I still don't think it's poverty so much as a culture of entitlement. Granted, that often goes right along with a welfare state, where "by damn the gov't owes me a living"** -- so there will be some *overlap* with poverty, but poverty isn't the direct cause. If it were, an armpit of the economy like Bakersfield wouldn't be so low in the crime stats, while a relatively affluent city like San Francisco wouldn't be so much higher up.
** I'm reminded that when the concept of "self esteem" was finally actually studied (rather than just *assumed* a good thing), it proved highest in career criminals.
Having seen the result of a small amount of propane mixed with a smaller amount of ammonia, which completely flattened the (fortunately unoccupied) structure where the explosion occurred, as well as the building and trees to either side, I'd say chances are his homemade explosives, in the same venue, would have made a far more spectacular mess than the firearms did.
The U.N. seems to have forgotten history. I recall a story someone related either here or on another board: During WW2, one small country (I believe it was Denmark??) had strict gun registration... the Nazis waltzed into local offices and here's these Handy Lists of People to Shoot First, the owners of registered firearms. As a result, after the war this country got rid of its gun reg'n laws.
Now, the U.S. may be physically too large for such an action by an invader to succeed, but this treaty wouldn't affect only the U.S. Would you like to be in a disarmed or gun-registration (aka "Handy List of People to Shoot First") country when a neighbouring country goes on the warpath??
I spent some time playing with the Wiki crime chart, and noticed something peculiar: homicide rates correlate more closely with a history of being a union town (back in the heyday of American manufacturing), than they do with poverty or gangs or the drug trade, in fact some of the biggest poverty pits and drug portals are on the low end for homicides. Also, there is approximately an inverse relationship between homicides and forcible rapes. However the level of various crimes against property tend to be consistent for a given city.
Be aware that a great deal of the "crime" in the U.S. is not what reasonable people would identify as crime. It is, rather, some quite trivial action which nonetheless is cited AS a crime, because in the large jurisdictions, fines and penalties from these minor citations has become a cash cow, at zero risk to the police and a guaranteed win for the prosecutor's office (96% in Los Angeles County, last I checked) because of the plea bargain system, which forces average people to plead guilty to a lesser offense and a substantial fine, to avoid the unpredictable risk and much greater cost of a trial and possible major jail sentence.
I've observed the criminal court for a few days here, and out of perhaps 100 cases, only two were what most people would call a "crime" (an assault and a theft). The rest were basically Stupid Behaviour like public drunkenness, drug possession, or the dumbest case I saw, some kid who'd followed a girl into a public restroom at a drunken frat party, and wound up copping to a "loitering" charge (with "sex offender" on his record) to avoid a charge of sexual assault. Whatever happened to "Hey now, enough of that, move along" instead of making a court case of every Stupid Thing people do? I can tell you... in this case it was a $1000 fine plus several hundred more dollars paid to various "sex education" classes required by the court. This is income on the books for the county and for various private contractors, for two minutes of the court's time, and an artificial inflation of the so-called crime statistics.
Also, what is called poverty in the U.S. would be called luxury in most of the world. I can't find it offhand but there is a good study on the average possessions of Americans living in "poverty" and it was quite startling... they own far more stuff, and more semi-luxury goods, than did *average* middle-class families when I was a kid. This isn't what most people envision when they hear the term "poverty".
I found the Cinnamon website, and the pictures are pretty, but it doesn't tell me what Cinnamon *is*. So what the heck IS it? new desktop??
Mint I know, it's perhaps one of the more comfortable distros I've looked at... tho I'm still looking for that linux I can use as an everyday OS... and not want to hurt one of the developers.:(
I detest touchscreens, swipescreens, and all their kin, and so do my already-overworked arms and shoulders.
And my experience and observation is the opposite; if the marriage isn't working, for whatever reason, the kids are better off if the parents split the sheets. Effectively your own advice, for the parents to improve their own lives so their difficulties (boredom, whatever) aren't devolving onto the kids, as they inevitably do. Sometimes it's just not possible to improve matters, no matter what effort is put into it, because the foundation isn't there, or has crumbled.
Sometimes "stay together for the sake of the children" may work best, but as I say, my experience and observation has been entirely the opposite. Your anecdotes may vary.
The easy way to recover text from early Word documents, or Pagemaker files or any other mix of binary and text (such as executables), is to run it through a text extraction utility. I use a little DOS app called XRAY, works good enough for all practical purposes.
Main thing with storing paper (I've got a lot of pre-computer-era paper archived too) is that you need to protect it from light and air (which includes moisture). If it's stacked and packed tight, only the edges and topsheets will deteriorate.
Side note from the pen-and-ink set, especially ballpoints: Black and red inks usually spread and fade; blue inks generally do not, or at a far lesser rate.
