The Black Panthers were supporters of the 2nd Amendment and utilized that right to protect their communities from police oppression. They would fill one or more cars with visibly armed members and then follow Police Patrol vehicles around town. They'd get out of the car and stand around at a safe distance whenever the Police had an interaction with a member of the community. The Police were still perfectly able to engage in performing their job duties, but didn't dare try abusing their position with the Black Panthers keeping a close eye on them. From my understanding this action by the Black Panthers was actually what precipitated a lot of the anti open carry and 2nd Amendment efforts by various localities, in our modern era.
Given that Waymo has cars that go 5600 miles on average between human interventions, and Uber was only averaging 13, I'd say your being alarmist. If I had a Waymo car I could in theory get away with intervening less than twice a year on average. What all of this has shown is that Uber isn't competent or responsible enough to be working in this field.
I never had all that many CD's, maybe 50 - 60. But even I've found a few here and there in the last couple years that won't play anymore in a standard CD player. The disks are in good shape, very few if any scratches, I'll have to try them on my computer and see if I can get anything out of them. They're coming up on twenty years old and been stored along with all my other discs that still play.
If there ever was another civil war in this country it would very likely not end up being the US military vs amateur hour red neck militias. The standing military is not some homogeneous organization, it is made up of millions of individuals who run practically the same gamut as the general public in so far as political leanings go. Whatever % of the population decides to take up arms against the status quo you could almost bet on getting a very similar % of active duty personnel absconding to, quite likely taking equipment with them. Then you have a very large number of veterans, who could throw in on either side, that obviously have military experience albeit possibly out of date.
Privately owned firearms by and large are going to be less powerful on average compared to whatever the military has, but would likely be more than compensated by sheer numbers. Some military weapons you mention would be worthless or nearly so in a civil war, the navy and ballistic missiles come to mind.
The biggest problem though in the event of a civil war, that doesn't break out along clear geographic lines, is infrastructure. Military bases are spread all around the country and often surrounded by civilian populations which support them. While there is usually some base housing it is not enough to actually house all of the enlisted and officers, let alone the civilian work force. So for the most part employees of the DoD, and their loved ones, live outside of the base perimeter.
Even supposing you could get all your people onto the base, you then have to worry about actually defending a perimeter, and I don't think I've ever seen a US military base in the CONUS that was laid out with defensive fighting positioning in mind. If you could spare the man power to man a perimeter you have to then arm and supply those positions, and again most places I've seen don't keep that many weapons on hand. Sure there is an armory for the policing force, plus some weapons for training purposes at the range, and you probably have a logistics group which keeps enough weapons to send out on deployments. But I really doubt there are enough weapons and ammunition on hand at each base to mount a sustained defensive posture. The military in general probably doesn't have enough small arms and ammunition to supply even half of it's personnel.
Then you have to worry about all of the other stuff you need to run the base properly, namely utilities. Sure individual facilities on bases will have backup supplies for power, fuel, water, and food but that is almost exclusively going to be limited to planned usage during natural disasters, intended to support minimum manning over a short duration. Those kinds of setups will not support full manning, plus dependents, for prolonged periods.
When the US military deploys to fight somewhere else it sets up bases that are planned for defense. They get hardened perimeters that are manned. Supplies are mostly shipped in from elsewhere. And all of the required personnel live within those defenses. That only works because the US can pour resources into supporting the relatively tiny number of people deployed to fight, from a peaceful first world nation.
A civil war in the US today wouldn't play out like that unless it was a largely geographic split. Regardless, I wouldn't expect a revolution to work in the long run unless it had a significant majority of the public behind it. It doesn't take a winning revolution to screw the whole country over for decades to come though. The threat of a civil war, even if it's not likely to succeed, is important in my mind because it can keep people working longer and harder to find a non-violent compromise that works rather than risk decades of misery and strife.
Most people don't give a rats ass about the sound quality. People have been listening to low bit rate MP3's for decades now. Most people are going to care about a few things when listening to music online; cost, convenience, and availability.
The cost for listening on youtube is free, or as close as you're likely to ever get.
The convenience is pretty good. When you find a video/song you like, it takes two clicks to add it to a playlist. There is a robust search feature to help you find anything you could ever want. And youtube is always keeping track of what you've accessed recently and recommending more stuff you might like.
