Actually guns have many uses, just like claw hammers, their primary military use is to kill people.
But they have many uses and are not necessarily manufactured by people looking to get other people shot.
They are certainly not "necessary for survival" in MOST of the eastern U.S.
They are however still pretty important in other places. One job application for Alaska N.W. area for someone to work with park rangers required the ability on the job posting to be able to use a gun to defend against wild animals, think grisly or moose. These things can and will kill you if you stumble into them on a bad day, are untrained, their territorial etc... And sometimes nuisance animals need to be killed.
This is not a "law enforcement position', just a legitimate U.S. gov employee job working with park rangers and folks in the private sector, think perhaps loggers, or tourism.
Stop going after everyones guns, and go after the people who are afraid, help educate them and stop living in fear and illogic.
I agree, it seems like the Kim line is a line of cosmetic figure heads and hold no real power except in swaying public opinion (perhaps on both sides) and it might just be the opinions of the rest of the world they are trying to sway. Also if they are selectively groomed for the roll they will be more then happy to do as they are tolled and not risk their position or the positions of their relatives and friends.
Outsmarting the real dictators and swaying local and world opinions in the right direction while minimizing casualties would be a hard feat indeed.
Citizens of this country had a right to perform music in private for their friends regardless of who owned the copyright. Private does matter.
The problem is the internet is not really private anymore. And people are using it like a bullhorn in public. This is the root of the issue. It's going to be super bad when it is turned into "public utilities" but the backbones and original phone companies are classified as such anyway.
So all that shit is "public". And not in private. Question is, with the internet, in a technical sense can you have private communication in a public space? How does that qualify legally... its a gray area.
P.S. The law is nothing but a social construct, it really matters not what it says, most people disobey "evil" laws. The world is not full of completely lawful people. If it was there should technically be no social disorder.
But the law is no more perfect then the people that create, administer and deliver it.
This is why "privacy" is important in the USA, and why it mattered so much to our founding fathers. Because what happened in private was less governed by the law then what happened in public. Not all aspects of commerce, our lives, etc need to be monitored and scrutinized by the whole institution of the United States.
Consequently there are many different categories of "law" from civil, to criminal, to common law to all kinds of B.S. international law.
The script kiddy information wants to be free internet was just fine types are just responding to this in a knee jerk way, rather then acknowledging that the internet is not "theirs" and that if they want their information to be free they will need to build and protect their own. And most likely govern it themselves with some kind of rules anyway. Law.
Back in the day men use to resolve these problems on their own. Why the fuck is this even neccissary, and at the very worst "harm caused by laser" in court is perfectly well covered by a gazillion pre-existing assault laws. Should be, "assault with any fucking bloody object". Make it a fucking law and stop tacking bullshit on or putting your grubby little regulatory hands into the marketplaces of this country over stupid shit.
To all above, All very good points. Definitely the key is to be boring enough to not get that three billion dollar treatment. Whether your on, off, halfway on-off the grid. I'm totally agreed there. If I went missing tomorrow, no one would care except my immediate family and they probably wouldn't even be able to get a chopper to fly around looking for me if they couldn't even give a location were I said I would be.
The point I was trying to make, in a technical sense, someone can find you if they really want to and have enough resources, those cases are pretty rare;p
Drones reach secure compounds in Afghanistan, spies posing as foreign aid reach secure compounds in Pakistan to track people by DNA. To the west, those are pretty inaccessible and "off the grid locations".
That leaves some mountain caves in North Korea or deep in Papua New Guinea Jungle. Or the heart of the Sahara. Or Antarctica or some other equally inhospitable places.
And believe it or not satellites will still find you. HUMANs are easy to find. Humans are also everywhere. And if you don't want to be burned at the stake as a heretic in a primitive culture you have to visit town once in awhile. We don't have the natural instinct, resistance to nature, endurance, camouflage and psychology to live our lives 24/7 in ghillie suites in the brush.
Your best bet is to just not be any different then anyone else all over the grid. Your better off having all the things to track and occasionally posting something on facebook and looking perfectly normal. Blending into plain site.
There are exceptions to the rules. But hey even they are "known". A gentleman lived till his late 80's in a cave in the Rocky Mountains. This good man moved there after coming back from world war two, I can't remember his name off the top of his head, but he was well known even though he subsisted on goats milk, wine from mountain grapes, and cheese. He survived on his own there until the millennium. But he was friendly enough to talk to journalists or other curious folk and was never kicked from his squat. Our government sure as hell knew who he was, probably had his records from his service in a cave their own somewhere.
