Kids not eating well? Instead of teaching them healthy choices, let's remove all the vending machines.
School lunch could stand a rework, if nothing else.
Every morning, I get up and immediately put rice (Kukuho Rose california sushi rice) I've been soaking into a stoneware pot, then fire it up to simmer. While that's going, I cook and eat breakfast; 15, maybe 20 minutes later the fire's off and I let it sit for about 5 minutes, during which time I prep the sashimi and avocado and whatever else. After the first 5 minutes I pull the rice, dump it in a bowl or small cypress Hangiri, fluff it to let some steam out for a minute, then add sushi seasoning and continue to mix. At this point I have nori (DARK nori, $18 for 50 sheets, extremely high quality) cut and ready, on a makisu (rolling mat). From one sheet I make 8 pieces of makizushi and two pieces of gunkanmaki. Total prep time is about 20 minutes of my day, give or take, since I have the rice cook while I make and eat breakfast.
The actual cost here for 10 pieces of sushi, given that I get 5 days out of $5 of sashimi and several months out of a $15 20lb bag of rice, is $1 sashimi + (we'll overestimate) 10 cent rice + 36 cent nori = $1.46. You can make rice in bulk; rolling and cutting sushi is rather quick (a minute or two). This would not be a huge undertaking for a school.
Other decent Japanese dishes include Onigiri, yaki-tori (to serve with the sushi, actually; it's chicken), some "Japanese Hot Pots," anything served in an Izakaya especially is quick and easy to make. Likewise, a lot of Chinese can be made pretty well (there's a lot of crap Chinese food out there though) with minimal effort and expense, since a lot is a pile of stewed or steamed meat covered with a sauce and mixed with a large amount of rice, or steamed buns/vegetables. Australian food is often... unhealthy... but who cares? You won't die of a meat pie and a small Pavlova once a month, and the "healthy choices" thing that dictates to NEVER EVER TOUCH THESE THINGS is retarded. Seafood is healthy, and Belgian dishes like mussels steamed in white wine sauce come to mind, as well as dishes like seafood soup. Mexican dishes, too, can be made pretty cheaply.
It's easy to select a few healthy/unhealthy main courses through the week, and pair them with unhealthy/healthy deserts. For example, a Japanese bento box with sushi, some yaki-tori, daifuku (sugary desert including anko paste, mochi (rice paste + sugar), and a whole strawberry), some steamed vegetables, and some sliced fruit is easy to assemble in a few seconds from prepared dishes (the sushi, yaki-tori, vegetables, and daifuku would just be around; the fruit would need to be continuously sliced, of course, for fresheness, if not preserved in a light syrup or salt water). Nobody can argue that a daifuku or yaki-tori (FRIED chicken) is extremely healthy, but it won't kill you. This is called "balance."
The same goes for, say, a taco salad. Sure, the sour cream, fried taco bowl, cheese, and refried beans are not "really good for you;" but it's filled with lettuce and tomatoes and well... beans have fiber and lots of protein... and a proper (not Taco Bell style) corn tortilla shell is tasty and filled with vitamins... cheese is 'unhealthy' but it's protein filled. Serve with apples in a light syrup with cinnamon; and perhaps add some beef or chicken to the taco salad for a meat balance. It's mostly vegetables.
School is mainly lunchroom pizza, milk, and a tray of unidentifiable fruit in a light syrup nobody is going to eat-- except the halved pears, because they're actually good. Sometimes they give you manacotti or stuffed shells that equate to manacotti in a shell shaped pasta instead of a tube shaped pasta. Sometimes there is spaghetti. here is a menu in a typical MD school. We can do far better.
As an educator, you are even below the lawyers because you pretend to do something useful while serving a barely-functional system that students escape from with exactly two things:
Knowledge of arithmetic (not enough to hand out cashier change without a pocket calculator, though)
But the school nerd is a huge dork and thinks he's Bruce Lee, so has been studying Kung Fu since he was like 10; and you're a fat schoolyard bully with big fists. True story.
I live next to a prison school in Baltimore. No joke. Bars on the doors, I never see any kids come in or out... I think it's a middle school, maybe an elementary school. It's across the street from me. I didn't realize it was a school until one year i saw school busses at the beginning of the school year, and then NO MORE. There's never any kids around, nobody comes in or out, but in the morning you can hear prison-yard-style bullhorns blaring the morning announcements out around the whole school.
That's stupid. 8pm is when high schoolers should be at a friend's house getting a blow job, lest they wind up like sexually defunct college kids that had their entire sexual maturation period suppressed until it was over, fixating them into a cycle of sexual discomfort.
You all know that guy. You knew him in college. You felt sorry for him 'cause he never got laid. Then you got him a girl and he damn near had a heart attack. Today he's an astrophysicist making $$$bazillions, but he still can't get comfortable in bed.
You all know the girls too. They're the "all sex is rape" femenists and the complete dorm sluts that finally lost their virginity their first day freshman year and fucked damn near everyone. They fall one way or the other eh?
On the quoted point, the problem is that it is stated US defense doctrine to assume that any potential physical threat is a real threat that needs to be responded to. So, if everyone adopts a similar policy, everyone else would, by US military logic, have to see the USA as a terrible threat that needs to be neutralized ASAP in some way.
This is asinine.
it's not quite as big a problem if, as you outline, people use conventional weapons and target only military installations as opposed to target populations
Yes, tactical military defense.
What would Go be like if you had to play 100 stones in one minutes or lose them (and there was no turn taking)?
And now you are making the connection. This is why I think generals (and the president of the united states, as commander in chief, is a general) need to be well versed in the study of Go, and will naturally make the same strategic considerations. Even more so, the study of philosophy, meditation, and the like will bring more intelligent questions to mind. Understand that people are not thinking; they are reacting. I want people to think, and I especially want these people to think.
