busdriver

People follow the law for three reasons: 1. They believe the law is just 2. The are afraid of getting caught 3. It's just not worth it to fight back (minor nuisance) At the end of the day, the state only has force as a tool to enforce laws. If you aren't comfortable enforcing a law at gun point, it probably shouldn't be a law. All the stupid laws only work when everyone agrees that they're good and just. That requires a common culture of shared values.

I didn't mean to imply they're wholesome, good dudes. McInnes bailed partly because his joke got out of control, too many assholes were tagging along, and he got swept up into the mob mentality. I was thinking more along the lines of the original motorcycle clubs, before they went full on organized crime.

You happen to see a picture of the dude who took over "leadership" of that group after McGuiness bailed? The corporate press seems to have a complete inability to understand internet culture. My guess is they have to smash everything into the boxes that define their world view. And that's how you get a "white nationalist" organization with an Hispanic leader Old school men's club type gang is probably more accurate.

We've attempted to attack the supply side of the drug problem for decades. It has had zero effect. Heroine used to be the drug of trainspotting and 90's bands, now it's suburban. Pfizer doesn't murder it's competitors for trade violations, they go to court. If we took a fraction of the money spent on the "war on drugs" and put it towards treatment, the country would be far better off.

There is a ton of people advocating for something not F-35. Beyond that, no consensus.

Why does the healthcare discussion always revolve around public vs private funding of the same bill instead of figuring out how to lower the bill? There is a missing root cause analysis discussion. All we hear are the simple 30s sound bites that conform to the party line.

Not woke-ness. Good old fashion partisan politics.

It does seem like something needs to change, but I'm not so sure a constitutional amendment is what needs to happen. Our politicians are generally gross, and our national politic is so broken I don't really want them touching the constitution. They'd likely make it worse. At the end of the day, I think the root cause of the problem is the DNC/RNC. Politicians are beholden to national tribal politics, and toeing the line on the national party platform. There used to be a lot of room for argument within the parties; there were conservative democrats and liberal republicans 30 years ago. Kill the power of the DNC/RNC and bring back earmarks to encourage cooperation. I also tend to think both parties are headed for major change anyway, we're in the midst of a generational power transition.

Americans have been obsessed with race for far longer than 2008, not without cause. The GOP was founded in opposition to the expansion of slavery. I've been thinking about how this thing might turn out. The 1960's were similarly tumultuous, and the republic came out the other side better for it. The Iranian revolution was ostensibly led by both secular leftist and religious thinkers, but fed by large numbers of unemployed men. Obviously the Ayatollah ended up as the leader of record. I'm seeing a lot of similarities with Iran, with respect to varying ideologies within the political parties. I suspect things will get worse before they get better. I think the DNC and RNC as we know them now are finished. I think it's just a matter of time, with my only question being what comes out the other end?

To be fair, the first part may have been very much already escalated, intentionally by portions of the protester group. There is a lot we don't really know about that whole situation. The dude looked to be wildly inept at firearm handling skills. Depending on what was being said to them, his wife may have committed an assault. You calling them "shoe-less" is as much "othering" language as his.

I can't remember which podcast/youtube video I saw this in, but I seem to remember Brett Weinstein making the argument that the college kids were indoctrinating themselves to a certain degree.

Kaepernick was an employee that made public statements that pissed off the customers, who viewed his statements as offensive, who made noises that implied they would stop being customers. That's it. He certainly wasn't the first person to lose a job over that sequence of events, and it seems to have become quite common these days. Just one more example of the mass hysteria afflicting our society.

BLM has an agenda. Most people in the streets and on facebook saying "black lives matter" are supporting the sentiment not the organization, or are only vaguely aware that the organization is more than just the sentiment.

There are plenty of words that already exist to describe the points that are trying to be made, none of those words are loaded with the emotion and horrific history of racism. Adding another meaning to a word that is so closely tied with lynching and Jim Crow is an organizing tactic. Not to mention so overly broad as to be almost useless as a tool for making any productive changes. unconscious bias agency structure lack of economic investment, [leading to] endemic poverty and crime [and] self destructive cultures and practices See plenty of words. So yes language evolves, but to claim that in this case it's due to a lack of ability to discuss the problem is a fallacy.

It's literally in the definition du jour. The woktivist arguement is completely tautological. From the Aspen Institute: https://assets.aspeninstitute.org/content/uploads/files/content/docs/rcc/RCC-Structural-Racism-Glossary.pdf Structural Racism: A system in which public policies, institutional practices, cultural representations, and other norms work in various, often reinforcing ways to perpetuate racial group inequity. Racial Equity: Racial equity refers to what a genuinely non-racist society would look like. In a racially equitable society, the distribution of society’s benefits and burdens would not be skewed by race. In other words, racial equity would be a reality in which a person is no more or less likely to experience society’s benefits or burdens just because of the color of their skin

