I've been struggling to find the right adjective to use to describe your story, but all I can say is thank you for telling it. It's personal accounts like this that really bring home the effects of war, and this is what happened to the victors!

I admit I don't read much non-fiction, but I hold a very special place in my heart and my life for Spike Milligan's war diaries which, along with the Maus graphic novels, taught me more about the reality of war than I ever wanted to know. Like your story they are so relatable and so full of banality and horror side-by-side that my disgust for the instigators makes it painful to try to see things from their point of view.

I try to eliminate unconscious bias where I spot it, but here I just can't. Unfortunately this disgust also stops me from wanting to learn more.

They're designed to stop people from climbing over, not to entice idiots to flip over them. That said, I bet they either remove or replace them after this....if they don't remove the skate park altogether.
The kind with bent spikes would work well I think, but those cost way more.

Really? With 2 clear angles? With rider using the spikes to lift himself?
If so, Hollywood needs to hire the editor. I'm convinced....but I am watching it on a small screen.

Survival of the fittest. I say, put a spike pit at the bottom. Hard mode engaged.

Here's the study he's talking about in the video: http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1311889?query=featured_home&#Results=&t=articleBackground

It looks like a legitimate study, but being correlational it should be taken with a grain of salt *snare drum, splash cymbal* As corrolation cannot show causation.

They seem to control for various factors like age, cholesterol level and previous hypertension too, so they don't appear to be fudging any results.

Perhaps I could argue they aren't measuring salt intake, but rather sodium excretion, and estimating intake based on urine samples. So there is potentially a huge difference in diet - a lot of the participants were from Asia, where they don't tend to use table salt (they use soy sauce instead) And even though it's still high in sodium, soy sauce could be going through a different process inside the body. (Similar to how sugar doesn't cause an insulin spike when it's in fruit form, but does when it's refined form). It's possible that the salt from soy could be passing through the body rather than settling in the blood stream. I'm just speculating. Or perhaps they are also eating other foods which are protective against moderate salt intake, allowing more of it to be excreted than absorbed.

Either way it's very interesting to me :-)

What I would like to see is a study on foods, rather than ingredients to get a better picture. Because humans don't usually eat individual minerals, and combinations of minerals seem to act differently in the body.


I guess what it's all saying though is if you are healthy, then 3-6g of salt is fine, but once you are at risk of CVD you need to back off in order to reverse the damage. But CVD is of course not the only disease people need to be careful about (although it is the #1 we should be worrying about), but salt also feeds various cancers etc.

why is it always about people with high blood pressure? I have low blood pressure, which at times makes me light-headed, but if I eat a little extra salt, my blood volume increases and everything is cool. So salt isn't "healthy" or "unhealthy". All depends on what your body's needs are. Same with sugar... if your body NEEDS sugar (I.E. after a workout to give a little insulin spike to help absorb protein) then it's healthy, if your body DOESN'T NEED sugar, (I.E. you've been sitting in bed all day playing WOW and want to get a mountain dew) then it will be unhealthy.

@RFlagg

The CBO says medical insurance under Trumpcare will spike about 800% for Trump's core demographic (old, lower income, white people) a few months before the mid terms. He and the Republicans in Congress also want to eviscerate Medicare and Medicaid. How long will their voters stay on that ride?

I suspect in the next three years or so, Republican voters will get a real chance to see what they've been voting for all these years. Tax breaks for the rich, the shaft for everyone else. When cold hard reality hits their personal finances I'm hoping there will be a fundamental shift in American politics.

For that reason alone, Trump may actually end up doing some good for the country.

Has anyone else noticed a sudden spike in unskippable minute long ads on YouTube recently?

I seem to be getting the same ad on everything I watch these days.

I just had a cholesterol spike watching this...

Plymptoons used to freak me the f out. They're still super creepy, as is his animation of the Simpsons couch intro.

First time I ever saw one of his animations was featured in a Spike & Mike animation festival collection (VHS), his shorts about how to kiss LOL. I'm pretty sure they're here on the Sift but I'm lazy. Submit, Ctrl+W, Next.

We really don't have sufficient driver's ed to be throwing down spike strips for cars going over a hundred while driven by the typical pleb.

Typical pleb should be a much better driver before this is a policy.

Otherwise it's more risk of harm than letting the typical pleb speed with his tyres in one piece.

That is, if public safety is a priority. Not saying that it is. Maybe this is a good use case for civilian uav air strikes. A mini hellfire would work well. (sarcastic/cynical comment, yet would not be surprised if in 20 years it becomes reality. "lol").

-scheherazade

Almost there with the skating mechs, just need guns and spikes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhPmmxZQHe0

It's like the public domain kung fu + hilarious CGI and film splices of Kung Pao: Enter the Fist, meets the ridiculous headlining on magazines (at the very end of this clip) from the Spike Jonze/Charlie Kaufman movie Being John Malkovich.

No, I didn't confuse anything. Almost every single country benefits from 'illegal' immigrants as well as regular ones. France, for example, has thousands of illegal immigrants from mostly Islamic countries that provide services to it's mostly aging native population. We benefit no more and no less than any other nation from illegal immigration, as @newtboy mentioned, if you import food products or grow them locally you probably are benefiting from illegal immigration.