Think of businessmen too. They want to make money, they think of what they can do, legal repercussions... I know a few CEOs that are overly concerned with doing the "right" thing, and will tell clients to fuck off if they're abusive to our employees regardless of the golden city that awaits on completion of the contract. They have an attitude of people first, then profits; most businesses run profits first, and people are a commodity. This is the difference between someone that accepts that "nothing can be perfect" and a car will have manufacturing issues that lead to peoples' death; and a person that determines that "People WILL die, but fixing this flaw will cost more than the wrongful death lawsuits" and sends out a known-faulty car.
I know people that would rather go into the red than produce a fatally faulty car. I know people that are genuinely concerned with moral right and wrong and run their businesses accordingly. They are still thinking humans. I don't always agree with such people, but that is a quality I highly value in a person. Some people that agree with me on everything are retarded and I generally dislike them; some people that disagree with me on a lot are still able to garner respect from me even though I hate everything about them.
I am not sure I'd want you running my country; but you definitely possess a quality our leaders sorely need. Wherever that lies, I'm sure you can see what's lacking in our world's current mentality.
This is always dumb. A computer implementation of existing inventions should never be patentable, for example most of the code that goes into graphing calculators is just mathematics. However, a new encoding algorithm is a novel invention. Specific new methods in MP3 and AAC were new inventions when created: new methods of doing things. A patent is a set of instructions: make this bore, bend this sheet, combine these materials, bolt here, and you have an engine. If you designed a novel mechanical process (i.e. otto cycle instead of diesel cycle, rotary instead of reciprocating), you just invented a whole new class of engines.
I see no good reason why the inventor of Spectral Band Replication, for example, couldn't patent his work and license it for use in AAC. And if the inventor worked at a software company that happened to create AAC, then why not? If they don't patent it, then Ogg Vorbis v2 gets much higher quality at lower bitrates (Xiph has, in fact, lusted after SBR for a while, but the patent hasn't expired); that indicates that they did indeed just create a new, non-obvious invention.
Most of all patents are crap. Software patents especially. Still, I don't see how software can't be an invention.
While I can't disagree that the approach you outlined that I quote can sometimes work for a time, it can lead to future conflicts, either sneak attacks or arms races. Here is a different way to deal with day-to-day bullies (although Izzy Kalman admits it won't work well with someone who is emotionally unstable or has a history of violence):
http://www.bullies2buddies.com/How-to-Stop-Being-Teased-and-Bullied-Without-Really-Trying
Here Izzy Kalman explains why attempts to legislate and end to bullying instead of teaching kids to handle the problem in the way he outlines is counterproductive (I have a comment there, too):
Yes, that's an inherent flaw in life. The problem is that school bullies have ego goals, and if you don't satisfy their ego goals they go away. When the goals become purely monetary (I don't care that I look like an asshole, I've got all your money, lol), or large scale economic (france takes over Africa and steals all their diamonds and trees and oil), nobody is going to go away because they're being ignored.
When you have something someone else wants, and they come to get it, the way to get rid of them is to give it to them or kick their ass. Deal with civil people civilly; obviously not everyone wants to rob from your store, but if you have someone robbing you every week, the police are going to show up with guns for a reason (it's crazy, but I've seen people shoot back at the police). Recall Germany (WW1 WW2) and Japan, both expansionist at times in their history, along with the USSR under Stalin.
Defense to me means the ability to repel an invasion. The ability to "bomb a country back" doesn't count much as defense; I hate the morale thing and I think "strategic bombing" (attacking civilian targets to reduce morale and force a political end to the war) is counterproductive (people see you as a monster if you blow up schools and hospitals). What I want is highly efficient cruise missiles with HUGE chemical loads and an awesome satellite imaging system: I want to point at every missile silo in the country that just bombed us and make them operationally defunct in one hour. Now they have no weapons, they have to send ground troops here; ever try to send ground troops to Switzerland? It should happen like that. If they want to fly planes, it'll be a long flight: we can bomb aircraft carriers too. And then your planes get engaged by OUR aircraft carriers and jet fighters.
MAD is easy. Big ass atomic bomb. Nuclear war is the worst invention humans have ever conceived. But we don't need a military of massive amounts of tanks; we need a military of strategic defense, of systems that allow us to detect a missile launch anywhere and figure out where it's going and where it came from. We need a military war machine that's targeted at first preventing the enemy from doing damage to us (missile defense shields, navy and airforce capabilities that keep them from approaching our borders, etc) and second allow us to precision-cripple their long range military offensive capabilities (forcing them to actually send their navy and airforce at us, which we have both ground-based missile silos with advanced targetting capabilities and sea-based battle ships and combat submarines for the purpose of repelling).
It takes surprisingly little. It takes a hell of a lot to invade. When they come to your door, though, they're right there. I don't need a massive amount of long-range destructive capabilities to fight a war against an invader; I just need to stop their missiles and put a bunch of ships and aircraft carriers and planes around me, and a few missile silos across the country for long range support (long enough to knock out ships engaging our navy by launching missiles from the coast).
I think our military right now is more tuned to a giant iron sledgehammer that we can threaten the world with. I want a well-honed K
The height thing is both an advantage and a disadvantage. It's easier to imbalance someone who is tall, because they have to lean over to come get you. That is from Aikido though; I have plenty of 6'8 people (ok, one 6'6 one 6'8) in my class, and holy shit they're big; but when they make a mistake it's pretty bad for them coming after a short guy like me. The flip side is if they have good posture and I try to down them, they've got a hell of a lot of leverage to pull my ass right off the ground even without any strength.
My car door would be locked though, that was mistake one. Get in car, shut door, lock door. One MAJOR part of all martial arts is to recognize attack: look at your attacker, why is this guy following me and why does he have a look on his face like he's going to beat my ass? Usually you know when someone is going to attack you well before they raise a hand; body language, dude.
