I don't think you can compare national crime statistics between nations.
1. They aren't all collected the same way.
2. They aren't all counted the same way.
3. They are highly political and you don't know whether politics are distorting numbers in country A or country B.
4. Demographics are not the same. They are different populations with different cultures, different economics, different religions, different politics, different age break downs, different distributions of rich and poor... etc. To compare them between the two only looking at that one variable is silly.
If you want to do this you first have to compensate for all population differences. So figure out what your base line demographic is then look at all the crime stats in each nation and reweigh the stats on the baseline demographic. And that would ONLY address the demographic distortion.
In short, I view such comparisons as less then worthless because while being worthless they confuse many into thinking they have value which effectively spread ignorance thus rendering them of negative value.
As to normal people standing up to criminals, they do it all the time and always have. I have hundreds of examples just in the last couple years of totally normal people standing up to men with guns and winning.
Of course... they had guns themselves.
Criminals are mostly cowards just like most people. But the man that stands up to a criminal and risks his life is not a coward and in any give crowd you'll find a few people that aren't cowards.
Again, hundreds of examples just recently.
As to why there is crime... there is crime because we are opportunists. That is our nature as human beings. We eat the fruit from the tree and the fish from the sea. You have crime in Chicago because it is a way to make money that is easier then other ways for some people. And human beings tend to take the easy route in all situations.
Make crime harder and more dangerous and fewer people will do it.
Its like anything in the great market of supply and demand. Increase the cost of crime on the criminal and you should lower the willingness of criminals to enter that business.
My solution to crime? That's like asking someone for their solution to war. Its not really something you solve but rather something you struggle against.
And really you probably always will struggle with it.
There were violent criminals 10,000 years ago and there will be violent criminals for as long as there are people.
As to your suggestions:
1. Throwing lots of cop at an issue probably works. Though I've seen very effective police forces that were very small and very ineffective police forces that were very large. I don't think it matters how many people you have so much as how you use them. Absolute minimum police force would have to be something like equal police officers to active criminals. You can double and triple up on criminals but you generally want at least one officer to respond to any given crime when it happens. If there are 100 crimes happening right now for example you'll probably want about 100 officers to deal with it at a minimum. Obviously you have investigators and various paper work handlers that increase overhead. But I'm talking minimum here. As to maximum? I don't know... I think New York City probably has too many police and I don't think they're efficiently used.
But I don't actually have very strong opinions on the number of police officers needed.
2. As to channeling people into more positive lines of activity, you'll actually find very little opposition there so long as you actually push people into something that is actually productive. Often you'll get a backlash when what is actually produced is a very high overhead publicly funded political program that exists mostly to prop up the political careers of local and national politicians using public tax dollars.
So long as you are scrupulous about not doing that you shouldn't have a problem. That is... avoid the ACORN mistake.
3. We already fence bad people away. Look at the demographic distribution in cities throughout the US and you'll find that everyone lives in clusters. You live in communities that are like "you" and not like "them". I live in Los Angeles, and nearly all the murders in my city happen in one neighborhood or within about a mile of it. Stay 2 miles from that neighborhood and you're pretty safe. Everyone knows that neighborhood. Its generally safe to walk through during the day. Certainly safe to drive through. But its dangerous at night even in your car. We all wall ourselves off. We always have.
4. As to paying people to turn their lives around, the only issue you might run into there would be people that exploit the system to get a free ride. Yes, a few bad apples do spoil the bunch. Tax payers don't like to think they're being robbed or conned or exploited. So you'll have to work very hard to filter out people that are exploiting the system from those that honestly want to better themselves.
If you pull that off to the voter's satisfaction then you could probably do that system.
As to my idea? I honestly think criminals respond to and prey upon perceived weakness. The lion does not stalk the biggest meanest wildebeest. They prey upon the young, the sick, and the old.
I would do something to make the people I was most interested in protecting too strong or dangerous to be worth the risk.
