 and 2020 alone.
I do agree with the importance of socio-economic solutions, though, even before gun regulations.
We have enough food and housing for everyone right now, except in some popular places, why exactly have we become so desperate? Why can't we give up some economic growth and use the resources we have on general human well-being?
You have to. For effective policy you need to distance yourself from the deed no matter how terrible they are. All other venues for grief are better than policies motivated by retribution, which will very likely not lead to constructive outcomes and resulting in repeats. Otherwise you end up invading random countries because someone attacked you.
You're being disingenuous if you're trying to claim that, say, the Beslan School Siege is the same as the Columbine school shooting. One was committed by a terrorist organization with a political goal. The other was just a couple of fellow students.
But what's the comparison with the rest of the world here? Are you trying to counter the claim that gun violence is a uniquely American issue? Or are you saying that even higher rates of youth suicide are an even more American issue? Because suicide happens everywhere, but unless the US is doing remarkably well on this, that 80x figure is still far far lower than any other developed country. Where, you know, a non-non-zero chance of shootings means infinite more chance of suicide, most other places in the world.
You're dismissing an acute problem with common sense solutions behind issues that are common enough to almost be normal, in order to justify doing nothing. It's like someone's pointed at your bleeding foot and you've said it's fine, because you've also got high cholesterol.
But TL;DR: I think that the juice is not worth the squeeze and that it is just another issue for the two tribes to fight about while the ruling class continues to destroy the human habitat and loot our country's wealth.
The cost, such as politically and time & energy to lobby, would be better spent making the social net better, or add more mental health services that target more people, and to prevent people from getting to a state of destitution (and fall into crime).
“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed”
I don't know. I certainly don't think anyone should be shooting kids.
>US is the only country in the whole universe that has an active shooter problem in schools.
Because we have guns that are relatively available and a handful of wingnuts that want to hurt kids.
That said, it is not the only place that has a violence against children problem. Not even the only place with a violence against children in schools problem.
Good way to word it. Suicides alone are an NP hard problem. Homelessness is an NP Hard problem, etc. Mass shooting could be a sort of NP Complete problem. If you can come up with solutions that prevent mass shootings, those same solutions will probably greatly reduce the others.
Just to name, a probably short, list of sources.
- We have a poor gun culture. Guns used to be viewed as tools, now they are some cool gadget that is apart of someone's identity.
- We often ignore and stigmatized mental health issues. If you want mental health, you are seen as weak or pathetic. When in reality, we probably all could use some sort of neutral third party counseling at the very least to talk about issues we individually face out loud.
- Insurance coverage is pretty shitty for mental health. My last employer had good benefits, good medical benefits, but it only covered 3 or 4 mental health appointments. Other than that, it was a decent plan.
- We probably should honestly evaluate the process of purchasing a firearm. You can be placed on a no-fly list for suspected involvement in terrorist activities, but can still purchase a gun? Doesn't seem to make sense to me at all.
US Teen suicide looks like around 8-11 per 100k, age 15-19, depending on year (source: https://www.americashealthrankings.org/explore/health-of-wom...), with 9 states over 20.
Compare to Germany, 184 between age 15-20 (https://www.aerzteblatt.de/int/archive/article/213427) from a population of 5.41 million (https://www.statista.com/statistics/454349/population-by-age...), or 3.4 per 100k.
They do have active shooter drills as routine part of education. And schools have cops in them routinely and Americans talk about it as normal. You cant those wish away, those are very really affecting the country.
Sure, if you limit the numbers to just school shootings. Why not count all kid deaths by firearms? A kid is twice as likely to die by bullet than by suicide.
School shootings are just the currently most visible form of kid death by bullet.
Being confronted with an armed robber in a home invasion is more of a problem in the US (but France has its own fair share of violent crime). Outside of that I think the bulk of gun violence is suicides and gang on gang violence.
The aviation sector is one of the most regulated on earth and has extreme safety standards for exactly this reason: we don't want to crash.
