Nah, I still don't win.

I do have some nice Mosins though.

LK

My oldest is a 1923 Tula.
Just picked up a 1944 Izhevsk ex sniper.

LK

Casio did. Well, it was an alphabetic order rather than QWERTY, but they did put it in their organiser line of watches.

Awesome heirloom but no one wins.

Yours has more historical significance to you and your family than any of mine but come on, I have guns that were used to kill Nazis.

LK

Isn't this what the "Chemtrails" conspiracy theorists say is going on right now?

LK

It is weird how so many anti-freedom people like yourself are so quick to claim majority support for what Eich did. Sure, a slim majority were anti-gay marriage back when he tried to enshrine his religious dogma into law. But the overwhelming majority did not support "the cause" enough to spend money on it. By his own actions he revealed himself to be an extremist.

Furthermore, the whole idea that being part of a majority somehow excuses a person from judgment and consequences of their actions is itself morally bankrupt. The civil rights movement was a struggle against majority opinion too.

BTW, the freedom to restrict another person's freedom is freedom in name alone.

Nostalgia.

Reliving past glory.

Interest in computing history.

Some guys collect classic cars even though newer cars can get better mileage and have lower emissions.

Some people like to make their own cabinets, even though it's cheaper and easier to go to Ikea.

I collect WWI/WWII vintage guns. I have guns made as far back as 1923 even though a new AR is cheap, easy and available.

LK

I enjoyed both, but I cringe at the thought of a movie version of either. If you have a description-heavy novel that's about 100 pages long, you can just about cram it into a movie. Anything longer, and you have to be quite aggressive about the cutting. Both Anansi Boys and American Gods have splits that would let them work quite well as a miniseries, but I can't imagine them as films without so much abridgement that they may as well be different stories. I've also not read Sandman, so I can't comment on that.

If the apocalypse were to come in my lifetime or a couple centuries after, there would be plenty of bicycles that would be tremendously useful if there was someone to keep them running.

In these terms, the question becomes "Does your skill set allow you to be in the 10% that lives?"

Your gardening hobby might mean that you have the skill set to grow enough food that you don't starve. Your neighbor's military background might mean that your crops don't get stolen before you can harvest them. The geek down the street might have the knowledge to convert your solar walkway lights into battery chargers for the 2-way radios the prepper two blocks away has in his garage.

All of this, of course, supposes that the scenario that brings about TEOTWAWKI doesn't somehow instantly convert most of the population into flesh eating zombies.

That ship has sailed. The time for deep throat was when she didn't have to whore herself for survival. If Julie can't contribute, her fee is anal. All anal, all the time.

LK

We make a lot of noise about a person's political activity when they're going to get appointed to a position of authority in the government, like the Surgeon General nominee that conservatives are trying very hard to torpedo.

A person's politics shouldn't have any bearing on their employment in the private sector.

LK

Are you now or have you ever been a conservative?

LK

Which, I'm sure, is a great comfort for that now-crippled or -deceased driver. The guy with the license plate frame is probably very sorry after the fact, and would probably do things differently in retrospect. Meanwhile, the guy who lost his legs doesn't want a million dollars; he wants his legs.

In occupational health and safety, it is generally and widely understood that serious or fatal accidents seldom occur out of the blue. A fatality will nearly always be surrounded in time and space by a cloud of (usually unrecorded or unreported) near misses and minor incidents. Relatedly, there is the concept of "normalization of deviance". Essentially, the idea that if you let your standards slip a bit and nothing bad happens, the tendency is to allow that lower level of vigilance to become the new acceptable standard. Lather, rinse, repeat until a major failure occurs. (The Challenger disaster is an oft-cited example.)

Coming back to the licence plate frames, I don't care whether or not someone gets a fine for speeding. I do care that we've created a pool of privileged drivers who are no longer receiving any feedback when they engage in higher-risk driving behaviors. "Go ahead and drive as fast as you want; we'll trust your judgement on that until after your first high-speed collision..." probably isn't a real solid basis for road safety.

Depends on the tickets, perhaps. Shaving a $400 'big' ticket down to a $200 'small' one, or even down to a warning--that can add up. Remember that nominally-small tickets often have a large number of fundraising surcharges and taxes from different levels of government piled on top.

And the tickets themselves aren't always the greatest cost. Insurance companies will bump an owner's rates substantially after a couple of tickets (sometimes after one ticket), and those higher rates will linger for years.

Between two and four moving violations in a 12-month period will get your license suspended in California, with all the personal and financial costs associated with resolving and working around that.

Finally, this 'charitable' donation is tax deductible--so the effective price tag on this bribe is lower.

Nuclear fusion = not required.