Is the entire weight loss supplement market really just an attempt to re-create the magic of the good old days of Dexedrine for weight loss? Just like "space" and all the synthetic fake marijuana is an attempt to get around legal prohibition of marijuana?
I wonder if we'd be better off just selling Dexedrine for weight loss. This way people would at least be taking a well-known substance with well-known risks and more or less predictable results, versus god knows what ("now with Melamine!") synthetics from China which are only "better for you" than Dexedrine because we know why Dexedrine can be bad for you.
And of course the entire "Spice" market wouldn't exist at all, along with the similar markets for kratom and other exotic-but-not-quite-regulated-out-of-existence substances designed to provide hallucinogenic experiences, if plain old marijuana and mushrooms/peyote/LSD were legal.
It's both interesting and sad that coding as a career path is a rare thing these days. Coding is seen as an entry level job, where coders will inevitably at some point move on to software design / architecture or management, instead of being given more responsibilities in management, strategy, coaching or design while still practising and improving on their coding skills. Where I work I see few to none top coders who are still actively coding or even just coaching; a "senior coder" is someone with 5 years experience. These then get promoted, the junior coders are left to fend for themselves, while management blames the resulting mess on "lack of process"
Prestige and process.
The coders are plebes who get shit pay, work in shitty cubicles and get treated like they were expendable.
System designers/architects and management are geniuses who get better pay, better offices and blowjobs.
It's like every other IT deal. Nobody wants to be on the help desk because you're treated like a subhuman moron and paid like it, too, while the "network engineer" gets all the perks.
Were they that bad? I think at the time, everybody knew you paid ridiculous brokerage fees, but people were also less likely to hold mutual funds where the bastards day-traded in the fund and loaded in hidden fees that dragged down the yield.
So if you bought and held stocks, you didn't get ass fucked except when you executed a trade.
Nowadays the trades are cheap, but you're reamed so bad with fees that unless the fund or stock appreciates by 20%, your yield is negative.
The team leader gets his general, not specific, verbal instructions from some guy in a tent in the middle of some desert wasteland. He goes back to Europe and recuits a half dozen guys.
They all manage to plan it secretly, don't tell anybody, and nobody gets busted doing something stupid, like getting pulled over with AK-47s and Semtex in the back seat.
How the fuck do you stop that with electronic surveillance?
The only thing that would seem to even put a dent in that kind of operation is going full-on totalitarianism, ie, sending in the jackboots to every house with "Mohammed" on the nameplate and turning the place upside down, hemming them into their own neighborhoods and not letting them out without checkpoints and searches.
I think everyone sees the drawbacks to such an approach. Even the people who manage to pull it off halfway decent STILL have problems and have all the other problems that go alone with such a system. The Israelis aren't 100% effective, even the goddamn Chinese can't seem to squeeze the Uighurs tight enough to shut that problem down and their playbook has rules like "if anyone objects, shoot them in the head and ship everyone they know to a gulag".
About the only country that makes it work is North Korea, and that just might be because we don't know what doesn't work there.
But that's kind of my whole argument, *most* on-screen activities aren't more efficient with touch and are only made more awkward with clumsy and complex multitouch "gestures".
I'm sure the pencil is great, most people who do actual art with a computer have a graphics tablet for this reason. But art is only a small percentage of the things people do with computers.
If graphics tablets were viable replacements for mice, everybody would have one.
The only people who do have them are people who need a pen(cil) like interface for that one specific use case -- drawing, painting, etc.
It's STILL less useful than a mouse for the 99% of other things you would use a mouse for, and in some ways WORSE than plain touch because now not only do you have to touch the screen, you have to pick up the pencil and touch the screen with it. At least hand-to-mouse doesn't involve grabbing and lifting the mouse or touching the screen.
Not as far as I can tell. I thought when they were more or less pitching it as a *cough* Pro *cough* tablet they might have finally given in on BT mouse support, at least for the Pro (which it seems would be a very Apple thing to do).
I'm guessing they're firmly wed to the notion of a touch only user interface. What always rankles me about this is that they could allow pairing of the device but not integrate it so that it can be used with system touch UI functionality and create a separate UI API for mice so that basically it would only work with apps that specifically code for mouse support.
