This brings up some interesting points.

What is an "assault rifle"? My grand-dad's 303 bolt action rifle was used to fight Germans in the war. It was an "assault rifle". Yet I don't believe this is what you mean. Do you mean AR-15s or similar? The AR in AR-15 stands for Armalite Rifle. It was a select fire gun (capable of automatic fire). The civilian version is semi-automatic. It isn't an "assault rifle" but you could use it as one. You can use any gun as an assault weapon if you so choose to designate it for that purpose.

You may not need a semi-auto for deer hunting, but hunting doesn't end with one animal. Going duck hunting - it's much easier with a semi-auto and 6 round versus a 2 round break action. Going on a pig hunt (for animal destruction). You'll want a semi-auto with a high capacity magazine.

What about home defense? You most certainly DO need a semi-auto long gun. If you choose a pistol over a long gun then you are putting yourself at a massive disadvantage - and the whole point of using a tool to defend yourself is to give yourself an advantage over the aggressor.

Should a gun be harder to get in the USA? In my opinion yes. It should be harder. Whether that is by making ownership of some firearms dependent on being an active member of a club (where the club has the requirement to be each other's keeper) or stopping unvetted second hand sales or some other solution or combination thereof, I don't know the answer. But the two suggestions I've put here are a really good start. Along with a storage onus (don't properly store your firearm and it gets used in a crime - you get a BIG fine). Basically I believe there are plenty of solutions that won't infringe on an American's 2nd amendment rights to acquire and own a firearm.

Appears to be kind of a cover of a video released by a German danceband called Captain Jack

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8fgYXiZmAU

@noims -- My grandfather had about 10 war stories that he rotated through telling, pretty much exclusively after one of my uncles "broke the dam" by asking him to recall things as they were at the Oshkosh air show standing next to a P-47 airplane like he had worked on.

By the time that happened, my grandfather was in his 80's and in very good physical and mental shape (cattle rancher that did daily work manhandling heavy feed bags around, etc.) but had a quirky personality because he was 90%+ deaf. I don't think that was a result of the war, hearing problems seem to run in the family.

Anyway, he frequently used those hearing problems as an excuse for not having to interact with people. He had hearing aids, but he'd turn them off most of the time and just ignore people. I think some of that was being an introvert, and some was probably lingering "shell shock" / PTSD effects. But overall he really adjusted back to civilian life just fine. Got a degree in education on the GI Bill and taught and coached basketball to High School students, then worked as a small-town Postmaster, and eventually retired to work the ranch. I don't think any of us in his family, including his wife and children, thought of him as being "impaired" by the mental effects of the war. But it was clear that some of what he experienced had a very deep, lifelong effect on his outlook.


I wrote out the 3 stories of his above because they seemed to be the ones that had the most emotional impact on him. To me, it was interesting that a lot of stuff outside of combat hit him the hardest. He also had more traditional "war stories" stuff about victories and bravery, like when his unit captured / accepted the surrender of a young German pilot in a Bf-109 who deserted to avoid near certain death from flying too many missions after the handwriting was on the wall that the allies were going to win. But by far, he got more choked up about the other stuff like having to knock that French girl off her bike and seeing starving civilians and being unable to help them much.

Like you said, more banal stuff side-by-side with or against a backdrop of horror. I think it's pretty much impossible to imagine what those sorts of experiences in war are really like and what being in those situations would do to us mentally. And then WW2 in particular just had a massive impact on the entire generation. Basically everybody back home knew multiple people that went away and never came back. Then when some did come back, they were clearly different and yet reluctant to talk about what happened. Pretty messed up time to live through, I guess.

Semites are a 'race'. Chosen professions aren't.

But ignoring that as you do....
Did Jewish leaders often come out publicly and explain how it's OK for any Jew to lie to Germans? No? Then not the same.
Did Jewish leaders stand in a wall to protect clear abusers and murderers from justice? No? Then it's not the same.

Again, professions aren't races, for the reasons listed above.

Calm down and look at it rationally. You people are triggered and being irrational.

Also, thanks for acknowledging you're mistakes and lack of reasoned points, and handing me the debate "win" by invoking Nazis. Conversation over, you threw in the towel.

