So, I'm not planning on voting for Trump and would prefer that no one did, but I'd have to ask, of those businesses that Trump went bankrupt on, perhaps all four of them were phone-ins too?
The business world does have ups and downs, and if you're a major player you're going to have them. Even Warren Buffett has the occasional bankruptcy in one or two of his holdings.
So, I think I agree that using something like the four bankruptcies (which in this case were Chapter 11 reorganizations, not liquidations), against Trump is magnifying a certain expected level of failure or error into a big deal. If he really does have 500 investments, then is four bankruptcies actually a big deal?
I actually think Trump needs to be taken very seriously as someone who knows exactly what they are doing, and I'd probably vote for Clinton if I didn't think she'd only make the problem worse. And that's a big deal, because I think the Democratic party platform is divisive and pandering, just like the Republican party platform, they just have fewer rednecks. Electing her is going to keep the pressure cooker from exploding one more term or two, but that just means the explosion is going to be even greater when she's done. She has nothing to help with this current situation, and the DNC mails only show the level of tone-deafness that her and the rest of the Democratic party are experiencing.
I wouldn't worry, this is hardly going to put Nintendo out of business. The only losers are those who didn't understand that this was a bubble and that they needed to take their money while they could get it while it was streaking upward, because it was very soon to come straight down again.
Nintendo will bounce off of the opposite and equally emotional response to sell and be back at their usual price in a little while.
If we'd only stop bailing out the losers who make these kinds of mistakes, the market would very efficiently remove them from contention by making them flat broke in two seconds flat.
In 1929 we had stockbrokers jumping off of buildings due to an overemotional response to emotional trading that led to crappy decisions. If only we could have kept the process going to clean the gene pool of these types of brokers.
It's not really all that hard, you just have to avoid greed. You sell some as soon as it hits a predetermined point, and some more at another higher predetermined point. Remember, if goes even higher, you aren't losing money by not getting that price, you've made money no matter what. Nintendo isn't a pump and dump stock, so if you end up with some left over at the normal price when the bubble pops, you're doing just fine.
Also, when the stock plummets you have some buy orders when the market irrationally decides that now the company is completely worthless because it isn't overpriced and you make even more money by using your gains on Nintendo to buy Nintendo when everyone is underpricing it. When Nintendo's stock price levels out, you've made even more money.
You will have a problem if you're holding all your cash for that "perfect moment" where you can maximize your take. That's how you end up getting your ass handed to you in sudden downturns in price or you simply miss most of the profit. Free money is free money. Don't get greedy.
Yes, although there are a few things that are the responsibility of the legislature that can, if the stars align, be usurped by the executive. The Presidency has been becoming more and more powerful over the years. There are tricks that can be used to apply a veneer of legality to what is not strictly legal, although you need popular support for that sort of thing to work.
Of course, Trump is trying to generate an air of urgency around his campaign. We're in decline, we're under seige. New ideas are needed, etc. Blah blah blah. That same urgency can be used to enact constitutionally "innovative" ideas. There have been a number of well intentioned power grabs like the New Deal and Great Society and some much less well intentioned ones in between.
In 2000, Verizon acquiring Yahoo and AOL would have been an insanely huge deal. It would basically be the equivalent of someone acquiring Google today.
How the mighty have fallen.
That said, AOL has had something of a soft landing after years of free fall, mostly due to the advertising business. After all of the terrible decisions that AOL and Time Warner made, that acquisition pretty much saved AOL as a business, even if it didn't save it as an industry leader.
Not everyone who works at LOC is actually a librarian by training or in job role. Congress has added responsibilities to it which are related to, but not actually what you'd expect a library to do.
So, it's basically a government agency that happens to have some librarians working for it. Sort of like the Secret Service having been created to stop counterfeiting, which they still have jurisdiction over, but they are much more high profile as bodyguards for the President and related VIPs.
They are rendering their icons now, as opposed to scaling a raster graphics image like a PNG. So no, they aren't enlarging an existing bitmap. They are basically generating a new image for that scale programmatically.
An SVG formatted vector graphics is basically the same idea. Scaling those is quite crisp, although I don't think this is actually SVG that they are using since that tends to be best used for line art.
Clinton would have to die or get thrown in jail (impossible given her +5 to "not going to jail" bonus) to lose. This is totally her election to lose.
I actually think that *she* could kill someone on Fifth Avenue and still win at this point.
Yeah, people are pissed at DC, but he has zero plan, no support outside his demographic, and again, his party is in disarray and his campaign is stumbling around. He's the wrong man at the right time.
