1. New Jersey considering a bill to have schools teach kids how to interact with the police.
2. Does risk-taking make people happier?
3. Uber-like hailable public toilet.
4. New paper on whether we are collecting the right health information.
Monday assorted links
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#1. Maybe we can add handling firearms and explosives to the syllabus?
Teaching some basic firearm handling and proper gun storage methods wouldn’t hurt. Too many deaths and injuries from negligent firearm ownership.
Negligent ownership of illegal firearms by felons, mostly.
Most gun deaths are due to guns owned illegally. It is not a stretch to think that most gun accidents are illegal guns as well. These “gun safety” studies never talk about if the guns were legally owned or not.
So? An illegally owned firearm could accidently take the life of the felon’s innocent child. Education for future legal and illegal gun owners!
I agree with Anon here. Even felons don’t want their children hurt accidentally by their firearms.
This progression of logic is something out of Terry Gilliam’s head. Well granted there are going to be felons with illegal guns and with kids able to access them…let’s get those kids into a gun training class pronto!
In seriousness, the only education needed here is: “Don’t touch the gun. Call the police.”
Maybe I missed it, did you ever provide a source for this?
Common, empty trope. You’re about 70x as likely to accidentally fall to your death, 11x to get mowed down by a car as a pedestrian, 7x as likely to drown, 91x as likely to die by poisoning. Can we have classes for all these things too?
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr65/nvsr65_04.pdf
A number of these safety skills are instilled in children at a young age. Look both ways when crossing the street, swimming lessons at the Y, etc. Gun safety, not so much.
So your point is that we should have a class for something that is a tiny fraction of the risk of other things we have classes for? State a coherent point, please.
Teaching kids about guns would save a lot of time rather than trying to teach adults that guns don’t jump to life and kill people all by themselves.
Preventing accidental gun deaths may be a better investment than other types of deaths because guns have a simple mechanism to produce death: aim at self, pull trigger. What would the scope of a class on poisoning, getting hit by an automobile, or falling to your death look like?
I believe this should absolutely happen. There are roughly 340 million firearms in the U.S. so for most people it is almost an inevitability that at some point they will have an interaction with a gun or someone with one. There should be some minimum of education so that interaction ends positively.
Karl Kasarda of InRange TV recently made that very point. If you can teach kids sex-ed you should have some basic firearms safety lessons in school.
I don’t own a gun. I’ve only fired one a couple times. I don’t know that I’d ever want to own one but I’d like to know how to safely load and unload one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9UDlyT4lHM
You might also try “load and unload revolver” after that.
It would seem logical wouldn’t it. Sadly logic has been banned.
There are plenty of places where you can take classes for free or a nominal amount if you want.
Gun enthusiast here. I can’t highly enough recommend good training for people who decide to buy guns…and for their kids. That’s a different question from whether we should teach every kid in public school about gun use. Two factors come to mind:
1) Priming. A lot of kids don’t have the emotional stability and intelligence to deal correctly with this stuff. You’re putting a lot of ideas in a lot of heads.
2) Force differential. Believe it or not, there are good reasons to have criminals be oblivious about gun use. When the gun fight happens, one guy will have range ammo, no idea how to correctly sight his gun (he’s the one holding it on a flat horizontal like he saw in the movies), and no ability to clear a malfunction. Compare the abilities of a common criminal (renders his pistol harmless by racking it incorrectly) to those of a trained off-duty cop.
https://youtu.be/2xdtZ-ZksDc
https://youtu.be/kfy1wcYqNCQ
If anybody is headed to Las Vegas and wants free expert instruction, find me on the About page of mcdangercreative dot com. I will steer you in the right direction.
Good points. But at least we could teach gun safety, like the three safety rules. Otherwise, kids learn from TV, and if you’ve ever seen the crappy trigger discipline of Hollywood actors, you’ll know that gun safety isn’t exactly well displayed in television shows and movies.
Your enthusiasm for guns is a result of your small penis.