I won't get in my car if someone is too close: close enough to open my car door. If I've specifically identified them as a non-threat that's one thing. It is more polite to stand outside the car talking, until they walk away; it is proper etiquette to clear the area when someone gets in to operate a heavy machine, i.e. back the fuck away from my car. If there's a huge crowd that's fine; one lone person approaching my car is a no. That puts me.. right where I can fight you.
7'4" and jumping me in my car is a bad thing. 7'4" and around 380 jumping me in the street is... scary. But come get some, you WILL get hurt. I might not win this one, but nobody's going to call whatever you manage to do "winning" either.
In Silat, everything just looks like death walking; in real life it works exactly like in training. Both of these are effective; one is just horribly nasty.
So in Silat training you kill or maim your sparring partners in seconds every time? Wow. Rough.
You seem to suffer from a common delusion in martial-arts enthusiasts: that your favorite MA is capable of training people to be almost superhero-level ultralethal fighting machines. It's fun for the ego, no doubt. Here's a rule to live by: if you haven't seen anyone trained in your MA do the things it claims to train you to do, it probably isn't real.
There are things we don't put into practice at full speed. Everything is under related theory; all the locks and entries and attacks are roughly identical, and I can map them out geometrically. Hell, I've thought about approaching Silat intellectually and documenting some things for a "theory" piece, because it's interesting. There are (exactly) 18 different angles of attack. Footwork relies on a complex shape that is effectively two triangles inside of a square with a cross between them; as you have two legs and tend to move one at a time, every movement is based on a particular triangle. It is well understood that when you use one leg for a sweep, you move that leg; the opponent falls in front of the other leg, on the natural next path of movement, meaning your opponent drops directly on an attack point and you can stamp on his face or whatnot.
Silat does not make you immortal; but it isn't a "nice" martial art where you try to throw your opponent, or lock them, or whatnot. In Aikido, most of the movements end in a throw; a few end in locks, and many of those locks can be applied forcefully for pain (called a "pain compliance hold"). In Silat, locks put pressure on a weak point-- the knee, the shoulder, the elbow-- which will break under a little pressure. If you don't intentionally slow down, you will break something. Often when you drop someone, you tip them off balance by dropping yourself into a horse stance, which lines your knee up with the back of their head; this does not end well.
It is extremely rough. Some people take Aikido because they would like to "not hurt anybody;" Silat is the exact opposite of this. Hell, the art is based around knives, and the bare-hand motions all translate to "if you have a knife, by the way, your hand is passing by their jugular/femoral artery/inner bicep/etc and you can slash this open and they bleed out in a few seconds."
How many martial arts do you know immediately highlight all the fatal attacks you can perform after you've successfully parried an attack? Tae Kwan Do with that fatal "block, then punch him in the head" maneuver right? Or Sumo with the fatal "push your opponent onto his ass" move? Judo with a fatal "wrist lock until he cries"? Maybe Kung Fu, with a fatal "get a little distance, then try to land a spinning kick to the head-- I hope he doesn't duck!" I haven't seen a lot of martial arts teachers point out an attack and go, "Here is your entry, here is the most lethal attack (try to get this if you can), but you could do this, which gives you this (fatal), or here (crippling, fatal with knife), or here... dead, dead, wounded, dead, dying, dead..."
I can lift about 30 pounds easily, 70 pounds struggling and it fatigues me in about 20 seconds. I know people who can bench over 300, and who have lost fights with me. Hell, I know a guy that got beat up by a 13 year old because he was being a dick talking about how he could "take" a 13 year old shodan Judoka. That was funny too; he tried to play "nice" and the kid got really offended and told him off, so he grabbed at him full force and uh. Nope, that doesn't work, not even when you're 6'2 and 220lb going up against an 80 pound middle school kid. The guy figured he was big, strong, and a lot older, and could just grab the kid and throw him down or whatever..... didn't work that way.
In other news, Mazda MX5 Miatas routinely beat out 500HP monster cars on the race track, especially shit Ford Mustangs. Anything with sufficient curves is going to demand you slow the fuck down... unless you're in an MX-5, RX-8, or a Porsche. And even then, the driver has to be good or he'll flat out lose; a Chevy Cobalt can beat a Porsche if the driver of the Cobalt is a race car driver and the driver of the Porsche is a teenager that thinks fast cars are cool.
See now you're essentially assuming she's trained to use her mace in the same way as someone who's trained to use their firearm/knife/katana effectively. And now we're back where we started: dumb people with no weapon/gun/mace vs smart people who have trained to use whatever weapon they're carrying (including fists). Even some basic knife theory 2 days a week for a few months (never mind a year or two) with a concealed P3 tactical folder in a leather sheath tucked under her belt would make her relatively lethal.
Yes I said a few months. The ROI graph is not slow uptake and then ever-increasing returns; the first few weeks are extremely beneficial, the first several months still much so, five years in you're doing upkeep and slow advancement. There is constant refinement; but the "wow" factor vanishes pretty fast.
For what it's worth, incorporating the use of mace into several months of grappling training even one day a week will make her a lot more dangerous. When somebody grabs her, she now has effective responses to free a hand and access her weapon.
You see where this is going, right? Do a few months of kickboxing, very light, once a week maybe. As soon as she shifts your weight off her leg and you're 4 inches away from her shin.... It just keeps coming. And that's on top of the grappling, and on top of having trained herself to quickly access and use her mace. We are still talking about getting rid of whatever it is that's between her and spraying you in the face with liquefied habeneros. And even if you're competent, now you have a wench with a can of mace in her hand, who is a vaguely competent grappler-- just barely enough to keep your attention-- who might kick you in the gut or nuts. How many places can you divide your attention to? There are too many threats.
Now instead of 0% failure, it's 20% failure. Then 40% failure. Then 50%. It's a coin flip: you get it in or you get kicked in the nuts, maced in the face, and thrown in jail. 50-50. Wanna play that one?
