p.s. And I would never defend property with a firearm. Even if I lived in a state that allowed it, which I'm almost sure of that I don't. I'd only risk an aggressor's life to defend my own. Because I really do want to be able to get through my whole life without killing or harming anyone. It just sucks that it's really the responsible thing to do to look into acquiring some means of deadly force, because of the remote but real threat of violence by uncivilized people.

(Took a chance seeing who's post this third one was, hoping that since mine wasn't a political JE it might not be toxic.)

As I had been wondering that if this person was trying to get in, why not really try and get in, so thanks for posting this as a possible explanation. Still uncomfortably brazen of this person. I'll always be locking it now even if just stepping out to another side of the building for a minute. I suppose with the blinds flapping so wildly, this person could've looked in and saw the back of someone sitting in a recliner and could've decided to take the chance that I had fallen asleep and that maybe it was potentially a grab-and-go opportunity.

I should probably get the real thing, just in case. What's extra bothersome about this is that the intruder could not be expecting to be a mere burglar in this case, but instead must've been okay with being a robber.

Home invasion robberies (by two or three perps) in my larger region have been in the news, and women sleeping with a window open have gotten raped (by lone pervs).

I've never been robbed or assaulted in 48 years of life so far, but I might not always be so lucky, and should think about that. I've thought about getting a shotgun, and holding my ground upstairs (assuming I'm awake) and being prepared to blast someone for coming up the stairwell after being warned. It would be firing towards my own garage and not into any of my neighbors' directions.

But there's other complications, I hear, in Soviet California, and it would be taking up and keeping up a new hobby. And it kind of sucks when bad people cause you to make demands on your own time, on account of them.

Then they would've first stuck their key in the deadbolt lock part above the door handle, to unlock the door first before squeezing the handle. Like I do when I don't park in my garage and hence come in this door. But they didn't.

And if they were expecting it to be their place and left unlocked, they would've squeezed the handle and pushed into the door to open it. LIke I do after just dragging my trash cans down to the front of the building. But they didn't do that either.

It was just a careful squeeze of the handle, so I only heard the slight creak of that mechanism, and didn't hear what I presume was the gentle push to see if the deadbolt had been left unlocked.

And I lied; my head is more like 18-24 inches from that door handle. But still at ear level where I sit. And if that mechanism wasn't oldish and creaky, I might not have heard it at all.

I haven't been the victim of any major crimes, just a few extremely weird incidences (like coming out to my car after work one day and finding someone trying to get into it, who claimed to mistake it for his own), so I don't consider it, but I should.

That Left vs. Right is only or mostly a distraction is a Leftie/Libertarian tactic. They are of course highly distinctly opposing philosophies, even if the extreme divide between the philosophies is not fully represented in Congress.

I don't know about the banks, but corporations are only trying to buy favor in regulations and subsidies, so that they can be more successful. This is tyranny in that it's anti-competitive and hurts the average citizen, but is nowhere near where the vast majority of the tyranny we're experiencing nowadays is coming from: The GOP's progressivism towards more and more perfect national security, and the Left's progressivism towards more and more perfect outcomes in almost everything in general.

TL;DR: That cartoon pushes the standard commie line that the institutions of capitalism are our biggest problem.

p.s. What it does get right is that, since neither major party cares one whit about libertarianism, in that sense it's meaningless which one you vote for, because neither will advance that cause. (But then that's hardly the only meaningful factor, whereupon there becomes a huge difference between the parties.)

Another thought is this: I've written my share of T-SQL in the same spirit as this. And that is, what I have come to philosophically consider to be doing too much on the database side. An RDBMS's strong suit is retrieving data, not string manipulations. And your requirements for the data to be built into a string and of a certain format is really a business rule, where even if you're not doing a tiered architecture physically, it isn't a best practice to mix business layer concerns into what is logically the data layer.