Everything is on youtube at some point. Only the most aggressively protected stuff is going to be kept off the site for long. As soon as the lawyers stop submitting take down notices whatever it is will likely pop right up.
I'm pretty sure that the google cars do this. I remember an article talking about google cars getting stuck at 4 way stop signs waiting for the other vehicles to actually stop before proceeding. The other cars weren't coming to a complete stop and so the google car just sat there patiently waiting to go.
My Father served as a Medic in Vietnam and only ever told us kids the funny stories regarding his time there. Then was outraged when my brother invited a Marine Recruiter over for dinner one night, still didn't bother giving voice to his misgivings. Myself and my brother both ended up enlisting, and came out of it pretty well with no combat time. We only learned after the fact that he was terrified the whole time that we'd end up dead on foreign soil fighting for some commercial interest.
My Dad has never been accused of being a good communicator. I plan to do better with my kids, though I luckily don't have any personal war time horror stories to use.
I don't know what the training is like these days. However I know Green Beret training used to include and entire squad emptying their magazines on full auto as rapidly as possible in the event of an ambush. Apparently doing that elicits a strong impulse in your enemy, the ambusher, to seek cover. Then you do a rapid reload and start looking for actual targets to pick off with semi-auto or burst fire. An M16 on full auto will empty a 30 round magazine in under 3 seconds, so yeah using full auto outside of very specific situations is just silly.
This has been my experience with every place I've ever worked that didn't aggressively discourage people talking about their salary. Even in the military where there was endless dick measuring on every conceivable topic on a constant basis people didn't seem to have an issue with the pay system and whether or not it was fair.
CNN has a video up showing the scene in the dark, presumably relatively soon after the accident. Everything is evidence tagged and so likely not moved. Anyways there are a few shot angles and you can see that a crosswalk was probably a few dozen feet away. The accident happened in the lane adjacent to the curb. The bicycle the lady was walking was thrown back up on the sidewalk and is less than ten feet away. The damage to the SUV is pretty minimal with some broken plastic and a bent hood. It looks to me like the lady stepped off the curb and was hit immediately. Given how close the bike is to the stopped vehicle I think that the impact was pretty low speed and I wouldn't be surprised if it was going under the speed limit. That said any impact with a moving vehicle is gonna be rough on the human and there isn't any soft places to fall down in the road.
My bet is on the car seeing her and not being able to slow down rapidly enough to avoid the fatality. The speed limit was above 40 MPH which means a stopping distance of 80 feet or more. CNN has a video that has a few frames showing the scene and you can see the AV-SUV with it's front banged up a bit. The bicycle the woman was walking is on the sidewalk less than 10 feet away. The AV-SUV is also in the lane closest to the curb. So it looks like the accident was actually pretty low speed and happened almost the moment the lady stepped off the curb. I expect the lady died because getting hit by a vehicle even moving slowly is going to throw you to the pavement pretty hard.
The normal claim has been that AV's simply need to be better than the average driver. although that might be a frighteningly low bar as the average driver doesn't seem to be capable of maintaining a lane, keep a consistent speed, use signal lights, abide by speed limits, actually stop at stop signs and red lights, park within several feet of a curb, or put down their cellphone.
If this guy was making his own explosives for a bomb he was deliberately going about it the hard way. You can buy materials to make effective diy bombs at practically any grocery store. If you want to go the extra mile you can buy gun powder by the pound and make some pipe bombs that are relatively safe to produce, handle, and time.
Hell I remember when an idiot at my middle school thought it would be funny to screw a lid onto a bottle of water after dropping in a few bits of dry ice and leave it at the back of the room when the bell rang. Luckily the teacher spotted it before the kids had even made it out the door and got the lid off before it built up enough pressure to blow.
It isn't the laws and regulations that provide most of the safety that we enjoy from violence these days. It is the simple fact that most people aren't murderous psychopaths. We have psychopaths aplenty but luckily the vast majority of them seem to be able to find better ways to get ahead than murder. The tools or weapons someone might need to wreak havoc are all around us and readily available despite plenty of nanny state rule making.
My Father and some of his buddies did a fair bit of chemistry experimentation when they were teenagers. They called it quits when one of them nearly blew his hand off. He didn't clean up everything one night and put it off till later. The next day when he slid a beaker across a counter top, it exploded. At the time the best the surgeons could manage was to save his hand by turning it into a flipper.
