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America's Real Criminal Element: Lead

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Re: America's Real Criminal Element: Lead

#131

Post by baddox »

clavalle wrote: post #115
baddox wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What can private insurance do for me if I am killed? What can anything do for you if you are killed? I don't understand the relevance. You could still have private life insurance to provide for your family, but that's no different than today. > What if I can't afford private insurance? What if you can't afford the fees associated with litigation in the government court system? I never claimed that my suggestion wou…

>What can anything do for you if you are killed? I don't understand the relevance. What is to keep someone from killing me to get their way? Private insurance? Are they going to go to war for me after I'm dead? >What if you can't afford the fees associated with litigation in the government court system? Well, if the conflict 'resolution' involves the other party resorting to violence or theft, I can turn the matter o…

> What is to keep someone from killing me to get their way? Private insurance? Are they going to go to war for me after I'm dead?

Yes, that's the idea, although "going to war" is hyperbolic. Private insurance would be strongly incentivized to seek out and punish murderers, assuming of course that potential customers would find that service valuable. The leap from the government's monopoly on violence to a competitive alternative is no more drastic or complex than the leap from the government's monopoly on postal service to a competitive alternative. Features that customers valued would almost certainly abound, and ones they didn't care about or like would be less common. The key difference is that the competitive systems get their revenue from willing payers, while the government coerces money from every single employer.

> I don't see how violence is expensive. Violence is cheap. Bullets don't cost much. Rocks are even cheaper.

I don't mean the cost of weaponry. I mean that you have to pay thugs well, mostly because of the inherent risk I mentioned earlier. There is also risk of massive retaliation which can end up causing a lot of damage to humans and property.

> In fact, violence can be very profitable.

It can be, sure, but it's extremely expensive and extremely risky. That was my point.

Re: America's Real Criminal Element: Lead

#132

Post by baddox »

rayiner wrote: post #111
baddox wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You mean private litigation which employs gov't judges to adjudicate and the gov't police to enforce? No, I mean private litigation and conflict mediation that is private. There is a lot of that already.

And it blows because the conflict mediators side with the people who have the deepest pockets and can offer repeat business.

I'd be curious to hear your notion of how government works.

Re: America's Real Criminal Element: Lead

#133

Post by baddox »

kolinko wrote: post #102
baddox wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You mean private litigation which employs gov't judges to adjudicate and the gov't police to enforce? No, I mean private litigation and conflict mediation that is private. There is a lot of that already.

How would that work?

The same way any private industry works. People or organizations offer services, and individuals choose which services to pay for.

Re: America's Real Criminal Element: Lead

#134

Post by baddox »

sophacles wrote: post #130
baddox wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... and "in the long run" everything would work out, right? Don't be silly. The world would still be a horrible place. Heinous acts would be committed every day. People would be murdered, tortured, and raped. There would still be a lot of violence—it would just be a lot less than what we have today. > In other words, your model assumes that aggregate consumer demand for a particular basket of goods will "stay still…

You're the one proposing a radical change, onus of evidence and "how it would be better" is on you. By the way "but there would be no government!" is not a valid argument of how it would be better, only a tautological statement of "if there was no government, there would be no government". We have seen governments arise for as far back as there is history, and not really a lot of evidence of how great things are with…

Well, that argument is ludicrous. We've never had a society without murder either, but I dare say that a society without murder would be superior. How would a society without murder work, you say? I don't know how to respond to that. It would be a bunch of people living together, like today, except there wouldn't be murder.

Re: America's Real Criminal Element: Lead

#135

Post by gruseom »

crusso wrote: post #125
greendestiny wrote: post #7

I'm tempted to repeat the oft said correlation is not causation. But really I have never thought that captures the problem I have with studies like this. Of course correlation does not necessarily imply causation. What I really find to be problematic is a small time series of data of a facet of a human behaviour across a population is probably going to correlate extremely well to many other time series across the sam…

So many factors that could have contributed to the crime drop. Hate to drive by this interesting thread, but wasn't this same crime drop attributed to the legalization of abortion? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Impact_of_Legalized_Abortio...

(Duplicated from a comment I made to the original posting of this article at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5002806...)

Via http://election.princeton.edu/2012/12/22/scientific-american, which cited Reyes' work on the lead theory, here's a link to a striking critique of the abortion theory:

http://www.economist.com/node/5246700?story_id=5246700

Someone inspected Donohue and Levitt's code and found a bug that meant they hadn't controlled for what they claimed they had. "Fixing that error reduces the effect of abortion on arrests by about half, using the original data, and two-thirds using updated numbers."

Re: America's Real Criminal Element: Lead

#136

Post by vacri »

ndonnellan wrote: post #59
ww520 wrote: post #8

Didn't the rise of violent video games contribute to the decline of the youth violence? People were venting their frustration and excessive energy in video games instead of on the street, leading to less violence in real life.

