The point you missed is that shotguns are not rifles. Shotguns are generally smoothbores.
Shotguns are aimed up because that is what is used for hunting birds. You don't generally hunt a flying bird with a rifle. You want shot dispersal to bracket them for much the same reason you wanted to shoot at airplanes with proximity fused ammo or a veritable hail of bullets: it's hard to hit a flying, moving object with a single slug.
You should always point any weapon downrange and/or toward the ground when it is not in use, but there's no reason whatsoever to point an actual rifle up at the sky unless you're trying to take a lucky shot at an airplane.
You're right about the US military, but the US military is *extremely* well behaved compared to many militaries out there.
That doesn't have to continue in the wrong situation. Militaries throughout history have gone from well-trained and well-disciplined into praetorian guard types in relatively short order.
All you need to do is find a way to divide the interests of the military from those of the common people, and the US is moving more towards that scenario, not away from it.
And you can easily avoid gunning down your relatives by being posted out of your home region.
I don't distrust the US military, but we should not let down our guard lest the institution change and we not be prepared for the eventuality.
Yes, but it is very easy to discover. Right now, if something is encrypted, you can't read it, so you can't prosecute for the content of the encrypted text.
Under this law, you get prosecuted if it is encrypted and they can't read it. It doesn't matter if it is your shopping list or not.
A law to control encryption means that as long as they can identify a file as encrypted, you could go to jail just for having an encrypted file they can't break.
They haven't lost their minds. Playing to fear is a standard political tactic. It gets votes. Why wouldn't they use it? They'd be stupid not to.
Oh, you mean that it is counterproductive and causes more problems than it solves? Well I'm sure that they believe that once they are in power, it will be temporary.
Actually *France* has a long history of losing their government to emergency powers and the like. They don't appear to have learned their lesson, or they don't actually care. Starting to think its #2.
The major problem is that most of the markets don't actually care about privacy in these contexts. Your standard iPhone user wouldn't know privacy from their privates.
Yes, everyone agrees that losing privacy is bad, but rarely does anyone know what that entails except for a relatively small informed group.
Well... if this attracts the attention of high level bureaucrats in the capital, that person could be in for trouble. Yes, it makes sense to have the appeals process deal with it, but you do not want people in the state capital getting wind of your actions. Then you're in for a world of trouble.
I think this person just broke the First Law of State Bureaucracy: Thou shall not be noticed by the politicians.
I sincerely doubt that the Governor would ever make a decision at that level, even in a cover-up situation. It was either a bureaucrat who was either following the letter of the regulations too closely, or they decided that they couldn't be bothered.
If it was really that big a deal, there would be a troubleshooter who would deal with that who is a political appointee attached to some executive office.
If you think this trivial stuff bubbles up to the Governor regularly, you have no idea at the scale at which the government really operates at.
Agreed. I knew someone in the NY State government who was a low level bureaucrat. She basically said, "Albany doesn't care unless something goes wrong, so we make sure that nothing goes wrong."
What she meant by that is that they ensure that no one makes noise about things and the upper level bureaucrats could not be bothered to care unless someone with clout complained.
I don't think this is because the bureaucrats don't care, mind you. Many of the people in various state services got into the business because they care about their field. The problem is that they're underfunded and when someone makes a stink, some political boss in the state capital starts some stupid program or worse, uses you to make an example out of. So you keep your head down, do what you can, and count how many years of seniority you have that goes against your eventual pension. This tends to reinforce the bureaucratic culture at lower levels.
And I don't think politics really matters. Your Democrats and Republicans at the state level are pretty much equally assholes. There are just differences in how many new programs they create which will later be defunded when the populace realizes that they can't pay for them and get mad at taxes.
Given that he could have probably invested his up front money soundly and made more money than the music business would have given him in "revenue", I think he made a wise decision.
Refusing to acknowledge jury nullification is not a new thing. In some senses, that's understandable given that we have a precedent based system where no one in the legal business likes it when the jury ignores the precedents and the letter of the law.
The world where you actually allow other states to develop is a safer, more stable place. This is why no one seriously believes that the Chinese will attack the US short of some small land squabbles and trade issues.
The Chinese will eventually have to deal with the same issues we had to, and their standard of living will rise which will bring their benefits (and expenses) in line with US standards.
