There are exceptions of course but there are essentially two types of Republicans these days. The ones guided by extreme nationalism and greed and the mystics that are guided by religious fanaticism.
There's three, I think. The two you listed: the Ayn Rand slash nationalist fanatics, and the religious nuts (which is largely the evangelicals). The third is the mainstream conservatives a la Barry Goldwater, but they're slowly moving to the Democrats I think, after realizing that the Dems are now the center-right party that loves big business.
It seems pretty self-evident to me. There are any number of species that mate for life. I see no reason that couldn't be a natural facet of human nature. ' So you're making a baseless assumption based on false facts? Name 5 species that mate for life. I can't even think of one offhand, though I know there's one or two. It's extremely rare in the animal kingdom.
I have yet to see an open relationship partnership which has endured.
I have yet to see one traditional marriage which has endured. Exactly how many open relationships have you seen anyway?
But let's explore the notion of family from another direction. I've known any number of people who never knew their birth parents but had a deep need to know who they were. They "wanted to know where they came from". That may not be important to you, and you're entitled to that feeling, but you can't begin to suggest how others should feel about something like that.
And WTF does that have to do with traditional marriage? That's just genetics. I have that feeling myself, but it has nothing to do with needing my bio-parents to be married to each other, just to know who they are and meet them personally.
You're really conflating a lot of different things with marriage, things which are only at best tangentially related to it.
But if you do pass away without making a will and you own property, then your children have a right to inheritance per state law. If you suggest there is no value to marriage, that everyone should be able to have sex with whoever is a consenting partner, then why should you have any specific responsibility to children just because you were a sperm donor?
Have you forgotten about DNA testing? State laws have obviously not kept up with the times, but if some people claim to be children of the deceased, then a simple DNA test can prove that fact, and they should get priority (second to the deceased's spouse/civil partner(s)) if there is no will. This isn't rocket science.
In a hunter-gatherer culture, there is no real concept of property, so this is a viable social model. I don't see as viable in our technical industrial culture.
Yes, I mentioned that it doesn't scale or fit with our current society, but it does prove that lifetime pairings are not the norm for humans, they only seem that way because post-agricultural society has made them so. Humans were around for millions of years before agriculture was invented, and other primates don't mate for life either. Just look at the Bonobos.
Afterwards we were wandering around in one of the nearby department stores and my wife said, "I hate to shop. Let's go home." I'm one very lucky man indeed.
Yes, and for every couple like you, there's a dozen couples where they constantly fight about small things like that. Should they stay married because of "the sanctity of marriage", or should they go find someone more compatible so they don't have to be constantly miserable because they made a hasty and poorly-considered decision in their youth? Considering how many couples these days don't have any kids, it would make more sense if the State didn't encourage marriage (through various financial incentives and other privileges bestowed on couples) and made it much easier for people to get out of bad relationships.
while i do agree with the general consensus that dogs shouldn't bark insistently, i believe that there are too many people who feel they need the LAW to help settle disputes that could reasonably be solved by two adults and a mediator.
How?
==mediation== mediator: Ok, we're going to figure out how to resolve this problem between you two. John, what do you want? John: I want him to shut his dogs up. I'm tired of hearing them all day and them keeping me up at night. Bubba: I'm not going to shut them up, I like hearing them bark. Fuck you! mediator: Well, I guess I'm done here.
???
The whole reason laws exist is because people are assholes and cannot be trusted to resolve issues like "two adults". It's been like this forever; instead of an agreement, you get a feud and then violence. When people have completely different viewpoints, they're not going to get along, and the law is the only thing that can prevent violence from erupting.
before you throw the first stone at "dumbass dog owners" are you sure you are not violating some law that you didn't know about? something that could come back and bite you in the butt?
For most things like this, governments do not throw the book at people unless they're a repeated violator. I've never heard of people getting hauled into court for a noise problem unless they've had the cops called on them numerous times. They always get a warning, usually several. So no, I'm not really worried about that.
but the law that i hate is leash laws. i have my animal under control and we walk side by side down the sidewalk with no leash. this is after years of training to get it this way. should i still have to follow leash laws? the police will say yes
And the police are right. Why should you be allowed to let your dogs attack people randomly, or even just jump on them? Of course, you're going to say that your dogs are well-trained and don't do this. How do I know that when I'm walking the other way towards you? I don't. Too many dog-owning assholes abused the privilege, so now it needs to be taken away. You talk about "adults", but obviously too many dog owners can't behave like adults so they had to have their rights restrained. So you only have yourself to blame (since you're part of the dog-owner group).
but i say no because as free civilians in a democracy we are allowed to choose which laws we follow and we don't
So you think it's OK to rape and murder people? You're really fucked up.
