and both operate to the right of what the rest of the world considers right.
Have you noticed how most in America don't really care what you do in Europe? Maybe it is because you're in a different country, working under a different set of laws, with a different society. Or maybe it is because many of our ancestors risked their lives to leave your particular brand of misery. It could be that you haven't shown yourselves to be particularly adept at anything we care about. Regardless, we don't care for a paternal government that promises to protect us from all harm, while keeping us in a padded cell.
I know the feeling, my GF is half Indian (Navajo to be exact) and when we are out the locals will sometime just start speaking Spanish to her thinking she is Mexican. She just blushes and says no habla but I just love how her brother handles it "Me no Mexican, me Indian. Me scalp your kind!" . Maybe it's different here (north AR) surrounded by the military bases, but we always laughed our asses off at the idiot racists like the klan, who last I heard are hiding out on a hill in Boone county, because the thought that anyone here was "white" was about as stupid as saying my dog was anything other than a mutt. Here every race has mingled with every race (or as I like to call it "Forget fighting, let's just screw") so much there isn't a pure ANYTHING anymore. I look white but am actually Irish, English, German, Two kinds of Indian (Comanche and Creek) and Cajun, which of course is pretty much any race that ever stepped through Louisiana. My girl looks Mexican but is just as much a mix as me, so the thought that anyone still judges based on "race" is kinda just silly to me.
I have the same experience. I'm half Indian (Lumbee) and half (mostly) Scot-Irish. The Lumbee is the remnants of several tribes, escaped slaves, and Scot-Irish...basically, anyone that was rejected from polite society was chased into the swamplands of southeast North Carolina. Red-headed Native Americans? REALLY? With a brother that has a flat nose and black curly hair (curly as in "of African descent"). Yeah! There's a lot of pure blood there.
But Mexicans will occasionally speak to me in the native tongues, and I just look at them with a "What the hell did you just say to me?" look ('cause I'm wondering what the hell he just said to me). My bond haired, blue-eyed wife and my dark-skinned, fair featured sons all think it is a hoot.
We don't live in a post-racial society, yet, but the "check your race" on the government forms are getting sillier every year.
As for TFA, it is nice to see that some put their money where they believe, and not just on the bottom line. We have had pretty much constant tax breaks for the top 3% for the past 30 years, and are worse off than ever before. I can drive through entire towns nearby that are nothing but empty factories and boarded up homes, The level of unemployment is frankly just insane, and if it wasn't for the dems extending unemployment benefits I know quite a few that would be living in their cars, not because they don't want to work, but simply because there isn't any work to be had while they push for more and more education while at the same time expect us to be able to compete with someone who paid $5k for their degree compared to our $70k, it is just nuts. It is just simple math folks, you can't have these ever growing huge masses of unemployed without it blowing up in your face. Just look at what happened to Germany in the 30s, the fascists basically came to power by offering "bread and jobs" and the people went along. Right now you have huge masses that simply don't believe in the American Dream anymore, and they grow more numerous every day. Things simply have to change, period.
Those jobs aren't coming back, not matter how well educated you are. We just had a person "given the opportunity to find another job." She was replaced by a shell script. Seriously, we automated her out of a job. The History Channel (Modern Marvels, I think) was doing a special on cotton, and was talking about the mills. The showed a machine and talked about how one machine replaced THOUSANDS of workers. Secretaries are quickly becoming a dead profession. The list goes on.
How about not having any of the the candidates names on the ballot. Every vote is a write-in. The voter has to correctly spell the candidates name. Anyone so apathetic they can't be bothered to learn to spell the candidates name will be eliminated from the voter pool. No candidate will get a boost from any random factors.
In fact, the voting machine should NEVER have any candidates name. The ballot should be a list of offices, and require the voter to correctly spell the candidates fully registered name. If you don't know enough about the candidates to correctly spell their name, you should not be allowed to vote (with special exceptions for qualified handicaps like blindness or dyslexia).
Life is not a multiple choice test. Voting should not be.
I'd mod you up if I had points today. But I don't, so I'll just add a little support.
Have you ever seen candidates squirm when asked what program they will cut? Every add they pay for will talk about cutting "wasteful spending", but when asked directly what they would cut, they will refuse to define wasteful. Our President, the jokester that he is, claimed he would look at every federal program and surgically remove any that are not living up to their goals. Two years in, he hasn't proposed eliminating ANYTHING, and instead has worked to install the most massive increase in Federal bureaucracy ever.
