Lurker > darkknight109

Joker_X_II posted...

Okay,...

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=201920200SB145

... god, I love being right, when everyone else is calling you crazy......

Imagine posting a source that completely destroys your own argument, yet still being oblivious enough to think you've won the debate.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Joker_X_II posted...

the libs themselves that are trying to create laws where homosexuals who sleep with underage same sex children won't be put on a sex-offender lis....

Imagine believing this is true.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Dunno if "hate" is the right word for it, but he definitely looks down on them and thinks they're idiots.

---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Zeus posted...

idk, lying is a pretty essential business skill.

If you're working in a fundamentally dishonest industry, that would probably be true.

In my line of work, we need to be the opposite of that. My job is to be brutally honest with my clients, which occasionally involves telling them things they don't want to hear. I don't particularly care how well a job candidate lies, because it's a skill they won't get a lot of use of in my department.

---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

"People have said that I'm just too good at the job. Like, I'm just way too focused on it. It's like I'm obsessed."

Jokes aside, I conduct hiring interviews and I've always found that to be one of the most useless questions to ask, because you're basically asking the candidate how convincingly they can lie to you. No one is actually going to tell you a weakness that reduces their chances at getting in the job.

When I interview, I avoid this question and instead ask something like, "Describe for me an experience in your school (if the applicant is a recent grad) or previous work (if they've got actual work experience) where things went really badly. How did you react? What would you have done differently if you could go back and do things again?"

Back when I was still in the market myself, if I got asked the "biggest weakness" question, my go-to answer was, "Inexperience. I'm still fairly new in this field, so I don't know the ins and outs of the industry or of the type of work this office does." That was a perfect answer to the question, because it was demonstrably true, demonstrating a good character trait (awareness of inexperience and hopefully not falling for the Dunning-Kruger effect), and also something that the company could easily address via their own internal training programs (it wouldn't work for me today, but I've stuck with a single company for my entire career, so I've never had to update my default answer). You never want to say something like, "I have trouble working with others", because that's a character trait with no upside and not something the company can really fix.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

You want a son indicted on multiple murder charges?

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

G. Other.

---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

wwinterj25 posted...

I feel folk who say "fuck the current year" have never experienced the worse year of their life yet.

Ordinarily I would agree, but I think 2020 has kind of earned it at this point.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

I would have trouble writing an essay that's that short. How the hell do you even frame a position in that small a space?

---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

If you want to chop the end of your dick off, be my guest, but if you want to do it on a kid they should be old enough to consent to it.

---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Red_Frog posted...

I said "questionable" and dk decided that was worth getting ruffled over.

Most people understand that "questionable" is not the same thing as "I don't like it".

And for all your blather about how mad I must be about this, you're the only one who's been tossing insults around like I fucked your sister, all because you're getting hot and bothered about someone's opinion of video game peripherals.

---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Red_Frog posted...

You seem fantastically buttmad about it for some reason.

You say this, but pretty much the only thing you've been able to sum up in response is, "I don't like it, so therefore it must be awful."

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Red_Frog posted...

N64 controller

Was built like a fucking tank, except for the control stick. Seriously, a magazine torture-tested all first- and third-party controllers of the fifth generation, including pouring pop on them, slap-shotting them with a hockey stick, and swinging them around by their cords and the N64 fared the best out of all of them, functioning perfectly afterwards except for a busted stick. I don't think the PS1 or Saturn controllers even worked afterwards, if memory serves.

Red_Frog posted...

GameCube controller

What was wrong with this one? These had no systemic issues that I'm aware of.

Red_Frog posted...

Wiimote

The only thing that the Wiimotes initially suffered from was weak wrist-straps that had a tendency to snap if people put enough force into them, which Nintendo quickly corrected.

Red_Frog posted...

Virtual Boy

Pretty much the only part of your post I agree with, given the soldering in them was shit and had a tendency to give way and screw up one or both screens.

Red_Frog posted...

Wii U gamepad, Switch

What's wrong with either of these? Again, no systemic issues that I'm aware of.