This would protect the ideological purity of the normal touch UI -- ie, prevent devs from coding nominally touch app UIs that were dependent on mice -- but still allow devs to code in mouse support for their specific UI as an extension if they thought it added value (editors, graphics, RDP, whatever).
Aren't they already? Even before the iPad became a thing, "non-serious" laptops like netbooks were a thing and the industry has already demonstrated a willingness and ability to produce the least serious and cheap conventional laptop it could, most of which are cheaper than iPads now.
"Serious" computers have more or less always been expensive, at least for whatever definition of "serious" might include some use that might remotely be considered "business" use that isn't mass produced for consumer use.
I'm always reminded of this whenever I decide to build a new desktop and think I'll finally avoid the mistake of trying to use a conventional desktop board, then I realize that the Supermicro case that would be perfect is like $600 and the motherboard that will support more RAM than whatever the desktop chipsets will support is also some multiple of the best suited desktop board I can find.
Which for me is a big disappointment. I'd already have an iPad Pro if it could pair a Bluetooth mouse to go with the bluetooth keyboard.
The iPad is fine for tablety kind of things, like couch surfing, etc.
I can already get a fair amount of more serious work done with a Bluetooth keyboard, but the lack of a mouse makes it just too clunky to get anything done. There's just too many weird, hard-to-remember touch swipes and combinations to be efficient.
When my iPad 3 finally stops being useful at all (not there yet, but I can see it..), I'll probably just end up with some kind of ultrabook, which will be less satisfying as a tablet but will provide the mouse option.
The only logical reason is that the combination of the value of the targets and their confidence in what they're hitting was lower than the risk of hitting innocent bystanders and fanning the flames of war. But now they've clearly made a different decision.
Fuck this innocent bystander idea. Anybody in Raqqah now is either ISIS or a collaborator.
And fuck this fanning the flames of war. I don't want them pissed off, I want them *terrified* of what Western military power is capable of.
I want B-52 strikes carpet bombing Raqqah. I want anyone who survives or manages to escape still waking up in a cold sweat 10 years from now every time they hear a low rumble for fear that the B52s are back.
I don't think the French military is wholly incapable, just not capable of ground-based force projection. When the Foreign Legion was tasked to Mali a year or two ago, they relied on US C-130s to insert their troops.
It's one thing to have 2-3 brigades of ground troops for sorting out the occasional coup d'etat in a former colony, it's quite another to be able to take and hold thousands of square miles of territory against seasoned fighters in dug in positions.
To me at least, it's looking increasingly like it might be necessary to occupy northern Iraq and Syria. Stage 1 would most likely have to be a large ground offensive more akin to WW II than any of the politically popular "counter-insurgency" campaigns. I don't think the French military is capable of such a campaign in the short term.
This makes complete sense. It's kind of a steganography, putting their data in where it can't be separated out easily or flagged because it blends in with the rest of it.
It's truly hard to understand the motives of ISIS by any rational, realpolitik kinds of analysis.
The attacks on Paris make rational sense in that they are probably one of the weaker world powers. While stronger than most, they don't have the kind of unilateral military reach and power of the US or Russia. France couldn't invade any part of the Middle East on its own for all kinds of practical reasons involving troop levels, troop transport and material assets. And politically they aren't aligned strictly with the US in terms of "war on terror" policy and seem less likely to react militarily (the US got hit on 9/11 and we invaded and occupied two countries, and still occupy one of them).
Ideologically, France has been one of the most militant in opposing Islamic cultural traditions and was military involved in pushing back ISIS affiliates in North Africa.
But Russia? It's arguable that they're more dangerous as an adversary now than when they were the Soviet Union, and the track record in Chechnya indicates they're not willing to abide by the Marquis of Queensbury rules.
I think ISIS is gambling that the existential risk of a no-holds-barred ground campaign isn't in the cards, but I think these direct attacks on adversaries capable of such a campaign really increase. If the US and Russia can sort out their issues and the future of Assad, I think this risk becomes a lot more of a gamble.