I'm guessing the only survivors will be the stone tablet and possibly the printed-on-paper version, if it doesn't get wet and you don't have ground termites (which will get into even the smallest crack) or paper-eating fungi archived along with the paper.
I once opened a jug of apple juice, decided it wasn't quite what I expected; stoppered it and stuck it under the sink and promptly forgot about it. It spent the winter under there, at temps just above freezing. Rediscovered next spring... turned to delicious sparkling apple cider, in fact I gave some of it to a friend as a wedding present.
Conversely there was the package of mini sausages I once forgot in the trunk of the car... appeared to be just fine 9 months later, but I wasn't touchin' them, no way!
Two, 3, or 4 times a year... out of 300 million people. It's spectacular as a headline, but 2-or-3-or-4 chances out of 300 million to be the next crazed shooter doesn't sound like a hugely "frequent" problem to me. In fact, I'd peg it as "vanishingly rare", way down below "VERY infrequently".
The degree to which it is shocking and horrifying doesn't change that, nor does the degree to which the press tries to inflate it in their everlasting search for more eyeballs to sell to their advertisers.
I can certainly say both; rights sometimes allow tragedies. But what I can't say is "I believe in the 2nd Amendment" *and* "People should be stopped from causing tragedies allowed by our Constitutional rights". You can't both have a right and complain about the consequences of that right, unless your real object is to restrict that right. (I think that's what you were getting at.)
It is better that a few suffer than that all live under the boot of restricted rights. Jane Q. Public said it well up above:
"Laws are made for reasonable people. There will always be idiots, but you can't mold the laws around them without punishing the reasonable people."
The same goes for rights, even when such rights occasionally permit a tragedy.
Actually, where stats have been toted up, turns out there are considerably more violent acts prevented by guns than are committed with the aid of guns.
Here's an article with a lot of stats including U.S. vs various other countries; read the whole thing:
[I have personally saved my own or another's ass and/or property three times with the aid of a gun. Only one of those incidents was reported to police. I'd guess this is a reasonable approximation of how many preventive incidents go unreported.]
What's not being looked at properly is the motivation. Most (perhaps all) of these are not "massacres" for the sake of killing. Rather, they are loud, messy *suicides*, where on his way out of life, the shooter is determined to show the world how much it hurt him -- by hurting the world back.
Overstressed kids considering suicide often plot such acts; most never act on them, but if someone gets pushed too far, it can happen. Guns don't change the picture; there are tales from the sword-and-stick era of people going mad and killing many before being brought down themselves.
I remember when that's how work was in the U.S. too, where you could concentrate on your job and not on trying to offend no one. Kudos to you, you are preserving a way of life and thought that's being lost. A reflection of lost freedoms in general, I think.:(
My cynical little voice thinks it's really more like "If we can get someone to flip these houses whose value has gone down since they were purchased *and* that consequently have applied for lower property tax assessments, we'll be able to reassess them at a higher property tax value and have as much money to spend as we thought we'd have during the real estate frenzy"... given that CA base property tax is 1% of the most recent sale price or the assessed value. Since they can't do this legitimately, they're gonna do it via eminent domain.
"there are people who aren't happy, but they need to get out of the relationship. Unless kids are involved. The they need to suck it up* and create a happy and stable home life."
The problem is you can't force or fake happiness. And marital stress always devolves onto the kids as stress that the kids have no outlet for. If your marriage is unhappy, you can bet it's making your kids unhappy, even if they claim otherwise (kids will say what they think pleases the parent, not what the kid actually feels).
Sometimes the very best thing you can do for your kids is get divorced. Kids will understand and accept people not getting along and not being able to live together anymore. They DON'T understand when you effectively LIE by pretending to get along while in fact hating each other. Kids will see right through that lie, and may even believe it's their fault (since in a kid's simpler world, if you don't like a situation, you get out of it, you don't "suck it up").
I've found it's not too hard to tell dysorthography and doesn't-give-a-shit apart; likewise, from English (or the tongue of your choice) as a 2nd/3rd/4th language. And everyone I know who is dyslexic or has can't-spell-to-save-their-lives or ESL at least makes an effort, and generally can learn better, at least to some degree, if gently corrected.
I've met a few as well who use their dysorthography as a weapon, but in general they will not learn from correction, so still fall under "don't give a shit".
Slashdot Mirror
I still don't think it's poverty so much as a culture of entitlement. Granted, that often goes right along with a welfare state, where "by damn the gov't owes me a living"** -- so there will be some *overlap* with poverty, but poverty isn't the direct cause. If it were, an armpit of the economy like Bakersfield wouldn't be so low in the crime stats, while a relatively affluent city like San Francisco wouldn't be so much higher up.