The truth is, you can't ever cut anything, because everything has a constituency. If one person looses their "waste widget sorting" job, the media will post a 24 hour circus on their doorstep and run the traditional "mean ol' government took their JOOOBBB!" line. (See how gaunt the poor starving children are.) Doesn't matter on whit that there is no money to pay them. We can just "tax the rich". (Rich is ALWAYS defined as "the person that has more than me".)
I'd just like to point out that in 2003 an ENTIRE U.S. rare earth production facility was packed up and reassembled in China. Who allowed this to happen? G. W. Bush.
He allowed it to happen? Just what exactly would you have done in his shoes to stop it? Send in the National Guard? The only power he had that could have influenced them would be to lower their taxes or tell the EPA to back off. When corporations start to move their headquarters to greener pastures after Obama and his crew allow the corporate tax rate to jump back up, will you complain that they moved and then blame Obama for it?
Someone has described US farming as the greatest mechanism ever devised for converting oil into fuel. From the oil derived fertilizers, to the diesel powered machinery, to oil fired food processing, everything depends on the cheap oil energy.
I'm not saying that we can't come up with alternatives. Just that "an oil supply shock is no problem" is a bit of an understatement.
The fact is that making economic or diplomatic decisions for a country has become harder and harder over the course of this century.
I disagree. The decisions of the past were made more difficult due to a lack of knowledge. There simply was not a way collect relevant information. That is not as true today. The American Revolution would not have happened if the English King could have made a telephone call to the colonial leaders to say that he had and epitome and had come to his senses.
John Kennedy looked like he was rolling the dice and making a stand against the Soviets during the Bay of Pigs crisis, but the true extent of what he really knew and when he knew it did not come out until much later. His stance during the crisis was not actually was not much of a gamble at all. He had a strong upper hand over the Soviets the whole time, and they knew it. Kennedy's superior knowledge was due to satellite monitoring.
My point being, the problems aren't that much more complex, and there is more data and complete analysis to guide the decision makers.
I cannot help but think that maybe people should be required to have some form of political education before they are allowed to vote.
Unnecessary, and it opens a world of 1st Amendment hurt. The answer is to eliminate the names on ballots. The ballot is a list of offices. To vote for someone, you have to correctly spell their name. If you look into a candidate well enough to spend the time to learn to spell his name correctly, you will be doing much more that the average voter of today. This will make voter self-selecting.
This is the race to the bottom and I am afraid we've already too far on the way down.
Race to the bottom, or "reach" to the bottom.
Mexico is loosing low-end jobs to China, you say. Could that be because the standard of living in Mexico has increased to the point that they have the infrastructure to no longer need those bottom of the barrel jobs? China has increased its peoples standard of living, and the bottom of the low-end jobs have moved to Vietnam. What happens when Vietnam's standard of living has increased to the point of no longer needing those jobs? Most importantly, would Vietnam's standard of living increase WITHOUT those low-end jobs?
Isn't the end game of all this that everyone has a better standard of living?
Do you really believe that it is the political class by themselves that decides if we go to war or not? What do you think will be the reaction of all those newly rich factory owners when they are informed that their government will be going to war with their primary customer?
Economic ties are an incredibly stabilizing force.
The problem is that once he has been mowing your lawn for a couple years, you will have to go out and buy a new mower before you can start doing it yourself again. You have to balance that against the hope the he will come home from band camp, and start mowing again.
You did it wrong, with the complicit help of the university and community college.
(You don't need this, but someone else may.)
Both schools will have a guidance office. Visit the office 1/2 semester before you plan to attend. You want mid-semester, because those people have much more downtime then. Tell one of the nice people there what you want to do. Be prepared with pen and notepad, because they will probably be able to spout off the top of their heads exactly which classes you should take that will transfer without problems, and in what order you should take them. Most of them are that good, because they do it day in and day out, and there just aren't THAT many colleges and universities to deal with.
That being said, in NC, we have been working toward a unified system for years. We've basically moved into a streamlined system that goes from high school to community college to a 4-year university. The smart student can bite off pieces, and exit the system at one of several points that will let them prepared to take some sort of productive role in society.
