In the best of circumstances, ignoring the confusion and panic, maybe...
Some people in the audience thought the thick smoke and gunfire was a special effect accompanying the movie, police and witnesses said.
Everything I'm reading says it happened very quickly. In a smoke filled theater, with people screaming and running around all over the place, I'm betting there would have been 'friendly-fire' incidents and and even higher body count. We'll never know either way, obviously, so I concede that it's possible, but I highly doubt it.
I have a love/hate relationship with the right to bear arms. On one hand, when interpreted the way I'm sure our founding fathers intended when they codified our rights, I think it is an excellent check on governmental power; if the shit truly hit the fan there would be militia's and guerrilla forces springing up overnight to fight back (the apathy of the modern-age be damned). " But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security." Attacking the right to bear arms seems to me to be attacking our right of revolution as spelled out in the Declaration.
On the other hand, however, I cannot believe that our founding fathers would have intended for the high-powered weaponry we have available to us today to be freely available to anyone out there that's capable of passing a cursory background check. People aren't buying AK's for practical defense, they're buying AK's for ePeen. For instance, a friend of mine, who lives in an apartment and recently got his Concealed Carry license, the day he got his license in the mail he went out and bought a massive Desert Eagle hand cannon that he loves to show off to people. If someone were to break into his apartment, and he started firing with that gun...how many rounds would end up in his neighbors apartments as they blast through those poorly-insulated plaster-board walls? He tells me he's in the market for an AR-15 now...for 'home defense', and he's still in that apartment with the tissue paper walls. He's a fucking accident waiting to happen...which is precisely why I won't hang out with him when he's strapped. He'd probably end up taking me or someone else around him out just trying to draw down on someone...
The problem, as I see it, is how you reliably prevent the fuck-tards like the stupid 20-year-old kid I mentioned above from endangering themselves and others while still preserving the rights of those that have the maturity and gravitas to properly be trusted with a lethal weapon. Just making sure the person in question doesn't have any felonies and isn't certifiably mentally ill doesn't seem like enough. How many kids in this country die every year because their dumbass parents don't properly secure the guns in the home? How many kids have been killed by other kids because their parents didn't properly secure them? We need to have an honest conversation about this on a national level but unfortunately the issue is driven to extremes: Either you're pro-gun and anyone and their sister should be able to buy whatever gun they want, no questions asked, or you're anti-gun and think that they should be completely illegal for everyone but the police and military. There's no grey area anymore.
Some people in the audience thought the thick smoke and gunfire was a special effect accompanying the movie, police and witnesses said.
We'll never know for sure, of course, but I'm betting that it wouldn't have made a difference if the audience had been packed with people carrying concealed. People don't expect to be opened fire upon in a movie theater, and the incident itself lasted only a few minutes at the most. He shot the place up and then dipped out.
Yeah the ones at my local theater don't even have handles on the outside of the door, and they have those alarm boxes on them with the push-bars like most places do for emergency exits, but I've seen those doors propped open many times so the alarms must either be broken or deactivated. Probably deactivated; I've seen people smoking near that door. More than likely, employees use it themselves to take a secret smoke break...
I doubt it, more than likely he burst in and started spraying wildly in the theater, probably within mere seconds, so even if half the people in that theater had been packing, they likely wouldn't have prevented anything. If anything, they probably would have increased the body count as they started shooting crazily in the dark and smoke filled theater (he threw a smoke grenade, remember? He was wearing a mask, the audience wasn't) and there probably would have been another half-dozen or so people killed.
Of the people I know who have a concealed carry license (we just got CC here in WI within the last year or so), only a handful have any real firearms handling experience, mostly through prior military service. Most everyone else just took the 4 hour course the state mandates. The fact that they're able to carry a firearm doesn't make me feel safer at all, and a few of the people actually scare me that they're legally allowed to carry concealed (stupid kids that think it makes them tough).
How would the people in that audience being armed, in a dark theater, with fucking smoke from the smoke grenades he tossed in before he started shooting, have made much of a difference at all?
How long did this incident go on? A minute? According to CNN he killed 12 people (their revised figure) and wounded 50 more. Even Quick Draw McGraw wouldn't have been able to stop him from killing a few people. Those people would have died whether the audience was armed or not...