Societies also implemented security measures after terrorist attacks. Especially after Bataclan in France.
These are extremely rare events because we take measures to prevent them.
i would argue that those measures are costing more than the attacks themselves. It's security theater - high cost (in terms of time and resources), high visibility (politically). But doesn't really prevent any terrorist attacks, because terrorist attacks are fairly rare all things considered.
So you can say that those terrorists' attack succeeded in making the lives of those they attacked worse, and it's because we let them dictate due to "fear", rather than rationally ignore them.
When you use the TSA and Patriot Act as an example of meaningful, useful legislation, you're probably not on strong footing. One is considered an expensive boondoggle jobs program, the other is tasked with illegal mass spying of US citizens and deprivation of rights. Neither shows any strong evidence of preventing terrorist acts. Its legislation like these that give gun owners pause of any "common sense" gun control solutions implemented based on emotion.
This isn't a very compelling argument, and it's kinda intellectually dishonest because you wouldn't accept any answer I gave you. You are now acting as "dear leader," who decides what individuals do or don't need.
Why does anyone NEED to go over 10 miles per hour, why does anyone NEED more than one pair of shoes? Why does anyone NEED coffee, tea, beer, lots of things, why does anyone NEED a fast computer? Why does anyone NEED cologne or perfume? Why does anyone NEED dessert? Why does anyone NEED fashionable clothes? Why does anyone NEED art? How do you even justify that outside of a profit motive in a way you will accept? See it's a trick you are playing.
Of course to answer your question, a gun would be the preferred tool. If you ever go camping in the woods, they are certainly handy. If someone tries to rape or murder you, it would certainly come in handy. If you were a woman (or a man even) and attracted a crazy stalker, invaluable. If you have a massive plague where the police stop working and society stops functioning correctly, it would certainly come in handy. Remember covid?
>These things will now be put under weapons regulation, and will be basically unavailable to the general public.
Of course, someone will kill someone with a bow and arrow, then it will be banned, then someone will kill someone with a knife, and they will ban the "scary looking" ones. Then someone will use a slingshot and those will get banned. You know it's all just a theatrical overreaction at that point to placate the hysterical masses.
Yes, but why do you NEED them, isn't that the argument you made?
Rare events that only happen in America.
I don't know what kind of parent looks at a rare event where their kid might die and says "yeah, I'm okay with that".
I've read that more children have died of gunshot wounds this year than police officers have died in the line of duty.[1]
Granted, there are probably more school children at school than there are police at work on any given day, so ... of course children are more likely to be shot at a school?
But then again, here in Australia we have reasonable gun control after that mass schooling in Tasmania all those years ago ... and the country still turned to shit ... so?
While were here, anyone else got any arguments no one would intentionally make?
1. https://en.as.com/latest_news/more-children-have-died-in-sch...
The outrage always happens on politically charged subjects, but worse outcomes happen on the roads, and nobody talks about it as though it was normal.
Kids should fear crossing the street more than an active shooter. While i don't disagree that gun control is a good outcome, the difficulty of achieving it in the US is real. Effort is better spent addressing the root cause of gun violence, rather than attempting to take the guns away and just hope that the violence doesn't occur.
And in most countries, they do.
There's enough concern to go around to work at improving both.
For the people who live outside the US and consume our "news", it must seem our country is falling apart. From gun violence, to wildfires, to racism, to homelessness, we truly must be living in a 3rd world country. However, my experience does not reflect any of this. Yes, these issues exist, but everyday I can go to the grocery store, put gas in my wife's car, walk downtown, take a trip to the lake, visit a neighboring town, etc - all without fear. People of differing backgrounds/colors talk pleasantly with each other, neighbors help neighbors, etc. Totally different from what the "media" is pushing these days.
My advice - walk/run away from the media and don't attach yourself to any political party. Your emotional state will thank you later.
