champu

If you equate disapproval of someone's lifestyle with hate, then I think you need to examine your extremist outlook on life. You disapprove of married life?

Holy shit, they were Muslims!?!

Well, I had to go to the voting registration office to get put on the voter roles. But maybe that was just me. In CA, you can register at the DMV, at any grocery store or transit hub or busy intersection where a partisan party pays someone to act as a registrar. The entire point of requiring visiting a sheriff to register a gun is to make more difficult, particularly for those who don't live in more rural areas, or who do not own a car. It's a perfect example of that "sounds reasonable to me if I don't think about it" type of gun control legislation. If they made it shall-issue, once in person, renew online, available at any Sheriff's department, local police department, dmv, post office, city hall, etc. and there were no new transaction records required when you used it to buy a firearm or ammunition then I would be on board. And for people out there who don't support certain things (not just firearms laws), that's great, but check to see if someone "representing" you does. If they do and you don't say something to them, then guess what...

Note above it's not just Republicans the study claims are racist, it's all non-democrats, to include people who identify as independent. I had some hope when I first saw the "racial resentment" metric, and held onto it even as I started reading the paragraph describing it, but then I got to the question that they claim is "predictive of whites’ attitudes on a variety of race-related issues, including crime, education, busing, and welfare." and I just started laughing. As I said a few years back it's not very productive to try and start a discussion with "listen up, racists..."

So, for starters... the map is showing the concentration of slaves according to the 1860 census... It's just establishing where the cotton/slave belt was located, it's not a results map of the study. This part is interesting though... It's an article in the Mail so I'm not expecting much, but that quote was taken from the school's summary of the study found here. So I took a look into the working paper itself to try and convince myself the author wasn't really equating lack of support for affirmative action and being a republican with being racist. Here's an explanation of the data... ...you be the judge.

Specific issue aside, this seems to be a bit of a misunderstanding about government budget operations. The government "does stuff" with two types of bills, authorization bills and appropriation bills. Authorization bills state what you legally can and can it do, and appropriation bills provide the funds to carry out activities. Due to the political nature of passing both of these bills we already end up with the ridiculous situation where things are authorized but not funded (basically a hollow statement of intention) and less commonly but not unheard of funded but not authorized (which is a broken situation that requires a mess of transfers to authorized activities so the funding can be used.) If, as has regularly been the case lately, appropriations bills don't get passed by the start of the fiscal year, the government risks going into a shut down because it hasn't been given money to do the things it decided it was supposed to do. A continuing resolution is a stop gap piece of legislation that more or less says, "keep doing what you're doing until we sort out our shit." But even passing those has become political and people want to attach crap to get those through as well, when all they were intended to do was give more time to pass the real deal. And then, after appropriations and continuing resolutions determine the outlays there is the debt ceiling. The money has already legally been spent and the allowable credit line to pay this debt needs to be there or else the government defaults. And passage of these increases has too been politicized to try one last time to get changes through. I don't think either party is "more to blame" about this than the other. Finding more and more steps and turning them into negotiating gates is a horribly inefficient way to do business, and has consequences like debt rating changes, but neither side has shown a willingness to make the kind of agreements they make on the brink during the initial authorization legislation.

As demonstrated by the long jump in track and field events, sometimes after a giant leap you find yourself sitting in a sand pit.

I know you know you're being ridiculous, but this statement is also false. If guns are illegal, all gun use is a crime in and of itself by definition, but that would still not preclude them from being used to prevent/halt other crimes from being committed. I picture you as Frankenstein's monster pointing at a defensive gun use instance and saying, "CRRRRRRRIIIIIIIIIIIMMMMMMMEEEE!" and someone says, "True, but actually no one was hurt, so I don't thi-" "CRRRRRRRIIIIIMMMMMMEEEEEE!"

Personally, I valet it whenever possible. Is this not a reasonable place to park?

I think cordless angle grinders/cut-off tools, reciprocating saws, or circular saws would all be much more brutal/deadly weapons than cordless drills. Or a hand-held band saw... Yikes...

I agree with you. I will also add that buried in that problem is that of identifying nutjobs prior to them getting a gun and shooting people with it. I think we can get at least a little better at it pretty easily, but getting much better or good at it is more challenging and needs to be done with consideration of people's rights (not talking about the second amendment here, talking about privacy and due process) Agreements are great in forum discussions but much as I'm sure you're waiting with baited breath for NRA members to write the organization and to say, "hey, don't oppose just anything that comes along." I don't expect many people who are in favor of things like expanded background checks to write their representatives and say, "Hey, stop tacking on type-bans to every gun control measure you introduce."

They're all on the "to do" list. It doesn't matter what particular type of firearm was used in any given incident or how that relates to overall gun violence statistics, whatever it was it will be the next thing addressed in legislation. Some people will say, "that's good because fewer firearms is always good, damn it, no matter what." And some people will say, "well, I don't know that I agree with that." Or "I've already made my stance on that clear." And then the people representing them in their respective jurisdictions will support and pass bans on them and they won't say anything, write, or complain. As BikerBabe's linked article in her thread stated, politics has made discussions of any topic like this completely useless.

