I'd be interesting if you could take a smart car on those paths. Maybe have a mode that would limit it to 20 miles in a hour and some sort of external light showing that you are in that mode.

FYI a smart car weighs around 1900lbs vs a golf cart at 1000 lbs.

@bobknight33 --

I'm interested in what your thoughts on McCain were in 2008, when he was the Republican candidate for president. If I looked back at your comment history from that era, would you have criticized him in the same ways back then? Were you OK with him being the Republican nominee?

Opinions can legitimately shift over time. But, that's usually a gradual process. If your opinions on McCain shifted radically in a short span of time (since, say, 2016 -- a date I've completely randomly selected for no particular reason), you might want to consider that perhaps some external actor is more responsible for that shift than your own internal feelings.

You are, of course, welcome to your own opinions. However, it seems possible that this one is not precisely "your own". McCain's willingness to break away from groupthink and be a "maverick" was one of the things that people on both side of the aisle respected the most about him.

Did anyone ever confirm he actually ever was funded by a church or had any external benefactors to be cut off from? The articles I looked only ever listed him as claiming to be a missionary, but never did anyone specify it as confirmed nor list any claim to affiliation with any specific organisation.

I'm proving it right now.

I'm sitting down and not sliding all over the place. In order to move, I have to propel myself by some mechanism, such as appendage movement (i.e., contraction and extension of muscle fibers that terminate at more rigid structures, e.g., bones).

Yeah, I'm not seeing how I'd be able to move otherwise, except perhaps by some kind of motion device external to my person.

I don't like to speak in absolutes, though, so I'll still just say I *think* there might be something a little fishy about this video. Maybe.

It's a glock. It has no external safety.

You can always pull the trigger on a charged glock and it will send the striker.

This is why I call B.S. on the idea that glocks have a safety.
Trigger dingle-berries as a primary 'safety' is a retarded concept.
If you can pull the trigger and fires, it isn't safe.

-scheherazade

Possible, but I don't really think so. I think that the Medical minds of the time thought that physical shock, pressure waves from bombing etc. as you described, were a (or perhaps THE) primary cause of the psychological problems of returning soldiers. So the name "shell shock" came from there, but the symptoms that it was describing were psychological and, I think precisely equal to modern PTSD. Basically, "shell shock" became a polite euphemism for "soldier that got mentally messed up in the war and is having difficulty returning to civilian life".

My grandfather was an Army Air Corps armorer during WWII. He went through basic training, but his primary job was loading ammunition, bombs, external gas tanks, etc. onto P-47 airplanes. He was never in a direct combat situation, as I would describe it. He was never shot at, never in the shockwave radius of explosions, etc. But after the war he was described as having mild "shell shock", manifested by being withdrawn, not wanting to talk about the war, and occasionally prone to angry outbursts over seemingly trivial things. Eventually, he started talking about the war in his mid 80's, and here's a few relevant (perhaps) stories of his:

He joined the European theater a couple days after D-Day. Came to shore on a Normandy beach in the same sort of landing craft seen in Saving Private Ryan, etc. Even though it was days later, there were still LOTS of bodies on the beach, and thick smell of death. Welcome to the war!

His fighter group took over a French farm house adjacent to a dirt landing strip / runway. They put up a barbed wire perimeter with a gate on the road. In one of the only times I heard of him having a firearm and being expected to potentially use it, he pulled guard duty at that gate one evening. His commanding officer gave him orders to shoot anyone that couldn't provide identification on sight. While he was standing guard, a woman in her 20's rolled up on a bicycle, somewhat distraught. She spoke no English, only French. She clearly wanted to get in, and even tried to push past my grandfather. By the letter of his orders, he was "supposed" to shoot her. Instead, he knocked her off her bike when she tried to ride past after getting nowhere verbally and physically restrained her. At gunpoint! When someone that spoke French got there, it turned out that she was the daughter of the family that lived in the farm house. They had no food, and she was coming back to get some potatoes they had left in the larder.

Riding trains was a common way to get air corps support staff up to near the front, and also to get everybody back to transport ships at the end of the war. On one of those journeys later in the war, my grandfather was riding in an open train car with a bunch of his buddies. They were all given meals at the start of the trip. A short while later, the track went through a French town. A bunch of civilians were waiting around the tracks begging for food. I'll never forgot my grandfather describing that scene. It was tough for him to get out, and then all he managed was "they was starvin'!" He later explained that he and his buddies all gave up the food that they had to those people in the first town -- only to have none left to give as they rolled past similar scenes in each town on down the line.

