Agreed. But it does address the worst aspects of the symptom.

Unless you can find an incident where someone killed or injured over 500 people with a knife.

Wikipedia has a nice list of school shootings. Look at it. Until the latter parts of the 1900's through today, most school shooters killed one or two people and often then turned the gun on themselves. Pistols and shotguns were by far the most common. Most pistols from the old days were revolvers, not clip based.

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

You'll also see a huge uptick in the number of shootings after the v. Heller supreme court case in 2008, which made guns more available to more people, and there is good correlation with laws and practices intended to reduce gun control.

...was learning there are Chinese car manufacturers.

Ya know why the English don't build computers?

They haven't figured out how to make them leak oil yet.

And somehow we manage to grow half the food you eat, the wine you drink, provide most of your tech and entertainment...and weed is only taxed at 15% plus local taxes.

Worst I've seen is in the mid 20% range.

Medical pot loses the 15% excise tax.

And they'll even bring it right to your house.

There are many reasonable cost of living areas, the weather is nice, our population is growing, and most of us are very happy to live here. Oh and > 4% GDP growth per year is hit every year.

Lets make ridesharing less profitable to drivers who aren't even clearing minimum wage while destroying the capital value of the most expensive thing they own, while making those rides more expensive for people who ride in them. So the government has more money to blow.

Woo hoo!

Interesting point is that in Mario Cart you blow up other drivers or make them fly off the road and over cliffs with a variety of projectiles, and can even electrocute everyone in sight. You do this to prevent them from getting ahead of you. Serious road rage.

I forget which COD (older one where you kill Nazis), they turned into gray smoke and disappeared when you killed them. And who can deny that killing Nazi's is a positive thing?

Having a 12 year old means I'm required to take him to every superhero action flick. I also watch much older action movies.

A modern superhero action flick like the PG-13 rated Wolverine movie (not the most recent R rated one) has so much violence in it that sometimes *I* want to cover my own eyes.

Older action flicks tended to often play down the violence, but you see boobs in them all the time.

I do have to wonder sometimes about how the evolution went to "less boobs, and lets have a guy with footlong knives shooting out of his hands rip someones limbs off".

What absolutely annoys the heck out of me is when I try to carry 23 guns, including rocket launchers and stuff like that, knives, 12 grenades and a chainsaw in real life and realize that they weigh 500lbs and I can't see where I'm going.

The vast, vast majority of drunk drivers never kill anyone.

The vast, vast majority of wife and child beaters never kill anyone.

Et cetera...

He also has said that vaccines cause autism, that his inaugural crowd was the biggest, and that 3-5 million illegal aliens voted for Hillary.

Facts aren't a particularly strong suit.

Its also humorous to learn that he's contradicted almost everything he's ever said or tweeted at one time or another.

What can you say about someone who says "take the guns, due process later" one day and wants to open up a can of settled science by suggesting video games are causative to the violence the next?

Lets try this logic in different scenarios.

"People are dying from opioid overdoses"

Well, opioids are all over the place, and if we take those away the same people will just kill themselves with heroin. So we won't bother.

"Crime rates are high"

Well, if we arrest the criminals, more will just show up. So we won't bother.

Interesting that crime overall and youth violence have been dropping for 50 years, regardless of the development of violent media of all sorts. In fact, I believe there are two countries with lower youth violence than we have and they're the two who have higher video game play time per person.

Kids all over the world play the same games, but their home country limits guns or have gun control. Few school shootings in those countries.

School shootings also go back to the 1700's. They've happened regularly every decade since.

The major difference in mass and school shootings is once you go back 50+ years, they're usually 1-2 victims. However military style weapons were rarely owned back then. Not particularly useful for hunting or property protection, expensive, harder to maintain, etc.

You also have to look back at how we handle mental illness. Reagan slashed funding for it during his administration. Many health care plans prior to Obamacare didn't cover mental health services.

Regardless of how you spin it, nutballs having easy access to military style weapons that can kill dozens of people is the problem. Not video games.

I think its a lot easier than that, and indeed impactful.

I drive fairly few miles. A car can literally last me 20 years or more. I have a 2005 Honda with 62,000 miles on it. Nowhere near needing to replace it, nor has it needed a thing other than scheduled maintenance.

