Pity about being Mormon though.

You see, comrade, terrorist attack is when Nazis attack bridge we stole, not when comrade bomb Nazi apartment building.

I think we should give them both Bowie knives and tell them to go at it, and may the most reprehensible person lose/win.

"Truth" is a matter of conclusions and meaning, not of facts. Factual information would be something like--and this is an intentionally racist argument--53% of the murder arrests in the US come from a racial group that makes up 14% of the population. This is a fact, and it can be clearly seen in FBI statistics. But your conclusions from that fact--what that fact means--that's the point of rhetoric and logic. Faulty logic would make multiple leaps and say, well, obvs. this means that black people are more prone to commit murder. A more logically sound approach would look at things like whether there where different patterns in law enforcement based on racial groups, what factors were leading to murder rates in racial groups and whether those factors were present across all demographics, and so on.

Not strictly necessary. If his parents were US citizens--and they aren't--then it wouldn't matter where he was born. Kind of. I think that there might be residency requirements for children of US citizens that are born abroad, e.g., if your parents are expats and you live all your life in another country, you might not be a citizen, but it's complicated. You'd def. want to contact an immigration attorney if that was the case.

BUT...!

The point is that Musk, since he wasn't born to US citizens, and since he wasn't born in the US, isn't eligible to run for president.

It's an open question as to what happens if he ran anyways, and how votes would be tabulated, etc. It would get messy, but I don't think that it's ever happened that someone ineligible has run for president and won any significant amount of the vote.

‘Cities should be better designed so that we don’t have to use cars’

...Which I agree with. And it's incredibly frustrating to me that, on the one hand, Republicans actively don't give a shit about sprawl, and on the other hand, Democrats don't want to ruin the charm and character of their lovely urban single-family neighborhoods with half acre plots of lawn in order to build dense housing that can make light rail economically viable. E.g., the people that should be on board with this shit talk a good game until it's their own neighborhood.

I recognize my own hypocrisy here, because I moved to a rural area to get away from a city, and I am now finding that it isn't rural enough because I can sometimes hear my closest neighbors. I just want to live in a shack like Ted... :(

As far as pay goes, doing from web development to dispatch is (probably) going to be a pretty big step down in most cases. Going from warehouse to EMS dispatch is probably going to be largely a lateral move (although likely with better benefits, if you're working directly for a municipality).

As far as my own pay rate is concerned, I would be fine with the amount that I was paid if it was annually adjusted for inflation and cost of living. As it stands, I make less money--in terms of purchasing power--now than when I started five years ago.

It really depends on where you are though. Much like other public policy debates, a lot of this comes down to where someone lives. People that live in dense urban areas can very reasonably go without cars, and trains (specifically light rail) make a lot of sense. Once you get out of urban areas, suddenly trains don't make any sense at all, and the ability to realistically take public transportation evaporates.

This is compounded by urban planning that doesn't prioritize dense housing. Everyone says that we need more and better housing, but no one wants high rise apartments and condos in their neighborhood of single-family homes. That ends up leading to the kind of urban sprawl that makes public transportation impossible to work. Until zoning is taken out of local hands--so that wealthy communities can't prevent high-density housing--you aren't ever going to see this kind of thing change. (BTW - this is overwhelmingly happening in the US in communities that have a Democratic supermajority; that's why housing is so expensive in California, because new housing isn't being built.)

From what I understand, when people that are good become cops and try to hold fellow cops to the same standards, they end up getting hung out to dry and forced out.

Check this case out: https://archive.is/2jzIx, and then consider that this kind of thing is only slightly extreme.

Cops that stay in enable the shitty cops or become shitty themselves, good cops get forced out. The entire system is rotten, and needs to be entirely reformed. I think that it probably needs to be handled in a way similar to the way that Reagan handled striking air traffic controllers: fire every single cop, use National Guard MPs on a temporary basis while entirely new cops are recruited and trained, and have iron-clad oversight and standards established before the new cops take their positions.

Most of the time I would agree. On the other hand, a serial child molester is not someone that is likely ever going to be able to change, even if they're given every opportunity through rehabilitation (which US prisons do not do in the first place), so I have a hard time feeling bad for him in particular.

That's very interesting; it seems to have a progressive twist rate. I assume that this is from a large bore armament of some kind? I believe that gain twist is sometimes (usually?) used on artillery. (See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KI-_CtmOzFs)

It's not that simple. The fabric most commonly made from bamboo is rayon, and rayon can be made from any cellulose fiber. Most rayon processes are actually pretty awful; they produce a lot of waste that's not great for the environment. Rayon--regardless of the source of the cellulose--is weaker than cotton, and tends to tear very easily when wet. You can process bamboo in a way that is much more environmentally responsible, but then you get a fiber that's more like linen rather than cotton. But very little bamboo fabric is made that way.

Overall, hemp is probably the most environmentally friendly fiber out there. It's not perfect, but it requires less pesticides, can be used as part of crop rotation (for the few farmers that do rotate crops), and needs less water to grow. It also grows in more climate zones. The fibers are harder to work with, and water is usually required to process them to a useful state, but you get very long staple fibers that are quite strong.