The question is, what do most of us have to hide? Nothing. Will some of us be persecuted, maybe, or all this tracking might bring hidden demographics to the publics or power elites knowledge, enough so that they won't feel like changing what was now private and making public spaces more accommodating to different mimetic sub-cliques.
The problem is, under a more or less Marxist system, once people realize they will never earn more then X amount the bureaucratic class (which is usually the owning class at that point) is unable to find workers to fulfill the bare minimum needed roles to keep everyone at the same level as they were per-socialist reform. So you have a collapse.
This sorta happened in the U.S.S.R. when people realized that working in the ball bearing factories was no better then handing out bread on bread lines. So then they had to force people to build ball bearings, which caused dissent. I wasn't around for it, I'm just guessing on complete lay mans knowledge.
If you had plenty of people who did actually want to work though (lets say make ball bearings) and some other way of rewarding these people rather then their stipend, you would get around the very same issue I think were talking about.
And I am not opposed to a large portion of the population completely free to do as they wish, as long as we find a fair way to keep the factories, robots, machines, power, water, food, going.
Volunteer work for some kind of "educational credit", or "vacation bonus" would be an option.
But so far, pretty much even communist, socialist economies run on some form of currency.
Your right. I propose a slightly different approach, there has to be a way to reward hardworking individuals who dedicate their lives to improving themselves or something that will help us all improve humanity.
Like I dunno, captaincy on the enterprise or whatever, similar things to that, being put in charge of Large Hadron Collider level projects. I guess the idea I have is a mix of socialism, capitalism, and meritocracy, with limits on each facet.
Honestly I have not fleshed the idea out fully in my head though.
Your idealistic view is flawed. This does not eliminate the black market and just further divides the gulf.
Soon you will be denied access to this system if you are not a "qualified citizen".
It will be criminal to use cash, or barter.
People are having issues with morality now... but wait till the government gets blamed for endorsing the purchase of sex toys.
And while, we are all beholden to this society, the minute you take off the pressure for people to work you will see massive amounts of unemployment over what we have now. It's bad and the disproportionate spread of wealth in this country is horrific, but it won't get any better under the system you are proposing, it will just be 1% rich and 99% people on welfare at the mercy of whatever country wide fiscal prison system that develops.
I speak in laymans terms and I am not criticizing your ideology, just trying to point out that it could go horribly wrong and is counter to the ideals of our culture.
People have the right to work for a living at the very leas, and we should limit the amount of property, power, money, and influence individuals or corporations can hold so that all the bread factories are divided up more evenly then rather under 3 or 4 large state owned corporations.
Another issue is food production, and companies like Monsanto which need to be broken down into smaller corporations and have their intellectual property liquidated into the public domain. And most likely their CEO's, or large investors, shareholders put behind bars.
"The exceptional claim is that the rock is a meteor" - I hear you there, that is maybe an exceptional claim, as a lay man I can not really comment there. But it certainly looks like there is good argument for it being a meteorite, and evidence is given in the paper linked to by the article.
But thanks for taking the time to further explain that the scientific community does not believe it is a meteorite. I would like to see more solid proof though. That would require the samples going to other labs and having analysis done, and a different theory postulated.
Those indeed are pretty extraordinary claims, thanks for pointing them out.
I wouldn't take anything he said at face value without scrutiny. The discussion section of http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1303/1303.1845.pdf pretty much states the arguments for the samples being meteorites.
There's also quite a few other names on the paper as well. Its not proof, but evidence, maybe.
Who knows, we are definitely still waiting for that extraordinary evidence. In my opinion it'll come from us going to space, digging around on asteroids, comets, and planets, and finding things like this to back it up. Or sending a probe to Europa and taking a picture of a geothermal vent crawling with life.
It stands to reason if fossils survived in meteorites on earth, there might be some in craters on the moon as well, microscopic fossils anyway.
The journals, news articles are not at least claiming this is the extraordinary proof to say, yeah for sure.
Really nice link, its almost enough to make the argument that nature is going to do it for us eventually anyway though. Might as well harness it and put it to good use.
Agreed but our government agencies of all caliber, law enforcing or otherwise have such a bad history with coming clean and being honest and open.
I mean "It's the American way" to lie and cheat your way to the top of the pile is a coined phrase regarding our politicians.