Predictable response. I never gave guns much thought until my house was broken into two years ago. Then I decided to educate myself. You giant-penis guys are missing out.
I was burgled once. A small gun safe would have been taken, and a big one might have encouraged a return visit. Home invasion is different, but the problem there is that the whole family would basically need quick access to a loaded gun. That brings a whole other set of risks.
How do you well-hung guys keep your chef knives in the block? Despite my small penis, my two handguns remain quietly in a bedside table.
Everyone fails to get the joke.
Surely cops aren’t as dangerous as explosives, right?
I enjoyed your joke, though I got carried away by the earnestness of the responses.
If that isn’t Nathan posting as Anon, I’ll eat my hat. That brand of bafflement should be trademarked.
HA-HA! It was ME, now eat your hat you cuck!
#2: nice experiments but they extrapolate a lot the results into “risky behaviors”. It does not explain why people smoked more before it was risky.
Taxes, social shaming, and various bans, perhaps?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giA3vTeHHHM
1. Illinois already has a similar law: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-drivers-ed-police-stops-illinois-law-met-20160906-story.html It only makes sense to instruct them on to handle a situation that has a high potential for deaths at the hands of an incompetent, trigger-happy thug employing the pacification techniques of the 15th century.
Right. It should be right after “What do do when in a hostage situation” and right before “What to do during a tornado” in the curriculum.
Millions of people are pulled over by the police every year. A major part of the process is to instill confusion and fear into the driver. Flashing lights, searchlights, shouted directions, it’s all meant to confuse and intimidate. And it works. Anyone with a driver license should be familiar with the process of being intimidated.
#5 I’m really starting to think, unlike what all the cheerleaders say, this technology is not going to be ready for primetime within the next decade afterall.
I doubt the technology is a slam dunk, but it’s clearly way past the whiteboard stage. At the point in time you’ve gotten so far down the issues list that “kangaroos” is on it at all, then you’ve cleared a lot of hurdles.
Yeah, right. Only about 100 years of hurdles left to go!
This technology basically needs to be a slam dunk or it’s nothing more than an advanced safety feature and not revolutionary. They’ve made a really sophisticated safety feature for luxury cars it appears.
Automated Kangaroo harvesters. Mmm, roo burger.
I’ve spent the last month commuting via Uber, often in pool mode, and often contemplate how well a robot car would react to the various exigencies. (“Hold on, I forgot to lock my front door”/”Can you help me put this bag in the trunk”/”Can you fold up this wheelchair?”/”I’m in a gated community and the gate code is 7338#”/etc etc.) If it’s effective on a large scale within twenty years I will be mightily surprised.
I wouldn’t say I follow developments closely but from what I see at least it hardly appears that much has advanced beyond where it was 2-3 years ago. It’s still just a super advanced cruise control technology, which would not be the revolutionary break-through being touted. Uber is also another interesting point, it is starting to look as if Uber is nothing more than billionaire Investors subsidising taxi rides for everyone. If in 10 years there’s no more Uber and true driverless cars are not a thing that’s going to be a real punch in the gut for the worldwide of Tyler and Alex.
I must say that Uber is a dream from the consumer side, though I agree with your take on the current economics. Honest politicians and journalists should be doing everything to help this company rather than sh*t on it, as is fashionable.
Although I like and use Uber as a service (because it’s basically Investors subsidising my cab rides),
“Honest politicians and journalists should be doing everything to help this company ”
Uhh no they shouldn’t…
“Uber is also another interesting point, it is starting to look as if Uber is nothing more than billionaire Investors subsidising taxi rides for everyone”
Substitute Amazon for Uber and retail purchase and delivery for taxi rides and it’s another subsidy for consumers.
We need a lot more of those billionaire investors!
Amazon makes money now and they’ve built a very formidable global logistics system in the meantime. Uber is in the end just an app.
Look at the gridlock and congestion in any major US city. Given widespread adoption, Uber and its ilk have the potential to create huge efficiencies, free up parking, reduce DUI deaths, and so on. It should be a policy-maker’s and leftist’s dream. Instead they focus on the uber-hateable white male douche who happened to be CEO.