Uh, did you actually look at that map? It displays exactly what I said, and what the Wikipedia article said. Keystone XL is the dashed blue line. It does not go to Texas.
As I said, the Keystone complex does. And the map shows that. I think you're confused.
Minimum wage is a crock too. It is wage controls, which like price controls, fails ultimately because it does not respect the actual value of labor or goods and services. All that is going to do is accelerate automation, which in turn accelerates structural unemployment.
We need to sit down and make a new determination of how people are compensated for participation in society. We used to use wages for this because human labor was needed for society to work. Now, it is clear that you don't need humans or at least, not as many unskilled humans, to make society work. Now that this is the case, wages are becoming a poor way of ensuring that humans participate usefully.
Humans increasingly represent more and more of the demand part of the equation and less and less of the productive supply portion of it. So we are actually worth "less" than before. Or rather, we're less useful than before, and especially in the realm of society where you used to get a $70,000/yr salary and a full pension for handing out tools from a shed.
Some have mentioned a basic income, which I am in favor of as long as the productivity gains of society make it feasible. If robots are doing work for us, then why are people considered useless for not doing that work? We're quite literally removing them from the workforce. We should extract that value from the system and use it to provide for society at an equitable level. That is to say, everyone gets it, not just the poor or the rich. It's enough to live on, but probably not enough to cause people who have skilled work to stop doing that work.
There is a strong subsidiary concern about what happens with lots and lots of unemployed people who do get such an income. Does it look like utopia, or does it look like the "projects"? To some degree, I think that is the more pressing question once you have decided that you're going to accept that automation has put people out of work for good.
Trump is not going to win. He is pushing the two pieces of the electorate further apart, but he's on the side with the smaller number of voters. He's also almost completely useless with his ground game and his negatives are way too high. He's only talking to part of the Republican party at this point, and the Republicans need more than their membership to win to begin with.
That said, I am concerned about what happens after Hillary wins and nothing really changes. She won't be the worst president we've ever had, but her existence in the office itself would represent business as usual. She's been the designated first female president since I can remember and pretty much represents the entitled political class. If the email fracas showed us anything is that, indictment or not, there is clearly a way things are done for people in her class, and how things are done for everyone else.
I don't really want for there to be some sort of revolution, since that's bad for everyone. And for that reason we need someone who isn't just going to win because they're better than Trump. That's far too low a bar. Trump is far too easy to beat, and him losing is only going to make the mob madder.
Well, terrorism has a higher chance of coordinated secondary attacks. If it is just a random guy in a truck who cracked up and went bezerk, it would probably not concern the rest of France. If it is a terrorist attack, you may want to avoid public areas for a little while to be safe.
Granted, an app for an attack already in practice seems about as likely to help as a duck and cover drill.
Actually, the US itself is fairly independent of Saudi oil these days.
The problem is that Europe and China are not. Even if we were 100% off Saudi oil, Saudi would still be making bank.
Our purpose in the Middle East is simple, prevent World War III so that we don't have to ride to save the day like we did in WWII. And since nuclear weapons are in play, if there is a WWIII we may not get the chance to play Big Damn Heroes before its all over and we're all fucked.
This is why I tend to favor libertarian ideas to some degree, but I absolutely, positively, do not support the isolationist planks.
Yes, we are the world's policeman. Perhaps we shouldn't be, but that process should be planned out and slowly executed. Immediately dumping our presence around the world is more likely to precipitate the loss of American (and other) lives, than the occasional terrorist act, no matter how outrageous.
You're confused with the rest of the Keystone oil pipeline complex, some of which does go to Texas. All of those pipelines have already been built.
In terms of why does any of it go to Texas? Keystone in general goes to refineries in Illinois and Texas. The reason for that is simple. That is where the refineries are.
You sort of have it backwards. Yes, the refineries are there because of the port terminals. However, that's because port terminals is where you receive imports and Gulf coast oil, which have in the past, been an important source of oil for the US. Since Refineries are not going to move, particularly due to the expensive shale and tar sands oil, the oil from those areas goes to the refineries, not vice-versa.
Of course, yes, sending the oil to the terminals does allow for export, but that's not really a focus of the Keystone pipeline complex. Could it happen? Quite possibly. But whether or not it is possible, the reason for the pipelines isn't the international banking conspiracy, it is the situation of refinery capacity. If there were not "banksters", they would still send the oil to Texas and other places with sea terminals because that is where you find a lot of refineries situated.