Why blame people for the nutty shit they do in response to the absolute insanity of our societies leadership. I know I know, two wrongs don't make a right. Nor are they an accurate means of finding the "truth".
But it doesn't matter if there's aliens on the moon or not. No one has faith or trusts anything anymore. And as far as housing and Census records, well, thats just a price we pay for living socially.
In a purely logical sense, believing anything you hear or see at school, on T.V. or from a politician in this country has been a bad idea (TM) for a long time, including radio, hell H.G. Wells comes to mind even though they sparsely advertised that as a work of fiction. So smart people are left in a perpetual state of dis-belief of everything with the only recourse to dig up evidence for stuff through FOIA or illegitimate means like hacking. And this goes for mildly secret stuff like diplomatic cables, Enron financial records, tax information on Google, etc...
But this has a lot more proof then Russels Teapot, at the very least there's pictures of something. The disproof comes from the people claiming it is a "rock ejected from earth"
Ok so prove its not a meteor. Haven't seen very good science done here =/
Just a bunch of curmudgeony professorial types demanding that Chandra Wickramasinghe is a heretic. Just because Mr Wickramasinghe's theory postulates its evidence for fossilized life in a meteor doesn't mean it must be tossed out. Add it to your body of "things to investigate more fully".
Please let me increase the detail for everyone, its like paying the plumbers union every time. That individual plumber, may more may not get payed for their performance.
Also the plumbers union ensures you don't get to pick what plumber you want to install your toilet. You can pick from a list they provide and syndicate.
Lastly you need to hold a license with the plumbers union and go to jail if you give away free toilet installations.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually guns have many uses, just like claw hammers, their primary military use is to kill people.
But they have many uses and are not necessarily manufactured by people looking to get other people shot.
They are certainly not "necessary for survival" in MOST of the eastern U.S.
They are however still pretty important in other places. One job application for Alaska N.W. area for someone to work with park rangers required the ability on the job posting to be able to use a gun to defend against wild animals, think grisly or moose. These things can and will kill you if you stumble into them on a bad day, are untrained, their territorial etc... And sometimes nuisance animals need to be killed.
This is not a "law enforcement position', just a legitimate U.S. gov employee job working with park rangers and folks in the private sector, think perhaps loggers, or tourism.
Stop going after everyones guns, and go after the people who are afraid, help educate them and stop living in fear and illogic.
Thanks a ton for the interesting clarification of this kind of political maneuver rtb61 =)
Indeed it seems like a bad move to make from a trade perspective. But NK has pretty much been screwed in that department for a long time.
I agree, it seems like the Kim line is a line of cosmetic figure heads and hold no real power except in swaying public opinion (perhaps on both sides) and it might just be the opinions of the rest of the world they are trying to sway. Also if they are selectively groomed for the roll they will be more then happy to do as they are tolled and not risk their position or the positions of their relatives and friends.
Outsmarting the real dictators and swaying local and world opinions in the right direction while minimizing casualties would be a hard feat indeed.
Nope just the para-military playing with UFO tech or shooting down aliens trying to scrap them XCOM style.
Citizens of this country had a right to perform music in private for their friends regardless of who owned the copyright. Private does matter.
The problem is the internet is not really private anymore. And people are using it like a bullhorn in public. This is the root of the issue. It's going to be super bad when it is turned into "public utilities" but the backbones and original phone companies are classified as such anyway.
So all that shit is "public". And not in private. Question is, with the internet, in a technical sense can you have private communication in a public space? How does that qualify legally... its a gray area.
P.S. The law is nothing but a social construct, it really matters not what it says, most people disobey "evil" laws. The world is not full of completely lawful people. If it was there should technically be no social disorder.
But the law is no more perfect then the people that create, administer and deliver it.
This is why "privacy" is important in the USA, and why it mattered so much to our founding fathers. Because what happened in private was less governed by the law then what happened in public. Not all aspects of commerce, our lives, etc need to be monitored and scrutinized by the whole institution of the United States.
Consequently there are many different categories of "law" from civil, to criminal, to common law to all kinds of B.S. international law.
The script kiddy information wants to be free internet was just fine types are just responding to this in a knee jerk way, rather then acknowledging that the internet is not "theirs" and that if they want their information to be free they will need to build and protect their own. And most likely govern it themselves with some kind of rules anyway. Law.
