champu

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Everything posted by champu

  1. champu
    This is Speakers Corner. There are no individuals. There are no conversations, nor posts, nor paragraphs. There are only sentences, floating in the sea of contextlessness. Oh, and Zuul. There is only Zuul.
  2. champu
    A school of herring, no doubt. In a barrel?
  3. champu
    Golf clap, Andy. Golf clap.
  4. champu
    Knowing Gary and seeing that jumpsuit, I guarantee that photo is at least two years old.
  5. champu
    Calculus, and mathematics "beyond" it, are pretty rough if you don't have an application that lets you appreciate what it is you're doing.
  6. champu
    Please stop quoting my wife. She can speak for herself. I'm sure she's right but is she a-cutie? you are such a square when you go off on tangents like that (I'm rooting for at least 3 more obvious posts along these lines) Depends on the angle at which you approach this. I'll take care of the secant one, now we just need a third person to strike a chord and Bill will be happy.
  7. champu
    A difference that should not be overlooked is that you had to add "Arlington Cemetery" in your hypothetical to make the level of offense come close (I still think it falls short.) This was in Garland Texas not Mecca. As I've noted previously, the whole of the entire universe is not the hallowed ground of Islam* where you can't do or say something offensive anywhere/anytime.
  8. champu
    I wonder if "may issue" law enforcement agencies would accept, "I'm a political cartoonist associated with anti-religious publications" as "good cause" on an application for a CCW permit...
  9. champu
    I don't know if it's a universal concept but in at least some jurisdictions there is such a thing as a "lesser included charge" where you can be charged for, say, murder and end up being found guilty of manslaughter. You can't go the other way though, as was recently demonstrated in Illinois when an off-duty cop fired his gun over his shoulder into an alley while fleeing and killed someone. He was charged with involuntary manslaughter and acquitted because what he did wasn't involuntary manslaughter... ...it was murder. /edited again... Yuck, I butchered that last sentence twice
  10. champu
    I find that I tend to learn/understand mathematical concepts best when I have both the symbolic representation and the relationship stated in English or as a plot/diagram. When I can go back and forth between the two, that's when I know I "get it." One form helps you get to the results, the other helps you appreciate them. For what it's worth, I would do the problem in the OP exactly as you stated. In fact, my brain already had "1500 divided by 1.0825" queued up before I even read as far as "The client then..." But telling someone that's how you solve this problem is about as useful as when my friend took me out on a snowboarding trip for the first time and explained that the way you snowboard is, "to just go."
  11. champu
    People's brains aren't all wired the same or to the same extent in certain topics. "Thinking" your way through an arithmetic or algebraic problem you never learned to do the old-school way is no guarantee of success. It can certainly be helpful in remembering how to do something though.
  12. champu
    You forgot to say "...three times in a row."
  13. champu
    I have Chicago vs Tampa in the finals.
  14. champu
    I think the analysis was pretty fair as well. One thing they don't really mention, which I think is related to mistaken impressions of large urban areas, is that while counts is not a good way to compare cities, rates don't give you the full picture of how it compares to live in one place or the other either. If you have two cities with the same murder rate, but one is more densely populated, that puts you physically closer to more murders and means you have more people in the city that have to walk past crime scene tape, etc. more frequently.
  15. champu
    Not that I necessarily agree with laws against "structuring" because of potential abuse when enforcing them and also understanding most or all of those laws are about cash transactions and thus wouldn't apply, many of the extreme cases of wealthy people taking advantage of favorable status of investment income could be see as running afoul of the spirit of such laws. All that to say: you can be a "tax cheat" without violating the law in the same sense that "structuring" would still be "structuring" even if there weren't laws against it.
  16. champu
    Puhleeze! (redefine terms until their plain English meaning is completely lost and my original point is unrecognizable/inconsistent in my newly invented language) Google is your friend dude; I'm not on the hook to catch you up with the rest of humanity.
  17. champu
    Hey I remember that! The individual dignity entitlement t-shirts were a nice touch. Although I only worked for them as an intern during undergrad; this meant non-random drug testing.
  18. champu
    Less specifically, here's what went wrong: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confusion_of_the_inverse
  19. champu
    http://www.dropzone.com/cgi-bin/forum/gforum.cgi?post=4172603;#4172603
  20. champu
    Well stated.
  21. champu
    If you don't care what the number is it only serves to reinforce how idiotic the exercise is, and how focusing energy on ridiculous calculations like this is a big part of the problem. When you created essentially this same thread I posted links to a number of suggestions I've made and to where I've shared my thoughts about the kinds of things we should and shouldn't be doing and that thread immediately died when I did that. Now the topic gets rebooted and people here are overjoyed to jump around in the bounce house of derp all over again.
  22. champu
    If you take a rough average or median of those per capita state numbers and extrapolate them to the US population; yes it is pretty close. This isn't forensic auditing to bicker over small amounts. The gun deaths in US is approximately 120x that of the UK adjusted for population. This is general the same for all other G7 nations. The rest of the planet just thinks the US can do a little better than say Angola. The exercise of converting all firearms deaths into as big a dollar amount as possible is dishonest. If pro-life people came in here and said, "well, if we imagine every abortion in the US resulted in a wrongful death lawsuit and figured an average jury award of $6.2M then that means abortion costs Americans $19,000 per capita each year." We would all laugh together at them and tell them to get bent.
  23. champu
    I don't really see that as an implied supposition. The problem is more insidious as they even have you referring to it as "all that money" as though it actually existed and was "spent" in some way.
  24. champu
    While kallend doesn't share his methodology, the methodology in the article you posted in your thread does not lend itself to dividing up the number per capita and treating it as a tax burden.
  25. champu
    This is not helping to clarify your last post. I was probably mixing willingness/determination with psychological ability but yes, I think the overall mental state of the person is going to be the most common limiting factor. I appreciate the food for thought and, yes, "not much difference" could translate to "a couple more people being injured and another person being killed" depending on the situation, which I understand is a bit cold to try and downplay. Measures to keep weapons (crossbows and rifles alike) out of the hands of children and the mentally ill are swell. Once you start regulating how many bolts you can keep with your crossbow or rounds in the magazine of the rifle you're off in weeds in terms of saving lives. It's silly to use an incident like this as an example of the failings or futility of firearms laws like the OP intended, or as an example of the success of firearms laws as the person I originally responded to intended.