If a religion cannot exist without extreme hate speech then it is banned. Just like a religion that mandates ritual killings of other humans is banned. However, almost all religions come in many different flavors. If only some flavors mandate illegal things you cannot ban the other flavors of the religions, that are within the bounds of the laws.
Both Islam and Christianity (and Judaism too, since they share the Old Testament with the Christians) advocate genocide and violence in their holy books. Why aren't they banned?
What do you base that assumption on? Pre-contact Hawaiians did no such thing, and their society probably closely resembles ancient hunter-gatherer lifestyles. Also, polyamory is quickly becoming popular across America, as well as open relationships.
Why should children be entitled to inherit property if marriage is without meaning or value?
What does one have to do with the other? You're not making any sense here whatsoever. If someone wants to will their property to their kids, they should obviously have that right. They don't need a formal marriage to know who their kids are or to leave them their stuff. Alternatively, if someone wants to cut their kids out of their will and will all their stuff to their niece or nephew, they should have that right too. The property angle only made sense in generations past, when paternity wasn't always known, so by forcing women to marry men and promise exclusivity, men could be more reasonably sure the kids were theirs. This is no longer the case; not only have women cheated on men ever since marriage was invented and given them kids that weren't theirs, but now we have DNA testing which renders the whole thing moot. If a woman shows you a kid and says it's yours, that can be easily proven or disproven with an inexpensive test. No marriage required.
If you want to understand what's wrong with marriage in our culture, consider this little story.
A young man from a wealthy family stands to inherit a sizeable sum, but is informed that he can only inherit if he marries by the age of 30....
Which girlfriend did he marry? The one with biggest tits.
So somehow it's wrong for people to want to form relationships with people they find physically attractive, rather than people who are good investors but otherwise not much fun in a relationship?
Personally, I think the Hawaiians had the right idea all along: no marriage, no permanent pairings, people can have sex with whoever they want, and the village takes care of the kids collectively. I'm sure people in that society were a lot happier overall than after the Europeans came and ruined it all with worries about property and repressive Christian values. Obviously that doesn't scale or mesh too well with modern society, but that doesn't mean that an ancient institution that came about solely because of agriculture and land ownership actually makes sense in modern society either, and the divorce rates prove me right.
Wrong. They use 100LL, for "low lead", which isn't really low at all. All standard small-engine aircraft use this fuel, unless it's some "experimental" aircraft with a Subaru automotive engine or something.
That must be why marriages are so long lasting and reliable in our culture...
Also, a lot of failed marriages are ones where the couple got married very young, so they either weren't selective enough (didn't make sure they had compatible long-term plans and such), or they changed a lot since they weren't mature when they hooked up.
But it's also arguable that the whole institution of marriage is fatally flawed to begin with. Statistics I've heard are that only 20% of marriages are actually "successful". That's 1 in 5! Why so low? Simple: only around 50% of first marriages last in the first place, and it gets much worse for subsequent marriages. But then out of those which don't end in divorce, only a fraction of them are actually happy marriages; in the rest, people just stay together and tolerate each other. I imagine a lot of the religious conservatives have marriages like that, since they're so anti-divorce. Don't forget all the people who stay together "for the kids" and get divorced after they leave the nest. Finally, the latest statistics show that more and more 50+ and elderly people are getting divorced.
All in all, it seems to simply be a bad idea, a product of a different time and different type of society.
I lived in two suburban HOAs and was plagued by barking (and in one case, vicious and biting) dogs. HOAs don't do shit. For the biting dog (which actually bit the HOA president!), the only thing that worked was my wife tracking down and contacting the dog owner's landlord. That got his ass evicted; landlords are rightfully afraid of liability that arises from housing vicious dogs. The dog actually biting two residents (one being the HOA pres) wasn't enough for the cops or the HOA to bother; the non-pres lady flaked out and refused to complain to the cops. For the other HOA, the only thing that worked there was having the dog owner prosecuted by the city, as again the HOA didn't give a shit.
