Here is how Israel does it, does it for free and very effectively: they let the screening agents to pick and choose any passenger that they want or have a hunch.
Yeah but errr... they're not private. What's your argument? We should privatise? OR we should do it like Israel? To do it like Israel will cost billions of dollars of public money because... the Israelis hire they're smart people and give them a great deal of training. Your average TSA grunt is so dumb they would have died off before reaching breeding age if they were born more than a few generations ago.
Yes but that's because the israelis take it seriously and we're just playing security like a bunch of 6 year olds.
Somebody's missing something here.... the idea is not to take a random sample of fliers to determine what percentage are carrying bombs, is it? Because I would have thought the idea was to catch all bombers. Therefore, the only way to do that is to search everybody.
I visit the USA several times a year. I come from a place where obesity is much less common, and much less extreme. These are my observations of the USA. I don't want this to sound like I'm hating on Americans, because some of you are super nice. This is just what I've seen.
The obesity axis runs diagonally, northwest to south east. People in Seattle are not much bigger then people around here. People in Mobile were appallingly huge. My theory is this correlates with biscuits and sausage gravy for breakfast.
It also correlates with escalators. In Seattle most people were walking up the escalators, In Mobile nobody walked up escalators.
A much bigger percentage of black people are overweight compared to white people. (Is this poverty related?).
You all drink way too much coke cola. I met people who drank 2 or three cans of soda per day at work and then drank it with every lunch and dinner.
Food servings in some restaurants are stupid big. Plates of spaghetti that two of us couldn't finish. 24 ounce prime rib. (really)
Most appalling thing I saw was whole families of fat people which is super rare here. Like mom and dad both 250 lbs plus and then 2 or 3 huge fat kids. Around here if your ten year old was 150 lbs the child welfare people would be all over you.
in my youth in canada, american visitors used to be really easy to distinguish, "corn fed" is the adjective that comes to mind; "beefy" is another. at the time i attributed it to the constant marketing of food they experienced, and the constant availability of food everywhere, both still rare in canada at the time. it was possible to go places where there wasn't food for sale; or drive down streets where there weren't places to get a snack everywhere; TV didn't have mcdonalds ads every 20 minutes. of course, canada has moved on and now it's all about food, just as much as the US.
I think I'll leave everyone with. One of the aspects of our food supply nobody every talks about is that we use oil byproducts to replenish soil. That's how we're able to grow so much food. Anyone want to guess what's going to happen when our oil supply dwindles...?
Indeed. we have accomplished the miracle of taking the food supply from being solar powered to being fossil fuel powered.
One of my minor hobbies is making old or ancient recipes straight from manuscripts or books, as close as I can. Something I've noticed is how much they really aren't that good. They're edible, to be sure, and they get you full and they're nutritious because they're always made from scratch. But they just ain't that good. There is almost always some simple optimization that would make them taste much, much better.
As someone who also tends to make old recipes or experiment with traditional techniques myself, I can point out a number of problems with old and ancient recipes. Many are bland, because spices were expensive. And access to a wide variety of ingredients was seasonal and often only for the very rich. These recipes can be improved by "modernizing" them with accessible ingredients. Same thing with recipes whose ingredients have changed over time -- so-called "heirloom" varieties of vegetables, fruits, and even old varieties of grains can make a huge difference in flavor and texture. Just subbing in a food that has the same basic name today may not be getting at the original flavors at all. And of course tastes change over time and in different cultures.
A lot of people ridicule McDonald's hamburgers or Applebee's entrees in the boil-in bags. But damn, that food is super-tasty.
They're "tasty" because they're generally engineered to be a completely unnatural mixture of flavors our bodies are adapted to be attracted too, since those flavors were often rare in the past... And consuming them could be important to survival. Now the artificial combinations and availability of those flavors results in overeating and excessive calorie consumption.
I cook and bake a lot of things in fairly traditional ways, I bring them to parties or serve them to guests, and inevitably people are blown away by the flavors, which vastly exceed the quality and satisfaction from a McDonalds hamburger or boil-in-a-bag meal. I've taken a simple loaf of plain bread prepared in a traditional manner with only natural (sourdough) yeast, fresh whole-grain flour, salt, and water, with long traditional fermentation... And I've seen people just rip apart the plain loaf and eat it without accompaniment... Because it's so damn good compared to what they usually eat. Traditional simple fresh ingredients, old-school prep. Result is often: Wow.