When my mother was growing up, she and her brothers learned that they'd better not leave any food on their plates to go to waste. She has said that the angriest she ever saw her dad was when her brothers got into a food fight one time, and my grandfather went ballistic. They couldn't really figure out what the big deal was, until years later when my grandfather started telling his war stories and suddenly things made more sense.


A lot of guys had a much rougher war than my grandfather. Way more direct combat. Saw stuff much worse -- and had to DO things that were hard to live with. I think the psychological fallout of stuff like that explains the vast majority of "shell shock", without the addition of CTE-like physical head trauma. I'd wager that when the docs said Stewart's father's shell shock was a reaction to aerial bombardment, that was really just a face-saving measure to try to explain away the perceived "weakness" of his condition.

Well said. I'm fairly comfortably in "weasel" territory, and I don't bitch about it. Too much. Any more.

Actually, in all seriousness, while I am one of those cynical beaten-down types in terms of how much I care about corporate / management expectations, I do take pride in holding myself to rather higher standards than those external ones. That's a good thing, and it means that I can look myself in the mirror and honestly feel like I'm contributing something real, even if the machine that I'm in is apathetic, highly inefficient, and moderately pointless to begin with.

As (the great) Kurt Vonnegut said, "so it goes."

Also no private insurance companies or banks will touch nuclear developments without state governments taking on the long term "externalities" like waste management and other risks

Nice. They must have built that motor (and trans) with this in mind...dry sump, front pickup, huge external reservoir....or it probably would have seized being vertical that long.
*quality driving

Does it bother any one else to hear politicians and news reporters incorrectly calling things "machine guns," "assault rifles" and "clips?" It makes them look ignorant, just like watching Fox News report on anything scientific.

Machine guns are primarily support weapons for sustained automatic fire. They usually have an active or passive cooling mechanism to prevent the barrel from overheating during sustained fire.

An assault rifle is a rifle which has a select fire mechanism that allows it to switch from semi-auto to burst or full automatic fire. An assault rifle can overheat if fired fully automatic (or even semi-automatic) without letting it cool, which can lead to failure of the weapon (if you can even hold on to it when it's that hot).

A magazine is simply something that holds bullets. Guns can have internal magazines or external detachable magazines. A clip is a mechanism used to load bullets into a magazine.

Corrections :

Lack of mechanical parts is not the reason a bump stock was deemed legal.
(Furthermore, they highlighted 'no automatically functional parts', while they said lack of mechanical parts.)

External attachment also does not disqualify an item from being considered part of a weapon.
For example, it's illegal to attach a foregrip to a pistol (because there are piles of insane gun laws already, making esoteric combinations of parts worth federal prison and 100'000 dollar fines.)

A machinegun is a gun that fires automatically.
Automatically is a mode where more than one shot comes out with 1 trigger pull.
Rate of fire does not define a machine gun.

A bump stock required the operator to trigger the weapon for every shot, which is why it was deemed not an automatic.

-scheherazade

Freedom of religion is independent of civilian armament.
History shows that religious persecution is normal for humanity, and in most cases it's perpetrated by the government. Sometimes to consolidate power (with government tie-ins to the main religion), and sometimes to pander to the grimace of a majority.

Ironically, in this country, freedom of religion only exists due to armed conflict, albeit merely as a side effect of independence from a religiously homogeneous ruling power.



It's true that Catalonians would likely have been shot at if they were armed.
However, likewise, the Spanish government will never grant the Catalans democracy so long as the Catalans are not armed - simply because it doesn't have to.
(*Barring self suicidal/sacrificial behavior on part of the Catalans that eventually [after much suffering] embarrasses the government into compliance - often under risk that 3rd parties will intervene if things continue)

When the government manufactures consent, it will be first in line to claim that people have democratic freedom. When the government fails to manufacture consent, it will crack down with force.

At the end of the day, in government, might makes right. Laws are only words on paper, the government's arms are what make the laws matter.

Likewise, democracy is no more than an idea. The people's force of arms (or threat thereof) is what assert's the people's dominance over the government.



You can say the police/military are stronger and it would never matter, however, the size of an [armed] population is orders of magnitude larger than the size of an army. Factor in the fact that the people need to cooperate with the government in order to support and supply the government's military. No government can withstand armed resistance of the population at large. This is one of the main lessons from The Prince.

Civilian armament is a bulwark against potentially colossal ills (albeit ills that come once every few generations).

Look at NK. The people get TV, radio, cell, from SK. They can look across the river and see massive cities on the Chinese side. They know they have to play along with the charade that their government demands. At the end of the day, without guns, things won't change.

Look at what happened during the Arab Spring. All these unarmed nations turned to external armed groups to fight for them to change their governments. All it accomplished was them becoming serfs to the invited 3rd parties. This is another lesson from The Prince : always take power by your own means, never rely on auxiliaries, because your auxiliaries will become your new rulers.