I think it would be better if people stopped perpetuating the likely myth that emotions are similar to a hot gas that can be reduced in pressure by venting. - http://www.nytimes.com/1983/03/08/science/venting-anger-may-... - [PDF] http://illinois.edu/lb/files/2009/03/26/9293.pdf *I'm not arguing against the video game link, just the suggested mechanism

The venting anger thing is just the pop-sci opposite of not overly suppressing your emotions ('bottling them up') which is also damaging.

Re: America's Real Criminal Element: Lead

#137

Post by baddox »

Mz wrote: post #129
baddox wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So then the insurance company becomes the government. Why? Retail stores don't become the government or merge into one. Neither do private security agencies. It's unlikely that any organization could "become the government" unless a vast portion of society accepts them as the sole legitimate purveyor of violence, which is precisely what I don't want to happen. > Or the insurance company also just says "No I don't l…

I worked for an insurance company for five years. A good one with high ethics. The entire insurance industry is predicated on not paying you. It is the very basis of the business model. I think you have no idea what you are talking about. None.

Are you claiming that the very idea of group insurance is fallacious? Or are you just saying the the big players in the industry are bad?

Re: America's Real Criminal Element: Lead

#138

Post by Mz »

baddox wrote: post #137
Mz wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked for an insurance company for five years. A good one with high ethics. The entire insurance industry is predicated on not paying you. It is the very basis of the business model. I think you have no idea what you are talking about. None.

Are you claiming that the very idea of group insurance is fallacious? Or are you just saying the the big players in the industry are bad?

I am saying that group insurance is so close to con artistry that it boggles my mind that it is legal.

Re: America's Real Criminal Element: Lead

#139

Post by rprasad »

baddox wrote: post #131
clavalle wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What can anything do for you if you are killed? I don't understand the relevance. What is to keep someone from killing me to get their way? Private insurance? Are they going to go to war for me after I'm dead? >What if you can't afford the fees associated with litigation in the government court system? Well, if the conflict 'resolution' involves the other party resorting to violence or theft, I can turn the matter o…

> What is to keep someone from killing me to get their way? Private insurance? Are they going to go to war for me after I'm dead? Yes, that's the idea, although "going to war" is hyperbolic. Private insurance would be strongly incentivized to seek out and punish murderers, assuming of course that potential customers would find that service valuable. The leap from the government's monopoly on violence to a competitive…

> In fact, violence can be very profitable.

It can be, sure, but it's extremely expensive and extremely risky. That was my point.

Violence is only risky because government makes it risky to commit violence.

Reality does not bear out your claims that turning everything over to private parties would magically solve the violence problem. In fact, places like Somalia and every conflict in Africa and the Middle East are strong evidence that violence would increase tenfold without a strong government. In contrast, the places with the lowest levels of violence are frequently places like Singapore or Europe with the highest levels of government.

Re: America's Real Criminal Element: Lead

#140

Post by sokoloff »

lutorm wrote: post #91
jwess wrote: post #69

It's scary to think that the transition to unleaded aviation fuel, or avgas, only began a couple years ago, and is scheduled for 2018 [0]. Currently, Avgas, which is different than jet fuel in that it's mainly used by private single-engine planes (ICE instead of turbine), can still contain up to 2.12 grams of lead per gallon [1]. Surprisingly, this 2.12 grams of lead/gal is termed 100LL, for 100-octane "low-lead". Up…

The article says that lead in aviation fuels (and in solder) is a far smaller contribution to current lead levels than remaining lead paint. In the grand scheme of things, there just isn't that much avgas used, and it gets dispersed widely as opposed to concentrated where people live. I think the real problem is the big aviation piston engine companies (e.g. Lycoming and Continental) that seem to have no incentive to…

IMO, the FAA and their standardization processes for fuels like G100UL (GAMI), UL102 (Swift) and 91/96UL (Hjelmco) is the bottleneck here. GAMI in particular appears to have a fuel ready to use (in lab/prototype quantities) and has flown test flights in normally aspirated and turbocharged applications. (Turbos live a harder life, have lower detonation margins and are generally a more difficult test case. Many normally aspirated engines would run fine on ethanol-free pump gas from the corner service station.)

I don't necessarily fault the individual FAA employees; they have every incentive to make GAMI, Swift et al jump through hoops to prove that their fuel is as safe and has as high detonation margins, even in worst case, high, hot and heavy departure conditions, as the proven over many decades 100LL fuel. It's a "heads I lose", "tails we push" set of incentives for them, so I don't blame them for being reluctant to move swiftly.

I feel bad burning 100LL in an engine (from Continental) perfectly capable of (and even happier) running on ethanol-free 87 octane pump gas. I'd happily buy clean mogas instead of low-lead, but it's virtually impossible to find and low-lead is available at the overwhelming majority of airports.

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