If you hand me a fist, I have access to your arm too! And I can break that! Also the other fist is coming; but that's okay because if I move the head, the body goes too... so when you're out here, and you have this arm, and the other comes up with a knife, slug (hell, just push) the chin away and as the head turns, so turns the body, and away goes the other weapon with it. (also, kick out the back of his knee and yank him backwards so he's in a pretty uncomfortable position to fight back; it helps) This works because you have an instinctive reaction to not fight back in a manner that feels like it's going to break your head off.
The problem is to get the mace she has to reach for it, or she has to walk around holding it in her hand. So I can tell at a glance that she's carrying mace IN HER HAND; or I am grabbing at her and she's suddenly digging in her pocket or purse and I'm not going to stand around waiting to see what she pulls out (hey, is that a meat cleaver? Who carries one of those in their purse? WTF?)
These are important secondary concerns. I say "secondary" because, as you can probably tell from this thread, most people like to say, "Well this won't work, so it's useless." For example, wind/solar/hydro power won't power our entire infrastructure, so it's a cute and useless toy, let's not bother. I believe in a hybrid approach.
There will always be good first steps. "Get all these desktops on Linux," "Install anti-virus software," "Get a firewall and get everyone's desktop and internal non-DMZ servers off public IPs," etc are good starts in your network when you have a/24 and you use it to publicly address your entire small office and have security issues. Pick one, do it. Pick another, do it. etc. Don't bother with serious security architecting until you do this. Preparation is key: teaching everyone self-defense is an important part of society, at least if you want a society where people can defend themselves in some capacity and everyone doesn't externalize all of society's problems as "somebody else's problem" (she is being robbed at knife point, but that is not my problem, so I will keep walking...). We have taken the wrong first steps.
It's not exactly an issue with "better," especially when discussing self-defense. Silat is, however, rather violent. I've had entire nights when I've learned nothing generally useful because the holds and locks are... faulty. Difficult. Complex. The position I get in is somewhat useful, but really it's "drop this way and his arm breaks" "Lean here and shatter the knee" "over, down, move your leg here and the back of his skull smashes against your knee" and so on. All fatal or permanently maiming.
And it's fast. Most of this shit assumes you're outnumbered 10 to 1, and I don't mean all by your lonesome. 100 little indonesian guys against 1000 mongolian invaders. The idea is that the second somebody comes at you, they're dead and you're engaging the next guy before they hit the ground. There is no fight; there is death on the way past. The "fight" lasts one second.
This is in stark contrast to Judo, where somebody comes up behind you and you go Race Bannon on them and flip them forward over your shoulder. Or they drive at you with a knife and you wheel them up and over your shoulder on their own momentum. Or you apply locks and holds and whatever else. In Judo everything looks like a choreographed dance; in real life, when you feel like you're struggling, you abandon that idea and move into a different Judo motion. In Silat, everything just looks like death walking; in real life it works exactly like in training. Both of these are effective; one is just horribly nasty.
I have no delusions about how the world works; it probably won't happen, hopefully not, but in some situations someone simply has to die. If that's all I can do, especially if I can't safely disarm someone with a gun in a crowded area (hey, his arm waving around is a bullet waiting to go off into someone else), this may have to happen. But I prefer to keep closest to me from my Silat training the locks, trips, and other movements that give me swift advantages in a fight. There are plenty of ways to disable someone, for example by dropping to the ground and turning your body when your legs outlie theirs.. kick the back of the knee, the other leg blocks, and as you roll they fall forward and you can put your weight on their back to hold them down. There's a derivative motion that knocks them forward with a sweep and a kick (scissor kick) and then locks your legs on their throat-- ONLY IF THEY DO NOT HAVE A KNIFE. You can make someone pass out by strangulation on that, or just force submission because fuck, you can crush their throat, who the hell is going to continue to fight? ALL of these motions also assume the attacker WILL continue to fight, so we address how to handle his arms and legs if they come back into play.
It's intense, and somewhat rough to train in. It's a lot to learn. And it's amorphous; my guru shows us one entry, some basic theory (lines, angles, footwork; everything is worked off a basic geometry), and then all the possible permutations that could follow and a list of responses we can chose from. They may be appropriate in some situations, not in others; they may be just personal taste; some are more interesting to grapplers, wrestlers, boxers, aikidoka, judoka, etc; sometimes it's a choice between fatality or an arm break or a lock; sometimes you avoid one particular action if a knife is involved; sometimes we play off the idea that you made one attempt and failed or met a counter, so now you have other options besides just breaking away and reclaiming sparring distance to start over. This is not Aikido, you do not learn Ikkyo/Nikkyo/Shihonage/etc.
I recommend you spend 3-6 months in it (I train twice a week) if you can find it, begrudgingly if you must; if you don't grow to like it, or appreciate it, then leave. If you hate it day 1, and 3 months in you still hate it, leave. I recommend against taking your first impression in anything, but also against forcing yourself through things you just don't like. It is, however, a worthy art to investigate.
I mean most people say "You've never been in a fight" or "you'll never be in a fight" like they somehow have god-like relevant experience, then either talk about how they've beaten people up at the bar (I have met these people, they went on to become marines, but they were wusses when I met them who basically figured "PUNCH A LOT AND HARD AND YOU WILL WIN" was a 100% perfect strategy) or just about how martial arts is ninja-shit for movies and real life relies 100% on muscles.
In other words, most people are stupid and ignorant.
Instead of teaching people to maim each other, why don't we go the abso-fucking-lutely simplest route and teach people not to goddamn rape?
Where I live, we teach people that violence is bad, fighting is bad, having weapons is bad, and if you are being attacked you should cover your head and wait for an authority figure. Creates a lot of easy marks, and I can ward off a group of 3 large men that are clearly well beyond my physical strength just by refusing to back down (I've had this happen a few times)... there's an easier mark 10 seconds away, why chance that he's carrying knives or is some kind of ninja huh?
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Kids not eating well? Instead of teaching them healthy choices, let's remove all the vending machines.
School lunch could stand a rework, if nothing else.
