Your video, Two theories for an unsolved Soviet mystery, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

To be fair, we tried pretty damn hard to stop big Kim from grabbing control in the first place. The price ended up being too high for us (America) then (during the Korean war), and the expected cost of forced regime change today is much higher, multiple millions of lives and rising constantly as lil' Kim's arsenal rapidly grows.
The multifaceted fiasco that is N Korea may prove unsolvable, but our current course has a predictable, unacceptable outcome.
I agree we need leaders with wisdom....also restraint, intelligence, diplomacy, and a high level of comprehension of the situation as seen from multiple viewpoints. Sadly I don't see those qualities exemplified by either of the men who count most in this situation.

I can't believe you posted this. This problem and all others like it are unsolvable unless you make at least one not very logical assumption about the use of graphical symbols as variables and this guys solution makes an even worse assumption that side by side variables with no operand between them should be added rather than multiplied.

This is the point of thought experiments. They're not supposed to be unsolvable zen koans. They're supposed to help you identify and examine the fundamentals of your whatever philosophical model for a given topic. This one is obviously doing its job, because when you can construct statements like 'perfect certainty makes inaction as culpable as action' then you already have a richer understanding of ethics than say 95% of the population.

Many people give the opposite answer to yours; they don't think you should take an innocent life deliberately, even if it is for a greater good. Now, are these stupid people? Yes. And you'll find more and more of them when you recast the question in increasingly uncomfortable terms: Should you shove a fat man in front of the train to slow it down, knowing the five will then have time to escape? Should a doctor harvest the vital organs of a perfectly healthy patient to save five otherwise healthy people who happen to be in need of various organ transplants?

Real world solutions and complications to these questions are irrelevant. Petri dishes don't exist in nature but you don't slap them out of biologists hands and yell at them to do real science in the real world. And isn't the fact that so many people would decline to assassinate baby Hitler informative in itself?

So wait...the agreement is to 'limit' temperature rise to 3.6F, the exact temperature rise they have said is the point at which feedback loops become engaged and make CO2 the least of our problems? Then...at some future point...they agree to limit CO2 production to levels that natural processes can absorb, with no time limit for that, and until then we'll continue to add to the already out of balance levels of CO2, adding to the already unsolvable problem? How on earth can they expect to do the former without first going well beyond the latter? There's no way to limit temperature rise from CO2 without lowering the amount in the atmosphere...and this plan NEVER goes that far, it only agrees to, at some point, balance the amount we add with the amount being removed...that keeps the levels at above current levels, it does not lower them. That keeps the temperature rise in effect, only lowering the speed at which it's rise accelerates, not lowering the speed it rises.
From what I can grasp of this 'agreement', it's beyond worthless and does nothing to solve the problem, only agrees to limit the speed at which we make it worse. It seemingly ignores the fact that what we do today takes 50-100 years to effect the climate and pretends that slowing (not stopping) the RISE in CO2 production is in any way meaningful. If we stopped ALL human CO2 production tomorrow, we still will see the 3.6F rise, the acidification of the ocean, and the myriad of issues that come from those and other disrupted natural cycles.

Also, if we stopped all CO2 production tomorrow, that would mean shutting down coal power plants, and that (while necessary) brings with it the problem of stopping global dimming. Global dimming occurs when aerosols block sunlight in the upper atmosphere, and has directly counteracted some effects of global warming. If we stop putting the pollution up there, we get a few more degrees of temperature rise from that alone.
Unexpected feedbacks like this make solving the problem an issue that requires thorough knowledge of all the processes involved, a near impossibility, meaning anyone who's not a professional climatologist who's offering solutions or opinions is really just spouting hot air....kind of like I just did.

Yes, you did say all that, but you also said none of that is a problem, at least not one to be really worried about. To me, that sounds a lot like climate change denial 3.0, where 1.0 was 'it's not happening at all, don't panic', 2.0 was 'it's happening, but it's natural and normal, don't panic' and 3.0 is 'it's human caused, but no problem, don't panic'. All of those are arguments designed to stall, not to be correct. If I'm reading you wrong, I apologize, but I've heard that argument before from those definitely in that camp.

If the IPCC says it won't be disastrous, yes, we would disagree, because I say it already is, and so have they in their summaries of their last few reports. Just abnormal drought alone is disastrous in many places worldwide already, as is increased flooding in some areas. I did not read the entire PDF's, only what you quoted because they were only linked as downloads/files, and I don't download files from sites I don't recognize.

