GI bill. Yep. Good idea. Sign up to commit murder or be murdered at the whim of a bunch of psychopaths in DC. The military isn't a summer camp -- once you realize what it actually does, the idea becomes less attractive.
Nothing wrong with a military career. Are there risks? Yep. But you can die as a clerk in a convince store too. Here's an idea... PICK carefully which branch of the service you choose. Not all branches are the Army or Marines. The Navy, for instance, would unlikely find you on the sending end of a gun or the receiving end of hostile actions. The Air Force doesn't do much shooting of small arms either, but you might get stuck in a missile launch control room for 48 hours at a time.
Of course, if war breaks out, you get to go first.. But that's how this game is played. No risk, no gain.
Higher Education sure doesn't have to compete when the government will loan you money to pay education costs without much concern for your ability to pay back the loan. Capitalism has NO chance to work in that case. Price has been literally unconstrained by the federal student loan program.
I'm therefore saying that government interference, by loaning money, has NOT helped this problem and has obviously made it worse by taking away nearly all constraint on tuition costs.
Now you want to argue what? That higher education wasn't subject to competition before? Maybe not, but the left's solution obviously wasn't a workable solution and made it worse.
So, apart from just nationalizing all colleges and making them tuition free and destroying the quality of higher education and driving the country deeper into debt we cannot afford to pay back, do you have a solution to this problem?
OK, OK, keep the automatic trigger group in your underwear drawer and throw the semi-auto into the box... You can buy this stuff, legally, and mail order is my point.
Most students don't get a gender studies degree. In fact, the vast majority of students don't get a gender studies degree. That's like a rounding error.
Woosh!
My point here is why are we loaning money for useless degrees? We have more "gender studies" and law degrees than we need right now and not enough STEM graduates, yet we loan money for all of these using the same rules and rates. Which is an illustration of how stupid this idea is. But the real problem is the unrestrained tuition prices. Nobody cares all that much, they can borrow to pay it... Never mind how long it will take to pay it off.
> This food insecurity is most prevalent at community colleges
Given that community colleges are dirt cheap, as far as education goes, I suspect the lack of food money has more to do with the kinds of folks whose incomes land them in community college, and that the tuition is not the cause of their woes.
Both of my kids "landed in community college" because it was inexpensive. Both will graduate with STEM degrees and have zero debt because I am able to pay their tuition and books and they are able to live at home. They will have a great education and zero debt. It's not impossible though it's not easy.
Until LEFT wing America started loaning money to college students in bulk, releasing the constraints on tuition costs and condemning students to a lifetime of debtors prison with nothing more than a "gender studies" degree to work from. What happened? Tuition rates went though the roof at a faster pace than inflation, schools built buildings and new campuses all over the place with the extra money, adding to their costs. All the while students and parents have been left holding the bill as debt.
This is a multi faceted problem. Stop looking at it in two dimensions.
By the way... The GI bill still pays out if you enlist. You CAN get though college nearly debt free if you are willing to do what it takes to make it happen. You may have to settle for a less well known college, spend your first two years at an inexpensive community college and work your butt off, but you can make it though college with a minimum of debt if you try. However, a lot of kids are loathed to work, prefer borrowing heaps of easy to obtain cash from the federal student loan program and will spend the next two decades struggling to pay the debt they so stupidly amassed.
LOL.. I do pro-bono work for him because he cannot really afford to pay me and I cannot afford to get paid due to the paperwork my employer would require and the tax implications of having a side job. Besides, he is my friend.
Also, he's actually providing a community service cashing checks and only collects 1-3% depending on the risk. If you cash checks there often from the same source with similar values, you get the preferred rate. If you show up the first time with a huge check you may walk away disappointed. He also has to eat bad checks that he cannot collect on, which costs time and money, so the risk he's taking and the costs he's paying justify what he charges.
Finally, he doesn't really make a lot of money on this check cashing business. In reality he makes more selling money orders, lottery tickets, chips and beer...
Making a fully automatic rifle of any kind will put you in a very bad place when the ATF finds out what you did.
But you can manufacture it from legally obtained parts... Yep, title 2 will bite pretty hard if and when they find out, but my point was you can build one simple part, then obtain the rest legally. You can even have all the parts, in a box, unassembled if you like and the ATF cannot do anything but hassle you.
Have we forgotten that Mars doesn't have a magnetic field to shield the solar winds from stripping away the atmosphere that's already there? Trying to terraform it to the point of having a stable atmosphere is a fools errand. It'll be like trying to fill a bucket with a hole in it.