They don’t actually make money. That goes far beyond the personality foibles of the CEO. Granting them a monopoly may be one way of allowing them to make money but we already have taxi services.
“Australia is home to around 35 million kangaroos and they are considered a pest in many parts of the country.”
Let me take a wild guess…these are polls of humans?
Modern humans have a 1% response rate to telephone polls, more or less.
All other species and have a 0% response rate.
Yes although I have lied and indicated I was on the line and handed it to my tortoise to handle.
16000 auto /roo collisions per year. That’s not bad, and must be a function of low population density. In the US deer and vehicles collide on the order of 1 million.
…it’s not only the one type of human – you’ve got short people, tall people, people wearing coats. The same applies to a roo,
Now that the roos have taken to wearing coats, it’s getting easier for them to impersonate people.
There are a lot more than 35 million kangaroos in Australia. Depending on rainfall, there may be 24 to 35 million of the 4 commercially slaughtered kangaroo species in areas surveyed. There are more in unsurveyed areas and there are a lot more than 4 species. How many kangaroos there are runs into problems because while there are around 48 species of maropods, Australians tend to call the larger ones kangaroos, the smaller ones wallabies, and then there are wallaroos, just to make things extra confusing.
3.“At Charmin, we’re always looking to bring people the best bathroom experience, both at home with our tissue and in new and unexpected ways,” said Janette Yauch, associate brand director for Charmin said in a statement. “
Toilet paper is an interesting subject. How can it possibly be hygienic? After defecating, the defecator is advised to wash his/her hands but not his/her rectum. If someone picks up dog poop in his bare hand, would it be sanitary to just wipe the hand with soft paper? And then eat? Wandering around in public with e. coli leaping off of the back of your pants doesn’t seem like a healthy practice. Toilet paper should be replaced by soap and water, as it is in some parts of the world.
I love my $700 Japanese toilet seat.
So you don’t wash your hands with soap and water after wiping?
Yet another thing the Saudis are light years ahead on. Wipe with the left, eat with the right, and don’t worry about that troublesome soap and water.
and it has the added benefit of making Saudis ambidextrous (you ever try wiping with your off hand?)
They should be better handball players now that I think about it…
#3…How about hailable flea bag hotel rooms where coworkers could meet during a break?
#4: The author writes, “Those who are well-off and pay out of pocket could effectively exempt their data from the publicly available information pot”.
Maybe, but I don’t see anyone saying, “I better pay for my knee replacement or round of chemo so that those health services researchers don’t get my data.”
“At Charmin, we’re always looking to bring people the best bathroom experience, both at home with our tissue and in new and unexpected ways,” said Janette Yauch, associate brand director for Charmin said in a statement.
Maybe I’m missing out of something, but I don’t want anything “new and unexpected” to happen in the bathroom. In fact, I’m looking for a predictable, dare I say, regular experience. Pretty much all the new and unexpected things that can happen in the toilet are going to put you in the hospital or at least calling the doctor.
The predictable and regular experience in a NYC public restroom is bad.
Hence, a good bathroom experience would be new and unexpected in this context.
If only American police could be sent to school to learn how to interact with American citizens.
I was talking this weekend to a German officer formerly stationed in Kosovo, who was familiar with the case of a police officer shooting someone dead in seven seconds, and he seriously wondered about what the rules of engagement were for American police. Soldiers, according to him, are expected to be disciplined, and part of that discipline is accepting the possibility of being shot at while following the rules of engagement. He also explained how the squad he was leading did not gun down a Kosovan teenager with an airsoft (BB) pistol, because even in what was essentially a war zone, soldiers follow orders – and for the military (not only German, I’m sure) ‘in fear of your life’ is never an excuse for your actions. And yes, that meant then that the soldiers must first be fired upon before returning fire. Period, and no excuses – and in the specific case of that example, such discipline meant not making a situation worse by killing a teenager who was innocent, though clearly one who was either very, very stupid or one being used to create an incident in the interest of further unrest. Because as soldiers who volunteered for service, they were expected to their duty without excuses for failing in it.