From what I read, the shooter came into the theater from outside through an emergency exit door. I don't know how he got it open, unless perhaps someone had propped it open to sneak their friends into the theater, that happens at my local theater all the time...
Up to and after the final vote on the mining bill (which I admit I was against for environmental reasons, and also because the bill was so bad that nobody would admit to having written it, which probably means it was written by Gogebic Taconite's legal department) there was a lot of bitterness and anger over the fact that the state representatives had a say in whether or not a mine went in at all. It was all Democrats against the bill (with one Republican, and boy were they pissed off at him) but most people cited the fact that representatives from areas that wouldn't be effected by the mine had a say as the reason why they were so angry about opposition to it.
There were a lot of people in comment threads on those articles screaming for the rights of municipalities and counties to overrule the state in cases like this. It's not limited to the States vs. the Fed anymore, now it's the towns versus the State and lord knows soon it will be the individual versus the town. I suppose it will never end until it's every many for himself, which seems to be what many of these people want, they just don't want to admit it either to themselves or others...
Thank you, that was the point I was trying to get across, which I admit I was pretty vague on since I was in a hurry...
The mining bill was shot down here in Madison, the state capitol, and for months in the local news there was a lot of negativity about representatives from other areas having a say in whether or not Gogebic Taconite was allowed to mine the North Woods area. It's not limited to Federal Government anymore here in Wisconsin (and I'm sure elsewhere in other local issues that we don't hear much about on a national stage); the anti-Madison sentiment is long documented (The common derogatory nickname is The People's Republic of Madison), but never before have I really seen it to the point I have in the last year or so since Walker took office.
Oh, I've been hearing people bitch about the state (as in the state of Wisconsin) and screaming that their local municipalities should have the power and people in Madison and Milwaukee shouldn't be telling people in the small towns and villages throughout the state how to live. Perfect example, the Gogebic Taconite mining bill that was shot down in the state senate.
The anti-government hysteria knows no bounds. I can only imagine how retarded it's going to get from here on out...
The excuses against it are precisely the same as the excuses that would be trotted out against this, and you know it: "Why should I have to pay for it? Government only gets in the way! If the free market won't do it, that probably means that it's gonna cost too much anyway!! It's regulations, regulations are why those people can't get internet! ARGHGHGHG!!!! BARGGHGGHGHLLE!!!!!"
If you've missed the selfish, asinine streak in people these days when it comes to anything involving government doing any fucking thing, you're either blind or deliberately obtuse. You could probably get people to vote down public water utilities in some parts of the country right now...that's how batshit retarded it is getting.
And with those words, you would drive half the people of this country into hysterics. We can't even agree to a public option...I doubt highly that enough of us would agree to fund something like that no matter how beneficial we all know it would be. Look at what they're doing to NPR...
I worked at CompUSA back when Vista launched (believe it was a January because I remember we had a massive blizzard and the midnight launch was a dismal failure) and in the month or so prior we started rolling out the hardware with it pre-installed so that by launch night we only had a couple models that were still running XP, and they didn't last long as word got around how much Vista sucked. By the time the store had failed and was being liquidated, we had one model that was still running XP.
Of course, depending on the hardware, you could always do like a lot of people did with those Vista machines, and put the old OS on there. There were some headaches with the really early models but within a few months driver support caught up and it wasn't such a big deal...
Goddamn right. This is why I find all the hysterics these days about Socialism and Liberals and all that shit so fucking funny...the people going apoplectic over "leftists" would probably have a heart attack if they were being represented by a real liberal, and not the Center-Right Democrats we have today.
I chalk it up to selective perception and ignorance. I mean, look at how many people here in the U.S. are screaming about how tyrannical and broken the National Health Service and it's equivalents are, while the people that are actually using said services shake their heads and wonder what the hell they're smoking because they can't imagine life without it. I can count on one hand how many times I've heard a Canadian bitch about waiting lists (which, to be fair, the bulk of the time was because they had an elective procedure they wanted to get done right now and didn't feel they should have to wait behind all the people that actually NEED treatment right away, poor babies) compared to most everyone else whose come out in support of it.
What the fuck happened over the last 30 or so years in this country? It's like the second Reagan was elected the collective IQ of this country dropped by a few dozen points...