I wasn't actually thinking Mars myself.. I was thinking some of Jupiter's moons might be juicy (literally) places for us to work on., still a bit far out there, but maybe worth it in the long run.
I have a friend who owns a check cashing business that I do IT work for pro-bono.. I can assure you that he's very careful about what checks he is cashing and for whom he's cashing them. He has a number of fake checks in his hands that the person trying to cash it left when they figured out that they where not getting it back w/o having a conversation with the police. It's kind of obvious too, when they bail like that.
Also, he doesn't buy stuff or deal with crypto currencies at all. He's more concerned about getting the checks to clear and getting his money and too busy to try and get rid of a bunch of goods on E-Bay or something..
However.... He does do a lot of money orders and western union transfers.... I wonder if there is a market for doing crypto currency conversions.. Customer pays cash for crypto, you provide the customer a printed version of a Bitcoin wallet and they can do what they will with it... I'll have to look into this.
Yup.. You can build your own AK-47 with not much more than hand tools, a hammer, vice, a drill and bits. All you need to make is a receiver, after that, you can order the rest of the parts via mail order if you cannot find them at the local big box store. I'm talking about a fully automatic machine gun too that would be untraced, unregulated and illegal as sin if you got caught with it.
Nope, they are NOT the same. I know how to make explosives that would be illegal, but knowing is not doing or even having intent to do. You don't get tickets for speeding, just because you can go faster in your car than is allowed... Usually....
This is true. I remember the DECSS code thing and how that worked out... The cows have already left the barn on this one, no need to close the door now.
BTW.. It's not like it's all that hard to build a gun these days. The only part you need to produce yourself is the receiver, which can be made with the equipment/tools available in any Vocational Education metal shop class. You can legally buy the rest of the parts mail order.
Yup, you too can own a personally made AK-47, fully automatic, with only one simple to make part not obtained mail order.
Mars doesn't have enough mass and magnetic spin to maintain an atmosphere. That's kind of always going to have anything you generate torn away by solar winds.
You'd have to do something absurd like send a Jovian moon into it, then wait for all that to cool down to get enough mass to start making a long-term environment on it. There's not even enough floating ice/rocks in our system to make it work without something like that.
Mars is not really a backup for earth, at least not if you don't have a large fraction of a million years to get it to that point. If you think that enough technology can get you there quicker - then cool, use that on Earth. There's no almost scenario where it would be easier to fix Mars than fix Earth.
Heck, it would be far easier to fix life to not need Earth than make Mars support our life as-is.
Ryan Fenton
Um.. IN a few billion years our sun will become a LOT larger than it is now... At that point it will envelop the earth totally. We might want to carefully consider how we can get something habitable out there... We obviously have time, but earth will not be a habitable planet at some point, either by our doing, or nature's.
We're not even done terraforming Terra. But we're working on it.
Trying to turn it into Venus? Venuforming?
It doesn't matter anyway. Our sun, a primary sequence star, will one day expand and envelope earth anyway so it will be hotter than Venus then. We THINK it's a few billion years out yet so no need to get upset, unless you just want to...
The whole thing breaks down into a question of legal jurisdiction fairly quick. The uncentralized nature of crypto means that you can use a "bank" for the transaction that isn't legally part of the jurisdiction of where the crime is committed. So you can get accessary charges or conspiracy charges filed on entities which cannot be forced to appear and stand trial or pay fines. (Just ask Robert Mueller about how this works, most of the charges from that investigation are like this so far.)
You got to admit it's the dumb criminals that get caught. My brother in law, who is a local cop, can tell you a lot of stories about how stupid they usually are. Like stealing a pile of stuff from somebody's garage then heading to the local pawn broker, using their real names and ID's to sell it, the same day and standing there while the broker calls the police...
But this guy was smart enough to steal it, You'd think that after amassing all this currency he would have laundered it though a couple of crypto currencies using multiple exchanges or something to hide the facts and make it untraceable...
and that is why the bitcoin exchanges need to be covered by banking laws. Now much info will they giveup? or will they hide over seas?
Sure they should... None... Yes.
The issue with any of the crypto is also their strength, they are not centralized and are uncontrollable by law.
So, if you dabble in crypto, it's like trading gold bullion in the wild west. Yea, you can buy *anything* you like with it, but if it gets stolen, it's gone. Smart money doesn't hold crypto online very long or use exchanges except when necessary, but you offline it ASAP. Just like you don't carry more bullion than you need for your trip and hide the rest.
It was once assumed that any news outlet that could afford to publish was trustworthy - proof that not only does money talk, it demands to be heard.
