They signed up to be the lowest of the overly-entitled rentacops out there. that’s on them.

Exactly my point.

The FCC (FAA? I may have that wrong)

I’m pretty sure that the TSA falls under the Dept. of Homeland Security, as does Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

realize they aren’t pasty-whites and then it’s mean to minorities.

You see that makes it worse, right? You’ve got a lot of non-white people signing up for the job of a rent-a-cop so that they can abuse the same kind of authority that is leveled against the populations that the job attracts. It’s like a black kid on the south side of Chicago looking at the ways that CPD abuses suspects and say, goddamn, how do I get into that gig?

And this just reminds you that if they could get other jobs then they will.

Eh. Maybe some of them. Maybe. But policing attracts a specific kind of person that wants that job; sometimes it’s people that are genuinely white knights, but they generally get run out pretty fast. More often it’s people that want authority. Given that TSA pay ain’t great, and that we’re in an era–temporarily, if Trump wins–of historic high employment, I don’t think that too many of the people in the TSA are really stuck there.

It’s very hard for me to care if cancer rates for TSA agents go through the roof; they willingly signed up for that shit, so fuck 'em.

I refuse to fly domestically anymore just because the TSA is all security theater, I refuse to go through their backscatter x-ray, and I’m not interested in their enhanced groping. I will ride my motorcycle 1000 miles in a single day rather than take a plane anywhere.

I’ve seen people on them. Not a ton. But I would see people on them every so often when I was heading to shows at House of Blues, usually later in the evening in the summer and early fall. I can’t imagine using them in the middle of winter, when it’s -10F and winds are whipping around at 30mph.

As a counterexample, look at the Marina City towers in Chicago (aka the corncobs); all of the units have balconies, and the balconies are definitely a selling point. They’re quite large; in the case of the studios, the balcony can be nearly as large as the living space. (I think that I recently saw a nearly all original condo in Marina City go up for sale in the mid $400s? It was an interesting time capsule.)

…Where you are currently stationed? What, military?

Regardless, if I were you, in Chicago, I’d take the reckless driving charge over being a CI.

Yeah, I’ve looked at those, briefly. I’m not sure if they would fit my wok, which is very thin cast iron (yes, actually cast iron, not a spun carbon steel wok). Hence the reason I want to get a wok burner that I’d end up needing to use outdoors.

There’s literally nothing else connected to it though; no USB drives, no other hard drives, etc. When I tried to plug in my old 2tb 7200rpm drives from my last computer, it wouldn’t even power on to boot up.

I’m… Skeptical. Mostly because I have a lot of cast iron and love it, and I’m not sure how well they’d work with induction burners. And also because I want to get a wok burner (yeah, the 100k+ BTU monstrosities) for doing stir-fry, and I’m not sure that the realistically affordable induction wok burners are going to manage that.

I find that my M.2 SSD (with Win 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC) is weirdly slower at booting up than my SATA SSD (Win 10 Pro) was. I’m not sure why, since the hard drive itself should be faster. BIOS itself seems to be slower.

I also can’t currently get it to even start if I have a hard drive plugged into the power supply and any of the SATA slots on the motherboard. IDK why. It reads the hard drives when I have them plugged in to an external bay and connected with a USB cable. It’s super-frustrating. I’ll try a SATA SSD and see if I have the same problem. If so, then I guess I’m stuck using M.2 drives. :(

I think this is compounded by the fact that many of the social institutions that used to exist are also greatly reduced, and children are expected to be much more structured now than they were. Used to be that kids could reasonably be expected to walk to a library or playground on their own, or play with neighborhood children, without being constantly supervised. (And yes, bullying happened, and yes, so did the Atlanta Child Murders. But the former was a much more realistic problem than the latter.) Kids were also going with parents to church, parents probably had some kind of social outlet, etc. There was, in general, more community. (I’m not bemoaning the loss of religion, since I think religion is trash, but I do miss the community that religion helped build.)

And yeah, most people I know now that home school kids are doing it to ensure that their kids aren’t exposed to ‘dangerous’ ideas.

Ha. Fair point.

No, this was the kind of suspension where they put hooks through your skin, and then hoist you above the ground by the hooks.

(I do ride, but only street bikes. And IMO, for street bikes, unless you track your bike regularly, your stock suspension is likely just fine.)

Suspension. I did a superman; 6 hooks in my back (they couldn’t pull up skin on my legs to run hooks there, so it was a little… awkward.) It was painful, sure. But the pain fades once you’re up there, and then it’s…

Boring.

You can’t really do anything much. You can swing around, but if you get motion sick then that’s not a good idea. I know a number of people that have experienced it as transcendental, and it just wasn’t for me. Everything was sore for a few days afterwards, but not bad. It just wasn’t for me.

I’d suggest that you start by reading David McRaney’s How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion. You should also look into street epistemology, and Peter Boghossian’s A Manual for Creating Atheists.

