champu

Spending other peoples' money and restricting other peoples' rights are probably rooted in the same minimum-effort-self-reward process, and neither is unique to any one party.

I still think it's funny to describe a person like the bicyclist as being "incredibly lucky" or "the luckiest..." when, in fact, they were just barely lucky enough and/or were almost remarkably unlucky.

Declaring war on anything other than a country conveys a misunderstanding of both war and that thing. Also, the problem with giving poor people money is they're just going to give it to a rich person.

some like being right, or at least winning. right or wrong doesn't matter much and some just take delight in others being wrong, or at least ridiculed others on topics that have no right or wrong A lot of "winning" on the internet is attacking what other people write and defending what you have written, and to hell with communicating ideas. The argument can't get pedantic fast enough for some people... "Ugh... when is this guy going to trip up and use the term 'most' instead of 'many' so I can stop hearing about his thoughts and ideas and go find a snopes article that says 49% and shove it in his stupid wrong eye cavities..." Combine that with people who take attempts by others to temper or qualify a statement they make as a comprehensive affront to their very existence and there's no beginning to what you can accomplish.

That's exactly my point. A split second is a crap amount of time to have to make a life and death decision, and I understand sometimes it has to be done. However, after an event where a LEO makes the wrong split second decision, and an unarmed person is shot, it's worth reviewing how that split second decision developed.

That's how it's done most all the time! In baton rouge if there is a shooting by the sheriff, the city police or state police will investigate for them. They also conduct an inside investigation obviously, but the next department up does the primary. That's also how I always see it done in every shooting that involved a death by officer. In fact I have never heard of a shooting where the department that shot someone and killed them was the only ones doing an investigation. Once again your taking one or two shootings and applying it to all the 600,000 active duty officers, when that's not the case. I think the problem is in cases (and there are admittedly not a ton of these but they are there) where it turns out the person was unarmed and the shooting was ruled as justified anyway, and it was determined that the officer responded according to established procedure. Maybe the person "turned around too suddenly" or "had a dark object in his hand." It's a bit like when a Vigil would go off inside a plane, or in someone's trunk, or just randomly while sitting on the packing mat, and AAD would, upon review, conclude and report back that the unit performed exactly as designed. I understand there's tension because there's a person's career on the line and you don't want to dump a process failure on them, but when an unarmed person winds up dead at the hands of police (or more generally any situation where police presence strictly made things worse) you can't say "there's nothing we would do differently on a regular basis" and expect the public to find that palatable.

Assuming that anyone has ever moved away from NYC and survived (a fair assumption I'd say, as you've just stated you have) then yes, the odds that an American choosen at random is either a New Yorker or ex-New Yorker is greater than the odds that they are strictly a current New Yorker. The probability of running into an ex-New Yorker as an ex-New Yorker is even greater still, as there's no reason to believe that ex-New Yorkers are distributed evenly and independently amongst the population across the United States. Similarly, if you have been injured skydiving, I'd assert you have a higher probability of knowing someone else who has also been injured or who has been killed skydiving than someone who has not been injured skydiving. (I'll just step back now and watch as people argue over why they think I think that would be the case )

This. When a speech is broadcast on half a dozen different stations and I want to watch it, the channel I watch it on is usually dictated by which network my DVR last recorded a show from, because that what comes on when I turn on the TV.

The population of New York City is around 2.6% of the population of the United States as a whole. The joke is that one would conclude that by selecting me (or just anyone in the US) there's a 2.6% chance they select a New Yorker.

Yours is a pretty good summary on the idiocy of trying to make predictions based on statistics of something as general as "making a skydive." Interestingly, as an American, there's a 2.6% chance that I live in New York City. It's just a roll of the dice.

My favorite part of this thread is the misspelling in the title, which I read aloud to myself each time it bubbles up to the top of the forum.

When I worked at CompUSA in high school the dress code was the logoed polo shirt (they gave you two and you could buy more, but they also replaced them as needed over time), khaki or black pants, black or brown shoes (no gym shoes.) I think the retail clothing stores where they make you wear the brand / latest styles are more arduous. One of my sisters worked at Abercrombie and I swear she was just getting paid in clothing. At my current job, in the last year, I've worn everything from shorts and sandles (working or not, the weekend is the weekend) to a suit and tie.

Before you can hope to reach a consensus on what to do in response to something, you have to first agree what that something actually is, you have to agree on what the options are, and then you have to agree on what the pros and cons (and to a first order how good and bad the pros and cons are respectively.) Then you can actually choose something and have a meaningful debate with someone who might choose something different. Around here we're lucky to agree on a problem statement.

AH - you have been reading up on "Democrats" again. Eeeeeeasy... Steady... Bonfire... Good Turtle.

I'd explain my understanding of it, but you wouldn't agree.

