champu

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Everything posted by champu

  1. champu
    Cheers!
  2. champu
    luxury.
  3. champu
    It wasn't yesterday, it was 7 months ago, and what she did was stumble head first over the fundamental problem with the AWB: safety is about making sure people who need help get it and about who has a weapon, not types of weapons. Instead of writing articles and having discussions about that though, we apparently would rather write articles and have arguments about whether she hates veterans. One stands a chance of preventing her from instituting idiotic policy, and one does not.
  4. champu
    I think this is an important point. Yeah there are some people that live on or right near the dropzone but most people drive at least a decent distance to get there and are going to drink their coffee on the way. I don't think I'd make it all the way to the dropzone in the morning without coffee. And I love Dunkin' Donuts coffee... I just buy the beans and grind and brew it fresh every morning at home. In part because it tastes better and in part because there are no Dunkin' Donuts in SoCal so I don't have a choice.
  5. champu
    That was the article I was alluding to when I made my comment. Although I was directing it more at the corresponding cartogram where you see a handful of deep purple cities and a bunch of mush everywhere else. This makes pointing fingers at states (regardless of what you're saying while you're pointing) silly. And, since you ask Wendy, I have been to Texas.
  6. champu
    There's no such thing as a "red state" or a "blue state," at least not anymore. All there are now are "blue cities" and "everything else" where "everything else" is just kinda a mix of people that collectively lean a bit one way or the other, here and there, but not as cohesively as most people make out. So any talk about "the blue states this..." and "the red states that..." like you're talking about any one thing is all garbage.
  7. champu
    Anyway, back to this... You probably mean this simply as a statement of how adamantly you disagree with her stance on gun control. Maybe it's a way to "feel out the waters" where if you get some people to agree without really considering the statement too literally, you'll feel like you're in good company. Maybe you want people to feel compelled to defend her policies as though they're defending her life and in the process they'll say something stupid and you can jump their shit over it. You know what though, just... fucking... don't... okay? People read shit like that and think, "oh great, I guess single-issue-voting has devolved into single-issue-loss-of-humanity." and then that person stops listening to anyone who disagrees with her. I don't mean to suggest that speakers corner is supposed to be, or ever was, some intellectual nexus of political debate, but it doesn't have to be such a train wreck either.
  8. champu
    No, what he wrote was, which is a piss-poor example of sentence construction. As a result, you're left with a fragment that is ambiguous as to whether he is talking about the post or the poster. This is intentional because it's a troll. (see how easy that is?) You can write any insults you want and then reword them into the passive form and introduce an ambiguity in the object between the post and poster and bam, not a personal attack. What irks me is when certain individuals actually do botch a verb and end up posting a personal attack and none of the mods even notice because they're so used to the MO of the poster in question.
  9. champu
    If you aren't paying for an online service you use, you're not the customer; you're the product.
  10. champu
    From the article: The intent of the principal was to appease any and all complaints made by any parent over anything by attempting to remove the thing being complained about. If the principal doesn't have the authority to unilaterally resolve complaints like this (e.g. "Harden the fuck up, Stephan."), and every issue is described anonymously as "some parents were concerned," then you may as well just fire the principal and replace them with an electronic complaint repository where any parent can prohibit whatever they want directly. And why say, "fully armed officer" in a statement? You're a spokesperson, can you say what you mean please? Was he walking around in SWAT gear with a rifle, sidearm, and flashbangs? Thankfully it sounds like the district is coming around and holding an assembly to provide information and perhaps address concerns. Good on the officer for participating.
  11. champu
    I would expect the debris to be moving N->S or S->N (or close to that) as sun-synchronous craft at that altitude are only slightly retrograde, and that's a popular orbit that would pose a lot of risk to moderately inclined prograde craft like the space station and Hubble. Fengyun-1C is a good example. There aren't many reasons to launch something into a highly retrograde orbit at such a low altitude and so, as you'd expect, there are very few craft in such an orbit. So I'll say half a demerit for that one .
  12. champu
    ...for recognizing a number of bills, including SB 374, as being solutions looking for problems, and not "signing down party lines" yesterday. He did sign several other gun control measures yesterday, not all of which are very useful in my opinion, but he seems willing to consider these measures critically, which is more than I can say about anyone else representing me here in California.
