As a layman observer, I would argue the root of problems with segregated neighbourhoods, schools and racism in general is inequality. I suspect racism is primarily driven not by some kind of eugenic notion of superiority as in the past, but simply the perception that black people are on more likely to be involved in criminal behaviour because they are on average poorer.

Until you take redistributive actions to give disadvantaged people (and those policies can simply target people in poverty, not by race) more opportunities, the imbalance in wealth / income will persist, and so will the bias towards living in separate suburbs, sending children to separate schools not to mention employment biases. As it is, there is a regressive, vicious cycle of poorer education, weaker job prospects leading people into the informal / illegal economy.

As a (slightly retired) fencer I love this, but I'd say a couple of things about the description.

The 'whap on the back' needs to apply 500g of pressure for 15ms in order to count. The time rule came in a while back to discourage 'flicking' - that exact problem.

The idea of dropping someone 'before he strikes back' is central to the roots of foil (fleuret in the video) and sabre. Essentially, if your opponent is attacking you have to parry them as a priority. The foil was traditionally the practice weapon which prioritised blows to vital areas, and defence over attack. Unfortunately, this also makes them very hard to follow if you don't know what you're watching.

Great video though. Makes me want to pick up a weapon again. Feel free to imagine some tragedy that made me swear never to fence again.

@eric3579, I agree with you. Hillary's reputation took a big hit after the DNC Leaks broke during the convention.

@newtboy, here's how I think of the campaign. (Please pardon me for this silly fable. I just kinda got writing and my creative side just sorta took over, and I just kinda had fun with it.)

.. ..

As the primary campaign advanced it was clear that Scissors was the front runner in the Rep's side. Unless something changed drastically, he would be become the nominee.

On the Dem’s side, the race was not yet decided. Rock was behind, but not by much. He was quickly closing in on Paper’s lead. Rock was hoping that his strategy of being consistent over time would prevail and win him votes. In the beginning Paper had taken off an airplane. Laughing at how slow Rock was to gain speed. But now Paper’s once comfortable head start was being called into question. Could Rock’s momentum grow fast enough to overtake her?

Paper had gone through extensive planning (on paper) long before the election. Paper wanted to keep news of Rock from reaching the voters. The idea as was to keep Rock "covered over" to the point that many of voters just didn't know about him. They just saw the old familiar name of "Paper" on the ballot and went with that. They had little or no exposure to Rock.

Rock was on a roll, and it was clear that it was gathering no moss.

Since so many voters relied on “traditional” media for information, it wasn’t too difficult to keep pro-Paper ads on the radio, and television, and in newspapers. It was expensive, but Paper seemed to have an unlimited supply of money to fund the campaign. It was almost like Paper had bought the press...

Though Rock started to break through into the areas that Paper had been dominant, the Strategy worked. Rocks downhill momentum wasn’t able to fully catch Paper’s airplane—head-start.

Paper would win the primary and go on to face Scissors in the general.

But at the Democratic Candidate Coronation Ceremony, something terrible happened!

It turns out that someone was keeping a paper-trail on Paper’s dealings. Paper had written many correspondences, and many of those letters had reached the hands of Wikileaks, which had finally chosen to publish the secrets!

The strategies Paper had used to ensure victory over Rock—the Cover-Up Campaign—were revealed. The fundraising done by The Paper Foundation to keep money flowing around laws were becoming clear.

And each week and new secret seemed to drip onto Paper’s hat…

What happens next? We don’t know. There are so many questions! Could a boat float if made of Panama Papers? How deep will the leaks get? What other secrets will be revealed before the final election? Will Paper win over former Rock supporters now that the reality of the Cover-Up-Campaign had been uncovered? Who will win the final election? Can Paper beat Scissors?

Could Scissors have been secretly helping Paper out behind the scenes out of a fear of facing Rock? Could Paper have been helping Scissors in the early parts of his primary campaign out of a fear of facing Ben Carson?

Tune in again for out next episode of House of Cards I mean Rock-Paper-Scissors to find out!

//

//

Okay, I hope you read that with in the lighthearted voice it was intended. And I’m not hiding my bias. This story was mostly about Paper—who (at first) I thought would be a fine second choice.

(I was rooting for Rock the whole time! I liked they way he rolled!)

Trump was Scissors: Wouldn't hesitate to cut his opponents with his uh.. 'wit.'
Sanders was Rock: Consistent over time. (Not blown around by the wind)
Hillary was like Paper: Thin, like her integrity.

I would never down vote a video like this simply because it offends my knowledge of math and logic and irritates the hell out of me. These kind of problems have been coming my way on facebook repeatedly and they do get huge numbers of comments with wildly different solutions. Actually out of the 500,000 comments claimed for this one probably half of them give 42 as the answer. My problem comes from the assumption that an algebraic variable represented by a symbol (an image of a boot) bears some inherent relationship to a different symbol (two boots). Even if you make that leap that two boots is two separate variables, if there is no operand between them they should be multiplied, not added. In algebra a term such as 3AB equals 3 times A times B not 3+A+B. Unfortunately in this problem with two horseshoes equaling 4 it works either way but if two boots equals 2 then one should equal the square root of two and the correct solution would be 21.414.

Karl Rove has whiteboards - plural - detailing her health situation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqAiRRVLdHc

I've never understood what this gambit is supposed to pay off in. Do whackjobs believe that Democrats will think - 'well, Hillary might not be long for this world, so I'll vote Trump'? Any president is better than a corpse?

Or do they just want to bolster Trump-trooper spirits? Are they afraid the grass roots will lay down their arms if they don't have at least a remote hope of winning?

Bob - you speak for the whackjobs of the world; what do you say?

I know you were making a joke -- and I loved your last line.