From what I understand the big concern about plastic in the food chain isn't that it is toxic on its own. The danger is that toxins that we do worry about like heavy metals can stick to the bits of plastic. When those bits are consumed by animals they frequently aren't expelled through natural processes, which ends up concentrating those toxins. When that animal is in turn consumed by another bigger animal the cycle repeats. Eventually you end up with animals at the top of the food chain containing much higher levels of those toxins than they would otherwise have, which puts people at risk if we then consume too much of them.
So far as the plastic in our water bottles go, I don't think it's likely to be directly harmful. That plastic hasn't been floating around where it's likely to collect toxins. The plastic could possibly get broken down into harmful chemicals by our bodies but I find that to be unlikely. The biggest direct danger might be the particles being absorbed and not removed at the same rate by our natural processes. In which case, the plastic might serve to help retain toxins in our bodies, although those toxins have to get there in the first place.
I'm not sure about abortion being most common among the poor. I know when I went to school the abortion clinic in the rich area that had 10% of the population did a lot more business than the clinics in the area. Maybe it just meant everyone preferred that clinic regardless of where they lived. I expect though that it had a lot more to do with who could afford to get an abortion.
I think the violence problem is baked into a culture more deeply than just how our schools work. The US is very culturally diverse and even in areas that would appear to be fairly homogeneous there is a lot of internal tribalism going on. Where I work conversations can get pretty heated over dumb things like football, and you sure as hell don't want to bring up politics or religion. And that's among a smallish group of a couple dozen people that work together all day every day. Our culture is a huge melting pot but unfortunately many people aren't interested in actually letting other cultures meld with theirs.
A few years back I was buying a new vehicle. It was supposed to come with a free trial subscription to one of those satellite radio companies. Being an adult and knowing how free trials work, I refused to complete the purchase until they had disabled that crap.
I don't know that having uniforms really helps all that much. Sure it can cut out people dressing outside of the norms to some degree. However it doesn't do anything about some people filling out a uniform in much more appealing ways than others, or some people finding something arousing about practically anything. You could pretty rapidly end up at the point that everyone is wearing a burka, and I'd bet even then you'd still have some part of the group acting like lecherous idiots. The problem is in people having wildly different social expectations. The more diverse your group of people the broader the risk of those differences causing strife. Sometimes those differences will be clearly expected and others will be quite surprising. The trouble usually starts though when people refuse to act like adults and won't try to control their own behavior once they know that it causes someone else undo stress.
A decade or so ago I had the questionable pleasure of driving Great Wall pickup trucks for a few months in the Mid East. I don't know what they cost but they wore out like they were intended to be disposable. The drive train seemed to hold up alright but everything else was falling apart after three months. Even the tuning and volume knobs on the radios went bad.
The story that I heard, was that Toyota had built a factory in China to build these light pickup trucks. The Chinese partner company, Great Wall, ended up breaking off the agreement with Toyota once the factory was all setup and re-branded everything to their logo. Then started pumping out trucks made with the cheapest materials possible. I remember the fenders being so thing and flexible you could probably cut them with a cheap can opener.
The FBI was aware of such a threat(s) existing. They however did not necessarily have knowledge about where any of their suspects were located within the USA. The CIA knew of several terrorists that were entering the USA and refused to notify the FBI because they thought any attack from them would be committed elsewhere. It's entirely possible that the FBI would have ignored any such notification, as they did with the douche bag in Florida, but we'll never know because the CIA was playing politics.
Dirty bombs aren't available to the general public because of restrictions on radio active material. Essentially the danger of accidents in allowing the general public to have ready access to the kind of radioactive material that would be useful for a dirty bomb probably outweighs the danger of anyone actually bothering to build such a bomb. The same isn't true for guns where accidents account for only a few percent of deaths.
I'm in favor of actually funding and enforcing the laws we already have. If that doesn't see an improvement then we should seek other regulations,
Statistically speaking the casualties from mass shootings, at least at current levels in the USA, just aren't really worth combating specifically. But that is what everyone seems to focus on every time we have a mass shooting. Mass shootings account for something like 1% of gun violence victims. We should be focusing on the 99%, any reduction we manage there will likely make for a bigger difference in real outcomes.