The human species? I ain't worried about the human species. I'm worried about ME. Quite a few people didn't survive the plague, you know. I just don't think nature needs any help in killing me, and I don't think the prospect of glow-in-the-dark yogurt is worth the trade off.
I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just saying that you should really look into what happened with the Morris Worm, especially with what Morris thought was going to happen and what actually happened.
If it is made of ice, use a microwave laser in orbit. Then you don't have to try to navigate a complicate piece of machinery all that way, while loosing weeks to travel time. If it is made of something else, use a carbon laser.
So put the solar sail based power station up there, and start collecting the free solar energy. Then when we detect a threatening asteroid, we turn the beam on it. The material burning off of one small spot will be like a jet to coral the roid into the orbit more to our liking. We can continue to use the beam for as long as necessary.
I find your post to be very patronizing of the average person. You portray everyone as helpless, stupid animals, and your answer to people not being willing to leave a crap job for a better one, is to allow a self-selecting crew of patronizing, self-absorbed PR people run our lives down to deciding how many handicap parking spaces must go into every business? Politicians must be PR hacks. They won't get elected otherwise.
Grass-roots campaigns are difficult? It took 3 people to bring down the ACORN organization, and they had millions of dollars of public money to work with.
You have the illusion that government is on your side. It's not. It's on government's side. Proof: 1)Watch any Presidential debate in the US. Does either candidate EVER say, "Government can't fix that problem." 2)Indications are that Obama's Justice Department will move to stay the decision of the judge prohibiting the DADT policy. Why would he challenge a ruling that supports a policy he is trying to advance? Because the ruling is a challenge to HIS power. 3)Why is Obama's Justice Department suing Arizona over a law which supports federal law? Because the law is a challenge to HIS power.
I could go on, but it just gets monotonous. Suffice it to say that unbridled economic power is a threat to freedom. We have valid anti-trust laws to deal with that. Unbridled political power is just as much a threat. We have a Constitution to deal with that.
Odd how the person who lead off his comment with the snarky 'citation needed' gives no such detail to a comment which screams for it.
Good point. I got lazy, thinking the statement has been covered so many times that the truth of it was obvious. A quick sample from the first page of 142,000 google results from the string "studies supporting gun ownership":
Someone on my street is broadcasting an SSID of "hornygirl", so I have to bring my smartphone trick-or-treating this Halloween.
Careful with that. It could be the 45yr old, overweight male divorcee that is always looking strange at the little boys in the neighborhood. You'll be sick for days after you find that out.
Much better to stick to the mental illusions you construct yourself.
You mean like how all the PC manufacturers converged and now we only have the choice of one modem, one soundcard and one network card? How about the way the situation we had in 1995 with all of those companies making ethernet cards that were slightly different. Notice how the ones that were inconsistent with the protocol splintered the market? And look how people turned their back on the WWW in 2000, with all of those competing web pages. (OK, that one was a stretch).
The truth is that people want choice and they want cheap. The market is still new, but the natural course of things will drive it to defacto standards as the competition both drives the cost down and forces innovative developers to the top of the heap. Apple offers a consistent platform, but in the process of maintaining that consistency, they have to maintain a choke hold on innovation. If they can predict the market and what people will want, they can let up on the choke hold in just the right place at just the right time, and allow the things people really want on their platform. The Android market, OTOH, throws everything out there, and lets the market decide, just like the PC platform did after Compaq was able to force it completely open by reverse engineering the BIOS.
Also, for every time someone in their jammies actually gets the drop on 'average' intruders, a dozen more take the lead themselves.
Citation needed. I've heard enough anecdotal stories of people waking up to noises outside that were relieved by the discharging of a weapon (the noise being caused by a bonified intruder). These are NOT the sort of situations that get reported to authorities; whereas the jammy clad victim always makes the police blotter. Furthermore, many studies exists that indicate crime drops in an area when gun laws are relaxed, and there tends to be sharply lower violent crime rates in areas with lax gun control laws that neighbor areas with tight controls.
That most definitely works. Another option is to switch to Linux, and forget everything you know about Windows. Then you can look them straight in the eye and say that you haven't a clue about their problem.
Slashdot Mirror
and both operate to the right of what the rest of the world considers right.