Then I would look at the result in the crime statistics to see what the next step should be... if the stats fall low enough then I will invest my time in solving other problems.
You will never solve crime entirely. All you can do is lower it to a reasonable level.
Your first link looks at "estimated gun ownership" and then compares that to gun homicide.
Can you guess why that study might not be valid?
1. Estimating gun ownership definitely includes criminal gun ownership. So if you have lots of criminals with guns and lots of normal people without them then your study would have nothing to do with gun restriction laws.
2. How do you estimate unregistered guns? Its totally arbitrary.
I could go on. But why? I just looked at your first link... annihilated it... and then moved on. Please look at the rest of your links and see if they have made similar errors.
Why? Because I don't think the criminals really have a hard time getting guns in either of those places.
If I am a gang banger working for the Mexican cartel which is reported to have heavy activity in Chicago at this point. Do you think I have a hard time getting access to a gun?
Obviously not.
So I am armed.
What is more, these sorts of people are reported to be very violent. Which means when push comes to shove they will kill you.
Now... what if many people that were not criminals were also armed. How does that change things. I can bombard you with literally hundreds of stories of robberies foiled by a cashier with a gun.
Furthermore, once it becomes known that guns are commonly pulled on criminals that try such things it alters behavior patterns. In places where there is high gun ownership "hot" burglaries are less common. That is, you get more breaking and entering, more cat burglars but fewer people that actually make themselves known to their victim. Why? Because criminals don't want to get shot. So they start sneaking around.
Now what do you assume the statistics are on gun violence in regards to cat burglars? I'm assuming its less then armed robbery crimes.
See, when you take guns away from normal people, you make gun violence SAFE for criminals. They wave their gun around without fear of getting shot.
If you'd like me to link you to summaries or commentary then I can do that though appreciate those will be from blogs and so forth. If you want to read the actual study you'll have to get it from those fellows.
If you want to save yourself some time, here is a quote:
""It was also found that assault weapons bans did not significantly affect murder rates at the state level.""
So there you go. Why are we fighting about this issue?
The gun people want to keep their guns. Why are the anti gun people fighting them? They say it is to save lives. But that might be a mistake on their part.
For the sake argument, assuming these laws don't reduce murder, do we still want to ban guns?
It just seems so needlessly confrontational. Leave people alone. If they want to carry guns let them do so. Does that mean every so often a crazy person will kill some people with such a weapon? Possibly but they're crazy and honestly could probably find something to do their deed. Remember, the 9/11 hijackers killed over 3000 people with a collection of box cutters.
If you have a will to kill then you really don't need a gun. And I'll be honest... I like the idea of NORMAL non-criminal people that aren't crazy having access to guns. I think that's a good thing. I think society is most secure when the most reasonable people have the trump card on violence.
My neighbors are mostly good people. If things get crazy the idea of us all popping up with a gun seems like a good check against anarchy.
Also... zombies can't use guns... so take that zombie uprising. The robot uprising might be more of a problem. After all those bastards can use guns.
Another study just came out showing that increased gun ownership actually lowers the murder rate and lower gun ownership does the opposite. We have multiple points of confirmation and there are a few skeptical politicians that are starting to come around.
The old truism is confirmed. Outlaw guns and only the outlaws will have them.
Does Chicago have a violence problem? Yes. Gun bans are not the solution.
Because I don't particularly respect the quality of his intellect.
His attack was incompetent. It only succeeded because our immigration department is even more incompetent and because "Someone" put blocks in that prevented the CIA/NSA/FBI from talking to each other. This led to the terrorists being able to operate in the US without being properly flagged.
Furthermore, Osama didn't think we'd get as far as we did in Afghanistan so his perfect grasp of things wasn't all that perfect.
As to this notion that 9/11 is what is destroying the US... I think not. Our issues are more profound then that. We are looking at generational fracture lines that have been building for about a century.