From what I remember the FBI wasn't watching the 9/11 terrorists, and that was the problem. The CIA had a team that was doing that work while the terrorists where outside of the USA. When some of the terrorists traveled to the USA an FBI agent that was working with the CIA team tried to bring in the FBI. The CIA leadership over that team threatened the FBI agent into silence because they were afraid of losing credit for eventually catching the terrorists in the act. Of course that didn't work out so well because unbeknownst to the CIA the terrorist intended to carry out an attack within the USA.
So, yes, 9/11 was allowed to happen because of the incompetence of our federal agencies. In this case though it wasn't the FBI in particular that is at fault, other than the blame they all share for being territorial glory hogs.
Whenever I hear people talking about sheltering their kids and trying to keep them safe from adult content I have to correct them. I was raised in a pretty conservative and religious family. I attended a private Montessori school run by Nuns for K through 3rd grade. We didn't even have cable TV for the discovery channel. But I sure as hell knew what a plethora of lewd jokes meant by the time I was in 2nd grade and a buddy had a "girlfriend". I didn't understand all of it and how it all worked, but I certainly knew what went where and what the result was likely to be. What kids usually don't understand and reasonably have a hard time comprehending is the huge responsibilities that come with sex. Hell, I know plenty of adults that seemingly can't grasp that and take proper precautions.
A big problem in my mind is what country to abscond to with so much cash? You need to first get the money there, cash gets pretty heavy and bulky when you start talking about hundreds of thousands and up. Then you need to get the money into a bank that isn't going to care where it came from. In a lot of countries even getting that money into a bank isn't going to keep it safe, let alone your person. Much of Central and South America is the territory of cartels that have diversified into kidnapping, for example.
In many respects it's just easier and safer to work a job, or series of jobs, for 40 years. Save 10-20% of your earnings in a market indexed retirement fund and you'll probably be safe from eating dog food in your old age. At least that is what I keep telling myself.
The center of the problem is that in many areas we are likely to always have a monopoly problem simply because of the physical infrastructure required. The cost of building and maintaining all of that infrastructure is not trivial. Even when municipalities own the poles there is frequently laws in place that heavily shield the incumbent from any upstarts. Ultimately the only good lasting solution I can see is to have the physical infrastructure, particularly last mile, be run as a utility. Then let any ISP that wants to service the area lease capacity.
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The Black Panthers were supporters of the 2nd Amendment and utilized that right to protect their communities from police oppression. They would fill one or more cars with visibly armed members and then follow Police Patrol vehicles around town. They'd get out of the car and stand around at a safe distance whenever the Police had an interaction with a member of the community. The Police were still perfectly able to engage in performing their job duties, but didn't dare try abusing their position with the Black Panthers keeping a close eye on them. From my understanding this action by the Black Panthers was actually what precipitated a lot of the anti open carry and 2nd Amendment efforts by various localities, in our modern era.
Given that Waymo has cars that go 5600 miles on average between human interventions, and Uber was only averaging 13, I'd say your being alarmist. If I had a Waymo car I could in theory get away with intervening less than twice a year on average. What all of this has shown is that Uber isn't competent or responsible enough to be working in this field.
I never had all that many CD's, maybe 50 - 60. But even I've found a few here and there in the last couple years that won't play anymore in a standard CD player. The disks are in good shape, very few if any scratches, I'll have to try them on my computer and see if I can get anything out of them. They're coming up on twenty years old and been stored along with all my other discs that still play.
If there ever was another civil war in this country it would very likely not end up being the US military vs amateur hour red neck militias. The standing military is not some homogeneous organization, it is made up of millions of individuals who run practically the same gamut as the general public in so far as political leanings go. Whatever % of the population decides to take up arms against the status quo you could almost bet on getting a very similar % of active duty personnel absconding to, quite likely taking equipment with them. Then you have a very large number of veterans, who could throw in on either side, that obviously have military experience albeit possibly out of date.
Privately owned firearms by and large are going to be less powerful on average compared to whatever the military has, but would likely be more than compensated by sheer numbers. Some military weapons you mention would be worthless or nearly so in a civil war, the navy and ballistic missiles come to mind.
The biggest problem though in the event of a civil war, that doesn't break out along clear geographic lines, is infrastructure. Military bases are spread all around the country and often surrounded by civilian populations which support them. While there is usually some base housing it is not enough to actually house all of the enlisted and officers, let alone the civilian work force. So for the most part employees of the DoD, and their loved ones, live outside of the base perimeter.
