TLDR: Public opinion polling has the number of households with guns in America as about 35-45%, depending on the poll. The number may be closer to 60% when this is cleverly investigated.
Turns out people lie on this issue, a lot. They asked people in a poll who said they don't own guns questions that are very highly correlated with gun ownership. The non-savvy respondents in the survey who said yes on all the highly correlated questions almost certainly, statistically speaking, own guns even though they said no in the survey. When you include those people as gun owners, the rate can go as high as 60% of homes.
.....a Rutgers University study published last month in Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology indicates that the number of gun owners may be substantially undercounted. According to Rutgers researcher Allison Bond, one reason is because “some individuals are falsely denying firearm ownership, resulting in research not accurately capturing the experiences of all firearm owners in the U.S.” He added, “The implications of false denials of firearms ownership are substantial.” Bond concluded, “It may be that a percentage of firearm owners are concerned that their information will be leaked and the government will take their firearms or that researchers who are from universities that are typically seen as liberal and anti-firearm access will paint firearm owners in a bad light.”
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00127-023-02515-y
According to J.D. Tuccille (a libertarian stoner from Reason Magazine): “...the problem of dishonesty among survey respondents as pos(es) a danger to those surveyed since they don’t receive proper firearm safety information [say academics]. But [the reasearchers'] deeper concern is with the validity of research into firearms culture and policy in a country where experts don’t have anywhere near as good a handle on the prevalence of gun ownership as they had believed. …
Believe it or not, people are reluctant to tell total strangers about their potentially controversial activities....but such evasion is an inevitable consequence of decades of fiery debate and punitive gun policies.”
video: https://patriotpost.us/alexander/99460?mailing_id=7694
I get that some people want privacy. But if you won the mega billion ultra powerball multistate lottery and took the one time payout of 800 million (which happens every few years), human nature and history tells us that one of these jokers, who are ordinary people, are going to make themselves famous with odd charity donations or buying stupid things on a whim that make the news.
I don't read about this sort of thing happening. I suppose it's happening, but I don't see it anywhere. Is the lottery at the highest levels a scam, that is to say, no real human being is getting the cash? I'd like to be shown otherwise. Thoughts?
"The trick is to harvest the organs before the person’s heart slows so much that the organs begin shutting down and are unusable. If the patient dies quickly—doctors say within 20 minutes—the organs are still good and can usually be transplanted. This year, doctors in Denver managed to do just that, recovering organs from a patient who wasn’t brain dead but whose family decided to unplug a ventilator…. More than 1,300 people in Colorado are awaiting transplants—a demand critical enough that patients, surgeons, and medical ethicists are beginning to question the brain-death criterion and wonder whether something more liberal may be appropriate. But those doing the diagnoses say redefining the point at which death occurs is a slippery ethical issue—one that may have a reverse effect on organ donations because of fears that the practice is predatory."
https://www.crisismagazine.com/vault/how-science-is-redefining-death
TLDR: the multicausal situation causing excess deaths is also causing “excess” health care costs. I’m convinced that my job’s health care costs are one anecdote of this trend.
I work in finance, and part of that job is doing the budgeting and expense/revenue tracking for a mid-sized employer. Now, this is just one data point, but when people say the vaxxed are ill and dying off, I would proffer my experience on top of the other data. I won’t give specifics, naturally, but here’s a short summary.
My employer is such that we are self-insured. That is to say our revenues cover the health care costs of the employees, with the employees kicking in a bit. We are fairly generous with the health care benefit plans, with low co-pays. Starting in 2022 and accelerating in 2023, we are experiencing a huge increase in the actual expenses for our benefit costs. We have less than 1,000 employees, most of whom are young to late middle age at most. Only a few Boomer oldsters in corner offices.
Given that we have a younger working population, we usually have 1-2% of our employees/families be high casualty claimants (cancer, premature babies, etc.). In the last two years, that’s jumped to about 5%. That may not sound like much, but in hypothetical numbers we’ve gone from 1-2 cancer cases to 3-4 and with some other serious issues, and that’s expensive. Again, in hypothetical but comparable numbers, if our budget was $1,000 year , we are at $1,200 per year. If it’s an outlier, then it’s gone on for 1-1/2 years, which makes it not an outlier anymore, but a trend.
I told the boss to budget 5% for medical inflation for 2023, and that still wasn’t enough. I new it at the time, but that was the best I could get out of the corner office Boomer. Said Boomer, triple vaxxed himself, thought that the pandemic is over and costs will go back to normal. Side note, working for boomers is both good and bad. They are way less backstabby and will look after those that report to them, but well, new ideas are sometimes difficult to convince them of.
Medical inflation is always higher than core inflation, if you watch this chart in the future, you’re going to find an increased divergence.