I just wanted to say that "boys don't cry" is an example of the horrible sexism that men are subjected to from childhood onward. I honestly believe that so much "toxic masculinity" is rooted in this oppression of the range of human emotions that is forced on men all their lives.

Don't want to poop on your joke, so I came over here to say this.

What men are subjected to is soul-crushing, I swear.

That was quite good and it should be chilling. We think that defeating Trump by a 60% margin will be enough to keep the anger down without addressing the root causes, but what we don't realise is that Trump is just a vehicle for the anger. Someone else could easily take his place.

Excellent, but also reminded me how i'd rather have root canal than listen to Limp Bizkit.

labor unions?

Guess the labor unions and the Democratic party are doing a a great job. All those fancy paying union jobs. All those nice cars, neighborhoods, educated enlighten children and grand children .

Really, Unions are the root reason for blacks to pool to the Democratic side? I don't think so.

But it really doesn't matter.. Time has bear out -- over the last 60 years the Democrat party has done little to lift their black constituents towards to middle class.

You are right it is about political power, people be damned, and black Americans have gotten the short end of the stick.

More that willing to discuss.

What is the root causes of race inequality of blacks in America?




Also:
Are you saying the following is not true?
A police officer is 18 times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a cop.


Over the last decade, black males made up 40 percent of all cop killers, even though they're six percent of the population.

from
Heather Mac Donald Book: The War on Cops.

Really highlights the false narrative of Bernie being ego driven.

"When oh when will he endorse Hillary?" Aren't you listening? Sometime after the platform is written. He was always about education and pushing the Dems left.

I hadn't heard about the Postal Banking bit. I've been rooting for that ever since I heard about the struggles of some low income people.

Now let's git 'er done!

I think corn would be doable, but the advantages would be less efficient compared to short plants.

At some level of efficiency, there is a break even point (which can also take into consideration shipping costs and fossil fuel usage to major metro areas). I'm pretty convinced that vertical farming could be a significantly good / efficient idea for those plants that it is best suited for, but I do think there would be some early-adoption issues that would make it less practical for tall stuff like corn. At least until it has been done enough to work out the kinks and economy of scale kicks in.

So at least for the time being, I think we'll see it first be applied to leafy plants and tuber / root plants. But I could definitely be a biased opinion since my family revolves around conventional corn farming on irrigated fields...

Good questions. My family operates farms for wheat and corn, and I've been involved in that process, so I can take a stab at answering the last bit:

Corn stalks get quite tall -- 6 feet / 2 meters or so. Each stalk usually has 1 or 2 ears of corn. On our farm, the experience I had suggests that each plant needs quite a lot of healthy leaves for Photosynthesis as well as quite a lot of available ground water. Irrigated corn often produces 2-3 times as many bushels per acre as compared to "dryland" / non-irrigated corn.

So the issues I can see potentially clashing between corn production and vertical farming are:

1) You'd have a greater space requirement for layers of corn since you'd need probably 8-10 feet per layer, as compared to what looks like 2-3 feet per layer for leafy vegetables in the video. Approximately one story per layer wouldn't allow for the massive footprint savings like in leafy plants without getting extremely tall, which would be expensive for water pumping etc.

2) Corn root systems are pretty deep to support a tall and relatively bulky stalk. Getting that to bite into a thin layer of fabric / recycled plastic to provide structural support for the plant would be difficult. I think you'd need to have a thicker bottom layer *and* to manually place further support lines on the stalks as the plants grow, which would get very labor intensive and therefore expensive.

3) The vertical nature of a corn stalk suggests that the overhead motion of the sun might be pretty important for getting light exposure onto all of the leaves. Fixed overhead lights might mean that the top leaves get plenty of light but the ones lower on the stalk would be shaded by those above and get nothing -- which isn't a problem if the sun progresses through low angles at sunrise/set to overhead at noon throughout a day. So you might have to have lighting that hits from all sides to account for that with corn, which would again add expense.

4) To maximize the output, corn needs a LOT of water. Pumping that up the vertical expanse to get lots of levels could easily get problematic. Corn will grow without optimal / abundant watering, and their misting system would likely be more efficient than irrigating to add ground water, but the main benefit of vertical farming seems to be high output in a small land footprint on the ground. So without LOTS of water, you'd be limiting that benefit.


So basically, my guess is that vertical farms are a fantastic idea for squat, spread out plants like lettuce, but a lot of the advantages disappear when you're talking about something tall like corn. I could easily be wrong about any/all of that though.

Muslin religion is the root cause of this mass killing. The gun is just a means of accomplishing the objective.

Be afraid of this true religion of hate and buy a gun to defend your self.

I have never heard of a case where simple indigence, or inability to "manage one's own financial affairs" was enough to remove their firearms....indeed, not managing one's financial affairs doesn't seem to be what the law intends or specifically says. Managing one's "affairs" is not the same as being good with money. Maybe it's been misused that way, but not that I've heard of, and that's not the kind of thing the NRA usually keeps quiet about. Lacking the mental capacity to contract or manage one's own affairs is completely different from being unable to pay your bills, and seems to require a mental evaluation to prove you aren't even lucid enough to hire someone to manage them for you. That is FAR from just being poor, it's being mental to the point where you can't even tell that you're poor or ask for help managing your finances....and I agree, if you are that far from lucid, you should not have deadly weapons of any kind.


OK, as I said, training makes ACCIDENTAL MISUSE of firearms LESS likely, not impossible, but more important, it lends credence to any charges because ignorance can't be an excuse for misuse if you've been trained.

I also don't know stats on accidental discharge, accidental misuse, intentional misuse, and intentional (but improper) discharge. I must think that improperly securing the weapon is one of the major root causes of accidents, because then completely untrained people (usually kids, but not always) get hold of them and misuse them.