I asked a Viet Nam combat veteran about that, and he said a couple of things.
One, you didn't want to just randomly pick up AKs as the Viet Cong were notorious for booby-trapping items. Where it was obvious the gun wasn't booby trapped (like the guy was running at me with it and I shot him dead and there was no way he could have been booby trapped), some guys may have picked one up as a toy or a prize, but on long patrols it was just dead weight and a lot of the times COs didn't want a bunch of random weapons, so they were hard to retain.
Two, the AK makes a unique sound -- dispersed units in close combat would often fire at the source of an AK sound. So you kind of took your life into your own hands if you couldn't be easily seen.
Three, Uncle Sam didn't supply 7.62x39 ammo. So obtaining sufficient ammo would have been tough.
Overall, it was just not worth it to bother with an AK. Not always easy to come by, discouraged by command, dangerous to use and hard to keep supplied with ammo.
Supposedly Green Berets or other special forces units operating behind enemy lines WOULD sometimes use them in a semi-official way. It threw off the enemy because it sounded like *their* rifles, ammo could be scrounged from the enemy and it was a reliable weapon in harsh field conditions.
When I replaced the trigger group on my AR with a JP group, the fitting process instructions were pretty clear that if you removed too much material it would turn into a machine gun. "Disassemble it and send the parts back to us and we will replace it, otherwise you have an illegal machine gun."
You're confused, there is no easy access to full auto weapons here.
And you're leaping to conclusions. I'm not making a gun control argument, just an observation that in say, Paris, being in possession of any firearm is probably grounds for jailing and interrogation, where in the US potential bad actors with a legal right to possess a firearm wouldn't get any scrutiny, making organizing, training and transporting weapons that much easier for any groups with bad intentions.
And as for "no easy access to full auto weapons", you can turn an AR into a full auto gun in about 5 minutes by filing the disconnector, and I'm sure similar hacks can be done with other self-loading rifles. It's not a very *good* full auto weapon, but if your goal is just firing on crowds it's probably serviceable.
Nor does "no easy access" mean much if you've got a motivated, organized group bent on doing harm. Just like criminals who can't pass the instant background check, these people would use black markets to obtain weapons.
It remains unclear to me whether American gun ownership, carry laws, etc, carry much weight with groups who would carry out such an attack. If your goal is to just spray bullets into a crowd at a mall, you'd probably achieve it before anyone could do anything about it. Most of these people have decided they're willing to meet their maker to begin with, so they're not likely to care that someone will shoot back sooner rather than later.
These "chaos" attacks where a handful of attackers with light infantry weapons (IIRC, the Kenya mall attackers had an RPK or some kind of light machine gun) are proving very effective as terrorist attacks.
Where will it happen next? The US?
Frankly, I'm kind of surprised it hasn't happened in the US -- between vulnerable infrastructure, easy freedom of movement and even relatively easy access to guns, I'm really surprised that one of these kinds of attacks hasn't happened.
I would imagine beyond the sheer terror aspect, an attack during "Black Friday" might possibly cause a pretty serious disruption to the economy if an attack happened at a shopping mall. You could potentially scare away mall customers right when business wants them.
I live about 5 miles from a commercial airport and planes fly over all the time.
I'm curious how someone on the ground is able to aim at the windshield of the cockpit from the ground. It seems like geometry of shining a laser at a plane would be such that if you were reasonably close to a plane, the windshield wouldn't be line of sight to an observer on the ground.
Maybe if you were fairly close, at a higher elevation and the plane was taking off pretty much in your direction.
I can see how helicopters or other aircraft with more of a completely transparent nose would be vulnerable to ground observers shining lasers, but jetliners look to me like they have the cockpit windshield on the top half of the nose hemisphere.
ConEmu is a godsend. The configuration options are kind of intricate, but it's awesome to have a cmd/powershell window that acts like every other GUI terminal emulator (like putty) has since forever.
It runs portable, so if I do a consulting gig that involves a metric assload of powershell I can run ConEmu on the client systems without doing an install and just blow it away when I'm done.