The major problem with that is the situations where countries like the US were riding high on a temporary inflated standard of living have to deal with a retraction of that. For all those who loved the 1950s, that was a windfall for the US because we were the only big country with any real undamaged industrial capacity left. That wasn't going to last forever. It was certainly not going to turn into some permanent prosperity situation were you could pay UAW union rates to unskilled workers and a pension forever. The enormous balance of human history has not really had any sense of "retirement" where you are somehow able to live off of capital built up in your life in Florida. Your only real retirement option was having some children, particularly daughters, around when you couldn't work anymore to take care of you, and maybe you owned your house and land.
Anyway, while the world will probably never completely equal out, a rising tide can lift all ships. As long as the barriers don't go up, prosperity elsewhere will eventually spread out and actual standards of living will rise over time. This may hurt for the West and the US in particular, but we shouldn't find ourselves relegated to the 19th Century again.
If only 100,000 people *could* pay for it, then you lost nothing.
Certainly, if there are those who pirate games in the group of people with disposable income who could reasonably buy it, that could be seen as loss of revenue. You can't argue realistically, however, that a game I would have never bought if it cost money is somehow a loss to a business when I get it for free. It isn't. If it wasn't free, it wouldn't have been bought any more than I would have to automatically buy a car if I could not hitch rides. I'd have to simply do without either.
And I know a lot of people who pirated games when they were younger who are happy to buy the sequels of those games now that they are older and have more income.
I even know someone who pirated Minecraft, realized that he'd been playing it long enough that it was definitely worth buying, and proceeded to purchase it, even after he'd spent something like 200 hours of play on it.
Piracy can be a grey area. You can certainly lose revenue in the sense you are talking about if the revenue loss is in the actual group you could realistically expect to be paid by. However, by increasing the population playing the game, you enlarge, and even create, a new market for follow ons, which can be worth a great deal to you.
Consider that Microsoft is happy to let people pirate their stuff up to the point where it may impact their core market segment who has the money. They do not seriously prevent you from pirating Windows or Office (with the usual caveats about security and non-support) because every person using those tools increases their market penetration and makes them familiar with the MS way of doing things.
MS then runs software anti-piracy initiatives to pick off businesses who have hit a certain critical mass of users and revenue so that they now the capability to pay. This is brilliant because if you do use unlicensed MS products to build a business, you're basically creating new revenue for MS if you become successful. All they need to do is keep an eye on whose head pops up above the unwashed masses of pirate software users, and either convince them to join the fold, or lop their heads off. And if you really do rely on MS products for your successful business, you probably can and want to pay for full service.
It is different for games, of course, because businesses are unlikely to buy entertainment in the amounts they would business software or operating systems. Nevertheless, the building of a network through piracy is real, while at the same time, they don't have to declare that they are devaluing their game as a loss leader. They get to keep their prices high, while they still get the effect of discounting their games. With the amount of money that many of these companies are making on their AAA games, it is difficult to see how piracy has really affected them. They have to cry about it because they have to show that they are defending their copyrights, but especially in the case where their DRM is sufficient to delay cracks until after the launch, it is win-win for any publisher of a good game.
And really, no one actually wants to steal a game. Cracked games can be buggy, unstable, and filled with malware. The problem is that some people don't want to allocate 60-80 dollars upfront on a game that they are going to end up not playing because it is buggy or they dislike it. I think piracy might well go the way of the dodos if they manage to bring prices down and/or ensure reasonable return policies like some distributors have.
They only have a stunted A-bomb that they don't have a delivery system for. So, they're still not really a serious threat.
However, they are much closer to taking that crappy payload and putting it on a missile that could hit Japan.
And they could probably already trundle that device into an underground tunnel that goes right into Seoul.
It's mostly a joke because they're waving around a BB gun and calling it an assault rifle. You could still put someone's eye out with that thing, though.
I don't know, if you put 768kT MIRVs in a single missile and targeted each separate warhead at a single city, you could theoretically do enough damage to a mid sized country to cause it to teeter close to collapse. In fact, if you shot those at say, the top 5 US cities, you wouldn't have enough to end the US, but you'd crater the US economy in short order. It's not necessary for those warheads to even annihilate those cities, which they probably wouldn't, but it would be enough to empty the cities out and cause complete chaos.
Yes, you can't kill everyone in a country that way, and it would actually take quite a lot of nukes to seriously depopulate a country by direct explosion effects or even residual radiation. But it could kick off the loss of order and infrastructure which would allow disease and disorder to complete the job. In that sense, radiation is much worse because it has a denial effect over areas that wouldn't be otherwise damaged by a blast.
