Thoughts:

1) There has been a ban on sales of new, fully-automatic firearms ("machine guns") since 1986. That leaves some loopholes (can still buy them if they were manufactured before then, but that demand plus scarcity makes them expensive, etc.) but in general, there isn't a whole lot of uproar over that 20-year-old ban.

2) These bump-fire stocks don't technically convert a firearm into fully-automatic; the trigger is still being pulled 1 time for each bullet that comes out (semi-automatic).

3) However, they easily allow for rates of fire (bullets per minute/second) comparable to fully-automatic weapons. So, I think an unbiased and reasonable person would say that while a firearm equipped with one of these does not violate the letter of the ban on fully-automatic firearms, it does quite reasonably violate the spirit of that ban.

4) Doing anything to correct that discrepancy will require updated laws. Updating the law requires a legislature that generally supports the update and a president that agrees, or a legislature that overwhelmingly supports the update and can override a presidential veto.

5) None of that exists at the moment in the US. So, it is (perhaps coldly) logical to say that these bump-fire stocks will not be banned as an extension to the 1986 ban on full-auto firearms, at least not in the short term.

6) However, before quietly accepting that, it is worth noting that political fallout amongst those individuals in the legislature that refuse to consider updating the law is a very real possibility. Plenty of people, even on the right, even plenty of gun nuts, say that they are in favor of some degree of "common sense" gun control. Pointing out that bump-fire stocks essentially circumvent the already in-place ban on fully-automatic firearms seems like a good way to test that professed adherence to common sense.

7) Get that word out there, and pretty importantly, try to do it in a way that is as respectful towards the average "gun nut" as possible. Their minds can be swayed. Hunters, sportsmen, and even people that have guns for self defense can be persuaded with reason -- they can still do their thing even without bump-fire stocks, just like they can do their thing without fully-automatic firearms. Congresscritters probably can't be convinced, because they've already been bribed"persuaded" with campaign donations, NRA lobbyists, etc.


So, don't preach to the choir. Try to convince the people that do actually own guns. The good news? You've got "common sense" on your side.

I went through and can't find the grading example that they had when I was dealing with this with my kids. If I can get the spacing right they showed the student's work as below, with the proper pen marks for 'carrying' if you were doing long hand multiplication:

37
*23
------
111
740
------
851

The marking guidelines stated that this was to be marked as INCORRECT, because the student was falling back and using the algorithm and the correct answer was to formulate multiple different strategies for solving the 'problem'.

A better answer would have been 10 times 37 is 370, so 20 times 37 is 740, then 3 times 37 is 111. So 740 plus 111 makes 851.

Even that though was NOT a good enough answer. No, the BEST answer was the above and then a second method like calculating 25 times 37 and subtracting 37 twice as an alternative solution.

The Roxanne break down at the one minute plus mark makes me emotional for some reason.

The blind leading those with sight...

That is what this feels like at certain moments.

I also hope that if they force someone to give birth, they at the least find out if: the mother can provide at all for the child or is even mentally prepared for it too, if the child needs to be put up for adoption and making sure it happens (follow through; plus making sure the child gets to a good household), possible payment of medical procedures and check-ups...as this is forced, and quite a few more things I won't get into here--I listed the biggest ones.

What a circus.

If the neighborhood is that bad, and their house payments are based on 220k versus the value of the home at 20k. I really doubt they'd make enough on rent without Section 8 to break even.

They'd either be losing money due to wear and tear on the home and it needed constant maintenance and work plus not making enough to cover all the fixed costs.

Or stuck with the fixed costs and an empty place they could let sit...that would probably end up getting broken into and vandalized if the neighborhood is that bad.


It's really difficult right now to find responsible renters in "slow recovery" areas.

Dunno if you can with Section 8, but I know I'd make em carry renter's insurance at the very least. So they are on the hook for the damage they do with a nice big corporation who can afford to go after them for the damages.


There's a reason why many of the places for rent out there are ran by huge corporations who just keep getting larger....the small guys can't afford to put up with all the bullshit problems people cause them. The big guys can effectively keep you from having a place to live if you screw up one of their properties bad enough.

>> ^Fade:

Their Airblade hand dryer system that's all the rage in public toilets these days is awesome. It is undeniably faster and more cost effective than those piss poor fan systems. Plus they make me feel like I'm drying my hands in the future!


Seconded! The best "exhibit" in the Glasgow Science Museum is the hand dryer in the bathroom. (OK, the planetarium is pretty awesome too...)

I love Dyson products.

Their Airblade hand dryer system that's all the rage in public toilets these days is awesome. It is undeniably faster and more cost effective than those piss poor fan systems. Plus they make me feel like I'm drying my hands in the future!

Gonna down-vote for stupid tags, plus it makes me feel good.

The NAFTA Superhighway thing always struck me as the weirdest rightwing conspiracy theory ever. Let's set aside for a moment whether or not it's real. Why is it something they oppose?

I mean, NAFTA is the North American Free Trade Agreement. Free trade is part of what you need for a free market. Business people love it, liberals kinda hate it.

Mexico and Canada are physically adjacent to the US, but to ship goods to and from them, it makes most sense for us to use road and railways as the primary cargo carriers. Since we're opening up trade, we expect the volume of goods transported between the countries to increase, putting additional load on our state-run road and rail systems. So they need to be enhanced, to deal with the added load.

Now yes, building highways is technically a big socialist public works project funded by tax dollars, but I've never met a Republican who thought roads weren't something government should build, and I've never met a crackpot Ron Paul-style "constitutionalist" who thought building roads weren't something the Federal government had the power to do.