He did have an opportunity, which can be almost entirely luck.
However, no one is really lauded for getting an opportunity, or we'd all admire Paris Hilton for being born rich.
Linus was prepared to take advantage of the opportunity that arose. And that is something you *can* prepare for, if by simply working to be good at what you do, and putting in the work to make something.
Linus did something. Admittedly, if Linus didn't, someone else would have, but they'd still have had to have done what Linus did in order to take advantage of the opportunity. We can admire the work and the commitment to the project while accepting that there are people out there who might have put in a similar amount of work, but never see any recognition.
And that, friends, is why you should never set out to work on something merely to take advantage of some opportunity that you think might make you rich or famous, you should work on something because you enjoy it, or you think it fulfills a need for something that you think is lacking. Then you never really feel cheated by luck, because you weren't counting on luck to make the work worthwhile in the first place.
I mean, its sort of funny to see someone with almost no accountability go off like that. It must have been like being lambasted by Steve Jobs. You know he's a dick, but its a good story and no one will actually think worse of you for it. Everyone knows that's just what Steve Jobs did.
In this case, it's just what Linus does. There's no request for improvement that he can make which would not be improved by a sweary rant. It's not like the army of paid corporate developers developing his kernel for him can actually do anything about it.
Now, all he has to do is get a car without a license place so he can start parking in handicapped parking spots and he can get to the same level of legendary unaccountablity.
Not saying I agree with everything that happens in the US, but I don't think fascism is accurate to what it is. It probably needs its own name.
There's nationalism, but there is far too high of a (legal) immigrant population here for it to take on the characteristics of what you'd see in Europe. We may be rabidly American, but we're much more accepting of what an "American" is. You're seeing some of that nativist sentiment, but given the last few years of Presidential elections, we're definitely more likely to elect someone who stands for "diversity".
As for corporatism, in fascism, the corporations don't run the government, the government runs the corporations. It's not exactly like state ownership, but the business owners are expected to remain in the good graces of the government and there is back and forth, but the State remains the prime mover.
In 1930's Germany, for instance, the Party collected an more or less obligatory Adolf Hitler Fund which was collected as a sort of voluntary tax from corporate donors which was then used to do things like give payments to German generals directly from Hitler personally to them. To use a more modern example, it would be like if Hillary Clinton "encouraged" corporate donations to the Clinton Foundation and then used Foundation money to pay off the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other government leaders to encourage them to stay in line.
The important thing is that this was not campaign contributions. The Nazi Party could tap their foot and put out their hand, and the owners of German businesses would pony up.
In our case, Clinton is more likely to be owned by the corporations then the other way around. She gets money from them, but that decision is firmly theirs, and purely based on the corporation's needs, not the State's. That's not incredibly democratic, but its not fascism.
Which is one reasonable cause for having the Second Amendment.
Personally, I tend towards maintaining gun rights because it *is* in the Constitution, and because I think there is something to be said for a population than can defend itself should it need to do so and choose to do so.
However, I am not totally convinced that the improvements in weaponry are not going to eventually cause the breakdown of law and order in certain cases.
A government should be afraid of its people, but it shouldn't be powerless against individuals who do need its protection. There has to be a balance somewhere. I almost think we may want to return to the idea of a larger community militia supporting the police instead of increasing militarization of the police force. Then you have your people bearing arms and being trained in their use, and you don't need to worry as much about the cops driving tanks through your front door.
One way or another, I think we may need to make a decision to either accept the chance of these shootings, which are not exactly the largest killer of people in the US, by far, or we have to somehow re-think what modern weaponry means for how we balance the power of the government against that of the people.
What should not keep happening is a false discussion about the role of weapons. We need to understand that they are not harmless, there is a danger to them, but there are reasons for maintaining such a situation which may make it necessary to accept the danger.
Slashdot Mirror
So, I'm not planning on voting for Trump and would prefer that no one did, but I'd have to ask, of those businesses that Trump went bankrupt on, perhaps all four of them were phone-ins too?
The business world does have ups and downs, and if you're a major player you're going to have them. Even Warren Buffett has the occasional bankruptcy in one or two of his holdings.
So, I think I agree that using something like the four bankruptcies (which in this case were Chapter 11 reorganizations, not liquidations), against Trump is magnifying a certain expected level of failure or error into a big deal. If he really does have 500 investments, then is four bankruptcies actually a big deal?