Which really *isn't* capitalism. A free market should not have the government stepping in to allow the companies to sit pretty on their gains.
The only real argument against capitalism in that sense is that it seems to be impossible to keep the government from reinforcing monopolies or bailing out losers in the name of "saving the economy" or to protect cronies. A theoretical government that is able to resist using its power to affect the economy would result in a considerably different result.
Look at Uber. Where people aren't trying to sue them out of operation, they're eating the lunches of taxi services because they offer better service. Of course, the taxi services have their hands tied by government regulations, so it is understandable they'd fight back, but that doesn't change the fact that taxi services complain about being regulated on one hand, and use that excuse to provide poor service on the other.
And Uber will not last if it does not continue to provide the best service. As long as there is nothing barring competition from challenging Uber, even Uber in a high market penetration position could be taken on. That's because if there is no law creating barriers to entry, Uber has to continue to make good business decisions to avoid eventually being cut down by an upstart.
The real problem with capitalism and the free market is that we've never actually seen it. And perhaps it may be fair to say that this is also why it is a red herring. If you can never have your perfect free market with no interference, then perhaps we should stop talking about how the free market is "theoretically" better when we're talking about the problems it has in its current incarnation.
I believe that honestly, a free market does not mean turning the world into a corporatist dystopia. I think that's bunk. Consider that corporations themselves are legal constructs and realize that those constructs which supposedly represent the ultimate in free market capitalism aren't even necessary for free markets. They're yet another way the government allows individuals to have a safety net under them when competing in a market. A true free market does not work unless you can actually fail and that you have to force yourself to hedge and add safety by good business practices. Otherwise, businesspeople do not internalize good practices as good business, but instead see those good practices imposed by government as something that can make them more profitable if they can figure out how to cheat them.
Except that most of the real monopolies are driven by the ability to involve the government, somehow.
The big banks? They should have failed and gone bankrupt because of their shitty practices. The government didn't let them. Both Republican AND Democratic administrations.
Ma Bell, used to be Comcast levels of unresponsiveness and they were fully enabled by the government.
The taxi services, by being forced by medallions into forming an exclusive club, have learned to take advantage of their government protected monopolies by cutting back services to maximize their profits.
Yes, the free market is not perfect, but there is probably nothing worse than a capitalist economy which is being prevented from receiving any negative market signals by government action.
Creating educated people does not create jobs for them by default. It just means you have very qualified unemployed people.
Yes, there is a relation between national education levels and productivity, but only if that education is pointed at productive enterprises. As much as I loved my history studies, if I wasn't someone with many years of tech experience, I'd have a lot more trouble holding down a job.
The problem with tuition in the United States right now is twofold. Colleges and Universities are increasing student services, and much more importantly, state government money is being diverted from education to pay for mandates for things like Medicaid and other entitlements. Unlike the Federal government, the state governments are more zero sum in their budgeting process, and state governments are constitutionally responsible for education.
If you want to seriously drive down tuitions, the state has to have the money to pitch in again, and you may need to drastically cut back student services on campus.
Additionally, it may well make sense to not make a college degree a prerequisite for every job under the sun. The US used to have a lot of jobs that did not require more than an apprenticeship to make very good money on.
Jamestown pre-dates Plymouth by 13 years and had nothing to do with religion.
Yes, the freedom of being out from under the thumb of the established churches did make it easier for fringe groups to come and set up their own little theocracies, but that period is actually a fairly small portion of the colonial period. Once the colonial governments were put under Royal administration, they simply ended up as areas with a very Puritan culture, but not a particularly religious governance. No more so than most governments of the time, really.
I don't think Tesla would agree with you. My family history also does not jobe with that narrative.
I think the greatest reason to come to the US was greater opportunity, not some sort of forced migration of despair.
Yes, the willingness to embrace opportunity can be enhanced considerably by having no ties to cut, but if you look at a number of immigrants, they had some things going for them elsewhere, but they had a limit to how far they could go in Europe. Rightly or wrongly, the US represented nearly unlimited opportunity for those who could make a go of it. It was not easy to grasp that opportunity, but except perhaps for becoming President of the United States, there's nothing a that a naturalized citizen could not do.
Europe of that time was very different from today, with a still powerful aristocracy in most places that was not just a bunch of people with ornamental titles. This tended to limit opportunity considerably for those not of the proper class. Some people were quite able to live happy lives under that situation, but all opportunity eventually led straight having to deal with the landed and aristocratic classes.