I have nothing against fast food's achievements in terms of packing calories in cheaply and quickly. But the idea that traditional foods are all crap, and we should bow to the "super-tasty" Big Mac as if it were some amazing culinary achievement? I think you may just not have eaten enough traditional GOOD food prepared from good ingredients.
note also that edible industrial products are engineered deliberately to be non satiating; they stimulate the appetite, but do not satisfy it so "you can't eat just one". http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02...
I know this thread is going to be full of We Hate Americans - it's already started. But I just think this is really amazing. For the entirety of human existence, food has been a huge problem. Hunger was always, at most, a year or two away. Starvation is the best way to kill huge numbers of humans at once. Malnutrition, or control of food, is one of the best ways to keep them in line. Ever seen those fiftyish/sixtyish Chinese ladies who are all so short? It's because their growth was stunted as children because their government didn't provide enough for them to eat. Even without shitheads starving people to death for political reasons, lack of enough food was always a concern.
Now, we not only have solved the food problem, but we have gone too far the opposite direction. Wow! People have too much food. Food is too cheap. But that's not all, they don't just have too much food, they have the wrong kind of it! It's not just the quantity, it is the diversity and free choice that is causing all the problems. Who would have even imagined such an outcome? Did any of the visionary Sci-Fi authors of the 20th century see this coming? Because this is more earth-shattering than landing a probe on a comet (but I have been educated by the media and now understand that the shirt the spokesman was wearing when he made the announcement WAS more important than any scientific achievement humanity might have accomplished that day). Moreover this food is available just about anywhere. It tastes delicious as well, something people today barely realize, if ever.
One of my minor hobbies is making old or ancient recipes straight from manuscripts or books, as close as I can. Something I've noticed is how much they really aren't that good. They're edible, to be sure, and they get you full and they're nutritious because they're always made from scratch. But they just ain't that good. There is almost always some simple optimization that would make them taste much, much better. I'm not saying the people of old didn't enjoy their food, because they did. It's a universal human condition, whether you're eating oeufs au plat Meyerbeer prepared by a separate entremettier, rotisseur and saucier; or a bowl of oat porridge with pig fat. A lot of people ridicule McDonald's hamburgers or Applebee's entrees in the boil-in bags. But damn, that food is super-tasty. Far better than kings used to eat. It's never spoiled, either, and if it is you send it back and get a fresh one...something else we never take note of.
Yeah, unhealthy food causes disease and cancer. We all know. But this is a new, thrilling problem to combat. It's *the right kind of problem*. It's like being confronted with what to do with too much money. How can we make healthy food taste just as good or better than that fast food crap? Surely society's great minds are going to work on this one. I don't know though...I get the idea too many people out there just enjoy hating fatties, Wal-mart, Applebee's, trailer parks, and Monsanto far too much to ever think that maybe things should be better. Imagine a day when McDonald's goes out of business because people can pick more delicious foods from public orchards. A microwave burrito that is more nutritious than fresh blueberries. A boil-in bag that makes fresh spinach look like a twinkie. It can happen, if we want it to happen.
marx said capitalism is a great engine that would be able to provide for the needs of everyone in the world, but would fail in the task ot apportioning it fairly,
Looking back at photos the "fat kid" wasn't that by current standards either. And that was with baked goods at the school canteen dripping with fat (cream buns, sausage rolls etc). No carbonated drinks though, which I suspect are a very major part of the cause.
absolutely, sugary drink are a major source of excess calories. time was, of course, when a normal soda was 6 ounces. now the norm is to guzzle down 4 times that. and that's led to every other kind of sugary drink, crapuccinos etc.
The largest cultural shift to happen in your time frame has been two-income households and on top of that most people are working longer hours than ever before.
That means less time to cook nutritious meals, less time to monitor what the kids are doing, and less time for recreation.