The moving rubber balls will be resisted by the spandex which will slow them down and thus render the experiment useless. Much more useful if the surface is hard but in roughly the right shape. Then the marbles will at least move freely on the surface.
I don't think he did... and in any case this doesn't help the radical islamists. If the US goes down this path long enough we'll be a different culture. A culture perhaps that would be okay with genocide. And that would be bad news for the islamists.
In any case, I don't advocate any of this... and I don't see the point of looking at UBL's point of view on the matter since he wanted to destroy us.
I think its a good deal more complicated then that. I agree there are those interests and I agree they are seem to go out of their way to gather money and power to themselves. But I think what we're dealing with is a bit more complex then that.
That is... I think they're a cough... and not the cold. Get me? I think their advances are a symptom but not a cause. Sort of how old people or HIV patients tend to die of pneumonia. Something else creates a weakness and then that weakness leads to infection.
These people are always there. They have always been there and they will always be there. But in past generations we were strong enough to resist their consistent tug. Now... not so much... and the question is why? What has broken down that has allowed these forces to be relevant?
The degeneration of the federal government is really amazing to watch.
I hesitate to put blame on anyone for it because we're so politically divided and I think everyone is so factional that we can't get past that. If I say X is responsible then people from X camp will automatically defend them or vice versa.
Regardless, there are serious problems here and the country could well trend towards tyranny.
I have even seen editorials in major newspapers calling for a King or the repeal of all sorts of rights past generations risked their lives to protect.
Its really sort of amazing. Its like a different country altogether. I'd expect to see this sort of thing in the developing world... some unstable backwater. But in the US? Really sort of amazing.
I'm not sure what is causing it... I just think its in everyone's interest if we take a few steps back and carefully consider what we are doing to ourselves.
I'm not educated enough in this kind of physics to really deserve an opinion.
But with that admission made upfront... whenever I hear dark matter or dark energy it makes me think that the equations themselves are wrong in one way or another.
I keep thinking back to epicycles. Remember that at one time we thought the earth was the center of the solar system. But when very accurate measurements of the movements of the planets were made they found that plants would stop and then go back on their course a bit before going forward again. So the theory was that planets orbit the earth while making little spirally circles.
But then it got weirder because when they did even more careful observation it looked like the planets were taking a spiral path along the spiral path. And so on.
Ultimately they figured out that they had made a fundamental error and that the sun was actually the center of the solar system. And thus the epicycles vanished.
To me... dark matter sounds like the epicycles have come back. What would you call epicycles today if they found them again? I'm thinking something like Dark Gravity or Dark orbits or something.
In any case... I don't know enough to have an opinion on the matter that means anything. But from my limited science education as well as my experience with history and people... dark matter/energy sounds like Epicycles all over again.
Where is the flaw in the equations? I really have no idea. But something somewhere in the math might be just ever so slightly askew.
The point of the rubber sheet analogy is to discuss the SHAPE of the surface which is a stand in for forces of gravitation.
As such, even if following the analogy you shouldn't use an actual rubber sheet because it will be distorted by the marble itself. Rather, use a hard surface modeled on what a rubber sheet would do with that deformation.
Will that be perfect? Probably not but will be less of a failure then this spandex idea.
Isn't the whole point of DM that we can't detect it except by the gravity distortion? Its basically "unfound matter"...
And what means is what we really have is a distortion of gravity in a given area that we cannot count for... its therefore not dark matter but dark gravity.
Or am I wrong? have we actually found dark matter? The actual stuff. Proven to exist? Or is it just what we write down when our math doesn't add up?
Why are we talking about Snowden's crime when it pales in comparison to the breach of the law by the NSA?
This is madness. I'll tell you what, I'll throw snowden in jail if you throw the head of the NSA as well as most of his direct subordinates in jail as well.
Short of that, Snowden deserves to be as free as any of them.
Do you think we gave the chinese compromising technical knowledge of the plane by sourcing some magnets from chinese companies?
I don't.