Every morning, I get up and immediately put rice (Kukuho Rose california sushi rice) I've been soaking into a stoneware pot, then fire it up to simmer. While that's going, I cook and eat breakfast; 15, maybe 20 minutes later the fire's off and I let it sit for about 5 minutes, during which time I prep the sashimi and avocado and whatever else. After the first 5 minutes I pull the rice, dump it in a bowl or small cypress Hangiri, fluff it to let some steam out for a minute, then add sushi seasoning and continue to mix. At this point I have nori (DARK nori, $18 for 50 sheets, extremely high quality) cut and ready, on a makisu (rolling mat). From one sheet I make 8 pieces of makizushi and two pieces of gunkanmaki. Total prep time is about 20 minutes of my day, give or take, since I have the rice cook while I make and eat breakfast.
The actual cost here for 10 pieces of sushi, given that I get 5 days out of $5 of sashimi and several months out of a $15 20lb bag of rice, is $1 sashimi + (we'll overestimate) 10 cent rice + 36 cent nori = $1.46. You can make rice in bulk; rolling and cutting sushi is rather quick (a minute or two). This would not be a huge undertaking for a school.
Other decent Japanese dishes include Onigiri, yaki-tori (to serve with the sushi, actually; it's chicken), some "Japanese Hot Pots," anything served in an Izakaya especially is quick and easy to make. Likewise, a lot of Chinese can be made pretty well (there's a lot of crap Chinese food out there though) with minimal effort and expense, since a lot is a pile of stewed or steamed meat covered with a sauce and mixed with a large amount of rice, or steamed buns/vegetables. Australian food is often... unhealthy... but who cares? You won't die of a meat pie and a small Pavlova once a month, and the "healthy choices" thing that dictates to NEVER EVER TOUCH THESE THINGS is retarded. Seafood is healthy, and Belgian dishes like mussels steamed in white wine sauce come to mind, as well as dishes like seafood soup. Mexican dishes, too, can be made pretty cheaply.
It's easy to select a few healthy/unhealthy main courses through the week, and pair them with unhealthy/healthy deserts. For example, a Japanese bento box with sushi, some yaki-tori, daifuku (sugary desert including anko paste, mochi (rice paste + sugar), and a whole strawberry), some steamed vegetables, and some sliced fruit is easy to assemble in a few seconds from prepared dishes (the sushi, yaki-tori, vegetables, and daifuku would just be around; the fruit would need to be continuously sliced, of course, for fresheness, if not preserved in a light syrup or salt water). Nobody can argue that a daifuku or yaki-tori (FRIED chicken) is extremely healthy, but it won't kill you. This is called "balance."
The same goes for, say, a taco salad. Sure, the sour cream, fried taco bowl, cheese, and refried beans are not "really good for you;" but it's filled with lettuce and tomatoes and well... beans have fiber and lots of protein... and a proper (not Taco Bell style) corn tortilla shell is tasty and filled with vitamins... cheese is 'unhealthy' but it's protein filled. Serve with apples in a light syrup with cinnamon; and perhaps add some beef or chicken to the taco salad for a meat balance. It's mostly vegetables.
School is mainly lunchroom pizza, milk, and a tray of unidentifiable fruit in a light syrup nobody is going to eat-- except the halved pears, because they're actually good. Sometimes they give you manacotti or stuffed shells that equate to manacotti in a shell shaped pasta instead of a tube shaped pasta. Sometimes there is spaghetti. here is a menu in a typical MD school. We can do far better.
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As an educator, you are even below the lawyers because you pretend to do something useful while serving a barely-functional system that students escape from with exactly two things:
But the school nerd is a huge dork and thinks he's Bruce Lee, so has been studying Kung Fu since he was like 10; and you're a fat schoolyard bully with big fists. True story.
Do you live in PA?
I live next to a prison school in Baltimore. No joke. Bars on the doors, I never see any kids come in or out... I think it's a middle school, maybe an elementary school. It's across the street from me. I didn't realize it was a school until one year i saw school busses at the beginning of the school year, and then NO MORE. There's never any kids around, nobody comes in or out, but in the morning you can hear prison-yard-style bullhorns blaring the morning announcements out around the whole school.
That's stupid. 8pm is when high schoolers should be at a friend's house getting a blow job, lest they wind up like sexually defunct college kids that had their entire sexual maturation period suppressed until it was over, fixating them into a cycle of sexual discomfort.
You all know that guy. You knew him in college. You felt sorry for him 'cause he never got laid. Then you got him a girl and he damn near had a heart attack. Today he's an astrophysicist making $$$bazillions, but he still can't get comfortable in bed.
You all know the girls too. They're the "all sex is rape" femenists and the complete dorm sluts that finally lost their virginity their first day freshman year and fucked damn near everyone. They fall one way or the other eh?
... what? o_O
Individual stones form a community. :) And I'm done here.
It shoots a coherent beam of darkness!
On the quoted point, the problem is that it is stated US defense doctrine to assume that any potential physical threat is a real threat that needs to be responded to. So, if everyone adopts a similar policy, everyone else would, by US military logic, have to see the USA as a terrible threat that needs to be neutralized ASAP in some way.
This is asinine.
it's not quite as big a problem if, as you outline, people use conventional weapons and target only military installations as opposed to target populations
Yes, tactical military defense.
What would Go be like if you had to play 100 stones in one minutes or lose them (and there was no turn taking)?
http://senseis.xmp.net/?NuclearTesuji
And now you are making the connection. This is why I think generals (and the president of the united states, as commander in chief, is a general) need to be well versed in the study of Go, and will naturally make the same strategic considerations. Even more so, the study of philosophy, meditation, and the like will bring more intelligent questions to mind. Understand that people are not thinking; they are reacting. I want people to think, and I especially want these people to think.