This notion of a qualitative shift within a few generations is asinine. There's a reason energy drinks happened within this generation. People are tired and harried.
remember when you couldn't change the channel without getting out of your chair? if you gave people the option of perfect health until 100 years of age, but they would have to give up the remote, which do you think they would choose? i'm not even sure which i would choose.
you can easily make meals by dumping a few ingredients together with 15 minutes prep on the weekend or day off
A lot of the working poor are working 2 or 3 jobs, just to make rent and utilities. They don't get weekends or days off. This is what happens when people can't make a living wage at 40 hours/week.
and of course the "food desert"; it's not optimally profitable to site supermarkets in the impoverished parts of town, if you invest the same money in siting it in the wealthy suburbs you make more profits. the small food stores which are situated in the inner city have higher prices, plus they can't afford to have such a high percentage of perishables, which will perish if nobody happens to buy them that day. if people don't have a car making a trek to a supermarket is a major task, not something to do every day on the way home, so buying perishables is again not in the cards.
It takes time. Time is not free. Especially if you're poor and are working a bunch of hours/jobs to pay rent, utilities, afford some sort of food.
and if you grew up in world where the norm is to eat food-like industrial products and nobody cooked from scratch, it would take a big internal decision to start doing that.
Well, there's always two ways you can err, false negatives and false positives. Meaning if you are majorly concerned about helping the deserving, more cheats will collect; if you are more concerned about stopping the cheats, some deserving will not. It's tempting, however, to feel that people who take the latter position are just cheap bastards.
In the US, our farm subsidies, which sound like a good idea, are in fact assigned in such a fashion that they are primarily for big agribiz, rather than bailing out small farms that are out of luck. As a result, the actual business of big agribiz is to harvest subsidies, and the result is that a lot of corn is produced as a waste product. this stuff has to be gotten rid of somehow; we feed it to animals who normally don't eat corn, we make it into alcohol and dispose of it in gasoline, we burn it in stoves, we make it into packing peanuts, and we feed it to people in every way possible, including of course the famous high fructose corn syrup. Which means that that stuff and the edible industrial products which contains it is always going to be cheaper than real food.
Except cancer is coming at earlier and earlier ages. What you eat impacts your body's ability to care of itself. Cancer is natural. Everyone likely has cancer at all points during their life. Cancer is simply some cells growing too much. However your body can handle that, except when it's overwhelmed or doesn't have the resources to deal with it. So yes, what you eat and do can directly impact your natural ability to keep cancer under control. Look at the cancer rate studies on nurses. Simply working the night shift instead of the day shift massively increases their chances of getting cancer. Society is getting sicker and sicker.
Leaked Emails Reveal Widespread Corruption in Global Oil Industry
Leaked Emails Reveal Widespread Corruption in Government
Leaked Emails Reveal Widespread Corruption in Major Corporation
Leaked Emails Reveal Widespread Corruption in Academic Research
Leaked Emails Reveal Widespread Corruption in Some Church
Leaked Emails Reveal Widespread Corruption in Scientific Community
Leaked Emails Reveal Widespread Corruption in HOA
Leaked Emails Reveal Widespread Corruption in Any Human Organization
Headlines you never see
Leaked Emails Reveal Widespread Corruption in Hell
What if everybody had the attitude of "well, this is a screwed-up world we live in, what can you do, (nothing), let's turn to the sports" about everything?
"King George wants us to suffer taxation without representation, surprise, surprise, well, duh." - there'd be no America.
"Big deal, this stuff happens, no need for major efforts to change" was the attitude of all those Bishops and Cardinals to kids getting buggered.
We SHOULD react with shock and disgust to lying and fraud in the financial industry, to corruption in oil, to military vendors promoting war; we should tell our politicians they're unemployed unless they act and can have all the money they need to sic 10,000 FBI agents on them.
The S&L crisis in the 80's prompted the assignment of 1000 FBI agents to the case. They brought in about one conviction each: 1000 convictions, a 90% success rate, after winnowing down 30,000 referrals to 1100-odd trials. It brought about real results.
By contrast, the 2008 crisis prompted no such effort despite being 70X as large a set of frauds.
