kelpdiver

A low-flow toilet uses 1.6 gallons (or less) per flush. So flushing just once per day, 30 gallons would be used up in 19 days. I'm no techie by any stretch, but I've always been incredulous that fully-treated, potable water is used to flush toilets. Until recently, water was plentiful enough that having double the infrastructure around water delivery didn't make any sense. It's always been safe to drink water from any source in the house. I did like how Bill's allotment didn't include flushing. That's a luxury, man! 5-10 gallons per day per person would be a meaningful allocation.

Oh, nothing to be concerned about then. Keep on killing and carry on. A smarter person might question the methodology at this point. (And remove the suicides, and it becomes > 10:1 difference between them) But carry on, y'all.

Comes back to knowing what this value actually represents. It is highly comprised of lost potential rather than true costs, and it is dominated by the suicides. We know fully well that there are other methods to kill oneself - the American suicide rate is not notably high. The key detriment with suicide by handguns is that it is more effective than most with an 80% success rate (success = dying). So forcing them to the methods used by Europeans and Japanese will likely mean slightly fewer deaths, but most of this 'cost' will remain even without guns. Mother Jones (LOL) was the source - that's why Kallend didn't want to offer it up. http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/04/true-cost-of-gun-violence-in-america Key ammo for my friends on this subject: "the Department of Transportation (DOT) published a 300-page study estimating the "total value of societal harm" from this problem in 2010 at $871 billion." IOW, using the same methodology, and including suicides, guns are still 1/4th the cost to society as car crashes.

This thread is the usual steaming pile of familiar bullshit, but you're right, this was a special (and new) one. Whether or not you want to assert AIDS as the driving force (and it's a huge stretch), it's blatantly obvious that the societal impact of reducing privacy around mental health care will be negative if everyone is afraid to go. On the main thread - if you want to debate the cost ogf guns or the cost of driving, you need to supply what you think the substitute cost will be. ie, if you ban legal gun ownership, people are still dying. Criminals still can use a knife or baseball bat, or their firsts. Abusive boyfriends can beat to death their 100lb girlfriends or simply strangle them. And people won't be able to legally defend themselves. So the value doesn't go from 30 to 0. Tell us what you think the new number is. Ending driving also will result in deaths. Battered wives and girlfriends can't escape effectively, get killed. Injured people can't get to the ER. People in rural areas starve, freeze, or don't get treated for injuries. So forth.

My attraction is actually driven more towards the maintenance aspects of the electric bikes. Not quite maint free, but getting close. I stopped riding in part because riding a Daytona 1200 (I wrecked the BMW) 4 miles in San Francisco traffic proved a bit impractical. It ran down the battery, got horrible fuel economy as it never warmed up, and sent a lot of hot air to my legs. But an electric bike is made for that sort of use case. It's also much lighter, even with the battery. Price is still not great. I also worry about the theft aspect. But maybe soon I'll be a retread.

That would be Reagan. Once you've exhausted unemployment benefits, you're no longer unemployed as you obviously aren't looking for work. yeah, yeah. Regardless, Obama is responsible for all that is wrong in the world. We know the drill.

not as much as you think, since that single year at 3M only involves paying SS once for $7600, while 45 years of 51k translates to 142k in payments (just the 6.2% side, though it's more honest to calculate including the employer side, imo). Add in 5k/year in income taxes and that's up to 370k.

well, at least you saved everyone the effort of debate. When someone tries to claim that earning 35% more in one year than the average household makes in their lifetime - that this doesn't qualified as rich - there's really no need to respond. It might be arguable if your opportunity to earn this is severely limited - to a single year. Maybe two years. The average NFL player has a 3 year career before it ends, usually to injuries. Their initial 3 year contract is set by their draft level and might be $3M over those 3 years. If they survive to get their first free agent contract, then they make bank.

that was enough to get me to click to look at the pictures, but not to read.

not an issue to me at all, especially when they develop new vaccines, or find chemicals that we put into the environment that cause damage, or find a better more fuel efficient car, or whatever it is that they do. Not an issue to me at all. Issue to me: when politicians completely ignore science and do it their way based on how much money they are getting paid to help get reelected, they lose a degree of credibility. Lawrocket's point, which you complete missed, is that scientists aren't above this. They can selectively view data, and having not even going through the motions of swearing an oath to the Constitution, often choose to ignore the rights of citizens to make their own decisions. Lawrocket already cited Ron Paul. I point to Stan Glantz, a man so convinced that no one should consume nicotine that he works to make e-cigs just as hard to get/use as the products it replaces. That's not his call. Personally, given a choice of second hand cigarrette/joint smoke or second hand e-cig vapor, it's a no brainer. As for climate science, the consensus is marred somewhat by the obvious gaps in the modeling (their inability to explain recent trends). But in any event, the data and the policy decisions over what to do about it are very different beasts.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/economics-no-longer-makes-keystone-153213747.html;_ylt=AwrSyCMiKWVUPEUAmi.TmYlQ This was an amusing article. The Keystone pipeline is unlikely to actually get built or see any usage if oil is under $100/barrel (and it's in upper 70s right now).

pesky 4% margin of error....and you then tried to compare it to results of a separate poll. Never mind that the GOP Congress is still 2 months away. I'd also question the notion that 40% approval for anything is a sign of popularity. As for 2016...the GOP has one year in this next congress (before election mania stops all meaningful work) to show it actually can govern. Are they up to the task? Or will the normals and TP wackos spend it positioning against each other for the primaries? I expect them to dodge real work and instead focus on publicity votes to force Democratic fillibusters or vetoes, and then campaign on it. And that may work - up until 2017 when they will have no excuses for no output. Hopefully their horse won't be as lame as the last one.

