If someone really, really wants to kill you, there's not much you can do about it other than going incognito and hoping they never find you.
A knife is actually quite good at ensuring a kill. Unlike a gun, it's very hard to miss with a knife. The relative quiet also makes it harder to notice by neighbors, giving the assailant more time to get it done. There's also no limit to the number of stabs like there are with bullets. And you can coat the blade in poison to ensure even a light wound would be fatal.
Of course, a bomb planted under your car or a truck bomb parked next to your driveway can be quite effective as well, and you can make explosives from household chemicals and home-made apparatuses. All you need is a bit of knowledge and patience.
A gun can also be manufactured with tools you might find in a shed, so they could make one that way. Or if regular guns are too boring, they could build a rail gun instead. Or if they prefer something more medieval, the crossbow is quite effective as well.
It's not possible to have your guard up at all times and it's not possible to ban all things which could be turned into a weapon (or even enforce such a ban). Given enough time and effort, eventually they will find a way to kill you.
Really damn high. Wood is a combustible and doesn't weaken or melt with heat. You just need to starve it from combustion ingredients or keep it below ignition temperature and you're sweet. A standard fireproofing membrane sprayed on top of wood suffice.
Do you have a source for any of that? I looked and the only thing I found other than advertisement pieces is this, which says lignin, the structural component of wood, starts breaking down at 250 C and is completely broken down when it reaches 500 C. For comparison, jet fuel will burn at 800-1000 C and gasoline is over 2000 C. There's a lot of molecular oxygen and hydrogen in wood, so temperature alone is sufficient to start the combustion, even if oxygen is not present. What you're left with afterwards is char, but char doesn't have a lot of structural strength, certainly not enough to hold up a building.
We can fireproof wood just as well as any other structural member.
Refractory bricks are good up to 1600 C and can withstand that indefinitely. What kind of temperature can "fireproof" wood withstand, and for how long?
More importantly, people can learn to be more social over time,
Most people can't just as most people can't change their IQ. It's possible, and sure it's more likely than raising IQ, but it's still quite rare. And if your a company like Google that fires people who say the wrong thing, you surely don't want to make that assumption that people can change during a job interview!
I only have anecdotal evidence, but of the 3 junior engineers on my team, two had good technical skills and poor social skills, the third is the opposite. Over the past 2 years, the two with poor social skills improved significantly and were writing good design docs, making meaningful contributions at meetings and creating understandable docstrings. The third still produced overcomplicated and bug-ridden code... code that they don't even fully understand themselves. After devoting significantly more time to coaching the third engineer than the other 2, I have concluded that technical skills are much harder to pick up on the job.
Again, this is just personal experience with a tiny sample size. But if you had the opposite experience, or any research pointing to the contrary, I'd be interested to hear it.
It's also a fast that Google interviews for dev positions in the way least likely to produce gender equality, by focusing narrowly on the most technical aspects of the job and ignoring measuring the social aspects of the jobs entirely from what I saw. FFS Google, if you want more women, then interview as if software development was the team effort it actually is!
On a team of software engineers, technical ability comes before social ability. Writing code is a core requirement of the job, if you can't do it, you cannot contribute as a software engineer. Talking to other folks is the job of the manager and product lead. Yeah, being able to do some of that as a software engineer is good, but it's secondary.
More importantly, people can learn to be more social over time, but trying to become more technical is difficult and requires rigorous study. So it's better to hire technical people and train them to work well in a team then a bunch of socializers and try to teach them coding.
Everybody always seems to forget the 'well regulated' part. _Nothing_ in the Constitution is there by accident. The Constitution _does_ allow arms to be regulated.
Nobody who studied the Constitution, the Revolutionary War, or the founders themselves, would ever read it to mean the federal government is allowed to regulate private arms ownership. The regulation applies to the militia, not the arms. A well-regulated militia is better than an unregulated one at fighting off the British, and with the entire populace armed, it'd be hell for anyone trying to conquer the US by force or rule it with an iron fist.