We can tackle these large problems; you just put out the same effort you'd put into a new highway interchange or skyscraper: $100M budget per year and a few thousand people working on it. The US Justice System has nearly one million employees; only 2300 on white-collar crime.
I wonder what MS is doing with the mysterious info they collect. Is every web page I visit in Chrome reported back to them? (And are they reported to Google? I turned off every option I could find, and that web sotes on the subject said to do, but you never know.)
At monthly meetings, employees are treated to a powerpoint of what customers are visiting and they laugh and throw popcorn.
I fully agree. And what disturbs me most is the plain face that they use to say such a thing, as if it were absolute truth. I'm afraid of people who can lie with such ease and so much scorn from the intelligence of others.
I still remember the ads for the IBM AT "so advanced that it will run programs that haven't been written yet"
No, what I believe is that 90% of humans are complete and utter morons, who can't be trusted with a firearm. They are irrationnal, moody, have mental problems (depression, mood swings, anxiety, are religious nuts, etc.)
Having a firearm at home is ok with me, but carrying it everywhere is a bad idea.
Why would you feel it's a bad idea to arm yourself when you believe that 9/10ths of humanity is FUBAR? You obviously believe yourself to be part of the 10% who aren't criminally insane, so why do you not trust yourself to carry a firearm? This is reasoning I've never understood. "The rest of the world is crazy, but I'm cool, although I still shouldn't be trusted with a gun". Wut?
another unamerican terrorist lover who doesn't believe in gun-owner exceptionalism!
No, it will be because you THINK you were under real threat.
If someone breaks into my house, especially at night, then they are automatically a perceived threat to myself and loved ones...I have no qualms about unloading at least one magazine into them before checking to see if they still breath or not.
And in New Orleans, if the intruder is somehow able to make it back outside your door...the NOLA cops will often be nice enough to help drag the body back across the threshold before pictures are taken...
So you're arguing for no restrictions on concealed carry inside your house?
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah but errr... they're not private. What's your argument? We should privatise? OR we should do it like Israel? To do it like Israel will cost billions of dollars of public money because... the Israelis hire they're smart people and give them a great deal of training. Your average TSA grunt is so dumb they would have died off before reaching breeding age if they were born more than a few generations ago.
Yes but that's because the israelis take it seriously and we're just playing security like a bunch of 6 year olds.
Somebody's missing something here.... the idea is not to take a random sample of fliers to determine what percentage are carrying bombs, is it? Because I would have thought the idea was to catch all bombers. Therefore, the only way to do that is to search everybody.
I visit the USA several times a year. I come from a place where obesity is much less common, and much less extreme. These are my observations of the USA. I don't want this to sound like I'm hating on Americans, because some of you are super nice. This is just what I've seen. The obesity axis runs diagonally, northwest to south east. People in Seattle are not much bigger then people around here. People in Mobile were appallingly huge. My theory is this correlates with biscuits and sausage gravy for breakfast. It also correlates with escalators. In Seattle most people were walking up the escalators, In Mobile nobody walked up escalators. A much bigger percentage of black people are overweight compared to white people. (Is this poverty related?). You all drink way too much coke cola. I met people who drank 2 or three cans of soda per day at work and then drank it with every lunch and dinner. Food servings in some restaurants are stupid big. Plates of spaghetti that two of us couldn't finish. 24 ounce prime rib. (really) Most appalling thing I saw was whole families of fat people which is super rare here. Like mom and dad both 250 lbs plus and then 2 or 3 huge fat kids. Around here if your ten year old was 150 lbs the child welfare people would be all over you.
in my youth in canada, american visitors used to be really easy to distinguish, "corn fed" is the adjective that comes to mind; "beefy" is another. at the time i attributed it to the constant marketing of food they experienced, and the constant availability of food everywhere, both still rare in canada at the time. it was possible to go places where there wasn't food for sale; or drive down streets where there weren't places to get a snack everywhere; TV didn't have mcdonalds ads every 20 minutes. of course, canada has moved on and now it's all about food, just as much as the US.
I think I'll leave everyone with. One of the aspects of our food supply nobody every talks about is that we use oil byproducts to replenish soil. That's how we're able to grow so much food. Anyone want to guess what's going to happen when our oil supply dwindles...?