Red_Frog posted...

original unlit GBA

The only crap part about the original GBA was the lack of a backlight, which was a design flaw, not a durability issue. I have two of these, one of which I acquired used, and they both still work fine to this day.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Red_Frog posted...

Nintendo may make some questionable choices when it comes to hardware, but batteries aren't one of them.

"Questionable choices"? Like what?

Nintendo's stuff is well known for being tough as a brick shithouse. Their hardware is almost impossible to destroy.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

MartianManchild posted...

Maybe Canada has less cases because theyve only done 4 million tests compared to the US which has done 68 million tests

Ah, yes, the favoured conservative talking point - "We only have more cases because we test more!"

Hate to break it to you bud, but you've got that perfectly backwards. You do more tests because you have more cases. Or, to put it more precisely, you do more tests because you need to do more tests because you have more people sick and dying and those people are sick and dying because they have the Coronavirus. And, as discussed ad nauseum, they have the Coronavirus because America is shit at pandemic management.

Most other countries aren't testing nearly as much because they don't need to - there's no sick people *to* test. The countries that actually instituted sensible lockdown procedures and sustained them for long enough to be effective (Canada included) saw huge drops in the virus counts and have since managed to keep the case numbers at a manageable level. Countries that put major efforts into contact tracing have been able to quickly isolate and quarantine anyone exposed, thus reducing the number of tests they've done. Meanwhile, in the US, a scattershot response and general negative attitude towards basically anything that would help combat the virus is ensuring it continues to run rampant there, with 5+ million infected, 160,000+ dead and no end in sight.

MartianManchild posted...

I would guarantee that if Canada had performed 68 million tests, their numbers would be in the millions too.

Ah, here's the problem - I've found another person who can't do basic math. I count at least three problems with your hilarious mangling of numbers:

1) If Canada had done 68 million tests, that would imply that they had tested every single person in the country approximately twice. They would have tested more, in terms of a percentage of their population, than anyone on the planet. And not just a little bit more either - counting countries with a population of at least 1 million, Canada would have tested more than triple the amount of the next country in line on basis of population (the UAE, which has tested a mere ~59% of their population).

2) Related to the above, you failed to correct for population, which gives a radically skewed impression of the data. On a population-adjusted basis, Canada has tested a little over half as much as the US (Canada has tested ~122k per million compared to ~208k per million for the Americans). If Canada was failing as hard as America was at addressing the virus and tests really did correlate to case numbers, you would expect that Canada would have roughly half as many cases as the US on a per-capita basis (and even that's being generous, because the tests are not randomized and would be more likely to have a higher positivity rate, assuming they were being prioritized on serious cases in this hypothetical); in reality, Canada has about a fifth of the cases per capita.

3) If Canada had "millions" (plural) of people infected with the virus, that would be roughly one in every ten Canadians infected, which would result in a massive spike in hospitalizations and deaths as well as rapidly turning the country into a giant plague cauldron, since once that much of the population had been infected there would be no stopping massive community transmission of the disease without hyper-aggressive quarantining and medical triage. The US has 5 million infections and 160,000 dead as a result; if Canada had that many people dying, I think we'd probably notice something was up. Since that plainly hasn't happened, I'm forced to conclude that your "guarantee" is full of shit.

Do you right-wingers actually think before you make your posts or do you just say the first thing that comes into your head without bothering to check if it has any basis in fact?

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

OhhhJa posted...

You know you shouldn't throw around ad hominems like idiot if you're going to look like one yourself.

Yes, I shouldn't throw around ad hominems to someone who apparently can't remember their own argument. Remember this:

"Or maybe it's because Canada is mostly wilderness with like two major cities compared to the US having dozens of major cities."

That was the first thing you said in response to me. I pointed out, in response:

"Canadians aren't evenly spread out; we have a pretty similar urban/rural population split to the US."

And you literally just admitted I was correct about that in your last post and yet you're *still* trying to argue the point.

OhhhJa posted...

You yourself stared that canada has 5 major cities compared to 10 in the US if we're going by populations over 1 mil. And if the rural/urban spread is roughly the same that means we have 330 mil spread over 10 major cities vs 30 mil spread over 5 major cities. 330/10 = 33, 30/5 = 6.