I linked the first google search pages that came up with water/glacial data, not the other dozen that said the same, or near the same thing, not the NOVA on glacial retreat that said the same thing, not the movie on the same topic with photographic proof of the retreats-Chasing Ice. You ignored that they did list their source for the 2/3 of Chinese cities low on water and the 50% loss of glacial mass per decade as the Chinese military and claimed they were source less so easily dismissed.
As for the diatoms and shellfish, I've seen numerous studies on them, and again just grabbed the first one that came up in a search with data. You seemed to dismiss it as well, but it's not alone. In one snail study I saw, the woman said the last few years it had become nearly impossible to get measurements because the snail shells literally turn to paste in her fingers and weighed nearly nothing! I'm glad to read now that you don't disagree that it's an issue, you only think it's not severe?

I'm not holding my breath on fusion or fission, we've heard the 'we're only 5 years away from fission/fusion' line before about as often as 'Iran is only 2 years away from having a nuclear bomb', but we can agree on wind and solar, except I say it is great for base load, you just need to pair it with micro hydro storage (pump water uphill with surplus solar/wind, then run micro hydro at night). Small solar/wind also decentralizes production, safeguarding from terrorism, and is quite cost effective. Mine paid for itself in well under 10 years.

My issue with your position is that what we do today just with CO2 production reduction won't really effect the atmosphere for 20-200 years (the accepted lifespan of 65-85% of atmospheric CO2, the remaining 15-35% takes thousands of years to be trapped) and that's only IF the ocean CO2 sink continues functioning, so we're already well past the point of avoiding moderate climate change. Without quick action, feedback loops like methane and/or ice sheets melting make the problem exponentially larger and difficult/impossible to manage at all. It may already be too late even if we cut to zero CO2 tomorrow, but it's certainly too late to avoid more, massive, unsolvable global issues if we don't even mitigate them before 2050.

Let's not get into the quagmire of global dimming from sulfur in coal actually mitigating a large part of expected global warming by reflecting sunlight. I've yet to hear a plan or study involving that variable.

How is it not surprising that the problem sees no problem?

You say : "I don't see people getting beat up, or shot, or assaulted, or arrested for no reason"
So, those that were "beat up, or shot, or assaulted, or arrested", were for a good reason, right?

Ever consider that those reasons are often made up?
Ever consider that the stories you heard around the water cooler were simply B.S., and it was in fact the police simply preying on innocent people?



Just what exactly does LE do for me, or anyone?

Do police have super powers and spidey senses?
Will they magically teleport to someone getting raped, and prevent it?
Will they magically teleport to someone getting run over, and prevent it?
Will they magically teleport to someone getting beaten, and prevent it?
Will they magically teleport to someone getting robbed, and prevent it?
The answer is : no.

Police can't actually /help/ anyone.
They can only show up after the fact, and ask you what happened, and if you know who did it.
If you don't know who it was, tough shit. Sucks to be you.
Unlike on TV, there is no in-depth investigation. The most they do is tell you to call them if you remember something else. (This is speaking from experience)

What if you're not around to even tell them anything? Almost every murder committed by an unrelated stranger without witnesses or video goes unsolved.
Why? Because all police know how to do is ask friends/family where they were, and if everyone has an excuse, police got nothing.

At least when a normal person [that you can identify] harms you, you /can/ call the police, and maybe, just maybe, if they feel like it, they will round them up after the fact.

(They often don't. We've had people dumping trash on our land : police didn't respond. We've had people hunting [strangers shooting guns] on our property : police didn't respond. Brought evidence of a fraud to the police station, with account numbers, names, addresses : we won't investigate. The only time they ever came was to talk with my mother after she reported her credit card number was being used by a stranger - LOL, of all the things, they bother coming for /that/?)

But if the police harm you, you've got nowhere to turn to - but them. And they care more about each other, than some stranger.

Heck, I've been tailgated by a cop, on a multi-lane road, so close his headlights weren't even visible over my trunk. He could have gone around me any time. After miles, when I finally sped up - BAM. Ticket.

I've pulled up to a roadblock by my house, and asked if I could go by. The guy was so incensed that he detained me for hours, and told me I was threatening his life, reckless driving, and not wearing a seatbelt.

I've been threatened by a cop - because I interrupted her chat with her girlfriend to ask for directions around a road they were closing off.

I've been pulled over with gun drawn, for trivial speeding (well below reckless).