Think of businessmen too. They want to make money, they think of what they can do, legal repercussions... I know a few CEOs that are overly concerned with doing the "right" thing, and will tell clients to fuck off if they're abusive to our employees regardless of the golden city that awaits on completion of the contract. They have an attitude of people first, then profits; most businesses run profits first, and people are a commodity. This is the difference between someone that accepts that "nothing can be perfect" and a car will have manufacturing issues that lead to peoples' death; and a person that determines that "People WILL die, but fixing this flaw will cost more than the wrongful death lawsuits" and sends out a known-faulty car.
I know people that would rather go into the red than produce a fatally faulty car. I know people that are genuinely concerned with moral right and wrong and run their businesses accordingly. They are still thinking humans. I don't always agree with such people, but that is a quality I highly value in a person. Some people that agree with me on everything are retarded and I generally dislike them; some people that disagree with me on a lot are still able to garner respect from me even though I hate everything about them.
I am not sure I'd want you running my country; but you definitely possess a quality our leaders sorely need. Wherever that lies, I'm sure you can see what's lacking in our world's current mentality.
This is always dumb. A computer implementation of existing inventions should never be patentable, for example most of the code that goes into graphing calculators is just mathematics. However, a new encoding algorithm is a novel invention. Specific new methods in MP3 and AAC were new inventions when created: new methods of doing things. A patent is a set of instructions: make this bore, bend this sheet, combine these materials, bolt here, and you have an engine. If you designed a novel mechanical process (i.e. otto cycle instead of diesel cycle, rotary instead of reciprocating), you just invented a whole new class of engines.
I see no good reason why the inventor of Spectral Band Replication, for example, couldn't patent his work and license it for use in AAC. And if the inventor worked at a software company that happened to create AAC, then why not? If they don't patent it, then Ogg Vorbis v2 gets much higher quality at lower bitrates (Xiph has, in fact, lusted after SBR for a while, but the patent hasn't expired); that indicates that they did indeed just create a new, non-obvious invention.
Most of all patents are crap. Software patents especially. Still, I don't see how software can't be an invention.
Like The Tenth Kingdom?
While I can't disagree that the approach you outlined that I quote can sometimes work for a time, it can lead to future conflicts, either sneak attacks or arms races. Here is a different way to deal with day-to-day bullies (although Izzy Kalman admits it won't work well with someone who is emotionally unstable or has a history of violence): http://www.bullies2buddies.com/How-to-Stop-Being-Teased-and-Bullied-Without-Really-Trying
Here Izzy Kalman explains why attempts to legislate and end to bullying instead of teaching kids to handle the problem in the way he outlines is counterproductive (I have a comment there, too):
Yes, that's an inherent flaw in life. The problem is that school bullies have ego goals, and if you don't satisfy their ego goals they go away. When the goals become purely monetary (I don't care that I look like an asshole, I've got all your money, lol), or large scale economic (france takes over Africa and steals all their diamonds and trees and oil), nobody is going to go away because they're being ignored.
When you have something someone else wants, and they come to get it, the way to get rid of them is to give it to them or kick their ass. Deal with civil people civilly; obviously not everyone wants to rob from your store, but if you have someone robbing you every week, the police are going to show up with guns for a reason (it's crazy, but I've seen people shoot back at the police). Recall Germany (WW1 WW2) and Japan, both expansionist at times in their history, along with the USSR under Stalin.
Defense to me means the ability to repel an invasion. The ability to "bomb a country back" doesn't count much as defense; I hate the morale thing and I think "strategic bombing" (attacking civilian targets to reduce morale and force a political end to the war) is counterproductive (people see you as a monster if you blow up schools and hospitals). What I want is highly efficient cruise missiles with HUGE chemical loads and an awesome satellite imaging system: I want to point at every missile silo in the country that just bombed us and make them operationally defunct in one hour. Now they have no weapons, they have to send ground troops here; ever try to send ground troops to Switzerland? It should happen like that. If they want to fly planes, it'll be a long flight: we can bomb aircraft carriers too. And then your planes get engaged by OUR aircraft carriers and jet fighters.
MAD is easy. Big ass atomic bomb. Nuclear war is the worst invention humans have ever conceived. But we don't need a military of massive amounts of tanks; we need a military of strategic defense, of systems that allow us to detect a missile launch anywhere and figure out where it's going and where it came from. We need a military war machine that's targeted at first preventing the enemy from doing damage to us (missile defense shields, navy and airforce capabilities that keep them from approaching our borders, etc) and second allow us to precision-cripple their long range military offensive capabilities (forcing them to actually send their navy and airforce at us, which we have both ground-based missile silos with advanced targetting capabilities and sea-based battle ships and combat submarines for the purpose of repelling).
It takes surprisingly little. It takes a hell of a lot to invade. When they come to your door, though, they're right there. I don't need a massive amount of long-range destructive capabilities to fight a war against an invader; I just need to stop their missiles and put a bunch of ships and aircraft carriers and planes around me, and a few missile silos across the country for long range support (long enough to knock out ships engaging our navy by launching missiles from the coast).
I think our military right now is more tuned to a giant iron sledgehammer that we can threaten the world with. I want a well-honed K
The height thing is both an advantage and a disadvantage. It's easier to imbalance someone who is tall, because they have to lean over to come get you. That is from Aikido though; I have plenty of 6'8 people (ok, one 6'6 one 6'8) in my class, and holy shit they're big; but when they make a mistake it's pretty bad for them coming after a short guy like me. The flip side is if they have good posture and I try to down them, they've got a hell of a lot of leverage to pull my ass right off the ground even without any strength.
My car door would be locked though, that was mistake one. Get in car, shut door, lock door. One MAJOR part of all martial arts is to recognize attack: look at your attacker, why is this guy following me and why does he have a look on his face like he's going to beat my ass? Usually you know when someone is going to attack you well before they raise a hand; body language, dude.
I won't get in my car if someone is too close: close enough to open my car door. If I've specifically identified them as a non-threat that's one thing. It is more polite to stand outside the car talking, until they walk away; it is proper etiquette to clear the area when someone gets in to operate a heavy machine, i.e. back the fuck away from my car. If there's a huge crowd that's fine; one lone person approaching my car is a no. That puts me .. right where I can fight you.