Instead of trying to fiddle with depreciation, lets use consumption and replacement.

Were I to become an Uber driver and handle a modest number of fares, that 20+ year replacement cycle could be consumed in 4-5 years. I hardly bother to wash or vacuum the car, but would have to do so regularly so it would be presentable.

A 25-35 thousand dollar expense (forgetting about gas, insurance, wear and tear, maintenance) is a big nut to crack.

I'm watching a version of this happening right now. My ex-wife commutes 350 miles to an area that pays more than she can make around here, and stays in an AIRBNB while she's there for 4 days, then she commutes back. She's putting an additional 30,000 miles per year on a top of the line Lexus and intends to replace it with a similar car when its worn out. In four years she'll have to lay out another $70K+ for a car. If she worked locally, the car would last her 12-15 years.

I'm pretty sure that adding in AIRBNB costs and so forth neutralize her extra pay, but critical thinking isn't her strong suit.

This line of thinking, car as a capitalized asset with a specific cost and period of useful life seems more sensible than trying to bring it to a per mile depreciation calc. While a car depreciates when not in use, a seldom used car lasts a LONG time.

I've done the Uber/Lyft calcs on this basis, as I have free time and a clean, reliable car...but it still turns into my having to replace the car more often than I would otherwise, and those replacement cost figures swamping anything I'd make.

Quite some time ago, I applied for a lower cost, higher end insurance package that my agent said would be good for me, but would require a huge background check. I've held a top secret and nuclear Q clearance, and this investigation felt about the same.

Bearing in mind that this is pre-internet, at one point they asked me about any relationship I might have had with the ex husband of an ex girlfriend I hadn't even seen in years. Turns out he'd been involved in some insurance fraud. About all I could think that we'd ever shared that could connect us was a Blockbuster video card. Yet somehow they'd established those linked relationships.

Today your credit report, what you buy on your credit cards, what you buy with a store rewards card are all collected and collated. Your picture or video of you is taken dozens of times per day.

I don't think getting rid of a smartphone would do much for you, and any ideas of privacy or keeping your information a secret went out the window a LONG time ago.

Hmm, lets see. I bought a Nexus 6 three years ago for $189. It received updates until just recently. I just bought an Essential phone for $280. It'll get updates for at least a couple of years.

How much are those iphones again?

Its a nice idea until you see the prices. $500 for the larger device and well over $300 for the pda.

I was thinking for $99 and $129 for the pda and the 'mini laptop' would have been sensible price points.

When you're starting to get into flagship phone price range for a gimped device that's 300% overpriced for what it is...

And they are handy.

A couple of years ago I picked up a 'refurbished' Samsung Gear Live for $79 on ebay. Bestbuy had taken them in as returns and their elite geek squad refurbishers flashed it with the wrong rom. It worked but wouldn't update android wear. So those were sold and most came back again and they dumped them on ebay wholesalers. All it needed was to be hooked up to the pc with adb and flashed with the right rom.

Having gotten a perfectly well working watch for 1/5 the original list price, I put it to work.

It replaced my fitbit with android fit, told me the time, weather, charge state of itself and my phone, all my notifications came up on it, if I was in the car and the phone rang I could answer it, and with 'ok google' I could trigger my phone to do a lot without picking it up. Lastly, wink ran on it so I could open/close/lock my front door and garage door.

Fast forward to this year. Verizon abandoned their $400 wear24 smart watch after just a few months and they've been on ebay for $75-80 for months. Running android wear 2.0, with internal LTE and GPS, more ram than most smart watches and included wireless charging dock it was a steal. Took me 20 minutes to get it doing everything my old smart watch did. I can also run google maps with navigation on it and it vibrates and announces the turn by turn with a mini map on my wrist.

I can also activate it on verizon for 5-10 bucks and use it as a standalone phone, although the little speaker on it sucks for phone calls. It has NFC but verizon only allows it to work with verizon pay. Morons.

It won't get any more updates but my gear live was stuck on android wear 1.3 and still does everything fine. In 2 years I'll replace the Wear24 with someone elses deeply discounted mistake where the issue doesn't really impact me.