My recommendation: make sure you move to a city with strong ordinances against annoying shit. Private organizations are mostly useless; they just take your money and blow it on bullshit (it was insane how much money those HOAs spent to just have some grass cut in the common areas) and don't hold members accountable for anything because they don't want to lose money. The police and city prosecutors, however, are interested in enforcing laws.
As for renting a place in the country, that sounds like BS to me too. I've lived in many rural places (on both temporary and more-permanent bases). There are no two rural properties that are alike. One spot may be super-quiet and peaceful, with your main problem being deer eating your flowers, and another spot a mile away will have you stuck next to some asshole with a bunch of dogs he lets run loose so they come over to your property and kill your chickens and harass your horses. (The solution to this of course is a shotgun.) It's no different than the city, where one house may be great and have wonderful neighbors, but another house in the next development over is surrounded by assholes with barking dogs. You just don't know until you get there, and no property seller is going to let you spend a month living in the place on a trial basis. (And also, very few places will let you rent on a short-term basis.)
It's just like I said before in this thread somewhere: somehow, as a society, we've evolved so that it's perfectly normal for us to spend years (usually 1-3 I'd guess) "trying out" a potential marriage partner before committing to a legal entanglement with them, however, we're expected to make a decision for a house purchase in a few days even though we take out a 30-year mortgage for it.
Well, as someone else here said earlier today, you can thank all the assholes for ruining it. That's what happens when things are democratized (in this case, because it became inexpensive): you get all the masses, and the masses are generally moronic assholes. Things seemed better in the past because things like this were expensive hobbies, so only people with a lot of money, or people with a very strong interest willing to dedicate their more-limited financial resources to it, would get involved. That not only limited the sheer numbers of people involved, it kept the quality level a lot higher.
Well if that's the case, then cargo is irrelevant. Maximum take-off weight is the same no matter how much cargo you add (going over the limit of course is dangerous and not allowed). It's exactly like GVWR in cars: the maximum vehicle weight with full fluids and maximum cargo.
some people will consider staying virgin until marriage to be beneficial, others will consider it harmful. So how would you tell if it is harmful or beneficial?
Some people find it beneficial to commit genocide. Their religion tells them they should commit genocide, so for them it's beneficial. Who are you to disagree?
Every harmful-vs-beneficial analysis is based on certain cultural assumptions. You can't pick and choose. Many people have a culture+religion which says genocide of certain groups is OK, so if you ban "hate speech" but don't ban the religion itself, you're being inconsistent. If you're going to make the religion legal, then you have to allow all the hate speech that is part-and-parcel of the religion.
Actually, yes. PostgreSQL is free. (So are a few others like MySQL/MariaDB, but PostgreSQL is much better.)
Of course, in-house devs to use Postgres are not free, nor all the other government workers needed (managers, administrators, etc.). But if any of this money is going to pay for DB licenses, that's a waste of taxpayer dollars and should be downright criminal. This is a job that Postgres can easily handle.
You really think $5 per drone is going to be profitable for a federal government agency? I doubt it even covers their costs for employing people to do the paperwork.
Yeah, but those old remote-control airplanes couldn't leave your sight, so people only used them in wide-open fields. It was easy to tell who the operators of an R/C airplane were. Now they have remote cameras and can travel for many miles.
Obviously, North Carolina is NOT progressive, and these "rubes" ARE representative of the population of your state. Do you even understand how democracy works? You have a "backwards Republican state government" precisely because people like this are in the majority in your state, and elected that government. The PhDs in RTP are the aberration, not the rubes.
Yes, I think I addressed that when I pointed out at the end how such code is unmaintainable, because only the original author has any clue how it works. It's also good to make maintainable code because even the original author will forget about it and have trouble working with it after some time. I'd say maintainability is one of the main reasons we have high-level languages (that plus being able to write applications with fewer programmer-hours): back in the old days, it only took one programmer to write a program, but these days we have whole teams of people working together, and team members coming and going periodically, and hacked-together assembly isn't going to work for that.
Why should that "grind your gears"? If the new city people call the cops and you're not doing anything that's against county laws, then the cops can't do anything. If, however, the cops give you a ticket for whatever they called you for, then that means that you were breaking the law. So why do you feel that the law doesn't apply to you?