You might argue that the cause for the 2nd amendment no longer exists, that Americans are no longer in danger of being conquered by another nation, and that no despot can possibly take control of the federal government. That would be a reasonable argument to make. But even if the argument is right, the correct process for eliminating the 2nd amendment is still with another amendment.
I'd rather see the left drop the issue and, like that comic says, live with the occasional horrific civilian massacre.
Of all the reasons to ban guns, mass shootings are by far the worst. The total number who die from it would be easily made up by better enforcement of drunk driving laws or better funding of suicide prevention programs. Not to mention trucks and fertilizer bombs are perfectly valid ways to kill people, even if some people on the left would like to pretend they're not. People who are intelligent, motivated and crazy are impossible to stop. Even if you got rid of guns, that only makes it more of a challenge for them, and some people like challenges.
You're right that these unwritten exceptions exist in practice, but I oppose almost all of them, as should you or anyone else who values living in a civilized society.
First amendment (free speech, religious establishment): Trademark, copyright, libel, slander, state secrets, trade secrets, dangerous speech ("Fire" in a crowded theater), hate speech, incitement to lawlessness. Religious charter schools.
All of these are tools a despot can use to silence their opponents. Trademark might be the only exception, but that's already handed at the state level. Copyright, meanwhile, is enumerated in Section 8 as a federal power, so that's not a free speech issue (though I still oppose its ridiculous term length).
Fourth amendment (search and seizure): Asset forfeiture, the amount police can "encourage" you to allow a search
Asset forfeiture is literally turning police into highway robbers. This exception should've never existed.
Fifth amendment (self-incrimination): The amount and tactics the police can use to "encourage" you to incriminate yourself are pretty obscene. Miranda is very weak protection. Pleading the fifth in court is quite limited.
Again, I oppose all of those exceptions. Confessions should never be admissible in court as it's too easily extracted with scare tactics, drugs or "enhanced interrogation techniques".
Sixth amendment (fair and speedy trial): Aaron Schwartz? Gitmo?
Ditto. Guantanamo bay never been allowed to exist as a prison and labeling people "enemy combatants" is just bullshit. They are PoW and should be treated as such.
I'm not going to go through the rest of your comment, but I think it suffices to say that almost all of those exceptions make the lives of government officials easier while screwing over the average people.
Many industrial processes have greater economic benefits for society than household products.
An unpainted house is probably worth a quarter less to potential buyers. Partly due to ugliness and partly due to weather and pest damage that's bound to occur. How much is 25% of the US real estate market?
None of this matters because the people who oppose all gun regulation have a lobby (the NRA) telling them how to vote, they listen, they vote and above all they're single issuer voters.
That's just wrong. Some of us prefer the highest law in the nation to be upheld as it's written. There are plenty of other rights enumerated in there that I don't want to see trampled on. Giving the government ability to ignore any part of it is a dangerous precedent and must be fought against at every step of the way.
If you want to get rid of the 2nd amendment, then do it the proper way with another amendment. If you think that's unreasonably hard, then hold a constitutional convention and write a new constitution that's easier to amend. And if you think that's too hard, then the only option you have left is to gather your fellow anti-gun folks, pick up your weapons and conquer everyone who disagrees with you.
You're not double taxed. All of those other things you pay for are paying less for the road they use due to these subsidies. Subsidies that your taxes pay for. If the road subsidies don't exist, those services would cost much more. A delivery guy with a push cart is not going to be anywhere near as efficient as one with a truck. Likewise, every factory that needs a road connection right now would need a rail connection instead, which costs much more. Those costs will be passed directly onto you.
How dare someone provide better service at lower cost? No, they must be reined in!
If you really feel strongly about supporting the traditional businesses, make it possible for them to compete by removing minimum wage laws. If you also feel strongly about giving the lower class a way out, support universal basic income, public health care and public education.
You can't both live in a free society and also prevent willing buyers and willing sellers from coming together. Uber drivers want to drive and Airbnb hosts want to rent out their property. Their customers want their service. Unless you want us to turn into North Korea, it's just not going to happen. Take look at how well the Prohibition and the Drug War went, or how illegal prostitution is available in every major city in the world. And it's been that way for millennia.