I'm to the point where I consider the T-SQL language's non-DML/non-DDL stuff to be only as a last resort, such as needing to send already formatted data into say SQL Server Reporting Services, where you might not have middle tier(s) and the luxury of processing the data via any other means before it gets presented. But for application work, I want to start using the database to do just enough calculating to identify what data I want retrieved, and then the rest of the crunching that needs to be performed being done in C# or whatever (which will typically be more expressive and efficient for this).

Then in your case you wouldn't have the recursion going on in the database side to construct the string.

p.s. Over time the DBA's can alter the indexes on tables, and the SQL Server query analyzer can adopt different cached data access plans depending on the amount of and distributions within the data. So timings can change, so if you were already close to a limit...

In SQL's order of operations, ORDER BY is done after SELECT, where in that 2nd query the string is built up, and then somehow some sorting is supposed to happen. It could be harmless or fouling things up, and it might not be what you want judging from the 1st query where the string is built in Sequence order.

...scientist Chen thought his results were fake but accurate?

And therefore, in his mind, and according to popular thinking, would still be worthy of dissemination. That is, if he felt it was an important enough truth, that needed to be gotten out.

IOW, in a world where the mindset of "the ends justify the means" has taken over, can he be blamed? If the world tells him that that's nothing to be ashamed about in other cases, why would he and other scientists see it as unethical in science?

I hold him less culpable, and society more culpable. And even more than society, I hold people of integrity, however few there might be left, culpable for this aspect of modern society.

As a libertarian-minded Conservative, people have a right to do what they want, but they don't have the right to not be called out as the unwise that they are. We let those who are morally, spiritually, and intellectually compromised, who flock to (or rather who are driven to, re: RG's mentioning of who is ultimately behind the degradation of the human conscience) positions of influence over society, have their says without it being answered.

I blame the silence of the good. Imagine if every stupid and/or dangerous idea, that started to get traction, was swiftly followed up by people pointing out exactly how ridiculous and wrong it was, and thoroughly debunked it. Doesn't mean there still wouldn't be casualties, as far as lost souls and lost moral compasses and lost reason. I just don't think there'd be so many, if we didn't let B.S. prevail.

Well, as Lefties say, "we're all in this together" now, and we gotta cut costs for the collective, because it's the system that's important, and not individuals' lives. So, breathing is optional. (I.e. you may have to take one for the team here.)

It occurs to me, Lefties decry capitalism in part because of the unfairness of the "survival of the fittest" aspect of it. Yet that aspect is only absent in socialism in pie-in-the-sky theory. The Left is just offering a trade for a different kind of "some do well and some get screwed".

In capitalism, your wealth determines the quality of your care. In Leftism, Leftists determine the quality of your care. I'll take the impartiality of it being a factor of my earning potential.

IIRC they were paying their full-timers a minimum of double the minimum wage, and even part-timers were getting 30% more than the state's arbitrary minimum. Probably not even due to market forces, per se; that surely enables it, but I assume it's the Christian outlook of its closely-held close-holders*.

An organization that values its workers and voluntarily pays them good wages; something the Left ought to approve of. Except for the fact they're a corporation (evil!), in the private sector (more evil!), non-union (super evil!), and pay for the 16 out of 20 birth control methods that aren't abortifacients (like conservation, taxes, and regulation, it's never enough**).

*Sorry for the dribblage, but Lefties are making a federal case out of the phrase "closely-held" lately.

**Progressives are like Wall Street analysts/company growth obsessed. It's never enough to progress to a good place, and then maintain that. There always has to be more, more, more.

But what if I don't sell to foreign nations, to other states, or to Native American tribes? Then according to that, the feds at least, have no grounds to get involved in my commerce.

I suppose then your idea of communities is that they be what I'll call right now "trade immunity" zones, where as long as it's intra-community, it's sans regulations (besides things like fraud laws)? And only trade outside the community would be where, in a sense, "foreign policy" considerations would come into play/get factored into trade regulations?

Too much acknowledgement lately of Leftie assertions that they don't even believe so are not worth (semi-validating by) acknowledging...