Why would you assume firstly, that it is only the agenda of the republitards, and secondly, that there are not conservatives in the demorats?
The whole idea of the modern U.S. Democratic party being "liberal" is a fucking joke in itself, anyway. There is no truly 'liberal' party in the U.S.; we've got centrist Democrats that like to call themselves liberals, and we've got the right leaning Republicans, but there are few truly left-leaning progressives in this government anymore.
Sure, compared to some of the far-right leaning reps we're seeing these days, they're liberal, but on the world stage they're just as much centrist, corporation-loving soulless bastards as their political opponents are. The entire spectrum has gotten shifted so far to the right now that the second anyone even breathes a word of support for a truly progressive policy or idea (such as Single Payer healthcare, for instance) there are angry mobs with torches and pitchforks screaming "SOCIALIST!!!11!!1!" on their doorstep.
Ya, I've got Stanley rolling case where I store all my computer parts, only cost $20, and has plenty of room for all my accessories, tools, and parts. Easily mobile for house calls, plus it has a swivel-out drawer for screws where I can organize all the different little shit that comes with most components these days. I haven't lost a screw since. Highly recommend something similar; plus it sure beats using old parts boxes for storage like most people do...
I just thought of a perfect, real world example I ran into a couple years ago when attempting to get a tune-up on my mid-80's Buick daily driver (it was a rust-bucket beast, but the winters here in Wisconsin are harsh and it handled great in the snow)...I had a ton of trouble finding someone that could even do a tune-up on it. Why? Because it was a carbureted engine, and in this era of fuel injection, it's a skill that hardly anyone except for hobbyists uses anymore. I was incredulous, but according to several shop managers I spoke to, they haven't even had a carbureted engine come into their shop in years. I think it took me 4-5 different tries before I found a place with an older mechanic that could do it...and they charged me a premium on the labor to boot.
Maybe I was just being bullshitted, but my own ignorance in car repair and maintenance precludes me from making a judgement call on that one way or the other. Logically speaking, though, if they just don't see carburetors anymore, what the hell is the point of learning how to repair them? I can't see one...
I don't agree with that at all. My kids probably couldn't identify what local plants they can eat and which ones they should avoid (a skill that was arguably of tantamount importance to our ancestors) but then again, our ancestors that depended on those skills to live probably weren't spending much of their time doing Calculus and discussing world politics, either.
Ignoring the fact that everyone I know is fully capable of reading an analog clock, over 30 years after the first digital clocks were hitting the market, even young children, tell me, how would society fundamentally be harmed by this if there were no more analog clocks to read? If the skill was no longer relevant, why the hell are we keeping it around? Nostalgia? What a waste of energy and those precious brain cells.
I will admit that filling our brains with useless pop-culture trivia is a waste, and I'm not innocent in that regards (I've pretty much become a walking encyclopedia of Star Trek: The Next Generation which is absolutely useless to me outside of playing "name that episode" with friends) but I'm not going to go into hysterics over the fact that our kids have no knowledge of, say, what it's like to operate a rotary telephone, or fiddle with a pair of rabbit-ears trying to get a better TV signal, or how to properly behave on a party-line. It's useless knowledge to them.
I'm sure there are lots of things our own parents learned that we blew off, and they probably had the same worries about kids getting stupid, too. Now that we're parents, the cycle continues...just as it will when our kids start having kids of their own, freaking out about the fact that they're not teaching kids home-row typing skills (which are probably already on their way out, honestly) in an era where 95% of written communication is being done on touch-screen interfaces.
Sure it is. I believe Larry Walters won a Darwin Award for his contribution to the genome by not procreating. With these guys, though, we may already be screwed...do they have kids yet?
Also, the higher the price of oil gets, the more domestic manufacturing we're going to see, regardless of the difference in labor costs.
Those behemoth Ultra Large Container Vessels consume an enormous amount of fuel bringing their shit from Asia to the U.S., and short of discovering some huge untapped energy source, I don't see that being sustainable at all in the long term. To be honest, though, I think we're probably going to end up at war with China before that really becomes an issue over China's stockpiling of Rare-Earth elements, preceded by sanctions and ever-increasing limits on Chinese imports that will help to encourage domestic production.