It seems to me that keeping a larger dog in the city is somewhat cruel, as they don't have any place to run around and end up confined in a tiny apartment or cage all the time. And yes, the poop thing is a big problem too, and a lot of dog owners are assholes who don't think they should have to clean it up (just like they think everyone should be happy to listen to their dogs bark endlessly at all hours). Cats aren't nearly as bad because cats naturally want to bury or hide their poop, plus usually, in a city, cats that are outside are feral, not pets.
I actually knew a guy with a legal sawed-off. He was ex-Army aviation, and his justification to the ATF
Yeah, you can get any kind of gun really (full-auto, etc.), but that's the catch: the guns are hard to find and therefore expensive, and you have to pay a special tax and file papers with the ATF and get a background check (beyond the regular one, I believe). It's not that easy and it's very very expensive. And I'm not sure about sawed-offs, but with machine guns/full-auto/select-fire, you aren't allowed to buy anything new, but only stuff manufactured before some date (in the 80s), so you only have access to grandfathered stuff. So of course the supply is limited, driving the prices through the roof.
That must be why marriages are so long lasting and reliable in our culture...
The problem is that people change over time, or they get married for the wrong reasons, or they get desperate to get married before they're too old and they settle for the wrong person. For the first one, after, say, 10 years, people have really matured and changed a lot, and if they've changed in incompatible ways, the marriage is usually doomed. Perhaps they want to move, but to entirely different places (one's set on moving to Florida, the other to Washington or Maine), they've evolved incompatible political views, they've found out the hard way they just can't agree about how to manage the family finances, etc. Especially when people marry in their 20s, it's really really hard to figure all that stuff out at that age.
And my wife is a real jewel who is patient, kind and giving.
That's definitely a real rarity. Most Americans are impatient, selfish assholes to some degree.
but the ultra-sonic gizmo others were talking about here are probably a pretty good idea.
I tried one of those; it didn't help. It also only works on next-door dogs where you have line-of-sight to the dog (if it works at all, someone here said they work on some dogs but not others); two doors down is too far away.
Smart people with large arsenals know when shit goes south all of their "unarmed" neighbors are going join together and forcibly appropriate that conveniently stockpiled armory. So they make good with their neighbors to show themselves as reasonable and likeable people. Reasonable enough.
Maybe, but sounds conspiracy-theorish to me. In my experience, all the super-well-armed people I met were a bit off-kilter, but otherwise just really nice people. If they were paranoid like that, they wouldn't let anyone know about their arsenals. They weren't that paranoid, they just liked guns a lot, sorta like some people are car nuts and collect dozens of cars. They did seem to have some slightly extreme political views (very, very libertarian), but it seems like everyone is like that these days.
The problem is, when you get married, usually your prospective spouse tells you all this stuff before you commit to it. She tells you about her kids, family, hopefully most of the emotional baggage, etc. You usually get to meet most of these other people too. That's what the whole "dating" phase is for, and why it usually lasts from 6 months to a couple of years or more these days. Most people even have sex a lot before they get married, so they can "kick the tires" so to speak. Unless you're one of those dumb religious people who gets married after a very short courtship and doesn't have sex until afterwards, you have plenty of warning about these things.
Not so with houses. You don't get to go live in the house for a month before signing the papers, so you can find out if the neighbors are people you can get along with, if there's a bunch of barking dogs, etc. The realtor isn't going to go for that, nor will the sellers. You might get a day to run around and knock on some doors, and that's about it. Good luck actually catching your neighbors at an opportune time to sit down and meet with them. And of course, the neighbors probably aren't going to be honest anyway about how they leave their dog outside to bark all day long. From what I've seen, most dog owners are just completely stupid, and have no idea at all that their little precious fido is doing this, because many times they're not home when this is happening. Other ones (including their dog-owning neighbors) just completely tune it out. You're not likely to get honest answers about these problems from the neighbors. At least with marriage, even if the person isn't complete forthcoming about their baggage and such, you have months or years to find out about it; most people just can't hide this stuff for too long. They put on a good appearance on the first date or three, but after a bit the real truth comes out. But that takes time and effort to get to know someone really well and find out about their bad habits. You don't have that time when buying a house, especially if it's a competitive market.
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There are exceptions of course but there are essentially two types of Republicans these days. The ones guided by extreme nationalism and greed and the mystics that are guided by religious fanaticism.