I'm kind of puzzled at why when MS came out with PowerShell they stuck to the same crappy console window that cmd.exe used. You'd have thought they would have gained a lot more adoption momentum if there was a gee-whiz new terminal window that came with it.
levying steep taxes on the wealth of the dead actually makes a lot of sense. It's the least intrusive and disruptive to the working economy at large, far less than income or sales taxes.
I think this gets tricky. I would bet that a significant chunk of inheritable wealth is tied up in working investments now, whether they're small business assets, family farms or blue chip securities. Taxing them essentially liquidates those investments, negating the capital productivity (although arguably it could be thought of as just shifting the capital to public good investments instead of private investments).
But even more fundamentally, I think the result is a purer form of capitalism, because in a capitalistic economy wealth should flow along vectors of productivity, not lineage.
I agree with this, but mostly because there's a non-financial goal achieved -- limiting the growth of an aristocracy, which has important implications for democracy.
But if the goal is achieving capital productivity, I would argue for something like steep taxes on excess cash holdings by corporations. According to the Fed, non-financial corporations hold something in excess of 2 trillion in cash and cash-like liquid investments, which is probably closer to 3 trillion if you take into account financial corporation cash holdings used to guarantee liquidity for short-term cash-alternative investments. A high marginal tax rate on cash hoarding would force companies to find useful work for this cash, such as R&D investment.
Milton Friedman advocated for a form of basic income, the negative income tax.
I think such a systems sounds interesting. One argument in favor of it is that it would replace the complex bureaucracies collectively called "welfare" and the inefficiencies surrounding them (complex means tests, restrictive, inefficient markets in which benefits can be used, such as "low income" housing, food stamps, etc).
Most seem to posit a progressive tax on income that doesn't negate all earned income below the basic income level. Ie, if the basic income is $30k a year, and you had a job that paid $15k a year, you'd pay $7500k in income tax, in the form a of a reduction of the basic income subsidy. This forms an incentive to work -- even low paid work -- since even that work accounts for an increase in total income.
I think it's doubtful it could be accomplished without raising taxes on high earners and corporations, but there's plenty of people who would advocate that rates are too low now.
Almost as if you're trying to invision a world where everyone's doing drugs
Actually, I'm looking at a world where most people actually do drugs, they just don't consider caffeine, nicotine, or alcohol as drugs.
and thus inducing the idea that narcotics are fine.
Straw man. I never claimed narcotics (eg, opioids) "were fine" although since the 1950s every objective risk analysis of drugs puts drugs like alcohol and tobacco well above opioids in terms of actual harm potential. It must be true, though, as the best treatment for heroin addiction is methadone or buprenorphine maintenance. Many people take opioids for chronic pain management for years without issue since they lack the corrosive side effects of alcohol (liver damage, brain damage, metabolic dysfunction). The only real risk in some users is chronic dependency, but given the quantities consumed versus known rates of addiction, it's likely grossly overrated as a risk due to ignorance, politics, and relentless law enforcement pressure.
Were you high when you posted? Are you stil? And on what if I may ask? Is it legal? If so, can we get some? Should we get some?
Probably drinking coffee. Fine drug, improves alertness and cognitive focus. I believe its fairly easy to come by.
If you interfere with the right to counsel you are violating constitutional rights. Attorney-client privilege isn't a constitutionally enumerated right, but it is a legally defined privilege.
The threat to civil rights is that these companies who provide services to the prison system have an inherent bias to the prison system and law enforcement -- that's who their customer base is.
The idea that these companies can be entrusted to maintain the confidentiality of recorded attorney-client conversations is extremely doubtful due to their relationship with their clients. It seems extremely likely that they would be willing to expose privileged communications if pressured by law enforcement or prison officials.
On a side note, it's awfully tedious to be constantly reminded that "the constitution limits the rights of the federal government". Yeah, sure, but nearly every state constitution mirrors Federal constitutional rights, and if you're talking prisoners and their attorneys it seems obvious to me that constitutional rights are in play *somehow*.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, when you shop around for a doctor you then get shoved into your state's Doctor shopping database like you are an addict.
