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Wow, that's crazy. Alabama you say? Wow, that's crazy. I wonder how many are POC.
Not surprising that they are also some of the most uneducated, the populations our prison industrial complex preys on the most.
Alabama is still the home of a lot of US operations like NASA.
States like Ohio and West Virginia are worse
A significant part of NASA may be in Alabama, but If bet that's not where most of those educated engineers are coming from.
Correct me if I'm wrong as I'm an Australian but isnt Alabama the only state that doesnt have a NHL, NFL, NBA or MLB franchise?
(Contiguous states that is, Alaska and Hawaii dont count.)
There are 24 (out of 50 total) us states with no big four teams.
https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/states-without-professional-sports-teams.html
So I was REALLY wrong. Lol
I mean not as much anymore since the end of the shuttle program. Huntsville is where a lot of vehicle production but a lot of that is private companies like ULA, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, etc. with govt contracts and subsidies. There’s only about 7k direct nasa employees at Marshall.
Because that makes members of Congress more likely to sign off on spending bills, not because Alabama is a great place for it.
Worse.....for having NASA? I'm quite confused.
Hey, we have NASA in Cleveland too (GRC)! but, I agree, we also largely suck. There are also some very good people there too (Alabama). It’s all a bad system.
Maybe it is isolated to a particular region but last time I checked there were a lit of smart people in Alabama. Everyone from farmers to aerospace engineers are really to innovate.
Alabama is the 49th dumbest state in the country.
If it weren't for Huntsville, Alabama would be a land of wild ape men
Oh, of course we have a lot of smart people in all of our states. But, unfortunately, Alabama has been consistently at the bottom overall in education.
There are way more states without any death row inmates.
Source: the link you posted
Fair enough. The data is presented very weirdly. I changed the post
Yeah the list on the wiki doesn't make the data very clear. Oregon and Wyoming are the only states where there's still a death penalty AND have 0 death row inmates. Took me a few minutes to realize as well.
The death penalty needs to end in America. Especially with people like Trump at the helm.
I remember when I was younger, I didn't know if I agreed or disagreed with the death penalty.
My young brain was thinking "Well, if this guy killed someone, why SHOULDN'T he die?"
But as I got older I realized that the justice system is nonexistant. It's a myth. It doesn't exist. We don't have a justice system. We have a punishment system. And it doesn't care who gets punished, just as long as some politician can say he killed X amount of "criminals".
But our legal system is so dysfunctional that we hardly ever get a "not guilty" plea. They'll convince innocent people that they're about to roll the dice. Plea not guilty, and lose? You're looking at 60 years. But......plea no contest in a plea deal? You're looking at 2-5 years. Most people take the deal, even if they've done nothing wrong.
So why would I trust THAT system to make a permanent decision to KILL them?
Trump was already wrong about the central park 5. But if we'd have killed them back in the 80s when it happened, you can't go back and undo it. They served time for something they didn't do, and are the perfect example of what I'm talking about. We can't give them back the time they spent wrongfully convicted, but at least they're not dead.
Not that I'm defending the system.
Any state that needs to be able to kill its own citizens to survive should not survive. Any state that doesn't need to but wants to kill its own citizens should be destroyed.
Unfortunately, Captain Dipshit has already mandated the death penalty for anyone who kills a cop, and he's been super keen in recent history on applying it to drug dealers.
The shithole of the shithole.
We used covid money to build a new private prison named after our governor!
inmates per 10M inhabitants
Why per 10 million?
Because it makes the numerator whole numbers for all data for easy comparisons by human minds. Comparing 300 to 5 is easier for people than comparing 30 to 0.5. It's the same reason machinists use inches per minute over inches per second. It's so values are between 1 and 600 and not between 0.0176 and 10. It's easier to reason about whole numbers than decimals.
I guess this is a US cultural thing. I grew up in a metric country and decimals are much easier for me to compare than fractions.
Who said anything about fractions? Whole numbers are easier than decimals and fractions.