Certainly, the people who didn't leave Europe had their reasons, and calling them cowards is ridiculous. If there was a bigger mass migration *from* Europe, it is quite possible that the opportunities would have opened up much closer to home for Europeans.
Except, they really don't have access to modern military tech. They have access to tech that everyone else gets because it's not weaponized, like TV and broadcast capabilities.
I personally know the principle behind and the general construction of a Teller-Ulam device, otherwise known as a thermonuclear warhead. Probably a significant portion of the readers of Slashdot do, or could find out very easily. What I cannot do is procure the materials, or tools, or the fabrication processes that make it possible to assemble one to the tolerances required to make it function properly. These are very specialized, easier to track, and not generally public knowledge to the level at which they could make a real go of it.
In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if, given the fizzles that they have had, they simply handed the Wikipedia entries for these things to scientists and told them to build it. The tests really feel like someone actually tried to build the real thing, but could not get the right precision, fuel, or alloys to make it actually work.
I agree that there is probably some propaganda angle in presenting NK as a backward country. Although, I think it is often both to demonize, but also to reassure the rest of the population that they aren't at the same level that we are in terms of weapons.
That said, if left alone long enough, they'll probably eventually succeed by simple trial and error. Everything is eventual.
North Korea is a very serious threat because their leaders have no real restraint and everything to lose if they aren't in control. To Kim Jong Un, the world begins and ends with himself, and he has complete control. If anything comes close to threatening his power externally, he has enough conventional artillery zeroed in on Seoul to demolish it and kill a significant portion of the population. And given his treatment of his uncle, I have no illusions that he would develop a conscience at the last minute about killing people in horrifying ways.
NK has a shitty, but real, nuclear weapon which they could smuggle somewhere which is enough to hurt a lot of people, and their country is shitty enough that a retaliatory strike of more than one missile at the capital would simply be making rubble bounce. There's really no point to nuking a bunch of huts that make up the rest of the country.
More to the point, I have serious doubts that we'd even retaliate with nuclear weapons on NK because it would really piss off China and affect SK and Japan to some degree and Kim probably knows that. That means that, effectively, we've probably already written off at least one city somewhere that their weapon could be used on without like and kind retaliation.
NK isn't going to end the world as we know it... at least with their current capabilities... but it doesn't have to do it alone. Serbia wasn't worth a World War either, but one happened anyway. If NK becomes a problem in the middle of a larger future crisis, there's going to be real trouble.
Shootings in Paris and California had no impact? Are you serious?
Yes, they killed fewer people than 9/11. That's actually pretty irrelevant. Pound for pound, they were probably more effective for the amount of resources and time they spent on them.
The point of all three of those attacks was to show the impunity which terrorists could act with and to get us to do things to turn this into a religious war. In that sense, all three of those attacks had similar impact.
I'm actually more concerned that a pair of otherwise normal-seeming individuals who are fully vetted before entering the country to come live and have a baby, suddenly just decide to leave their kid with their mom and go off and start shooting people. The 9/11 people were undercover to some degree, but their actions were that of a team made up of single men sent to take care of an operation.
If random Muslims couples are going to just suddenly show up at work or in public and start shooting people, I'm a little more concerned about that becoming a trend than I ever was about 9/11. And if ISIS can weaponize those sorts of people, I am quite concerned about ISIS.
I don't want to get drawn into the debate about Bush or Obama. Frankly, it's pretty clear that Bush made the big mistake of going into Iraq, and Obama made the mistakes of taking us out of Iraq, and completely messing up the Syrian situation. The correctness of being in Iraq or not is actually based on the situation at the time. We didn't have to get into Iraq, but once there, we should not have left until it was stable.
I think there is a pervasive notion that it is stupid to give a cop shit, no matter if you think he's going to shoot you or not. And I agree with that notion. I don't care if a cop is a dick to me, the place to handle that is a complaint to the department and the citizen's review board, not on the side of the road.
Yes, the cop has no right to treat me in a dickish manner, and yes, he should be run out of the department. However, being an asshat about it on site is a great way to undermine your case and possibly get you dead at the hands of an unbalanced individual who happens to be a cop.
Dealing with law enforcement is always best when the situation is under the control of you and your lawyers. In a traffic stop, the cop is specifically trained to ensure the situation is under his control and he is practiced at that. You need to be calm, collect necessary evidence and recollections, and live through the encounter without giving him more ammo to charge you with and make you less likely to be sympathetic.
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The point you missed is that shotguns are not rifles. Shotguns are generally smoothbores.