Seriously people, every time you get pulled over, you are at risk of getting shot, because someone is trained to be suspicious and paranoid, and they saw something shiny.

Just look at how they behave. Cop shoots his daughter in his own garage, because he thought she was a burglar.
What, too much to ask just to look at the person to see if they're even a burglar? Shoot first ask questions later.

Every year there are multiple cases of police raiding a house and shooting people - only to find out it was the wrong house. What, too much trouble to be a decent human being and just knock first, and ask for whoever they need to come out?

Oh, but that might put them at a greater risk. And we all know that police take MINIMAL risks themselves, and instead risk the lives of the citizens. (Why not approach with gun drawn? At least you're ready to shoot the suspect. And if you accidentally shoot the suspect, oh well, just say they 'attacked'. No biggie. Why take the risk.)
The biggest risk they take, is the one they dream up for when they want to take credit for being the heroes they never were.

Look at the friggin VT shooting. Swarms of cops surrounding a building. Man inside, could be killing more people by the moment... and the cops just camp out and wait for him to kill himself.
Worst part, is if it were my family inside, and I tried to go in and stop the shooter, the police would just shoot me for trying to enter.

(And no, police don't deserve heroic praise. They deserve the _pay_check_ they signed up for. If that's not enough, they should take life more seriously and really think about what it is they're getting into, before they do it. Take responsibility, like an adult should.)

The police are a liability. They're armed. They're selfish. They're paranoid and suspicious. They're jumpy.
IMO, the best thing to do is keep away from them, don't look at them, don't talk to them. Stay away, and stay safe.

Oh yeah, and the police are also immune form the constitution's equal protection clause. "Because interpretation".

Look at the numbers. You are less likely to be arrested or go to jail in NORTH KOREA, than here in the U.S. of A. By a factor of 4 last I checked.
What the heck is going on here?

1 in 18 men is either in jail, on parole, or somewhere in the process of going to jail.
Most of the countries in Europe have smaller populations, than the people that we have 'in the system'. And most of the people we have 'in the system', never even harmed another person. They're just arrested for 'behavior crimes' - simply doing things that are not allowed. This is madness. The system is mad, the police are mad.

You don't end up with videos of a gang of police acting like gangsters, if it's a matter of 'a few bad apples'. They all have to be in the same frame of mind.
If they weren't all of the same frame of mind, one would do something bad, and the others would say "whoa there man, you're out of line".
But instead, they all do it. Because there are no 'bad apples'.
There is 'bad training', and 'bad culture', and it permeates the profession.

And when I say bad, I don't mean that "they are trained to be thugs".
I mean that the police don't see suspects as 'citizens (members of the state) that the police are on the side of'.
Whoever crosses their path is dehumanized. Some kind of "other", that the police need to protect society from. Not realizing that those people /are/ society, and /they/ need protection.
The kind of behavior that I see in these kinds of videos, it's simply treason. Betrayal of the state.

If the laws of this country were written to provide restitution to victims - and there were no laws to simply tell people how to live, and if the police spent their time providing restitution to victims, then I would have nothing but the greatest appreciation for the police.
As it stands, there's very little nobility around this profession. Majority of the job is simply picking on people - sometimes because they did harm, but usually because they mind their own business in an unapproved of way, or for kicks.

-scheherazade

You seem to think that eliminating guns will somehow eliminate mass shootings. However, there is zero correlation to the number of legal gun ownerships with the number of homicides. In fact, here are some statistics for you:

At present, a little more than half of all Americans own the sum total of about 320 million guns, 36% of which are handguns, but fewer than 100,000 of these guns are used in violent crimes. And, as it happens, where gun ownership per capita increases, violent crime is known to decrease. In other words, Caucasians tend to own more guns than African Americans, middle aged folks own more guns than young people, wealthy people own more guns than poor people, rural families own more guns than urbanites --> But the exact opposite is true for violent behavior (i.e., African Americans tend to be more violent than Caucasians, young people more violent than middle aged people, poor people more violent than wealthy people, and urbanites more violent than rural people). So gun ownership tends increase where violence is the least. This is, in large part, due to the cultural divide in the U.S. around gun ownership whereby most gun owners own guns for recreational sports (including the Southern Caucasian rural hunting culture, the likes of which aren't found in Australia or the UK or Europe, etc.); and about half of gun owners own guns for self-defense (usually as the result of living in a dangerous environment). Most of the widespread gun ownership in the U.S. predates any gun control legislation and gun ownership tends to generally rise as a response to an increase in violent crime (not the other way around).