Clearly our definitions of 'working class' are pretty disparate. The MAFIAA organizations that were most harmed by this are anything but working class, they're little more than middlemen that are using their immense wealth and every legal maneuver available to them to continue to justify their existence in an era when artists are eschewing the mainstream industry entirely and self producing more and more.
When the horse fell out of favor as the preferred method of transportation, the harrier became an endangered species, and I doubt very many people shed too many tears over that fact. Now that the MAFIAA organizations are no longer the preferred method of distribution, they're living on borrowed time, and they know it. Imagine if the harriers of yesteryear possessed the political clout at the turn of the 20th century that the MAFIAA possesses at the turn of the 21st and the negative impact that would have had on the automotive industry.
As a consumer of media, I have as much use for an A&R rep these days as I do for the harrier, which is to say, none at all. 99% of the music I listen to is self produced and put on the 'net free of charge by the artists themselves, and what's more, an ever growing percentage of the videos I watch are as well. The days of the "Major Label Darling" riding around in limousines snorting coke off of hookers tits and trashing hotel rooms is quickly coming to a close. I have a hard time feeling bad about that, no matter how much David Lowery cries about it (whose band Cracker almost epitomizes the problems in the industry in the 90's before Napster took off, go back and listen to Kerosene Hat, the album endlessly pimped on MTV when "Low" was a Buzz Clip...a handful of decent tracks and a shit-load of low-production filler bullshit that were obviously recorded as fast and loose as possible and shoved on the album to justify charging LP prices for EP content).
And why is it that we have such a large prison population?
The admittedly glib answer would be growing poverty, the idiotic war on drugs (that alone contributed to an enormous spike), piss-poor education/kids 'slipping through the cracks', inadequate focus on rehabilitation in lieu of punitive measures in the prison system itself, the privatization of the prison system which leads to prisoners being a commodity (Kids For Cash)...but there are a lot of reasons, obviously.
Still, I fully believe it has little to do with having 'too much freedom' and everything to do with our failure to address the social ills that lead to criminal behavior.
Slashdot Mirror
In the best of circumstances, ignoring the confusion and panic, maybe...
Some people in the audience thought the thick smoke and gunfire was a special effect accompanying the movie, police and witnesses said.
Everything I'm reading says it happened very quickly. In a smoke filled theater, with people screaming and running around all over the place, I'm betting there would have been 'friendly-fire' incidents and and even higher body count. We'll never know either way, obviously, so I concede that it's possible, but I highly doubt it.
I have a love/hate relationship with the right to bear arms. On one hand, when interpreted the way I'm sure our founding fathers intended when they codified our rights, I think it is an excellent check on governmental power; if the shit truly hit the fan there would be militia's and guerrilla forces springing up overnight to fight back (the apathy of the modern-age be damned). " But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security." Attacking the right to bear arms seems to me to be attacking our right of revolution as spelled out in the Declaration.
On the other hand, however, I cannot believe that our founding fathers would have intended for the high-powered weaponry we have available to us today to be freely available to anyone out there that's capable of passing a cursory background check. People aren't buying AK's for practical defense, they're buying AK's for ePeen. For instance, a friend of mine, who lives in an apartment and recently got his Concealed Carry license, the day he got his license in the mail he went out and bought a massive Desert Eagle hand cannon that he loves to show off to people. If someone were to break into his apartment, and he started firing with that gun...how many rounds would end up in his neighbors apartments as they blast through those poorly-insulated plaster-board walls? He tells me he's in the market for an AR-15 now...for 'home defense', and he's still in that apartment with the tissue paper walls. He's a fucking accident waiting to happen...which is precisely why I won't hang out with him when he's strapped. He'd probably end up taking me or someone else around him out just trying to draw down on someone...
The problem, as I see it, is how you reliably prevent the fuck-tards like the stupid 20-year-old kid I mentioned above from endangering themselves and others while still preserving the rights of those that have the maturity and gravitas to properly be trusted with a lethal weapon. Just making sure the person in question doesn't have any felonies and isn't certifiably mentally ill doesn't seem like enough. How many kids in this country die every year because their dumbass parents don't properly secure the guns in the home? How many kids have been killed by other kids because their parents didn't properly secure them? We need to have an honest conversation about this on a national level but unfortunately the issue is driven to extremes: Either you're pro-gun and anyone and their sister should be able to buy whatever gun they want, no questions asked, or you're anti-gun and think that they should be completely illegal for everyone but the police and military. There's no grey area anymore.