Shotguns are aimed up because that is what is used for hunting birds. You don't generally hunt a flying bird with a rifle. You want shot dispersal to bracket them for much the same reason you wanted to shoot at airplanes with proximity fused ammo or a veritable hail of bullets: it's hard to hit a flying, moving object with a single slug.
You should always point any weapon downrange and/or toward the ground when it is not in use, but there's no reason whatsoever to point an actual rifle up at the sky unless you're trying to take a lucky shot at an airplane.
You're right about the US military, but the US military is *extremely* well behaved compared to many militaries out there.
That doesn't have to continue in the wrong situation. Militaries throughout history have gone from well-trained and well-disciplined into praetorian guard types in relatively short order.
All you need to do is find a way to divide the interests of the military from those of the common people, and the US is moving more towards that scenario, not away from it.
And you can easily avoid gunning down your relatives by being posted out of your home region.
I don't distrust the US military, but we should not let down our guard lest the institution change and we not be prepared for the eventuality.
Yes, but it is very easy to discover. Right now, if something is encrypted, you can't read it, so you can't prosecute for the content of the encrypted text.
Under this law, you get prosecuted if it is encrypted and they can't read it. It doesn't matter if it is your shopping list or not.
A law to control encryption means that as long as they can identify a file as encrypted, you could go to jail just for having an encrypted file they can't break.
They haven't lost their minds. Playing to fear is a standard political tactic. It gets votes. Why wouldn't they use it? They'd be stupid not to.
Oh, you mean that it is counterproductive and causes more problems than it solves? Well I'm sure that they believe that once they are in power, it will be temporary.
Actually *France* has a long history of losing their government to emergency powers and the like. They don't appear to have learned their lesson, or they don't actually care. Starting to think its #2.
The major problem is that most of the markets don't actually care about privacy in these contexts. Your standard iPhone user wouldn't know privacy from their privates.
Yes, everyone agrees that losing privacy is bad, but rarely does anyone know what that entails except for a relatively small informed group.
Well... if this attracts the attention of high level bureaucrats in the capital, that person could be in for trouble. Yes, it makes sense to have the appeals process deal with it, but you do not want people in the state capital getting wind of your actions. Then you're in for a world of trouble.
I think this person just broke the First Law of State Bureaucracy: Thou shall not be noticed by the politicians.
I sincerely doubt that the Governor would ever make a decision at that level, even in a cover-up situation. It was either a bureaucrat who was either following the letter of the regulations too closely, or they decided that they couldn't be bothered.
If it was really that big a deal, there would be a troubleshooter who would deal with that who is a political appointee attached to some executive office.
If you think this trivial stuff bubbles up to the Governor regularly, you have no idea at the scale at which the government really operates at.
Agreed. I knew someone in the NY State government who was a low level bureaucrat. She basically said, "Albany doesn't care unless something goes wrong, so we make sure that nothing goes wrong."
What she meant by that is that they ensure that no one makes noise about things and the upper level bureaucrats could not be bothered to care unless someone with clout complained.
I don't think this is because the bureaucrats don't care, mind you. Many of the people in various state services got into the business because they care about their field. The problem is that they're underfunded and when someone makes a stink, some political boss in the state capital starts some stupid program or worse, uses you to make an example out of. So you keep your head down, do what you can, and count how many years of seniority you have that goes against your eventual pension. This tends to reinforce the bureaucratic culture at lower levels.
And I don't think politics really matters. Your Democrats and Republicans at the state level are pretty much equally assholes. There are just differences in how many new programs they create which will later be defunded when the populace realizes that they can't pay for them and get mad at taxes.
Given that he could have probably invested his up front money soundly and made more money than the music business would have given him in "revenue", I think he made a wise decision.
Refusing to acknowledge jury nullification is not a new thing. In some senses, that's understandable given that we have a precedent based system where no one in the legal business likes it when the jury ignores the precedents and the letter of the law.
The world where you actually allow other states to develop is a safer, more stable place. This is why no one seriously believes that the Chinese will attack the US short of some small land squabbles and trade issues.
The Chinese will eventually have to deal with the same issues we had to, and their standard of living will rise which will bring their benefits (and expenses) in line with US standards.
