Kingpin was a great villain, but I'm not sure I'd call him empathetic. You certainly see a human side to him, but he doesn't have any kind of goal the audience can get behind.

In fact, it's the disconnect between the urbane, kind man he is with his girlfriend and the ruthless, sadistic monster that makes him interesting.

Flooding, in particular, could also be a symptom of poor drainage due to urban development as much as climate change. Possible more-so tbh.

We have better evidence of a warming climate, and indeed that it's our fault without needing to point to, err, the weather. Still, record breaking weather is what we expect from a warming cllimate, because, you know, when things change stuff happens that didn't happen so much before.

Better urban planning could ease some of the ambient noise in cities.

American Christianity is extreme because it's a business. Is it any surprise that the US excels at selling the "Christianity" product? Lifestyle marketing is our specialty and religion provides the ultimate product for building Brand Identity.

Apple
Anthropologie
Urban Outfitters
Focus on the Family
Saddleback Church

Christianity in the US sells an identity to its followers. When done right, it's a carefully tuned brand that collects profits in both money and power.

In the finest tradition of religion.

Am I old because I had to look up the Urban Dictionary definition of "Albatraoz" to fully understand the message she was trying to get across?

Dredd's been one of my favorite flicks of all time, ever since @enoch recommended it to me. Urban and Headey played their parts disturbingly well.

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

Stockley was caught on camera retrieving and planting the gun, which only had his DNA on it.
He was acquitted today with the judge commenting "Finally, the Court observes, based on its nearly thirty years on the bench, that an urban heroin dealer not in possession of a firearm would be an anomaly."

It seems clear that, in this judges opinion, it's open season on accused drug dealers, armed or not. He should probably move to the Philippines with that attitude, where they approve of murdering the accused.

Rewatch the video, when it starts the light is green.

-The time on the video is 1 second in when the light turns yellow
-His speed at that time is 54km/h, default speed limit in Canada in urban centers is 50km/h but plenty of stretches are 60km/h, decent odds his 5k under versus over.
-The time on the video when his front wheel hits the stop line is 3 seconds.


From that we can say the time from the light turning yellow, to him reaching the point he needed to stop was 2 seconds. At 50km/h, lets work out the distance. 50 km/h works out to 13.9m/s, so the moment the light went yellow he was maybe 28metres from the stop line.

Australian government says that dry road stopping distance for a family car at 50km is 35m. Now, sometimes a bike can perform better braking, sometimes it can perform worse, but it doesn't seem that it's obvious a biker should be able to stop in 28m the instant a light goes yellow, seems that passing through is not only prudent, but quite likely the only option that physics allows.

https://www.qld.gov.au/transport/safety/road-safety/driving-safely/stopping-distances/graph

Or when you're on a motorcycle actually follow the rules of the damn road?

Yellow means stop if it's safe. He had tons of room to stop and decided to hit the gas instead. LOS doesn't matter, he was the one breaking the law, yellow light is the left turner's chance to turn.

Guy was being a prick and then complains about the other guy's driving.

There's a reason the majority of organ donations come from motorcyclists.

Also, missed this the first time round. He's in an urban area doing 60. So on top of running the light, he's speeding!

Waaaaah?

This video gets so many things wrong it is truly cringe-worthy.

The country has been covered by vending machines since the 1960s--long before there were problems with an aging population and birthrates. The primary reason for vending machines being installed everywhere is, surprise, convenience! Who wants to go to the store and stand in line to buy a drink when you can just go downstairs from your apartment and grab one from outside your front door?

Another thing to consider is that Japan late at night basically completely shuts down--even in major cities like Tokyo the trains stop running around 1AM or so and won't start again until 5AM. Nowadays their are 24-hour convenient stores on practically every other urban street corner but back when vending machines first started getting installed nothing was open late besides bars. If you caught the last train home from work and wanted to buy a coke or something on your walk back from the station you were SOL. Vending machines helped solve that problem.

Which brings us to another point--VERY few Japanese people in urban areas commute by car. Mass transit is fast and efficient and a huge number of people just walk/bike everywhere. Since there is so much foot traffic vending machines make total sense, especially in the summer when temperatures are going to rise into the mid-90s (30+ degrees Celsius) with high humidity and people who are walking/biking are going to get thirsty pretty damn quick.

Another thing he gets wrong is that retailers are not the ones primarily profiting off of vending machines: land owners are. Either they purchase and stock the machines themselves (thereby keeping all the profits) or they make a contract with the retail company in which the company stocks and services the machine but compensates the landowner for use of the space.

Oh, almost forgot something not mentioned in the video--the low crime rates. Another reason for the proliferation of vending machines is that whoever puts them out can be reasonably sure they won't be damaged, defaced, or robbed.

Finally, while he is right that credit cards are not as big here as in, say, the U.S., e-money is huge. And all of the newer vending machines produced in the last few years will take either cash or e-money, such as Suica or Pasmo cards.

By the way, all of this information that I've posted here is available from a simple Google search and there have actually been several articles written on vending machines in Japan over the last couple of years. It's like this guy just came over here and tried to guess why there were so many vending machines around....

So clean up your drains with boiling salt water? That's enough to make me question everything -in- this video. I'd suspect it all of being just a collection of urban myths.

Serious contender for comment of the month over at NC. Excerpt:

Flyover people and the uncomfortable urban poor fight the never-ending wars. We provide commodities like food and coal and oil and metals. We provide cheap labor. Comfortable people have decided that most of us aren’t really needed. Immigration, free trade, and automation have made us redundant but we’re not going away. At least we’re not going away fast. Flyover people and the uncomfortable urban poor have no real place in establishment Democratic or Republican thinking. We are the establishment’s problem and the establishment is our problem.

*ban
Urban Gameplay
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bz6qU76uUlE

Yeah, I don't buy it. Most nearly everyone, especially in urban areas and even more especially so around ATM machines have massive danger zones/spheres. That guy would have felt/heard that guy's presence when he was walking up. And who reads shit on the ATM that isn't on the screen, anyway? No one.