And who might the rich be? I guarantee you're rich compared to someone. Shall we then cut off your head as well?
Comparatively rich is not absolutely rich. A beggar with a loaf of bread is richer than another with nothing. That doesn't make the beggar rich.
Since we're talking about cutting heads off, let's use Marx's definitions. The proletariat consists of people whose only means of subsistence is to sell their labor. In other words, if you need to work to stay alive, you're part of the proletariat.
For myself, I escaped because I turned to religion. Those thoughts don't cross my mind anymore and haven't anymore. I recognise now that there are forces out there which don't want me alive and that there is also a benevolent personality out there (God) who wants me to live and thrive.
I realise that this thought may be scorned or mocked on this site and others. But for me it saved my life.
I think you still consider yourself powerless. The idea that you're not strong enough or worthy enough to keep living for your own sake is so ingrained that you need someone else is out there who wants you to stay alive. But really, that's not necessary. Living for your own sake is perfectly fine, as billions of atheists do everyday. So I hope one day you can become your own God. Or perhaps even someone else's God.
... you'd be batshit insane to actually _want_ to learn all that crap if you were just starting out, considering how much the city has grown since 1865
Eventually it will be impossible. Look at Shanghai, it's 3 times the size of London by population and 4 times the area, with constant construction that makes whatever you learned a year ago completely obsolete. If your Shanghai cabbie doesn't have a GPS, get ready to give them turn-by-turn directions.
The fleet car may be available all day, but the majority of people need the cars during rush hour. Are you going to have enough cars in the fleet for everyone at once? If you did, then there will be as many cars on the road as there is now. If you didn't, then some people won't be able to get to work.
Self-driving taxis just aren't going to solve the congestion problem. At best it's at the same level as carpooling. The real solutions are to replace the cars with buses, trains, telecommuting or better zoning laws.
Funny, all I did was list a few reasons that could explain the decrease in energy usage. Nowhere did I ever say I didn't go outside, or played WoW, or even that I agreed with what some people choose to do. You're free to believe whatever you want though.
The contents of the dream were not real, but the dream itself? The experience you had? That's real. The feelings and thoughts you had weren't imaginary. If you ran away from velociraptors in the dream, you really were running away in fear. If you were marrying the love of your life in the dream, you really were happy. Likewise, if you had fun playing an MMORPG, the fun was real.
A cheap bicycle costs $50+ and there's nothing to do at the park except talking to old people and judgmental moms who look at you like you're about to eat their baby.
Drop by some basketball courts and meet some new people and get some exercise.
Then you need to be able to play basketball. A lot of people are too short for that.
Go down to the city library and find some interesting books to read.
Why do that when you have a Kindle or project Gutenberg? You're just wasting gas money.
Go to some wacky community event involving art or music.
If it's free, it's probably something nobody cares about, and usually for good reason.
A lot of older people have this strange notion that only things you do in "real life" matters, that if you had the most fun experience in virtual reality, it isn't as good. But the fact is, there's no such thing as a fake experience. Every experience you had is real, otherwise you wouldn't remember them.
For many people, having fun in beating a boss in WoW is a much better experience than hunting down a bear in real life. So if you could have a better experience on your computer, why would you try to do it in real life? It costs much less, there's no animal protection laws to worry about, a lot less of sitting around waiting for the bear to show up, absolutely no risk of being mauled, and if you want to go with a group, you don't need a bunch of well-off friends with a lot of time to spare.
Virtual reality is the future. Soon it will surpass real life in every aspect. When that day comes, you can fully expect nobody to be outside anymore except to do work that needs to be done outside.
Slashdot Mirror
If someone really, really wants to kill you, there's not much you can do about it other than going incognito and hoping they never find you.
