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FTA: "it is estimated that 28.3% of the EU population aged 16 or over could not afford a one-week annual holiday away from home in 2018"

Surely including 16 year olds is skewing these numbers.


That's true of most of the stats you see.

For example looking at incomes. If you're a college kid making $5K over the summer, you're counted as being below the poverty level.


Except if you're Danish, students are always excluded when counting who's poor or not. Technically students are poor (mostly), but it's viewed a temporary, and therefore they're not included.


In America, only college students that live off campus and do not live with relatives are counted in the official poverty rate. I can't really see why they should be excluded, since they are living in poverty that is just often propped up by debt.

But, the census bureau also calculates an additional poverty rate that excludes college students.


It should probably only include people mid-twenties to mid-fifties or so, which should hopefully avoid most intentionally underemployed people. I care about breadwinners, not dependents.


lies, damn lies and...


I can see that going either way, depending on how the question is posed. Fewer 16-year olds may be able to afford a vacation paid from their own income, compared to the population mean.

But sponsored through parents/relatives, more 16-year olds than the population mean may be able to take a vacation, given your vacation at 16 years old is likely to be cheap, relative to an older person's vacation.


Totally agree but I can also say that at around 17-18 most Swedish kids I grew up around had been on some sort of travel abroad.

Either themselves or with a student organisation.

Sort of a vacation. It used to be very popular to "tågluffa" here when I grew up, which means getting a train pass and just seeing Europe by rail.


That's probably their parents paying their way, and not them trying to get by on their own savings.


Because the media turns everything into a witch hunt these days.


[flagged]


Did they tag you that on 4chan?


At Apple: "Ah, another request to not log anything, make sure you log everything."


Neolithic 1%ers and their elite lake front Crannogs...


You jest, but if they were trading outposts as mentioned, there may be be a grain of truth to this!


Just like all the profits made from the "war on drugs" government will just view climate change taxes as a new source of revenue with no incentive to truly end the problem.


"In 2015, the federal government seized drugs the state bought illegally off the black market. The shoddy, shady sources for the deadly cocktails have become a weak spot death penalty opponents have leveraged."

wat?


https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/06/executi...

> In June of that year, officials in Georgia discovered a work-around: a small-time businessman in London named Mehdi Alavi, who sold wholesale drugs through a company called Dream Pharma, would ship sodium thiopental to them. Georgia bought some from him, and then Arkansas did too. With Hospira offline, Alavi had the U.S. execution market cornered. Arizona bought sodium thiopental from him in late September and used it the next month to execute a convicted murderer named Jeffrey Landrigan. California placed an order as well.

> Maya Foa, an anti-death-penalty advocate based in London, saw Dream Pharma mentioned in court documents related to Landrigan’s execution and decided to pay a visit. At the company’s address, she found a small building with peeling white paint and a placard that read elgone driving academy. Inside she found two desks and, in the back of the room, a single cabinet. That was it: Dream Pharma. Alavi imported execution drugs from elsewhere in Europe and shipped them to the United States, using that cupboard in a driving school as his base of operations.

...

> Since Hospira had been the only FDA-approved supplier of sodium thiopental, states that had imported it had done so illegally. Prisons had become, in effect, drug smugglers, and while the FDA may have been willing to look the other way, the DEA was not. In March 2011, agents seized Georgia’s supply of sodium thiopental. In April, they seized Tennessee’s, Kentucky’s, South Carolina’s, and Alabama’s.


Apparently the government is having to get their execution drugs off the street


Murdering people legally is hard. It's a good indication that it _should_ be impossible.


I say this as an opponent of the death penalty, there is nothing intrinsically difficult about killing someone, and I would guess that the ways a person can legally be killed have grown smaller and smaller over time by opponents of the practice. This is identical to the strategy used by anti-abortion advocates who chip away at access and timing and so on, and it's ethically questionable IMO.


There's absolutely nothing stopping states from reinstituting the firing squad: https://www.npr.org/2018/11/05/664548834/tennessee-death-row...

The reason why states can't source drugs to use them for killing is because, surprise, the corporations that manufacture them refuse to sell them for that purpose.


The corporations refuse because they’re afraid of the PR backlash. Let’s not hide the fact that it’s all about money.


Fair enough, but that doesn't negate their refusal to sell them for that purpose. They refuse to sell them for that purpose because they know the state will pay far less than they would otherwise lose from public scrutiny. I'm okay with that.


It doesn’t negate it, but it does taint it. You know that if they thought the calculation would come out the other way and they’d make money, they’d be actively soliciting prisons to buy their drugs for executions.


Actually, it's simply illegal for companies in the EU to export drugs for use in executions.


Yeah, and corporations never do illegal things for profit in the EU, either.


Except this is unlikely to be a big business opportunity, plus chances are someone would notice (executions in the US aren't exactly secret), so I would be pretty surprised if big pharma companies would try to circumvent this.


The condemned convict might get lead poisoning.


No, the two strategies differ in whether they are in concordance with a constitutional right or against a constitutional right (to take a strictly legalistic view).

Limiting access to abortion is counter to the Supreme Court's decision that abortion is a right.

Limiting the methods of execution is to prevent undue suffering, which violates the constitutional right against cruel and unusual punishment.


> No, the two strategies differ

That "No" is unwarranted - the strategies differ in the way you say, but they coincide in the way the post your responded to says.