Have you noticed how most in America don't really care what you do in Europe? Maybe it is because you're in a different country, working under a different set of laws, with a different society. Or maybe it is because many of our ancestors risked their lives to leave your particular brand of misery. It could be that you haven't shown yourselves to be particularly adept at anything we care about. Regardless, we don't care for a paternal government that promises to protect us from all harm, while keeping us in a padded cell.
I know the feeling, my GF is half Indian (Navajo to be exact) and when we are out the locals will sometime just start speaking Spanish to her thinking she is Mexican. She just blushes and says no habla but I just love how her brother handles it "Me no Mexican, me Indian. Me scalp your kind!" . Maybe it's different here (north AR) surrounded by the military bases, but we always laughed our asses off at the idiot racists like the klan, who last I heard are hiding out on a hill in Boone county, because the thought that anyone here was "white" was about as stupid as saying my dog was anything other than a mutt. Here every race has mingled with every race (or as I like to call it "Forget fighting, let's just screw") so much there isn't a pure ANYTHING anymore. I look white but am actually Irish, English, German, Two kinds of Indian (Comanche and Creek) and Cajun, which of course is pretty much any race that ever stepped through Louisiana. My girl looks Mexican but is just as much a mix as me, so the thought that anyone still judges based on "race" is kinda just silly to me.
I have the same experience. I'm half Indian (Lumbee) and half (mostly) Scot-Irish. The Lumbee is the remnants of several tribes, escaped slaves, and Scot-Irish...basically, anyone that was rejected from polite society was chased into the swamplands of southeast North Carolina. Red-headed Native Americans? REALLY? With a brother that has a flat nose and black curly hair (curly as in "of African descent"). Yeah! There's a lot of pure blood there.
But Mexicans will occasionally speak to me in the native tongues, and I just look at them with a "What the hell did you just say to me?" look ('cause I'm wondering what the hell he just said to me). My bond haired, blue-eyed wife and my dark-skinned, fair featured sons all think it is a hoot.
We don't live in a post-racial society, yet, but the "check your race" on the government forms are getting sillier every year.
As for TFA, it is nice to see that some put their money where they believe, and not just on the bottom line. We have had pretty much constant tax breaks for the top 3% for the past 30 years, and are worse off than ever before. I can drive through entire towns nearby that are nothing but empty factories and boarded up homes, The level of unemployment is frankly just insane, and if it wasn't for the dems extending unemployment benefits I know quite a few that would be living in their cars, not because they don't want to work, but simply because there isn't any work to be had while they push for more and more education while at the same time expect us to be able to compete with someone who paid $5k for their degree compared to our $70k, it is just nuts. It is just simple math folks, you can't have these ever growing huge masses of unemployed without it blowing up in your face. Just look at what happened to Germany in the 30s, the fascists basically came to power by offering "bread and jobs" and the people went along. Right now you have huge masses that simply don't believe in the American Dream anymore, and they grow more numerous every day. Things simply have to change, period.
Those jobs aren't coming back, not matter how well educated you are. We just had a person "given the opportunity to find another job." She was replaced by a shell script. Seriously, we automated her out of a job. The History Channel (Modern Marvels, I think) was doing a special on cotton, and was talking about the mills. The showed a machine and talked about how one machine replaced THOUSANDS of workers. Secretaries are quickly becoming a dead profession. The list goes on.
The last time I posted an answer like this, I was immediately modded troll.
At least no one pressed the button to blow you up.
No pressure, of course.
How about not having any of the the candidates names on the ballot. Every vote is a write-in. The voter has to correctly spell the candidates name. Anyone so apathetic they can't be bothered to learn to spell the candidates name will be eliminated from the voter pool. No candidate will get a boost from any random factors.
In fact, the voting machine should NEVER have any candidates name. The ballot should be a list of offices, and require the voter to correctly spell the candidates fully registered name. If you don't know enough about the candidates to correctly spell their name, you should not be allowed to vote (with special exceptions for qualified handicaps like blindness or dyslexia).
Life is not a multiple choice test. Voting should not be.
I'd mod you up if I had points today. But I don't, so I'll just add a little support.
Have you ever seen candidates squirm when asked what program they will cut? Every add they pay for will talk about cutting "wasteful spending", but when asked directly what they would cut, they will refuse to define wasteful. Our President, the jokester that he is, claimed he would look at every federal program and surgically remove any that are not living up to their goals. Two years in, he hasn't proposed eliminating ANYTHING, and instead has worked to install the most massive increase in Federal bureaucracy ever.
