I'm actually a great employee, but I have been around long enough to know my rights and know when some CEO is pulling BS moves to line her pockets via big bonuses for saving the company money at my expense. I even understand when companies have to downsize due to market forces/bad economic conditions etc., but I expect them to come out and acknowledge that is what they are doing and offer their employees all the benefits that they are entitled to.
For far too long we have treated C-level managers like employees, when in reality they are the company, and if I had my way we would have a law that it is assumed that the board and CEOs on down the C-level are assumed to be aware and are inseparably criminally liable for any corporate action that is illegal (not the lone guy acting against stated corporate policy). This back door layoff scheme is fraudulent on its face (depriving laid off workers of their benefits for the enrichment of the company) and they should all be perp walked out of IBM and charged with a few thousand counts of fraud.
This, exactly. They are trying to cheat their employees out of unemployment benefits, and if I were telecommuting and unable to relocate, I would refuse to accept the terms and I would not hand in my resignation either. I would make them fire me and let their HR department know that I expected unemployment and a severance package as if I were laid off. If they try to withhold unemployment benefits, I would get a lawyer and start a class action for unemployment benefits, legal fees and punitive damages for bad faith and contact my state AG to start an investigation.
Please cite Trumps campaign promise (not some offhanded thing he said once) about scrubbing "irrelevant or excessive" statements from the internet. Seems like most of his speeches would get scrubbed right off the bat.
Cracking down on print press, TV, radio and internet for demonstrably false statements (the sky is green) is a different thing and in general a good thing if we can do it. The press gets special privileges for the express purpose of passing information to the public. If the press gets it wrong, either on purpose or inadvertently, there should be serious consequences to them because an irresponsible press can devastate the nation. I have always liked the idea of no programming or commercials for a duration equal to the time they gave that topic for the last month with a PSA static message displayed that they were wrong and a text of the correction below that for TV. Something similar for radio, and for Newspapers, a full front page above the fold blank with the correction in 20 point font minimum half the page taken up by the correction.
However, that should apply only to the press (businesses run for the dissemination of information) not to individual citizens who can say whatever the hell they want up to the point of libel/slander. Booting politicians out of office for repeatedly lying to the public (either on TV or print/online) should get them sanctioned or kicked out after something like 3 strikes over less than 3 months.
Also, we have to be talking about demonstrable facts, not controversial topics. The sky is green/I was at X today when in reality I was at Y, that kind of thing. If you get into controversial topics like anthropogenic global warming, etc, those topics are not settled fact (regardless of how hard the environmental nuts stomp their feet or how loud they shout) and generally hotly debated.
You have a recipe right there to start WW3... Good thing you are not in charge.
When somebody comes into your house and puts huge amounts of military power on your doorstep the normal response is to develop nuclear weapons to achieve strategic parity. US stationed Nuclear weapons in South Korea and let Israel have nuclear weapons. Both countries developed weapons in response so you dont get to blame them for your bloated defense budget. Stop with the victim blaming. The days of "She asked for it" are long gone
So the US, Israel and South Korea all have defensive nukes and that justifies rabid, totalitarian dictator states getting them. You must be a special kind of stupid to think that there is any kind of parity between democratic states having strong militaries and nuclear weapons for defense, and countries who want to rule the world or watch it burn getting them. Your kind of logic says that because police have guns, the criminals deserve to have guns so that it is a fair fight. Your reasoning is completely and utterly flawed because you assume that all states are equal and neutral, when reality clearly shows us that some states are evil and should be sanctioned and prevented from gaining any more power until they can shape up and treat their citizens and their neighbors properly...
Let me know how not having a missile defense shield works out when North Korea finally manages to start hitting things with their thermonuclear or dirty ICBMs (it is only a mater of time, as they keep at it unchecked). Or when Iran starts shooting ICBS at Israel, or Russia starts shooting ICBS at Eastern Europe. Defense is one of the fundamental things that the government is supposed to do. Yes, there is suffering abroad and at home, but there has always been suffering, and will always be suffering, it is impossible to eliminate, and charities do a far better job than the government at alleviating suffering. What anti-military types like you fail to understand is that conflict requires both sides to stop for peace to resume.
Hypothetically, if someone hates your guts for some reason and come to your house and start hitting you in the face with a baseball bat, someone needs to make them stop, or they will just keep going until they get tired (which might not happen for a long time). You want the police to come and make them stop with their tasers/guns (coincidentally more powerful than a bat). The military are our tasers/guns/ability to project force around the world. There are evil people who would rule the world if there was no constraint on them (look at ancient history, it was a procession of countries conquering the known world one after the next: Sumeria, Babylon, Assyria, Persia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, British empire, et al.) They all rose up and conquered the much of the known world.
The Germans tried to do it in WW2, but were defeated by the US, the USSR wanted to do it for 70 years but were held back by the US and MAD, the Russians and Chinese would like to do it now, but are held back by the US. North Korea wants to invade South Korea, but is held back by nearly 30,000 US troops stationed there. Notice the trend? Since the US rise to superpower status, the aggressors who would conquer and rule the world have been held in check. If the price of a relatively peaceful world is a few people who have to find support somewhere other than the government teat (or heaven forbid, get a job) I can live with that, and the millions of lives saved across the globe by not having WW3.