Oh my gosh, this is torturous. Seriously, between this and the last time I had to explain ratios to you, I'm starting to think you never actually took a math course in your school years.

So, first of all - and I'm flat-out stunned I need to explain this - not all of Canada or the US lives in major cities! Some live in smaller cities with less than a million people, some live in smaller, non-city urban centres, some live in rural areas. Your math assumes that the entire population of both countries lives in just a handful of cities, which is straight up wrong.

Fuck me, you have the *actual* population of those cities one google search away. Spoiler alert: it's ~13.3 million for Canada (i.e. about a third of our population) in five cities versus ~25.8 million for America (i.e. less than a tenth of your population) in 10 cities; it is NOT 30 million (which, bizarrely, isn't even Canada's actual population) and 330 million because, holy shit of course it isn't.

So yes, a greater proportion of Canada's population lives in cities with over a million people than the US. That suggests our population is actually packed more densely than the US. If anything, we should be more vulnerable to the virus as a result, yet we've managed to get through it quite well, while the US has floundered.

OhhhJa posted...

See above

Even if this were true (and, as I just showed, it isn't), it wouldn't even prove your actual point, which is that US cities are "denser" than Canadian cities. That's not the same thing as saying they are more populous, because cities don't have uniform sizes; you can have cities that are more populous, but also more spread out, making the actual population density lower.

If you want to argue that American cities are "denser" than their Canadian counterparts, you'll need to back that assertion up with something more than the imaginary math you were using before.

OhhhJa posted...

I mean... we were comparing countries by various metrics. So your comparison metrics are ok to discuss but mine aren't?

Correct, because yours were about as relevant as discussing which country has more waterfowl. Remember, this was the original point of contention that you raised with my post:

"Or maybe it's because Canada is mostly wilderness with like two major cities compared to the US having dozens of major cities. No couldnt be that. It's probably because Canadians are so much smarter."

That's it. This entire topic has been about COVID-19; not comparing and contrasting quality of life between the US and some third world countries.

OhhhJa posted...

You're the one torturing statistics here to make direct comparisons to Europe and the US.

I mean, you were the one who said that the reason the US was so garbage at this whole COVID business was because it had so many people (even though literally every country on the globe that has more people than you guys do is doing better and the handful of countries that have worse metrics than the US also have much lower populations); I merely pointed out that, if you really want to do this by population, the US doesn't look any better. You could basically consider the EU as one country for this comparison, given that their member states act not dissimilar to states in the US.

I mean, take a look at what you've said so far. You've basically argued that "The US hasn't done so bad, as long as you only compare it to impoverished third world countries with nine-digit populations and terrible healthcare and also ignore the fact that the US is still somehow losing to those countries." Seriously, of all the countries that have at least 100,000,000 people, the only one that's even close to the US in terms of virus load is Brazil (not coincidentally being another country run by a populist right-wing lunatic); the rest all have per-capita virus numbers that are at least one order of magnitude lower than the US.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

captpackrat posted...

A horse walks into a bar. The bartender asks, "Why the long face?"

A moose walks into a bar with a pair of jumper cables attached to its antlers. The bartender says, "I don't mind the long face, but don't you try and start anything in here."

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

OhhhJa posted...

Lol no. US pop density is 90 per sq mile. Canada is 10 per sq mile

So, it's really kind of sad I have to do this, but you kind of need to read the entire sentence you're responding to if you don't want to make yourself look like an idiot.

Here's the part that you missed:

"When you look at the actual areas that have people in them and not the vast swathes of wilderness and arctic in Canada that have, essentially, no people in them, Canada has a pretty similar population density to the US."

Hilariously, you yourself managed to concede that point and admit that I was correct in your very next bullet point.

OhhhJa posted...

Also untrue.

It was based on the "methodology" you put forward originally, so that's not surprising.

OhhhJa posted...

Still, US cities are definitely more densely packed overall

He says with no source for his assertion.

OhhhJa posted...