7'4" and jumping me in my car is a bad thing. 7'4" and around 380 jumping me in the street is ... scary. But come get some, you WILL get hurt. I might not win this one, but nobody's going to call whatever you manage to do "winning" either.
In Silat, everything just looks like death walking; in real life it works exactly like in training. Both of these are effective; one is just horribly nasty.
So in Silat training you kill or maim your sparring partners in seconds every time? Wow. Rough.
You seem to suffer from a common delusion in martial-arts enthusiasts: that your favorite MA is capable of training people to be almost superhero-level ultralethal fighting machines. It's fun for the ego, no doubt. Here's a rule to live by: if you haven't seen anyone trained in your MA do the things it claims to train you to do, it probably isn't real.
There are things we don't put into practice at full speed. Everything is under related theory; all the locks and entries and attacks are roughly identical, and I can map them out geometrically. Hell, I've thought about approaching Silat intellectually and documenting some things for a "theory" piece, because it's interesting. There are (exactly) 18 different angles of attack. Footwork relies on a complex shape that is effectively two triangles inside of a square with a cross between them; as you have two legs and tend to move one at a time, every movement is based on a particular triangle. It is well understood that when you use one leg for a sweep, you move that leg; the opponent falls in front of the other leg, on the natural next path of movement, meaning your opponent drops directly on an attack point and you can stamp on his face or whatnot.
Silat does not make you immortal; but it isn't a "nice" martial art where you try to throw your opponent, or lock them, or whatnot. In Aikido, most of the movements end in a throw; a few end in locks, and many of those locks can be applied forcefully for pain (called a "pain compliance hold"). In Silat, locks put pressure on a weak point-- the knee, the shoulder, the elbow-- which will break under a little pressure. If you don't intentionally slow down, you will break something. Often when you drop someone, you tip them off balance by dropping yourself into a horse stance, which lines your knee up with the back of their head; this does not end well.
It is extremely rough. Some people take Aikido because they would like to "not hurt anybody;" Silat is the exact opposite of this. Hell, the art is based around knives, and the bare-hand motions all translate to "if you have a knife, by the way, your hand is passing by their jugular/femoral artery/inner bicep/etc and you can slash this open and they bleed out in a few seconds."
How many martial arts do you know immediately highlight all the fatal attacks you can perform after you've successfully parried an attack? Tae Kwan Do with that fatal "block, then punch him in the head" maneuver right? Or Sumo with the fatal "push your opponent onto his ass" move? Judo with a fatal "wrist lock until he cries"? Maybe Kung Fu, with a fatal "get a little distance, then try to land a spinning kick to the head-- I hope he doesn't duck!" I haven't seen a lot of martial arts teachers point out an attack and go, "Here is your entry, here is the most lethal attack (try to get this if you can), but you could do this, which gives you this (fatal), or here (crippling, fatal with knife), or here... dead, dead, wounded, dead, dying, dead..."
I can lift about 30 pounds easily, 70 pounds struggling and it fatigues me in about 20 seconds. I know people who can bench over 300, and who have lost fights with me. Hell, I know a guy that got beat up by a 13 year old because he was being a dick talking about how he could "take" a 13 year old shodan Judoka. That was funny too; he tried to play "nice" and the kid got really offended and told him off, so he grabbed at him full force and uh. Nope, that doesn't work, not even when you're 6'2 and 220lb going up against an 80 pound middle school kid. The guy figured he was big, strong, and a lot older, and could just grab the kid and throw him down or whatever. .... didn't work that way.
In other news, Mazda MX5 Miatas routinely beat out 500HP monster cars on the race track, especially shit Ford Mustangs. Anything with sufficient curves is going to demand you slow the fuck down... unless you're in an MX-5, RX-8, or a Porsche. And even then, the driver has to be good or he'll flat out lose; a Chevy Cobalt can beat a Porsche if the driver of the Cobalt is a race car driver and the driver of the Porsche is a teenager that thinks fast cars are cool.
Are you also a proponent of removing malware that steals your credit card information and online bank log-ons from your computer?
See now you're essentially assuming she's trained to use her mace in the same way as someone who's trained to use their firearm/knife/katana effectively. And now we're back where we started: dumb people with no weapon/gun/mace vs smart people who have trained to use whatever weapon they're carrying (including fists). Even some basic knife theory 2 days a week for a few months (never mind a year or two) with a concealed P3 tactical folder in a leather sheath tucked under her belt would make her relatively lethal.
Yes I said a few months. The ROI graph is not slow uptake and then ever-increasing returns; the first few weeks are extremely beneficial, the first several months still much so, five years in you're doing upkeep and slow advancement. There is constant refinement; but the "wow" factor vanishes pretty fast.
For what it's worth, incorporating the use of mace into several months of grappling training even one day a week will make her a lot more dangerous. When somebody grabs her, she now has effective responses to free a hand and access her weapon.
You see where this is going, right? Do a few months of kickboxing, very light, once a week maybe. As soon as she shifts your weight off her leg and you're 4 inches away from her shin.... It just keeps coming. And that's on top of the grappling, and on top of having trained herself to quickly access and use her mace. We are still talking about getting rid of whatever it is that's between her and spraying you in the face with liquefied habeneros. And even if you're competent, now you have a wench with a can of mace in her hand, who is a vaguely competent grappler-- just barely enough to keep your attention-- who might kick you in the gut or nuts. How many places can you divide your attention to? There are too many threats.
Now instead of 0% failure, it's 20% failure. Then 40% failure. Then 50%. It's a coin flip: you get it in or you get kicked in the nuts, maced in the face, and thrown in jail. 50-50. Wanna play that one?