The second part is not quite accurate as some people more than others are able to more easily adapt and pick up the new sounds of other languages. I know a German who can do flawless American and British English accents (attested to by other Americans and Brits). And some people are able to accurately replicate accents they are consistently exposed to (most millennials in Australia can do perfect American accents due to the exposure of American TV here that they have grown up with).

Interesting addition - in the dubbed German version of "Sledge Hammer" the gun actually has a name - Susi.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'music, comedy, politics' to 'neo magazin, trump, wilders, nationalism, refugees, pride, stereotype, german, 2016' - edited by Eklek

They're preparing for the next time the Germans show up uninvited.

Counter-rotating propellers sparked my curiosity when I first saw them on a British Seafire Mk46 at a flight show in the early nineties.

So my amateur's answer would be that it's about the problem of turning the engine's power into thrust. With increasing power, you can either increase the propeller's RPM or its area. So you either a) spin it faster, b) increase its diameter, c) use a more favourable blade geometry, d) add more blades.

a) and b) both lead to blade tips moving faster, and once they approach the speed of sound, wave drag sets in and ruins your day. b) also runs into issues in terms of ground clearance. Thus the Kim Jong-un blades on planes like the An-70: short and fat.

c) is rather difficult to do in terms of manufacture -- that's why more pronounced blade shapes are a relatively recent development.

d) on a single propeller decreases the efficiency of each blade as it passes through the previous blade's vortex. That's why, for instance, German planes in WW2 almost exclusively relied on 3-bladed propellers with increasing blade size, whereas Supermarine went to four and even 5 blades rather quickly. You can work the issue to a certain degree by modifying the blade geometry, thus the 8 blade props on a modern A400M.

Adding more blades by adding another propeller gets around d), although the aft prop still loses efficiency compared to the front prop. On the other hand, counter-rotating props massively reduces problems with torque, which can be rather horrendous for single engine prop planes. The Bf 109, for instance, is (in)famous for being difficult during take-off as it pulls to the side quite violently.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'anhydrite, groundwater, gypsum, geology, hydrology, german, town, tom scott' to 'anhydrite, groundwater, gypsum, geology, hydrology, geothermal drilling, tom scott' - edited by Eklek

Your video, The German Town That's Literally Breaking Apart, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

@JustSaying and @draebor --

I was aware of the ban on Nazi symbols / flags / etc. in Germany, and (wrongly) assumed that meant that the country was just kind of trying to "gloss over" that part of history; not talk about it in schools, etc. A sifter (can't remember who offhand) set me straight a few years ago.

However, this does remind me of a thought that I had then: what about piracy?

Any games featuring Nazis have to be heavily edited to get a legal German release. But are there any extra considerations for piracy, or even people that buy the original versions of such games outside of the country and them bring them in?

The internet is really ramping up the speed of globalization, and it seems like it would be essentially impossible to enforce the ban on Nazi imagery in the digital realm. The best a government can hope to control such things is to try to keep them out of the mainstream. But the world is full of examples of failures to control such things -- lots of cracks in the Great Firewall of China, El Paquete in Cuba, etc.

So I'm curious if Germany even makes any attempt to add any additional measure to try to prevent piracy of media containing those things, and/or circumventing region-blocked access to such things in legitimate distributors like Steam.

https://twitter.com/HerthaBSC_EN/status/919199084354949120

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/early-lead/wp/2017/10/14/german-soccer-team-takes-a-knee-before-bundesliga-game-for-a-tolerant-berlin/

In open warfare of govt vs people, drones don't matter, just like jets don't matter. I already covered this above.



Nowhere is an oppressive dictatorship - until it is.
[redacted]
I feel like people are too distracted with instagram and other B.S. to bother learning about how the world works.
History is long. The current peace is an anomaly. When things go bad, there is little warning. If you're lucky, a year or so of build up. If you're not lucky, weeks or days. Shit likes to spiral.
In bad times, you have only what you have on hand.