I actually think Trump needs to be taken very seriously as someone who knows exactly what they are doing, and I'd probably vote for Clinton if I didn't think she'd only make the problem worse. And that's a big deal, because I think the Democratic party platform is divisive and pandering, just like the Republican party platform, they just have fewer rednecks. Electing her is going to keep the pressure cooker from exploding one more term or two, but that just means the explosion is going to be even greater when she's done. She has nothing to help with this current situation, and the DNC mails only show the level of tone-deafness that her and the rest of the Democratic party are experiencing.
I wouldn't worry, this is hardly going to put Nintendo out of business. The only losers are those who didn't understand that this was a bubble and that they needed to take their money while they could get it while it was streaking upward, because it was very soon to come straight down again.
Nintendo will bounce off of the opposite and equally emotional response to sell and be back at their usual price in a little while.
If we'd only stop bailing out the losers who make these kinds of mistakes, the market would very efficiently remove them from contention by making them flat broke in two seconds flat.
In 1929 we had stockbrokers jumping off of buildings due to an overemotional response to emotional trading that led to crappy decisions. If only we could have kept the process going to clean the gene pool of these types of brokers.
It's not really all that hard, you just have to avoid greed. You sell some as soon as it hits a predetermined point, and some more at another higher predetermined point. Remember, if goes even higher, you aren't losing money by not getting that price, you've made money no matter what. Nintendo isn't a pump and dump stock, so if you end up with some left over at the normal price when the bubble pops, you're doing just fine.
Also, when the stock plummets you have some buy orders when the market irrationally decides that now the company is completely worthless because it isn't overpriced and you make even more money by using your gains on Nintendo to buy Nintendo when everyone is underpricing it. When Nintendo's stock price levels out, you've made even more money.
You will have a problem if you're holding all your cash for that "perfect moment" where you can maximize your take. That's how you end up getting your ass handed to you in sudden downturns in price or you simply miss most of the profit. Free money is free money. Don't get greedy.
Yes, although there are a few things that are the responsibility of the legislature that can, if the stars align, be usurped by the executive. The Presidency has been becoming more and more powerful over the years. There are tricks that can be used to apply a veneer of legality to what is not strictly legal, although you need popular support for that sort of thing to work.
Of course, Trump is trying to generate an air of urgency around his campaign. We're in decline, we're under seige. New ideas are needed, etc. Blah blah blah. That same urgency can be used to enact constitutionally "innovative" ideas. There have been a number of well intentioned power grabs like the New Deal and Great Society and some much less well intentioned ones in between.
Grand Theft Call of Crysis Duty.
I love that series. I'm currently playing Grand Theft Call of Crysis Duty II: Rise of the Polygons
AOL actually bought Time Warner, not vice-versa.
There was a coup where the TW execs basically took over after the fail began, but AOL was the bigger fish at the time.
Why? Isn't yahoo that company that used to have a search engine or something? What do they do now?
They're a women's fashion site devoted to Marissa Mayer's clothing and design choices.
In 2000, Verizon acquiring Yahoo and AOL would have been an insanely huge deal. It would basically be the equivalent of someone acquiring Google today.
How the mighty have fallen.
That said, AOL has had something of a soft landing after years of free fall, mostly due to the advertising business. After all of the terrible decisions that AOL and Time Warner made, that acquisition pretty much saved AOL as a business, even if it didn't save it as an industry leader.
Yahoo... well... I guess they have Alibaba.
Not everyone who works at LOC is actually a librarian by training or in job role. Congress has added responsibilities to it which are related to, but not actually what you'd expect a library to do.
So, it's basically a government agency that happens to have some librarians working for it. Sort of like the Secret Service having been created to stop counterfeiting, which they still have jurisdiction over, but they are much more high profile as bodyguards for the President and related VIPs.
They are rendering their icons now, as opposed to scaling a raster graphics image like a PNG. So no, they aren't enlarging an existing bitmap. They are basically generating a new image for that scale programmatically.
An SVG formatted vector graphics is basically the same idea. Scaling those is quite crisp, although I don't think this is actually SVG that they are using since that tends to be best used for line art.
These are certainly concerning times, but the guys who have been shooting cops aren't voting for someone like Trump.
Clinton would have to die or get thrown in jail (impossible given her +5 to "not going to jail" bonus) to lose. This is totally her election to lose.
I actually think that *she* could kill someone on Fifth Avenue and still win at this point.
Yeah, people are pissed at DC, but he has zero plan, no support outside his demographic, and again, his party is in disarray and his campaign is stumbling around. He's the wrong man at the right time.