Is the entire weight loss supplement market really just an attempt to re-create the magic of the good old days of Dexedrine for weight loss? Just like "space" and all the synthetic fake marijuana is an attempt to get around legal prohibition of marijuana?
I wonder if we'd be better off just selling Dexedrine for weight loss. This way people would at least be taking a well-known substance with well-known risks and more or less predictable results, versus god knows what ("now with Melamine!") synthetics from China which are only "better for you" than Dexedrine because we know why Dexedrine can be bad for you.
And of course the entire "Spice" market wouldn't exist at all, along with the similar markets for kratom and other exotic-but-not-quite-regulated-out-of-existence substances designed to provide hallucinogenic experiences, if plain old marijuana and mushrooms/peyote/LSD were legal.
It's both interesting and sad that coding as a career path is a rare thing these days. Coding is seen as an entry level job, where coders will inevitably at some point move on to software design / architecture or management, instead of being given more responsibilities in management, strategy, coaching or design while still practising and improving on their coding skills. Where I work I see few to none top coders who are still actively coding or even just coaching; a "senior coder" is someone with 5 years experience. These then get promoted, the junior coders are left to fend for themselves, while management blames the resulting mess on "lack of process"
Prestige and process.
The coders are plebes who get shit pay, work in shitty cubicles and get treated like they were expendable.
System designers/architects and management are geniuses who get better pay, better offices and blowjobs.
It's like every other IT deal. Nobody wants to be on the help desk because you're treated like a subhuman moron and paid like it, too, while the "network engineer" gets all the perks.
Were they that bad? I think at the time, everybody knew you paid ridiculous brokerage fees, but people were also less likely to hold mutual funds where the bastards day-traded in the fund and loaded in hidden fees that dragged down the yield.
So if you bought and held stocks, you didn't get ass fucked except when you executed a trade.
Nowadays the trades are cheap, but you're reamed so bad with fees that unless the fund or stock appreciates by 20%, your yield is negative.
How is this shocking?
The team leader gets his general, not specific, verbal instructions from some guy in a tent in the middle of some desert wasteland. He goes back to Europe and recuits a half dozen guys.
They all manage to plan it secretly, don't tell anybody, and nobody gets busted doing something stupid, like getting pulled over with AK-47s and Semtex in the back seat.
How the fuck do you stop that with electronic surveillance?
The only thing that would seem to even put a dent in that kind of operation is going full-on totalitarianism, ie, sending in the jackboots to every house with "Mohammed" on the nameplate and turning the place upside down, hemming them into their own neighborhoods and not letting them out without checkpoints and searches.
I think everyone sees the drawbacks to such an approach. Even the people who manage to pull it off halfway decent STILL have problems and have all the other problems that go alone with such a system. The Israelis aren't 100% effective, even the goddamn Chinese can't seem to squeeze the Uighurs tight enough to shut that problem down and their playbook has rules like "if anyone objects, shoot them in the head and ship everyone they know to a gulag".
About the only country that makes it work is North Korea, and that just might be because we don't know what doesn't work there.
But that's kind of my whole argument, *most* on-screen activities aren't more efficient with touch and are only made more awkward with clumsy and complex multitouch "gestures".
I'm sure the pencil is great, most people who do actual art with a computer have a graphics tablet for this reason. But art is only a small percentage of the things people do with computers.
If graphics tablets were viable replacements for mice, everybody would have one.
The only people who do have them are people who need a pen(cil) like interface for that one specific use case -- drawing, painting, etc.
It's STILL less useful than a mouse for the 99% of other things you would use a mouse for, and in some ways WORSE than plain touch because now not only do you have to touch the screen, you have to pick up the pencil and touch the screen with it. At least hand-to-mouse doesn't involve grabbing and lifting the mouse or touching the screen.
Not as far as I can tell. I thought when they were more or less pitching it as a *cough* Pro *cough* tablet they might have finally given in on BT mouse support, at least for the Pro (which it seems would be a very Apple thing to do).
I'm guessing they're firmly wed to the notion of a touch only user interface. What always rankles me about this is that they could allow pairing of the device but not integrate it so that it can be used with system touch UI functionality and create a separate UI API for mice so that basically it would only work with apps that specifically code for mouse support.