And we know that news outlets that predated the Internet are no more or less trustworthy now than they were back then. Discerning truth or at least objectivity isn't any easier than ever, though it seems harder because there are more to consider. This is false. Those legacy outlets had a history that confirmed trust without any real foundation.
Personally I find the legacy outlets only slightly better than the fly by night, come lately, website operators. Most of the legacy operators have long ago left the era where "news" was about network prestige, trust and not profit. There are a few dinosaurs left who attempt to adhere to traditional journalistic ethics at these places, but profits are driving your local newsroom and have for more than a decade. News papers are dying, Network news has deteriorated into the dueling 24 hour cable news networks. Good reporting costs money, takes time and it isn't profitable anymore (not that it ever really was). So the industry has been consolidating, merging and fighting bankruptcy after bankruptcy. So they have turned to being tabloids, publishing click bait news stories with dubious sources in a desperate attempt to make a few pennies, pay salaries and their hosting services. Even the established legacy outlets are doing this now.
Before the internet literally anybody could spread whatever rumor they wanted and there was no way to check for yourself. It wasn't that long ago that such word of mouth was the only way to get any news.
And even then, the media, was agenda driven. I observed such political bias 25 years ago in the media, long before the internet was a thing or the talking heads came into being. I can assure you that it's much WORSE now.
The question is what the antidote is. MORE garbage from the internet? Censorship OF the internet? What?
Censorship is NOT the answer, nor is it consistent with the 1st amendment. So we cannot do this anyway. What does that leave?
In my view, the solution is one of personal responsibility and the publishing of VERIFIED original source material. Press conferences need to be available in their entirety, no comment or opinion. Public meetings, public records and the full text of any and all materials need to be archived and available. THEN, any news reporting needs to disclose their sources and provide copies of ALL materials they base their reporting on unless it's clearly labeled "opinion". Under these rules, you can publish anything you like. The only new requirement is that you must disclose the source of your "facts" so they can be traced back to their original source.
Slashdot Mirror
LOL.. That was more of a lawyer joke than anything else. We seriously have PLENTY of lawyers. some say too many...
Q: What do you call a dozen lawyers at the bottom of the ocean?
A: A good start..
GI bill. Yep. Good idea. Sign up to commit murder or be murdered at the whim of a bunch of psychopaths in DC. The military isn't a summer camp -- once you realize what it actually does, the idea becomes less attractive.
Nothing wrong with a military career. Are there risks? Yep. But you can die as a clerk in a convince store too. Here's an idea... PICK carefully which branch of the service you choose. Not all branches are the Army or Marines. The Navy, for instance, would unlikely find you on the sending end of a gun or the receiving end of hostile actions. The Air Force doesn't do much shooting of small arms either, but you might get stuck in a missile launch control room for 48 hours at a time.
Of course, if war breaks out, you get to go first.. But that's how this game is played. No risk, no gain.
Higher Education sure doesn't have to compete when the government will loan you money to pay education costs without much concern for your ability to pay back the loan. Capitalism has NO chance to work in that case. Price has been literally unconstrained by the federal student loan program.
I'm therefore saying that government interference, by loaning money, has NOT helped this problem and has obviously made it worse by taking away nearly all constraint on tuition costs.
Now you want to argue what? That higher education wasn't subject to competition before? Maybe not, but the left's solution obviously wasn't a workable solution and made it worse.
So, apart from just nationalizing all colleges and making them tuition free and destroying the quality of higher education and driving the country deeper into debt we cannot afford to pay back, do you have a solution to this problem?
OK, OK, keep the automatic trigger group in your underwear drawer and throw the semi-auto into the box... You can buy this stuff, legally, and mail order is my point.
Most students don't get a gender studies degree. In fact, the vast majority of students don't get a gender studies degree. That's like a rounding error.
Woosh!
My point here is why are we loaning money for useless degrees? We have more "gender studies" and law degrees than we need right now and not enough STEM graduates, yet we loan money for all of these using the same rules and rates. Which is an illustration of how stupid this idea is. But the real problem is the unrestrained tuition prices. Nobody cares all that much, they can borrow to pay it... Never mind how long it will take to pay it off.
> This food insecurity is most prevalent at community colleges
Given that community colleges are dirt cheap, as far as education goes, I suspect the lack of food money has more to do with the kinds of folks whose incomes land them in community college, and that the tuition is not the cause of their woes.
Both of my kids "landed in community college" because it was inexpensive. Both will graduate with STEM degrees and have zero debt because I am able to pay their tuition and books and they are able to live at home. They will have a great education and zero debt. It's not impossible though it's not easy.