  13. champu
    I saw it last night. Yes, where everything is portrayed to be relative to each other is completely bananas* and yes, what the characters would have supposedly been trained to do and some of the protocols they were following were very unrealistic, but none of that was the point, it was still a good story, it was visually very impressive, and I think Bullock in particular did a great job. *side note: demerit to Neil D. Tyson for complaining about altitude differences. The movie would have had them going from ~30 deg inclination, to ~50 deg, to ~40 deg and those plane changes would be waaaaay more of an issue in terms of fuel and planning. Who cares about a hundred miles of altitude?
  14. champu
    I think a big part of the communication problem is owed to the fact that people (the OP when titling the thread and the video creator included) keep asking about "How wealth is distributed in America" when what they are actually talking about is "What is the current distribution of wealth in America." Nobody really wants to pay attention to how wealth is distributed because that involves examining everyone's behavior and not just the behavior of a handful of really greedy people that you can then claim represent the whole of the "1%" and be angry and yell and complain.
  15. champu
    I don't think you understand the meaning of the word 'extortion,' my young sock puppet. Extortion (to our trolling sock-puppet friend here) just means "any transfer of money between two parties where the receiving party already has more money/capital." Rent an apartment? You're being extorted. Buy some food at a supermarket? Extorted. Pay a friend who is a little better off than you back after he or she covered the check at lunch when you forgot your wallet? Extortion (but just barely!) Paying a cab driver? Ah, trick question. You're extorting the cab driver by not paying him more.
  16. champu
    I didn't know that something being zip-tied to a board prevented it from being possessed even if I'm still touching it. How big does the board need to be? Can I get a 2" by 2" piece of board and zip-tie it to the right side of the stock? Do I have to be raving about how inherently evil it is or can I just bring it to a range and shoot it? Neither of those two activites are themselves illegal, so I don't really see a difference.
  17. champu
    Sentient ash!
  18. champu
    The title of that video is awesome.
  19. champu
    I don't know if the ash will take I-15 to get to us Bill. I hope it does though because I'm 1028 miles away and that's cutting it pretty close.
  20. champu
    I would say that republicans are acutely responsible in the case of the current shut down, but politicians in general are chronically responsible for negotiating matters of authorization and policy during the appropriations, continuing resolution, and/or debt service processes. Congress has ADHD.
  21. champu
    I haven't seen it yet, but based on the trailers this quote from the article caught my attention... When you involve a bunch of real space vehicles, you're asking for experts to descend on you. I probably have much lower expectations of Hollywood than Tyson does though.
  22. champu
    No. Is your memory failing? When I wrote, "Are you mad?" I didn't mean, "Does that make you angry?" I meant it's crazy to talk about the pension aspect of social security as being beneficial. Unfortunately, not enough people do the math on social security to realize in the big picture that it doesn't do them any good. It's a system that just cheats everyone and the only reason it has support is because everyone is trying to minimize the damage it has done to them. I don't blame individuals for that, but please don't try and tell me they're benefitting.
  23. champu
    Now our conversations don't even make sense. Thanks a lot Obama.
  24. champu
    Benefitting? Too small? Are you mad? I think the tea party is as nutty as the next person, but if the government let me invest the extra 6.2 percent instead of taking it, and took the 6.2 percent they were making my employer pay and set it on fire in the street and did a little dance around it telling me to go fuck myself then the government and I would both be on better financial grounds when I retire.
  25. champu
    The problem with Social Security is not that liberals view it as an entitlement, or that conservatives view it as a return on their investment. The problem with Social Security is that's it's ill-concieved, fundamentally broken, and we can't get rid of it. People bitch about defense spending, and that's fine, but even defense programs, wars, and standing forces come and go over the years. Social Security is just there now in all it's hulking terribleness. If it were only "SDI" and not "OASDI" it could maybe work, but as a retirement plan it's horrible. It's one of the few government programs where it's plain to see how horrible it is because it's dollars in and dollars out. There's no, "well we all use the roads directly and indirectly" or, "you can't put a price on national security" here. I know how much is going to go in and I know how much is going to come out*, and I'm going to get a