Most western countries with [regardless of gun ownership] don't have a population that's F'd in the head.
Nothing stops a German gun owner from taking his AR15 and shooting up a concert.
Storing his guns in a safe that he can open doesn't mean anything.
Paying for a new license card for every few guns doesn't alter the guns.

Gun laws, as proposed, are fluff. Nothing that makes people safer, nothing that prevents ownership, but plenty to crap on collectors.
* 10 round limit = 2 second pause to reload
* Gun show loophole is a misnomer.
* (re. above) Only private sales (gun show or not) don't require checks - but you still end up in court if the buyer does something bad.
* Assault weapons ban only bans pistol grips and threaded barrels. Cosmetics. Just google "California compliant AR15" (they already have a de-facto AWB).
* There's already laws against straw purchase.
* There's already laws against crazy people buying (already part of the background check)
* Registration is pointless as gun control. Doesn't alter the guns or who has them (background check already tells gov who, when, and where bought a gun).

(I'd sooner vote for mandatory roll cage and 6 point harness in every car. Could eliminate 90+% of car fatalities in one rule - if people cared enough.)


By the way, gun owners hate people like the Vegas shooter even more than anti-gunners hate people like him.
Precisely because assholes like that shooter make anti-gunners turn on their frustration on innocent gun owners.

The call to "do something" is the phrase that perfectly describes the sentiments that led to actions, that in turn became described by either "famous last words" or "the road to hell is paved with good intentions".





We had shit health insurance before Obama. We had shit insurance during Obama (only you're required by law to buy it, even if it's not a good value), we continue to have shit health insurance during Trump, and no matter what trump does, it will still be shit.
Problem is that the insurance company lobbyists draft the language of the law (no matter the party in charge), and it's not for our benefit.





Re. Minorities, most are living normal lives. The white eutopia that the few vocal people complain about, doesn't exist. At least I have yet to see it. Don't let a few thousand people in a nation of millions guide your thoughts about overall social norms.

I'm happy to see them protest. Frankly, I wish white people had the same solidarity that black people have. When a black gets shot by a cop, they come together. When a white is shot by a cop, other whites say "he probably deserved it". I wish the black community good luck and success.





Yes, I wish we weren't jailing more people than anywhere else on the planet, over things that harm nobody.
I wish we had the drug laws of Portugal (decriminalization)
I wish we had the legal system of Sweden (no jail before conviction).

Know how I said that most countries don't have as many people that are F'd in the head? Same applies for people in government.
None of this shit will get fixes.
Republicans are bible thumping retards that funnel money to defense contractors and campaign donors.
Democrats are buck-passing censors that funnel money to insurance companies and campaign donors.
And people just pick a team and bark at the other team, while each gets fleeced by their very own side.

-scheherazade

"And if you prefer one or the other, I can adapt. Humans are good at that. ;-) "

No, they're not. Or did you miss the part where some of the smartest people on the planet crashed millions of dollars into another planet? People are TERRIBLE at these kinds of things. One conversion? Fine. Ten conversions? No problem. Hundreds, thousands or millions of conversions? The probability of error tends to 100%.

It would definitely be more efficient if everyone used one common language (especially for cross cultural endeavours such as business and engineering). In fact, that kinda happens by default and that language tends to be English.

However, there are practicalities in play. First up, there aren't just two languages, there are hundreds, and there is a broad split in the number of speakers of each language. Whereas in metric v imperal, the US is the ONLY country in the developed world that hangs onto imperial.

Second, learning a new language is an order of magnitude more work than changing to using metric.

I'm speaking from experience here; in the course of my life, I've studied Irish, French, German, Spanish and Japanese, and I am in no way close to fluent in any of them

On the other hand, when I left Ireland, it was officially metric but imperial was still common (distances were in KM, speed limits in miles, people used imperial weights for humans, metric for food). When I moved to NZ, everything is metric, and honestly, relearning happens without effort. Once you immerse yourself, you eventually just start thinking in the new system.


Finally, metric is just a better system for everything. There isn't a single scenario where imperial is a more useful measurement.

Come on America, join us. It's awesome and you don't really want to use "English" units, do you? Did you fight a war to get rid of them? What would George Washington say!? It's unamerican, I tells ya!