champu

True. By "standard" I meant the style with the 1/8" cable sewn into a channel so they sit propped open.

What do you mean "in on"? I think "solely responsible for" is more appropriate here. It would be interesting to review the grand jury proceedings to see what they were allowed to consider in indicting him. "The defendant was breaking the law in some way... yadda yadda yadda... two people sustained gun shot wounds and we want to charge him with felony assault." "You yadda yadda'd over the most important part." "No I didn't, I mentioned he was breaking the law."

Most statistics and data sources related to firearms violence are a complete mess. As long as the predominant argument remains "more gun control" vs. "less gun control" like it's a volume knob or something there's not much motivation to get the information straight.

That definitely appears to have been a link in the chain. I have a pair of WLOs and a slider, but I've never actually used either. Call me lame/boring, but I prefer slider off to slider down and LRM with standard toggles. This is also a good argument for wearing knee/shin protection. I should start doing that.

I'll rephrase my reply to davjohns a bit, but my point is the same. What is the material difference between paying for health insurance for your employees which may or may not provide particular services and paying them directly with dollars which they may or may not spend on those same services? Does the employer have a right to decide what they want their employees to use their compensation for in one case but not in the other? This is a really good argument. So, you are drawing an analogy between how an employee spends his/her pay in dollars and how he/she spends his/her pay in healthcare. At that point, it only becomes one degree of separation. The bill for the health insurance goes directly to the employer, where the bill for the Wiccan Orgy Seance goes directly to the employee (am I the only one into that sort of thing?). But there's still a degree of separation here as well. The employer pays the insurance bill (though depending on the policies, they may be actually just be relaying the employees money - companies pay 0-100% of the bill with the typical being 50-80%) for the plan, they aren't paying for Sally's abortion; she in fact will get the bill for any copays or additional payments due for that specific service. If Hobby Lobby feels it cannot support these sort of immoral health care, then really they cannot have employees that would use this sort of care, since HL is paying the bill. It leaves me with the obvious (imo) conclusion that these are political actions. Thanks, that was basically going to be my response. If I go to the doctor to get a cholesterol test or a prescription for azithromycin or something then the doctor/pharmacy bills the insurance company and I would generally get a copy of the bill. (in my particular case, neither of the above would cost me anything.) Then when I get statements from my insurance company or my employer gets the bill, none of the specifics are included. If I were a women going on the pill that would look exactly the same as the above to my employer. So the employer's objection is about the availability of particular prescriptions/procedures in the coverage whether or not the employee uses them and in spite of the fact that they'd never even know about it if they did. Their involvement is so diluted that they're argument breaks down in my mind. If a person in that mindset goes into a store to buy something, do they make sure that none of the employees of that store are going to spend their paycheck (which they would be contributing to by shopping there) in an immoral way? Of course not, you couldn't function in society if your religious/moral convictions crippled you that severely. I will admit, being an atheist and finding the whole objection to birth control and abortion on religious grounds absurd from the get go makes it a much easier call for me. I'm just presenting the argument about why it still shouldn't matter if you take the religious stance for sport.

You should date that 1866.

I'll rephrase my reply to davjohns a bit, but my point is the same. What is the material difference between paying for health insurance for your employees which may or may not provide particular services and paying them directly with dollars which they may or may not spend on those same services? Does the employer have a right to decide what they want their employees to use their compensation for in one case but not in the other?

I think the "indirectly" in your post is important. To me, balking at some level of support to an employee's use of birth control in between personally administering it and paying the employee money for their work (which they then go off and spend on birth control) is capricious.

Why are you attributing to me something that I didn't do? Write 100 times on the board "I will not make false accusations". I don't find the distinction between someone who combines data using shoddy methods to support their point and a person who merely presents/repeats the results of said work to support their views to be particularly meaningful.

Averaging rankings is dumb... Yes. How would YOU do it? How would I what? Make how new guns used in a crimes are just as important as how many murders are committed? Simple, I wouldn't... That's why I looked up the original uncombined rankings and shared them. Here's an exercise for you... tell me four implications of the way the rankings were combined in the article YOU posted that you agree with and why. And then tell me four implications of this averaging that you disagree with and why. Then write, "I will not average rankings of non-independent statistics" 100 times on the blackboard.

