impartialobserver

This thread needs a poster that used the avatar, Spartan, on liberalforum.org. Did not always agree with his conservative politics but he could lay out gun laws and research like no other.

You always contend that it takes the toughest of the tough to live in FL. You could say the same about other places which have inhospitable climates such as North Dakota/Eastern Montana (cold), Southern NV/Southern Cal/Southern AZ (intense heat) or parts of NV/ID/WY (isolation). Where I spent summers growing up; Shoup, Idaho.. is very remote. That kind of isolation takes a unique individual. Miles of dirt road with no one there. At the end of the dirt road.. civilization ends. If you venture north or south from this vantage point.. you might not see a single human being for 200+ miles. Keep in mind that this area is mostly roadless.

Someone in our office once said.. once you make it ok for one then comes the flood. Well, then explain why there is not a single trans person in the office 5 years later. Not a single one has interviewed and we have hired 20 individuals and done 100+ interviews

Its just the limits of statistics and modeling. If you use a data point that is subjective and you extrapolate.. the bias gets larger. I love data, statistics, etc.. I do it for a living. But it frequently leaves a bit to be desired. The real oddball one is that they claim that folks in a neighborhood where gun ownership is likely but not explicitly shown/proven save lives simply because the criminal somehow discerns that the homeowner owns a gun AND is willing to use it and therefore moves on to the next home.

this is not like measuring how much a player scores in an NBA/NHL season. They use documented instances where the homeowner/vehicle owner/civilian files a police report or statement and they claim that the criminal stopped what they were doing because they brandished their weapon. There is no way to know for absolute sure that the only reason that they stopped was this. It is logical that they did but there are always exceptions. From there, they extrapolate to the larger population with gun rate ownership, overall criminal activity, population, income, and housing differences factored in.

Defensive lives saved is an interesting metric. It is an estimate and it has some large margins of error. Why? Simple... It is really hard to measure accurately. It is useful in a debate but should not be the lead metric/data point if you truly debating.

I have never been to Toronto but would like to some day. I am not one of those who think that all bigger cities are S@@@holes. Went to NYC in August 2022 and found it to be ok. Hoping to visit Edmonton in Sept 2024 to see Metallica.

I have zero interest in ever visiting or living in Florida. Why? Too humid, too hot, and too many bugs. After having lived in the high desert (southern Idaho and Northern Nevada) for 46 years.. I have become a bit too used to the dry heat, lack of bugs, and mild weather. Second, I like mountains. I can be 9,000 feet elevation in 30 minutes from my house. Almost endless trails in Northern NV/Northern Cal and plenty of them will be empty on a given day.

To myself... the most alarming aspect of WV is the the younger population leaves and almost never comes back. In the West.. the kids leave small town Nevada, Idaho, etc but after awhile they come back once they have something built up. In WV.. they leave and stay away. Even when their cost of living would decrease substantially.. they still opt to not be in WV. At last count.. only 4% of the 16-24 age bracket since 1992 comes back. You get this info from the Drivers License surrender database.

Reading the OP makes me have even less interest in ever visiting FL and the surrounding area.

cost of living being higher because of unions is very hard to prove.

Well, they rarely move from NY to ID.. they come from So Cal, Phoenix, or Portland OR. My hometown, Boise, had an MSA population of 115K in 1985 and is coming close to 800K. It is not all people being born.

answer is simple.. They think that if john doe is getting a job, buying a house, etc.. then that tells them that they could do so as well. John Doe must know something so why should they be left out. I agree with the sentiment of wanting to live in a lightly populated place (but not too sparsely populated) place. Not having traffic, sirens, crime, etc. is nice. Growing up in Boise, the sentiment was that you needed to move to Portland or Seattle after high school. Quite a few did so and have led fine lives but I went the other route, Reno.

Idaho in the early 80's was no mans land and much like how you describe West Virginia. Well, mid-80's come along and the game changed. HP put its headquarters in West Boise, CA retirees could move somewhere and not pay CA state income tax, and the population growth began. Why do you think that even with dirt cheap housing that folks from high cost states such as PA, NY, MD, CT, and MA do not move there? They came to Idaho which is even more remote than WV

When there was kneeling in the NFL, the conservatives were up in arms. They were boycotting the NFL and as a result... the NFL was going to die and cease operations. Well.. has the NFL died? No. Have ratings recovered? Yes. In stadium attendance has not but that is due to exorbitant prices. Have attended two NFL games and only did so because someone sold them on Craigslist for bargain basement prices ($40 and $55 respectively). I am a die hard sports fan but there is a zero percent chance that I am paying $300 to go to an NFL game. The point is that while In-Bev is hurting now.. people have short memories and this will blow over.

Then we are starting to argue about degrees of influence. Person X says that we can attribute 20% of the result to President, Person Y says that it is more like 45.4456%, and so on. When they are forced to explain why they chose 45. 4456% and not 44.4457%... the explanation is nothing but biased opinion. The bias coming from their information being 100% based on interpretation of secondary events. Its like how in serious historical research.. it is better to have primary sources than secondary sources. To say that Biden influenced the interest rate hikes is nothing but guessing on our part.

all we can do is go by what they say in public. Its my assumption that you are not privy to behind closed doors meetings and other stuff that give us more insight. I know that I am not. This kind of conspiratorial thinking does not work for me because there is no way to definitively prove/disprove it.

however, the Federal reserve operates independent of the President on a day to day basis. Yes, they appoint the chairman if that time comes but the decisions of the Fed are not controlled by the President.

possibly. It could also be more of an example of random correlation than actual causality. Just because two things happen at the same time.. does not mean that one caused the other.

I know intimately how the CPI is formulated. I do not need links/articles. If we were in a room together.. I could spell out every detail. It is not as easy as you think it is. The point is that Biden or any president has little to no control over the vast majority of the elements in the CPI. I am somewhat new here but have held the position that in general (covid stimulus being rare and unprecedented).. a president does not control inflation or the economy. Yes, they impact it... but not control it

When I made my first trip to CA in 2007.. everyone told me that if I did one thing.. I had to go to In-n-out. So we went to one in Salinas, CA. It was good but nothing amazing. The fries are inedible if you do not consumer them almost immediately. There is one about 2 miles from my house in Sparks, NV. It has a line around the block every day it is open. Honestly.. it is not all that different from what you find at McD's or Burger King.

It is comical that someone thinks that a President has complete control over this. The Covid stimulus payments definitely led to some inflation.. how much EXACTLY.. all we can do is approximate. As for now.. it is unlikely that Biden's current actions are doing much to change this number.

Do you have any actual cold hard FINANCIAL data that shows that they have defunded their police? Links to articles are not sufficient. Can you supply raw financial reports that show less money being allocated?

If my daughter was raped.. like you my first thought would be finding the guy who did this. Second, would be tending to her emotional and physical needs as much as I can. Lastly, I would trust that she can make the decision to have an abortion or not.

Just because I struggled does not mean that I did not graduate.... swing and a miss for you. The foreigners in my case were more than up for the task. And they paid 3.5 times more than the instate student and got the same services. Seems like University of Nevada did pretty well. They got high achieving students (masters or phd in economics is not easy) and much needed revenues.