And no, this isn't just a US thing. I'm certain your country uses things like "parts per million".
In metric countries, parts-per notation is common but it’s normally per million, billion, trillion, etc. Parts per 10 million is not common. Using an uncommon parts-per notation makes it difficult to compare between countries for instance as it’s unlikely that other countries are reporting in parts per 10 million.
The imperial measurement system uses fractions, 3/4 inch, etc. The metric system uses decimals, 19mm, etc.
So to represent this data in a metric country you would use per million inhabitants and use 2 significant figures. Decimals are easy for people who grew up in metric countries to understand.
I moved to Canada which used a lot of imperial measurements for building materials and tools (it’s a weird mix). I find the imperial system confusing with its use of fractions but I know lots of people that grew up with this system prefer it.
That’s why I think this globally uncommon per 10 million inhabitants might feel normal for Americans.
It's not about being normal. This data is for scientists. The denomination was a deliberate choice given the various sizes of the data. It might be as low as single digits in some cases.
We use decimals all the time. We're not dumb. But when making direct comparisons of values, it's a simple fact that comparing 5 to 20 is easier than comparing 0.05 to 0.2. This is a scientific fact. It's easier for your brain to parse. You can't deny that. Go ask a psychologist. In addition, the data is cleaner. It's easier to print "5" than "0.05", and then you mention the denominator under the graph or table of data.
Every engineer and scientist in the US uses metric, and it doesn't matter what the average person uses. Proper home cooks find bread recipes with metric weights for ingredients, for example. Woodworkers use feet and inches. People who use the Imperial system are just people using what they know. It's entirely moot to this conversation. I don't know why you keep bringing up fractions and the Imperial system as if that adds any weight to your argument about the actual topic at hand. The topic being scientists using a deliberate unit of measure to make it easy to print values and compare them at a glance.
We’re not dumb
I'm not suggesting this at all. I'm arguing that using "parts per 10 million" makes more sense to an American audience because fractions are more common in America. So using non common denominators is easier for an American audience. Whereas in metric countries, using standard denominators like thousand, million, billion, etc with decimals and significant figures is easier to interpret.
it’s a simple fact that comparing 5 to 20 is easier than comparing 0.05 to 0.2.
Sure, but you're ignoring the additional cognitive load of using non common denominators. And losing the ability to easily compare these metrics with others.
Every engineer and scientist in the US uses metric
Imperial measurements are commonly used in construction & civil engineering in the US.
I mean, you can choose any denominator, as long as you're using the same one to compare statistics
Sure but using a non standard denominator makes off more difficult to compare to other metrics.
Considering this is US, at least they're not using football fields
x inmates per football stadium, where 1 football stadium equals 43,583 persons.
Sorry, what is the "standard denominator" for comparing executions?
Powers of a thousand; per thousand, per million, per billion, etc
Right? Alabama doesn’t even have 10 million people.
100k seems ubiquitous, but I guess they use 1M for state numbers. 10M truly is silly. My only guess is that most other states are around <10/10M and they wanted something to compare that even a politician could understand.
Fair enough, thought of converting it to 100k but was too lazy lol
Clearly a lawless hellhole. Alabama should be seized and cleaned up.
Edit: It may be unclear, but this is a riff on poor quality studies that indicate increased lawlessness among certain populations.
But also, Alabama sucks.
Once the appeals are exhausted, tap, tap. Problem solved. Cheaply. No more of our money spent to house and care for these outcast.
You specify "cheaply". Because you KNOW in reality, it costs more to execute a prisoner than to house and care for them. So implied by this is the existence of a fucking MAGIC WAND so that you can live in the world that best fits your ideological views. I hope you will share your fucking MAGIC WAND when you have finished reshaping society.
$4.00 now vs $40,000+ per year. Damn! Math is hard.
Bad faith reply that continues to ignore the reality that you know exists, because reality hurts your feelings.
Nah, they just hate black and/or poor people.
this post was submitted on 08 Mar 2025
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