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Sturgeon's House

Toxn

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Everything posted by Toxn

  1. In other words: many causes, many possible solutions.
  2. Steve, Let me offer you an alternative theory that has some traction now. Crime rates rise with economic inequality. The more unequal a population is, the more crime you have. European and Asian countries have a long history of social security and wealth redistribution, keeping inequality in those countries low. Or they have limited free market capitalism after starting with limited inequality. The US has mostly avoided implementing socialist or communist policies, and most of its actions of that sort are more than 50 years in the past, and involved smallish economic populations (unions, the elderly and so on). Would you advice the US, if it could reduce crime by reducing inequality, to undertake radical socialism, if that was the only option? Toxn
  3. This needs to be a feel-good live action movie produced by Disney. "This summer, a little goat is going to make a big splash in the Navy!"
  4. What happens if freedom/liberty and growth/prosperity/security are mutually exclusive?
  5. I look forward to the day where genetic engineering allows us to produce clap-proof people. And also allows people to choose whether to have kids or not by, like, thinking their sperm back into the tubules or something. It will be a glorious era for youth group bible study camps.
  6. I'm finding it a bit hard to have a conversation about this topic right now because I'm very busy at work/home. But also because there are a huge number of fact-free assertions and anecdotes being thrown around. Which doesn't mean that the assertions are wrong or that the anecdotes hold no value (I'm finding virdea's immensely valuable and interesting), but they don't add up to a sober argument about crime and incarceration. The fact is that you guys live in a country with a massive number of people behind bars, and talking about how just and lenient your prosecution system is doesn't change that. Nor does it change the fact that a lot of the social ills that people love to talk about (single-parent families, for instance) both contribute to crime and are a direct result of locking people up in large numbers. So trying to lock less people up; or at least focus on locking people up where it will do some good rather than making the situation worse; seems like a no-brainer to me.
  7. Returning to Aefrica, here is some cheerful news about one of my favourite countries. You can be the Lesotho to my South Africa any day, Ethiopia
  8. Like, seriously, they would have made an Abrahams killer by 1947, an F-15 killer by 1948 and a working ABM laser system by 1950.
  9. Isn't Israel still the single biggest recipient of American foreign aid money? That sounds like a pretty easy lever to use to change attitudes in Tel Aviv.
  10. I love that a simple observation made about changes in existing technology has been blown into this quasi-religious belief in ever-exponentiating computer power. And by "love" I mean hate.
  11. This isn't even a joke: episodes I to III make it canon.
  12. Dude, I'd rather you didn't leave us. And I have a well-known problem with finding about 50% of what Don says to be utter crap (the other 50% being complete genius, sadly). But you're also a stubborn fucker (hence the faceless butcher) who doesn't respond to common debate tactics well. Making jokes and referring to previous jokey comments is, like, 50% of forum activity. I don't want to turn this thread into moan-about-our-feelings page, but it's clear that sorting things out requires some of this communication malarkey that we all manfully chortle about. I suggest you, Sturgeon and whoever else might hold a stake here take it to PMs and hash it out until you have something that everyone can live with. And if that ends up being that you decide to opt out, then at least it will be a thought-out decision rather than the result of simply getting pissed off.
  13. I think the issue is that the judge somehow bought into the idea that; a superstar athlete could feel vulnerable to the point that he would shoot at sounds coming from his own bathroom without bothering to check if his girlfriend was still in the bed with him, and that he could fire multiple shots through the bathroom door and somehow not kop that the person on the other side would die. Over here it is seen as something of a case of two great legal teams on either side, and a judge in the middle who was perhaps a bit too swayed by a carefully orchestrated sob-story/crying campaign conducted by the defendant.
  14. The case was judged to lack dolus eventualis (the ability to forsee that your actions would lead to a death) so it would probably fit with manslaughter.
  15. Because they are under the malignant spell of the cult of the Cobra?