Not really. It actually shows the US does a great job by comparison of maintaining a relatively high standard of living compared to other countries of comparable populations that all have a significantly lower standard of living.

In what universe were we talking about "standard of living" in this topic?

And I would expect that standard of living would also include "not getting killed by a pandemic." Which, y'know, the US is apparently really bad at.

OhhhJa posted...

Managing hundreds of millions of people is obviously tough work which is something no European country nor canada would know anything about.

Put it this way: the ENTIRE European Union, which has far more scattered governance compared to the US, has fewer cases and fewer deaths than the US, despite having half-again as many people in their borders.

You can try and torture the statistics of this as much as you like, there is no way to avoid the fact that the US has been an abject failure when it has come to COVID-19 management. The country is almost a perfect case study in what not to do during a pandemic.

---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

OhhhJa posted...

You can't simply focus on per capita though since how the populations are distributed is a huge factor.

And I already pointed out that our population distribution is pretty much the same as the US. There are more people in the US, which means more population centres, but the distribution doesn't change. When you look at the actual areas that have people in them and not the vast swathes of wilderness and arctic in Canada that have, essentially, no people in them, Canada has a pretty similar population density to the US.

OhhhJa posted...

Canada has what... two real major cities...

By that metric, you're saying that a "major city" must have at least 3.5 million people. In which case Canada has two (Toronto and Montreal) and America has... oh, also two (New York and Los Angeles). Even if you wanted to drop that definition to "cities with at least a million people", Canada has five and the US has just 10 which, considering the US has nearly 10x the population of Canada, still disproportionately skews in favour of Canada.

So, by your own logic, Canada has MORE of its population living in "major cities", therefore making America's failure to adequately address the virus all the more acute.

OhhhJa posted...

Also, far more people travel to and from America and China than anywhere in the world and its not even close.

And?

That's not how the virus was spread in the US. That's how it arrived in the US, much like how it arrived in every other country that wasn't China, but statistically the virus was spread almost exclusively by locals.

No one is faulting the US for the virus reaching her shores - that was always inevitable. Most of the world - sensible Americans included - simply recognize that America's response has been an absolute trainwreck. Like, laughably bad for a country that claims to be the greatest in the world.

OhhhJa posted...

Yes I believe the US should be compared to other countries among the highest populations in the world

You say that, but then you say...

OhhhJa posted...

These places are all impoverished shitholes even compared to the US.

...which sounds to me like a good reason why the US *should* be far and away ahead of them and why they make for poor comparables. Or they would... but the US isn't, even when you set the bar almost as low as you possibly could. Worse, when held up to other first-world countries - even those in east Asia that have population densities far, far higher than even the most cramped US cities - the US still lags far behind.

That's why this, "Yeah, well, India and Brazil are gaining on us!!" defence is so laughable. India has one of the most impoverished underclasses in the world. Brazil's health care system is a disaster for anyone who isn't rich and its favelas are a breeding ground for disease even when there isn't a global pandemic going on. Yet these are the countries that you're proud that the US is... well, still losing to, but maybe not quite so badly anymore.

OhhhJa posted...

I feel that trailer park boys simply paints a solid picture of your average Canadian. Thats all

If that's reflective of the average American point of view, I'd say you've more or less proved my point pretty decisively.

---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

OhhhJa posted...

And the US still has several dozen times the amount of major cities that Canada has and 10 times the population. This isn't a difficult concept to understand

Neither is a per-capita infection rate, but that seems to be lost on you if you think that population difference is actually meaningful to this discussion.

OhhhJa posted...

Like Brazil? India? Indonesia? Russia? All places where the virus is really starting to take hold now and the cases are rapidly growing.

So congratulations on naming four countries that have lower virus numbers - both raw and per-capita - than the US, thus doing a great job of proving my point for me.

Moreover, look at the countries you just named. That's who you think the US should be compared to? Those are the health-care titans that you think the world's biggest economy should boast about being ahead of (despite, y'know, not actually being ahead of them) after eight months of a global pandemic? You really don't see how pathetic of a flex that is?

OhhhJa posted...

Unless you think Netflix is only watched by americans.