One way is examining the dimensions of analysis. A simple counting exercise and declaring “well it’s just not relevant,” despite contradictory qualitative evidence is really simple-minded and an abuse of statistical reasoning.
But this is typical of non-research thinking, in non-academic contexts so forgive me if I come off harshly.
The principles we use for relevance, and other techniques we’ve built upon them are axiomatic: there’s no real reason they persist except as a form of historical convention and necessary standardization.
What makes statistics useful is when it’s able to capture quantitatively something that exists practically, i.e. material phenomena. When the stats don’t square with reality, it’s not exactly reality’s fault, so to speak. It’s the statistician’s job to understand and explain why the statistics, or the techniques thereof, failed. This is the red meat of “hard” statistics, how the field refines itself, and it’s also the most fun and challenging thing about it.
When eye-to-eye with a provoked bear in real life, I’d be curious to see if any statisticians would dismiss it on statistical grounds. My bet is zero because they know the limits of their discipline.
Statistically: that time I lived in the US.
Good job those gang bullets aren't allowed to hit anything other than gang members!
Do you seriously think the traveling public would accept a plane crashing every week?
The fact that schools have active shooter drills says more about the disclaim-all-liability culture of schools here than it does about gun violence. The more pervasive gun violence problem is outside of schools, and is more a result of a systemic collapse of order in inner cities. The lone-wolf school shooters just make better headlines.
From a European point of view it's incomprehensible how that is even a thing.
This is an ironic demonstration of why larger problems in the US are not addressed. Someone always starts off talking about an issue then "think of the children" rears it's head. Do you believe there's a benefit from the whataboutism when "think of the population" is far more important? The larger societal issues are more likely issues on which there is plenty of low hanging fruit, versus this hand-wringing about children which will not promote any short-term improvements.
To quote Daryl Zero: Now, a few words on looking for things. When you go looking for something specific, your chances of finding it are very bad. Because of all the things in the world, you're only looking for one of them. When you go looking for anything at all, your chances of finding it are very good. Because of all the things in the world, you're sure to find some of them.
By that I mean universal healthcare, guaranteed sick leave and childbirth leave as well as minimum 3-4 weeks vacation a year and a good unemployment system.
This would in effect force employers to pay better.
However, due to the hedonic treadmill, after people get accustomed to it and take things for granted, people will find reasons to be unhappy and frustrated and claim that they live in the worst possible times etc.
EDIT: just to be clear: I'm not saying that since people will complain there is no point in improving, nor I'm saying that you don't have to listen people's complaints since they just don't know how lucky they are. It's important to keep improving more and more, since there is still room for improvement. What I'm saying is that it's hard to compare the quality of life in different places just by measuring how many people are complaining here or there.
With $50/hr you will have your pick of providers.
Besides if 50 dollars an hour becomes minimum wage for everyone you can bet your years salary that healthcare providers are going to raise their prices accordingly.
It's also not at all obvious that this is better than someone just investing a bunch of money. After all, the way investments ultimately make money is by supplying people with what they want at low prices, which means that investment money floating around can lead to innovation which supplies people with more stuff using less resources, increasing the amount available for everyone can buy with their wages.
Plenty of public works projects we could start and pay people $50/hr.
You can't really tax "increase in net worth", because net worth can - and does fluctuate both positively and negatively, As opposed to income which just accumulate more or less linearly.
Imagine Jeff Bezos stock has a perfect seasonal effect: on odds years, he gains $1 billion and on even years, he loses that amount. We can all agree here that Jeff sin't getting any richer, on average and thus should not be taxed since he is not getting any stable income. Yet you would want to tax him, every odd year, on the $1 billion - which is unfair, unless you also give him back that tax money every even year. This means firing those workers and asking them to give back their undue wage - which you can't do of course.
The way we solve this is by not taxing the increase in net worth, until he does actually sell the stock and converts this increase in stock value into what is called realized gains. At that point, his net worth won't fluctuate anymore since he sold the stock for cold hard cash. And we tax him on that cash amount. You might argue that we should tax him more on those realized gains - which is fair discussion point.