The major problem with that is the situations where countries like the US were riding high on a temporary inflated standard of living have to deal with a retraction of that. For all those who loved the 1950s, that was a windfall for the US because we were the only big country with any real undamaged industrial capacity left. That wasn't going to last forever. It was certainly not going to turn into some permanent prosperity situation were you could pay UAW union rates to unskilled workers and a pension forever. The enormous balance of human history has not really had any sense of "retirement" where you are somehow able to live off of capital built up in your life in Florida. Your only real retirement option was having some children, particularly daughters, around when you couldn't work anymore to take care of you, and maybe you owned your house and land.
Anyway, while the world will probably never completely equal out, a rising tide can lift all ships. As long as the barriers don't go up, prosperity elsewhere will eventually spread out and actual standards of living will rise over time. This may hurt for the West and the US in particular, but we shouldn't find ourselves relegated to the 19th Century again.
If only 100,000 people *could* pay for it, then you lost nothing.
Certainly, if there are those who pirate games in the group of people with disposable income who could reasonably buy it, that could be seen as loss of revenue. You can't argue realistically, however, that a game I would have never bought if it cost money is somehow a loss to a business when I get it for free. It isn't. If it wasn't free, it wouldn't have been bought any more than I would have to automatically buy a car if I could not hitch rides. I'd have to simply do without either.
And I know a lot of people who pirated games when they were younger who are happy to buy the sequels of those games now that they are older and have more income.
I even know someone who pirated Minecraft, realized that he'd been playing it long enough that it was definitely worth buying, and proceeded to purchase it, even after he'd spent something like 200 hours of play on it.
Piracy can be a grey area. You can certainly lose revenue in the sense you are talking about if the revenue loss is in the actual group you could realistically expect to be paid by. However, by increasing the population playing the game, you enlarge, and even create, a new market for follow ons, which can be worth a great deal to you.
Consider that Microsoft is happy to let people pirate their stuff up to the point where it may impact their core market segment who has the money. They do not seriously prevent you from pirating Windows or Office (with the usual caveats about security and non-support) because every person using those tools increases their market penetration and makes them familiar with the MS way of doing things.
MS then runs software anti-piracy initiatives to pick off businesses who have hit a certain critical mass of users and revenue so that they now the capability to pay. This is brilliant because if you do use unlicensed MS products to build a business, you're basically creating new revenue for MS if you become successful. All they need to do is keep an eye on whose head pops up above the unwashed masses of pirate software users, and either convince them to join the fold, or lop their heads off. And if you really do rely on MS products for your successful business, you probably can and want to pay for full service.
It is different for games, of course, because businesses are unlikely to buy entertainment in the amounts they would business software or operating systems. Nevertheless, the building of a network through piracy is real, while at the same time, they don't have to declare that they are devaluing their game as a loss leader. They get to keep their prices high, while they still get the effect of discounting their games. With the amount of money that many of these companies are making on their AAA games, it is difficult to see how piracy has really affected them. They have to cry about it because they have to show that they are defending their copyrights, but especially in the case where their DRM is sufficient to delay cracks until after the launch, it is win-win for any publisher of a good game.
And really, no one actually wants to steal a game. Cracked games can be buggy, unstable, and filled with malware. The problem is that some people don't want to allocate 60-80 dollars upfront on a game that they are going to end up not playing because it is buggy or they dislike it. I think piracy might well go the way of the dodos if they manage to bring prices down and/or ensure reasonable return policies like some distributors have.
They only have a stunted A-bomb that they don't have a delivery system for. So, they're still not really a serious threat.
However, they are much closer to taking that crappy payload and putting it on a missile that could hit Japan.
And they could probably already trundle that device into an underground tunnel that goes right into Seoul.
It's mostly a joke because they're waving around a BB gun and calling it an assault rifle. You could still put someone's eye out with that thing, though.
I don't know, if you put 768kT MIRVs in a single missile and targeted each separate warhead at a single city, you could theoretically do enough damage to a mid sized country to cause it to teeter close to collapse. In fact, if you shot those at say, the top 5 US cities, you wouldn't have enough to end the US, but you'd crater the US economy in short order. It's not necessary for those warheads to even annihilate those cities, which they probably wouldn't, but it would be enough to empty the cities out and cause complete chaos.
Yes, you can't kill everyone in a country that way, and it would actually take quite a lot of nukes to seriously depopulate a country by direct explosion effects or even residual radiation. But it could kick off the loss of order and infrastructure which would allow disease and disorder to complete the job. In that sense, radiation is much worse because it has a denial effect over areas that wouldn't be otherwise damaged by a blast.
Which really *isn't* capitalism. A free market should not have the government stepping in to allow the companies to sit pretty on their gains.