Bird shot is way more effective, 00 buckshot only has 9(?) pellets in a 12 gage shell, vs 130 ish for bird shot. If you hit just about anything on the drone (propeller, motor, controller board etc) you will crash it. They are made to be light, not armor plated.
12 gage automatic with bird shot and a radar sensor to shoot anything flying at an AFV. A shaped charge will do nothing 20 yards away, if it detonates at all as the drone is shot down.
Some people have no baseline on reality and so are easily fooled. As you say, the entire military budget for FY 2015 was under $1Trillion, so unless this report is referring to pesos, there is no way they misplaced 6x their annual budget. Not sure WTF this DoD IG report is referring to, but it aint real money for FY2015.
And then watch the government ban all drones without a pilots license and a license for every drone, make it a felony to fly one without above and go around jack booting everyone's house looking for drones and arresting hobbiests at the local parks. I can almost guarantee that is what would happen.
Any commercial drone could be very economically neutralized with a shotgun with birdshot for low flying UAVs and a laser guided computer controlled automatic rifle pod: something like a combination of a laser guided bomb, where a human paints the target with a relatively wide beam laser light (or adjustable beam width), and an Phalanx CIWS for the computer compensated aiming solution, but with 5.56 instead of 20mm. It would probably take a few dozen rounds, and you may want some tracers loaded so the computer can track and compensate the trajectory for crosswind, but it should be pretty easy to shoot any commercial drone out of the sky with that kind of a weapon system, at a consumable cost of less than $10 (5.56 is about $.20/round)
Until enough users are tech savy enough to demand that systems work cross platform, each company will continue to carve out their own feifdom full of surfs who live and die by their rules. As soon as a couple of companies (WhatsApp, IM and skype, for example) start to offer cross platform functionality, those who don't offer cross platform functionality will be progressively marginalized. Then it will be just a preference of what UI you like better.
Only if you are male, under 45, and have the courage to join the National Guard. Try actually reading the thing some time instead of the Ollie North Hezbolla version.
I have my pocket constitution right here. It does require that you have a brain capable of rational thought when you read it though. The federal government and the general citizenry as well as the supreme court for 230 plus years disagree with your liberal progressive assertion on the nature of the 2nd amendment, care to try again?
As soon as your lawyer club (ACLU) teachers club (NEA) vagina club (NOW) et. al. get regulated, you can bitch about the NRA not being regulated. Until then you are way off base. George Washington and the founders wanted all the gun owners to form organized militia such that anytime there were any threats to the constitution, foreign or domestic, we would all load our guns and saddle up and go kill the tyrants. You best be glad we have moderated from his position.
So yah, feel free to read the other replies to your post, who pretty effectively take apart your assertions:
Fun fact: The M-16 is dramatically less powerful than the gun it replaced in US service. It's also dramatically less powerful than a typical hunting rifle.
We (people who firmly believe in the 2A and the rest of the BoR and willing to walk the walk) *are* the military (at least, the vast majority) in the all-volunteer US military. The US military upper-echelons are not given enough credit. The vast majority are good people with integrity who would never obey orders like enforcing domestic gun confiscation, etc. The US military is not a 'button' that can be pressed nor are they unquestioning minions.
Any US leaders who would issue such orders to the military should be more worried that the guns may get pointed at them, instead.
The AR-15 is the exact same rifle as the M-16 (without the wasteful and ineffective full-auto). Fun fact: there are more AR-15s in private hands in the US than there are M-16s in military hands.
Also, in terms of range, power, etc, it's much less effective at killing people than grampa's hunting rifle and the military rifle that it replaced. It was designed from the ground up to allow soldiers to carry more rounds of (less powerful) ammunition and to lower the recoil felt by the shooter (by making the cartridge less powerful).
You know so very little about all of this, but you are so ready to spout off about it...
The only thing I would add is that there are about 50 million gun owners in the US with more than 300 million guns, and lets say for the sake of argument that the politicians found 1 million soldiers from the UN to follow orders to confiscate guns (because fun fact: our military takes an oath to uphold and protect the constitution and most of them would not follow such an order). They would be facing most of our volunteer military and an an armed and for the most part trained (retired military and hunters) citizenry who wouldn't fight like a conventional force. There would be no green zones, no enemy lines, and within a matter of a few weeks, every occupying soldier would be picked off or would flee.
Don't let the peace loving nature of the majority fool you, Americans are far more deadly when cornered than the ignorant savages we fought in Afghanistan or Iraq. The fascist progressive politicians all know this, and that is why they try to confiscate the guns.