It's called assault with a deadly object. Armed assault. Or what have you. Been around since before cowboys and Indians.
More Bullshit(tm) from the pulpit of propaganda.
Back in the day men use to resolve these problems on their own. Why the fuck is this even neccissary, and at the very worst "harm caused by laser" in court is perfectly well covered by a gazillion pre-existing assault laws. Should be, "assault with any fucking bloody object". Make it a fucking law and stop tacking bullshit on or putting your grubby little regulatory hands into the marketplaces of this country over stupid shit.
To all above, All very good points. Definitely the key is to be boring enough to not get that three billion dollar treatment. Whether your on, off, halfway on-off the grid. I'm totally agreed there. If I went missing tomorrow, no one would care except my immediate family and they probably wouldn't even be able to get a chopper to fly around looking for me if they couldn't even give a location were I said I would be.
The point I was trying to make, in a technical sense, someone can find you if they really want to and have enough resources, those cases are pretty rare ;p
Drones reach secure compounds in Afghanistan, spies posing as foreign aid reach secure compounds in Pakistan to track people by DNA. To the west, those are pretty inaccessible and "off the grid locations".
That leaves some mountain caves in North Korea or deep in Papua New Guinea Jungle. Or the heart of the Sahara. Or Antarctica or some other equally inhospitable places.
And believe it or not satellites will still find you. HUMANs are easy to find. Humans are also everywhere. And if you don't want to be burned at the stake as a heretic in a primitive culture you have to visit town once in awhile. We don't have the natural instinct, resistance to nature, endurance, camouflage and psychology to live our lives 24/7 in ghillie suites in the brush.
Your best bet is to just not be any different then anyone else all over the grid. Your better off having all the things to track and occasionally posting something on facebook and looking perfectly normal. Blending into plain site.
There are exceptions to the rules. But hey even they are "known". A gentleman lived till his late 80's in a cave in the Rocky Mountains. This good man moved there after coming back from world war two, I can't remember his name off the top of his head, but he was well known even though he subsisted on goats milk, wine from mountain grapes, and cheese. He survived on his own there until the millennium. But he was friendly enough to talk to journalists or other curious folk and was never kicked from his squat. Our government sure as hell knew who he was, probably had his records from his service in a cave their own somewhere.
The question is, what do most of us have to hide? Nothing. Will some of us be persecuted, maybe, or all this tracking might bring hidden demographics to the publics or power elites knowledge, enough so that they won't feel like changing what was now private and making public spaces more accommodating to different mimetic sub-cliques.
Or occupy a niche that is bitchin hard for predators to get at you in.
Earbuds and soothing non-rhythmic music for sleep. Its the only way to white noise out the noise. The buds work like regular ear plugs.
Either that or just get yourself so tired that you can just go unconscious during WWIII eventually your body and mind will adapt.
Indeed. And its hard to keep everyone honest in ideal virtuous ways too I suppose.
The problem is, under a more or less Marxist system, once people realize they will never earn more then X amount the bureaucratic class (which is usually the owning class at that point) is unable to find workers to fulfill the bare minimum needed roles to keep everyone at the same level as they were per-socialist reform. So you have a collapse.
This sorta happened in the U.S.S.R. when people realized that working in the ball bearing factories was no better then handing out bread on bread lines. So then they had to force people to build ball bearings, which caused dissent. I wasn't around for it, I'm just guessing on complete lay mans knowledge.
If you had plenty of people who did actually want to work though (lets say make ball bearings) and some other way of rewarding these people rather then their stipend, you would get around the very same issue I think were talking about.
And I am not opposed to a large portion of the population completely free to do as they wish, as long as we find a fair way to keep the factories, robots, machines, power, water, food, going.
Volunteer work for some kind of "educational credit", or "vacation bonus" would be an option.
But so far, pretty much even communist, socialist economies run on some form of currency.
Your right. I propose a slightly different approach, there has to be a way to reward hardworking individuals who dedicate their lives to improving themselves or something that will help us all improve humanity.
Like I dunno, captaincy on the enterprise or whatever, similar things to that, being put in charge of Large Hadron Collider level projects. I guess the idea I have is a mix of socialism, capitalism, and meritocracy, with limits on each facet.
Honestly I have not fleshed the idea out fully in my head though.
Your overcomplicated this. Now pay attention while I hold this shiny thing in front of you and give you a short speech.