There's three, I think. The two you listed: the Ayn Rand slash nationalist fanatics, and the religious nuts (which is largely the evangelicals). The third is the mainstream conservatives a la Barry Goldwater, but they're slowly moving to the Democrats I think, after realizing that the Dems are now the center-right party that loves big business.
It seems pretty self-evident to me. There are any number of species that mate for life. I see no reason that couldn't be a natural facet of human nature.
'
So you're making a baseless assumption based on false facts? Name 5 species that mate for life. I can't even think of one offhand, though I know there's one or two. It's extremely rare in the animal kingdom.
I have yet to see an open relationship partnership which has endured.
I have yet to see one traditional marriage which has endured. Exactly how many open relationships have you seen anyway?
But let's explore the notion of family from another direction. I've known any number of people who never knew their birth parents but had a deep need to know who they were. They "wanted to know where they came from". That may not be important to you, and you're entitled to that feeling, but you can't begin to suggest how others should feel about something like that.
And WTF does that have to do with traditional marriage? That's just genetics. I have that feeling myself, but it has nothing to do with needing my bio-parents to be married to each other, just to know who they are and meet them personally.
You're really conflating a lot of different things with marriage, things which are only at best tangentially related to it.
But if you do pass away without making a will and you own property, then your children have a right to inheritance per state law. If you suggest there is no value to marriage, that everyone should be able to have sex with whoever is a consenting partner, then why should you have any specific responsibility to children just because you were a sperm donor?
Have you forgotten about DNA testing? State laws have obviously not kept up with the times, but if some people claim to be children of the deceased, then a simple DNA test can prove that fact, and they should get priority (second to the deceased's spouse/civil partner(s)) if there is no will. This isn't rocket science.
In a hunter-gatherer culture, there is no real concept of property, so this is a viable social model. I don't see as viable in our technical industrial culture.
Yes, I mentioned that it doesn't scale or fit with our current society, but it does prove that lifetime pairings are not the norm for humans, they only seem that way because post-agricultural society has made them so. Humans were around for millions of years before agriculture was invented, and other primates don't mate for life either. Just look at the Bonobos.
Afterwards we were wandering around in one of the nearby department stores and my wife said, "I hate to shop. Let's go home."
I'm one very lucky man indeed.
Yes, and for every couple like you, there's a dozen couples where they constantly fight about small things like that. Should they stay married because of "the sanctity of marriage", or should they go find someone more compatible so they don't have to be constantly miserable because they made a hasty and poorly-considered decision in their youth? Considering how many couples these days don't have any kids, it would make more sense if the State didn't encourage marriage (through various financial incentives and other privileges bestowed on couples) and made it much easier for people to get out of bad relationships.
while i do agree with the general consensus that dogs shouldn't bark insistently, i believe that there are too many people who feel they need the LAW to help settle disputes that could reasonably be solved by two adults and a mediator.
How?
==mediation==
mediator: Ok, we're going to figure out how to resolve this problem between you two. John, what do you want?
John: I want him to shut his dogs up. I'm tired of hearing them all day and them keeping me up at night.
Bubba: I'm not going to shut them up, I like hearing them bark. Fuck you!
mediator: Well, I guess I'm done here.
???
The whole reason laws exist is because people are assholes and cannot be trusted to resolve issues like "two adults". It's been like this forever; instead of an agreement, you get a feud and then violence. When people have completely different viewpoints, they're not going to get along, and the law is the only thing that can prevent violence from erupting.
before you throw the first stone at "dumbass dog owners" are you sure you are not violating some law that you didn't know about? something that could come back and bite you in the butt?
For most things like this, governments do not throw the book at people unless they're a repeated violator. I've never heard of people getting hauled into court for a noise problem unless they've had the cops called on them numerous times. They always get a warning, usually several. So no, I'm not really worried about that.
but the law that i hate is leash laws. i have my animal under control and we walk side by side down the sidewalk with no leash. this is after years of training to get it this way. should i still have to follow leash laws? the police will say yes
And the police are right. Why should you be allowed to let your dogs attack people randomly, or even just jump on them? Of course, you're going to say that your dogs are well-trained and don't do this. How do I know that when I'm walking the other way towards you? I don't. Too many dog-owning assholes abused the privilege, so now it needs to be taken away. You talk about "adults", but obviously too many dog owners can't behave like adults so they had to have their rights restrained. So you only have yourself to blame (since you're part of the dog-owner group).
but i say no because as free civilians in a democracy we are allowed to choose which laws we follow and we don't
So you think it's OK to rape and murder people? You're really fucked up.