I made no conclusions, just observations. However, if I were a president who wanted to push my anti-gun agenda and felt that the ends justified the means, one of the things I would do would be to move personnel away from the DROSS screening system and try my best to only leave republicans and make sure that they were consistently shorthanded. That way, I could virtually guarantee that at least a few criminals and crazies would be able to legally buy a gun. When they inevitably shoot up a school or church, I can then go on TV (as Obama did) and lobby hard for gun confiscation.
DROS is a background check, not surveillance per se. It just reviews what the government already knows about you.
But I expect the number of mass shootings to drop now that the Muslim overlord is out of the White House, which seemed to incite a whole lot of crazy talk and er, ill-mannered behavior among the Godfearin'. After all, angry white liberals can't can't shoot & sip their soy lattes at the same time & would never shoot up their favorite Starbucks.
If the mass shootings drop way down under Trump, I would hope there is a congressional investigation, because usually where there is smoke there is fire. It is a hard fact that the numbers shot way up under Obama, the only question that remains is why.
Please feel free to point to any examples of: - Conservatives rioting and burning cars and destroying property. - Any examples of conservatives assaulting liberals trying to attend a speech or shouting down and assaulting the speaker. - Examples of conservatives going easy on convicted felons and letting them back out on the streets where 80% plus re-offend within 5 years. - Examples of conservatives litigating for the release of mentally ill patients who then go on to commit the majority of mass shootings in the US.
No, I grew up well before cell phones, and I remember the days of being completely disconnected. They weren't as great as you think. When I am out in the mountains fishing or hunting, I have no service and it is no big deal, but when I am at home, people and emergency services expect to be able to reach me.
Am I to suppose the BSA represents me because I own a computer? Or that the MPAA represents me because I own a few DVDs? Or that FSF represents me because I sometimes code in emacs? Or that various eco-terrorists represent me because I think than many of their chosen targets actually are assholes?
I get what you are trying to say (though most of those organizations represent corporations who are fighting with their customers, as opposed to the gun industry who are pretty well aligned with their customers). In the case of the NRA, lets change the example to one that more closely resembles the situation with the NRA: if there were a large contingent of politicians who wanted to take away or dramatically infringe on your right to own a computer or have online access because, while admittedly useful to you, "many children are being damaged by online porn and child predators", so we need "computer and internet regulation and controls," to ensure "internet safety." (I basically just transposed for the word gun) I am pretty sure you would donate to the EFF or some other similar organization to fight for your personal freedom and rights, and most people who want to own computers/have online access would feel that the EFF or similar represented them, whether they donated to it or not, and computer ownership/internet access is not even a right spelled out in the constitution.
In power generation, you must always be able to generate the entire load of the grid, or you have brown outs or forced blackouts to balance the load with the supply. This means that things like wind must be backstopped with 100% capacity gas/coal/storage, not peak load gas as you assert. It may only happen a few times a year, but if you EVER have a moment when wind generation drops to zero (and you will), your gas turbines have to generate 100% of that load (not peak load) or bad things happen. The only way you could theoretically prevent this is if your wind turbine grid spans the entire globe and has something like 300-600% baseline capacity. As we don't have a grid like that, wind as anything but a small supplement to grid power is a pipe dream.
If you do have brownouts, it can damage electronics and/or the grid hardware, and blackouts can cause car accidents, fatalities at hospitals and surgery centers as well as numerous other deleterious consequences.
Take a look at this graph of a month long generation of wind power. See every time it dips to zero, that means no wind power during that period (which is minutes to hours). Compared to gas, coal or nuclear which are horizontal lines that match demand exactly.
No need to be an ass, I was merely making the point that we do not currently have an efficient method of storing large amounts of electricity, and any proposed methods are theoretical and nowhere near production worthy.
If I were making a legal argument, you would be correct, but I am making a logical, moral argument (which highlights the brokenness of the UK freedom of speech). Laws are a reflection of moral will combined with state force. In representative government, the laws are the moral will of the people. If I lived in the UK, I would start a movement to push the government to pass laws to protect free speech similar to the freedom that Americans have. If the laws change, then the Judges will have to go by the new legal statute.
That drivel may get you modded up on/. but in America, where we have freedom of speech, there is a much higher libel/slander threshold than in the UK. This is well documented and known by anyone who knows WTF they are talking about. The net result is to stifle legitimate free speech in the UK and leave it's citizens ignorant of key facts because people and the media fear lawsuits.
Any time you can sue an entity for libel when it is not a clearly defined statement asserting fact that is demonstrably false, you reduce your freedom of speech for everyone. Libel and slander laws by definition are limits on freedom of speech. That you don't understand that that simple fact puts you squarely in the ignorant or troll category. Experts in the UK legal system may disagree with me, but the entire premise of my post is that UK freedom of speech and libel laws are substandard in quality and US freedom of speech is the gold standard that the UK should push for.
Talk about ridiculously thin skinned. 107,000 British Pounds for what amounts to an insult... Talk about a broken system. In the free world with freedom of speech, we tweet back "You're an ass." then block the person and move on with our lives.
By the way, since you apparently burned all your dictionaries during Brexit, libel is stating something damaging as factual about a person in writing. It was clear that that tweet was an insult and not real libel: i.e. "I saw/heard so and so deface(d) a war memorial."
