Back in 1988 when Sony came out with their digital tape recorder that changed everything. Before that the big reel to reel audio tapes were expensive and only ran for about 15 minutes. The machine was expensive and fussy. The with R-DAT we could record for hours on a 6 dollar tape with no distortion ad then "look" at it and edit it on a computer screen. That was exciting. A good room, a good mic and an R-DAT deck and you had a studio. It was heaven.

Of course there is more crime where there are more people. Alabama fares better than the other southern states, by the way.

https://usafacts.org/articles/which-states-have-the-least-and-most-crime/

In regards to "woke media," crime is dramatically down across the country over the last 4 decades, but hair on fire coverage of crime in the media is dramatically up. So much for "woke media." The news is driven by profit, not ideology. Keeping us at each others throats and scared half to death drives engagement and that drives revenue. Don't fall for it.

I have fond memories of Alabama. I also have some fond memories of the Michigan football team's victory over the Tide this year.

I guess I am one of those who documents rather than creates.

You make an excellent point about the "general dissatisfaction with accumulation of stuff that societies have bought as the secret to happiness." So much of the stuff sold now is shoddy and throwaway.

I documented some Seersucker sedge in bloom today, so I'm happy. It comes and goes so quickly that I always miss it in bloom.

I had a good friend, now deceased, who built musical instruments with hand tools. He did beautiful work.

Where there are more people there will be more of everything. That doesn't mean there is more per capita.

Yes, it depends on the area and some areas are worse than others. It also depends upon your age, race and wealth.

"A new study published in Journal of the American Medical Association’s Surgery found that firearm deaths are more likely in small rural towns than in major urban cities, adding to research that contradicts common belief that Democratic blue areas have higher incidences of gun-related deaths than do Republican red districts."

https://www.forbes.com/sites/ariannajohnson/2023/04/28/red-states-have-higher-gun-death-rates-than-blue-states-heres-why/?sh=5e66e4b1f812

"Republicans claim Democrats can’t keep us safe – crime data disagrees"

"Studies show that states with higher murder rates are those that vote red even as conservatives stoke fear about crime."

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/30/murder-rates-democrat-republican-states-gun-control

Rural communities are experiencing high rates of gun violence

• From 2016 to 2020, the two U.S. counties to experience the most gun homicides per capita were rural:* (see Figure 1)

Phillips County, Arkansas: 55.45 age-adjusted homicides per 100,000 people

Lowndes County, Alabama: 48.36 age-adjusted homicides per 100,000 people

• From 2016 to 2020, 13 of the 20 U.S. counties with the most gun homicides per capita were rural: (see Figure 1)
80 percent of these 20 counties are in states that received an “F” grade for their weak gun laws, according to Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence’s 2021 annual state scorecard rankings.

• In 2020, the total gun death rate for rural communities—when age-adjusted per 100,000 people—was 40 percent higher than it was for large metropolitan areas.

Media attention on large cities misrepresents the reality of gun violence in the United States

• Despite negative media attention, many large cities are proportionately safer from gun violence than their rural counterparts:

Chicago is within Cook County, which ranks 79th for firearm homicide rates.

Philadelphia County ranks 38th for firearm homicide rates.

The five counties that encompass New York City rank between 360th and 521st for firearm homicide rates:
New York County (Manhattan) ranks 521st.
Kings County (Brooklyn) ranks 404th.
Bronx County (Bronx) ranks 360th.
Richmond County (Staten Island) ranks 488th.
Queens County (Queens) ranks 502nd.
Los Angeles County ranks 316th for firearm homicide rates.

Southern and Midwestern states with loose gun laws and large rural populations have contributed to a rise in gun homicides

• Southern and Midwestern states—such as Arizona, Arkansas, and Missouri—have drastically contributed to the more than 100-fold relative increase in gun homicide rates from 2014 to 2019:

Rural areas in Arizona and North Carolina have outpaced their large metropolitan counterparts; in fact, gun homicide rates in rural Arizona were 14 percent higher than they were in the state’s large metropolitan areas from 2016 to 2020.

Gun homicide rates in rural North Carolina were 76 percent higher than they were in large North Carolina metropolitan areas from 2016 to 2020.

Gun violence continues to damage the lives of citizens across the nation, but our political leaders have the ability to prevent the senseless losses of lives. Unfortunately, pro-gun political leaders have failed to enact commonsense gun violence prevention measures that can save lives and have actively made it easier for guns to fall into the wrong hands. It is easy for these same leaders and the media to criticize urban, Democrat-led counties, but the truth is that rural communities within several Republican-led states have experienced a level of gun homicides that matches or outpaces that of their urban neighbors. It is time for political leaders to show their constituents that their lives matter and push for commonsense gun laws.

https://www.americanprogress.org/article/gun-violence-in-rural-america/

Gun Violence Isn’t Just a City Problem

"Between 2011 and 2021, the overall firearm death rate in rural counties was nearly 40 percent higher than in urban counterparts. Politicians and news media coverage have fueled a widespread belief that gun violence primarily affects urban communities. But researchers are urging the public to understand that shootings are a universal issue — and that many rural Americans experience higher rates of gun death than their big-city counterparts."

https://www.thetrace.org/2023/05/gun-death-rate-america-urban-rural/

Granted, this topic is a political football.

This is from a pretty even-handed article. What was it Mark Twain said? "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."