The only real argument against capitalism in that sense is that it seems to be impossible to keep the government from reinforcing monopolies or bailing out losers in the name of "saving the economy" or to protect cronies. A theoretical government that is able to resist using its power to affect the economy would result in a considerably different result.
Look at Uber. Where people aren't trying to sue them out of operation, they're eating the lunches of taxi services because they offer better service. Of course, the taxi services have their hands tied by government regulations, so it is understandable they'd fight back, but that doesn't change the fact that taxi services complain about being regulated on one hand, and use that excuse to provide poor service on the other.
And Uber will not last if it does not continue to provide the best service. As long as there is nothing barring competition from challenging Uber, even Uber in a high market penetration position could be taken on. That's because if there is no law creating barriers to entry, Uber has to continue to make good business decisions to avoid eventually being cut down by an upstart.
The real problem with capitalism and the free market is that we've never actually seen it. And perhaps it may be fair to say that this is also why it is a red herring. If you can never have your perfect free market with no interference, then perhaps we should stop talking about how the free market is "theoretically" better when we're talking about the problems it has in its current incarnation.
I believe that honestly, a free market does not mean turning the world into a corporatist dystopia. I think that's bunk. Consider that corporations themselves are legal constructs and realize that those constructs which supposedly represent the ultimate in free market capitalism aren't even necessary for free markets. They're yet another way the government allows individuals to have a safety net under them when competing in a market. A true free market does not work unless you can actually fail and that you have to force yourself to hedge and add safety by good business practices. Otherwise, businesspeople do not internalize good practices as good business, but instead see those good practices imposed by government as something that can make them more profitable if they can figure out how to cheat them.
Except that most of the real monopolies are driven by the ability to involve the government, somehow.
The big banks? They should have failed and gone bankrupt because of their shitty practices. The government didn't let them. Both Republican AND Democratic administrations.
Ma Bell, used to be Comcast levels of unresponsiveness and they were fully enabled by the government.
The taxi services, by being forced by medallions into forming an exclusive club, have learned to take advantage of their government protected monopolies by cutting back services to maximize their profits.
Yes, the free market is not perfect, but there is probably nothing worse than a capitalist economy which is being prevented from receiving any negative market signals by government action.
Creating educated people does not create jobs for them by default. It just means you have very qualified unemployed people.
Yes, there is a relation between national education levels and productivity, but only if that education is pointed at productive enterprises. As much as I loved my history studies, if I wasn't someone with many years of tech experience, I'd have a lot more trouble holding down a job.
The problem with tuition in the United States right now is twofold. Colleges and Universities are increasing student services, and much more importantly, state government money is being diverted from education to pay for mandates for things like Medicaid and other entitlements. Unlike the Federal government, the state governments are more zero sum in their budgeting process, and state governments are constitutionally responsible for education.
If you want to seriously drive down tuitions, the state has to have the money to pitch in again, and you may need to drastically cut back student services on campus.
Additionally, it may well make sense to not make a college degree a prerequisite for every job under the sun. The US used to have a lot of jobs that did not require more than an apprenticeship to make very good money on.
Rich kids are guaranteed higher education, if they want it.
Poor kids have to work at it.
My only problem with this is that the Rich kids don't have to work for it.
Jamestown pre-dates Plymouth by 13 years and had nothing to do with religion.
Yes, the freedom of being out from under the thumb of the established churches did make it easier for fringe groups to come and set up their own little theocracies, but that period is actually a fairly small portion of the colonial period. Once the colonial governments were put under Royal administration, they simply ended up as areas with a very Puritan culture, but not a particularly religious governance. No more so than most governments of the time, really.
I don't think Tesla would agree with you. My family history also does not jobe with that narrative.
I think the greatest reason to come to the US was greater opportunity, not some sort of forced migration of despair.
Yes, the willingness to embrace opportunity can be enhanced considerably by having no ties to cut, but if you look at a number of immigrants, they had some things going for them elsewhere, but they had a limit to how far they could go in Europe. Rightly or wrongly, the US represented nearly unlimited opportunity for those who could make a go of it. It was not easy to grasp that opportunity, but except perhaps for becoming President of the United States, there's nothing a that a naturalized citizen could not do.
Europe of that time was very different from today, with a still powerful aristocracy in most places that was not just a bunch of people with ornamental titles. This tended to limit opportunity considerably for those not of the proper class. Some people were quite able to live happy lives under that situation, but all opportunity eventually led straight having to deal with the landed and aristocratic classes.
