... including, at times, itself.

It seems more likely that if you want to use a gun to kill yourself, you will buy one.

You've had a shit day at the office, so you set off for the gun store, and on the way there you start to calm down, and there's a nice sunset so you turn round and go home, have a few beers and fall asleep. Then in the morning you go "shit, what was I thinking?"

or

You've had a shit day at the office, so you pull the gun out from under the pillow and shoot yourself with it.

Which is better? Which is more likely?

All I did was float around the Big Pond (East coast) in Uncle Sam's Yacht Club DURING the Vietnam era.

I don't know why you call it the big pond, it's smaller than the one on the other side.

Still, you were maintaining a state of preparedness & covering the other flank in case the Frogs, Limeys or Krauts got up to something.

There's a metal for those wounded in combat

Usually it's lead. Though it might be cold steel.

It's Irish, actually.

You mean you don't think typical jurors are smart enough to form their own opinion of what he's saying?

It's his job to do the best he can to secure a guilty verdict. It's another guy's job to do the opposite, and yet another's to keep things fair.

The distribution of intelligence follows a normal curve, but intelligence itself follows a power law curve.

WTF? IQ scores follow a normal curve, because they're normalised.

If you ever meet someone who thinks they are smarter than normal people, ask him (her) "If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?"

Bad form to answer a question with a question[1], but why do you think smart people are automatically rich? Do you also think rich people are automatically smart? Have you heard of David Beckham or Paris Hilton?

[1] or three. Well, two and a half.

There was no prohibition in the 1800s.

And that's relevant how, exactly?

Do you reckon the idea of prohibition just fell out of the sky one day, or it was the zenith of temperance movements that had been around since at least 600 AD.

The researchers actually observing this long-ago concluded that it has nothing to do with being black, hispanic, white or asian and almost exclusively to do with economic and social factors.

Other researchers, who know how to control for those factors, say otherwise.

Been a while since I did any but the spread was no more than 5.

We're discussing high intelligence and you admit to believing what an advert says?

But now we have 3d printers, bitcoin and Elon Musk. This time it really *is* different.

That'd be an awesome case study on a game theory course.

As a limey, neither have we.

And we don't want one.