Toxn

My system is classless, but as I've pointed out we're actually dealing with a few approaches that need to be winnowed.
 
Maybe we should start out by telling the ideal story we want to see in this game. Here is one:
 
"The forests which ring our little circle of light are dark and full of wordless menace. Wild people live there; men savage and degenerate. Worse things, too: creatures not described even in our myths. Things which crawl in the dark and worm their way amongst the cold pines. Things which speak with voices that whistle and moan like wind through leafless trees.
 
And our little circle of light, this last vestige of civilization, is fading. The empire is dead, my friend. No ships have come. We may be the last civilized men left in the entire world. And year on year, as our walls crumble and our roads become weed-infested, we become like the savages beyond our borders.
 
We have hard choices ahead of us now. Do we gather ourselves to face the looming dark, trusting in the virtues of our old ways? Do we try to forge a new path for our people in a time of change? Or do we change and become the savages we have despised?"
 
The kicker being that the Romanised Britons aren't exactly reliable narrators for what's going on around them, and might label as savages any number of different people. Hell, it might simply be that the guys next door are simply being pragmatic about transitioning their societies away from trade with a dead empire. Or they might actually be old-school, hair-liming atavists from the misty north...

I must admit to a huge bias here; namely that I have no love for Saudi Arabia at all. They create nothing of value, provide nothing good to the world at large beyond the crude that they just so happen to sit on. So fuck 'em.

I must admit to a huge bias here; namely that I have no love for Saudi Arabia at all. They create nothing of value, provide nothing good to the world at large beyond the crude that they just so happen to sit on. So fuck 'em.

My system is classless, but as I've pointed out we're actually dealing with a few approaches that need to be winnowed.
 
Maybe we should start out by telling the ideal story we want to see in this game. Here is one:
 
"The forests which ring our little circle of light are dark and full of wordless menace. Wild people live there; men savage and degenerate. Worse things, too: creatures not described even in our myths. Things which crawl in the dark and worm their way amongst the cold pines. Things which speak with voices that whistle and moan like wind through leafless trees.
 
And our little circle of light, this last vestige of civilization, is fading. The empire is dead, my friend. No ships have come. We may be the last civilized men left in the entire world. And year on year, as our walls crumble and our roads become weed-infested, we become like the savages beyond our borders.
 
We have hard choices ahead of us now. Do we gather ourselves to face the looming dark, trusting in the virtues of our old ways? Do we try to forge a new path for our people in a time of change? Or do we change and become the savages we have despised?"
 
The kicker being that the Romanised Britons aren't exactly reliable narrators for what's going on around them, and might label as savages any number of different people. Hell, it might simply be that the guys next door are simply being pragmatic about transitioning their societies away from trade with a dead empire. Or they might actually be old-school, hair-liming atavists from the misty north...

I must admit to a huge bias here; namely that I have no love for Saudi Arabia at all. They create nothing of value, provide nothing good to the world at large beyond the crude that they just so happen to sit on. So fuck 'em.

My worth to the tribe is determined by the amount of smug I generate.

1

1

Armed society not a polite society. Who would have guessed?

The thought of Saudi Arabia having nukes fills me with much more dread than the idea that Iran might.

The thought of Saudi Arabia having nukes fills me with much more dread than the idea that Iran might.

Oh god that is my least favorite pro-gun slogan.
Gunnies in general don't seem to recognize how incongruent that slogan is with "guns don't kill people, people kill people", either.

Armed society not a polite society. Who would have guessed?

On searches, trademarks probably won't be that helpful. This is because the mark is usually a word rather than phrase, and "lights first time, every time" would probably be considered descriptive but not distinctive.
 
I ran a quick search through the USPTO anyway, here are the results:
"lights AND first AND time" returns one result (LIGHTS FIRST TIME ... EVERYTIME) for a word mark by the bic pen corporation. The mark was submitted in 1975 and cancelled in 1981. Searching for the owner name "Ronson" returns 314 results, the oldest of which is from 1974 (Ronson corporation, New Jersey). Given the above, I suspect that the USPTO online database only goes back to the 1970s, so we'd probably have to check paper records.
I'll look into it over my lunch break and get back to you guys later.
 
edit: did a date search. The first available records are from the 1970s.
 
edit 2: I quickly searched WIPO, which has a bunch of records (from multiple countries) going back to the 1800s. Ronson corp applied for a logo in 1929, and had a couple of product-specific image marks (Red devil, an image of a smoking indian and so on) in the 1930s and 40s. Searching for the "lights first time" slogan just returns the Bic mark again, which strongly suggests that that was the origin for the meme. Here is the logo for reference:
 

It lives!
 

Because it is my human rights that have to be spent to get the guy who robbed a bank (or even sold heroin) out of jail.  Personally, if I have to pay to have someone warehoused under threat of their committing violence on me, then it has to be done under my terms.  And my terms are - commit a violent act for any reason, earn a stay at a welfare center which I choose to call a jail.  I will accept no other terms since they are my rights, I possess them already, and it takes extraordinary acts to remove them.
 
Pablo Fajnzylber, working under a Neo-Marxist assumption set, reverses causality as a matter of course in the article - which is why I teach my students to tread carefully when employing a tool like Neo-Marxism.  Now I am the last person to throw Gary Becker and the Chicago mafia under the bus here, their work is valid and their discovery connecting racial bias with economic disfavor are ground breaking and important.  But their work can, should, and is questionable with regards to crime.  Messier found no connection between economics and crime.  Blau squared found a connection, but also a blizzard of caveats.  All this work pre-exists the article you provide but the author - a world bank employee, choose to only use Becker as a foundation.  About like someone arguing against germ theory but failing to cite John Snow.  
 
Now to personal experience.  I never in five years arrested anyone who stole because they needed money to feed themselves or house their family.  You could argue they did not have a yacht, but neither do I.  And the theory you present cannot be used to predict the chance of someone being a criminal.  

I doubt this will actually happen.  Terminal graphing is a very useful exercise, and zero intercept generation a tool no leader should misunderstand, but my stats professor said that taken to far you will actually believe that in the year 2101 the entire world will live in Kenya, have a last name of Chang, and be Hindu.
 
Orthodox religions in free societies with open press always look good on paper, but the conversion rate out of the religion is simply too high.  And yes, as soon as Israel falters on its everyone fights rule probably it quits being Israel, but if the army starts to suffer then even the orthodox will be handed swords and called Essenes. 

In other words: many causes, many possible solutions.

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.

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.

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.

This isn't even a joke: episodes I to III make it canon.

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.

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.