This would protect the ideological purity of the normal touch UI -- ie, prevent devs from coding nominally touch app UIs that were dependent on mice -- but still allow devs to code in mouse support for their specific UI as an extension if they thought it added value (editors, graphics, RDP, whatever).
Aren't they already? Even before the iPad became a thing, "non-serious" laptops like netbooks were a thing and the industry has already demonstrated a willingness and ability to produce the least serious and cheap conventional laptop it could, most of which are cheaper than iPads now.
"Serious" computers have more or less always been expensive, at least for whatever definition of "serious" might include some use that might remotely be considered "business" use that isn't mass produced for consumer use.
I'm always reminded of this whenever I decide to build a new desktop and think I'll finally avoid the mistake of trying to use a conventional desktop board, then I realize that the Supermicro case that would be perfect is like $600 and the motherboard that will support more RAM than whatever the desktop chipsets will support is also some multiple of the best suited desktop board I can find.
Which for me is a big disappointment. I'd already have an iPad Pro if it could pair a Bluetooth mouse to go with the bluetooth keyboard.
The iPad is fine for tablety kind of things, like couch surfing, etc.
I can already get a fair amount of more serious work done with a Bluetooth keyboard, but the lack of a mouse makes it just too clunky to get anything done. There's just too many weird, hard-to-remember touch swipes and combinations to be efficient.
When my iPad 3 finally stops being useful at all (not there yet, but I can see it..), I'll probably just end up with some kind of ultrabook, which will be less satisfying as a tablet but will provide the mouse option.
The only logical reason is that the combination of the value of the targets and their confidence in what they're hitting was lower than the risk of hitting innocent bystanders and fanning the flames of war. But now they've clearly made a different decision.
Fuck this innocent bystander idea. Anybody in Raqqah now is either ISIS or a collaborator.
And fuck this fanning the flames of war. I don't want them pissed off, I want them *terrified* of what Western military power is capable of.
I want B-52 strikes carpet bombing Raqqah. I want anyone who survives or manages to escape still waking up in a cold sweat 10 years from now every time they hear a low rumble for fear that the B52s are back.
If only they would pair it with a desktop board that could take 256 GB RAM.
I find that I eat all my disk i/o and RAM way before my cpu.
I don't think the French military is wholly incapable, just not capable of ground-based force projection. When the Foreign Legion was tasked to Mali a year or two ago, they relied on US C-130s to insert their troops.
It's one thing to have 2-3 brigades of ground troops for sorting out the occasional coup d'etat in a former colony, it's quite another to be able to take and hold thousands of square miles of territory against seasoned fighters in dug in positions.
To me at least, it's looking increasingly like it might be necessary to occupy northern Iraq and Syria. Stage 1 would most likely have to be a large ground offensive more akin to WW II than any of the politically popular "counter-insurgency" campaigns. I don't think the French military is capable of such a campaign in the short term.
This makes complete sense. It's kind of a steganography, putting their data in where it can't be separated out easily or flagged because it blends in with the rest of it.
It's truly hard to understand the motives of ISIS by any rational, realpolitik kinds of analysis.
The attacks on Paris make rational sense in that they are probably one of the weaker world powers. While stronger than most, they don't have the kind of unilateral military reach and power of the US or Russia. France couldn't invade any part of the Middle East on its own for all kinds of practical reasons involving troop levels, troop transport and material assets. And politically they aren't aligned strictly with the US in terms of "war on terror" policy and seem less likely to react militarily (the US got hit on 9/11 and we invaded and occupied two countries, and still occupy one of them).
Ideologically, France has been one of the most militant in opposing Islamic cultural traditions and was military involved in pushing back ISIS affiliates in North Africa.
But Russia? It's arguable that they're more dangerous as an adversary now than when they were the Soviet Union, and the track record in Chechnya indicates they're not willing to abide by the Marquis of Queensbury rules.