A single CPI based estimation of real wage growth or decline is flawed. Everything is not inflating at the same rate. I also don't think income inequality is a very good measure of anything by itself. It might be a good indicator to look deeper, but by itself doesn't tell you much. It's like chasing metrics. An increase in minimum wage also isn't going to do much (if the underlying problem is a loss of manufacturing jobs) other than help drive inflation. Service industry jobs are already low margin sectors of the economy (the restaurant industry as an example). Thought this was interesting, I obviously can't vouch for accuracy, but it at least seems to match my own anecdotal experience (mainly that the fun stuff is far cheaper now). My main thoughts: -"Higher education" has become a scam box-check requirement for no good reason. - What is actually driving up the cost of healthcare? Nationalized healthcare seems like a great way to keep paying ever increasing costs without solving the root cause. Maybe Andrew Yang is right and we'll all be served by robots soon, better get on some nuclear power plants to power it all, Star Trek here we come......

The issues at hand are far more complicated than a simplistic and overly broad platitude. But thoughtful, nuanced discussions don't work with the advertising model and no one's righteous indignation fix will be met when it turns out that everyone is to blame.

That SCR with a rifle length wood handguard would be pretty. I'm envisioning a free float handguard that goes all the way out to the muzzle of a 16 inch barrel, kind of like a manlicher fore end. You'd probably have to glue the wood to a fiberglass inner tube.

The helos fly red air at WIC during the DCA vul every year, shot kill is sketchy trying to simulate a MANPADS, but it's not complete bullshit. Every couple of years a WUG will get the idea to drop down and try to gun one of the helos for shits and grins, it usually doesn't turn out good. Then the lesson gets learned for a few classes and they just sit off and snipe us with AIM-9Xs where we die before having a chance to react. So yeah, exactly like Zero says.

Actual studies/experiments, both pre-date the current insanity: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2843945/ https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0843-2

I would assume there's a huge variable in population density and general culture that can't really be accounted for in the models, since they're just best fit curve differential equations. The public national policy making conversation centers around the major urban areas. There's lot of stupid running around these days though; the doc on base made a point of telling us someone had done a study to determine that temps would have to get up to 150ish degrees to kill the virus so the summer wouldn't be helping........... I'm not really sure why "they" thought that air temperature in the summer was the key variable instead of a change in human behavior, but what do I know. In any event, if my sarcastic cliff's notes is about what they're thinking, it's probably not a terrible way to calm the nerves of the panic monsters in the major urban areas.

Jesus, that video is patronizing. So to be clear the short version is: don't open the go back to work tap all the way, keep the stream of folks going back out to a medium pace so that when people start getting sick there isn't a huge pool of potential infectees to feed a spike and more tests available to catch a spike earlier (hopefully before it become a full blown epidemic). And support and feels and stuff.

Almost every politician has been a panicky shit sandwich. Organizations have twisted the truth (with good intentions in their hearts) in an attempt at modifying people's behavior, but it's still bullshit. The media is behaving like a cat chasing a laser pointer, knowing they want to craft a narrative but can't figure out what it should be other than A: Trump is evil and Fox News sucks or B: Trump is awesome and CNN is evil. The people need to be told the truth, then allowed to make decisions. If the people can't be trusted to act responsibly of their own free will, what's the point of having a free society? Yes, I realize that statement is lacking in a lot of the nuance that is actually necessary in making a functional government. Then again, telling people who lost their jobs because the government shut down their employer to just fucking stay at home and stop bitching is pretty fucking obtuse. The reality is this will continue in waves until a vaccine is developed or the pandemic has run it's course, either way ending in herd immunity or a virus mutated for lower mortality that we just learn to live with.

Old engineering cliche: All models are inaccurate, some are useful. The data is seriously crappy. Given the apparent wide range of symptoms (asymptomatic all the way to knocking on death's door) and the limited amount of testing that is triaged to more serious cases, the case fatality rate is inflated if you just divide deaths by total verified cases. The lower CFR being reported is (I assume) an estimate based on epidemiological modeling. As an example, if you just take total verified cases in Italy, the CFR is something like 12%. But that same number also results in only a quarter of a percent penetration into the population, New York state is around 2% penetration. Which seems like an insanely low percentage given the Ro estimate of 2.5ish. Even more so when you consider the seasonal flu is around 1.3 and the 1918 pandemic is something like 1.8. For reference, I scrounged around google and found a paper (published years ago) on selective social distancing to control a flu epidemic. Based on a "small town model" of 10k residents and an epidemic meant to be representative of the 1918 flu (natural progression 50% of the population would get it before herd immunity did its thing), they applied a handful of different techniques and managed a maximum reduction down to 15% getting it. They assumed kids and teens were the primary vector so restricted their movements (closed schools and kept kids/teens at home). Would a total societal application get that percentage down to the 1-2% range? Maybe? The information from people who know things is being filtered through communications majors who don't have the aptitude to understand any of it. They are incentivized to freak people out, it sells ads. So take it seriously, but freaking out and destroying everything because we're scared isn't a good idea either.

Checkout "1" on amazon prime or netflix. Almost a remake of "The Formula 1 Drivers: aka The Quick and The Dead" Both good