Indeed. we have accomplished the miracle of taking the food supply from being solar powered to being fossil fuel powered.
One of my minor hobbies is making old or ancient recipes straight from manuscripts or books, as close as I can. Something I've noticed is how much they really aren't that good. They're edible, to be sure, and they get you full and they're nutritious because they're always made from scratch. But they just ain't that good. There is almost always some simple optimization that would make them taste much, much better.
As someone who also tends to make old recipes or experiment with traditional techniques myself, I can point out a number of problems with old and ancient recipes. Many are bland, because spices were expensive. And access to a wide variety of ingredients was seasonal and often only for the very rich. These recipes can be improved by "modernizing" them with accessible ingredients. Same thing with recipes whose ingredients have changed over time -- so-called "heirloom" varieties of vegetables, fruits, and even old varieties of grains can make a huge difference in flavor and texture. Just subbing in a food that has the same basic name today may not be getting at the original flavors at all. And of course tastes change over time and in different cultures.
A lot of people ridicule McDonald's hamburgers or Applebee's entrees in the boil-in bags. But damn, that food is super-tasty.
They're "tasty" because they're generally engineered to be a completely unnatural mixture of flavors our bodies are adapted to be attracted too, since those flavors were often rare in the past... And consuming them could be important to survival. Now the artificial combinations and availability of those flavors results in overeating and excessive calorie consumption.
I cook and bake a lot of things in fairly traditional ways, I bring them to parties or serve them to guests, and inevitably people are blown away by the flavors, which vastly exceed the quality and satisfaction from a McDonalds hamburger or boil-in-a-bag meal. I've taken a simple loaf of plain bread prepared in a traditional manner with only natural (sourdough) yeast, fresh whole-grain flour, salt, and water, with long traditional fermentation... And I've seen people just rip apart the plain loaf and eat it without accompaniment... Because it's so damn good compared to what they usually eat. Traditional simple fresh ingredients, old-school prep. Result is often: Wow.
I have nothing against fast food's achievements in terms of packing calories in cheaply and quickly. But the idea that traditional foods are all crap, and we should bow to the "super-tasty" Big Mac as if it were some amazing culinary achievement? I think you may just not have eaten enough traditional GOOD food prepared from good ingredients.
note also that edible industrial products are engineered deliberately to be non satiating; they stimulate the appetite, but do not satisfy it so "you can't eat just one". http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02...
I know this thread is going to be full of We Hate Americans - it's already started. But I just think this is really amazing. For the entirety of human existence, food has been a huge problem. Hunger was always, at most, a year or two away. Starvation is the best way to kill huge numbers of humans at once. Malnutrition, or control of food, is one of the best ways to keep them in line. Ever seen those fiftyish/sixtyish Chinese ladies who are all so short? It's because their growth was stunted as children because their government didn't provide enough for them to eat. Even without shitheads starving people to death for political reasons, lack of enough food was always a concern.
Now, we not only have solved the food problem, but we have gone too far the opposite direction. Wow! People have too much food. Food is too cheap. But that's not all, they don't just have too much food, they have the wrong kind of it! It's not just the quantity, it is the diversity and free choice that is causing all the problems. Who would have even imagined such an outcome? Did any of the visionary Sci-Fi authors of the 20th century see this coming? Because this is more earth-shattering than landing a probe on a comet (but I have been educated by the media and now understand that the shirt the spokesman was wearing when he made the announcement WAS more important than any scientific achievement humanity might have accomplished that day). Moreover this food is available just about anywhere. It tastes delicious as well, something people today barely realize, if ever.
One of my minor hobbies is making old or ancient recipes straight from manuscripts or books, as close as I can. Something I've noticed is how much they really aren't that good. They're edible, to be sure, and they get you full and they're nutritious because they're always made from scratch. But they just ain't that good. There is almost always some simple optimization that would make them taste much, much better. I'm not saying the people of old didn't enjoy their food, because they did. It's a universal human condition, whether you're eating oeufs au plat Meyerbeer prepared by a separate entremettier, rotisseur and saucier; or a bowl of oat porridge with pig fat. A lot of people ridicule McDonald's hamburgers or Applebee's entrees in the boil-in bags. But damn, that food is super-tasty. Far better than kings used to eat. It's never spoiled, either, and if it is you send it back and get a fresh one...something else we never take note of.