Below is general pontification. No longer a reply.
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Civilian armament does come with periodic tragedies. Those tragedies suck. But they're also much less significant than the risks of disarmament.
(Eg. School shootings, 7-11 robberies, etc -versus- Tamils vs Sri Lankan government, Rohingya vs Burmese government. etc.)

Regarding rifles specifically (all varieties combined), there is no point in arguing magnitudes (Around 400 lives per year - albeit taken in newsworthy large chunks). 'Falling out of bed' kills more people, same is true for 'Slip and fall'. No one fears their bed or a wet floor.

Pistols could go away and not matter much.
They have minimal militia utility, and they represent almost the entirety of firearms used in violent crime. (Albeit used to take lives in a non newsworthy 1 at a time manner)

(In the U.S.) If tragedy was the only way to die (otherwise infinite lifespan), you would live on average 9000 years. Guns, car crashes, drownings, etc. ~All tragedies included. (http://service.prerender.io/http://polstats.com/?_escaped_fragment_=/life#!/life)






A computer learning example I was taught:

Boy walking with his mom&dad down a path.
Lion #1 jumps out, eats his dad.
(Data : Specifically lion #1 eats his father.)
The boy and mom keep walking
Lion #2 jumps out, eats his mother.
(Data : Specifically lion #2 eats his mother)
The boy keeps walking
He comes across Lion #3.

Question : Should he be worried?

If you are going to generalize [the first two] lions and people, then yes, he should be worried.

In reality, lions may be very unlikely to eat people (versus say, a gazelle). But if you generalized from the prior two events, you will think they are dangerous.

(The relevance to computer learning is that : Computers learn racism, too. If you include racial data along with other data in a learning algorithm, that algorithm can and will be able to make decisions based on race. Not because the software cares - but because it can analyze and correlate.)

(Note : This is also why arguing religion is likely futile. If a child is raised being told that everything is as it is because God did it, then that becomes their basis for reality. Telling them that their belief in god is wrong, is like telling the boy in the example that lions are statistically quite safe to people. It challenges what they've learned.)



I mentioned this example, because it illustrates learning and perception. And it segways into my following analogy.



Here's a weird analogy, but it goes like this :

(I'm sure SJW minded people will shit themselves over it, but whatever)

"Gun ownership in today's urban society" is like "Black people in 80's white bred society".

2/3 of the population today has no contact with firearms (mostly urban folk)
They only see them on movies used to shoot people, and on the news used to shoot people.
If you are part of that 2/3, you see guns as murder tools.
If you are part of the remaining 1/3, you see guns like shoes or telephones - absolutely mundane daily items that harm nobody.

In the 80's, if you were in a white bred community, your only understanding of black people would be from movies where they are gangsters and shoot people, and from the nightly news where you heard about some black person who shot people.
If you were part of an 80's white bred community, you saw black people as dangerous likely killers.
If you were part of an 80's black/mixed community, you saw black people as regular people living the same mundane lives as anyone else.

In either case, you can analytically know better. But your gut feelings come from your experience.



Basically, I know guns look bad to 2/3 of the population. That won't change. People's beliefs are what they are.
I also know that the likelihood of being in a shooting is essentially zero.
I also know that history repeats itself, and -just in case- I'd rather live in an armed society than an unarmed society. Even if I don't carry a gun.

-scheherazade

Interesting stuff, I don't agree with the 'bigger isn't necessarily better' conclusion he came to. Sauropods lasted a good 150 million years, and it took a massive worldwide external extinction event like an asteroid strike to take them out.

Humans have been around in some form for a fair bit less than 200,000 years. Stretching that to apes you can get to 10 million at a push. Even the early primates probably wouldn't have had their break if it weren't for that extinction event a mere 65 million years back.

Come back to me in 3 million generations and I'll ceded the point.

Externally: I'm no hero, I just did what I had to do. I didn't want to chase this guy, I had other things to do.

Internally: FUCK YEEEAAAAAHH! A legit excuse to chase someone on my bike! Best goddamn day ever! I am Batman on a motherfuckin' bike! wooot!

Yeah, and a Democrat shot up a GOP basketball practice after Kathy Griffin {or insert whatever left-leaning public persona you want} made negative / seemingly "violent" comments about Trump / Republicans.

The common thread isn't that trivial nonsense like this video "incited" those people to violence. The common thread is that unhinged idiots that can't differentiate between fiction and reality sometimes do crazy / terrible / violent stuff. The fault lies with said unhinged idiots, not any external entity that they claim influenced them (Trump, Kathy Griffin, Grand Theft Auto / Doom video games, Ozzy Osbourne, whatever).