If a religion cannot exist without extreme hate speech then it is banned. Just like a religion that mandates ritual killings of other humans is banned. However, almost all religions come in many different flavors. If only some flavors mandate illegal things you cannot ban the other flavors of the religions, that are within the bounds of the laws.
Both Islam and Christianity (and Judaism too, since they share the Old Testament with the Christians) advocate genocide and violence in their holy books. Why aren't they banned?
Sounds to me like you're picking and choosing.
Basically, yes, given the way the word "drone" is currently used. That's all the toy drones are: R/C aircraft with remote cameras.
It is natural for humans to pair off.
What do you base that assumption on? Pre-contact Hawaiians did no such thing, and their society probably closely resembles ancient hunter-gatherer lifestyles. Also, polyamory is quickly becoming popular across America, as well as open relationships.
Why should children be entitled to inherit property if marriage is without meaning or value?
What does one have to do with the other? You're not making any sense here whatsoever. If someone wants to will their property to their kids, they should obviously have that right. They don't need a formal marriage to know who their kids are or to leave them their stuff. Alternatively, if someone wants to cut their kids out of their will and will all their stuff to their niece or nephew, they should have that right too. The property angle only made sense in generations past, when paternity wasn't always known, so by forcing women to marry men and promise exclusivity, men could be more reasonably sure the kids were theirs. This is no longer the case; not only have women cheated on men ever since marriage was invented and given them kids that weren't theirs, but now we have DNA testing which renders the whole thing moot. If a woman shows you a kid and says it's yours, that can be easily proven or disproven with an inexpensive test. No marriage required.
If you want to understand what's wrong with marriage in our culture, consider this little story.
A young man from a wealthy family stands to inherit a sizeable sum, but is informed that he can only inherit if he marries by the age of 30. ...
Which girlfriend did he marry? The one with biggest tits.
So somehow it's wrong for people to want to form relationships with people they find physically attractive, rather than people who are good investors but otherwise not much fun in a relationship?
Personally, I think the Hawaiians had the right idea all along: no marriage, no permanent pairings, people can have sex with whoever they want, and the village takes care of the kids collectively. I'm sure people in that society were a lot happier overall than after the Europeans came and ruined it all with worries about property and repressive Christian values. Obviously that doesn't scale or mesh too well with modern society, but that doesn't mean that an ancient institution that came about solely because of agriculture and land ownership actually makes sense in modern society either, and the divorce rates prove me right.
Wrong. They use 100LL, for "low lead", which isn't really low at all. All standard small-engine aircraft use this fuel, unless it's some "experimental" aircraft with a Subaru automotive engine or something.
That must be why marriages are so long lasting and reliable in our culture...
Also, a lot of failed marriages are ones where the couple got married very young, so they either weren't selective enough (didn't make sure they had compatible long-term plans and such), or they changed a lot since they weren't mature when they hooked up.
But it's also arguable that the whole institution of marriage is fatally flawed to begin with. Statistics I've heard are that only 20% of marriages are actually "successful". That's 1 in 5! Why so low? Simple: only around 50% of first marriages last in the first place, and it gets much worse for subsequent marriages. But then out of those which don't end in divorce, only a fraction of them are actually happy marriages; in the rest, people just stay together and tolerate each other. I imagine a lot of the religious conservatives have marriages like that, since they're so anti-divorce. Don't forget all the people who stay together "for the kids" and get divorced after they leave the nest. Finally, the latest statistics show that more and more 50+ and elderly people are getting divorced.
All in all, it seems to simply be a bad idea, a product of a different time and different type of society.
I lived in two suburban HOAs and was plagued by barking (and in one case, vicious and biting) dogs. HOAs don't do shit. For the biting dog (which actually bit the HOA president!), the only thing that worked was my wife tracking down and contacting the dog owner's landlord. That got his ass evicted; landlords are rightfully afraid of liability that arises from housing vicious dogs. The dog actually biting two residents (one being the HOA pres) wasn't enough for the cops or the HOA to bother; the non-pres lady flaked out and refused to complain to the cops. For the other HOA, the only thing that worked there was having the dog owner prosecuted by the city, as again the HOA didn't give a shit.