Yeah, unhealthy food causes disease and cancer. We all know. But this is a new, thrilling problem to combat. It's *the right kind of problem*. It's like being confronted with what to do with too much money. How can we make healthy food taste just as good or better than that fast food crap? Surely society's great minds are going to work on this one. I don't know though...I get the idea too many people out there just enjoy hating fatties, Wal-mart, Applebee's, trailer parks, and Monsanto far too much to ever think that maybe things should be better. Imagine a day when McDonald's goes out of business because people can pick more delicious foods from public orchards. A microwave burrito that is more nutritious than fresh blueberries. A boil-in bag that makes fresh spinach look like a twinkie. It can happen, if we want it to happen.
marx said capitalism is a great engine that would be able to provide for the needs of everyone in the world, but would fail in the task ot apportioning it fairly,
Looking back at photos the "fat kid" wasn't that by current standards either. And that was with baked goods at the school canteen dripping with fat (cream buns, sausage rolls etc). No carbonated drinks though, which I suspect are a very major part of the cause.
absolutely, sugary drink are a major source of excess calories. time was, of course, when a normal soda was 6 ounces. now the norm is to guzzle down 4 times that. and that's led to every other kind of sugary drink, crapuccinos etc.
The largest cultural shift to happen in your time frame has been two-income households and on top of that most people are working longer hours than ever before.
That means less time to cook nutritious meals, less time to monitor what the kids are doing, and less time for recreation.
This notion of a qualitative shift within a few generations is asinine. There's a reason energy drinks happened within this generation. People are tired and harried.
remember when you couldn't change the channel without getting out of your chair? if you gave people the option of perfect health until 100 years of age, but they would have to give up the remote, which do you think they would choose? i'm not even sure which i would choose.
you can easily make meals by dumping a few ingredients together with 15 minutes prep on the weekend or day off
A lot of the working poor are working 2 or 3 jobs, just to make rent and utilities. They don't get weekends or days off. This is what happens when people can't make a living wage at 40 hours/week.
and of course the "food desert"; it's not optimally profitable to site supermarkets in the impoverished parts of town, if you invest the same money in siting it in the wealthy suburbs you make more profits. the small food stores which are situated in the inner city have higher prices, plus they can't afford to have such a high percentage of perishables, which will perish if nobody happens to buy them that day. if people don't have a car making a trek to a supermarket is a major task, not something to do every day on the way home, so buying perishables is again not in the cards.
But it takes work.
It takes time. Time is not free. Especially if you're poor and are working a bunch of hours/jobs to pay rent, utilities, afford some sort of food.
and if you grew up in world where the norm is to eat food-like industrial products and nobody cooked from scratch, it would take a big internal decision to start doing that.
Well, there's always two ways you can err, false negatives and false positives. Meaning if you are majorly concerned about helping the deserving, more cheats will collect; if you are more concerned about stopping the cheats, some deserving will not. It's tempting, however, to feel that people who take the latter position are just cheap bastards.
In the US, our farm subsidies, which sound like a good idea, are in fact assigned in such a fashion that they are primarily for big agribiz, rather than bailing out small farms that are out of luck. As a result, the actual business of big agribiz is to harvest subsidies, and the result is that a lot of corn is produced as a waste product. this stuff has to be gotten rid of somehow; we feed it to animals who normally don't eat corn, we make it into alcohol and dispose of it in gasoline, we burn it in stoves, we make it into packing peanuts, and we feed it to people in every way possible, including of course the famous high fructose corn syrup. Which means that that stuff and the edible industrial products which contains it is always going to be cheaper than real food.
Except cancer is coming at earlier and earlier ages. What you eat impacts your body's ability to care of itself. Cancer is natural. Everyone likely has cancer at all points during their life. Cancer is simply some cells growing too much. However your body can handle that, except when it's overwhelmed or doesn't have the resources to deal with it. So yes, what you eat and do can directly impact your natural ability to keep cancer under control. Look at the cancer rate studies on nurses. Simply working the night shift instead of the day shift massively increases their chances of getting cancer. Society is getting sicker and sicker.