Uh, did you actually look at that map? It displays exactly what I said, and what the Wikipedia article said. Keystone XL is the dashed blue line. It does not go to Texas.
As I said, the Keystone complex does. And the map shows that. I think you're confused.
Minimum wage is a crock too. It is wage controls, which like price controls, fails ultimately because it does not respect the actual value of labor or goods and services. All that is going to do is accelerate automation, which in turn accelerates structural unemployment.
We need to sit down and make a new determination of how people are compensated for participation in society. We used to use wages for this because human labor was needed for society to work. Now, it is clear that you don't need humans or at least, not as many unskilled humans, to make society work. Now that this is the case, wages are becoming a poor way of ensuring that humans participate usefully.
Humans increasingly represent more and more of the demand part of the equation and less and less of the productive supply portion of it. So we are actually worth "less" than before. Or rather, we're less useful than before, and especially in the realm of society where you used to get a $70,000/yr salary and a full pension for handing out tools from a shed.
Some have mentioned a basic income, which I am in favor of as long as the productivity gains of society make it feasible. If robots are doing work for us, then why are people considered useless for not doing that work? We're quite literally removing them from the workforce. We should extract that value from the system and use it to provide for society at an equitable level. That is to say, everyone gets it, not just the poor or the rich. It's enough to live on, but probably not enough to cause people who have skilled work to stop doing that work.
There is a strong subsidiary concern about what happens with lots and lots of unemployed people who do get such an income. Does it look like utopia, or does it look like the "projects"? To some degree, I think that is the more pressing question once you have decided that you're going to accept that automation has put people out of work for good.
Trump is not going to win. He is pushing the two pieces of the electorate further apart, but he's on the side with the smaller number of voters. He's also almost completely useless with his ground game and his negatives are way too high. He's only talking to part of the Republican party at this point, and the Republicans need more than their membership to win to begin with.
That said, I am concerned about what happens after Hillary wins and nothing really changes. She won't be the worst president we've ever had, but her existence in the office itself would represent business as usual. She's been the designated first female president since I can remember and pretty much represents the entitled political class. If the email fracas showed us anything is that, indictment or not, there is clearly a way things are done for people in her class, and how things are done for everyone else.
I don't really want for there to be some sort of revolution, since that's bad for everyone. And for that reason we need someone who isn't just going to win because they're better than Trump. That's far too low a bar. Trump is far too easy to beat, and him losing is only going to make the mob madder.
Well, terrorism has a higher chance of coordinated secondary attacks. If it is just a random guy in a truck who cracked up and went bezerk, it would probably not concern the rest of France. If it is a terrorist attack, you may want to avoid public areas for a little while to be safe.
Granted, an app for an attack already in practice seems about as likely to help as a duck and cover drill.
Actually, that could work, if we make sure it is in Texas again. The last two fools who were dumb enough to fall into that trap did not do so well.
All we have to do is manage to have enough events like that so that they Darwin themselves out of existence. Brilliant!
I was going to mod him up just to add some irony, but unfortunately, I've already posted on this page.
Actually, the US itself is fairly independent of Saudi oil these days.
The problem is that Europe and China are not. Even if we were 100% off Saudi oil, Saudi would still be making bank.
Our purpose in the Middle East is simple, prevent World War III so that we don't have to ride to save the day like we did in WWII. And since nuclear weapons are in play, if there is a WWIII we may not get the chance to play Big Damn Heroes before its all over and we're all fucked.
This is why I tend to favor libertarian ideas to some degree, but I absolutely, positively, do not support the isolationist planks.
Yes, we are the world's policeman. Perhaps we shouldn't be, but that process should be planned out and slowly executed. Immediately dumping our presence around the world is more likely to precipitate the loss of American (and other) lives, than the occasional terrorist act, no matter how outrageous.
The Keystone XL pipeline extension was planned between Hardisty, Alberta, and Steele City, Nebraska. It does not go to Texas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
You're confused with the rest of the Keystone oil pipeline complex, some of which does go to Texas. All of those pipelines have already been built.
In terms of why does any of it go to Texas? Keystone in general goes to refineries in Illinois and Texas. The reason for that is simple. That is where the refineries are.
You sort of have it backwards. Yes, the refineries are there because of the port terminals. However, that's because port terminals is where you receive imports and Gulf coast oil, which have in the past, been an important source of oil for the US. Since Refineries are not going to move, particularly due to the expensive shale and tar sands oil, the oil from those areas goes to the refineries, not vice-versa.