From CNN:
Some people in the audience thought the thick smoke and gunfire was a special effect accompanying the movie, police and witnesses said.
We'll never know for sure, of course, but I'm betting that it wouldn't have made a difference if the audience had been packed with people carrying concealed. People don't expect to be opened fire upon in a movie theater, and the incident itself lasted only a few minutes at the most. He shot the place up and then dipped out.
Yeah the ones at my local theater don't even have handles on the outside of the door, and they have those alarm boxes on them with the push-bars like most places do for emergency exits, but I've seen those doors propped open many times so the alarms must either be broken or deactivated. Probably deactivated; I've seen people smoking near that door. More than likely, employees use it themselves to take a secret smoke break...
I doubt it, more than likely he burst in and started spraying wildly in the theater, probably within mere seconds, so even if half the people in that theater had been packing, they likely wouldn't have prevented anything. If anything, they probably would have increased the body count as they started shooting crazily in the dark and smoke filled theater (he threw a smoke grenade, remember? He was wearing a mask, the audience wasn't) and there probably would have been another half-dozen or so people killed.
Of the people I know who have a concealed carry license (we just got CC here in WI within the last year or so), only a handful have any real firearms handling experience, mostly through prior military service. Most everyone else just took the 4 hour course the state mandates. The fact that they're able to carry a firearm doesn't make me feel safer at all, and a few of the people actually scare me that they're legally allowed to carry concealed (stupid kids that think it makes them tough).
How would the people in that audience being armed, in a dark theater, with fucking smoke from the smoke grenades he tossed in before he started shooting, have made much of a difference at all?
How long did this incident go on? A minute? According to CNN he killed 12 people (their revised figure) and wounded 50 more. Even Quick Draw McGraw wouldn't have been able to stop him from killing a few people. Those people would have died whether the audience was armed or not...
From what I read, the shooter came into the theater from outside through an emergency exit door. I don't know how he got it open, unless perhaps someone had propped it open to sneak their friends into the theater, that happens at my local theater all the time...
The shooter should have at least done the world a favor and taken himself out, too. What a fucking piece of shit...
Up to and after the final vote on the mining bill (which I admit I was against for environmental reasons, and also because the bill was so bad that nobody would admit to having written it, which probably means it was written by Gogebic Taconite's legal department) there was a lot of bitterness and anger over the fact that the state representatives had a say in whether or not a mine went in at all. It was all Democrats against the bill (with one Republican, and boy were they pissed off at him) but most people cited the fact that representatives from areas that wouldn't be effected by the mine had a say as the reason why they were so angry about opposition to it.
There were a lot of people in comment threads on those articles screaming for the rights of municipalities and counties to overrule the state in cases like this. It's not limited to the States vs. the Fed anymore, now it's the towns versus the State and lord knows soon it will be the individual versus the town. I suppose it will never end until it's every many for himself, which seems to be what many of these people want, they just don't want to admit it either to themselves or others...
Thank you, that was the point I was trying to get across, which I admit I was pretty vague on since I was in a hurry...
The mining bill was shot down here in Madison, the state capitol, and for months in the local news there was a lot of negativity about representatives from other areas having a say in whether or not Gogebic Taconite was allowed to mine the North Woods area. It's not limited to Federal Government anymore here in Wisconsin (and I'm sure elsewhere in other local issues that we don't hear much about on a national stage); the anti-Madison sentiment is long documented (The common derogatory nickname is The People's Republic of Madison), but never before have I really seen it to the point I have in the last year or so since Walker took office.
Their suggestion to delete System32 worked great for speeding up my computer, too!
Oh, I've been hearing people bitch about the state (as in the state of Wisconsin) and screaming that their local municipalities should have the power and people in Madison and Milwaukee shouldn't be telling people in the small towns and villages throughout the state how to live. Perfect example, the Gogebic Taconite mining bill that was shot down in the state senate.
The anti-government hysteria knows no bounds. I can only imagine how retarded it's going to get from here on out...
And even when the people try to do something about it, why, that's when those reps start getting leaned on...