I think for FUTURE planes they should be sourced entirely from US production. But since they made a stupid mistake they should just leave the chinese parts alone assuming they were accurate when they said it was only simple non-classified parts.
the parts they sourced seem pretty harmless and they are only doing this for the test phase... the main production will be all US parts and again these weren't secret parts.
various nations are using the GMO issue to justify blocking US agricultural exports.
That's mostly what it is about... trade wars... diplomatic power games... and the drums of war. This sort of thing tends to lead to it.
In any case, abandoning GMO is not the solution. The technology is too powerful to abandon.
Rather, we need to play the power game back at them. This is now officially a pissing contest. If the feds want to be anything but a useless waste of money they might want to actually win one of these fights. They've done little lately but embarrass themselves.
Well they're inferior. They provide an inferior degree of control. That is not an opinion but an experimentally proven empirical fact.
They are bad for anything but the most rudimentary of games. And more frustrating their influence on the PC community is to impose those design limitations on PC gaming to allow for easy porting between platforms. This means PC games are frequently simplified to be made compatible with this inferior system.
Ultimately this is what annoys me. I am a PC gamer. I don't really care how bad or good the console controls are since I am not a primary user. That said, they influence the development houses that also make my games. Worse, microsoft keeps pouching PC devs to make console games. Yes, its all consensual... no one is putting a gun against their head. Just showing up with briefcases full of cash.
Here is all I need to be happy with the garbage controls on consoles... Stop pouching PC devs to make garbage games.
OR
Upgrade the controls on the console so the PC ports don't need to be turned into playschool parodies of themselves.
I don't really care what else happens. Either leave the devs alone that make the games I care about... The console can drowned in JRPGs for all I care. Or fix the f'ing controllers so they aren't such a pathetic mess.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think you can compare national crime statistics between nations.
1. They aren't all collected the same way.
2. They aren't all counted the same way.
3. They are highly political and you don't know whether politics are distorting numbers in country A or country B.
4. Demographics are not the same. They are different populations with different cultures, different economics, different religions, different politics, different age break downs, different distributions of rich and poor... etc. To compare them between the two only looking at that one variable is silly.
If you want to do this you first have to compensate for all population differences. So figure out what your base line demographic is then look at all the crime stats in each nation and reweigh the stats on the baseline demographic. And that would ONLY address the demographic distortion.
In short, I view such comparisons as less then worthless because while being worthless they confuse many into thinking they have value which effectively spread ignorance thus rendering them of negative value.
As to normal people standing up to criminals, they do it all the time and always have. I have hundreds of examples just in the last couple years of totally normal people standing up to men with guns and winning.
Of course... they had guns themselves.
Criminals are mostly cowards just like most people. But the man that stands up to a criminal and risks his life is not a coward and in any give crowd you'll find a few people that aren't cowards.
Again, hundreds of examples just recently.
As to why there is crime... there is crime because we are opportunists. That is our nature as human beings. We eat the fruit from the tree and the fish from the sea. You have crime in Chicago because it is a way to make money that is easier then other ways for some people. And human beings tend to take the easy route in all situations.
Make crime harder and more dangerous and fewer people will do it.
Its like anything in the great market of supply and demand. Increase the cost of crime on the criminal and you should lower the willingness of criminals to enter that business.
My solution to crime? That's like asking someone for their solution to war. Its not really something you solve but rather something you struggle against.
And really you probably always will struggle with it.
There were violent criminals 10,000 years ago and there will be violent criminals for as long as there are people.
As to your suggestions:
1. Throwing lots of cop at an issue probably works. Though I've seen very effective police forces that were very small and very ineffective police forces that were very large. I don't think it matters how many people you have so much as how you use them. Absolute minimum police force would have to be something like equal police officers to active criminals. You can double and triple up on criminals but you generally want at least one officer to respond to any given crime when it happens. If there are 100 crimes happening right now for example you'll probably want about 100 officers to deal with it at a minimum. Obviously you have investigators and various paper work handlers that increase overhead. But I'm talking minimum here. As to maximum? I don't know... I think New York City probably has too many police and I don't think they're efficiently used.