My recommendation: make sure you move to a city with strong ordinances against annoying shit. Private organizations are mostly useless; they just take your money and blow it on bullshit (it was insane how much money those HOAs spent to just have some grass cut in the common areas) and don't hold members accountable for anything because they don't want to lose money. The police and city prosecutors, however, are interested in enforcing laws.
As for renting a place in the country, that sounds like BS to me too. I've lived in many rural places (on both temporary and more-permanent bases). There are no two rural properties that are alike. One spot may be super-quiet and peaceful, with your main problem being deer eating your flowers, and another spot a mile away will have you stuck next to some asshole with a bunch of dogs he lets run loose so they come over to your property and kill your chickens and harass your horses. (The solution to this of course is a shotgun.) It's no different than the city, where one house may be great and have wonderful neighbors, but another house in the next development over is surrounded by assholes with barking dogs. You just don't know until you get there, and no property seller is going to let you spend a month living in the place on a trial basis. (And also, very few places will let you rent on a short-term basis.)
It's just like I said before in this thread somewhere: somehow, as a society, we've evolved so that it's perfectly normal for us to spend years (usually 1-3 I'd guess) "trying out" a potential marriage partner before committing to a legal entanglement with them, however, we're expected to make a decision for a house purchase in a few days even though we take out a 30-year mortgage for it.
Well, as someone else here said earlier today, you can thank all the assholes for ruining it. That's what happens when things are democratized (in this case, because it became inexpensive): you get all the masses, and the masses are generally moronic assholes. Things seemed better in the past because things like this were expensive hobbies, so only people with a lot of money, or people with a very strong interest willing to dedicate their more-limited financial resources to it, would get involved. That not only limited the sheer numbers of people involved, it kept the quality level a lot higher.
Well if that's the case, then cargo is irrelevant. Maximum take-off weight is the same no matter how much cargo you add (going over the limit of course is dangerous and not allowed). It's exactly like GVWR in cars: the maximum vehicle weight with full fluids and maximum cargo.
some people will consider staying virgin until marriage to be beneficial, others will consider it harmful. So how would you tell if it is harmful or beneficial?
Some people find it beneficial to commit genocide. Their religion tells them they should commit genocide, so for them it's beneficial. Who are you to disagree?
Every harmful-vs-beneficial analysis is based on certain cultural assumptions. You can't pick and choose. Many people have a culture+religion which says genocide of certain groups is OK, so if you ban "hate speech" but don't ban the religion itself, you're being inconsistent. If you're going to make the religion legal, then you have to allow all the hate speech that is part-and-parcel of the religion.
Databases and developers are free now?
Actually, yes. PostgreSQL is free. (So are a few others like MySQL/MariaDB, but PostgreSQL is much better.)
Of course, in-house devs to use Postgres are not free, nor all the other government workers needed (managers, administrators, etc.). But if any of this money is going to pay for DB licenses, that's a waste of taxpayer dollars and should be downright criminal. This is a job that Postgres can easily handle.
Well as long as the regulation specifies the weight as manufactured, and not when carrying cargo, you should be good.
You really think $5 per drone is going to be profitable for a federal government agency? I doubt it even covers their costs for employing people to do the paperwork.
Yeah, but those old remote-control airplanes couldn't leave your sight, so people only used them in wide-open fields. It was easy to tell who the operators of an R/C airplane were. Now they have remote cameras and can travel for many miles.
Obviously, North Carolina is NOT progressive, and these "rubes" ARE representative of the population of your state. Do you even understand how democracy works? You have a "backwards Republican state government" precisely because people like this are in the majority in your state, and elected that government. The PhDs in RTP are the aberration, not the rubes.
Yes, I think I addressed that when I pointed out at the end how such code is unmaintainable, because only the original author has any clue how it works. It's also good to make maintainable code because even the original author will forget about it and have trouble working with it after some time. I'd say maintainability is one of the main reasons we have high-level languages (that plus being able to write applications with fewer programmer-hours): back in the old days, it only took one programmer to write a program, but these days we have whole teams of people working together, and team members coming and going periodically, and hacked-together assembly isn't going to work for that.
Why should that "grind your gears"? If the new city people call the cops and you're not doing anything that's against county laws, then the cops can't do anything. If, however, the cops give you a ticket for whatever they called you for, then that means that you were breaking the law. So why do you feel that the law doesn't apply to you?
