Politics

At the risk of joining the echo chamber, I want to talk for a moment about gun violence. But I don’t want to talk about criminal gun violence. Start here. Click through that graph. See the red dots? Those are suicides. Two-thirds of the 33,000 gun deaths annually in America are suicides. That’s more than 20,000 people killing themselves annually. This is why I want to talk about gun control. I believe it would also reduce gun-related homicides and accidental gun deaths, a result that would also be amazing. But they’re much harder to argue about because we don’t have enough data and there are too many guns in circulation and blah blah blah blah. ...

Today I found out that a good friend of mine quit Facebook. I was astounded – he had just been filled with such righteous indignation about the election, and big ideas about the change that we needed to bring about. How could he bring about that change if he removed the best tool for talking to people? But the more we talked, the more convinced I was that he had it right. ...

Trump gave a surprisingly presidential victory speech: I mean, she fought very hard. Hillary has worked very long and very hard over a long period of time, and we owe her a major debt of gratitude for her service to our country. I mean that very sincerely. Now it is time for America to bind the wounds of division, have to get together. To all Republicans and Democrats and independents across this nation, I say it is time for us to come together as one united people. ...

I’ve heard a lot of chatter about SOPA (the Stop Online Privacy Act), which is currently going through congress. However, today I finally decided to look into it. And I definitely didn’t like what I found. Here’s a video summing up the problems (the video is for the Protect IP act, which was introduced earlier this year, but most of the same problems apply to both bills). (Found via Matt Cutt’s Blog ...