Even supposing you could get all your people onto the base, you then have to worry about actually defending a perimeter, and I don't think I've ever seen a US military base in the CONUS that was laid out with defensive fighting positioning in mind. If you could spare the man power to man a perimeter you have to then arm and supply those positions, and again most places I've seen don't keep that many weapons on hand. Sure there is an armory for the policing force, plus some weapons for training purposes at the range, and you probably have a logistics group which keeps enough weapons to send out on deployments. But I really doubt there are enough weapons and ammunition on hand at each base to mount a sustained defensive posture. The military in general probably doesn't have enough small arms and ammunition to supply even half of it's personnel.
Then you have to worry about all of the other stuff you need to run the base properly, namely utilities. Sure individual facilities on bases will have backup supplies for power, fuel, water, and food but that is almost exclusively going to be limited to planned usage during natural disasters, intended to support minimum manning over a short duration. Those kinds of setups will not support full manning, plus dependents, for prolonged periods.
When the US military deploys to fight somewhere else it sets up bases that are planned for defense. They get hardened perimeters that are manned. Supplies are mostly shipped in from elsewhere. And all of the required personnel live within those defenses. That only works because the US can pour resources into supporting the relatively tiny number of people deployed to fight, from a peaceful first world nation.
A civil war in the US today wouldn't play out like that unless it was a largely geographic split. Regardless, I wouldn't expect a revolution to work in the long run unless it had a significant majority of the public behind it. It doesn't take a winning revolution to screw the whole country over for decades to come though. The threat of a civil war, even if it's not likely to succeed, is important in my mind because it can keep people working longer and harder to find a non-violent compromise that works rather than risk decades of misery and strife.
Most people don't give a rats ass about the sound quality. People have been listening to low bit rate MP3's for decades now. Most people are going to care about a few things when listening to music online; cost, convenience, and availability.
The cost for listening on youtube is free, or as close as you're likely to ever get.
The convenience is pretty good. When you find a video/song you like, it takes two clicks to add it to a playlist. There is a robust search feature to help you find anything you could ever want. And youtube is always keeping track of what you've accessed recently and recommending more stuff you might like.
Everything is on youtube at some point. Only the most aggressively protected stuff is going to be kept off the site for long. As soon as the lawyers stop submitting take down notices whatever it is will likely pop right up.
I'm pretty sure that the google cars do this. I remember an article talking about google cars getting stuck at 4 way stop signs waiting for the other vehicles to actually stop before proceeding. The other cars weren't coming to a complete stop and so the google car just sat there patiently waiting to go.
My Father served as a Medic in Vietnam and only ever told us kids the funny stories regarding his time there. Then was outraged when my brother invited a Marine Recruiter over for dinner one night, still didn't bother giving voice to his misgivings. Myself and my brother both ended up enlisting, and came out of it pretty well with no combat time. We only learned after the fact that he was terrified the whole time that we'd end up dead on foreign soil fighting for some commercial interest.
My Dad has never been accused of being a good communicator. I plan to do better with my kids, though I luckily don't have any personal war time horror stories to use.
I don't know what the training is like these days. However I know Green Beret training used to include and entire squad emptying their magazines on full auto as rapidly as possible in the event of an ambush. Apparently doing that elicits a strong impulse in your enemy, the ambusher, to seek cover. Then you do a rapid reload and start looking for actual targets to pick off with semi-auto or burst fire. An M16 on full auto will empty a 30 round magazine in under 3 seconds, so yeah using full auto outside of very specific situations is just silly.
This has been my experience with every place I've ever worked that didn't aggressively discourage people talking about their salary. Even in the military where there was endless dick measuring on every conceivable topic on a constant basis people didn't seem to have an issue with the pay system and whether or not it was fair.
CNN has a video up showing the scene in the dark, presumably relatively soon after the accident. Everything is evidence tagged and so likely not moved. Anyways there are a few shot angles and you can see that a crosswalk was probably a few dozen feet away. The accident happened in the lane adjacent to the curb. The bicycle the lady was walking was thrown back up on the sidewalk and is less than ten feet away. The damage to the SUV is pretty minimal with some broken plastic and a bent hood. It looks to me like the lady stepped off the curb and was hit immediately. Given how close the bike is to the stopped vehicle I think that the impact was pretty low speed and I wouldn't be surprised if it was going under the speed limit. That said any impact with a moving vehicle is gonna be rough on the human and there isn't any soft places to fall down in the road.