OK, so you're basing the assertion that this is Canada's most "well-known" show off of Netflix only, which seems spurious. I don't know what metric you're using for this, or how Netflix calculates it, and I don't honestly care enough to dig into it, because the fact that you've been reduced to trying to talk about a fictional television series as a line of attack during a discussion of a global pandemic is honestly kind of pathetic. If that's where you're going to try and find your W's, go ahead and take this one, but you might want to set your sights a little higher next time.

MartianManchild posted...

Because it doesnt fit the agenda of making it look like Americans are stupid and every other country is just doing great and accepting all these restrictions.

There are idiots everywhere, but the press doesn't have to "make Americans look stupid"; the virus data that gets published regularly does a good enough job of that on its own.

---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

captpackrat posted...

I saw a sign that said "horse boarding"

That's like waterboarding, but with horses?

I always assumed that was the entrance that horses used to get on the plane.

---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

OhhhJa posted...

Or maybe it's because Canada is mostly wilderness with like two major cities compared to the US having dozens of major cities.

And why do you think that would make a difference?

Most of that wilderness is uninhabited. Canadians aren't evenly spread out; we have a pretty similar urban/rural population split to the US.

OhhhJa posted...

It's probably because Canadians are so much smarter.

Probably. That's really not a high bar to surpass, though, given the current state of the USA.

That "B-but we have bigger cities!" argument will really only take you so far, particularly when dozens of other countries with higher population densities have managed this virus better than you.

OhhhJa posted...

That's why their most famous TV show is a show about a trailer park with stupid people committing small time crimes and going to jail

I mean, if that's the Canadian show that Americans are most familiar with, I think that says more about Americans than Canadians...

---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

MartianManchild posted...

Posting for all those snobby Canadians who like to pretend their country is soooo much better.

I mean... we objectively are. The virus numbers don't lie.

Not saying we don't have idiots here - those protests clearly show we do - but we plainly have a lot less of them.

---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Zeus posted...

And it's worth noting that the areas with the lowest gun ownership rates have been home to many mass shootings, while the ones with higher gun ownership rates haven't.

Mass shootings are exceedingly rare events and make up substantially less than 1% of all shootings. It's rather telling that you're focusing on this for your statistic and zeroing in on a single state rather than looking at the data as an aggregate. In the world of statistics, we call this "cherry-picking".

I also note that you're not bothering to correct for population on this point. Not that it would help, because the event you're discussing is such an outlier that it is subject to enormous statistical skew.

Zeus posted...

And the state with the highest gun ownership rate -- Montana -- has one of the lowest murder rates in the country.

The highest rate of gun ownership is Alaska (61.7% of its population), not Montana (52.3% of its population). Montana is actually sixth. Alaska, for the record, had the fourth-highest homicide rate in the US as of 2018.

You appear to have lifted your data from the number of people living in households with guns, in which Montana is, indeed, number 1, but that's not the same as the gun ownership rate.

Zeus posted...

But if you want to argue access, look at Mexico.

Yes, let's look at a developing country that's running rampant with illegal guns, massive gang problems, police corruption, rampant poverty, and ineffective law enforcement and assume it will make a good comparable for the US. America's getting there, I'll grant you that, but you guys aren't quite at that level yet.

Again, you may want to steer clear of the cherry picking - the fact you need to focus on carefully selected examples rather than overall trends just highlights how bad your position is on this.

Or you could, y'know, look at literally any other developed country and recognize that the US has a murder rate multiple times higher than theirs.

Zeus posted...

So basically you're arguing that whether or not he had a gun, the kid's life was in danger... something that would have only been stopped if other people there had guns.

The kid's life would have been in substantially less danger if his attacker wasn't armed.

And no, if the attacker was unarmed it would not require a gun to stop him. That's one of the many reasons you want attackers to not have guns.

Not to mention, if there were people around with guns, all that would mean is that there would have been two bodies (or more) rather than one, which is not an improvement on the situation; by contrast, if no one was armed, there's an excellent chance that there would have been no corpses at the end of the night, which is the ideal outcome for that scenario.