The "no" was responding to the suggestion that there is a moral equivalency to the two scenarios, and I was disagreeing that there is one.


There is a moral equivalence between the method, not the goal.


That makes no sense. Morality applies to the goal (or the result, including side-effects, which may or may not have been the goal).

If I scratch you to relieve an itch you can't reach, or I scratch you to violently gouge out your eyes, it's a meaningless comment to say "There's a moral equivalence to the method."

The only "equivalence" between the two original scenarios is that they both involve the verb "limiting," but there is no "moral equivalence" that automatically applies to any action using that verb. Or is there a "moral equivalence" between the laws to limit abortion and my attempts to limit my kid's screentime?

Are you just arguing for the sake of arguing?


Yes, yet another wrongly convicted of murder released. Police destroyed records: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/glen-assoun-wrong... Was in Canada, but if we still had execution...


Did you reply in the right place? Not seeing how this is a reply to GP.


Millions of human beings are dying of starvation, but no let's fret about the insects we might step on while we walk across the lawn.


It's not a zero-sum game, we can recognise and work to solve both issues simultaneously.

Tomasik's recommendations are moderate:

> Given how many insects each of us harms or helps by our choices, consideration of insect suffering should play a significant role in our actions. For instance, we should generally avoid buying silk and shellac, reduce driving especially when roads are wet, and minimize walking on grass or in the woods.

We aren't responsible for the vast majority of insect suffering but can potentially in the future do something about it:

> Most insect suffering results from natural causes such as predation, parasitism, physical injury, and dehydration. We should encourage concern for wild-insect suffering and research ways in which human environmental policies can reduce it. Our descendants should also think twice before spreading insects and insect-like creatures to new realms, which could multiply suffering manyfold.


lol you support an article that includes the following:

"consider the ethical implications of virtual insects, including insect brain “uploads” and insect-like artificial intelligences that will emerge in the next few decades."


Thank you.


Maybe now younger people will join me in yelling at passerby, "Get off my lawn!"


Let's now wait while some "bright mind" jumps to add "Why not do both?".


"Break Up With Your Girlfriend, I'm Bored" came on over the radio while reading this.


I'm confident it will be as effective as the do not call registry.


This article blames sprawl and climate change, but neglects the connection to the Plum Island Animal Disease Center right off the coast of Lyme CT. Borrelia has been in the US for ages, but wasn't known for causing the debilitating symptoms this modern strain causes.


http://www.cnn.com/2004/SHOWBIZ/books/04/02/lab.257/index.ht...

> Moreover, a Department of Agriculture spokesperson, Sandy Miller-Hays, told the news service that -- counter to Carroll's claims -- Lyme disease was never studied at Plum Island.

As for symptoms, it was described in the 1760s as "exquisite pain [in] the interior parts of the limbs", neurological symptoms in the 1920s, etc. That it took a while to recognize the cause of these things doesn't mean the disease didn't exist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyme_disease#History


I think that a government spokesperson should not be considered a reputable source when speaking on potential misdoings by the same government. Is there an independent source that can speak to the Plum Island claims?


Given that it's impossible to prove a negative, the onus is on conspiracy theorists to provide evidence that Lyme research was performed there.


15 years ago, conspiracy theorists were being asked to prove government spying. It's hard, and the coverup might leave only circumstantial evidence, but it doesn't mean its not true.

Either way, if you're trying to provide a source against the point being made, it needs to be better than that one. Is there any other?

Edit: I did a bit of looking into it.

Tick-borne diseases were definitely studied there, which means general subject was being researched. (a bunch of pubmed studies are listed here [1], and pubmed shows in the author information that they were from Plum Island. Ignore the site if you like, just look at the pubmed articles.)

The geography of the disease also fits a spread from the Plum Island facility. See the same article for a map.

I obviously can't go order and read a physical book off the cuff, but it seems like the Lab 257 book by Carroll is decently reliable, as far as can be expected when making claims counter to an official government position. From wikipedia: "The review in Army Chemical Review concluded 'Lab 257 would be cautiously valuable to someone writing a history of Plum Island'".

Anyway, in summary, there is enough evidence to ask a reasonable question: which puts the onus back on the government, or you, to provide credible evidence that Lyme was not developed there.


> The geography of the disease also fits a spread from the Plum Island facility. See the same article for a map.

No, it doesn't, considering it was documented in Scotland in the 1700s. The Plum Island facility was started in 1954.

> From wikipedia: "The review in Army Chemical Review concluded 'Lab 257 would be cautiously valuable to someone writing a history of Plum Island'".

The actual quote is:

> The review in Army Chemical Review concluded "Lab 257 would be cautiously valuable to someone writing a history of Plum Island, but is otherwise an example of fringe literature with a portrayal of almost every form of novelist style."

In other words, "it gets the biographical stuff mostly right, before it goes nutty".

> Anyway, in summary, there is enough evidence to ask a reasonable question: which puts the onus back on the government, or you, to provide credible evidence that Lyme was not developed there.

Lyme's historical record predating the very existence of the lab is fairly conclusive proof that it wasn't developed there.


> No, it doesn't, considering it was documented in Scotland in the 1700s. The Plum Island facility was started in 1954.

Yes, it does. This strain was before unseen in the US so much so it's very name references where it was first seen in the US, regardless of where it may have been elsewhere in the world.


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