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brian0918

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Posts posted by brian0918

  1. These charts tend to be very misleading in that they tend to only list murders in the gun control countries with everything lumped together in the USA.

    The stats you are quoting are from 2010 I believe.

    The whole picture of that is that out of the 30K gun deaths almost 20k of those were suicides.

    So in perspective, 10k non-suicide gun deaths each year, compared to: 17k due to drug abuse; 20k due to STDs; 35-45k due to car accidents; 50k-100k due to medical errors in hospitals; 55k due to toxins, particulates and radon; 75k due to infectious diseases; 85k due to alcohol; 110+k due to obesity and heart disease; 400+k due to tobacco use.

  2. This problem with violence is definitely not helped by the free availability of guns.

    Your statement may seem obvious, but is it accurate? If more law-abiding citizens are armed, what effect (if any) does that have on the decisions of those violent offenders who have no interest in following the law?

  3. So, even though the Police did determine who's gun fired the shot (which they could do if they recovered the bullet)

    His example had two people using the same gun, and presumably not knowing about the stray bullet until much later.

  4. If it's clear that they were shooting in the direction and within the range of the neighbor's house - which it must be, since they can't determine who shot the lethal bullet -, then they both were negligent and just as likely to be responsible for the neighbor's death. I am not familiar with the legal terms but I would expect it should be negligent homicide or manslaughter, maybe.

  5. The thief, as the initiator of force, is to blame for the outcome of the incident of rights violation. In a system where everyone can impact the ability to violate the rights of others, there are degrees of blame depending on the context. Whereas the thief should be harshly punished for his action, ignorant voters should not - instead, one might treat them with contempt, or even see the opportunity to educate them.

  6. Here is a Daniel Dennet video where he takes an hour to belabor the point that any theory of consciousness that has a little witness or decider inside of it fails, because the theory of consciousness is supposed to explain that witness or decider.

    I'm always reminded of the Cartesian theory of mind when a movie/show depicts a robot's first-person perspective having a heads-up display (HUD) - now why would a truly conscious robot need an internal display of the information that it directly measures with its sensory devices?

    [media=]

    The same reason a robot doesn't need a heads-up display is the reason a human does not need a homunculus to watch such a display.

  7. It also has the advantage of not offering a "canned answer" and the advantage of being a conversation, rather than lecture. If the other person is a friend, then I would want to understand where exactly they're coming from. Understanding the other person's context is the only way to give them an answer that clicks for them.

    Well said. This is probably the best method for influencing change in society.

  8. Objectivist Keith Weiner (who is getting his finance PhD I believe) also wrote a piece explaining why FRB is not fraud.

    He also describes what he believes is an actual fraud perpetrated by banks: duration mismatch, which is borrowing short to lend long. It is taking money that a depositor would like to put into a time deposit of 1 year and lending it on a 10 year loan. I'm not sure I agree with him that it is fraud, assuming that the practice is clearly stated in the contract signed by all parties, but here is his explanation, in any case:

    http://dailycapitali...the-real-story/

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