Comment Re:Old? Old. (Score 1) 69
That is totally not the answer I was expecting. That's awesome. Thanks.
That is totally not the answer I was expecting. That's awesome. Thanks.
Chicago? Why?
When I was in Ireland, I never bought another drink once people discovered I'd been to Boston. Which I though was odd, but it made a kind of sense given the large Irish population. It was like a kind of Irish promised land.
What's the Aussie connection to the Windy City?
I find it kind of remarkable that it's so low in the US. I wonder why that is. I can't imagine that conditions are any better. Or are UK prisons that much worse?
Could we be taking stronger steps to prevent it? (Surely not.) Could it be something about our pro-imprisonment culture that makes for a different mind-set among prisoners? Perhaps the record keeping is different?
I'm not any kind of expert, so this is the rankest speculation. The factor-of-five difference is very striking.
It's certainly not cost; executing someone costs far more than life does.
Only because the standard of proof is so high. We have a lot of protections in place for those who stand accused of a capital crime, precisely because it's so final.
And that's good, but that says less about capital punishment than it says about the difficulty of proof. How many people are put in prison for decades, sometimes to die there, because their cases don't attract as much attention and aren't subject to the same level of scrutiny? Prison is still punishment, made worse in many places (including the US) by subjecting the prisoners to each other. Last year 82 prisoners in UK prisons killed themselves, more than twice the 35 people who were executed in the US (with a vastly larger prison population). (I'm sorry; I couldn't find data on US prison suicides but I suspect it's at least comparably high.)
I wish we could provide all of the accused with the level of scrutiny that they deserve. It would save a great many lives from being ruined, a fate I find at least as horrifying as execution.
True, though it could well impact the estimates of methane emissions worldwide. If there's some unexpected source of methane, there may be more. Or it may indicate that if some sources are producing more then others are producing less, or that that methane atmospheric lifetime is different than we thought.
So it's scientific curiosity, but it may well end up having an impact on our understanding of climate change due to greenhouse gases, beyond the immediate production at this site.
It's always an election year now.
For God's sake, stop researching for a while and begin to think!