Bay 12 Games Forum

Right now, all I can think is that we need to provide pure humanitarian evacuation. Just say, "If you're a decent human being, we're sending a ship to help you. Please, come join us. We have a dozen midwestern states with temperate climates, fertile ground, and vast quantities of unused land. Just leave your weapons behind." If the entire population took us up on the offer, that's 18 million people -- about 5% of the US' current population. If we spread them evenly around the country, that'd be one free city of 450k per state. Settling them would be a huge boom for virtually every industry, from construction on up, because that's a sudden influx of consumer spending. It's also inflation-free, because the people themselves would be a massive lift to the US' economic productivity cap -- the people themselves are providing the economic value that is being spent for them. What state would say no to a free Sacramento, or Atlanta, or Miami?

We'd need to employ countless current citizens as well, of course. Language teaching (actually quite easy, if you aren't hindered by school schedules; just get people to practice every day), job training, computer literacy... the need for good-paying jobs would be exceptional. Of course, they would need to be naturalized, but the President can provide amnesty just like the past two Republicans did. It'd save a lot of time and money that way.

Here's the best part: after we do that, we just... leave Syria. Assad and the rebels are both pieces of shit. Let them kill each other over crater-spattered fields of salty sand. Heck, we'll sell them rockets and mortars, all lightly used. Can you imagine the cities we could build with the wealth we've locked up in drones and artillery and mines and ships and bombs and planes?

The best part of it all is, it's a by-partisan solution, from the American perspective. Obviously the Democrats will back it because they are progressives, and seek diplomatic solutions. The Republicans will like it because it's pro-life AND good for the budget. Win-win.

Hitler did care about the technology to carry out the war, but he was a military man by profession. That doesn't imply that he wanted or needed detailed accounts of what happens in concentration camps to prisoners. He cared about things that would help win the war. Those details wouldn't help with him winning the war.

sure, Hitler was hands-on with some things. But given that you can only be involved in so many pies that doesn't imply he was hands-on with everything. That just wouldn't make sense. Normally, leaders who are hands-on with a specific aspect have less attention for other aspects, not more. Hitler probably knew the abstract details of the Final Solution, but I'm pretty certain he wouldn't want to hear any specifics. Just like hearing that 1000 of people in an earthquake in some third-world country doesn't affect us emotionally like a smaller tragedy closer to home would.

Wait hold the phone. This is the first time I've heard someone using the "he was only giving orders" defense.

I think this is all getting rather far away from the core of the considerations about gun control. People don't really care about suicide as gun violence, generally, because of an important and often disregarded part of risk management: people have a preference for risks that are on "their terms."

People intuitively prefer driving to riding in a plane, smoking to "wifi radiation," and state violence to terrorism, because in each case, the preferred form of risk is one that, at least naively, the person in question can control. If you die in a plane crash, you're just doomed. If you die in a car crash, you probably went out fighting to the very end -- or at least we prefer to believe. Likewise, you can quit smoking whenever you like, but trivial (or imaginary) radiation sources around you are insidious. A generic, imagined terrorist might target anyone, but the police only target criminals, at least in theory.

This is why we allow cars to be such unsafe deathtraps while fearing airplanes. It's why TSA security theater is so popular.

This isn't to say that people are wrong to want to control guns (I for one want to see guns restricted to well-regulated militias, as the second amendment clearly states). But it is why arguments regarding actual deaths is less effective than arguments regarding powerlessness. Ultimately, people would rather have a poor chance of winning a rigged fight than they would have a good chance of avoiding some instant death. So look for a way to argue that gun control is a way of taking back power and you'll get a strong argument. I think that the March For Our Lives has it right: "We want this policy, and unresponsive politicians have taken the power to make that policy away from us."

*Did you read that it's beginning to look like Alzheimers is going to be treatable? I'm quite hopeful, myself.

My VR rig was always on the bare minimum of support from Oculus, and as far as I can tell a recent patch finally killed it off for good. My sensors are giving me repeated poor tracking errors when I use the motherboard's 2.0 ports (no 3.0 on it), and my 3.0 expansion card is even worse, with "repeated catastrophic errors."

Going to have to upgrade the old beast, but until I do, no more VR for me.

How do we know that the car wasn't trying to save more lives in a trolley-question-style philosophical dilemma?

Man, I miss having a president who was a transparent shill for native corporations, rather than a hostile foreign government.

To be fair, Evangelicals did like Bush a little bit more than Trump, but in practice that just means that they're much, much more forgiving of Trump than they are of Bush. After all, the terrible things Bush did were to infidels.

We better be able to export from our rome history to Crusader Kings II.