Um no, the 4 lane highway was sufficient for the last 50 years and the growth rate of the population is not increasing much at all. The 6 lanes should be good for another 15 to 20 years, but this thing called city and roadway planning allows for us to look forward and predict future use and population, and governments that are not filled with complete incompetents will save up the gas taxes and make plans for the next big expansion (maybe a double deck roadway or a tunnel under the existing roadway) and implement those improvements before there is gridlock on the existing system.
The root problem is that the government types want to steal that money to spend on sexy projects or give it away to buy votes, or try and force half assed solutions that waste millions of man hours. Through choice, they create massive gridlock, put buses in that gridlock so that people can spend 15 minutes walking to a bus station, 5 minutes waiting for a bus, ride a bus for 30 minutes that goes 10 miles out of their way to then drive another 15 minutes home to avoid 2h of gridlock on a route that normally takes 15 minutes... This is why people like me are pissed with all the incompetence.
Eminent domain for fire houses, police buildings, roadways, drainage ditches etc is a good thing and the reason that it exists. I want my government to pay people the market rate for their property plus 20% for the inconvenience of having to move. America is not the old country, we move and own land but are not that attached and can easily move to a different home or build one.
I agree with everything you said up to this point:
"Objecting to politicians spending money on non-car forms of transport seems to be like cutting off your nose to spite your face."
The problem is not spending on non-car transportation, the problem is spending on ineffective, non-car transportation. In New York, non car transportation is great and effective. There are a number of large, high density cities where non car transportation works great. The problem is having politicians try for 40 plus years to cram a one size fits all solution down everyone's throat and piss away billions of dollars on a solution that is demonstrably ineffective while forcing the people who pay those taxes to suffer due to the incompetence of the politicians and bureaucrats.
Some solutions to overcrowding that could save tons of CO2 every day: 1. Mandate 3 days a week telecommuting for jobs that do not require physical presence. 2. Ban long haul trucking during rush hour (Texas or some cities in Texas did this and it helped a lot). 3. Subsidy of van pools that carry 4 or more people more than 30 miles per day.
This kind of thinking is what we need, along with real investments in freeways and roads. The suburban sprawl of the west coast is not going away for at least 50 years, so plan ahead and build the roads accordingly, just like they did in the 1960s.
Please, by all means David Thornley, show me with sourced references and clear logic where exactly I am "wrong on every point."
1 Observe - The earth has been warmer and cooler than it is now, with more CO2 in the atmosphere (we agree here)
2 Hypothesis - Humans must be destroying the world and bringing about the apocalypse
-if the polar caps melt, climate change proponents claim that the sea level rise will be 230 feet, leading to mass starvation, wars over resources and land, basically the end of all civilization as we know it. Feel free to refute my statement with a facts of your own. Didn't you see An Inconvenient Truth by your spokesman Al Gore? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... If climate change is not the apocalypse, why should we give two shits about it or spend $500B a year to combat it?
3 Mathematical model - Create mathematical models that have been proven wildly inaccurate without exception for the last 25 years; engage in incestuous consensus, conduct a witch hunt for any who disagree, shout down any opposing theories by claiming majority rule regardless of their scientific merit
- This is not libel and is easily searchable. Here is a nice graph of predicted vs actual global temperatures for the last 30 years vs 90 different climate models. As you can clearly see, they are nearly all way off high from the actual temperatures. http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp... You might want to, you know, learn something before you call other people names.
4 Conclusion - AGW is right and is the apocalypse, everyone who disagrees is either an idiot or a shill for fossil fuels (pretty sure you made this point already yourself with your personal attacks) Also, one of your biggest supporters, Bill Nye is quite vocal on this topic: http://dailycaller.com/2017/02...
The sad truth is that global warming/climate change is no longer about science, it is about orthodoxy, conformity and grants for "scientists", it is about manipulation and power for the politicians, and it is about feeling intellectually and morally superior for the unwashed masses who in most cases have no more than a high school level education in the physical sciences and only know what they have been spoonfed. Notice that nowhere in there is actual science where hypotheses are continually being made and challenged and are furthered by peer review and debate.
Further, the steps above are exactly what the global warming crowd call science, and as I showed in my prior post, it is clearly not the scientific method. It may be based in physics, but climate science isn't science, it is climate modeling or climate simulation, but those names are not as catchy and don't sound as authoritative.
Side note: I do thermal design for a living and create very complex closed form and FDA models of thermal systems, but after the models, I always build and test, as that is the only way to be sure that your model is accurate. Climate scientists don't/can't do this testing at any faster than realtime, and so far their realtime testing has not been favorable for their thermal models.
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I'm actually a great employee, but I have been around long enough to know my rights and know when some CEO is pulling BS moves to line her pockets via big bonuses for saving the company money at my expense. I even understand when companies have to downsize due to market forces/bad economic conditions etc., but I expect them to come out and acknowledge that is what they are doing and offer their employees all the benefits that they are entitled to.
