Gurven, Michael & Hillard Kaplan (2007). “Longevity Among Hunter-Gatherers: A Cross-Cultural Examination.” Population and Development Review, 33(2), 321–365
If you made it past age 5 as a hunter-gatherer you’d likely live to 50-60 years of age.
It’s also worth noting that, while this is (I think) likely the most cited paper on the topic, all the observed societies are from the 20th century. So we can’t necessarily extrapolate from that that hunter-gatherers 300,000 years ago fared the same.
I never imagined that, in my lifetime, Roe would be overturned or that entirely untrained federal thugs would be allowed to murder people on video with no repercussions at all… we live (as others often have) in strange times.
At the same time, I expect consumers to have a skosh of sense - I would never expect a third party to hold any sort of digital media remotely for me, in perpetuity, just because I gave them a few bucks. I know they should, based on allowing consumers to “buy” movies but, at the same time, I have a good enough understanding of the world to know that’s not likely.
You could sure make decent explosives with OTC fireworks though - in the early 90s we would buy hundreds of those whistling fireworks, hammer them, cut the bottoms off, and then fill various bottles with all the powder. We made a shockwave with one of our makeshift bombs and decided we should probably stop after that.
The old school whistling fireworks were often based on picrate chemistry. Picrates famously have the ability when burned to hover between normally deflagration and true detonation; the whistling is a side effect of this. One of the largest non-nuclear explosions in history (see below) was a picrate explosion. These aren’t used anymore for safety reasons; they don’t have a great stability profile and picrates are true high-explosives.
Over the years they have found alternatives for and phased out most high-explosives used in fireworks. Many high-explosives will just deflagrate/burn but can spontaneously detonate with considerable power if the conditions are right, which makes them dangerous.
Have advances in explosives, fuses and quality control made fireworks safer in the last 40 years?
Or perhaps the safety improvements are offset by sellers now offering bigger fireworks (either because those are now actually safe and both buyers and sellers are more comfortable with them, or just because of a general hedonic improvement).
Or perhaps they are safer for their users, but worse for starting fires or interfering with low-flying aircraft.
Either way I would be interested in reading more about this, something more nuanced than "fireworks dangerous". At the least it's a counterpoint to what happened with illegal drugs which seem to have become more dangerous as a result of regulation and bans.
I think the improvements in consumer fireworks safety has been incremental. The fuses are more reliable, they’ve reduced the use of mercury and other heavy metals in pyrotechnics, and they’ve moved toward more stable chemistries. That said, I think regulation is marginal at best so who knows what a random firework will actually do. There are also practical constraints on the kinds of chemistries that make good fireworks e.g. you don’t want potential high-explosives to be something you can buy over-the-counter by the kilo.
There is a parallel in military explosives research. For example, the US military is slowly moving toward “insensitive munitions” which use explosive chemistries that are nearly impossible to detonate accidentally due to fire or impact. This originated in nuclear weapons research but has spread to other weapon systems.
Fireworks are intrinsically dangerous in the hands of incompetence, ignorance, or stupidity. No amount of engineering can solve that problem unfortunately.
The Chinese government has been rounding up Uyghurs (pronounced like we-gir) to reeducate them. And the government really does not like it when people talk about it.
If you are pro gun, gun rights should be universal. Anyone should be able to buy a gun, because otherwise, "the big bad government" can take away your gun rights by labeling you as belonging to the group that is forbidden to buy guns.
If you are scared of getting shot by people that you think shouldn't own guns, then it means you haven't trained enough with your own gun.
(I personally don't believe this, but its a fun way to troll pro gun people)
If you said people who carry firearms when drunk, I might be inclined to agree.
But if you mean more generally people who drink, vs. people who smoke weed, I would expect to find the type of people who use illegal drugs (even weed) would be far more concerning on average.
I really doubt the nonviolent, victimless crime of smoking weed correlates much with violence.
Drugs that are a strong indictor of underlying psychological issues like Heroin, maybe. But for weed that's just far fetched, especially compared to alcohol.
I’ve never seen someone stoned outta their mind get into a fight with strangers, friends, or beat their spouse. I have seen drunk people do that though. I’ve been attacked by drunks myself. I’ve never been attacked by someone who is high as fuck. And I spent years smoking, and hanging out with a huge amount of folks who smoked weed.
The connotation that because marijuana is an “illegal drug” in some places means those people are more inclined to violence is borderline absurd. Violence is more likely to happen to producers, and sellers, because they have no access to the police. Producers and sellers are also categorically different than someone buying it to consume it.
Can someone who consumes weed be violent? Sure, but I would highly suspect it’s correlation and not causation.
It’s not at all. They’re wildly different substances. All the synthetic approximations of weed or imitations are categorically different substances. Comparing weed to “spice” is like comparing alcohol to Rohypnol. They’re materially different compounds and effects are dramatically different even if there’s a marginal similarity.
And FWIW- I used to know body builders who would take Rohypnol in extremely small doses because it’d make them feel drunk without the calories.
Which, tangentially, is insane considering how fucked up I was from (what I assume was) Rohypnol— as it was the most insanely drunk I’ve ever felt after consuming a single beer. I wasn’t the intended target, but all things considered I’m glad I was the one who had to tank it because the alternative would’ve been awful (one of the ladies in my group who got the beers).
What gives you this impression? Take a gander at all the superfund sites in the States - they’re almost all caused by 1) the government or 2) large corporations. And neither of those entities made any efforts to clean up those sites until forced to.
But they were forced to, and it cost them billions. Far more than what they saved. Megacorp is still paying for the superfund near me, despite it being deemed contained 45 years ago.
Mom and pop places that caused super funds never paid out a cent, because they were small operations that folded decades ago and never had billions anyway.
I’m just offended Helen isn’t depicted as having goose parts. After-all, Zeus was a goose when he seduced Leda, and Helen hatched from an egg. Some part of her must be goosey.
Edit: I meant swan. My recollection of mythology is rusty.
Most galvanizing statements have been pithy and comprehensible to 13 year olds. The general population is not doing a deep dive in to something like Thoreau’s “Resistance to Civil Government,” contemplating the proper role of government, and then getting fired up to act. We need CliffsNotes, slogans, and visible art like this.
It became necessary because, for years (decades), if you made a comment online that your personal experience informed you in such-and-such a way, the first comment would always be some moronic comment dismissing that personal experience because it is just one person’s experience. So, to avoid that idiocy, people started to preface their anecdotes by acknowledging that they know it is an anecdote. It sets the tone for the conversation.
Yeah but we can't let the insufferable dictate our way of speaking. In spoken language I hear it mainly by people that don't have a scientific background trying to sound more scientific.
If you made it past age 5 as a hunter-gatherer you’d likely live to 50-60 years of age.
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