Zeus posted...

Before you were distorting statistics, now you're just making them up.

If you picked a random adult out of the US, there's a 30% chance they have a gun. But police aren't doing pure random selection; they're far more likely to pick criminals than a pure random selection and criminals are more likely to be armed.

I gave 50% as a high-level estimate (hence why I qualified it with the tilde); I don't know what the exact number is, but that's in the ballpark (I would guesstimate it's within +/-10%).

---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Zeus posted...

We live in the world's largest gun manufacturer which, in addition, has essentially two open borders and a ton of places where contraband to enter the country. The idea that even a gun ban would stop criminals from getting guns is a fantasy.

Guns flow out of America, not in. Your weapons equip criminals in Canada and Mexico, not the other way around.

And yes, gun bans do stop criminals from getting guns, as proven by basically any crime statistic you care to mention. Within the US, gun-restrictive states have lower homicide rates than gun-permissive states. On a national level, gun-restrictive countries have lower homicide rates than gun-permissive ones.

Yes, you will never fully prevent all criminals from arming themselves, but most are not James Moriarty, criminal geniuses both mentally and financially capable of evading arms control measures; most are your garden variety fuckups who wouldn't have the first clue on where to get a gun if they weren't fucking everywhere in the US.

Zeus posted...

And I should mention grenades are illegal in Switzerland, but they have a stunningly large number of grenade attacks in recent years.

There have been literally zero grenade attacks in Switzerland in recent years. This is, as you are so fond of putting it, fake news.

Check your facts before posting garbage like this.

Zeus posted...

Per capita is a purposefully deceptive statistic that ignores gun ownership trends in nations.

This is a hilarious deflection that ignores the entire point of the paragraph you carefully excised it from.

The US has fewer restrictions than any other gun-friendly nation. You can define "gun-friendly" however you like and if you want to try and dither about per-capita, you're free to use any other metric you please, the comparison still holds true.

America is one of the only countries in the world - and the only developed one, to my knowledge - where gun ownership is considered a right rather than a privilege and where there is, essentially, no universal check, licensure, or registration required to own a weapon.

Zeus posted...

Your statistic is based on the guns per overall population argument, which overlooks that gun ownership in the US is driven by collectors with many guns.

Which ultimately doesn't make a difference, because there are so many guns in America that even if you want to define it exclusively by gun owners, you're still talking about an enormous percentage of the population.

30% of all US adults own a gun and 43% live in a household where at least one gun is present.

I don't have the percentages for Switzerland, but there are only 2.3 million guns for 8.3 million people (7 million adults). Even if the guns were distributed perfectly evenly, that would equate to 32% of all Swiss adults owning a gun - basically the same as the US. When you factor in that collectors exist in Switzerland as well, the actual percentage of gun-owning adults in the country is almost assuredly lower than the US.

Once again, check your facts.

Zeus posted...

Switzerland historically *had* one of the lowest rates of violence in the world up until recent years

Switzerland also has much tighter regulations around guns than the US. Guns are only allowed for sport-shooting, hunting, or collecting, concealed carry is mostly banned, ammunition is restricted, permits are required for carrying the weapon in public and require both regular renewal and the passing of a test proving knowledge of the weapon and safe practices in its use, and transport of the weapon is heavily regulated and must only be done with a specific purpose in mind.

If the US adopted the Swiss model, it would be a massive step in the right direction.

---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Zeus posted...

lolwut? Does a drug dealer "fuck up" when he sells drugs? You're pretending that there's some oversight when it's usually just deliberate criminality.

That gun was legal at one point. Criminals don't have their own secret gun factory that they use to manufacture their firearms. So somebody, at some point, bought that gun legally and it eventually came into the criminal's hands. How the criminal himself got a hold of it isn't particularly relevant to this point, because the point is if there were stricter controls on guns and/or fewer guns floating around, there's less of a chance for that gun to get to its original owner and, therefore, less of a chance it eventually passes on to someone who will use it for criminal means.

Zeus posted...

Not really, no. There are countless onerous laws on the books making it difficult for law-abiding citizens to buy guns.

