Not as expensive as I feared, but still not exactly affordable... The locomotive on Amazon is just a tad under $80 USD. We've tried similar and cheaper such things from the art store, meh on those, but they don't seem as detailed as these either.

Incidentally, for those interested, Russian newspapers are reporting that the driver was fleeing the police a few days ago and ended up cornered in the airport. That's when this video started.

He did a reported 6,000,000 rubles damage (almost 100k in USD or EUR) since he damaged the heating system.

The video of the leadup is at the end of this article, but seems so drab without Yakety Sax:
http://therussiantimes.com/news/147636.html

Ok, in the interest of fairness I did some further research on this issue.

He was fined a total of 42,000 dollars. This does not count his accrued court and legal fees which are estimated to be around 100,000 dollars at this time. I won't bother converting that to USD, but he is going to be out of pocket 142k as a ballpark figure.

This is the joke:

“Everyone said he sucked, but I defended him,” Ward says. “They said he was terrible, but I was like, ‘He’s dying but he’s living a dream, leave him alone.’ ” The niceties end when Ward figures out Gabriel isn’t actually dying. “He’s unkillable! I saw him at the water park, and I tried to drown him, but I couldn’t. Then I went on the Internet to figure out what was wrong with him, and you know what it was? He’s ugly, goddammit!”

That is all. He was making a joke that he thought the kid was being given a 'make a wish' type thing because he was dying, but that he was just ugly.

I listened to it and it wasn't really funny. However, it wasn't 142k worth of court costs and damages either. The kid, disability or not, is now a public figure and should not be protected from jokes at his expense. The fact that a comedian called him ugly does not mean he should get 42k in recompense because it made him feel bad. Fuck, if I got 42k every time someone called me ugly in jest, I wouldn't be posting here. I'd be on a damn Yacht in the Mediterranean.

People say hurtful things. How many people looked at this kid and made fun of him when he was trying to sing the Canadian anthem at a Hockey game? Does he deserve 42k from each of them?

One of the talks I listened to as part of this research brought up a salient point. The commission that was created to address hurtful speech has clearly ran out of 'real' hate speech to go after. To save their jobs, they need to start going after the next level of 'hate speech'. Where better to look than blue comedians?

This brings me back to my original point. If you create an organization and give it power to control what people say through punitive measures, it may work great when your group is in power. You will probably have no issue with it, as long as it goes after speech you dislike. But, no group is in power forever and organizations don't just disappear when a new group of leaders come into power. Suddenly you might really come to regret your choice to create that organization, especially when they decide it is 'YOUR' words that need to be penalized.

That said, my only dog in this fight is that I think it is idiotic to limit what people can say. They don't stop saying it, they just stop saying it around people they don't trust. This sows the seeds of dissension and the harvest is never a good one.

Bad Grandpa 2013

Box office: 151.8 million USD
Budget: 15 million USD

Just saying.

Suppress not every kind of economic activity, but the kind of activity that employs people at or near minimum wage.

Minimum wage is not paid by magic, it has to be paid by an employer. If he has to pay too much for labor he will quit (or look for creative solutions in order not to employ people - like robots, illegal immigrants, not paying taxes/insurance, outsourcing, some other form of cheating).

The 30 or 100 USD examples are just to show that there does have to be a sane upper limit. What is that limit? Experts argue, areas differ. Why set a federal limit?

The thumbnail image for this video has been updated - thumbnail added by Mordhaus.

BTW, you can own Bombs/RPGs/Missiles/etc.

Just fill out a form4 to get one transferred to you from a current owner, or a form1 if you wish to make a new one.

If you get a class 7 firearms license, and make sure to make whatever you make available for sale to LEO/military, then you can also make new automatic weapons for yourself (usually by converting semi auto to auto).

You can also own tanks and fighter planes.
There are clubs where folks hang out and drive around in their tanks, and fly around in their fighters, and shoot heavy weapons, etc.

Granted, the expense and paperwork of all of these makes them something only wealthy/organized people can afford. And realistically, anyone who has the cash to play with these sorts of things has his ducks in a row to begin with. (eg. An automatic rifle runs around the 20'000 usd range.) With a median individual income of around 26k per year, practically everyone in the U.S. can't afford such items (or is unwilling to).

Things called NFA items (rockets/artillery/etc) are registered, but not denied. Since AFAIK the mid 1930's, only a dozen NFA item owners have been convicted of a serious crime, and none of those crimes involved any NFA item. Only one shooting involved an automatic weapon, and it was committed by a police officer that lost his mind.

Other than a periodic flashy event like Fla, practically every gun crime is committed by cheap pistols. Crime and lack of wealth go hand in hand. Poor people are less likely to be educated, less likely to be from a stable well adjusted home, more likely to grow up in a strife ridden neighborhood, and less likely to be able to afford more than a cheap pistol. This is why you never hear about rockets/tanks/etc regarding crime - if the typical criminal could afford them, he wouldn't have to be a criminal. Realistically speaking, the U.S. is wealthy as a nation, but as individuals, people are not that well off. Majority of the country lives hand to mouth. TBH, that's the real problem. That's not to do with exceptions/unicorns like Fla - only with the most common/likely case.

As a side note, Swiss civilians are more heavily armed than U.S. civilians. But as a people they have their heads on straighter, so gun attacks are rare.

-scheherazade

@radx

I think you misunderstand the Swiss referendum. It's about preventing banks from creating money through fractional lending, it doesn't restrict the central bank. Typically banks will take in deposits and lend a portion out (keeping a % as a capital buffer), that money then filters through the system and some of if returns as deposits, and the process repeats (hence the term fractional banking).