For far too long we have treated C-level managers like employees, when in reality they are the company, and if I had my way we would have a law that it is assumed that the board and CEOs on down the C-level are assumed to be aware and are inseparably criminally liable for any corporate action that is illegal (not the lone guy acting against stated corporate policy). This back door layoff scheme is fraudulent on its face (depriving laid off workers of their benefits for the enrichment of the company) and they should all be perp walked out of IBM and charged with a few thousand counts of fraud.
This, exactly. They are trying to cheat their employees out of unemployment benefits, and if I were telecommuting and unable to relocate, I would refuse to accept the terms and I would not hand in my resignation either. I would make them fire me and let their HR department know that I expected unemployment and a severance package as if I were laid off. If they try to withhold unemployment benefits, I would get a lawyer and start a class action for unemployment benefits, legal fees and punitive damages for bad faith and contact my state AG to start an investigation.
Please cite Trumps campaign promise (not some offhanded thing he said once) about scrubbing "irrelevant or excessive" statements from the internet. Seems like most of his speeches would get scrubbed right off the bat.
Cracking down on print press, TV, radio and internet for demonstrably false statements (the sky is green) is a different thing and in general a good thing if we can do it. The press gets special privileges for the express purpose of passing information to the public. If the press gets it wrong, either on purpose or inadvertently, there should be serious consequences to them because an irresponsible press can devastate the nation. I have always liked the idea of no programming or commercials for a duration equal to the time they gave that topic for the last month with a PSA static message displayed that they were wrong and a text of the correction below that for TV. Something similar for radio, and for Newspapers, a full front page above the fold blank with the correction in 20 point font minimum half the page taken up by the correction.
However, that should apply only to the press (businesses run for the dissemination of information) not to individual citizens who can say whatever the hell they want up to the point of libel/slander. Booting politicians out of office for repeatedly lying to the public (either on TV or print/online) should get them sanctioned or kicked out after something like 3 strikes over less than 3 months.
Also, we have to be talking about demonstrable facts, not controversial topics. The sky is green/I was at X today when in reality I was at Y, that kind of thing. If you get into controversial topics like anthropogenic global warming, etc, those topics are not settled fact (regardless of how hard the environmental nuts stomp their feet or how loud they shout) and generally hotly debated.
You have a recipe right there to start WW3... Good thing you are not in charge.
When somebody comes into your house and puts huge amounts of military power on your doorstep the normal response is to develop nuclear weapons to achieve strategic parity.
US stationed Nuclear weapons in South Korea and let Israel have nuclear weapons. Both countries developed weapons in response so you dont get to blame them for your bloated defense budget.
Stop with the victim blaming. The days of "She asked for it" are long gone
So the US, Israel and South Korea all have defensive nukes and that justifies rabid, totalitarian dictator states getting them. You must be a special kind of stupid to think that there is any kind of parity between democratic states having strong militaries and nuclear weapons for defense, and countries who want to rule the world or watch it burn getting them. Your kind of logic says that because police have guns, the criminals deserve to have guns so that it is a fair fight. Your reasoning is completely and utterly flawed because you assume that all states are equal and neutral, when reality clearly shows us that some states are evil and should be sanctioned and prevented from gaining any more power until they can shape up and treat their citizens and their neighbors properly...
Let me know how not having a missile defense shield works out when North Korea finally manages to start hitting things with their thermonuclear or dirty ICBMs (it is only a mater of time, as they keep at it unchecked). Or when Iran starts shooting ICBS at Israel, or Russia starts shooting ICBS at Eastern Europe. Defense is one of the fundamental things that the government is supposed to do. Yes, there is suffering abroad and at home, but there has always been suffering, and will always be suffering, it is impossible to eliminate, and charities do a far better job than the government at alleviating suffering. What anti-military types like you fail to understand is that conflict requires both sides to stop for peace to resume.
Hypothetically, if someone hates your guts for some reason and come to your house and start hitting you in the face with a baseball bat, someone needs to make them stop, or they will just keep going until they get tired (which might not happen for a long time). You want the police to come and make them stop with their tasers/guns (coincidentally more powerful than a bat). The military are our tasers/guns/ability to project force around the world. There are evil people who would rule the world if there was no constraint on them (look at ancient history, it was a procession of countries conquering the known world one after the next: Sumeria, Babylon, Assyria, Persia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, British empire, et al.) They all rose up and conquered the much of the known world.
The Germans tried to do it in WW2, but were defeated by the US, the USSR wanted to do it for 70 years but were held back by the US and MAD, the Russians and Chinese would like to do it now, but are held back by the US. North Korea wants to invade South Korea, but is held back by nearly 30,000 US troops stationed there. Notice the trend? Since the US rise to superpower status, the aggressors who would conquer and rule the world have been held in check. If the price of a relatively peaceful world is a few people who have to find support somewhere other than the government teat (or heaven forbid, get a job) I can live with that, and the millions of lives saved across the globe by not having WW3.