There were about 350,000 crimes in 2009 in which a gun was present (but may not have been used), 24% of robberies, 5% of assaults, and about 66% of homicides. By contrast, guns are used as self-defense as many as 2 and a half million times every year (according to criminologist Gary Kleck at Florida State University), thereby decreasing the potential loss of life or property (i.e., those with guns are less likely to be injured in a violent crime than those who use another defensive strategy or simply comply).

Interestingly, violent crimes tend to decrease in those areas where there have been highly publicized instances of victims arming themselves or defending themselves against violent criminals. (In the UK, where guns are virtually banned, 43% of home burglaries occur when people are in the home, whereas only 9% of home burglaries in the U.S. occur when people are in the home, presumably as a result of criminals' fear of being shot by the homeowner.) In short, gun ownership reduces the likelihood of harm.

So, for example, Boston has the strictest gun control and the most school shootings. The federal ban on assault weapons from '94-'04 did not impact amount and severity of school shootings. The worst mass homicide in a school in the U.S. took place in Michigan in 1927, killing 38 children. The perpetrator used (illegal) bombs, not guns in this case.

1/3 of legal gun owners obtain their guns (a total of about 200,000 guns) privately, outside the reach of government regulation. So, it's likely that gun-related crimes will increase if the general population is unarmed.

Out of a sample of 943 felon handgun owners, 44% had obtained the gun privately, 32% stole it, 9% rented/borrowed it, and 16% bought it from a retailer. (Note retail gun sales is the only area that gun control legislation can affect, since existing laws have failed to control for illegal activity. Stricter legislation would likely therefore change the statistics of how felon handgun owners obtain the gun towards less legal, more violent ways.) Less than 3% obtain guns on the 'black market' (probably due, in part, to how many legal guns are already easily obtained).

600,000 guns are stolen every year and millions of guns circulate among criminals (outside the reach of the regulators), so the elimination of all new handgun purchases/sales, the guns would still be in the hands of the criminals (and few others).

The common gun controls have been shown to have no effect on the reduction of violent crime, however, according to the Dept. of Justice, states with right-to-carry laws have a 30% lower homicide rate and a 46% lower robbery rate. A 2003 CDC report found no conclusive evidence that gun control laws reduced gun violence. This conclusion was echoed in an exhaustive National Academy of Sciences study a year later.

General gun ownership has no net positive effect on total violence rates.

Of almost 200,000 CCP holders in Florida, only 8 were revoked as a result of a crime.

The high-water mark of mass killings in the U.S. was back in 1929, and has not increased since then. In fact, it's declined from 42 incidents in 1990 to 26 from 2000-2012. Until recently, the worst school shootings took place in the UK or Germany. The murder rate and violent crime in the U.S. is less than half of what it was in the late 1980s (the reason for which is most certainly multimodal and multifaceted).

Regarding Gun-Free Zones, many mass shooters select their venues because there are signs there explicitly banning concealed handguns (i.e., where the likelihood is higher that interference will be minimal). "With just one single exception, the attack on congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in Tuscon in 2011, every public shooting since at least 1950 in the U.S. in which more than three people have been killed has taken place where citizens are not allowed to carry guns," says John Lott.

In any case, do we have any evidence to believe that the regulators (presumably the police in this instance) will be competent, honest, righteous, just, and moral enough to take away the guns from private citizens, when a study has shown that private owners are convicted of firearms violations at the same rate as police officers? How will you enforce the regulation and/or remove the guns from those who resist turning over their guns? Do the police not need guns to get those with the guns to turn over their guns? Does this then not presume that "gun control" is essentially an aim for only the government (i.e., the centralized political elite and their minions) to have guns at the exclusion of everyone else? Is the government so reliable, honest, moral, virtuous, and forward thinking as to ensure that the intentions of gun control legislation go exactly as planned?

From a sociological perspective, it's interesting to note that those in favor of gun control tend to live in relatively safe and wealthy neighborhoods where the danger posed by violent crime is far less than in those neighborhoods where gun ownership is believed to be more acceptable if not necessary. Do they really want to deprive those who are culturally acclimatized to gun-ownership, who may be less fortunate than they are, to have the means to protect themselves (e.g., women who carry guns to protect themselves from assault or rape)? Sounds more like a lack of empathy and understanding of those realities to me.