I think ISIS is gambling that the existential risk of a no-holds-barred ground campaign isn't in the cards, but I think these direct attacks on adversaries capable of such a campaign really increase. If the US and Russia can sort out their issues and the future of Assad, I think this risk becomes a lot more of a gamble.
I asked a Viet Nam combat veteran about that, and he said a couple of things.
One, you didn't want to just randomly pick up AKs as the Viet Cong were notorious for booby-trapping items. Where it was obvious the gun wasn't booby trapped (like the guy was running at me with it and I shot him dead and there was no way he could have been booby trapped), some guys may have picked one up as a toy or a prize, but on long patrols it was just dead weight and a lot of the times COs didn't want a bunch of random weapons, so they were hard to retain.
Two, the AK makes a unique sound -- dispersed units in close combat would often fire at the source of an AK sound. So you kind of took your life into your own hands if you couldn't be easily seen.
Three, Uncle Sam didn't supply 7.62x39 ammo. So obtaining sufficient ammo would have been tough.
Overall, it was just not worth it to bother with an AK. Not always easy to come by, discouraged by command, dangerous to use and hard to keep supplied with ammo.
Supposedly Green Berets or other special forces units operating behind enemy lines WOULD sometimes use them in a semi-official way. It threw off the enemy because it sounded like *their* rifles, ammo could be scrounged from the enemy and it was a reliable weapon in harsh field conditions.
When I replaced the trigger group on my AR with a JP group, the fitting process instructions were pretty clear that if you removed too much material it would turn into a machine gun. "Disassemble it and send the parts back to us and we will replace it, otherwise you have an illegal machine gun."
You're confused, there is no easy access to full auto weapons here.
And you're leaping to conclusions. I'm not making a gun control argument, just an observation that in say, Paris, being in possession of any firearm is probably grounds for jailing and interrogation, where in the US potential bad actors with a legal right to possess a firearm wouldn't get any scrutiny, making organizing, training and transporting weapons that much easier for any groups with bad intentions.
And as for "no easy access to full auto weapons", you can turn an AR into a full auto gun in about 5 minutes by filing the disconnector, and I'm sure similar hacks can be done with other self-loading rifles. It's not a very *good* full auto weapon, but if your goal is just firing on crowds it's probably serviceable.
Nor does "no easy access" mean much if you've got a motivated, organized group bent on doing harm. Just like criminals who can't pass the instant background check, these people would use black markets to obtain weapons.
It remains unclear to me whether American gun ownership, carry laws, etc, carry much weight with groups who would carry out such an attack. If your goal is to just spray bullets into a crowd at a mall, you'd probably achieve it before anyone could do anything about it. Most of these people have decided they're willing to meet their maker to begin with, so they're not likely to care that someone will shoot back sooner rather than later.
These "chaos" attacks where a handful of attackers with light infantry weapons (IIRC, the Kenya mall attackers had an RPK or some kind of light machine gun) are proving very effective as terrorist attacks.
Where will it happen next? The US?
Frankly, I'm kind of surprised it hasn't happened in the US -- between vulnerable infrastructure, easy freedom of movement and even relatively easy access to guns, I'm really surprised that one of these kinds of attacks hasn't happened.
I would imagine beyond the sheer terror aspect, an attack during "Black Friday" might possibly cause a pretty serious disruption to the economy if an attack happened at a shopping mall. You could potentially scare away mall customers right when business wants them.
I live about 5 miles from a commercial airport and planes fly over all the time.
I'm curious how someone on the ground is able to aim at the windshield of the cockpit from the ground. It seems like geometry of shining a laser at a plane would be such that if you were reasonably close to a plane, the windshield wouldn't be line of sight to an observer on the ground.
Maybe if you were fairly close, at a higher elevation and the plane was taking off pretty much in your direction.
I can see how helicopters or other aircraft with more of a completely transparent nose would be vulnerable to ground observers shining lasers, but jetliners look to me like they have the cockpit windshield on the top half of the nose hemisphere.
What am I missing here?
ConEmu is a godsend. The configuration options are kind of intricate, but it's awesome to have a cmd/powershell window that acts like every other GUI terminal emulator (like putty) has since forever.