I don't think quade is suggesting we should be happy about it, I think he's just pointing out that if you're communicating outside of technical, scientific, or legal documentation/channels, it's a losing battle to try and steer the general public when it comes to language. In fact, whenever you get into the details of any subject, the definition of the "general public" basically collapses to "people who hopelessly don't know what the hell they're talking about." The only time I tend to get worked up is when the "general public" uses, and any misconceptions embedded therein, start working their way into technical, scientific, or legal documentation in what I'll call "codifying of ignorance." (for example, imagine a law that tried to govern "drones" and then just copied and pasted everything you see here into the definition.) Also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkwfkU0hRZM

I promise never to care what the media or the public calls anything I design.

I know this thread got off to a great start, and may not be all that serious at this point, but as I've said before I think the unconcious AAD fire / half-brake unflared reserve landing scenario is a stupid one to bring up when talking about reserve size selection and jumping with or without an AAD. The reason being... Virtually no one is jumping reserves loaded in the 0.3-0.7:1 range so why do we continue to toss that out there as the benchmark to shoot for? And why do people (only half-jokingly) suggest they should forego an AAD altogether unless they get there? There are so many more meaningful, more likely to matter, and more easily achievable thresholds to stay below when it comes to reserve wing loading.

BASE jumping is not recommended.

If the domain name is any hint, yes you're probably right. As I mentioned earlier I think it's funny that people like to hold up examples of the government doing stupid things next to people doing stupid things when not governed. There's really not much of a coherent argument that follows from such a comparison. I think "decency" laws and regulations in the US are ridiculous and inconsistent. What is judged to be "decent" to different extents when it comes to language, violence, nudity, and sexuality (yes, I listed those last two separately on purpose) is absurd. What I also think is absurd is so many people losing their shit and calling for intervention over a couple range incidents. As I mentioned up thread, giving any inexperienced shooter (and especially one without a fair amount of upper arm strength) a machine pistol like an Uzi, Glock 18, Steyr TMP, etc. is a bad idea... why can't bad ideas be just that? Why does this have to turn into the usual debate where each side puts their four dice in a cup, shakes them up and rolls... Let's see, on the person die I got "child", on the anecdote die I got "range accident", on the statistics die I got "30,000 firearms deaths per year", and on the proposed legislation die I got "high-capacity magazine ban." Oh yeah? well on the person die I got "meth head", on the anecdote die I got "car jacking", on the statistics die I got "11 minute average 911 response time", and on the anti-legislation die I got "stop lead ammunition bans."

It's interesting that you think it's illegal for them to see breasts. Particularly under the supervision of both parents. You are right, America has a very healthy attitude when it comes to nudity. Nudity bad, guns awesome sums it up pretty well. Well, what I think we can all agree on is that nudity vs. guns is necessarily a one dimensional trade space.

Plastic surgeons around the world just took a financial hit. She is in New York though, so her family should be able to stuff her into one of those recycling center machines and get a 5 cent deposit back.

That something is discussed, particularly in the age of the internet, is indicitive of nothing. There was an aritcle on Discovery.com about crickets (yes... the insects) two days ago, and by the third comment the term "Obama Regime" had been invoked. The "among sane people" qualifier is just a No-True-Scotsman fallacy.

I don't think police have the story of what happened in a particular situation in their head any better or worse than any other person that gets called up to the witness stand. I imagine many also take notes after encounters which would generally improve police recounts of events over an average person who probably wouldn't do this. The difference, however, is that through their training as police and through their experience as witnesses, what they also collect in their heads are what needs to have happened, what needs to have been said by whom, and what needs to be said about what happened for a particular outcome in court to be realized. Once you know "Hey if the case is about X and I say Y the guy likely gets convicted but if I say Z the guy gets off." you can't un-know that. Any experienced police officer is thus effectively a coached witness. Whether that has no effect, a subconscious effect (e.g. remembering simply that it was a "routine" event and then going on auto-pilot from there when describing the details), or a conscious effect (the outright lying you describe in a subsequent post) I'm sure varies on a case-by-case basis.

Yeah, I gathered that. After I wrote my response I went back and added the "(general you)" caveat to address it more towards the author of the article. The contrast is indeed interesting and I think it stems less from the gun culture and more from the sentence, "Another parent noticed the girl there alone and contacted the police." The chain of events that followed in that case are what I find most disturbing in the article, but the author is actually dismissive of how idiotic it was handled in the second to last paragraph. The author suggests that the reader be terrified, scared to death, upset, infuriated, and absolutely terrified. He demands that "something has to change" and fails to realize that what that attitude leads to isn't fewer gun incidents but to more phone calls to police and school administrators, more mindless zero tolerance policies, more pressure from insurance companies for everyone to behave "nominally", more suspensions, and more parents being thrown in jail.