That said, the talk about Spain controlling it actually comes from this (no, World Net Daily isn't reliable in the usual sense, but it is usually the source of most right-wing crazy these days). Basically, Ed Rendell (PA-Gov, and a DEMONCRAT) auctioned off the contract for managing the Pennsylvania Turnpike, possibly the most well-known toll road in America, to private companies. Who had the winning bid? A private corporation based in Spain called Abertis Infraestructuras that manages toll roads all over Europe.

So, basically, I'm left wondering...why the hell this is supposed to be scary?

Now, I can think of a few good reasons why liberals would be opposed to such a thing. Specifically, it makes it easier for companies to move manufacturing to Mexico to take advantage of their cheap labor, low taxes, and low regulation, plus it makes it so they can use non-union ports to unload goods coming in from Asia, and then truck them into the US. But those should all sound like positives to your average right-winger.

I get that this is lumped in with a fear of some sort of EU-style North American Union, but I honestly don't get why that is supposed to be scary either.

Are all conservatives so xenophobic that they see any signs of long-term collaboration between the US and its closest neighbors as a threat of some sort?

Anyways, for those who are curious, this is the most thorough debunking of this nonsense I've seen.

This was actually really good.

First they had on a guy who makes t-shirts which I basically agree with, and they're talking about free speech etc.

And then they bring out the right wing guy who has utterly disgusting things on his t-shirts (how insanely war happy is he?)... BUT, that comes with the territory. He can have them, it's free speech, plus it makes it easy for me to spot people I have NO INTEREST in ever being friends with... so it's a time saver too

>> ^MINK:
lithuania has a fairly free market because it's fucking corrupt, and i can tell you it's not beneficial to the consumer. the lies they get away with in unregulated advertising are shocking. of course they do it, because they can and it works.
corruption is what humans do unless someone with a bigger gun tells them not to.
individual freedom will always fuck up the common good. crime does pay. if you legalise business practices which are currently criminal, you'll get more of it, not a magical balanced free utopia.
Imstellar, in your version of a free market, who would stop Microsoft dominating the place with shitty software? I think we need MORE regulation there, not less. How is it efficient for microsoft to keep churning out that crap? you are asking for everything to be a marketing, bribery and advertising contest.
here on the sift we have a free market of ideas and video uploads, and look what happens, a bunch of cliques and lolcats and vote whores and the noise level is so high that you can't find the good shit without watching 10 crappy videos. Can you imagine what it would be like here if siftbot stopped checking for sock puppet accounts?


You're confused, I blame the all-encompassing buzzword of the day "regulation" for this, people don't understand the markets and have come to take it as meaning "government making it all better and overseeing greed." Government indeed has desirable functions in law enforcement and offering recourse through courts for disputes. They should NOT be price-fixing, monopolizing money, or handing out taxpayer money under socialist ideals of directing industry or "enhancing market confidence," this has collusion and corruption written all over it. Politicians are humans and someone spending millions of his own money to get in a low-salary position of controlling other people's money is probably going to be a more harmful source of greed than any businessman. Because even though Henry Ford became a millionaire, thousands of people got cars out of the deal. Not sure the same would have come from government expenditures...

But many would consider this form of corporate wealth redistribution "regulating" the market. I don't.

Your example of false advertising is an example of where law enforcement should take place. Can I sell a product that purports to do something it doesn't? No, that's a swindle, the contract was not upheld, and you can go to government-provided courts to be compensated. Similar things apply to other swindles, though in most cases even the government can't prevent you from falling for some e-mail scam to a Nigerian clearing house. Unless, of course, you agree to have them snoop all your incoming e-mail to check for this stuff. I'd hope you understand that that's a pretty stupid of you, though, for giving up your privacy in order to protect yourself from being gullible. Not understanding cost/benefit ratios is a huge socialist mistake. They're always missing the potential costs and focusing on the benefit.

Gun bans, for example, have the intention of reducing violence but in reality remove the deterrent criminals otherwise have against a society that does have them, causing crime to increase. Plus, it makes you defenseless to oppressive government. The utopian allure of creating a "perfect" society where no gun crime exists and everyone can live in peace and trust is what gets them to miss the greater cost incurred that any thinking man would have foreseen.

The Fed is another one. Fractional reserves caused a lot of bank runs in the old days. Instead of banning this practice, they backstopped it with a central bank, but the central bank price fixed interest rates, causing a crash in 29. Further temporary socialist measures turned it into a fifteen year depression, a nuclear explosion compared to the firecrackers of the original problem. Then the FDIC was created. This incentivized a lot of risk and borrowing, which has helped the current problem fester. See how the failure to correctly solve one problem has led to a cascade of "solutions" that create even more problems that beget even more solutions? That's socialism, my friends. It just builds and builds until eventual collapse.

I would say that another socialist mistake you are making is that law enforcement itself is a proper regulatory measure. Not when they're selective, they're not. There is plenty of legislation out there that legalizes something for one industry, but not the other. Banks can loan out money they don't have at interest. Any other industry, and you're thrown in jail for fraudulent lending practices.

LOLskers at your Microsoft argument, too. Who prevents Microsoft from churning out crap? Consumers, mayhaps? People were free to not adopt Windows ME or Vista, and that's exactly what happened, their sales were disappointing for both. Anyone investing in Microsoft don't like failures leading to lost earnings. But Microsoft is smart and continues to sell XP, which is a perfectly good OS even today. But if they currently get any tax credits or subsidies, they shouldn't. No company should have access to forcibly appropriated money, period.

I think the real scary thing about all this, besides the fact that you don't understand it, is that you seem to be implying that a government office operating on forcibly appropriated money is capable of greater efficiency than the private sector. Maybe it comes close for laying pavement and picking up garbage. But in the grander scheme, no. It wasn't the case with Chernobyl and it ain't today, buddy. You take a hell of lot of innovations and products for granted if you believe that.

No pratfalls or over-rated "art". Plus, thinking makes my brain hurt.

*discard