** I'm reminded that when the concept of "self esteem" was finally actually studied (rather than just *assumed* a good thing), it proved highest in career criminals.
Having seen the result of a small amount of propane mixed with a smaller amount of ammonia, which completely flattened the (fortunately unoccupied) structure where the explosion occurred, as well as the building and trees to either side, I'd say chances are his homemade explosives, in the same venue, would have made a far more spectacular mess than the firearms did.
The U.N. seems to have forgotten history. I recall a story someone related either here or on another board: During WW2, one small country (I believe it was Denmark??) had strict gun registration... the Nazis waltzed into local offices and here's these Handy Lists of People to Shoot First, the owners of registered firearms. As a result, after the war this country got rid of its gun reg'n laws.
Now, the U.S. may be physically too large for such an action by an invader to succeed, but this treaty wouldn't affect only the U.S. Would you like to be in a disarmed or gun-registration (aka "Handy List of People to Shoot First") country when a neighbouring country goes on the warpath??
I spent some time playing with the Wiki crime chart, and noticed something peculiar: homicide rates correlate more closely with a history of being a union town (back in the heyday of American manufacturing), than they do with poverty or gangs or the drug trade, in fact some of the biggest poverty pits and drug portals are on the low end for homicides. Also, there is approximately an inverse relationship between homicides and forcible rapes. However the level of various crimes against property tend to be consistent for a given city.
Good points all, but...
Be aware that a great deal of the "crime" in the U.S. is not what reasonable people would identify as crime. It is, rather, some quite trivial action which nonetheless is cited AS a crime, because in the large jurisdictions, fines and penalties from these minor citations has become a cash cow, at zero risk to the police and a guaranteed win for the prosecutor's office (96% in Los Angeles County, last I checked) because of the plea bargain system, which forces average people to plead guilty to a lesser offense and a substantial fine, to avoid the unpredictable risk and much greater cost of a trial and possible major jail sentence.
I've observed the criminal court for a few days here, and out of perhaps 100 cases, only two were what most people would call a "crime" (an assault and a theft). The rest were basically Stupid Behaviour like public drunkenness, drug possession, or the dumbest case I saw, some kid who'd followed a girl into a public restroom at a drunken frat party, and wound up copping to a "loitering" charge (with "sex offender" on his record) to avoid a charge of sexual assault. Whatever happened to "Hey now, enough of that, move along" instead of making a court case of every Stupid Thing people do? I can tell you... in this case it was a $1000 fine plus several hundred more dollars paid to various "sex education" classes required by the court. This is income on the books for the county and for various private contractors, for two minutes of the court's time, and an artificial inflation of the so-called crime statistics.
Also, what is called poverty in the U.S. would be called luxury in most of the world. I can't find it offhand but there is a good study on the average possessions of Americans living in "poverty" and it was quite startling... they own far more stuff, and more semi-luxury goods, than did *average* middle-class families when I was a kid. This isn't what most people envision when they hear the term "poverty".
I found the Cinnamon website, and the pictures are pretty, but it doesn't tell me what Cinnamon *is*. So what the heck IS it? new desktop??
Mint I know, it's perhaps one of the more comfortable distros I've looked at... tho I'm still looking for that linux I can use as an everyday OS... and not want to hurt one of the developers. :(
I detest touchscreens, swipescreens, and all their kin, and so do my already-overworked arms and shoulders.
And my experience and observation is the opposite; if the marriage isn't working, for whatever reason, the kids are better off if the parents split the sheets. Effectively your own advice, for the parents to improve their own lives so their difficulties (boredom, whatever) aren't devolving onto the kids, as they inevitably do. Sometimes it's just not possible to improve matters, no matter what effort is put into it, because the foundation isn't there, or has crumbled.
Sometimes "stay together for the sake of the children" may work best, but as I say, my experience and observation has been entirely the opposite. Your anecdotes may vary.
The easy way to recover text from early Word documents, or Pagemaker files or any other mix of binary and text (such as executables), is to run it through a text extraction utility. I use a little DOS app called XRAY, works good enough for all practical purposes.
http://www.doomgold.com/pcstuff/xray.zip
Main thing with storing paper (I've got a lot of pre-computer-era paper archived too) is that you need to protect it from light and air (which includes moisture). If it's stacked and packed tight, only the edges and topsheets will deteriorate.
Side note from the pen-and-ink set, especially ballpoints: Black and red inks usually spread and fade; blue inks generally do not, or at a far lesser rate.
I'm guessing the only survivors will be the stone tablet and possibly the printed-on-paper version, if it doesn't get wet and you don't have ground termites (which will get into even the smallest crack) or paper-eating fungi archived along with the paper.