No it isn't, http://www.cancerresearchuk.or...
Leaked Emails Reveal Widespread Corruption in Global Oil Industry Leaked Emails Reveal Widespread Corruption in Government Leaked Emails Reveal Widespread Corruption in Major Corporation Leaked Emails Reveal Widespread Corruption in Academic Research Leaked Emails Reveal Widespread Corruption in Some Church Leaked Emails Reveal Widespread Corruption in Scientific Community Leaked Emails Reveal Widespread Corruption in HOA Leaked Emails Reveal Widespread Corruption in Any Human Organization
Headlines you never see
Leaked Emails Reveal Widespread Corruption in Hell
What if everybody had the attitude of "well, this is a screwed-up world we live in, what can you do, (nothing), let's turn to the sports" about everything?
"King George wants us to suffer taxation without representation, surprise, surprise, well, duh." - there'd be no America.
"Big deal, this stuff happens, no need for major efforts to change" was the attitude of all those Bishops and Cardinals to kids getting buggered.
We SHOULD react with shock and disgust to lying and fraud in the financial industry, to corruption in oil, to military vendors promoting war; we should tell our politicians they're unemployed unless they act and can have all the money they need to sic 10,000 FBI agents on them.
The S&L crisis in the 80's prompted the assignment of 1000 FBI agents to the case. They brought in about one conviction each: 1000 convictions, a 90% success rate, after winnowing down 30,000 referrals to 1100-odd trials. It brought about real results.
By contrast, the 2008 crisis prompted no such effort despite being 70X as large a set of frauds.
We can tackle these large problems; you just put out the same effort you'd put into a new highway interchange or skyscraper: $100M budget per year and a few thousand people working on it. The US Justice System has nearly one million employees; only 2300 on white-collar crime.
Capt. Citroen:
A leak from an oil company, that turns out to be documents? Thank the Lord.
I wonder what MS is doing with the mysterious info they collect. Is every web page I visit in Chrome reported back to them? (And are they reported to Google? I turned off every option I could find, and that web sotes on the subject said to do, but you never know.)
At monthly meetings, employees are treated to a powerpoint of what customers are visiting and they laugh and throw popcorn.
I fully agree. And what disturbs me most is the plain face that they use to say such a thing, as if it were absolute truth. I'm afraid of people who can lie with such ease and so much scorn from the intelligence of others.
I still remember the ads for the IBM AT "so advanced that it will run programs that haven't been written yet"
Is that a euphemism for female parts?
Worst April Fools gag ever
I still like the ring gun personally.
http://www.pinfireguns.com/pin...
As a long time bicycle rider, when gyrojets went off the market I lost interest.
No, what I believe is that 90% of humans are complete and utter morons, who can't be trusted with a firearm. They are irrationnal, moody, have mental problems (depression, mood swings, anxiety, are religious nuts, etc.)
Having a firearm at home is ok with me, but carrying it everywhere is a bad idea.
Why would you feel it's a bad idea to arm yourself when you believe that 9/10ths of humanity is FUBAR? You obviously believe yourself to be part of the 10% who aren't criminally insane, so why do you not trust yourself to carry a firearm? This is reasoning I've never understood. "The rest of the world is crazy, but I'm cool, although I still shouldn't be trusted with a gun". Wut?
another unamerican terrorist lover who doesn't believe in gun-owner exceptionalism!
Riddle:
Why don't the police like you to point a gun at them?
Because it might be a secret camera, disguised as a gun.
The battery only lasts 3 hours, and there's no coverage in 8 states.
If someone breaks into my house, especially at night, then they are automatically a perceived threat to myself and loved ones...I have no qualms about unloading at least one magazine into them before checking to see if they still breath or not.
And in New Orleans, if the intruder is somehow able to make it back outside your door...the NOLA cops will often be nice enough to help drag the body back across the threshold before pictures are taken...
So you're arguing for no restrictions on concealed carry inside your house?