Russian soldiers sleeping with puppy, Prague, Georgy Lipskerov 1945.
Hrm… these areinteresting. Although the whole “a village of 100 people” seems so odd I’m just sitting here thinking “yeah, that’s how percentages work?”
-Joe
A breakdown of what the average American household buys, based on government data (PDF) for December, 2011.
We didn’t include everything, but we included the biggies, as well as some smaller categories that caught our eye.
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics
Credit: Lam Thuy Vo / Planet Money
Dear average Americans, please spend more on books, magazines, and newspapers and less on alcohol. Your friend, Newsweek.
Patsy Takemoto Mink (December 6, 1927- September 28, 2002)She was the first female Asian American elected to Congress in 1964 as a representative for Hawaii. She was also the first Asian American to seek the Democratic Party Presidential nomination in 1972.
That awkward moment when you are looking at your own work and you have no idea how you got the answer
Death Penalty
“It just seemed inconceivable to me, though I was pretty young at the time, that in this society that I had been trained to believe was the most effective and efficient of all societies, that the only we could deal with violent crime…is to governmentally sanction the taking of another person’s life,” recounts George Moscone, one of San Francisco’s most legendary mayors. Like so many others, he expresses his disbelief that his democratic and just nation utilizes such a draconian and barbaric method of dealing with crime. Without question, the death penalty is a morally repugnant method of disguising state-sanctioned murders as just killings.
Proponents of the death penalty presume that it deters others from committing heinous crimes despite the overwhelming empirical evidence to contradict such claims. In 2007, the murder rates in states practicing the death penalty exceeded those in states that eliminated it by 42%. In addition, some experts express concerns that the death penalty leads to higher rate of murders due to the “brutalization hypothesis” (“Opposing Views”), which suggests that capital punishment encourages homicide by seeming to legitimize killing. Even if this hypothesis is untrue, the data clearly proves that capital punishment doesn’t deter criminals from committing violent crimes.
Instead, continuing the death penalty increases the risk of pushing the innocent. According to the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC), 140 people in 26 states have been released from death row with evidence of their innocence since 1973. New evidence discovered suggests that some states have executed several innocent men. Rather than protecting our society, the death penalty continues to threaten the lives of innocent people.
Furthermore, the death penalty has been administered disproportionately against the minorities. In 1995, a Supreme Court Justice declared, “Even under the most sophisticated death penalty statues, race continues to play a major role in determining who shall live and who shall die,” (Amnesty International). A recent study shows that the odds of receiving a death sentence is four times higher if the defendant is black (Racial Prejudices). While blacks make up 12% of the population, they account for 40% of death-row inmates (Amnesty International). Unless our society can devise a plan of convicting the right criminal to receive the ultimate penalty, the death penalty will continue to claim the lives of many minorities.
Incredibly, our society “pays” for their crimes in more ways than one. According to a recent finding, “The California death penalty system costs taxpayers $114 million annually beyond the costs of keeping convicts locked up for life. Tax payers have paid more than $250 million for each of the state’s executions” (DPIC). Imagine investing this money into education! How about cancer research? Our society is forced to pay for the policy that delivers not the results it promises but the harms it professes to avert!
Thus, simply locking criminals up is the best choice, for the sake of fairness, justice, and costs. In every sense, the death penalty is a policy that is financially unwise as well as vindictive.