A knife is actually quite good at ensuring a kill. Unlike a gun, it's very hard to miss with a knife. The relative quiet also makes it harder to notice by neighbors, giving the assailant more time to get it done. There's also no limit to the number of stabs like there are with bullets. And you can coat the blade in poison to ensure even a light wound would be fatal.
Of course, a bomb planted under your car or a truck bomb parked next to your driveway can be quite effective as well, and you can make explosives from household chemicals and home-made apparatuses. All you need is a bit of knowledge and patience.
A gun can also be manufactured with tools you might find in a shed, so they could make one that way. Or if regular guns are too boring, they could build a rail gun instead. Or if they prefer something more medieval, the crossbow is quite effective as well.
It's not possible to have your guard up at all times and it's not possible to ban all things which could be turned into a weapon (or even enforce such a ban). Given enough time and effort, eventually they will find a way to kill you.
Really damn high. Wood is a combustible and doesn't weaken or melt with heat. You just need to starve it from combustion ingredients or keep it below ignition temperature and you're sweet. A standard fireproofing membrane sprayed on top of wood suffice.
Do you have a source for any of that? I looked and the only thing I found other than advertisement pieces is this, which says lignin, the structural component of wood, starts breaking down at 250 C and is completely broken down when it reaches 500 C. For comparison, jet fuel will burn at 800-1000 C and gasoline is over 2000 C. There's a lot of molecular oxygen and hydrogen in wood, so temperature alone is sufficient to start the combustion, even if oxygen is not present. What you're left with afterwards is char, but char doesn't have a lot of structural strength, certainly not enough to hold up a building.
We can fireproof wood just as well as any other structural member.
Refractory bricks are good up to 1600 C and can withstand that indefinitely. What kind of temperature can "fireproof" wood withstand, and for how long?
Don't forget "touch", "bash", "fsck" and "do".
If they don't want to be called by a certain name, maybe they can try introducing themselves with another name.
More importantly, people can learn to be more social over time,
Most people can't just as most people can't change their IQ. It's possible, and sure it's more likely than raising IQ, but it's still quite rare. And if your a company like Google that fires people who say the wrong thing, you surely don't want to make that assumption that people can change during a job interview!
I only have anecdotal evidence, but of the 3 junior engineers on my team, two had good technical skills and poor social skills, the third is the opposite. Over the past 2 years, the two with poor social skills improved significantly and were writing good design docs, making meaningful contributions at meetings and creating understandable docstrings. The third still produced overcomplicated and bug-ridden code... code that they don't even fully understand themselves. After devoting significantly more time to coaching the third engineer than the other 2, I have concluded that technical skills are much harder to pick up on the job.
Again, this is just personal experience with a tiny sample size. But if you had the opposite experience, or any research pointing to the contrary, I'd be interested to hear it.
It's also a fast that Google interviews for dev positions in the way least likely to produce gender equality, by focusing narrowly on the most technical aspects of the job and ignoring measuring the social aspects of the jobs entirely from what I saw. FFS Google, if you want more women, then interview as if software development was the team effort it actually is!
On a team of software engineers, technical ability comes before social ability. Writing code is a core requirement of the job, if you can't do it, you cannot contribute as a software engineer. Talking to other folks is the job of the manager and product lead. Yeah, being able to do some of that as a software engineer is good, but it's secondary.
More importantly, people can learn to be more social over time, but trying to become more technical is difficult and requires rigorous study. So it's better to hire technical people and train them to work well in a team then a bunch of socializers and try to teach them coding.
Everybody always seems to forget the 'well regulated' part. _Nothing_ in the Constitution is there by accident. The Constitution _does_ allow arms to be regulated.
Nobody who studied the Constitution, the Revolutionary War, or the founders themselves, would ever read it to mean the federal government is allowed to regulate private arms ownership. The regulation applies to the militia, not the arms. A well-regulated militia is better than an unregulated one at fighting off the British, and with the entire populace armed, it'd be hell for anyone trying to conquer the US by force or rule it with an iron fist.
You might argue that the cause for the 2nd amendment no longer exists, that Americans are no longer in danger of being conquered by another nation, and that no despot can possibly take control of the federal government. That would be a reasonable argument to make. But even if the argument is right, the correct process for eliminating the 2nd amendment is still with another amendment.