But I don't actually have very strong opinions on the number of police officers needed.
2. As to channeling people into more positive lines of activity, you'll actually find very little opposition there so long as you actually push people into something that is actually productive. Often you'll get a backlash when what is actually produced is a very high overhead publicly funded political program that exists mostly to prop up the political careers of local and national politicians using public tax dollars.
So long as you are scrupulous about not doing that you shouldn't have a problem. That is... avoid the ACORN mistake.
3. We already fence bad people away. Look at the demographic distribution in cities throughout the US and you'll find that everyone lives in clusters. You live in communities that are like "you" and not like "them". I live in Los Angeles, and nearly all the murders in my city happen in one neighborhood or within about a mile of it. Stay 2 miles from that neighborhood and you're pretty safe. Everyone knows that neighborhood. Its generally safe to walk through during the day. Certainly safe to drive through. But its dangerous at night even in your car. We all wall ourselves off. We always have.
4. As to paying people to turn their lives around, the only issue you might run into there would be people that exploit the system to get a free ride. Yes, a few bad apples do spoil the bunch. Tax payers don't like to think they're being robbed or conned or exploited. So you'll have to work very hard to filter out people that are exploiting the system from those that honestly want to better themselves.
If you pull that off to the voter's satisfaction then you could probably do that system.
As to my idea? I honestly think criminals respond to and prey upon perceived weakness. The lion does not stalk the biggest meanest wildebeest. They prey upon the young, the sick, and the old.
I would do something to make the people I was most interested in protecting too strong or dangerous to be worth the risk.
Then I would look at the result in the crime statistics to see what the next step should be... if the stats fall low enough then I will invest my time in solving other problems.
You will never solve crime entirely. All you can do is lower it to a reasonable level.
You didn't read it did you?
Your first link looks at "estimated gun ownership" and then compares that to gun homicide.
Can you guess why that study might not be valid?
1. Estimating gun ownership definitely includes criminal gun ownership. So if you have lots of criminals with guns and lots of normal people without them then your study would have nothing to do with gun restriction laws.
2. How do you estimate unregistered guns? Its totally arbitrary.
I could go on. But why? I just looked at your first link... annihilated it... and then moved on. Please look at the rest of your links and see if they have made similar errors.
Actually? Yes.
Why? Because I don't think the criminals really have a hard time getting guns in either of those places.
If I am a gang banger working for the Mexican cartel which is reported to have heavy activity in Chicago at this point. Do you think I have a hard time getting access to a gun?
Obviously not.
So I am armed.
What is more, these sorts of people are reported to be very violent. Which means when push comes to shove they will kill you.
Now... what if many people that were not criminals were also armed. How does that change things. I can bombard you with literally hundreds of stories of robberies foiled by a cashier with a gun.
Furthermore, once it becomes known that guns are commonly pulled on criminals that try such things it alters behavior patterns. In places where there is high gun ownership "hot" burglaries are less common. That is, you get more breaking and entering, more cat burglars but fewer people that actually make themselves known to their victim. Why? Because criminals don't want to get shot. So they start sneaking around.
Now what do you assume the statistics are on gun violence in regards to cat burglars? I'm assuming its less then armed robbery crimes.
See, when you take guns away from normal people, you make gun violence SAFE for criminals. They wave their gun around without fear of getting shot.
That is the result.
Is that what you want?
Here is one of them:
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13504851.2013.854294#.Urh7a_ZRYvR
If you'd like me to link you to summaries or commentary then I can do that though appreciate those will be from blogs and so forth. If you want to read the actual study you'll have to get it from those fellows.
If you want to save yourself some time, here is a quote:
""It was also found that assault weapons bans did not significantly affect murder rates at the state level.""
So there you go. Why are we fighting about this issue?
