People,

It costs $1.99 to download.

Can anyone confirm if the music was by Sigur Ros?

I guess the proper response is to just not give a f*** and enjoy white wine whenever you please.

I think Ethan's seen this trick before.

I hope he considered the battery. I'd hate to have to unwind all that hemp just to change a couple AA's.

This presents an interesting dilemma for, say, high school shop classes:
Replace expensive (~$600?) parts everytime some fool puts a finger/hotdog to the blade, or just let social darwinism run amok?

I guess the question is 'how much is a finger worth?'

Ted,
I'm afraid you misunderstood the statistic. You're absolutely right that more guns would mean more deaths. However, it's not about "more people die from swimming pools because there are more swimming pools out there." The point is how risky it is for a family to own either one based on how likely each is to be dangerous. On average, it's always 100 times safer to own a handgun.

Skipweasel, you're absolutely right about Levitt's broader point (and I stress the word broader, since it isn't mutually exclusive with the one I presented). I would caution you to evaluate utility carefully, however, since it is subjective. The reason gun nuts, as they have been labeled, so adamantly defend gun ownership is because they value it so highly. Hunting, self defense, the economy of the gun industry, and the enjoyment of guns in general are all utilities of gun ownership.

Privately held machines guns don't have as much utility for their risk as other, less dangerous guns (which I why I don't have a problem with the strict laws against them), but they do have some utility.

KC makes a fantastic point about relative dangers and how we perceive them.
Has anyone here read the book Freakonomics? One of the main themes of the book is that we perceive relative dangers without full perspective. The example from the book says that if you have a swimming pool and a handgun, the swimming pool is 100 times more likely to kill your child, yet society clearly doesn't prioritize according to the facts.

This, of course, isn't to say that society should ban swimming pools, or that handguns be available to every man, woman, and child. Rather, we need to understand the relative costs associated with everything and separate emotion from understanding.

Society's misunderstanding of the relative dangers of swimming pools and handguns is a testament to the fragility of freedom. The fact that accidents such as this one, however extremely graphic, seemingly unnecessary, and tragically preventable, automatically sway public opinion toward the banning of guns, and therefore the restriction of libertarian freedom, is the real tragedy.