The excuses against it are precisely the same as the excuses that would be trotted out against this, and you know it: "Why should I have to pay for it? Government only gets in the way! If the free market won't do it, that probably means that it's gonna cost too much anyway!! It's regulations, regulations are why those people can't get internet! ARGHGHGHG!!!! BARGGHGGHGHLLE!!!!!"
If you've missed the selfish, asinine streak in people these days when it comes to anything involving government doing any fucking thing, you're either blind or deliberately obtuse. You could probably get people to vote down public water utilities in some parts of the country right now...that's how batshit retarded it is getting.
Or better yet: The state
And with those words, you would drive half the people of this country into hysterics. We can't even agree to a public option...I doubt highly that enough of us would agree to fund something like that no matter how beneficial we all know it would be. Look at what they're doing to NPR...
I worked at CompUSA back when Vista launched (believe it was a January because I remember we had a massive blizzard and the midnight launch was a dismal failure) and in the month or so prior we started rolling out the hardware with it pre-installed so that by launch night we only had a couple models that were still running XP, and they didn't last long as word got around how much Vista sucked. By the time the store had failed and was being liquidated, we had one model that was still running XP.
Of course, depending on the hardware, you could always do like a lot of people did with those Vista machines, and put the old OS on there. There were some headaches with the really early models but within a few months driver support caught up and it wasn't such a big deal...
Goddamn right. This is why I find all the hysterics these days about Socialism and Liberals and all that shit so fucking funny...the people going apoplectic over "leftists" would probably have a heart attack if they were being represented by a real liberal, and not the Center-Right Democrats we have today.
I chalk it up to selective perception and ignorance. I mean, look at how many people here in the U.S. are screaming about how tyrannical and broken the National Health Service and it's equivalents are, while the people that are actually using said services shake their heads and wonder what the hell they're smoking because they can't imagine life without it. I can count on one hand how many times I've heard a Canadian bitch about waiting lists (which, to be fair, the bulk of the time was because they had an elective procedure they wanted to get done right now and didn't feel they should have to wait behind all the people that actually NEED treatment right away, poor babies) compared to most everyone else whose come out in support of it.
What the fuck happened over the last 30 or so years in this country? It's like the second Reagan was elected the collective IQ of this country dropped by a few dozen points...
Why would you assume firstly, that it is only the agenda of the republitards, and secondly, that there are not conservatives in the demorats?
The whole idea of the modern U.S. Democratic party being "liberal" is a fucking joke in itself, anyway. There is no truly 'liberal' party in the U.S.; we've got centrist Democrats that like to call themselves liberals, and we've got the right leaning Republicans, but there are few truly left-leaning progressives in this government anymore.
Sure, compared to some of the far-right leaning reps we're seeing these days, they're liberal, but on the world stage they're just as much centrist, corporation-loving soulless bastards as their political opponents are. The entire spectrum has gotten shifted so far to the right now that the second anyone even breathes a word of support for a truly progressive policy or idea (such as Single Payer healthcare, for instance) there are angry mobs with torches and pitchforks screaming "SOCIALIST!!!11!!1!" on their doorstep.
What you need is a sewing box
Ya, I've got Stanley rolling case where I store all my computer parts, only cost $20, and has plenty of room for all my accessories, tools, and parts. Easily mobile for house calls, plus it has a swivel-out drawer for screws where I can organize all the different little shit that comes with most components these days. I haven't lost a screw since. Highly recommend something similar; plus it sure beats using old parts boxes for storage like most people do...
I just thought of a perfect, real world example I ran into a couple years ago when attempting to get a tune-up on my mid-80's Buick daily driver (it was a rust-bucket beast, but the winters here in Wisconsin are harsh and it handled great in the snow)...I had a ton of trouble finding someone that could even do a tune-up on it. Why? Because it was a carbureted engine, and in this era of fuel injection, it's a skill that hardly anyone except for hobbyists uses anymore. I was incredulous, but according to several shop managers I spoke to, they haven't even had a carbureted engine come into their shop in years. I think it took me 4-5 different tries before I found a place with an older mechanic that could do it...and they charged me a premium on the labor to boot.
Maybe I was just being bullshitted, but my own ignorance in car repair and maintenance precludes me from making a judgement call on that one way or the other. Logically speaking, though, if they just don't see carburetors anymore, what the hell is the point of learning how to repair them? I can't see one...