Bird shot is way more effective, 00 buckshot only has 9(?) pellets in a 12 gage shell, vs 130 ish for bird shot. If you hit just about anything on the drone (propeller, motor, controller board etc) you will crash it. They are made to be light, not armor plated.
12 gage automatic with bird shot and a radar sensor to shoot anything flying at an AFV. A shaped charge will do nothing 20 yards away, if it detonates at all as the drone is shot down.
Some people have no baseline on reality and so are easily fooled. As you say, the entire military budget for FY 2015 was under $1Trillion, so unless this report is referring to pesos, there is no way they misplaced 6x their annual budget. Not sure WTF this DoD IG report is referring to, but it aint real money for FY2015.
AC may very well be trolling.
And then watch the government ban all drones without a pilots license and a license for every drone, make it a felony to fly one without above and go around jack booting everyone's house looking for drones and arresting hobbiests at the local parks. I can almost guarantee that is what would happen.
Any commercial drone could be very economically neutralized with a shotgun with birdshot for low flying UAVs and a laser guided computer controlled automatic rifle pod: something like a combination of a laser guided bomb, where a human paints the target with a relatively wide beam laser light (or adjustable beam width), and an Phalanx CIWS for the computer compensated aiming solution, but with 5.56 instead of 20mm. It would probably take a few dozen rounds, and you may want some tracers loaded so the computer can track and compensate the trajectory for crosswind, but it should be pretty easy to shoot any commercial drone out of the sky with that kind of a weapon system, at a consumable cost of less than $10 (5.56 is about $.20/round)
Until enough users are tech savy enough to demand that systems work cross platform, each company will continue to carve out their own feifdom full of surfs who live and die by their rules. As soon as a couple of companies (WhatsApp, IM and skype, for example) start to offer cross platform functionality, those who don't offer cross platform functionality will be progressively marginalized. Then it will be just a preference of what UI you like better.
Only if you are male, under 45, and have the courage to join the National Guard. Try actually reading the thing some time instead of the Ollie North Hezbolla version.
I have my pocket constitution right here. It does require that you have a brain capable of rational thought when you read it though. The federal government and the general citizenry as well as the supreme court for 230 plus years disagree with your liberal progressive assertion on the nature of the 2nd amendment, care to try again?
http://tenthamendmentcenter.co...
As soon as your lawyer club (ACLU) teachers club (NEA) vagina club (NOW) et. al. get regulated, you can bitch about the NRA not being regulated. Until then you are way off base. George Washington and the founders wanted all the gun owners to form organized militia such that anytime there were any threats to the constitution, foreign or domestic, we would all load our guns and saddle up and go kill the tyrants. You best be glad we have moderated from his position.
So yah, feel free to read the other replies to your post, who pretty effectively take apart your assertions:
Fun fact: The M-16 is dramatically less powerful than the gun it replaced in US service. It's also dramatically less powerful than a typical hunting rifle.
.223 (5.56) used by the M-16 and AR15 vs the typical hunting round (30-06)
https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-6wz...
We don't have to fight the military.
We (people who firmly believe in the 2A and the rest of the BoR and willing to walk the walk) *are* the military (at least, the vast majority) in the all-volunteer US military. The US military upper-echelons are not given enough credit. The vast majority are good people with integrity who would never obey orders like enforcing domestic gun confiscation, etc. The US military is not a 'button' that can be pressed nor are they unquestioning minions.
Any US leaders who would issue such orders to the military should be more worried that the guns may get pointed at them, instead.
The AR-15 is the exact same rifle as the M-16 (without the wasteful and ineffective full-auto). Fun fact: there are more AR-15s in private hands in the US than there are M-16s in military hands.
Also, in terms of range, power, etc, it's much less effective at killing people than grampa's hunting rifle and the military rifle that it replaced. It was designed from the ground up to allow soldiers to carry more rounds of (less powerful) ammunition and to lower the recoil felt by the shooter (by making the cartridge less powerful).
You know so very little about all of this, but you are so ready to spout off about it...
The only thing I would add is that there are about 50 million gun owners in the US with more than 300 million guns, and lets say for the sake of argument that the politicians found 1 million soldiers from the UN to follow orders to confiscate guns (because fun fact: our military takes an oath to uphold and protect the constitution and most of them would not follow such an order). They would be facing most of our volunteer military and an an armed and for the most part trained (retired military and hunters) citizenry who wouldn't fight like a conventional force. There would be no green zones, no enemy lines, and within a matter of a few weeks, every occupying soldier would be picked off or would flee.
Don't let the peace loving nature of the majority fool you, Americans are far more deadly when cornered than the ignorant savages we fought in Afghanistan or Iraq. The fascist progressive politicians all know this, and that is why they try to confiscate the guns.
I made no conclusions, just observations. However, if I were a president who wanted to push my anti-gun agenda and felt that the ends justified the means, one of the things I would do would be to move personnel away from the DROSS screening system and try my best to only leave republicans and make sure that they were consistently shorthanded. That way, I could virtually guarantee that at least a few criminals and crazies would be able to legally buy a gun. When they inevitably shoot up a school or church, I can then go on TV (as Obama did) and lobby hard for gun confiscation.