As far as your evidence, I hope this will suffice as 'some':

Steven A. Camarota, PhD, Director of Research at the Center for Immigration Studies, in a Jan. 6, 2015 article, "Unskilled Workers Lose Out to Immigrants," available at nytimes.com, stated:

"There are an estimated 11 million illegal immigrants in the country and we also admit over a million permanent legal immigrants each year, leading to enormous implications for the U.S. labor market. Bureau of Labor Statistics data show that there are some 58 million working-age (16 to 65) native-born Americans not working — unemployed or out of the labor market entirely. This is roughly 16 million more than in 2000. Equally troubling, wages have stagnated or declined for most American workers. This is especially true for the least educated, who are most likely to compete with immigrants (legal and illegal).

Anyone who has any doubt about how bad things are can see for themselves at the bureau's website, which shows that, as of November, there were 1.5 million fewer native-born Americans working than in November 2007, while 2 million more immigrants (legal and illegal) were working. Thus, all net employment gains since November 2007 have gone to immigrants."

Jan. 6, 2015 - Steven A. Camarota, PhD

George J. Borjas, PhD, Robert W. Scrivner Professor of Economics and Social Policy at Harvard University, in a Sep./Oct. 2016 article, "Yes, Immigration Hurts American Workers," available at politico.com, stated:

"[A]nyone who tells you that immigration doesn't have any negative effects doesn't understand how it really works. When the supply of workers goes up, the price that firms have to pay to hire workers goes down. Wage trends over the past half-century suggest that a 10 percent increase in the number of workers with a particular set of skills probably lowers the wage of that group by at least 3 percent. Even after the economy has fully adjusted, those skill groups that received the most immigrants will still offer lower pay relative to those that received fewer immigrants.

Both low- and high-skilled natives are affected by the influx of immigrants. But because a disproportionate percentage of immigrants have few skills, it is low-skilled American workers, including many blacks and Hispanics, who have suffered most from this wage dip. The monetary loss is sizable...

We don't need to rely on complex statistical calculations to see the harm being done to some workers. Simply look at how employers have reacted. A decade ago, Crider Inc., a chicken processing plant in Georgia, was raided by immigration agents, and 75 percent of its workforce vanished over a single weekend. Shortly after, Crider placed an ad in the local newspaper announcing job openings at higher wages."

Sep./Oct. 2016 - George J. Borjas, PhD

Vernon M. Briggs, Jr., PhD, Emeritus Professor of Labor Economics at Cornell University, in an Oct. 14, 2010 briefing Report to the US Commission on Civil Rights, "The Impact of Illegal Immigration on the Wages and Employment Opportunities of Black Workers," available at usccr.gov, stated:

"Because most illegal immigrants overwhelmingly seek work in the low skilled labor market and because the black American labor force is so disproportionately concentrated in this same low wage sector, there is little doubt that there is significant overlap in competition for jobs in this sector of the labor market. Given the inordinately high unemployment rates for low skilled black workers (the highest for all racial and ethnic groups for whom data is collected), it is obvious that the major looser [sic] in this competition are low skilled black workers…

It is not just that the availability of massive numbers of illegal immigrants depress wages, it is the fact that their sheer numbers keep wages from rising over time, and that is the real harm experienced by citizen workers in the low skilled labor market."

Oct. 14, 2010 - Vernon M. Briggs Jr., PhD

There are more educated people than I that hold the same opinion, but let me give you an easier to understand, and absolutely true, example. How do I know it is true? When I was a much younger man, I worked for a roofing company. So I lived it.

The company I worked for was owned by a family friend, who had worked for most of his life in the field and had an excellent reputation. However, in the 90's around the time NAFTA was passed and (not related, I hope) illegal immigration spiked in Texas, he began to lose out to other companies. He did some snooping around and found out they were often charging hundreds of dollars less in their estimates than he could possibly offer, at least while still making a profit. He also found out that the two companies that were taking most of his business were staffed with illegal workers, being paid much lower wages than he could give to his legal employees.

Fast forward a year and he was close to declaring bankruptcy. Just like any type of labor where you pay your employees little to nothing comparatively to their compatriots in the same field, you cannot compete fairly. Net result, he was forced to let us go one by one, replacing us with illegals.

Obviously, I moved on, learned a different skill and began to make far more than I would have as a simple laborer. But the fact remains that an entire industry was undermined and radically changed by the inclusion of cheap illegal labor. This will not change if we simply ignore illegal immigration because it is the 'nice' thing to do. What it will accomplish is that young people will slowly find that certain jobs are out of their selection. It also will get worse the more accepted and commonplace illegal immigration becomes. I know for a fact that while I worked at Apple there were entry level support techs that were illegally here. Perhaps you will say that it is a benefit because it would prevent offshoring, but I disagree. What it does is make the working class poorer and doesn't solve the other issues brought about by illegal immigration, such as Emergency Rooms being flooded by people who can't afford insurance. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that it is common to go to the ER and see people stacked like cordwood because they can't refuse patients unless they are a private hospital.

As far as The Jungle, and my statement about it and it's author, I was merely pointing out that as much as you try to put forth that illegal immigrants have a bad life here in the USA, the fact is that we used to treat legal immigrants far worse. Perhaps it was a reach on my part, but it seemed logical at the time.

I doubt we will agree on any of this, but I respect your opinion. I live in a state that has a very large proportion of illegal immigrants, and while you are correct that they are generally not a criminal negative to society, they do have severe effects which I think you are overlooking. I do think that legal immigration policy needs massive change and businesses that exploit the almost slave like labor of illegals to make more profit should be punished severely. In the meantime, when we do catch illegals, they should be deported, not protected by a sympathetic politically motivated law enforcement group.