He was utterly bewildered how any armed person who sworn an oath in service to a legitimate authority could be found innocent of all charges when gunning an innocent person down, and wondered what are American police taught. He was more than a bit disdainful to be honest, as if such police were not worthy to be associated with soldiers who really know what it means to keep the peace in a place where combat zone was not a metaphor. Basically, if a man panics in seven seconds and kills an innocent man, that is the sort of person this officer would remove from instantly from having any contact with such situations (he did not take a wider view, but said such a man would have been kicked out of his unit immediately for being utterly unsuited to the job at hand).
Many people in Germany don’t care about all the various American specific politics swirling around such cases – all they see, on a regular basis, is how often American police gun down unarmed and innocent Americans without ever being penalized. Creating the perception, in their eyes, that American police engage in what seems to be clearly legal murder, and wondering why Americans put up with it.
Must be nice to be a German, living in a country so perfect that you have leisure to critique the police in other countries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforcement_officers_in_Germany
A German military officer who served in Kosovo, who fully expects police to be be professional enough not to kill kids with toy guns, as another example, was critiquing people he considered unsuitable cowards for killing innocent people ‘in the line of duty’ because they are ‘in fear of their life.’
And did you actually look at that list? German police rarely kill people, as there is rarely any need to, particularly when one trains regularly with service weapons. This includes automatic weapons, by the way – seeing German police carrying automatic weapons in places like airports or major train stations is not unusual (again – there was a pause for several years, between say 2009 and 2013 or so, oddly enough).Generally, German police are always in pairs, but several times I saw trios, so when a couple of minutes extra were available at the Frankfurt main train station, I went up to a trio, one carrying a submachine, to ask why there were now trios in Frankfurt and Mannheim. His answer was that the third person was a trainee – I thanked them for their time, and went on my way. Oddly, I don’t mind being in a crowded public space where a couple of people are likely walking around with automatic weapons – as long as it is in Europe, that is.
It is simply not necessary to kill people because you are ‘in fear of your life.’ Of course, only a moron would fire on a German police officer – training regularly on the range pays off in such situations generally.
What really surprised the German officer though, was the number of police killed in the line of duty in a year. He could not believe that the number was so low, considering that all the media coverage gives you the feeling that being a police officer in America is extremely dangerous. When told the following, he was shocked, and even more bewildered how a police officer could kill an innocent man, while noting that the police clearly delude themselves about the extreme danger of being a police officer (remember, we are talking about somebody who had a bit of experience of leading groups of literal targets, so his perspective is not exactly a typical one, of course. Including the fact that he fully supports American style gun laws, by the way – at least in the U.S. with its large distances)
The basic facts given to him – ‘The most recent FBI data from 2014 show 96 law enforcement officers were killed in the line of duty. Of them, 51 died as a result of felonious acts, and 45 died in accidents. There were 48,315 other officers who were victims of assaults while on duty.
————————————-
The memorial fund found that traffic-related incidents were the leading cause of death for officers in 15 of the past 20 years. According to the fund’s count, 124 law enforcement officers were killed in 2015. Traffic-related incidents were the leading cause, comprising 52 of the deaths. Of the 52, 41 died in automobile or motorcycle crashes and 11 were struck and killed outside their vehicles. Of the total number of officers killed in 2015, 42 were shot and killed.’ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/07/12/are-most-job-related-deaths-of-police-caused-by-traffic-incidents/?utm_term=.2872bc9cc3af
The threshold for a felonious assault must be quite low if there is only a 1/1000 chance of death.
Yeah, I seriously have no idea how to rate that assault number. If you have ever watched German riot police in action at a soccer match (Waldhof Mannheim/Dresden a couple of years ago being one I saw the police preparations for, and read the Mannheimer Morgen reports afterwards), something on the order of many dozens of felonious assaults against police occurred during that single match.