Until LEFT wing America started loaning money to college students in bulk, releasing the constraints on tuition costs and condemning students to a lifetime of debtors prison with nothing more than a "gender studies" degree to work from. What happened? Tuition rates went though the roof at a faster pace than inflation, schools built buildings and new campuses all over the place with the extra money, adding to their costs. All the while students and parents have been left holding the bill as debt.
This is a multi faceted problem. Stop looking at it in two dimensions.
By the way... The GI bill still pays out if you enlist. You CAN get though college nearly debt free if you are willing to do what it takes to make it happen. You may have to settle for a less well known college, spend your first two years at an inexpensive community college and work your butt off, but you can make it though college with a minimum of debt if you try. However, a lot of kids are loathed to work, prefer borrowing heaps of easy to obtain cash from the federal student loan program and will spend the next two decades struggling to pay the debt they so stupidly amassed.
LOL.. I do pro-bono work for him because he cannot really afford to pay me and I cannot afford to get paid due to the paperwork my employer would require and the tax implications of having a side job. Besides, he is my friend.
Also, he's actually providing a community service cashing checks and only collects 1-3% depending on the risk. If you cash checks there often from the same source with similar values, you get the preferred rate. If you show up the first time with a huge check you may walk away disappointed. He also has to eat bad checks that he cannot collect on, which costs time and money, so the risk he's taking and the costs he's paying justify what he charges.
Finally, he doesn't really make a lot of money on this check cashing business. In reality he makes more selling money orders, lottery tickets, chips and beer...
Making a fully automatic rifle of any kind will put you in a very bad place when the ATF finds out what you did.
But you can manufacture it from legally obtained parts... Yep, title 2 will bite pretty hard if and when they find out, but my point was you can build one simple part, then obtain the rest legally. You can even have all the parts, in a box, unassembled if you like and the ATF cannot do anything but hassle you.
Have we forgotten that Mars doesn't have a magnetic field to shield the solar winds from stripping away the atmosphere that's already there? Trying to terraform it to the point of having a stable atmosphere is a fools errand. It'll be like trying to fill a bucket with a hole in it.
I wasn't actually thinking Mars myself.. I was thinking some of Jupiter's moons might be juicy (literally) places for us to work on., still a bit far out there, but maybe worth it in the long run.
I have a friend who owns a check cashing business that I do IT work for pro-bono.. I can assure you that he's very careful about what checks he is cashing and for whom he's cashing them. He has a number of fake checks in his hands that the person trying to cash it left when they figured out that they where not getting it back w/o having a conversation with the police. It's kind of obvious too, when they bail like that.
Also, he doesn't buy stuff or deal with crypto currencies at all. He's more concerned about getting the checks to clear and getting his money and too busy to try and get rid of a bunch of goods on E-Bay or something..
However.... He does do a lot of money orders and western union transfers.... I wonder if there is a market for doing crypto currency conversions.. Customer pays cash for crypto, you provide the customer a printed version of a Bitcoin wallet and they can do what they will with it... I'll have to look into this.
Nice, I didn't know that. Got to love how imaginative folks get about stepping around stupid laws anyway.
Yup.. You can build your own AK-47 with not much more than hand tools, a hammer, vice, a drill and bits. All you need to make is a receiver, after that, you can order the rest of the parts via mail order if you cannot find them at the local big box store. I'm talking about a fully automatic machine gun too that would be untraced, unregulated and illegal as sin if you got caught with it.
Nope, they are NOT the same. I know how to make explosives that would be illegal, but knowing is not doing or even having intent to do. You don't get tickets for speeding, just because you can go faster in your car than is allowed... Usually....
Guns don't kill people, bullets do. Guns just make them go really fast...
And people are the ones who decide what direction the bullet goes and when it goes there... People use bullets, fired from guns to kill people..
This is true. I remember the DECSS code thing and how that worked out... The cows have already left the barn on this one, no need to close the door now.
BTW.. It's not like it's all that hard to build a gun these days. The only part you need to produce yourself is the receiver, which can be made with the equipment/tools available in any Vocational Education metal shop class. You can legally buy the rest of the parts mail order.
Yup, you too can own a personally made AK-47, fully automatic, with only one simple to make part not obtained mail order.
Mars doesn't have enough mass and magnetic spin to maintain an atmosphere. That's kind of always going to have anything you generate torn away by solar winds.
You'd have to do something absurd like send a Jovian moon into it, then wait for all that to cool down to get enough mass to start making a long-term environment on it. There's not even enough floating ice/rocks in our system to make it work without something like that.
Mars is not really a backup for earth, at least not if you don't have a large fraction of a million years to get it to that point. If you think that enough technology can get you there quicker - then cool, use that on Earth. There's no almost scenario where it would be easier to fix Mars than fix Earth.
