Standard IBM practice is to come up with an excuse to screw any salesman out of a commission that high. Where they screwed up is forgetting to come up with a reason for the white guy, but going ahead with one for the black guy and then firing the manager who told them about it.

It's a minority of incidents, but there are cases of young children using guns to accidentally kill people. Your average 6 year old has the strength to lift, point and pull the trigger on a gun - and has seen movies that tell them it's cool. By contrast, a child would have a difficult time killing someone with a bat or fists.

Guns are expertly designed ranged weapons that kill efficiently with little skill or effort on the part of the user.

Thinking about the whole issue, weapon and wielder, is important to understanding and solving the problem.

They say reward the behavior you want to encourage. Civil forfeiture rewards them going after addicts and small time dealers because they can't afford lawyers to fight the seizure. We need to change the reward structure if we want to change the behavior.

There's no doubt that the media (on all sides) prefers eye catching stories to thoughtful ones. It is also true that the petroleum industry purposely manipulated the media to sow doubt about climate change and ensure enough confusion to avoid real regulation. See: https://www.bbc.com/news/stori...

I look at things like Greenland melting, a number of glaciers that have visibly shrunk, chunks of Antarctica falling off, the ice roads in Alaska having a shorter duration and it seems that warming is happening. There's a number of cities in the world where pollution from fossil fuels is obviously diminishing the quality of life. And the lie of recycling is easily uncovered by looking at contaminated beaches and oceans.

You can debate whether humans are causing the warming, but not that we're the source of the Pacific floating garbage patch. So I'd rather talk about solutions to observable problems than about where to put blame anyway.

I get that confirmation bias is a thing on both sides. But let's for a moment consider that most scientists, even most climate scientists, are publishing results from specific research and/or experimentation. It is not a gotcha that many of those papers don't deal with the overall issue of anthropomorphic climate change. If a group publishes a paper on the ability of CO2 to trap heat under various conditions and concentrations with other atmospheric gasses, why the CO2 is there is irrelevant. Similarly, a paper on the pace of melting of Siberian permafrost can just report data, not offer any hypotheses on causes. To say that among climate related research papers only a limited number addressed the question of why these things are happening is reasonable. And it still does carry some meaning that among those who sought any answer as to cause, they pretty much all arrived at humans.

Can you admit the possibility of a difference between what the media hyped to draw eyeballs and what was getting published in scientific journals? Even now things look far more undecided than they are if you're watching the news. They'll conduct the debate 1:1 like it's an even contest, when 99:1 would be closer to the ratio of published peer reviewed research.

Clearly you'd rather tar me with the baby hating brush than discuss the issues I've mentioned. Not worth the effort to continue the thread.

The social conservatives outright dismiss any ideas around preventing unwanted pregnancy except abstinence. If you are so against abortion, get your ass out there and protest the dumbing down of sex education, the obstacles to getting contraception and the fighting against a good social safety net. At around the time kids start thinking about sex they should be taught how it works and what it's about. None of this scared straight crap that wrecks their chances of healthy relationships later. Make sure anyone who wants it can get safe, effective contraception. And for goodness sake, quit opposing financial help for people who need it. The right want to scare women off sex, belittle single mothers, belittle those who need help to feed their kids and all the while talk about how life is precious. Apparently the unborn are worth much more to them than the born. What a world they'll be welcomed into, eh?

My position is simply that the rights of the woman trump the rights of an embryo or fetus. If it were only about protecting the unborn you'd see them clamoring for more sex education and contraception. The best way to stop abortion is to prevent unwanted pregnancies.

What I hate is a bunch of do gooders who fell for a plot to mobilize them into a voting bloc to prop up the Republican party. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.go...

The core of a democracy is the participation of its citizens by voting. Republicans are scared that their numbers are declining and making up for it by hampering the opposition. The right to vote is different from the right to ride an airplane or eat at a restaurant during the limited time that it matters before the saner parts of society get vaccinated and stamp out the infection.

I don't think those who don't get vaccinated DO know what they're risking. What we all risk is that the virus will continue on in pockets and mutate into something worse. It's been lucky so far that the existing vaccines work against the known variants but that's not a given. Also we've been lucky that the variants haven't yet been significantly more deadly. But either or both of those things could change for future variants. That's why educating people about the safety and necessity of getting vaccinated is important.

To be clear, they only think 'my body, my choice' when it's convenient. They think vaccination is a private choice to be made for their own reasons. It's how you know that pro-life is actually anti-woman.

I thought it was intentional and funny :)

Forgot to include a link to the story: https://www.bbc.com/news/stori...

The petroleum industry paid big bucks to manufacture climate science doubt and stave off regulations. Their own internal researchers were finding strong evidence of man made climate change.