DROS is a background check, not surveillance per se. It just reviews what the government already knows about you.
But I expect the number of mass shootings to drop now that the Muslim overlord is out of the White House, which seemed to incite a whole lot of crazy talk and er, ill-mannered behavior among the Godfearin'.
After all, angry white liberals can't can't shoot & sip their soy lattes at the same time & would never shoot up their favorite Starbucks.
If the mass shootings drop way down under Trump, I would hope there is a congressional investigation, because usually where there is smoke there is fire. It is a hard fact that the numbers shot way up under Obama, the only question that remains is why.
Please feel free to point to any examples of:
- Conservatives rioting and burning cars and destroying property.
- Any examples of conservatives assaulting liberals trying to attend a speech or shouting down and assaulting the speaker.
- Examples of conservatives going easy on convicted felons and letting them back out on the streets where 80% plus re-offend within 5 years.
- Examples of conservatives litigating for the release of mentally ill patients who then go on to commit the majority of mass shootings in the US.
No, I grew up well before cell phones, and I remember the days of being completely disconnected. They weren't as great as you think. When I am out in the mountains fishing or hunting, I have no service and it is no big deal, but when I am at home, people and emergency services expect to be able to reach me.
Am I to suppose the BSA represents me because I own a computer? Or that the MPAA represents me because I own a few DVDs? Or that FSF represents me because I sometimes code in emacs? Or that various eco-terrorists represent me because I think than many of their chosen targets actually are assholes?
I get what you are trying to say (though most of those organizations represent corporations who are fighting with their customers, as opposed to the gun industry who are pretty well aligned with their customers). In the case of the NRA, lets change the example to one that more closely resembles the situation with the NRA: if there were a large contingent of politicians who wanted to take away or dramatically infringe on your right to own a computer or have online access because, while admittedly useful to you, "many children are being damaged by online porn and child predators", so we need "computer and internet regulation and controls," to ensure "internet safety." (I basically just transposed for the word gun) I am pretty sure you would donate to the EFF or some other similar organization to fight for your personal freedom and rights, and most people who want to own computers/have online access would feel that the EFF or similar represented them, whether they donated to it or not, and computer ownership/internet access is not even a right spelled out in the constitution.
Your logic is beyond reproach and your facts are well organized and well sourced... oh wait, nevermind.
In power generation, you must always be able to generate the entire load of the grid, or you have brown outs or forced blackouts to balance the load with the supply. This means that things like wind must be backstopped with 100% capacity gas/coal/storage, not peak load gas as you assert. It may only happen a few times a year, but if you EVER have a moment when wind generation drops to zero (and you will), your gas turbines have to generate 100% of that load (not peak load) or bad things happen. The only way you could theoretically prevent this is if your wind turbine grid spans the entire globe and has something like 300-600% baseline capacity. As we don't have a grid like that, wind as anything but a small supplement to grid power is a pipe dream.
If you do have brownouts, it can damage electronics and/or the grid hardware, and blackouts can cause car accidents, fatalities at hospitals and surgery centers as well as numerous other deleterious consequences.
Take a look at this graph of a month long generation of wind power. See every time it dips to zero, that means no wind power during that period (which is minutes to hours). Compared to gas, coal or nuclear which are horizontal lines that match demand exactly.
http://www.esru.strath.ac.uk/E...
"tinfoil hat time"
No need to be an ass, I was merely making the point that we do not currently have an efficient method of storing large amounts of electricity, and any proposed methods are theoretical and nowhere near production worthy.
If I were making a legal argument, you would be correct, but I am making a logical, moral argument (which highlights the brokenness of the UK freedom of speech). Laws are a reflection of moral will combined with state force. In representative government, the laws are the moral will of the people. If I lived in the UK, I would start a movement to push the government to pass laws to protect free speech similar to the freedom that Americans have. If the laws change, then the Judges will have to go by the new legal statute.
That drivel may get you modded up on /. but in America, where we have freedom of speech, there is a much higher libel/slander threshold than in the UK. This is well documented and known by anyone who knows WTF they are talking about. The net result is to stifle legitimate free speech in the UK and leave it's citizens ignorant of key facts because people and the media fear lawsuits.
http://www.npr.org/sections/pa...
http://saperlaw.com/2010/02/24...
Any time you can sue an entity for libel when it is not a clearly defined statement asserting fact that is demonstrably false, you reduce your freedom of speech for everyone. Libel and slander laws by definition are limits on freedom of speech. That you don't understand that that simple fact puts you squarely in the ignorant or troll category. Experts in the UK legal system may disagree with me, but the entire premise of my post is that UK freedom of speech and libel laws are substandard in quality and US freedom of speech is the gold standard that the UK should push for.
Talk about ridiculously thin skinned. 107,000 British Pounds for what amounts to an insult... Talk about a broken system. In the free world with freedom of speech, we tweet back "You're an ass." then block the person and move on with our lives.