My bet is on the car seeing her and not being able to slow down rapidly enough to avoid the fatality. The speed limit was above 40 MPH which means a stopping distance of 80 feet or more. CNN has a video that has a few frames showing the scene and you can see the AV-SUV with it's front banged up a bit. The bicycle the woman was walking is on the sidewalk less than 10 feet away. The AV-SUV is also in the lane closest to the curb. So it looks like the accident was actually pretty low speed and happened almost the moment the lady stepped off the curb. I expect the lady died because getting hit by a vehicle even moving slowly is going to throw you to the pavement pretty hard.
The normal claim has been that AV's simply need to be better than the average driver. although that might be a frighteningly low bar as the average driver doesn't seem to be capable of maintaining a lane, keep a consistent speed, use signal lights, abide by speed limits, actually stop at stop signs and red lights, park within several feet of a curb, or put down their cellphone.
If this guy was making his own explosives for a bomb he was deliberately going about it the hard way. You can buy materials to make effective diy bombs at practically any grocery store. If you want to go the extra mile you can buy gun powder by the pound and make some pipe bombs that are relatively safe to produce, handle, and time.
Hell I remember when an idiot at my middle school thought it would be funny to screw a lid onto a bottle of water after dropping in a few bits of dry ice and leave it at the back of the room when the bell rang. Luckily the teacher spotted it before the kids had even made it out the door and got the lid off before it built up enough pressure to blow.
It isn't the laws and regulations that provide most of the safety that we enjoy from violence these days. It is the simple fact that most people aren't murderous psychopaths. We have psychopaths aplenty but luckily the vast majority of them seem to be able to find better ways to get ahead than murder. The tools or weapons someone might need to wreak havoc are all around us and readily available despite plenty of nanny state rule making.
My Father and some of his buddies did a fair bit of chemistry experimentation when they were teenagers. They called it quits when one of them nearly blew his hand off. He didn't clean up everything one night and put it off till later. The next day when he slid a beaker across a counter top, it exploded. At the time the best the surgeons could manage was to save his hand by turning it into a flipper.
From what I understand the big concern about plastic in the food chain isn't that it is toxic on its own. The danger is that toxins that we do worry about like heavy metals can stick to the bits of plastic. When those bits are consumed by animals they frequently aren't expelled through natural processes, which ends up concentrating those toxins. When that animal is in turn consumed by another bigger animal the cycle repeats. Eventually you end up with animals at the top of the food chain containing much higher levels of those toxins than they would otherwise have, which puts people at risk if we then consume too much of them.
So far as the plastic in our water bottles go, I don't think it's likely to be directly harmful. That plastic hasn't been floating around where it's likely to collect toxins. The plastic could possibly get broken down into harmful chemicals by our bodies but I find that to be unlikely. The biggest direct danger might be the particles being absorbed and not removed at the same rate by our natural processes. In which case, the plastic might serve to help retain toxins in our bodies, although those toxins have to get there in the first place.
I'm not sure about abortion being most common among the poor. I know when I went to school the abortion clinic in the rich area that had 10% of the population did a lot more business than the clinics in the area. Maybe it just meant everyone preferred that clinic regardless of where they lived. I expect though that it had a lot more to do with who could afford to get an abortion.
I think the violence problem is baked into a culture more deeply than just how our schools work. The US is very culturally diverse and even in areas that would appear to be fairly homogeneous there is a lot of internal tribalism going on. Where I work conversations can get pretty heated over dumb things like football, and you sure as hell don't want to bring up politics or religion. And that's among a smallish group of a couple dozen people that work together all day every day. Our culture is a huge melting pot but unfortunately many people aren't interested in actually letting other cultures meld with theirs.
A few years back I was buying a new vehicle. It was supposed to come with a free trial subscription to one of those satellite radio companies. Being an adult and knowing how free trials work, I refused to complete the purchase until they had disabled that crap.
I don't know that having uniforms really helps all that much. Sure it can cut out people dressing outside of the norms to some degree. However it doesn't do anything about some people filling out a uniform in much more appealing ways than others, or some people finding something arousing about practically anything. You could pretty rapidly end up at the point that everyone is wearing a burka, and I'd bet even then you'd still have some part of the group acting like lecherous idiots. The problem is in people having wildly different social expectations. The more diverse your group of people the broader the risk of those differences causing strife. Sometimes those differences will be clearly expected and others will be quite surprising. The trouble usually starts though when people refuse to act like adults and won't try to control their own behavior once they know that it causes someone else undo stress.