Yeah, kinda a bummer, but we knew going in it was unlikely we'd be able to finish because of the Sunday forecast. One of our team members was only able to get away from work for the weekend and had to leave Sunday night. It was a pickup team and we were just doing it for fun anyway. Also, Skydive Chicago handled it well by refunding the unjumped rounds.

It's a complete waste of time. People uninterested in owning or having anything to do with firearms or a particular type of firearm are going to be completely uninterested in other people's right to own a firearm. Just like people who have no interest in having an abortion can so easily disregard women's rights to have an abortion or people who are not gay can so easily promote bans on gay marriage. You can make all the analogies, examples, hypotheticals, etc. that you want. You can isolate parts of the issues where there is disagreement and you can find common ground elsewhere. It still won't matter. They're still going to walk away from the conversation and vote for candidates that support every gun control, anti-abortion, and anti-gay piece of legislation that comes through because they feel their "side" of the issue is right and even if it's a shit bill that lies about it's intentions, it doesn't directly affect them in a negative way, so fuck it. They'll say, "yeah, that one was pretty stupid" but they won't tell the person representing them who voted for it that, and they'll probably even vote to reelect them.

4-way intermediate finished through round 7 today. Open and advanced got through round 6. We had a bit of delay getting started due to some fog this morning but otherwise it was a great day of skydiving. I think on Omniskore they only have through round 5 scored and posted though. Theoretically we start up again at 7 tomorrow morning, but the weather forcast is less than encouraging.

It's more amusing if you imagine people as Zapp Brannigan.

Asshole.

Nope. I know the English language is tricky, but it's not THAT tricky. "Banned from driving" is not the same as "Allowed to drive with a license." English isn't, but laws can be. As I've said before... It is not illegal to BASE jump in US national parks, you just have to get a permit. And there are also exceptions in most all of the laws that California passes against particular types of weapons. If you work in law enforcement or the movie industry you can have pretty much whatever you want. See, totally not bans! Also, the California state assembly just passed SB-374 today. It extends the definition of assault weapons to directly go after people who have modified their weapons to be compliant with California's previous assault weapon ban. (People who have voluntarily crippled their rifles so they can be compliant to laws are the last people you want having weapons.) But it's totally not a ban, it's a... okay yeah it's a ban... but it doesn't happen until the end of the year! Does that still count? Also: concealed carry in Los Angeles County? totally not banned

Seeing as Assad and Putin are both talking about doing something along these lines now, it would appear the cost dropped a bit it the last two days...

You've done this on at least one other topic here as well and, as always, it's not a sensible way to approach a problem. You cannot take "doing nothing" off the table until there is at least one "something" on the table that is better than "doing nothing." Cost. Risk*. Reward. You can define it for doing nothing just like anything else. This Platonic Form of "some action that makes a good compromise" is crap, please stop asserting its existence. Are there things we could do? Sure, there are a lot of options. We could push for a UN-led, US-backed mandated stand-down and march through the country securing and destroying all chemical weapons we can find. That would be consistant with the international safety concerns about chemical weapons usage and it even has the added benefit of being agnostic about the perpetrators of the Aug 21st attack in case people still have doubts. Cost. Risk. Reward. Is that better than doing nothing? I'd say no. Reward is moderate. Risk is moderate. But the rent is too damn high (as they say.) *Risk in the risk management sense, not the "common" meaning where people just use it as a synonym for dangerous.

I agree that's what many people are thinking, but I believe they're missing the end result: The subject is somewhere in the frame, but only taking up 15% of that frame. Those aren't OK results, and those videos usually look like amateur shots worth about $15 to me. No argument. "Okay" was not meant to be a term of endearment.

The advantages and disadvantages of having one have not changed, so to call them "outdated" doesn't really make any sense. Nothing has replaced them for what they do. I think more people are strictly shooting things like GoPros set to their widest setting where you can get away with not composing the shot very carefully and still get okay results so they don't bother with a ringsight.

No, I think you misunderstand. People see others get all worked up about some things and not all worked up about other things, and the default response seems to be, "Hey, maybe you should be as pissed off and angry about X as you are about Y." and I rarely see, "See how you can read this news about X without going non-linear? Why don't you also try that with Y?" I don't want to be in control of thread content, it's just that more and more these days I think that, "where's the outrage?" is not a productive question.

As I said in another thread, worrying about whether a criminal used "hate" when committing a crime is as silly as worrying about whether a shooting involved an "assault weapon." They're both basically warnings that the person talking is about to suggest a completely misguided "solution." Also, can we stop fighting over the national "outrage remote control" so you can be sure it's tuned to the channel you want?

Between 2004 and 2007 I averaged around 500 jumps a year and I did over 600 in 2008. I did around 14-15 hours of tunnel in 2007-2008 too. ...all as a weekend warrior. ...no instructing, coaching, or shooting tandem videos... all fun jumps, team training jumps, and shooting photos at events/boogies. ...all packing for myself. I can't imagine skydiving at theat pace again let alone more than that. These days 50-100 jumps a year feels great.