I don't agree with that at all. My kids probably couldn't identify what local plants they can eat and which ones they should avoid (a skill that was arguably of tantamount importance to our ancestors) but then again, our ancestors that depended on those skills to live probably weren't spending much of their time doing Calculus and discussing world politics, either.
Ignoring the fact that everyone I know is fully capable of reading an analog clock, over 30 years after the first digital clocks were hitting the market, even young children, tell me, how would society fundamentally be harmed by this if there were no more analog clocks to read? If the skill was no longer relevant, why the hell are we keeping it around? Nostalgia? What a waste of energy and those precious brain cells.
I will admit that filling our brains with useless pop-culture trivia is a waste, and I'm not innocent in that regards (I've pretty much become a walking encyclopedia of Star Trek: The Next Generation which is absolutely useless to me outside of playing "name that episode" with friends) but I'm not going to go into hysterics over the fact that our kids have no knowledge of, say, what it's like to operate a rotary telephone, or fiddle with a pair of rabbit-ears trying to get a better TV signal, or how to properly behave on a party-line. It's useless knowledge to them.
I'm sure there are lots of things our own parents learned that we blew off, and they probably had the same worries about kids getting stupid, too. Now that we're parents, the cycle continues...just as it will when our kids start having kids of their own, freaking out about the fact that they're not teaching kids home-row typing skills (which are probably already on their way out, honestly) in an era where 95% of written communication is being done on touch-screen interfaces.
Sure it is. I believe Larry Walters won a Darwin Award for his contribution to the genome by not procreating. With these guys, though, we may already be screwed...do they have kids yet?
Also, the higher the price of oil gets, the more domestic manufacturing we're going to see, regardless of the difference in labor costs.
Those behemoth Ultra Large Container Vessels consume an enormous amount of fuel bringing their shit from Asia to the U.S., and short of discovering some huge untapped energy source, I don't see that being sustainable at all in the long term. To be honest, though, I think we're probably going to end up at war with China before that really becomes an issue over China's stockpiling of Rare-Earth elements, preceded by sanctions and ever-increasing limits on Chinese imports that will help to encourage domestic production.
**AA
working class
Clearly our definitions of 'working class' are pretty disparate. The MAFIAA organizations that were most harmed by this are anything but working class, they're little more than middlemen that are using their immense wealth and every legal maneuver available to them to continue to justify their existence in an era when artists are eschewing the mainstream industry entirely and self producing more and more.
When the horse fell out of favor as the preferred method of transportation, the harrier became an endangered species, and I doubt very many people shed too many tears over that fact. Now that the MAFIAA organizations are no longer the preferred method of distribution, they're living on borrowed time, and they know it. Imagine if the harriers of yesteryear possessed the political clout at the turn of the 20th century that the MAFIAA possesses at the turn of the 21st and the negative impact that would have had on the automotive industry.
As a consumer of media, I have as much use for an A&R rep these days as I do for the harrier, which is to say, none at all. 99% of the music I listen to is self produced and put on the 'net free of charge by the artists themselves, and what's more, an ever growing percentage of the videos I watch are as well. The days of the "Major Label Darling" riding around in limousines snorting coke off of hookers tits and trashing hotel rooms is quickly coming to a close. I have a hard time feeling bad about that, no matter how much David Lowery cries about it (whose band Cracker almost epitomizes the problems in the industry in the 90's before Napster took off, go back and listen to Kerosene Hat, the album endlessly pimped on MTV when "Low" was a Buzz Clip...a handful of decent tracks and a shit-load of low-production filler bullshit that were obviously recorded as fast and loose as possible and shoved on the album to justify charging LP prices for EP content).
And why is it that we have such a large prison population?
The admittedly glib answer would be growing poverty, the idiotic war on drugs (that alone contributed to an enormous spike), piss-poor education/kids 'slipping through the cracks', inadequate focus on rehabilitation in lieu of punitive measures in the prison system itself, the privatization of the prison system which leads to prisoners being a commodity (Kids For Cash)...but there are a lot of reasons, obviously.
Still, I fully believe it has little to do with having 'too much freedom' and everything to do with our failure to address the social ills that lead to criminal behavior.