Inquiring minds want to know.

There are plenty of capital "investments". Take the State I live in as an example. Continental Tire is spending more than half a billion dollars on a new tire plant, while Michelin and Bridgestone are expanding theirs. BMW exports SUVs to mainland China! Infrastructure investments are being made so the port of Charleston can handle greater traffic from these and other domestic businesses.

The main barrier to marketing "new ideas" is that we have all the basics and most luxuries covered! There is almost nothing American consumers "need" that they don't already have.

The main barrier to more employment is high productivity. You don't need meatsacks running manual production machinery when fewer meatsacks can produce vastly more product supporting machining centers and other automated production equipment.

We inherited a baseline underclass which was useful when manual labor was valuable. Now, most manual labor is not valuable yet deliberate policies ensure immigration (legal or otherwise) of people who are unskilled and compete with domestic unskilled people for the economic scraps remaining.

The War on Some Drugs coerces people to immigrate to the US for safety, but they have few jobs and end up ghettoized, disenfranchised, and self-destructive.

A variety of political calculation by both Parties ensures open borders and destroys what exclusivity (overloaded lifeboats SINK, the Industrial Revolution is OVER) might somewhat protect.

Underclasses are a result of surplus people. Too few humans of the right age mix weakens an economy, too many for available jobs (which are rapidly being destroyed by technology) and there will not be work for them so the State must provide bread and circuses. Populations which practice birth control including abortion have high quality of life. Uneducated groups who breed what they can't care for (even if Uncle Sugar is paying for the food) have chosen a lower quality of life.

When members of the underclass reject the old ways (consider the increasing number of Black women in higher education), they move up the ladder.

The only "solution" is "every man for himself" and his politically active subgroup. As long as we are rich enough to feed the underclass, we'll have domestic peace. People revolt for lack of food, nothing else.

"Ironically, that's less upsetting -- getting your nation's ass whooped -- than getting your Fearless Leader killed."

Fearless Leaders write the rules.

Water purification is simple. Distill it and you have far "purer" water than you get from a well.

You don't need to be a survivalist to own cold weather clothing. Military surplus is fine.

If you live where it's cold enough outside to be dangerous, you should have suitable gear in your vehicle that you can WALK away from a breakdown without problem. Add a sleeping bag for home use, and the only cold hazard is frozen pipes.

A heater is only useful when it's running and only in proximity to that heater.

Never forget boots. Combat boots are fine, and if you fail to wear them enough to break them in make sure you wear double socks when you do use them. (Old military trick.)

"They are taking a virgin tech and trying to make it MANDATORY."

Indeed.

I find it amusing that a site which rails against pant-on-head-retarded proposed restrictions on COMPUTERS has so many firearm-tech-illiterate folks on it.

Dear Willful Fucktards:
If you are too lazy to make the minimal effort to understand the VERY simple (compared to compared to computers) technology behind firearms, SHUT THE FUCK UP until you actually know whereof you speak. How dare you have an opinion on tech you don't understand?

Thousands of dead children and adults are the price you pay for stupid people, but they are a very reasonable price to pay to embed the capability for both self-defense and revolution in the American public.

Crime rates are very low, we are a huge nation, and if you consider that homicide rates among good citizens are very, very low, it's even less a problem. (Not all the casualties matter because hood rats offing each other is pure good.)

How about some outrage over the many things that kill hundreds of thousands of your fellows in less newsworthy ways? No? Thought not.

26 officers over ten years is a TINY casualty rate, not worth bothering about.

How many did obesity and other medical conditions cripple or kill during the same period?

Don't imply all suicide is a loss or that ease of suicide is always a negative.

Honest insightful discussion of why people elect to SHORTEN their own lives is overdue in the US and rest of the world.

As more and more of us live lives prolonged into crippled dementia by modern medical technology, suicide will be a reasonable and logically defensible choice for many people.

Sorry if someone checked out and made you unhappy thereby, but I'm GUARANTEED a slow, prolonged, very nasty dying process due to a combination of various spinal/neurological problems plus Alzheimers if I live into my seventies.

I'll check out in a way that can't be used against the Second Amendment by idiots, but check out I will, and my remaining loved ones already understand and support that option for myself and themselves.

You may have a Sky Fairie (prove he/she/it exists or fuck off, I don't respect delusions nor is there reason I should) giving you marching orders, but as a free thinker who owns his own body I shall do my will to the extent practical according to my situation.

"These 3D printed cheap plastic guns are going to flood Africa and other such places with very cheap guns. "

I'm usually polite, but that sentence qualifies as "fucking stupid".

Africans are quite capable of making things, Kalashnikovs included.

Firearms are easy to make on basic machine tools available globally. Most classic weapons PREDATE CNC technology of any type. The Third World has many machinists who are skilled and ingenious. It has to because people must repair what we would discard in the US.

Kalashnikov prints abound, but a decent machinist can simply copy a working example. It ain't rocket surgery, because Mikhail Kalashnikov was a MECHANIC who wanted a rugged, simple weapon.

Africans can also obtain weapons from foreign donors. (First World sanctions are mostly good for disarming the innocents Janjaweed kill. If we wanted to protect Darfur we'd arm and train the weak to kill their enemies so they could defend themselves in detail, not help ghettoize them in refugee camps instead!)

Many people who are anti-gun are also worried about impending tyranny, be it government or corporate (which in the US are the same).

History repeatedly teaches such worry is not mere paranoia.

If things get bad enough, then we have events such as the American Revolution or the Syrian Revolt. One required flintlocks and the other requires Kalashnikovs, but in the end ALL political power flows from a gun barrel like it or not.

It's incredibly difficult and time-consuming to eat well.

If there is an efficient way to get ALL the nutrients required in a safe and economic way, that's a great idea for times when cooking for "fun" is too much hassle.

If I could be satiated and well-fed with a mouse-click that would give me more time to enjoy other things in life, and be better for my health too.

They don't need to smuggle them now, and anyone with serious (as in, drug money) cash can with zero traceability and zero exotic technology, buy a few CNC machine tools and produce modern firearms in quantity. They can then resell the tools, close the shop, cover their tracks, and sell their product.

Specs won't be valuable because weapon designs are HIGHLY refined tech. All that's left are " bells and whistles" to provide product differentiation.

A legit machine shop could work two shifts and mass-produce weapons on one of them.

"The same lybia you bombed to the grounds to "liberate from tyranny" had on average a better living standar than your beloved america (this sounds strange, I know, but have you ever been to libya?"

Citation needed. Yes really.

BTW I'd have left both Qaddafi and Saddam Hussein in power as they were basically secular and kept order, but if you make a statistical assertion do back it up.