No, there aren't.

If you want to see actual, effective gun control laws, go literally anywhere else. Even other "gun-friendly" countries like Switzerland (19th most guns per capita), Canada (7th most guns per capita) or Finland (10th most guns per capita) have things like gun licenses, registration, mandatory training, mandatory waiting periods, etc.

The US's gun laws are only strict if you don't compare it to anyone else.

Zeus posted...

If everybody at that BK -- including the employee -- was packing, do you think this thug would have engaged in a violent confrontation?

The numbers say yes.

If your logic actually worked, the US would have the lowest violent crime rates in the world, particularly in gun-heavy areas, because criminals would be too terrified to commit violence. The US, after all, has by far the highest civilian gun ownership rate, so shouldn't all those guns push down crime rates as criminals are either deterred or killed in justifiable homicides?

But that's not what actually happens. Instead, the US has high rates of violent crime and a frankly obscene murder rate, proving that this "gun deterrence" is and always has been right-wing fiction. There's also no indication that gun-friendly states fare better than their gun-restrictive peers, as many of the US's most violent states (Top 10, in order, are Alaska, New Mexico, Tennessee, Arkansas, Nevada, Louisiana, Alabama, Missouri, South Carolina, and Arizona as of 2018). When civilians have essentially free access to firearms, the criminals do too, which makes them more effective at what they're doing because, unlike their victims, they know when violence is going to take place and they can have their weapons ready first.

I also shouldn't have to point this out, but someone who is willing to shoot someone else over fast food service isn't thinking rationally and plainly is not all that worried about consequences for their actions or else, y'know, they wouldn't have shot someone over fast food service. Adding guns to the mix is not going to alter that equation.

Zeus posted...

Given that you guys don't trust or even like cops, you should be all for more citizens having guns to defend themselves against violent felons like this punk who, even if he only had a knife, was a danger to the employee and others.

Half the reason why policing in the US is in such a sorry state is because the cops are dealing with a heavily armed populace. They need to have itchy trigger fingers for their own safety, because there's an excellent chance that whoever they're trying to arrest is armed.

You notice how most other first-world countries have police that more effectively de-escalate situations? How many have cops that don't even bother to carry firearms? They can do that, because their odds of running into an armed criminal are low. US cops always have to assume that whoever they're dealing with is potentially armed, because there's a ~50% chance they do.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Your honour, the prosecution hereby presents Exhibit #4,267,897 in the case of "The Second Amendment is Dumb as Fuck".

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQ8q6p_avU8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RaKSRU60bw

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

MartianManchild posted...

Biden is no better than Trump and in many ways hes worse.

This is literally not possible.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Playstation easily. The N64 has some seminal titles that still have active communities (Mario 64, Ocarina of Time, Majora's Mask, Banjo Kazooie, Mario Kart 64, etc.), particularly in speedrunning or modding; by contrast, most of the PS1's best titles have since been improved upon and few are still considered high-tier games today.

One proviso on this is that I'm assuming that this ban also encompasses ports and remakes (i.e. the N64 ban would also cover the DS port of Mario 64 and the 3DS ports of OoT and MM, etc.); otherwise, I'd be more inclined to go with the PS1, as most of the N64's most celebrated games have since been ported/remade on other systems.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Doesn't "Cimarron" just mean "sheep" or something like that? Seems like kind of a weird concept.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

*Seven.

Seven evil *exes

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Surprisingly, despite having practised martial arts for 30 years and having had some very close encounters with bears (inadvertently got within four feet of a grizzly on two separate occasions, given that I lived on an acreage that was right in their habitat), I have yet to combine the two.

I feel that this was a missed life opportunity.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Getting away with anything.

Or, if it has to be an actual skill, archery. Never had the time to learn it properly, but was always interested in it.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

ParanoidObsessive posted...

I took seven years of French in middle school, high school, and college, and if you dropped me in Paris today I couldn't even ask my way to the bathroom.