I once opened a jug of apple juice, decided it wasn't quite what I expected; stoppered it and stuck it under the sink and promptly forgot about it. It spent the winter under there, at temps just above freezing. Rediscovered next spring... turned to delicious sparkling apple cider, in fact I gave some of it to a friend as a wedding present.
Conversely there was the package of mini sausages I once forgot in the trunk of the car... appeared to be just fine 9 months later, but I wasn't touchin' them, no way!
Two, 3, or 4 times a year... out of 300 million people. It's spectacular as a headline, but 2-or-3-or-4 chances out of 300 million to be the next crazed shooter doesn't sound like a hugely "frequent" problem to me. In fact, I'd peg it as "vanishingly rare", way down below "VERY infrequently".
The degree to which it is shocking and horrifying doesn't change that, nor does the degree to which the press tries to inflate it in their everlasting search for more eyeballs to sell to their advertisers.
I can certainly say both; rights sometimes allow tragedies. But what I can't say is "I believe in the 2nd Amendment" *and* "People should be stopped from causing tragedies allowed by our Constitutional rights". You can't both have a right and complain about the consequences of that right, unless your real object is to restrict that right. (I think that's what you were getting at.)
It is better that a few suffer than that all live under the boot of restricted rights. Jane Q. Public said it well up above:
"Laws are made for reasonable people. There will always be idiots, but you can't mold the laws around them without punishing the reasonable people."
The same goes for rights, even when such rights occasionally permit a tragedy.
Actually, where stats have been toted up, turns out there are considerably more violent acts prevented by guns than are committed with the aid of guns.
Here's an article with a lot of stats including U.S. vs various other countries; read the whole thing:
http://gunowners.org/fs0404.htm
[I have personally saved my own or another's ass and/or property three times with the aid of a gun. Only one of those incidents was reported to police. I'd guess this is a reasonable approximation of how many preventive incidents go unreported.]
What's not being looked at properly is the motivation. Most (perhaps all) of these are not "massacres" for the sake of killing. Rather, they are loud, messy *suicides*, where on his way out of life, the shooter is determined to show the world how much it hurt him -- by hurting the world back.
Overstressed kids considering suicide often plot such acts; most never act on them, but if someone gets pushed too far, it can happen. Guns don't change the picture; there are tales from the sword-and-stick era of people going mad and killing many before being brought down themselves.
Lots of stats:
http://gunowners.org/fs0404.htm
I remember when that's how work was in the U.S. too, where you could concentrate on your job and not on trying to offend no one. Kudos to you, you are preserving a way of life and thought that's being lost. A reflection of lost freedoms in general, I think. :(
So play the game instead. Insert your own comments that translate to "small dicks".
My cynical little voice thinks it's really more like "If we can get someone to flip these houses whose value has gone down since they were purchased *and* that consequently have applied for lower property tax assessments, we'll be able to reassess them at a higher property tax value and have as much money to spend as we thought we'd have during the real estate frenzy" ... given that CA base property tax is 1% of the most recent sale price or the assessed value. Since they can't do this legitimately, they're gonna do it via eminent domain.
"...rights are the limits that must be observed by the collective without any compromise."
Very interesting way to put it; I find myself enlightened. Thanks.
Want your neighbor's house? Just call the bank.
http://freebeacon.com/democratic-domain/
Yes, SB County actually has this in the planning stages.
"there are people who aren't happy, but they need to get out of the relationship. Unless kids are involved. The they need to suck it up* and create a happy and stable home life."
The problem is you can't force or fake happiness. And marital stress always devolves onto the kids as stress that the kids have no outlet for. If your marriage is unhappy, you can bet it's making your kids unhappy, even if they claim otherwise (kids will say what they think pleases the parent, not what the kid actually feels).
Sometimes the very best thing you can do for your kids is get divorced. Kids will understand and accept people not getting along and not being able to live together anymore. They DON'T understand when you effectively LIE by pretending to get along while in fact hating each other. Kids will see right through that lie, and may even believe it's their fault (since in a kid's simpler world, if you don't like a situation, you get out of it, you don't "suck it up").
Older than that. Used to be "free floppies" occasionally with bonus malware.
Now get off my lawn!
"German sounds like a man being choked to death; French sounds like cat fight; Spanish sounds like molasses gurgling out of a jug." -- R.A. Heinlein
I'm thinkin' this might apply equally to their respective grammars.
English might be compared to a cement mixer. ;)
I've found it's not too hard to tell dysorthography and doesn't-give-a-shit apart; likewise, from English (or the tongue of your choice) as a 2nd/3rd/4th language. And everyone I know who is dyslexic or has can't-spell-to-save-their-lives or ESL at least makes an effort, and generally can learn better, at least to some degree, if gently corrected.
I've met a few as well who use their dysorthography as a weapon, but in general they will not learn from correction, so still fall under "don't give a shit".