A decade or so ago I had the questionable pleasure of driving Great Wall pickup trucks for a few months in the Mid East. I don't know what they cost but they wore out like they were intended to be disposable. The drive train seemed to hold up alright but everything else was falling apart after three months. Even the tuning and volume knobs on the radios went bad.
The story that I heard, was that Toyota had built a factory in China to build these light pickup trucks. The Chinese partner company, Great Wall, ended up breaking off the agreement with Toyota once the factory was all setup and re-branded everything to their logo. Then started pumping out trucks made with the cheapest materials possible. I remember the fenders being so thing and flexible you could probably cut them with a cheap can opener.
Or not:
http://www.newsweek.com/2015/0...
The FBI was aware of such a threat(s) existing. They however did not necessarily have knowledge about where any of their suspects were located within the USA. The CIA knew of several terrorists that were entering the USA and refused to notify the FBI because they thought any attack from them would be committed elsewhere. It's entirely possible that the FBI would have ignored any such notification, as they did with the douche bag in Florida, but we'll never know because the CIA was playing politics.
Dirty bombs aren't available to the general public because of restrictions on radio active material. Essentially the danger of accidents in allowing the general public to have ready access to the kind of radioactive material that would be useful for a dirty bomb probably outweighs the danger of anyone actually bothering to build such a bomb. The same isn't true for guns where accidents account for only a few percent of deaths.
I'm in favor of actually funding and enforcing the laws we already have. If that doesn't see an improvement then we should seek other regulations,
Statistically speaking the casualties from mass shootings, at least at current levels in the USA, just aren't really worth combating specifically. But that is what everyone seems to focus on every time we have a mass shooting. Mass shootings account for something like 1% of gun violence victims. We should be focusing on the 99%, any reduction we manage there will likely make for a bigger difference in real outcomes.
From what I remember the FBI wasn't watching the 9/11 terrorists, and that was the problem. The CIA had a team that was doing that work while the terrorists where outside of the USA. When some of the terrorists traveled to the USA an FBI agent that was working with the CIA team tried to bring in the FBI. The CIA leadership over that team threatened the FBI agent into silence because they were afraid of losing credit for eventually catching the terrorists in the act. Of course that didn't work out so well because unbeknownst to the CIA the terrorist intended to carry out an attack within the USA.
So, yes, 9/11 was allowed to happen because of the incompetence of our federal agencies. In this case though it wasn't the FBI in particular that is at fault, other than the blame they all share for being territorial glory hogs.
Here, here!
Whenever I hear people talking about sheltering their kids and trying to keep them safe from adult content I have to correct them. I was raised in a pretty conservative and religious family. I attended a private Montessori school run by Nuns for K through 3rd grade. We didn't even have cable TV for the discovery channel. But I sure as hell knew what a plethora of lewd jokes meant by the time I was in 2nd grade and a buddy had a "girlfriend". I didn't understand all of it and how it all worked, but I certainly knew what went where and what the result was likely to be. What kids usually don't understand and reasonably have a hard time comprehending is the huge responsibilities that come with sex. Hell, I know plenty of adults that seemingly can't grasp that and take proper precautions.
A big problem in my mind is what country to abscond to with so much cash? You need to first get the money there, cash gets pretty heavy and bulky when you start talking about hundreds of thousands and up. Then you need to get the money into a bank that isn't going to care where it came from. In a lot of countries even getting that money into a bank isn't going to keep it safe, let alone your person. Much of Central and South America is the territory of cartels that have diversified into kidnapping, for example.
In many respects it's just easier and safer to work a job, or series of jobs, for 40 years. Save 10-20% of your earnings in a market indexed retirement fund and you'll probably be safe from eating dog food in your old age. At least that is what I keep telling myself.
The center of the problem is that in many areas we are likely to always have a monopoly problem simply because of the physical infrastructure required. The cost of building and maintaining all of that infrastructure is not trivial. Even when municipalities own the poles there is frequently laws in place that heavily shield the incumbent from any upstarts. Ultimately the only good lasting solution I can see is to have the physical infrastructure, particularly last mile, be run as a utility. Then let any ISP that wants to service the area lease capacity.