If you hand me a fist, I have access to your arm too! And I can break that! Also the other fist is coming; but that's okay because if I move the head, the body goes too... so when you're out here, and you have this arm, and the other comes up with a knife, slug (hell, just push) the chin away and as the head turns, so turns the body, and away goes the other weapon with it. (also, kick out the back of his knee and yank him backwards so he's in a pretty uncomfortable position to fight back; it helps) This works because you have an instinctive reaction to not fight back in a manner that feels like it's going to break your head off.
The problem is to get the mace she has to reach for it, or she has to walk around holding it in her hand. So I can tell at a glance that she's carrying mace IN HER HAND; or I am grabbing at her and she's suddenly digging in her pocket or purse and I'm not going to stand around waiting to see what she pulls out (hey, is that a meat cleaver? Who carries one of those in their purse? WTF?)
These are important secondary concerns. I say "secondary" because, as you can probably tell from this thread, most people like to say, "Well this won't work, so it's useless." For example, wind/solar/hydro power won't power our entire infrastructure, so it's a cute and useless toy, let's not bother. I believe in a hybrid approach.
There will always be good first steps. "Get all these desktops on Linux," "Install anti-virus software," "Get a firewall and get everyone's desktop and internal non-DMZ servers off public IPs," etc are good starts in your network when you have a /24 and you use it to publicly address your entire small office and have security issues. Pick one, do it. Pick another, do it. etc. Don't bother with serious security architecting until you do this. Preparation is key: teaching everyone self-defense is an important part of society, at least if you want a society where people can defend themselves in some capacity and everyone doesn't externalize all of society's problems as "somebody else's problem" (she is being robbed at knife point, but that is not my problem, so I will keep walking...). We have taken the wrong first steps.
It's not exactly an issue with "better," especially when discussing self-defense. Silat is, however, rather violent. I've had entire nights when I've learned nothing generally useful because the holds and locks are ... faulty. Difficult. Complex. The position I get in is somewhat useful, but really it's "drop this way and his arm breaks" "Lean here and shatter the knee" "over, down, move your leg here and the back of his skull smashes against your knee" and so on. All fatal or permanently maiming.
And it's fast. Most of this shit assumes you're outnumbered 10 to 1, and I don't mean all by your lonesome. 100 little indonesian guys against 1000 mongolian invaders. The idea is that the second somebody comes at you, they're dead and you're engaging the next guy before they hit the ground. There is no fight; there is death on the way past. The "fight" lasts one second.
This is in stark contrast to Judo, where somebody comes up behind you and you go Race Bannon on them and flip them forward over your shoulder. Or they drive at you with a knife and you wheel them up and over your shoulder on their own momentum. Or you apply locks and holds and whatever else. In Judo everything looks like a choreographed dance; in real life, when you feel like you're struggling, you abandon that idea and move into a different Judo motion. In Silat, everything just looks like death walking; in real life it works exactly like in training. Both of these are effective; one is just horribly nasty.
I have no delusions about how the world works; it probably won't happen, hopefully not, but in some situations someone simply has to die. If that's all I can do, especially if I can't safely disarm someone with a gun in a crowded area (hey, his arm waving around is a bullet waiting to go off into someone else), this may have to happen. But I prefer to keep closest to me from my Silat training the locks, trips, and other movements that give me swift advantages in a fight. There are plenty of ways to disable someone, for example by dropping to the ground and turning your body when your legs outlie theirs.. kick the back of the knee, the other leg blocks, and as you roll they fall forward and you can put your weight on their back to hold them down. There's a derivative motion that knocks them forward with a sweep and a kick (scissor kick) and then locks your legs on their throat-- ONLY IF THEY DO NOT HAVE A KNIFE. You can make someone pass out by strangulation on that, or just force submission because fuck, you can crush their throat, who the hell is going to continue to fight? ALL of these motions also assume the attacker WILL continue to fight, so we address how to handle his arms and legs if they come back into play.
It's intense, and somewhat rough to train in. It's a lot to learn. And it's amorphous; my guru shows us one entry, some basic theory (lines, angles, footwork; everything is worked off a basic geometry), and then all the possible permutations that could follow and a list of responses we can chose from. They may be appropriate in some situations, not in others; they may be just personal taste; some are more interesting to grapplers, wrestlers, boxers, aikidoka, judoka, etc; sometimes it's a choice between fatality or an arm break or a lock; sometimes you avoid one particular action if a knife is involved; sometimes we play off the idea that you made one attempt and failed or met a counter, so now you have other options besides just breaking away and reclaiming sparring distance to start over. This is not Aikido, you do not learn Ikkyo/Nikkyo/Shihonage/etc.
I recommend you spend 3-6 months in it (I train twice a week) if you can find it, begrudgingly if you must; if you don't grow to like it, or appreciate it, then leave. If you hate it day 1, and 3 months in you still hate it, leave. I recommend against taking your first impression in anything, but also against forcing yourself through things you just don't like. It is, however, a worthy art to investigate.
I mean most people say "You've never been in a fight" or "you'll never be in a fight" like they somehow have god-like relevant experience, then either talk about how they've beaten people up at the bar (I have met these people, they went on to become marines, but they were wusses when I met them who basically figured "PUNCH A LOT AND HARD AND YOU WILL WIN" was a 100% perfect strategy) or just about how martial arts is ninja-shit for movies and real life relies 100% on muscles.
In other words, most people are stupid and ignorant.
Instead of teaching people to maim each other, why don't we go the abso-fucking-lutely simplest route and teach people not to goddamn rape?
Where I live, we teach people that violence is bad, fighting is bad, having weapons is bad, and if you are being attacked you should cover your head and wait for an authority figure. Creates a lot of easy marks, and I can ward off a group of 3 large men that are clearly well beyond my physical strength just by refusing to back down (I've had this happen a few times) ... there's an easier mark 10 seconds away, why chance that he's carrying knives or is some kind of ninja huh?
Odds are that you'll never be in a real fight.
Everyone who says this seems to either A) have bar fight experience but no martial arts experience; or B) never have been in a fight in their lives.