Well I will say that one really nice thing about greyhounds is that they don't bark.
It seems to me that keeping a larger dog in the city is somewhat cruel, as they don't have any place to run around and end up confined in a tiny apartment or cage all the time. And yes, the poop thing is a big problem too, and a lot of dog owners are assholes who don't think they should have to clean it up (just like they think everyone should be happy to listen to their dogs bark endlessly at all hours). Cats aren't nearly as bad because cats naturally want to bury or hide their poop, plus usually, in a city, cats that are outside are feral, not pets.
I actually knew a guy with a legal sawed-off. He was ex-Army aviation, and his justification to the ATF
Yeah, you can get any kind of gun really (full-auto, etc.), but that's the catch: the guns are hard to find and therefore expensive, and you have to pay a special tax and file papers with the ATF and get a background check (beyond the regular one, I believe). It's not that easy and it's very very expensive. And I'm not sure about sawed-offs, but with machine guns/full-auto/select-fire, you aren't allowed to buy anything new, but only stuff manufactured before some date (in the 80s), so you only have access to grandfathered stuff. So of course the supply is limited, driving the prices through the roof.
That must be why marriages are so long lasting and reliable in our culture...
The problem is that people change over time, or they get married for the wrong reasons, or they get desperate to get married before they're too old and they settle for the wrong person. For the first one, after, say, 10 years, people have really matured and changed a lot, and if they've changed in incompatible ways, the marriage is usually doomed. Perhaps they want to move, but to entirely different places (one's set on moving to Florida, the other to Washington or Maine), they've evolved incompatible political views, they've found out the hard way they just can't agree about how to manage the family finances, etc. Especially when people marry in their 20s, it's really really hard to figure all that stuff out at that age.
And my wife is a real jewel who is patient, kind and giving.
That's definitely a real rarity. Most Americans are impatient, selfish assholes to some degree.
but the ultra-sonic gizmo others were talking about here are probably a pretty good idea.
I tried one of those; it didn't help. It also only works on next-door dogs where you have line-of-sight to the dog (if it works at all, someone here said they work on some dogs but not others); two doors down is too far away.
Smart people with large arsenals know when shit goes south all of their "unarmed" neighbors are going join together and forcibly appropriate that conveniently stockpiled armory. So they make good with their neighbors to show themselves as reasonable and likeable people. Reasonable enough.
Maybe, but sounds conspiracy-theorish to me. In my experience, all the super-well-armed people I met were a bit off-kilter, but otherwise just really nice people. If they were paranoid like that, they wouldn't let anyone know about their arsenals. They weren't that paranoid, they just liked guns a lot, sorta like some people are car nuts and collect dozens of cars. They did seem to have some slightly extreme political views (very, very libertarian), but it seems like everyone is like that these days.
The problem is, when you get married, usually your prospective spouse tells you all this stuff before you commit to it. She tells you about her kids, family, hopefully most of the emotional baggage, etc. You usually get to meet most of these other people too. That's what the whole "dating" phase is for, and why it usually lasts from 6 months to a couple of years or more these days. Most people even have sex a lot before they get married, so they can "kick the tires" so to speak. Unless you're one of those dumb religious people who gets married after a very short courtship and doesn't have sex until afterwards, you have plenty of warning about these things.
Not so with houses. You don't get to go live in the house for a month before signing the papers, so you can find out if the neighbors are people you can get along with, if there's a bunch of barking dogs, etc. The realtor isn't going to go for that, nor will the sellers. You might get a day to run around and knock on some doors, and that's about it. Good luck actually catching your neighbors at an opportune time to sit down and meet with them. And of course, the neighbors probably aren't going to be honest anyway about how they leave their dog outside to bark all day long. From what I've seen, most dog owners are just completely stupid, and have no idea at all that their little precious fido is doing this, because many times they're not home when this is happening. Other ones (including their dog-owning neighbors) just completely tune it out. You're not likely to get honest answers about these problems from the neighbors. At least with marriage, even if the person isn't complete forthcoming about their baggage and such, you have months or years to find out about it; most people just can't hide this stuff for too long. They put on a good appearance on the first date or three, but after a bit the real truth comes out. But that takes time and effort to get to know someone really well and find out about their bad habits. You don't have that time when buying a house, especially if it's a competitive market.