The gun people want to keep their guns. Why are the anti gun people fighting them? They say it is to save lives. But that might be a mistake on their part.
For the sake argument, assuming these laws don't reduce murder, do we still want to ban guns?
It just seems so needlessly confrontational. Leave people alone. If they want to carry guns let them do so. Does that mean every so often a crazy person will kill some people with such a weapon? Possibly but they're crazy and honestly could probably find something to do their deed. Remember, the 9/11 hijackers killed over 3000 people with a collection of box cutters.
If you have a will to kill then you really don't need a gun. And I'll be honest... I like the idea of NORMAL non-criminal people that aren't crazy having access to guns. I think that's a good thing. I think society is most secure when the most reasonable people have the trump card on violence.
My neighbors are mostly good people. If things get crazy the idea of us all popping up with a gun seems like a good check against anarchy.
Also... zombies can't use guns... so take that zombie uprising. The robot uprising might be more of a problem. After all those bastards can use guns.
Another study just came out showing that increased gun ownership actually lowers the murder rate and lower gun ownership does the opposite. We have multiple points of confirmation and there are a few skeptical politicians that are starting to come around.
The old truism is confirmed. Outlaw guns and only the outlaws will have them.
Does Chicago have a violence problem? Yes. Gun bans are not the solution.
So we should just cut our throats with kitchen knives... what is your point?
Because I don't particularly respect the quality of his intellect.
His attack was incompetent. It only succeeded because our immigration department is even more incompetent and because "Someone" put blocks in that prevented the CIA/NSA/FBI from talking to each other. This led to the terrorists being able to operate in the US without being properly flagged.
Furthermore, Osama didn't think we'd get as far as we did in Afghanistan so his perfect grasp of things wasn't all that perfect.
As to this notion that 9/11 is what is destroying the US... I think not. Our issues are more profound then that. We are looking at generational fracture lines that have been building for about a century.
The moving rubber balls will be resisted by the spandex which will slow them down and thus render the experiment useless. Much more useful if the surface is hard but in roughly the right shape. Then the marbles will at least move freely on the surface.
I don't think he did... and in any case this doesn't help the radical islamists. If the US goes down this path long enough we'll be a different culture. A culture perhaps that would be okay with genocide. And that would be bad news for the islamists.
In any case, I don't advocate any of this... and I don't see the point of looking at UBL's point of view on the matter since he wanted to destroy us.
I think its a good deal more complicated then that. I agree there are those interests and I agree they are seem to go out of their way to gather money and power to themselves. But I think what we're dealing with is a bit more complex then that.
That is... I think they're a cough... and not the cold. Get me? I think their advances are a symptom but not a cause. Sort of how old people or HIV patients tend to die of pneumonia. Something else creates a weakness and then that weakness leads to infection.
These people are always there. They have always been there and they will always be there. But in past generations we were strong enough to resist their consistent tug. Now... not so much... and the question is why? What has broken down that has allowed these forces to be relevant?
The degeneration of the federal government is really amazing to watch.
I hesitate to put blame on anyone for it because we're so politically divided and I think everyone is so factional that we can't get past that. If I say X is responsible then people from X camp will automatically defend them or vice versa.
Regardless, there are serious problems here and the country could well trend towards tyranny.
I have even seen editorials in major newspapers calling for a King or the repeal of all sorts of rights past generations risked their lives to protect.
Its really sort of amazing. Its like a different country altogether. I'd expect to see this sort of thing in the developing world... some unstable backwater. But in the US? Really sort of amazing.
I'm not sure what is causing it... I just think its in everyone's interest if we take a few steps back and carefully consider what we are doing to ourselves.
I'm not educated enough in this kind of physics to really deserve an opinion.
But with that admission made upfront... whenever I hear dark matter or dark energy it makes me think that the equations themselves are wrong in one way or another.
