Toxn
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The Matt Easton/Nikolas Lloyd Appreciation Thread
Toxn replied to Sturgeon's topic in History, Culture, and Archaeology
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Opinions? http://chinamatters.blogspot.co.za/2016/03/blame-us-elite-failure-for-trump.html?m=1
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Given what little I know about ramjets, I'm not sure you could make them work well at all given the need to boost them up to speed and the scaling problems associated with airflow. But then a few (big) AAMs have ramjets, so... maybe? A fuckoff-big solid penetrator has some major advantages in terms of not being stopped by active defences of any sort, so there is that. Plus, you know, the cool factor. My feeling on the most realistic way forwards is that you might see some approaches which specifically rely on swarms of smaller rockets rather than a single big 'un. This has the advantage of allowing you to fiddle with things like formation and timing a bit, as well as rendering active defences moot by dint of saturation. Another approach might be to run the multiple charge concept to its endzone in the same way that a few LRP ideas were supposed to do - by having your missile spit out multiple warheads just before impact and line them up into a train. This makes interception harder (first warhead in the train is a shield or disposable) and allows you to hit the same place multiple times while still leaving time for flyer plates to get out of the way and so on.
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Hate to ruin your boner for kinetic missiles, because damn are they cool: https://youtu.be/JCmSs6hXWoU But they're also obscenely bulky compared to anything with HEAT in the tip.
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Truly you have answered my question here. Is so. Yes, we're at that level of discourse folks. In any case, before I quit in a huff about Sturg's strange ideas about logic and statistics, I'm going to make my political position clear again. I am not arguing that we take people's guns away to stop suicides, nor that we take them away because they don't stop murders. They'd do little for the one and nothing for the other, and in any case your cheese burger habit is more likely to kill you overall. I'm arguing that guns are, in the grand scheme of things, a frivolity. They're toys, essentially. At least, for any society not currently engaged in a civil war.
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That's perfectly logical, at least assuming that all murders happen by gun.
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Is the situation in any way analogous to that of the citizen gun owner? In any case, the answer is pretty self-evident here. Owning a gun does pretty much squat for your chances of getting murdered. If it were otherwise, you would talk of nothing else. Ignoring the slight mischaracterisation of my argument, it is perfectly logical, and a perfect application of statistics. I'm really trying to make this as simple as possible for you, and you just don't seem to get it (hence words like 'astounding'). I'll try again anyway: You take a statistically average sample of the population, lets say 1000 000. You tot up how many of them die in a year and by what means. 120 will have died by suicide. 40 will have been murdered. Of those 160 souls, roughly 50 will be gun owners. 40 of the gun owners will have committed suicide, while 13 will have been murdered. As something like 50% of the suicides in the US involve a firearm, this means that damn near all your gun owner suicides will be by gun. Of your 13 gun-owning murder victims, 10 will have been shot to death (80% of homicides in the US involve a gun). The score is thus 40-odd souls who killed themselves using their own gun versus 10 who were killed by someone else's. The maths is really that simple. So yes; statistically, your own gun is the one most likely to kill you. Per my comment to Bronze, note how tiny these amounts are. Of the 1000 000, about 7400 will die in a year. Of those, 1850 will be from heart disease. Compare this to the 160 dead and you get an idea of how insignificant both murder and suicide are in the grand scheme of mortality.
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You can't even formulate your analogy right. All I'm saying here is that, if there are more piercings than car crashes, you will be more likely to HAVE a piercing (certain caveats notwithstanding) than be in a car crash. That such a simple point seems to elude you is astounding. If more people die by suicide than murder then you, as one of the lumpen proles, are more likely to kill yourself than be killed by another person. That is all. Ard you really arguing the contrary here?
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So is there any statistical evidence that owning a gun lowers your chance of getting murdered? Because that would be kind of a big thing in terms of proving efficacy as a self defense tool.
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I know that Salon is verboten, but this entertained me in any case: http://www.salon.com/2016/03/14/bill_clintons_odious_presidency_thomas_frank_on_the_real_history_of_the_90s/ The best part of the joke, of course, is that we're on the cusp of seeing yet another Clinton presidency. And political pundits wonder why the whole country seems to be stumping for Trump...
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Also, if you take the 4.7 million prevented murders at face value, it means that around 80% of American should have fended off a murderer using a gun by the end their lives. I don't know about you, but this makes the US seem positively apocalyptic. Edit: or, to put it another way, every non gun owner in the US should be dead by now. In fact, now that I think about it, this is a great way to test the DGU hypothesis. Is there any evidence that gun owners get murdered at significantly lower rates than non gun owners in the US?
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You're arguing against someone else again. All I said is that chance of suicide >> chance of homicide in the US. Thus, your death is more likely to come at your own hands than another's. Thus, if your hand is holding a gun... Unless you want to argue that gun owners are statistically much less likely to off themselves than the general population, I can't see how the above could be an issue regardless of what subpopulation you belong to. Edit: Links to why the above is wrong in any case. http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/gun-ownership-and-use/ http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2015/02/daily-chart
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The rest of it seemed pretty pertinent as well. God knows I how much I would curse when I inevitably lost the important pin in the dust or whatever while trying to clean things.
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I've mentioned this before, but the joke is that even our sky-high murder rate (down to 31/100 000!) leaves you roughly on par with transport-related deaths (5000 a year for both) and well under the biggest killers in our country: TB (50 000 a year), flu and pneumonia (40 000 a year), HIV (20 000 a year) and diabetes (20 000 a year). Which is to say that, if you're worried about extending your lifespan, you would be equally served by cutting down on travel time and infinitely better served by wearing a condom and leaving the sugar alone. I figure that this general pattern is similar all over.
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We have plenty of democraceh, bruh. Why, today you can even vote for two other viable* parties (the DA and EFF) when choosing another five years of ANC rule! * Which means you can fuck right off, VF+ and COPE.
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I'm just speaking statistically, here. Suicide/death by accident is just more likely than murder in the US (12.1/100 000 versus 3.8/100 000). Ergo, owning a gun means that you're much more likely to get killed by it than by another person. Of course, South Africa is in the pretty unusual position of actually having a lower suicide rate than murder rate.
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In fairness to hired goons and old guys with .380s, the person most likely to shoot you is always you.
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You see, that's our secret: we don't have a town hall.
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This Bob guy apparently has some weird ideas regarding the root causes of crime.
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You live in a strange land, guy-who-likes-leverguns.
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I'm really confused right now. Are you arguing with someone?
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You going to give up and join me the one true church of stalling out/stick flying?
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Speaking of armed guards, a very South African thing I saw once was when I was driving to varsity one morning (years ago) through the 'burbs. Now, pretty much every house in the suburbs has security (barbed wire,electric fences and an alarm), so it's really common to see a response vehicle parked outside one as you drive past. Usually to deal with a false alarm or accidental panic-button press. What made this one interesting was that the guard was leaving the house (they usually just chat with you at the door) while putting his shirt back on. My guess is that that household saw more than its fair share of alarm malfunctions while the wife was at home. Although, in her defence, the lady had good taste - the guard was lean, handsome and literally paid to come in and rescue her from danger. Now, I can't say I actually saw a well-heeled lady run out to help the guard back into his vest. But the image completes the story perfectly so I'm going to leave it in.