There are many generational issues worth mentioning here. For example, the rise in gun ownership coincided with the war on drugs and the war on poverty. There are also nearly 24 million combat veterans living in the U.S. and they constitute a significant proportion of the U.S.' prison population as a result of sex offenses or violent crime. Male combat veterans are four times as likely to engage violent crime as non-veteran men; and are 4.4 times more likely to have abused a spouse/partner, and 6.4 times more likely to suffer from PTSD, and 2-3 times more likely to suffer from depression, substance abuse, unemployment, divorce/separation. Vietnam veterans with PTSD tend to have higher rates of childhood abuse (26%) than Vietnam veterans without PTSD (7%). Iraq/Afghanistan vets are 75% more likely to die in car crashes. Sex crimes by active duty soldiers have tripled since 2003. In 2007, 700,000 U.S. children had at least one parent in a warzone. In a July 2010 report, child abuse in Army families was 3 times higher if a parent was deployed in combat. From 2001 - 2011, alcohol use associated with domestic violence in Army families increased by 54%, and child abuse increased by 40%. What effect do you think that's going to have, regardless of "gun controls?"
("The War Comes Home" or as William Golding, the author of Lord of the Flies said, "A spear is a stick sharpened at both ends.")

In addition, families in the U.S. continue to break down. Single parent households have a high correlation to violence among children. In 1965, 93% of all American births were to married women. Today, 41% of all births are to unmarried women (a rate that rises to 53% for women under the age of 30). By age 30, 1/3 of American women have spent time as a single mother (a rate that is halved in European countries like France, Sweden, & Germany). Less than 9% of married couples are in poverty, but more than 40% of single-parent families are in poverty. Much of child poverty would be ameliorated if parents were marrying at 1970s rates. 85% of incarcerated youth grew up without fathers.

Since the implementation of the war on drugs, there's a drug arrest in the U.S. every 19 seconds, 82% of which were for possession alone (destroying homes and families in the process). The Dept. of Justice says that illegal drug market in the U.S. is dominated by 900,000 criminally active gang members affiliated with 20,000 street gangs in more than 2,500 cities, many of which have direct ties to Mexican drug cartels in at least 230 American cities. The drug control spending, however, has grown by 69.7% over the past 9 years. The criminal justice system is so overburdened as a result that nearly four out of every ten murders, and six out of every ten rapes, and nine out of ten burglaries go unsolved (and 90% of the "solved" cases are the result of plea-bargains, resulting in non-definitive guilt). Only 8.5% of federal prisoners have committed violent offenses. 75% of Detroit's state budget can be traced back to the war on drugs.

Point being, a government program is unlikely to solve any issues with regards to guns and the whole notion of gun control legislation is severely misguided in light of all that I've pointed out above. In fact, a lot of the violence is the direct or indirect result of government programs (war on drugs and the war on poverty).

(And, you'll note, I made no mention of the recent spike in the polypharmacy medicating of a significant proportion of American children -- including most of the "school shooters" -- the combinations of which have not been studied, but have -- at least in part -- been correlated to homicidal and/or suicidal behaviors.)

He means the origin of life on earth. That is one of the most hotly debated and unsolved questions in science. It could also be something we can never know for sure, because it only had to happen once.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis

Anyway, I do think it's cool that they're making some high-budget cosmology lessons for the masses. If you want something less focused on entertainment and flashy presentation, you've got lots of options.

Just what I'd expect from FOX.

A vacuous spectacle.

WTF was with..

"life on Earth, is one of the unsolved mysteries of science"

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Are you fucking shitting me ?

Not to say the concept is invalid but I'm not sure this experiment proves the point. I probably would have been still trying to solve the 'unsolvable' words before I went on to number three. They just ran out of time... nothing to do with learning 'helplessness'. A better structure would have been to flash the words one at a time to both groups. That way the 'dummies' don't get hung up trying to solve the words above. THEN compare what happens when both groups are simultaneously presented with word three.

Ahh, but you ignore the idea that the "stricter" gun control most likely to pass does not make more rules, it simply requires that the existing rules be effective EVERYWHERE.
To reuse the auto analogy, the no background check at gun shows is like saying you don't need a license to drive if you start your drive on toll roads because they are "private" roads. This loophole exists no where because it's ridiculous, dangerous, and impossible to enforce.

To your second point, freedom would only be a good teacher if every crime committed was successfully prosecuted. Because most crimes go unsolved, freedom becomes a disinterested substitute teacher showing a 1960's film strip.

So what's the verdict? Just an unsolved mystery?

Fascinating. *Quality unsolved science mystery.