I keep thinking back to epicycles. Remember that at one time we thought the earth was the center of the solar system. But when very accurate measurements of the movements of the planets were made they found that plants would stop and then go back on their course a bit before going forward again. So the theory was that planets orbit the earth while making little spirally circles.
But then it got weirder because when they did even more careful observation it looked like the planets were taking a spiral path along the spiral path. And so on.
Ultimately they figured out that they had made a fundamental error and that the sun was actually the center of the solar system. And thus the epicycles vanished.
To me... dark matter sounds like the epicycles have come back. What would you call epicycles today if they found them again? I'm thinking something like Dark Gravity or Dark orbits or something.
In any case... I don't know enough to have an opinion on the matter that means anything. But from my limited science education as well as my experience with history and people... dark matter/energy sounds like Epicycles all over again.
Where is the flaw in the equations? I really have no idea. But something somewhere in the math might be just ever so slightly askew.
The point of the rubber sheet analogy is to discuss the SHAPE of the surface which is a stand in for forces of gravitation.
As such, even if following the analogy you shouldn't use an actual rubber sheet because it will be distorted by the marble itself. Rather, use a hard surface modeled on what a rubber sheet would do with that deformation.
Will that be perfect? Probably not but will be less of a failure then this spandex idea.
Isn't the whole point of DM that we can't detect it except by the gravity distortion? Its basically "unfound matter"...
And what means is what we really have is a distortion of gravity in a given area that we cannot count for... its therefore not dark matter but dark gravity.
Or am I wrong? have we actually found dark matter? The actual stuff. Proven to exist? Or is it just what we write down when our math doesn't add up?
Why are we talking about Snowden's crime when it pales in comparison to the breach of the law by the NSA?
This is madness. I'll tell you what, I'll throw snowden in jail if you throw the head of the NSA as well as most of his direct subordinates in jail as well.
Short of that, Snowden deserves to be as free as any of them.
Nothing ever changes.
Which is why we need alternatives to the banking system.
Do you think we gave the chinese compromising technical knowledge of the plane by sourcing some magnets from chinese companies?
I don't.
I think for FUTURE planes they should be sourced entirely from US production. But since they made a stupid mistake they should just leave the chinese parts alone assuming they were accurate when they said it was only simple non-classified parts.
the parts they sourced seem pretty harmless and they are only doing this for the test phase... the main production will be all US parts and again these weren't secret parts.
Why are you giving him a freebee? Think he didn't know it was illegal to lie to congress?
Jail now.
They promise. *giggle*
various nations are using the GMO issue to justify blocking US agricultural exports.
That's mostly what it is about... trade wars... diplomatic power games... and the drums of war. This sort of thing tends to lead to it.
In any case, abandoning GMO is not the solution. The technology is too powerful to abandon.
Rather, we need to play the power game back at them. This is now officially a pissing contest. If the feds want to be anything but a useless waste of money they might want to actually win one of these fights. They've done little lately but embarrass themselves.
Well they're inferior. They provide an inferior degree of control. That is not an opinion but an experimentally proven empirical fact.
They are bad for anything but the most rudimentary of games. And more frustrating their influence on the PC community is to impose those design limitations on PC gaming to allow for easy porting between platforms. This means PC games are frequently simplified to be made compatible with this inferior system.
Ultimately this is what annoys me. I am a PC gamer. I don't really care how bad or good the console controls are since I am not a primary user. That said, they influence the development houses that also make my games. Worse, microsoft keeps pouching PC devs to make console games. Yes, its all consensual... no one is putting a gun against their head. Just showing up with briefcases full of cash.
Here is all I need to be happy with the garbage controls on consoles... Stop pouching PC devs to make garbage games.
OR
Upgrade the controls on the console so the PC ports don't need to be turned into playschool parodies of themselves.
I don't really care what else happens. Either leave the devs alone that make the games I care about... The console can drowned in JRPGs for all I care. Or fix the f'ing controllers so they aren't such a pathetic mess.
This one lacks specificity.