It runs portable, so if I do a consulting gig that involves a metric assload of powershell I can run ConEmu on the client systems without doing an install and just blow it away when I'm done.
I'm kind of puzzled at why when MS came out with PowerShell they stuck to the same crappy console window that cmd.exe used. You'd have thought they would have gained a lot more adoption momentum if there was a gee-whiz new terminal window that came with it.
levying steep taxes on the wealth of the dead actually makes a lot of sense. It's the least intrusive and disruptive to the working economy at large, far less than income or sales taxes.
I think this gets tricky. I would bet that a significant chunk of inheritable wealth is tied up in working investments now, whether they're small business assets, family farms or blue chip securities. Taxing them essentially liquidates those investments, negating the capital productivity (although arguably it could be thought of as just shifting the capital to public good investments instead of private investments).
But even more fundamentally, I think the result is a purer form of capitalism, because in a capitalistic economy wealth should flow along vectors of productivity, not lineage.
I agree with this, but mostly because there's a non-financial goal achieved -- limiting the growth of an aristocracy, which has important implications for democracy.
But if the goal is achieving capital productivity, I would argue for something like steep taxes on excess cash holdings by corporations. According to the Fed, non-financial corporations hold something in excess of 2 trillion in cash and cash-like liquid investments, which is probably closer to 3 trillion if you take into account financial corporation cash holdings used to guarantee liquidity for short-term cash-alternative investments. A high marginal tax rate on cash hoarding would force companies to find useful work for this cash, such as R&D investment.
Milton Friedman advocated for a form of basic income, the negative income tax.
I think such a systems sounds interesting. One argument in favor of it is that it would replace the complex bureaucracies collectively called "welfare" and the inefficiencies surrounding them (complex means tests, restrictive, inefficient markets in which benefits can be used, such as "low income" housing, food stamps, etc).
Most seem to posit a progressive tax on income that doesn't negate all earned income below the basic income level. Ie, if the basic income is $30k a year, and you had a job that paid $15k a year, you'd pay $7500k in income tax, in the form a of a reduction of the basic income subsidy. This forms an incentive to work -- even low paid work -- since even that work accounts for an increase in total income.
I think it's doubtful it could be accomplished without raising taxes on high earners and corporations, but there's plenty of people who would advocate that rates are too low now.
Almost as if you're trying to invision a world where everyone's doing drugs
Actually, I'm looking at a world where most people actually do drugs, they just don't consider caffeine, nicotine, or alcohol as drugs.
and thus inducing the idea that narcotics are fine.
Straw man. I never claimed narcotics (eg, opioids) "were fine" although since the 1950s every objective risk analysis of drugs puts drugs like alcohol and tobacco well above opioids in terms of actual harm potential. It must be true, though, as the best treatment for heroin addiction is methadone or buprenorphine maintenance. Many people take opioids for chronic pain management for years without issue since they lack the corrosive side effects of alcohol (liver damage, brain damage, metabolic dysfunction). The only real risk in some users is chronic dependency, but given the quantities consumed versus known rates of addiction, it's likely grossly overrated as a risk due to ignorance, politics, and relentless law enforcement pressure.
Were you high when you posted? Are you stil? And on what if I may ask? Is it legal? If so, can we get some? Should we get some?
Probably drinking coffee. Fine drug, improves alertness and cognitive focus. I believe its fairly easy to come by.
If you interfere with the right to counsel you are violating constitutional rights. Attorney-client privilege isn't a constitutionally enumerated right, but it is a legally defined privilege.
The threat to civil rights is that these companies who provide services to the prison system have an inherent bias to the prison system and law enforcement -- that's who their customer base is.
The idea that these companies can be entrusted to maintain the confidentiality of recorded attorney-client conversations is extremely doubtful due to their relationship with their clients. It seems extremely likely that they would be willing to expose privileged communications if pressured by law enforcement or prison officials.
On a side note, it's awfully tedious to be constantly reminded that "the constitution limits the rights of the federal government". Yeah, sure, but nearly every state constitution mirrors Federal constitutional rights, and if you're talking prisoners and their attorneys it seems obvious to me that constitutional rights are in play *somehow*.