Of course, yes, sending the oil to the terminals does allow for export, but that's not really a focus of the Keystone pipeline complex. Could it happen? Quite possibly. But whether or not it is possible, the reason for the pipelines isn't the international banking conspiracy, it is the situation of refinery capacity. If there were not "banksters", they would still send the oil to Texas and other places with sea terminals because that is where you find a lot of refineries situated.
He did have an opportunity, which can be almost entirely luck.
However, no one is really lauded for getting an opportunity, or we'd all admire Paris Hilton for being born rich.
Linus was prepared to take advantage of the opportunity that arose. And that is something you *can* prepare for, if by simply working to be good at what you do, and putting in the work to make something.
Linus did something. Admittedly, if Linus didn't, someone else would have, but they'd still have had to have done what Linus did in order to take advantage of the opportunity. We can admire the work and the commitment to the project while accepting that there are people out there who might have put in a similar amount of work, but never see any recognition.
And that, friends, is why you should never set out to work on something merely to take advantage of some opportunity that you think might make you rich or famous, you should work on something because you enjoy it, or you think it fulfills a need for something that you think is lacking. Then you never really feel cheated by luck, because you weren't counting on luck to make the work worthwhile in the first place.
I rather think that's part of his charm.
I mean, its sort of funny to see someone with almost no accountability go off like that. It must have been like being lambasted by Steve Jobs. You know he's a dick, but its a good story and no one will actually think worse of you for it. Everyone knows that's just what Steve Jobs did.
In this case, it's just what Linus does. There's no request for improvement that he can make which would not be improved by a sweary rant. It's not like the army of paid corporate developers developing his kernel for him can actually do anything about it.
Now, all he has to do is get a car without a license place so he can start parking in handicapped parking spots and he can get to the same level of legendary unaccountablity.
Not saying I agree with everything that happens in the US, but I don't think fascism is accurate to what it is. It probably needs its own name.
There's nationalism, but there is far too high of a (legal) immigrant population here for it to take on the characteristics of what you'd see in Europe. We may be rabidly American, but we're much more accepting of what an "American" is. You're seeing some of that nativist sentiment, but given the last few years of Presidential elections, we're definitely more likely to elect someone who stands for "diversity".
As for corporatism, in fascism, the corporations don't run the government, the government runs the corporations. It's not exactly like state ownership, but the business owners are expected to remain in the good graces of the government and there is back and forth, but the State remains the prime mover.
In 1930's Germany, for instance, the Party collected an more or less obligatory Adolf Hitler Fund which was collected as a sort of voluntary tax from corporate donors which was then used to do things like give payments to German generals directly from Hitler personally to them. To use a more modern example, it would be like if Hillary Clinton "encouraged" corporate donations to the Clinton Foundation and then used Foundation money to pay off the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other government leaders to encourage them to stay in line.
The important thing is that this was not campaign contributions. The Nazi Party could tap their foot and put out their hand, and the owners of German businesses would pony up.
In our case, Clinton is more likely to be owned by the corporations then the other way around. She gets money from them, but that decision is firmly theirs, and purely based on the corporation's needs, not the State's. That's not incredibly democratic, but its not fascism.
Which is one reasonable cause for having the Second Amendment.
Personally, I tend towards maintaining gun rights because it *is* in the Constitution, and because I think there is something to be said for a population than can defend itself should it need to do so and choose to do so.
However, I am not totally convinced that the improvements in weaponry are not going to eventually cause the breakdown of law and order in certain cases.
A government should be afraid of its people, but it shouldn't be powerless against individuals who do need its protection. There has to be a balance somewhere. I almost think we may want to return to the idea of a larger community militia supporting the police instead of increasing militarization of the police force. Then you have your people bearing arms and being trained in their use, and you don't need to worry as much about the cops driving tanks through your front door.
One way or another, I think we may need to make a decision to either accept the chance of these shootings, which are not exactly the largest killer of people in the US, by far, or we have to somehow re-think what modern weaponry means for how we balance the power of the government against that of the people.
What should not keep happening is a false discussion about the role of weapons. We need to understand that they are not harmless, there is a danger to them, but there are reasons for maintaining such a situation which may make it necessary to accept the danger.
Good point.
Oddly, this seems less like something I'd want to patent (and describe publicly) than something I'd want to keep as secret sauce for myself.
After all, as soon as the method is well known, it can be worked around.
This leads me to believe that this works just enough to try and make money on it, but not well enough to actually be worth keeping close to the vest.