But trying to impose a tax on virtual net worth increase is a quite risky path because you would also need to pay billionaires when their stock portfolio decreases. And although everyone wants to tax billionaire when you hear about them having a fantastic month on the stock market (even tho these gains haven't been realized yet), but no one want to send them money when a headline says "$25 billion wiped out in a single day" (and rightfully so).
Personally, I wish the income tax for high earners could be deferred for the first year or two. It’s like, right when you are first building wealth, it goes away so fast… but then, once you got wealth, why not plan to pay a percent or two a year in tax?
Consumers who spend a majority of their income on food, energy and housing are paying more in than they get back because the income they receive from assets is smaller than their living expenses aka the income share of labor is less than 100%.
Imagine being so rich that you can live off dividends, there is no reason for your wealth accumulation to ever stop. The amount you pay into the economy is much lower than the income you derive from your assets.
This is the reason why there is a constant flow of money toward the top. When you think about how a market economy worksy the above is completely illogical. The entire point of markets is to trade which means those who have too much give to those who have too little in exchange for monetary compensation.
Why doesn't the same happen with money? Why isn't money flowing from those who have too much to those who have too little in exchange for their labor?
Instead, those who have too much get more and those who have too little get less, this is highly inefficient.
To get to $50/hr I imagine the middle class will need their federal tax doubled, at least.
But do you want to live in a civilized society or not?
I can relate to that... in the 80s USA was the dream for us kids. But now... I'm so glad I don't live there. France is indeed extremely generous. I wish more french people would realize this.
For most people, especially any French person who'd move to the US, all of those indicators are fine, and, income is considerably higher than in France, if not 'free time' and guaranteed access to healthcare.
Yes, the food in many ways is not good, but it's fine. There is no 'security' problem - Manhattan is generally safer than Paris, and US has great educational institutions unless you live in a ghetto.
It hasn't changed that much over 20 years other than what you see on TV.
Attitudes towards work have changed, our material standard of living is considerably higher than it was 2 generations ago, and people are considerably less willing to do manual labour for example. Ironically, wages in semi skilled and skilled labour are actually not that bad.
What we have now is a 'new white collar working class' - large swaths of people who went to college and have expectations they wouldn't be managing restaurants.
Yes, it’s worse than France, which is part of Western Europe, the most developed and best-run part of the entire world.
Where did I claim it should be seen as a great accomplishment?
If the US ever gets near the median on these global lists, it would be the result of a collapse worse than the Soviet Union’s.
The facts are as exhaustive as they are exhausting. There’s one simple conclusion from all of this. We’ve been tricked. We’ve been told that America, like most other majority-white countries, deserves the title “developed economy”. It does not.
A bit polemic but an interesting perspective. Maybe it's just the case that the us IS a "third world' aka >developing county<
People love talking about how the US is the worst developed country across so many categories, without grasping the point that if something is clearly an outlier from everything else in a category, the definition of the category itself is flawed.
The US isn't that bad of a country in that sense that if you knew you were going to be born into the US, and you got one optional re-roll, you shouldn't take it. But for some reason that isn't totally clear to me people (though I have some hypotheses), people seem to think that we should be doing dramatically better than we are, and the fact that we're not in an even higher percentile of best countries to live in is some sort of unconscionable moral failing.
My hypotheses for the source of this idea:
* Pure racism -- people think "the US is a Western country with a European-influenced culture; why shouldn't it be doing as well as all the other countries that fit that description?"
* People confuse wealth with development. They think "of course [country X] is fucked up, because it's poor, but the US doesn't have that excuse". However, they are actually two independent axes (despite being correlated, of course).
* The existence of so much "America #1" propaganda makes people want to hold the US to a higher standard -- if country X has problems, well, at least they're not going around claiming to be the best country in the world.
* The ironclad pop-cultural dominance of the US in the Western world means it's on people's minds way more than random median-quality countries.