Heck, it would be far easier to fix life to not need Earth than make Mars support our life as-is.
Ryan Fenton
Um.. IN a few billion years our sun will become a LOT larger than it is now... At that point it will envelop the earth totally. We might want to carefully consider how we can get something habitable out there... We obviously have time, but earth will not be a habitable planet at some point, either by our doing, or nature's.
We're not even done terraforming Terra. But we're working on it.
Trying to turn it into Venus? Venuforming?
It doesn't matter anyway. Our sun, a primary sequence star, will one day expand and envelope earth anyway so it will be hotter than Venus then. We THINK it's a few billion years out yet so no need to get upset, unless you just want to...
The whole thing breaks down into a question of legal jurisdiction fairly quick. The uncentralized nature of crypto means that you can use a "bank" for the transaction that isn't legally part of the jurisdiction of where the crime is committed. So you can get accessary charges or conspiracy charges filed on entities which cannot be forced to appear and stand trial or pay fines. (Just ask Robert Mueller about how this works, most of the charges from that investigation are like this so far.)
You got to admit it's the dumb criminals that get caught. My brother in law, who is a local cop, can tell you a lot of stories about how stupid they usually are. Like stealing a pile of stuff from somebody's garage then heading to the local pawn broker, using their real names and ID's to sell it, the same day and standing there while the broker calls the police...
But this guy was smart enough to steal it, You'd think that after amassing all this currency he would have laundered it though a couple of crypto currencies using multiple exchanges or something to hide the facts and make it untraceable...
and that is why the bitcoin exchanges need to be covered by banking laws. Now much info will they giveup? or will they hide over seas?
Sure they should... None... Yes.
The issue with any of the crypto is also their strength, they are not centralized and are uncontrollable by law.
So, if you dabble in crypto, it's like trading gold bullion in the wild west. Yea, you can buy *anything* you like with it, but if it gets stolen, it's gone. Smart money doesn't hold crypto online very long or use exchanges except when necessary, but you offline it ASAP. Just like you don't carry more bullion than you need for your trip and hide the rest.
It was once assumed that any news outlet that could afford to publish was trustworthy - proof that not only does money talk, it demands to be heard.
And we know that news outlets that predated the Internet are no more or less trustworthy now than they were back then. Discerning truth or at least objectivity isn't any easier than ever, though it seems harder because there are more to consider. This is false. Those legacy outlets had a history that confirmed trust without any real foundation.
Personally I find the legacy outlets only slightly better than the fly by night, come lately, website operators. Most of the legacy operators have long ago left the era where "news" was about network prestige, trust and not profit. There are a few dinosaurs left who attempt to adhere to traditional journalistic ethics at these places, but profits are driving your local newsroom and have for more than a decade. News papers are dying, Network news has deteriorated into the dueling 24 hour cable news networks. Good reporting costs money, takes time and it isn't profitable anymore (not that it ever really was). So the industry has been consolidating, merging and fighting bankruptcy after bankruptcy. So they have turned to being tabloids, publishing click bait news stories with dubious sources in a desperate attempt to make a few pennies, pay salaries and their hosting services. Even the established legacy outlets are doing this now.
Before the internet literally anybody could spread whatever rumor they wanted and there was no way to check for yourself. It wasn't that long ago that such word of mouth was the only way to get any news.
And even then, the media, was agenda driven. I observed such political bias 25 years ago in the media, long before the internet was a thing or the talking heads came into being. I can assure you that it's much WORSE now.
The question is what the antidote is. MORE garbage from the internet? Censorship OF the internet? What?
Censorship is NOT the answer, nor is it consistent with the 1st amendment. So we cannot do this anyway. What does that leave?
In my view, the solution is one of personal responsibility and the publishing of VERIFIED original source material. Press conferences need to be available in their entirety, no comment or opinion. Public meetings, public records and the full text of any and all materials need to be archived and available. THEN, any news reporting needs to disclose their sources and provide copies of ALL materials they base their reporting on unless it's clearly labeled "opinion". Under these rules, you can publish anything you like. The only new requirement is that you must disclose the source of your "facts" so they can be traced back to their original source.
Yup.. We are rushing headlong into a story line that would make Orwell proud..
The US isn't a democracy.. We are a representative Republic.
What's the difference?
In a democracy, everybody votes on every question directly and usually majority wins.
In a representative Republic, voters pick who they want to represent them. Then those picked go make decisions about the issues.
THIS is how we where founded and why things like the electoral college, Congress and the Senate exist.