The truth is, you can't ever cut anything, because everything has a constituency. If one person looses their "waste widget sorting" job, the media will post a 24 hour circus on their doorstep and run the traditional "mean ol' government took their JOOOBBB!" line. (See how gaunt the poor starving children are.) Doesn't matter on whit that there is no money to pay them. We can just "tax the rich". (Rich is ALWAYS defined as "the person that has more than me".)
I'd just like to point out that in 2003 an ENTIRE U.S. rare earth production facility was packed up and reassembled in China. Who allowed this to happen? G. W. Bush.
He allowed it to happen? Just what exactly would you have done in his shoes to stop it? Send in the National Guard? The only power he had that could have influenced them would be to lower their taxes or tell the EPA to back off. When corporations start to move their headquarters to greener pastures after Obama and his crew allow the corporate tax rate to jump back up, will you complain that they moved and then blame Obama for it?
Someone has described US farming as the greatest mechanism ever devised for converting oil into fuel. From the oil derived fertilizers, to the diesel powered machinery, to oil fired food processing, everything depends on the cheap oil energy.
I'm not saying that we can't come up with alternatives. Just that "an oil supply shock is no problem" is a bit of an understatement.
The fact is that making economic or diplomatic decisions for a country has become harder and harder over the course of this century.
I disagree. The decisions of the past were made more difficult due to a lack of knowledge. There simply was not a way collect relevant information. That is not as true today. The American Revolution would not have happened if the English King could have made a telephone call to the colonial leaders to say that he had and epitome and had come to his senses.
John Kennedy looked like he was rolling the dice and making a stand against the Soviets during the Bay of Pigs crisis, but the true extent of what he really knew and when he knew it did not come out until much later. His stance during the crisis was not actually was not much of a gamble at all. He had a strong upper hand over the Soviets the whole time, and they knew it. Kennedy's superior knowledge was due to satellite monitoring.
My point being, the problems aren't that much more complex, and there is more data and complete analysis to guide the decision makers.
I cannot help but think that maybe people should be required to have some form of political education before they are allowed to vote.
Unnecessary, and it opens a world of 1st Amendment hurt. The answer is to eliminate the names on ballots. The ballot is a list of offices. To vote for someone, you have to correctly spell their name. If you look into a candidate well enough to spend the time to learn to spell his name correctly, you will be doing much more that the average voter of today. This will make voter self-selecting.
This is the race to the bottom and I am afraid we've already too far on the way down.
Race to the bottom, or "reach" to the bottom.
Mexico is loosing low-end jobs to China, you say. Could that be because the standard of living in Mexico has increased to the point that they have the infrastructure to no longer need those bottom of the barrel jobs? China has increased its peoples standard of living, and the bottom of the low-end jobs have moved to Vietnam. What happens when Vietnam's standard of living has increased to the point of no longer needing those jobs? Most importantly, would Vietnam's standard of living increase WITHOUT those low-end jobs?
Isn't the end game of all this that everyone has a better standard of living?
Do you really believe that it is the political class by themselves that decides if we go to war or not? What do you think will be the reaction of all those newly rich factory owners when they are informed that their government will be going to war with their primary customer?
Economic ties are an incredibly stabilizing force.
The problem is that once he has been mowing your lawn for a couple years, you will have to go out and buy a new mower before you can start doing it yourself again. You have to balance that against the hope the he will come home from band camp, and start mowing again.
You did it wrong, with the complicit help of the university and community college.
(You don't need this, but someone else may.)
Both schools will have a guidance office. Visit the office 1/2 semester before you plan to attend. You want mid-semester, because those people have much more downtime then. Tell one of the nice people there what you want to do. Be prepared with pen and notepad, because they will probably be able to spout off the top of their heads exactly which classes you should take that will transfer without problems, and in what order you should take them. Most of them are that good, because they do it day in and day out, and there just aren't THAT many colleges and universities to deal with.
That being said, in NC, we have been working toward a unified system for years. We've basically moved into a streamlined system that goes from high school to community college to a 4-year university. The smart student can bite off pieces, and exit the system at one of several points that will let them prepared to take some sort of productive role in society.
The human species? I ain't worried about the human species. I'm worried about ME. Quite a few people didn't survive the plague, you know. I just don't think nature needs any help in killing me, and I don't think the prospect of glow-in-the-dark yogurt is worth the trade off.