*sunglasses
Swampgas+Venus+Light Reflected
Your idealistic view is flawed. This does not eliminate the black market and just further divides the gulf.
Soon you will be denied access to this system if you are not a "qualified citizen".
It will be criminal to use cash, or barter.
People are having issues with morality now... but wait till the government gets blamed for endorsing the purchase of sex toys.
And while, we are all beholden to this society, the minute you take off the pressure for people to work you will see massive amounts of unemployment over what we have now. It's bad and the disproportionate spread of wealth in this country is horrific, but it won't get any better under the system you are proposing, it will just be 1% rich and 99% people on welfare at the mercy of whatever country wide fiscal prison system that develops.
I speak in laymans terms and I am not criticizing your ideology, just trying to point out that it could go horribly wrong and is counter to the ideals of our culture.
People have the right to work for a living at the very leas, and we should limit the amount of property, power, money, and influence individuals or corporations can hold so that all the bread factories are divided up more evenly then rather under 3 or 4 large state owned corporations.
Another issue is food production, and companies like Monsanto which need to be broken down into smaller corporations and have their intellectual property liquidated into the public domain. And most likely their CEO's, or large investors, shareholders put behind bars.
"The exceptional claim is that the rock is a meteor" - I hear you there, that is maybe an exceptional claim, as a lay man I can not really comment there. But it certainly looks like there is good argument for it being a meteorite, and evidence is given in the paper linked to by the article.
But thanks for taking the time to further explain that the scientific community does not believe it is a meteorite. I would like to see more solid proof though. That would require the samples going to other labs and having analysis done, and a different theory postulated.
Those indeed are pretty extraordinary claims, thanks for pointing them out.
I wouldn't take anything he said at face value without scrutiny. The discussion section of http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1303/1303.1845.pdf pretty much states the arguments for the samples being meteorites.
There's also quite a few other names on the paper as well. Its not proof, but evidence, maybe.
Who knows, we are definitely still waiting for that extraordinary evidence. In my opinion it'll come from us going to space, digging around on asteroids, comets, and planets, and finding things like this to back it up. Or sending a probe to Europa and taking a picture of a geothermal vent crawling with life.
It stands to reason if fossils survived in meteorites on earth, there might be some in craters on the moon as well, microscopic fossils anyway.
The journals, news articles are not at least claiming this is the extraordinary proof to say, yeah for sure.
The nitrogen content doesn't match living organisms, don't know about the fossil record though.
Really nice link, its almost enough to make the argument that nature is going to do it for us eventually anyway though. Might as well harness it and put it to good use.
Agreed but our government agencies of all caliber, law enforcing or otherwise have such a bad history with coming clean and being honest and open.
I mean "It's the American way" to lie and cheat your way to the top of the pile is a coined phrase regarding our politicians.
Why blame people for the nutty shit they do in response to the absolute insanity of our societies leadership. I know I know, two wrongs don't make a right. Nor are they an accurate means of finding the "truth".
But it doesn't matter if there's aliens on the moon or not. No one has faith or trusts anything anymore. And as far as housing and Census records, well, thats just a price we pay for living socially.
In a purely logical sense, believing anything you hear or see at school, on T.V. or from a politician in this country has been a bad idea (TM) for a long time, including radio, hell H.G. Wells comes to mind even though they sparsely advertised that as a work of fiction. So smart people are left in a perpetual state of dis-belief of everything with the only recourse to dig up evidence for stuff through FOIA or illegitimate means like hacking. And this goes for mildly secret stuff like diplomatic cables, Enron financial records, tax information on Google, etc...
But this has a lot more proof then Russels Teapot, at the very least there's pictures of something. The disproof comes from the people claiming it is a "rock ejected from earth"
Ok so prove its not a meteor. Haven't seen very good science done here =/
Just a bunch of curmudgeony professorial types demanding that Chandra Wickramasinghe is a heretic. Just because Mr Wickramasinghe's theory postulates its evidence for fossilized life in a meteor doesn't mean it must be tossed out. Add it to your body of "things to investigate more fully".
I suppose you make good point there hehe...
Please let me increase the detail for everyone, its like paying the plumbers union every time. That individual plumber, may more may not get payed for their performance.
Also the plumbers union ensures you don't get to pick what plumber you want to install your toilet. You can pick from a list they provide and syndicate.
Lastly you need to hold a license with the plumbers union and go to jail if you give away free toilet installations.
I'm with the Protoss on this one.