"For the past two years, several think tanks on opposite sides of the political divide have waged war over whether 'red' or 'blue' America has a worse crime problem. Commentators on the left have pointed out that red states have higher homicide rates than blue states, while those on the right have noted that the relationship is more nuanced and can easily flip at a more local level: red-state crime problems are often concentrated in blue cities, and red counties have lower murder rates than blue counties."

"It seems to us that it would be far more productive to spend that time and effort debating the merits of actual policies, as opposed to measuring the effect of partisan leanings in the population. Democrats say that lax Republican gun laws drive up murder; Republicans say that Democratic mishandling of policing and prosecution is what really matters. Though our cross-sectional data are not suited to studying these hypotheses—for one thing, police staffing and gun ownership can change in response to crime, in addition to whatever effect they have on crime—there are large and important academic literatures on both topics."

"Let’s have those discussions, rather than interminably going back and forth over whose constituents are more violent. The U.S. certainly has more than enough murders to go around."

https://manhattan.institute/article/red-vs-blue-crime-debate-and-the-limits-of-empirical-social-science

Ha! Very good. You got me. I'd never seen the word and was too lazy to look it up.

Elitist? Wow. I will take that as a compliment.

That is pretty much how I see it, too.

I am not a "proponent of total gun abolishment." It is "abolition," not "abolishment," by the way, so long as we are correcting other people's usage. You are barking up the wrong tree there.

I don't think there are many calling for the abolition of gun ownership. There are many who make the slippery slope argument, saying that any regulations will inevitably lead to gun confiscation and that those advocating or regulations are secretly promoting a gun confiscation agenda.

"Who is taking a absolutist position on the Second Amendment?" you ask. Well, there is the National Association for Gun Rights, for example.

"Accepting NO COMPROMISE on the issue of gun control, NAGR works tirelessly to hold politicians accountable for their anti-gun views, and has made great strides in protecting and preserving the Second Amendment."

https://www.nationalgunrights.org/about-us/key-issues/

He is referring, no doubt, to the absolutist position many take on the Second Amendment.

Perhaps you could point out where in the Constitution it says that firearm ownership should not be regulated.

Sure, but we aren't allowed to shoot the deer and the other animals are easier to trap than shoot.

Killing coyotes makes the problem worse.

"Why would predation increase after predators are killed? When pack animals such as coyotes, dingoes and wolves are killed, the social structure of their packs breaks down. Female coyotes become more likely to breed and their pups are more likely to survive, so their numbers may actually increase. Packs generally protect territories, so breaking up a pack allows new animals to come in, raising the population. In addition, some new arrivals may opportunistically prey on livestock, which can increase predation rates."

Non-lethal methods of coyote control have proven to be more effective than lethal methods.

"Few Americans probably know that their tax dollars paid to kill 76,859 coyotes in 2016. The responsible agency was Wildlife Services (WS), part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Its mission is to 'resolve wildlife conflicts to allow people and wildlife to coexist.'"

"It is understandable for struggling ranchers to blame coyotes for economic losses, since kills leave tangible signs and killing predators seems like a logical solution. However, a widely cited 2006 study called coyotes scapegoats for factors that were more directly related to the decline of sheep ranching in the United States."

"The author, Dr. Kim Murray Berger, who was then a research biologist with the Wildlife Conservation Society, built and tested a series of statistical models to explain the declining number of sheep being bred in the United States. She found that variables including the price of hay, wage rates and the price of lamb explained most of the decline, and that the amount of money spent on predator control had little effect. Other research indicates that even if predation is one factor in ranchers’ economic losses, lethal control is not the best way to reduce it."

https://theconversation.com/why-killing-coyotes-doesnt-make-livestock-safer-75684

Well, that is true of nuclear weapons, poison gas, flame throwers, rocket launchers, etc., as well. Of course people kill people. No one says otherwise. Automobiles don't kill and maim people, people maim and kill people. Should we toss out all of the laws and regulations governing the use of automobiles? Airplanes are inanimate objects with no mind of their own. I guess we don't need any safety regulations or air traffic control.

I think you are correct. The percentage of people owning guns in the US has stayed remarkably stable over a long period of time. At the same time, the number of guns per capita has increased, and the number of high capacity high velocity weapons on the street has increased. Everyone here on the farms has rifles and shotguns. If only we could thin the deer herd, but that is a topic for another day. Nuisance critters we mostly trap rather than shoot. I question whether or not people who say they need rifles or varmint control actually are farmers. Maybe ranchers?

That is a myth. Rural areas often have higher crime rates than urban areas, and among urban areas New York is comparatively safe. The endless fear mongering about crime is good for TV ratings and for the campaigns of dishonest politicians, but it does the public a real disservice.

So, yes, the fear mongering about crime, and about cities, is driven by politics and also by commercial interests. It is certainly not "factual."

Hard work and happy accidents: why do so many of us prefer ‘difficult’ analogue technology?

https://theconversation.com/hard-work-and-happy-accidents-why-do-so-many-of-us-prefer-difficult-analogue-technology-227472

One photographer they interviewed on the topic of working with film:

"I like the pace of it, it really slows you down. Your options to take pictures are really limited – you’ve only got two-to-six shots, and the film and processing are expensive. It’s also very labor-intensive getting that shot from inside the camera to print, so you’re really conscious of getting it right. If you make a mistake at the beginning, you can invest a few days and it’s still going to be a rubbish shot. You’re not going to fire off 1,000 pictures like digital, and that really appeals to me."

Whether or not you use film is there value in slowing down and welcoming "happy accidents?"