I'd rather see the left drop the issue and, like that comic says, live with the occasional horrific civilian massacre.
Of all the reasons to ban guns, mass shootings are by far the worst. The total number who die from it would be easily made up by better enforcement of drunk driving laws or better funding of suicide prevention programs. Not to mention trucks and fertilizer bombs are perfectly valid ways to kill people, even if some people on the left would like to pretend they're not. People who are intelligent, motivated and crazy are impossible to stop. Even if you got rid of guns, that only makes it more of a challenge for them, and some people like challenges.
First amendment (free speech, religious establishment): Trademark, copyright, libel, slander, state secrets, trade secrets, dangerous speech ("Fire" in a crowded theater), hate speech, incitement to lawlessness. Religious charter schools.
All of these are tools a despot can use to silence their opponents. Trademark might be the only exception, but that's already handed at the state level. Copyright, meanwhile, is enumerated in Section 8 as a federal power, so that's not a free speech issue (though I still oppose its ridiculous term length).
Fourth amendment (search and seizure): Asset forfeiture, the amount police can "encourage" you to allow a search
Asset forfeiture is literally turning police into highway robbers. This exception should've never existed.
Fifth amendment (self-incrimination): The amount and tactics the police can use to "encourage" you to incriminate yourself are pretty obscene. Miranda is very weak protection. Pleading the fifth in court is quite limited.
Again, I oppose all of those exceptions. Confessions should never be admissible in court as it's too easily extracted with scare tactics, drugs or "enhanced interrogation techniques".
Sixth amendment (fair and speedy trial): Aaron Schwartz? Gitmo?
Ditto. Guantanamo bay never been allowed to exist as a prison and labeling people "enemy combatants" is just bullshit. They are PoW and should be treated as such.
I'm not going to go through the rest of your comment, but I think it suffices to say that almost all of those exceptions make the lives of government officials easier while screwing over the average people.
Instead, shouldn't we be looking at the pollution a country generates relative to its land area?
No. That's a terrible idea. Island nations won't be able to have any industry and Russia and Canada will get a free pass.
Many industrial processes have greater economic benefits for society than household products.
An unpainted house is probably worth a quarter less to potential buyers. Partly due to ugliness and partly due to weather and pest damage that's bound to occur. How much is 25% of the US real estate market?
None of this matters because the people who oppose all gun regulation have a lobby (the NRA) telling them how to vote, they listen, they vote and above all they're single issuer voters.
That's just wrong. Some of us prefer the highest law in the nation to be upheld as it's written. There are plenty of other rights enumerated in there that I don't want to see trampled on. Giving the government ability to ignore any part of it is a dangerous precedent and must be fought against at every step of the way.
If you want to get rid of the 2nd amendment, then do it the proper way with another amendment. If you think that's unreasonably hard, then hold a constitutional convention and write a new constitution that's easier to amend. And if you think that's too hard, then the only option you have left is to gather your fellow anti-gun folks, pick up your weapons and conquer everyone who disagrees with you.
50% of your income going to housing and 50% going to taxes leaves you with an empty house and an empty stomach.
You're not double taxed. All of those other things you pay for are paying less for the road they use due to these subsidies. Subsidies that your taxes pay for. If the road subsidies don't exist, those services would cost much more. A delivery guy with a push cart is not going to be anywhere near as efficient as one with a truck. Likewise, every factory that needs a road connection right now would need a rail connection instead, which costs much more. Those costs will be passed directly onto you.
How dare someone provide better service at lower cost? No, they must be reined in!
If you really feel strongly about supporting the traditional businesses, make it possible for them to compete by removing minimum wage laws. If you also feel strongly about giving the lower class a way out, support universal basic income, public health care and public education.
