Should upgrade to 6pt harnesses...

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

Har har har.

I went through every calculus class my uni offered, so not so much.

Mayhaps I didn't explain the example given in enough length. The simple operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication, division all have a single correct answer. Insisting that students find multiple methods of performing those operations and demonstrate multiple different learning methods for them is mental masturbation. You could spend that same time actually moving on to the more advanced stuff that is supposed to 'in theory' prepare them for.

Another example was solving a double digit multiplication problem like 37*86. The marking example showed a student using the old school vertical method and showing their work to arrive at the correct answer. The provincial grading system declared that as WRONG. The student was 'falling back' on the algorithm and should have demonstrated the use of multiple methods of solving the problem. That is idiocy.

Basic add/subtract/multiply/division isn't MATH it's arithmetic and it's a basic operation with a single answer and so long as you use a correct method to arrive at the correct answer you are good to go. Teach students that foundation and then move on to teaching them actual MATH. Read through our provincial curriculum, they are STILL teaching add/subtract/multiply/division at the Grade 11 level in the curriculum on the premise that students are still 'mastering' something that should've been a given by junior high.

maybe he was afraid of heights....

or part of an OSHA class on the proper use of step ladders...
I mean, face it - he didn't have a harness, he didn't have rope to tie off and secure the ladder, he didn't have the proper barriers to keep pedestrians from walking under the ladder. If OSHA caught him using the ladder without the proper safety equipment, they could have shut down the whole facility and fined them $100,000.

The video of someone trying to put a harness on kittah might actually be more entertaining than this one. And will almost certainly be NSFW.

no harness? bad kittah

He would have fallen right out the bottom of his harness to his death. There was nothing holding him in but the 'vest' part, no anti-submarine strap, no leg straps, nothing.

She was probably ok with a harness, but probably made her displeasure with a helmet very... obvious...

There is actually an argument that our brains are three due to the way the frontal cortex works. (not the "triune brain" which is a different idea)

The frontal part can exercise control over the two hemispheres and is about as close as we have gotten to identifying where free will comes from. Certainly, in people who have had frontal brain damage there appears to be a direct link to lack of impulse control.
Almost every serial killer in history appears to have had some manner of frontal brain trauma at some stage in their lives and the link to delinquency is fairly well documented by this stage.

The latest research suggests consciousness itself is a fractal programme running co-operatively across the brain, but it remains pretty obscure none the less. The frontal cortex is split between left and right hemispheres, but it certain appears to behave as one in healthy brains.

The best way I could describe it is that the left and right represent the animistic unconsidered side of our behaviour and desires as we see in most animals (interacting via the corpus callosum that connects them). With the frontal cortex seeming to represent the higher functions that allow us to harness the rest of our brain in more considered and abstract ways (presumably also split into left and right).

I think of it like the foreman directing the other divisions of the factory but staying largely hands off when considered decisions don't need to be made.

All of the above is a gross oversimplification though. We can guess at the basis for free will, but it remains elusive.

All I see is a shit-ton of workers without safety harnesses.

I wonder how many they lose in a year?

Not that anyone cares. I have a friend who helped set up some agro-chemical production factories in China. On a tour once, he saw workers handling the raw chemicals with no respirators or even gloves and commented on it. His guide shrugged and said if they died the company would find new workers. My friend (with a PhD in Chemistry) figured the average life-span for those workers would be about two years, given the toxicity of what they were handling.

A matter of scale, distance & speed. (assuming we are talking about electrically driven engines like ion drives or the proposed EM engine.)

If nothing else, the sun gets weaker the further away you get. Out at the edges of the solar system it's almost negligible.

Given that mass directly effects net thrust & fuel range, smaller craft working in the inner solar system may well be better off sticking with solar over a bulky reactor.

Larger and or longer ranged ships should start to favour fusion reactors and such.

Unless of course they manage to miniaturise the fusion apparatus, or perhaps harness quantum effects like matter/anti-matter. etc. etc.

Surface area to volume ratio also starts to shaft solar power the bigger the ship gets too. The panels would have to get exponentially bigger along with the ship/engines.

I couldn't tell you exactly where, but there will be natural tipping points between the practicality of one over the other.

Edit: The calculation would mostly be the ratio of energy produced to mass of the generating apparatus. The point where a fusion reactor (inc it's fuel) can produce more required power per unit of mass than solar cells (and associated gubbins), is the point where it becomes more efficient for most spacecraft.

Though solar still has a clear advantage where indefinite operational duration is a factor. (fusion requires fuel, albeit in small quantities)

Because the Sun doesn't have a convenient plug socket

There are some pesky logistical problems in harnessing even a fraction of the suns output.

It's not that it can't be done but.......we could instead just make our own fun sized suns like these people are trying to do.

Nothing else could really touch the output of a fusion reactor if (when) they finally nail it.

Not that solar cells wouldn't still have their niches, or a stopgap role in the mean time.

The GOP never to this point kowtowed to that part of the base anyway until they decided to attempt to harness the energy of that faction to the point that this faction has a stranglehold of the party, and yet are wholly ignorant on the issues. We're talking about people who hold up signs that read "Keep your government hands off my medicare" caliber people. Or people who think Obama isn't an American. Or people who think Obama is "a complete socialized take over of health care". Stuff like that which is so obviously untrue, it's laughable.

And I want to be clear. I'm not accusing the right of having a monopoly on stupid people in their base. There's PLENTY of stupid liberals. The difference is the Democratic party is doing a far better job of keeping their idiots supporting them without enacting what those idiots want or succumbing to their idiocy.

Here's proof - how many times do you see Democratic leaders constantly say crap like George W. Bush is a war criminal for Iraq? Name a Democratic presidential candidate who actually has said over and over again that Ted Cruz isn't a US citizen? Donald Trump, the current GOP frontrunner, over and over again insists Obama isn't a US citizen, as have many many Republican Congressmen.

When the GOP signed the deal with the devil so to speak by trying to co-opt the Tea Party movement, this was the inevitable outcome. The Tea Party has been hijacked twice by my count because the people within it are so incredibly ignorant, they don't seem to realize what they stand for. It was Libertarian in the beginning both socially and economically. Then it got hijacked to become more socially conservative and economically conservative. Now, it's been hijacked by Donald Trump, who nobody actually even knows what he is socially or economically at this point overall.

Why did this happen? Because GOP support is so contaminated and dominated by so much ignorance, you can have a TV personality say a bunch of stupid crap they want to hear but is certifiably absurd, that he can become the front runner. Building a wall to keep the Mexicans out, no matter how you feel about illegal immigration as far as ideals go, is simply not a practical solution to stop illegal immigration. You can't make Mexico pay for a wall even if you built it. Obama wasn't born in Kenya. Replacing Obamacare with something "terrific" is NOT a policy proposal; it's non-specific anti-Obama BS to make people who hate Obama love you. He could replace it with "Trumpcare" which could be basically Obamacare, and that could be "something terrific" for all you know.

Trump and Cruz don't exist without the Tea Party, and the Tea Party wouldn't be a thing if the GOP didn't decide to eventually attempt to galvanize it. Well, mission accomplished, but you're never going to get the support of the growing minority segments of the population. You've forfeited the support of moderates like myself, too. And young people by enlarge are rejecting this version of the GOP big time. Women are increasingly rejecting it, too.

Your second point... Umm, big fat no.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/03/21/the-last-presidential-candidate-who-was-as-unpopular-as-donald-trump-david-duke/