Certainly, the people who didn't leave Europe had their reasons, and calling them cowards is ridiculous. If there was a bigger mass migration *from* Europe, it is quite possible that the opportunities would have opened up much closer to home for Europeans.
Except, they really don't have access to modern military tech. They have access to tech that everyone else gets because it's not weaponized, like TV and broadcast capabilities.
I personally know the principle behind and the general construction of a Teller-Ulam device, otherwise known as a thermonuclear warhead. Probably a significant portion of the readers of Slashdot do, or could find out very easily. What I cannot do is procure the materials, or tools, or the fabrication processes that make it possible to assemble one to the tolerances required to make it function properly. These are very specialized, easier to track, and not generally public knowledge to the level at which they could make a real go of it.
In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if, given the fizzles that they have had, they simply handed the Wikipedia entries for these things to scientists and told them to build it. The tests really feel like someone actually tried to build the real thing, but could not get the right precision, fuel, or alloys to make it actually work.
I agree that there is probably some propaganda angle in presenting NK as a backward country. Although, I think it is often both to demonize, but also to reassure the rest of the population that they aren't at the same level that we are in terms of weapons.
That said, if left alone long enough, they'll probably eventually succeed by simple trial and error. Everything is eventual.
North Korea is a very serious threat because their leaders have no real restraint and everything to lose if they aren't in control. To Kim Jong Un, the world begins and ends with himself, and he has complete control. If anything comes close to threatening his power externally, he has enough conventional artillery zeroed in on Seoul to demolish it and kill a significant portion of the population. And given his treatment of his uncle, I have no illusions that he would develop a conscience at the last minute about killing people in horrifying ways.
NK has a shitty, but real, nuclear weapon which they could smuggle somewhere which is enough to hurt a lot of people, and their country is shitty enough that a retaliatory strike of more than one missile at the capital would simply be making rubble bounce. There's really no point to nuking a bunch of huts that make up the rest of the country.
More to the point, I have serious doubts that we'd even retaliate with nuclear weapons on NK because it would really piss off China and affect SK and Japan to some degree and Kim probably knows that. That means that, effectively, we've probably already written off at least one city somewhere that their weapon could be used on without like and kind retaliation.
NK isn't going to end the world as we know it... at least with their current capabilities... but it doesn't have to do it alone. Serbia wasn't worth a World War either, but one happened anyway. If NK becomes a problem in the middle of a larger future crisis, there's going to be real trouble.
Shootings in Paris and California had no impact? Are you serious?
Yes, they killed fewer people than 9/11. That's actually pretty irrelevant. Pound for pound, they were probably more effective for the amount of resources and time they spent on them.
The point of all three of those attacks was to show the impunity which terrorists could act with and to get us to do things to turn this into a religious war. In that sense, all three of those attacks had similar impact.
I'm actually more concerned that a pair of otherwise normal-seeming individuals who are fully vetted before entering the country to come live and have a baby, suddenly just decide to leave their kid with their mom and go off and start shooting people. The 9/11 people were undercover to some degree, but their actions were that of a team made up of single men sent to take care of an operation.
If random Muslims couples are going to just suddenly show up at work or in public and start shooting people, I'm a little more concerned about that becoming a trend than I ever was about 9/11. And if ISIS can weaponize those sorts of people, I am quite concerned about ISIS.
I don't want to get drawn into the debate about Bush or Obama. Frankly, it's pretty clear that Bush made the big mistake of going into Iraq, and Obama made the mistakes of taking us out of Iraq, and completely messing up the Syrian situation. The correctness of being in Iraq or not is actually based on the situation at the time. We didn't have to get into Iraq, but once there, we should not have left until it was stable.
I think there is a pervasive notion that it is stupid to give a cop shit, no matter if you think he's going to shoot you or not. And I agree with that notion. I don't care if a cop is a dick to me, the place to handle that is a complaint to the department and the citizen's review board, not on the side of the road.
Yes, the cop has no right to treat me in a dickish manner, and yes, he should be run out of the department. However, being an asshat about it on site is a great way to undermine your case and possibly get you dead at the hands of an unbalanced individual who happens to be a cop.
Dealing with law enforcement is always best when the situation is under the control of you and your lawyers. In a traffic stop, the cop is specifically trained to ensure the situation is under his control and he is practiced at that. You need to be calm, collect necessary evidence and recollections, and live through the encounter without giving him more ammo to charge you with and make you less likely to be sympathetic.