You can't both live in a free society and also prevent willing buyers and willing sellers from coming together. Uber drivers want to drive and Airbnb hosts want to rent out their property. Their customers want their service. Unless you want us to turn into North Korea, it's just not going to happen. Take look at how well the Prohibition and the Drug War went, or how illegal prostitution is available in every major city in the world. And it's been that way for millennia.
And who might the rich be? I guarantee you're rich compared to someone. Shall we then cut off your head as well?
Comparatively rich is not absolutely rich. A beggar with a loaf of bread is richer than another with nothing. That doesn't make the beggar rich.
Since we're talking about cutting heads off, let's use Marx's definitions. The proletariat consists of people whose only means of subsistence is to sell their labor. In other words, if you need to work to stay alive, you're part of the proletariat.
For myself, I escaped because I turned to religion. Those thoughts don't cross my mind anymore and haven't anymore. I recognise now that there are forces out there which don't want me alive and that there is also a benevolent personality out there (God) who wants me to live and thrive.
I realise that this thought may be scorned or mocked on this site and others. But for me it saved my life.
I think you still consider yourself powerless. The idea that you're not strong enough or worthy enough to keep living for your own sake is so ingrained that you need someone else is out there who wants you to stay alive. But really, that's not necessary. Living for your own sake is perfectly fine, as billions of atheists do everyday. So I hope one day you can become your own God. Or perhaps even someone else's God.
... you'd be batshit insane to actually _want_ to learn all that crap if you were just starting out, considering how much the city has grown since 1865
Eventually it will be impossible. Look at Shanghai, it's 3 times the size of London by population and 4 times the area, with constant construction that makes whatever you learned a year ago completely obsolete. If your Shanghai cabbie doesn't have a GPS, get ready to give them turn-by-turn directions.
The fleet car may be available all day, but the majority of people need the cars during rush hour. Are you going to have enough cars in the fleet for everyone at once? If you did, then there will be as many cars on the road as there is now. If you didn't, then some people won't be able to get to work.
Self-driving taxis just aren't going to solve the congestion problem. At best it's at the same level as carpooling. The real solutions are to replace the cars with buses, trains, telecommuting or better zoning laws.
suicide victim
I never noticed before, but the person would also be a suicide perpetrator, no?
Funny, all I did was list a few reasons that could explain the decrease in energy usage. Nowhere did I ever say I didn't go outside, or played WoW, or even that I agreed with what some people choose to do. You're free to believe whatever you want though.
Anything so I don't have to listen to the whining.
Maybe you should consider taking your own suggestion to heart and get off the internet.
The contents of the dream were not real, but the dream itself? The experience you had? That's real. The feelings and thoughts you had weren't imaginary. If you ran away from velociraptors in the dream, you really were running away in fear. If you were marrying the love of your life in the dream, you really were happy. Likewise, if you had fun playing an MMORPG, the fun was real.
Get a cheap bicycle and rid down to a local park.
A cheap bicycle costs $50+ and there's nothing to do at the park except talking to old people and judgmental moms who look at you like you're about to eat their baby.
Drop by some basketball courts and meet some new people and get some exercise.
Then you need to be able to play basketball. A lot of people are too short for that.
Go down to the city library and find some interesting books to read.
Why do that when you have a Kindle or project Gutenberg? You're just wasting gas money.
Go to some wacky community event involving art or music.
If it's free, it's probably something nobody cares about, and usually for good reason.
A lot of older people have this strange notion that only things you do in "real life" matters, that if you had the most fun experience in virtual reality, it isn't as good. But the fact is, there's no such thing as a fake experience. Every experience you had is real, otherwise you wouldn't remember them.
For many people, having fun in beating a boss in WoW is a much better experience than hunting down a bear in real life. So if you could have a better experience on your computer, why would you try to do it in real life? It costs much less, there's no animal protection laws to worry about, a lot less of sitting around waiting for the bear to show up, absolutely no risk of being mauled, and if you want to go with a group, you don't need a bunch of well-off friends with a lot of time to spare.
Virtual reality is the future. Soon it will surpass real life in every aspect. When that day comes, you can fully expect nobody to be outside anymore except to do work that needs to be done outside.