I was a little confused to see, for example, Arizona listed as 4th when the three major violence stats were ranked 13th, 16th, and 19th for that state. Averaging rankings is dumb... here's a map of the actual report

A couple quotes from the article that caught my eye... ...which really just demonstrates that administrators have no idea what they're doing. Violence associated with the drug trade and people with mental issues (sometimes exacerbated by bullying) shooting up a school are problems. Punishing any and all offenses severely and/or creating new offenses to punish not only doesn't help these problems in practice, but it doesn't even help on paper. This is the curse of "doing something" and why I cringe when I hear people demand it. Risk aversion leads to becoming victims of your own knowledge base about what could go wrong. If you "do something" in response to everything that ever happens then before too long you find yourself doing nothing but the sum total of ineffective "somethings" and you have no capacity left to actually accomplish anything. In corporate buzz speak this is called "continuous process improvement." Sorry Mr. Trump [up charges]... dead wrong with a cherry on top. Zero tolerance policies, by definition, only come into play when you can't make a reasoned, discretionary argument for why you want to take an action. Also, if you find yourself casually referring to schools as "the front lines" you may want to reevaluate your choice of professions.

The escape slide is yellow, so it had it coming.

The price of a NAS server isn't as ridiculous as it once was. I have a Synology NAS that I got a while ago and it supports 4TB drives.

The cash discount you need to make it worthwhile is straight-forward enough to calculate, but the result isn't necessarily intuitive. Suppose you want to buy a $30K car with a 1.5% loan over 5 years. That's a monthly payment of $519.30 for five years. If you're going to pull money out of an account that is otherwise earning 7% you need to get that price down to about $26,225 (~12.6% discount) to make it worth paying up front.

Studies show that you're more likely to be counted in the statistics presented in a study if you support the author's point.

Funny, you don't look grueish. Oh great, that's all we needed...

As I've said over and over, it's not illegal to BASE jump in US National Parks, all you have to do is get a permit. Based on what I've read about the history of approved ranges, licensing, and ATT in Canada over the last decade or so it sounds a bit messy. As discussed in the "hate crime" thread, the behavior people have come to expect from county sheriffs, district attorneys, prosecutors, etc. who act as the subjective arm of poorly-worded (or just poorly-conceived) laws varies greatly based on geography. So one person may see a law and say, "I don't see the issue, if you're not being an ass you're going to be left alone" and they may be completely right. Another may see the same law and say, "Hell no, the DAs here are going to go on a rampage with this in their tool belt" and they may also be completely right.

This is basically what I hear every time a gun control politician/pundit mentions "common sense gun control measures." Once a person who is going to do bad things and shouldn't have a firearm (regardless of how we decide to determine that) has a firearm, then they have it, and there's no way they give a shit about where you've told them they're allowed to bring it, how many locks they're supposed to put on it, or how they're supposed to have crippled it.

...Or a person who just spray-painted anything at all... ...but he's got tattoos of swastikas and quotes from Mein Kampf all over his arms.

Is it feasible to establish a private, approved range on your own property? (Or do they make that cost prohibitive, contingent on signatures of everyone within 100 miles of you, etc.)

No, but googling "M&P shield light strike" and a little browsing around yielded a tutorial on removal, inspection, and re-install of the firing pin/striker for M&P pistols.

Most of that seems pretty reasonable, but you start to lose me at the "Authorization to Transport" thing. I looked into it a bit and it appears you can file a sort of recurring one for up to five years (saying, more or less, "On weekends I take these specific hand guns and/or rifles with barrels shorter than 18.5 inches to Joe Smith's shooting range.") So depending on how general they let you be and what the turnaround time is, it could range from not being too big of a deal to being an enormous PITA/restriction. But, let's assume it's executed well, the data is kept secure, etc... what does this accomplish? Picture a few scenarios, and see if/how requiring or not requiring a person to have an ATT (on top of all the licensing and safety course stuff) affects the situation. I have five scenarios to consider; these really apply to the evaluation of any prophylactic criminal law. 1) The person who is not out to do anything we're trying to prevent, and who goes through whatever troubles are necessary to comply with the law while carrying through with it anyway. 2) The person who is not out to do anything we're trying to prevent, and wants to comply with the law, but who changes their behavior because the law makes something too much of a pain in the ass. 3) The person who is not out to do anything we're trying to prevent, but who just says "to hell with that, I just won't get caught." 4) The person who is out to do bad things who will comply with all prophylactic laws, but then commit a "primary" crime (e.g. murder/assault/armed robbery) anyway. 5) The person who is out to do bad things and says, "I don't think I'm going to get caught for the primary crime, it's even easier to not get caught breaking the prophylactic laws." The common terse arguments just focus on one of these groups (e.g. 5: "criminals don't obey laws" or 3: "you're just making criminals out of honest citizens" or 2: "fewer guns is better"), but any added law really creates all these groups for better and for worse. If the "for better" doesn't really add up then you need to reconsider having the law.

...make lemonade. Seriously, I think this is a level of idiocy that goes beyond merely using the wrong tool for the job.

Felt compelled to dig this video up and post it to share here. It's from 2007. The "extra people on the skydive" prank