Dresden Dynamo fans are likely responsible for thousands of felonious assaults against police each year, to be honest – in Karlsruhe in May, 15 police and 21 stadium attendants/ushers were injured, for example. 2000 fans were involved, and certainly not every assaulted police officer using their batons and pepper spray was injured while breaking up the hundreds of rioting Dynamo fans.
But then, what German police consider something along the lines of another bad day dealing with soccer fans, American police would likely consider something that could only be properly handled with armored vehicles and lines of police carrying automatic weapons. (German reporting – https://www.swr.de/sport/randale-durch-dresdner-fans-beim-ksc-heimspiel/-/id=1208948/did=19544580/nid=1208948/qjnq8y/index.html )
Right…US doesn’t even collect data… number is probably too scary… http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-36826297
Oh, sorry – I’m American, and one of my friends was a DC cop in the early 1990s. He never shot anyone, but then, he probably would have agreed with the German officer about killing someone sitting in a car or on a playground in a few seconds.
Not every American police officer is a lying coward, after all. It is just they seem to get the most attention, especially in an age where cameras provide clear evidence of what actually happens.
Has your German cop’s daughter been gang raped, yet?
Has your daughter?
I was raped by Obama’s big black cock.
These stats pretty much prove the point. 7 killed in all of 2014 in Germany, a country with a population of over 80M. The US, with a population of about 320M had 991 people killed by police in 2015 (according to the Washington Post, since the US Government doesn’t bother to accurately track the figures). So a country four times the population has 141 times more killings by police.
I was in Germany with the US military during the Cold War. The typical German I knew wouldn’t spit on the side walk.
Obviously, the US has 141-times more bad actors/career criminals than does Germany. I estimate the number at 500-times.
This. I’m European and have lived all over. The scariest places I spent time include DC and New Orleans. In the latter burg, a supermarket needed an armed guard post in the parking lot.
I visited Spain on a school trip when I was in high school (this was in the early 80s). There were armed guards at the airport and on major overpasses on the highway into Madrid.
Your point is?
I’m pretty sure _American_ soldiers have stricter rules of engagement in war zones for the most part.
But the “fear for your life” thing is a legal term of art. It’s got a legal meaning that’s different than the colloquial meaning and police officers are trained to take advantage of that: They’ll hold a civilian to the legal definition but bank on jurists accepting the colloquial version if they ever come to a trial.
“… American soldiers have stricter rules of engagement than American police are held to…” Is what I meant to say.
Was initially excited about 5, thinking it compared driver less cars to those driven BY kangaroos.
Problems caused by impact with kangaroos can be easily solved via the methods featured in the “Death Race 2000” movie. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_Race_2000
3: The article did not describe the basic economics or business set-up of this van: what are their costs? And revenue (I’m guessing zero because the article doesn’t mention price), although they’re getting non-financial returns i.e. publicity/advertising. Seems likely to be a one-off publicity stunt. OTOH the Oscar Mayer Weinermobile has been around for 80 years — and now there are eight of them!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wienermobile
#1,
We attempt to teach calculus to all students, 90% of whom will never use it again. Why not teach some useful life skills to the below average kids instead?
You seriously want to teach gun skills to below average kids?
The number one thing you could do to stop gun violence, though it’ll never happen, is institute intelligence screening. Bottom quintile with guns in their hands is a perfect example of the 80/20 rule, though probably more pronounced.
It’s currently illegal for felons to own guns, and you never see any armed felons, that’s for sure. I’m sure an intelligence test would be just as effective at keeping guns away from morons.
Concede the point. Nonetheless if you could do away with the various absurdities in state code and replace them all with this one screen, it would be a step in the right direction.
Quite aside from all the jumping, roos in OZ have a way of whooshing across roads fast from out of nowhere. I have seen it, mates.
thmfr,
Accidental gun death rates in US way ahead of rest of world. We are far from tops in accidental falling and poisoning rates, with neither of very amenable to education. Most fallers are elderly or disabled.