In effect banks are creating money through lending out more money than otherwise exists. It also means they lend out far in excess of the deposits they have, creating high leverage and meaning even a small level of default can lead to them eating through their capital and insolvency (see US in 2008). The referendum seems to be about effectively preventing fractional lending.

No idea what effect it would have in a country like Switzerland. The country is an exception as it has a relatively small economy but is seen globally as a safe haven currency meaning every time there is a crisis you see the CHF appreciate rapidly (similar to the USD). Naturally that tends to wreck havoc with the economy and exports since the currency value no longer reflects the real economy and is why the central bank has taken various measures to discourage it in the past.

I thought $60k was high, then I realized they were in Australia, so I asked Google to convert: $60,000 AUD = $42,804 USD

still a lot for a lemon, sucks to be him. Definitely go for a Toyota next time.

Thailand's national debt is $147B USD.

QE certainly isn't perfect. Giving liquidity to banks in theory should give them an incentive to loan it out (they earn more by doing that rather than sitting on it or putting it in super safe assets like Treasuries). However, they have generally erred on the conservative tack, partly also because their capital requirements (how much cash/equity they have to sit on) was raised. Companies that have done well and not received bailouts have also hoarded cash rather than invest because of uncertainty around the economy.

Meanwhile stock market valuations have soared because of a lack of other assets to put it in. Many of these cash holdings from corporations and banks have been dumped in Treasuries. This has reduced the return from Treasuries to a miserable amount. Meanwhile commodity prices have also tanked. That pretty much left stocks, which are arguably now inflated in price (and historically overvalued) largely as a result of the QE money handed out to banks.

What oritteropo says is very correct, if any poor or middle class person had opened a brokerage account and dumped their money in an S&P or Nasdaq tracking fund at or near the bottom of the 2009 market, they would have tripled their money or more. The option was certainly available and affordable to anyone.

The problem was that there were arguably limited alternatives. What the Australian government here did, which was far more effective (and completely avoided any recession) is simply gave out cash to everyone. Unlike QE money which just sat around in safe assets this got spent (largely to pay off debts, but this would have to happen anyway and sped up a recovery).

The issue was, this was fiscal policy, and we could easily afford it because we had (and still have) very low debt levels. A country like the UK could not so easily do this, certainly not many of the troubled European countries. The US arguably could have because with the USD being such a crux global currency, there is virtually no chance it would have led to a currency crash or brought about serious worries about being able to service their debt levels (even if they are high).

about 8k usd in price. I wonder if the metal engraver actually does work in a cathedral library

@Jerykk

I'll address by paragraph.

(1)

Wait, so I'm confused. Not enough research on my claim yet the death penalty apparently offers guaranteed results despite evidence to the contrary that I suggested?

Firstly I think you might be trying to make a bit of a straw man. I'm not saying that there should be no penalty. Some penalty obviously discourages some crime. But the argument is more over whether harsher sentences and mandatory minimums as this video discusses are helping, which I would argue they are not for the reasons outlined previously.

As for evidence of rehabilitation reducing recidivism, take for example:

http://ijo.sagepub.com/content/12/1/9.refs (see PDF)

Page 1
Finland, Norway and Sweden all have ~50-70 locked up per 100K, among the lowest. US has 716.

Page 2-3
Norway recidivism - 20%
US recidivism - 52%

I await your evidence to the contrary.

(2)

I'm talking per capita. Per capita the US certainly does have the highest among first world countries.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate#By_country

Sort by per capita and find me a developed country higher than the US please.

Russia is not a first-world country (that's actually a Cold War term, more correctly not a a developed country). I'm Russian, I assure you, I would know

Russia's GDP/capita is $14K USD, versus the US's $52K. Not even a close comparison.

(3)

But do criminals proportionalise justice? Like I asked, do you think anything but a small minority (likely white collar criminals) accurately know the likely sentence of a crime before they commit it? If they don't what's the purpose of making them more severe?

Nobody is proposing there be no penalty. Even Scandanavian prisons are a penalty. The question is, does the threat of 30 over 15 years locked up (should they even be able to decipher legal code to know this) actually make a difference? I would argue not, hence the argument for harsher sentences is illogical.

People are generally good at gauging the likelihood of being caught (ie your pirating example) but that's not what I was talking about (the scale of punishment being a deterrent).

(4)

I don't think what you're proposing is practical or logical. No society is going to accept the death penalty as a punishment for speeding. It's an irrelevant argument to make.

Again, why the need for elaborate ideas never before attempted? Why not just adopt a model that has already worked, such as the Scandinavian one? It seems like you're trying to wrap your mind around a solution that fits your preconceived notion of incentives and no government assistance like I suggested in my first post.

(5)

Venezuela is a developing country. Crime is largely a result of economic mismanagement by Chavez leading to joblessness and civil unrest.

There are plenty of countries with which to compare the US with. Obvious choices would be Australia or the UK. Anglo-Saxon countries, similar culture, comparative income/capita. Or really any European country. Your comparison would suggest tp me you're trying to stretch your argument to fit.

I've built just this device, but far better for $800-$1200 USD max, and this was around 2005.

It can be difficult to build these, but my experience doing so is almost a decade old (fuck you, time!). Despite that, this person is clearly selling the construction quality over the technical ability. As far as building your all-inclusive emulation box, especially considering the world today, the difficulty of doing such is negligible.

Open up your wallet for this one. Apparently it costs 4800 Euro (~$6500 USD).