By the way, since you apparently burned all your dictionaries during Brexit, libel is stating something damaging as factual about a person in writing. It was clear that that tweet was an insult and not real libel: i.e. "I saw/heard so and so deface(d) a war memorial."
Um no, the 4 lane highway was sufficient for the last 50 years and the growth rate of the population is not increasing much at all. The 6 lanes should be good for another 15 to 20 years, but this thing called city and roadway planning allows for us to look forward and predict future use and population, and governments that are not filled with complete incompetents will save up the gas taxes and make plans for the next big expansion (maybe a double deck roadway or a tunnel under the existing roadway) and implement those improvements before there is gridlock on the existing system.
The root problem is that the government types want to steal that money to spend on sexy projects or give it away to buy votes, or try and force half assed solutions that waste millions of man hours. Through choice, they create massive gridlock, put buses in that gridlock so that people can spend 15 minutes walking to a bus station, 5 minutes waiting for a bus, ride a bus for 30 minutes that goes 10 miles out of their way to then drive another 15 minutes home to avoid 2h of gridlock on a route that normally takes 15 minutes... This is why people like me are pissed with all the incompetence.
Eminent domain for fire houses, police buildings, roadways, drainage ditches etc is a good thing and the reason that it exists. I want my government to pay people the market rate for their property plus 20% for the inconvenience of having to move. America is not the old country, we move and own land but are not that attached and can easily move to a different home or build one.
I agree with everything you said up to this point:
"Objecting to politicians spending money on non-car forms of transport seems to be like cutting off your nose to spite your face."
The problem is not spending on non-car transportation, the problem is spending on ineffective, non-car transportation. In New York, non car transportation is great and effective. There are a number of large, high density cities where non car transportation works great. The problem is having politicians try for 40 plus years to cram a one size fits all solution down everyone's throat and piss away billions of dollars on a solution that is demonstrably ineffective while forcing the people who pay those taxes to suffer due to the incompetence of the politicians and bureaucrats.
Some solutions to overcrowding that could save tons of CO2 every day:
1. Mandate 3 days a week telecommuting for jobs that do not require physical presence.
2. Ban long haul trucking during rush hour (Texas or some cities in Texas did this and it helped a lot).
3. Subsidy of van pools that carry 4 or more people more than 30 miles per day.
This kind of thinking is what we need, along with real investments in freeways and roads. The suburban sprawl of the west coast is not going away for at least 50 years, so plan ahead and build the roads accordingly, just like they did in the 1960s.
Thankfully it only affected the 13 people who use Windows 10 and also have Windows phones...
Please, by all means David Thornley, show me with sourced references and clear logic where exactly I am "wrong on every point."
1 Observe - The earth has been warmer and cooler than it is now, with more CO2 in the atmosphere (we agree here)
2 Hypothesis - Humans must be destroying the world and bringing about the apocalypse
-if the polar caps melt, climate change proponents claim that the sea level rise will be 230 feet, leading to mass starvation, wars over resources and land, basically the end of all civilization as we know it. Feel free to refute my statement with a facts of your own. Didn't you see An Inconvenient Truth by your spokesman Al Gore? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... If climate change is not the apocalypse, why should we give two shits about it or spend $500B a year to combat it?
3 Mathematical model - Create mathematical models that have been proven wildly inaccurate without exception for the last 25 years; engage in incestuous consensus, conduct a witch hunt for any who disagree, shout down any opposing theories by claiming majority rule regardless of their scientific merit
- This is not libel and is easily searchable. Here is a nice graph of predicted vs actual global temperatures for the last 30 years vs 90 different climate models. As you can clearly see, they are nearly all way off high from the actual temperatures. http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp...
You might want to, you know, learn something before you call other people names.
4 Conclusion - AGW is right and is the apocalypse, everyone who disagrees is either an idiot or a shill for fossil fuels (pretty sure you made this point already yourself with your personal attacks) Also, one of your biggest supporters, Bill Nye is quite vocal on this topic: http://dailycaller.com/2017/02...
The sad truth is that global warming/climate change is no longer about science, it is about orthodoxy, conformity and grants for "scientists", it is about manipulation and power for the politicians, and it is about feeling intellectually and morally superior for the unwashed masses who in most cases have no more than a high school level education in the physical sciences and only know what they have been spoonfed. Notice that nowhere in there is actual science where hypotheses are continually being made and challenged and are furthered by peer review and debate.
Further, the steps above are exactly what the global warming crowd call science, and as I showed in my prior post, it is clearly not the scientific method. It may be based in physics, but climate science isn't science, it is climate modeling or climate simulation, but those names are not as catchy and don't sound as authoritative.
Side note: I do thermal design for a living and create very complex closed form and FDA models of thermal systems, but after the models, I always build and test, as that is the only way to be sure that your model is accurate. Climate scientists don't/can't do this testing at any faster than realtime, and so far their realtime testing has not been favorable for their thermal models.