We also lead the world in Grand Canyon deaths and private aviation deaths, as those, too, are things Americans have access to and most other people don’t.
Unless you think there’s something particularly awful about guns as a form of death, the numbers suggest we’re managing the risk pretty well.
Sorry, but no, thfmr. We are far worse even than other nations with lots of guns.
.
So our rate of accidental gun deaths is .24 per 100,000 per year. Switzerland is fourth in guns per capita after US, Yemen, Serbia. Their rate is .04. Matter education and laws.
You can’t be serious. Even granting that ownership/regulation in Switzerland in any way resemble the situation here (they don’t), you cannot say with a straight face that this is an education issue rather than a demographic issue.
New Hampshire is one of the gun-happier states in the country, and has a miniscule gun death rate, in line with Japan’s. Do you think this is an educational success?
I most certainly can, thfmr. Obviously you know nothing about the situation in Switzerland.
Most of the guns are rifles owned by former military. They are ordered to own them and keep them locked up. Universal draft. These people are highly trained. So, education and laws.
Right, Barkley. Each male has one state-issued long gun that he is not allowed to carry. Handguns are scarce, permits to carry even scarcer. You think this makes a good comparison with the U.S.?
Even granting this awful comparison, guns per capita are one-fourth the number in the U.S., which happens to be the same proportion of accidental deaths you cite.
You’re a professor. Do better.
p.s. the most recent numbers I could find indicate an accidental rate in the U.S. of 0.14/100k. Adjusting for the number of guns, that would make the U.S. safer than Switzerland.
Looks to me that you are wrong, thrmr, once again.
I have two sources. Wiipedia says Swiss rate is 0.04 and US rate is 0.18 per 100,000. Another source ,Humanosphere (I can provide link if wanted) also has Swiss rate at 0.04 but US rate at 0.24. That is what I was counting. US does have a bit more than four times as many guns per capita as Switzerland, which would say with Wiki numbers that accidental gun death rate per gun in the two countries about the same, while the Humanosphere numbers has the US having a higher rate per gun, which would say Swiss doing a better job per gun. Of course in total, we are way less safe on this matter, which suggests room for education or something here.
What is shocking to me is how the views of the NRA have changed on this. Once upon a time, back when I got an NRA marksmanship award on the way to becoming an Eagle scout, the NRA emphasized education and gun safety. Now they emphasize making sure mentally unstable people can get guns and that guns that can only be used by the owner cannot be sold in the US. What the justification for either of these is I do not know, and the latter certainly cannot be some slippery slope argument that if some restrictions are put on guns, then they will be banned, and it certainly does not improve gun safety, just the opposite, very obviously. But then it was quite some time ago that the NRA leadership turned into a bunch of unconscionable drooling monsters.
I ran the math myself, using U.S. accidental gun deaths and U.S. population from cdc.gov and census.gov. Even granting your slightly higher number, I trust you can see that, accounting for differences in the numbers of guns, the U.S. has a safety record very close to that of Switzerland. Yet still you maintain the U.S. is some hotbed of gun negligence?
Your take on the NRA is equivalent to the Occupy crowd yelling about “banksters.” If you’d had any experience with the organization recently, you’d know their education and safety elements are prominent and good.
Yes, thfmr, I maintain that we have an awful record on gun negligence. And I also think nothing but terrible things about the NRA, which is a disgrace of an organization. But I get that you have recently gotten all involved with them and so on, so fine, go ahead and think they are great. But I think it is bizarre that you do not seem to think that more should be done in the US to reduce accidental gun deaths. But this discussion has probably reached it useful end. I will note that you seem to mean well, even if I think poorly of the NRA.
Enjoyed the debate.
This New Toilet Paper Is So Soft And Absorbent!
India could definitely use more of #3, the concept, not a toilet paper dispensing one, one that uses water. Public restrooms in India are pretty much non-existent or highly unhygienic if present.