I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just saying that you should really look into what happened with the Morris Worm, especially with what Morris thought was going to happen and what actually happened.
If it is made of ice, use a microwave laser in orbit. Then you don't have to try to navigate a complicate piece of machinery all that way, while loosing weeks to travel time. If it is made of something else, use a carbon laser.
Yes.
So put the solar sail based power station up there, and start collecting the free solar energy. Then when we detect a threatening asteroid, we turn the beam on it. The material burning off of one small spot will be like a jet to coral the roid into the orbit more to our liking. We can continue to use the beam for as long as necessary.
I find your post to be very patronizing of the average person. You portray everyone as helpless, stupid animals, and your answer to people not being willing to leave a crap job for a better one, is to allow a self-selecting crew of patronizing, self-absorbed PR people run our lives down to deciding how many handicap parking spaces must go into every business? Politicians must be PR hacks. They won't get elected otherwise.
Grass-roots campaigns are difficult? It took 3 people to bring down the ACORN organization, and they had millions of dollars of public money to work with.
You have the illusion that government is on your side. It's not. It's on government's side. Proof: 1)Watch any Presidential debate in the US. Does either candidate EVER say, "Government can't fix that problem." 2)Indications are that Obama's Justice Department will move to stay the decision of the judge prohibiting the DADT policy. Why would he challenge a ruling that supports a policy he is trying to advance? Because the ruling is a challenge to HIS power. 3)Why is Obama's Justice Department suing Arizona over a law which supports federal law? Because the law is a challenge to HIS power.
I could go on, but it just gets monotonous. Suffice it to say that unbridled economic power is a threat to freedom. We have valid anti-trust laws to deal with that. Unbridled political power is just as much a threat. We have a Constitution to deal with that.
Odd how the person who lead off his comment with the snarky 'citation needed' gives no such detail to a comment which screams for it.
Good point. I got lazy, thinking the statement has been covered so many times that the truth of it was obvious. A quick sample from the first page of 142,000 google results from the string "studies supporting gun ownership":
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:929I8o_1jRAJ:www.cato.org/pub_display.php%3Fpub_id%3D975+studies+supporting+gun+ownership&cd=5&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_politics#Self-defense
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/493636.html
Someone on my street is broadcasting an SSID of "hornygirl", so I have to bring my smartphone trick-or-treating this Halloween.
Careful with that. It could be the 45yr old, overweight male divorcee that is always looking strange at the little boys in the neighborhood. You'll be sick for days after you find that out.
Much better to stick to the mental illusions you construct yourself.
"wishful thinking" that is instructed by history.
You mean like how all the PC manufacturers converged and now we only have the choice of one modem, one soundcard and one network card? How about the way the situation we had in 1995 with all of those companies making ethernet cards that were slightly different. Notice how the ones that were inconsistent with the protocol splintered the market? And look how people turned their back on the WWW in 2000, with all of those competing web pages. (OK, that one was a stretch).
The truth is that people want choice and they want cheap. The market is still new, but the natural course of things will drive it to defacto standards as the competition both drives the cost down and forces innovative developers to the top of the heap. Apple offers a consistent platform, but in the process of maintaining that consistency, they have to maintain a choke hold on innovation. If they can predict the market and what people will want, they can let up on the choke hold in just the right place at just the right time, and allow the things people really want on their platform. The Android market, OTOH, throws everything out there, and lets the market decide, just like the PC platform did after Compaq was able to force it completely open by reverse engineering the BIOS.
Also, for every time someone in their jammies actually gets the drop on 'average' intruders, a dozen more take the lead themselves.
Citation needed. I've heard enough anecdotal stories of people waking up to noises outside that were relieved by the discharging of a weapon (the noise being caused by a bonified intruder). These are NOT the sort of situations that get reported to authorities; whereas the jammy clad victim always makes the police blotter. Furthermore, many studies exists that indicate crime drops in an area when gun laws are relaxed, and there tends to be sharply lower violent crime rates in areas with lax gun control laws that neighbor areas with tight controls.
That most definitely works. Another option is to switch to Linux, and forget everything you know about Windows. Then you can look them straight in the eye and say that you haven't a clue about their problem.
How did the cat get up there?
And, no, he doesn't DESERVE anything from me or anyone else. If I do help, I deserve at least his gratitude.