Yeah, right. She probably practiced in front of a mirror. And today, she's getting almost as much press as Kim Kardashian's rather oddly-proportioned bare ass. it feels like a Freudian slip, but why would it be an intentional act? His show is one of their mainstays. last year when I was in NY for the marathon, I stumbled upon a screening for the Huckabee show. I wouldn't want to presume his audience reflects all of Fox, but....WOW. It explains a lot.

like Skydekker, I'm not sure if I'm supposed to read this literally, or if there was a snark explosion. A leader who answers - 'I'm not a disease expert, so I rely on the CDC's recommendation' is good, not great. This risk bureaucratic takeover - you trust them for the science, but still should be evaluating the policy conclusion. But a leader who answers, 'I'm not a disease expert, but I think the CDC are a bunch of quacks and are trying to kill Americans' had better put out some facts based foundation for the claim. Else they deserve scorn and replacement. One who says 'I'm a politician, not a doctor, but the inconsistencies in the stories from the CDC troubles me. And I wish they had arranged a private transport for that nurse in Cleveland' - this works fine for me. Politicians in general know better the importance of consistent messaging, particularly in a crisis.

heh - Comcast/AT&T/Verizon have that bandwidth in place to deliver their VOD already. And much as power generation has to deal with a daytime peak with plenty to spare during nighttime, the same is true for the internet providers. This is about competition to be the content provider. As Quade already wrote, if there really is a true cost (there isn't), then you cap it. The reality is this is difficult to do if customers actually have choice, because someone will continue to sell unlimited. I know they'd love to get acceptance so they can rape their broadband customers they way they do with cellular data and SMS. In most of the world outside the US, these caps are normal, and one reason for cheaper rates than we see.

it's the combination of that statement and a refusal to address the argument that results in scorn. 'I am not a scientist but I read on Facebook that the eye is far too complex to have developed by chance.' Or the great one I saw last night 'that vaccines given to women in Africa is lace with HGC so that they will become sterile.' Or the fear mongering around radiation from Japan leading to deaths of fish and sea lions in California ... even those demoic acid poisonings have been happening for decades. These people put out the defense 'i am not a scientist' to somehow defend not providing citations or proper data or their deliberate misreading of other articles. Somehow only scientists have to do those things. I AM PROUD OF MY IGNORANCE! So yeah, I fart in their direction.

eh...I feel that such people can feel they have a responsibility to their friends and family to do this, but IMO they're already greatly overburdened with the reality of being terminally ill. A close friend suffered a second bout with melanoma - did the against all odds chemo that effectively just knocked her on her back for nearly all of the time between diagnosis and death. Having seen that, I'm more inclined to skipping such treatment and enjoying the few days I have and then consider ending it on my terms, rather than to merely postpone the inevitable but spend it all in bed. May none of us have to made that decision.

1/3rd of the Liberian population would be well over a million people. (otoh, the population of Nigeria is 173M people) Which wouldn't be a risk because there just aren't enough flights to move that many people that fast, but the question is why you would assume a random sample? The belief (and truth) that there is better medical care available in the US means that the potentially infected would self select. It would not be remotely random. If this current outbreak in Africa finally dies out but we've made no real strides towards a cure, then I'd expect another flare up a decade or two down the road that would be even bigger, and a bad case scenario of 100+ cases in the US in a dozen + cities. Figure more than a few will be misdiagnosed due to rarity (esp if 10 years have passed), more than a few health workers getting infected. It still burns out fairly quickly, but how gross will the kneejerk reactions be, how disruptive to our economy? I'd rather we not shoot ourselves unnecessarily.

You don't have to deal with hypotheticals here. Comcast is one of the primary players in the broadband world, and one of the primary content providers, owning numerous stations. Who is surprised that they'd rather sell you movies via VOD on their network rather than you getting them from Netflix? Same applies to Uverse and Verizon FIOS. So long as they're providing both content and the pipeline, there's an obvious conflict of interest when they have the option of selectively throttling packets.

Jake has made quite a few postings indicating a belief that what we saw was as bad as it can be, including the one just before your's. In an effort to counteract a strawman argument of PANIC PANIC, he's doing precisely the same on the other end of the spectrum.

We have such an ID check for all new employment. I've had to show my passport a couple dozen times now. But you have employers who don't comply, and some amount of fake documents. Few of those 100 nations you speak off offer the dramatic difference in wages from their neighbors. Most of SE Asia is developing, poor. Most of EU is developed, affluent.

And to assume the apocalypse is daft. Which is a false dichotomy. Planning for a variety of scenarios is hardly presuming the worst case. You would advocate a reactive approach rather than a proactive. Your funeral. I spend most of my hours at work engineering for reliable infrastructure at scale The old school happy path is to try to prevent failures from happening. That's your happy path. Modern thought acknowledges that failures will occur and the focus is on recovery process. That prepares you for a much great range of severities. MTTR > MTBF.

How can tentanus rate as a serious threat in America? It's a shot every 10 years. And even for the anti vaccination wackos, you can get the shot after the bite or stepping on nail and still be protected.

right...because smart people never do stupid shit. for example, we have college professors on this very forum... Even without the error, Oregon still wins 44-34.

This last year saw more cases in Africa then in its prior combined history. Larger outbreaks = larger potential for cases here, esp if the belief is that its 60-70% lethal there and < 20% here. And if we want to be dramatic in the hollywood style, mutations can change the equation considerably. Were lessons learned? Or will they be quickly forgotten? To repeat, to assume a happy path is stupid, Jake. The threat is more likely to be one of these asian flu variants, but the legwork is similar.