First, I think that approaching this with the idea that you’re going to “change them” is probably not the correct approach. Rather, you need to approach it as a conversation where you’re hoping that you can better come to understand each other. Beginning with the idea that you will change them has the a priori assumption that you are morally correct, and that’s not necessarily the case. Is it better to do it in person? Absolutely. You will have a very hard time reaching real understanding online. You’ll need to do is find common ground, ask questions, and really, really listen to them. You need to be able to empathize with them. It’s also worthwhile to ask if they’re open to changing their beliefs, if they find conflicting information. (And ask yourself - are you open to changing your beliefs if facts conflict with what you believe?)

What you need to get at is underlying beliefs and fears, not surface-level stuff. You need to understand that these aren’t issues that can be solved with more factual information, because people will weigh facts through an emotional lens, and will weight things differently than you would to arrive at different conclusions.

On a slight tangent, when you talk about cult de-programming–which is controversial–the important thing to do is to utterly separate a cult victim from their support group, aka their cult, and then give them only one point of view. When you talk about deprogramming conservatives, you’re asking people to commit social suicide; it’s likely that all their close friends and associates (or all of their parasocial relationships) are with people that hold similar conservative beliefs. Without surrounding them with people that are more liberal, and are willing to accept them, you’re not going to be able to have a long-lasting effect.

Higher octane fuel shouldn’t give you any more power; it just prevents pre-ignition. If your engine is very high compression and needs high octane fuels, then usually something like an anti-knock sensor is going to be present to cut engine performance–retard timing, I think?–if you have the wrong fuel in your car.

OTOH, a less energy-dense fuel like pure alcohol can increase power because you can increase compression in the engine even more than you could with high grade gasoline. That means that you can get more benefit from turbo- or super-charging.

IIRC, most fuel injected cars can now make some kind of adjustment to the fuel:air mix if you’re at high altitude so that it shouldn’t be an issue (unless you’re at altitudes outside of their range of adjustment). Carbureted engines can not do that.

Longevity is almost always the price you pay for power though. The engine in my VW GTI could put out nearly double the horsepower that it currently gets, but the lifespan would be under half that of normal.

Uh. I know a whole bunch of people that have bounced at multiple clubs in Chicago. I know one guy that was loss prevention at a store in Chicago that used to love chasing people down, because he enjoys that shit.

Tell yourself that if you want to, but the truth is that bouncers are going to have to know how to fight to at least some degree, because they’re going to end up in fights.

A bouncer isn’t usually going to be fighting to survive; they’re throwing some dude the fuck out of a venue, or subduing them until cops show up.

As far as my comment about Shiv Works - I stand by that 100%. Look them up. They train with bare hands, knives, and guns (firing non-lethal training munitions), and in awkward spaces (such as you might experience in a car jacking).

Any discipline that forces you to act while under pressure is going to improve your odds if you end up in a situation where fighting is your only real option. If you get sucked-punched on a subway, experience in e.g. boxing is going to be far, far better than nothing at all, despite the fact that boxing has rules. IDPA/USPSA will not, contrary to claims, get you kilt in da streets, because practice moving and shooting is better than not.

The idea that there’s a real distinction between self-defense and martial arts in general is nonsense. If you’re good in MMA, this is going to translate almost 1:1 to self defense. Here’s the blunt truth: most of the people that are going to attack a person have a LOT of experience fighting. If you want to defend yourself, you’re going to need to give yourself a lot of the same experiences, even if it’s in a more controlled setting, and “self-defense” classes aren’t going to do that.

And, BTW, I know a guy that teaches wu shu (Eagle Claw, I think?) that also works as a bouncer. He is very, very effective, and uses the things he teaches as a bouncer. He’s small–like, 5’5", 150#–and he punches well above his weight.

This is a difficult question.

If you’re a bouncer, then yeah, mixed martial arts is definitely useful (e…g., something like both muay thai and Brazilian juijitsu). For a typical person that’s unlikely to ever need to defend their life, probably not.

As far as which martial art you should take, if you’re going to take one… It depends on what you want. If you want a physical activity that doesn’t have to be practical, then take up something like kyudo, kenjutsu, or aikido. If you want something that’s practical, then look into juijitsu and things based more in grappling. If you seriously worry about getting into a confrontation with someone that’s armed, then look up Shiv Works, and see what they have in your area.

A concealed carry permit can be useful, yes, but it’s very, very situational, and requires practice. Moreover, ever single bullet you fire outside of a range has to be accounted for.

People that are registered Republicans, consistently vote Republican, or hold Republican views make up a little under half of the overall population, current population in the US is around 340M (last time I checked, it’s been a minute), so 140M is a fairly conservative (ha!) guess at how many people would more-or-less be Republican, or lean Republican.

Oh, and the flip side of that is that there are a larger number of people that are registered as Democratic voters, consistently vote Democratic, or tend to lean Democratic in their views, even if they don’t vote/don’t vote consistently.