  16. I might be, given that apparently locking up violent crims for violence is really hard. You know, on my end of the world we actually tried the jury system for a while before giving up in disgust. Are there any serious proposals to do the same in the U.S.? Edit: Oh god, I just had a terrible realisation: the whole Oscar case, where a first-time offender was locked up for 5 years with parole for culpable homicide, was seen as a sign that our justice system was too easily swayed by wealthy defendants able to afford top-notch legal council. Are you guys seriously saying that this would be seen as an unusually strict sentence on your end?
  17. Let's get the ugly-but-sexy ones out of the way first: Tiltrotor Osprey/Combat Helo hybrid Just straight up remaking the IL-102
  18. I think it's more a case of Zin taking every statement absolutely seriously and straight-faced. Which is a different issue, as it invites trolling and subsequent escalation. We should all be very careful to consider other angles and interpretations for arguments here - text is a bit low-bandwidth to tease nuance out of situations, especially when you have folk from a bunch of different cultures chatting together. And I'm obviously just as guilty as anyone else in this regard (see: arguments about American topics as understood by a dude sitting in Joburg). Further than that, I'm keen to completely drop this line of argument about the future of CAS and design a napkin A-10/Frogfoot killer. Because mudfighters and armour and ordinance and big guns and high-bypass turbofans and oh god I think I came.
  19. It seems to have gotten very quiet on this front of late. Are we all waiting to see what shakes out of the prosecutions? Some belated points:
  20. There's this idea of WWI being a sort of strange historical anomaly: 10 years earlier and it would have been a mobile war that ground into a stalemate only towards the end due to trains, telephones and artillery. Ten years later and it would have been a mobile war based around horse logistics, aerial reconnaissance, radio communication and armoured cavalry, probably resulting in the belated development of the tank only when armoured cars hit terrain they have trouble with.
  21. Man that kid was terribly miscast. Beyond that, the whole idea of a nine year old kid meeting his teenage future lover and then having incredibly stilted dialogue to suggest that they will get down to boning in movie two is enough to sink the movie all by itself... As Zin points out, the American public seems to be pretty happy with drones right now so long as they hum around killing filthy foreigners/American citizens we kind of don't like, and don't do any top-gun shit that might put all the Tom Cruise wannabes out there out of a job. I don't see blue-on-blue stuff as being either especially likely or especially troubling to the public. My beef with this attitude is that drones are actually much worse platforms for making the right decision on which guy rocking a beard to splat than manned aircraft are. Manned aircraft, in turn, are much worse than people on the ground in terms of splatting the beard owner. Drones, IMHO, will be amazing in the near term for air-to-air stuff (which we've already debated) and acting as an artillery surrogate guided in by a forward observer on the ground. Barring that, direct control should be performed as close in as is safely possible by dedicated control units of some sort (AWACs, drone command trucks, mini-carriers or whatever). Another use for drones is area denial: make them fully autonomous and let them go to town on anything with a human outline and heat signature in a given sector. Finally, the role/usefulness of drones changes depending on what sort of war you're fighting. For the sort of low-intensity shit we're seeing now, I'd actually prefer to put a manned system in close to the ground to get a little more precision. For full-on, heavy-metal war I'd view drones as a great way to substitute productive capacity for manpower in roles where the wastage rate is too high to be sustainable. Here it should be noted that both sides during the Cold War figured on running out of aircraft and pilots within the first week.
  22. I was trying to avoid that specific reference - just re-watched the first prequel and dear lord it is a wonky beast. In any case, the issue is that the only reason for a data link between manned plane and drone is that it improves the capacity of the whole package (either by givng your drones access to the larger load carrying capacity of the bomber, or by allowing some of the decision making to be handled by the manned asset). If the small manned component is providing no increase in capabilities then you just replace it with another drone. So removing the manned plane will always be a priority in those sorts of setups: either to deprive the drone fleet of ordinance or to make it dumber/slower.
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