That's because classroom language-learning (especially at grade-school level) is generally awful and impractical. I did five years of French and I can remember, like, maybe three basic sentences. After my first year of Japanese study (a combination of self-study, lessons and conversation practice with a Japanese friend, and online courses), I could speak more Japanese than I could speak at the height of my French "fluency".

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

If I can give you some advice, memorize the kana first. All of it, katakana and hiragana both. I have no idea what your aspirations are for Japanese, but knowing the kana is hugely useful, even if you're not planning on learning how to read. If's basically the building blocks of the language.

FrozenBananas posted...

I know oni-chan

You know a demon?

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

JigsawTDC posted...

You two are having the dumbest argument about nothing and you both look ridiculous right now.

I'm not even sure you could call it an argument. He seemed to have me mistaken for someone else and then just ran with it, even when I corrected him.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

OniRonin posted...

Lol whatever you say Derek

I'm honestly just confused at this point on whether you're actually stupid enough to think you're making a point or are deliberately taking the piss.

Either way, is Derek someone you have a mancrush on or something?

I apologize in advance if you think that term is misogynist.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

OniRonin posted...

https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/472/097/73b.png

So... are you trying to tell us something with this post or just more deflection from how ridiculous your original argument was and how you're trying to flat-out make shit up in order to distract from the topic at hand?

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

OniRonin posted...

it's funny that you think these are the same. Oh wait you're the MRA guy from CE arent you. that tracks.

I literally never post on CE or have anything to do with MRA, but way to make wildly incorrect guesses and not check your facts in service of a bullshit argument that you're not even bothering to defend.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

streamofthesky posted...

As someone who's no fan of the GOP, I have to say that Democrats aren't exactly innocent here.
The new financial relief bill is stalled largely due to Republicans wanting to reduce the outrageous $600 bonus per week to unemployment (not even remove it, just reduce it to a still way-fucking-better-than-2008-unemployment boost of +$200) and Democrats are fighting to keep it at $600.

At this point, if Dems are unwilling to bend on the fucking unemployment giveway that means people are making $20-$25 per hour sitting at home from jobs that paid half of that, then both sides should split the bill into separate bills. Get the shit like eviction mortatoriums that are about to be a crisis and have bipartisan support passed in a lesser bill.
I know, I know. Congress critters love giagantic fucking spending bills so they can stuff it full of pork w/o anyone noticing. But maybe this time they should just take one for the team?

This doesn't even involve the Democrats at this point. The Republicans can't even decide what THEY want, nevermind the Democrats. The Republicans haven't even been able to put together a bill that will pass in the Republican-controlled Senate - it hasn't even reached the point where they're talking to the Democrats and negotiating yet. The Democrats have already laid out their position; the Republicans have broken down into factions, with the fiscal conservatives arguing that they don't want to spend any more money, the at-risk senators saying they need to be generous or else they'll lose their jobs (and the senate majority) in November, the pro-business senators saying that they need to work in liability protection for workplaces that expose their workers/customers to COVID and sicken/kill them, and no one can come to an agreement on what the final bill should look like. And, again, this is all happening without even thinking about the Dems or trying to get their buy-in, because they're not even ready to do that part yet.

It's hilarious how dysfunctional it all is... or it would be if, y'know, peoples lives weren't hanging in the balance.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

OniRonin posted...

there isn't one because k*ren is a misogynist slur

Are you similarly upset that Chad is misandrist?

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

A Karorr.

Or at least that's the name I'm trying to push for them.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

HornedLion posted...

Or better yet, DT is the anti-Christ and theyre submissively following orders just to save their own asses?

I've said it before - I'm not an "end-times fetishist" sort of Christian, but Donald Trump ticks so many of the boxes for what the Anti-Christ is supposed to look like when he shows up, it's actually kind of eerie.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

The unfertilized ovum of an adult female milk, of course.

Seriously, how do you think milks reproduce?

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

The Phantom Menace isn't great, but it's the only one that's watchable. It pretty much wins by default, given that it's the sole prequel that doesn't have its head planted firmly up its own ass.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Dick York is the only true Darrin.

Also, if you read what happened to him vis-a-vis the back injury and how it completely scuttled his career, it's heartbreaking.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!