I agree to disagree - most times I have ended up in court I could have made choices to stay out, on balance I feel that even when I have won in court by preparing and going I still lost overall and so, most times those were bad decisions to go, fight and win.
Staying out of court is the real win.
Agree to disagree. I have all kinds of tech from GoPros with mounts for the car to phone holder that can make my phone serve as a dashcam in 5 seconds flat. I also have several exterior facing cameras around our home, and the software ready to switch on and archive all the footage, and multiple 2TB drives laying around doing nothing at the moment. If I wanted to record looping video at the house I easily could - and do what with it? Fight in court. Do you enjoy fighting in court? I don’t. I’d rather not do things that encourage fighting in court, and so I don’t record the video. It’s a deliberate choice - maybe “I don’t feel like it” - but not because I can’t push a button on Amazon and get one delivered.
Yeah, and I’ve faced a couple of those potential nightmares… unfortunately, my experience has been: the cops act a lot worse when you have “anti-cop tech” visible in your car, for instance I got the most bogus speeding ticket of all time when a radar detector was visible. Times I’ve been “at their mercy” where they could plant anything, claim anything, do anything, no witnesses around just me and them, they’ve always been more decent - almost never wrote anything up, just waved me on about my business after the stop.
For awhile, I ran around with 10 old registrations in the trunk but “couldn’t find” the most recent one, even though the sticker on the tag was updated. I must have gotten 3 written warnings for “no valid registration” when I thought I was going to get a speeding ticket. They got a free look inside my trunk, got to write something up, and didn’t have to hit me with a speeding fine. It’s far from ideal, in the ideal world everything is on audio/video record and we base everything on the actual truth, but cops being human (and subject to human pettiness) sometimes having that record just makes them want to show you everything they can do to you without you being able to effectively fight back - including dragging your ass in to court for no reason whatsoever, they don’t even bother to show - or maybe they do and they lie when they get there and they know (and in some towns are related to) the judge… If they know they have nothing of substance to present in court (like that radar detector cop) they just don’t show up.
I “calibrate” my speedos vs GPS every so often, they’re reasonably close (+/- 2mph at 70).
I waffle about the dash cam, of course I’ll want it after something happens and I don’t have it, but on the other hand I also hate the thought of a protracted court fight for what?
Ironically enough, I am pretty sure I got let off by traffic enforcement units a couple of times when I was far enough over to qualify for “the expensive ticket”, but very rarely when it was just 12-15 mph over. Also, even though I tend to drive about 9 over most of the time, I seem to get an awful lot of tickets for 15 over - where the fine takes a bump up… Their word against mine…
Biochar is good stuff, if you’ve got a renewable supply.
Vance has already demonstrated “full waffle capacity” flip-flopping on his Trump stances. Of course we can expect Vance to read whatever scripts his backers hand him.
Well, I think the first clue is when they put their lights on and tell you to pull over, if you don’t then they have reason to call in the cavalry and “maintain order and justice in the land” by forcing you to stop, comply, lie face down while they cuff you first and ask questions later.
If you play nice (darn) then they ask the questions politely first and look for “tells” - you know: blood dripping from the trunk, piles of loose cash in the floorboards, a dark complexion (driving while black) - all the “usual suspects’” signs - probable cause. A remarkable percentage of actual criminals are not stone cold liars who are able to cooly answer the questions and act like nothing unusual is going on.
So once upon a time, a long long time ago (well past all applicable statutes of limitation) I noticed a pattern when people would get pulled over for speeding. If they were speeding a little, it was a speed trap and the cop was there to write tickets, it would take a whole lot of charm and luck to get let off in that situation.
If they were speeding a lot, like a whole lot, they’d get pulled over by officers who were more interested in where they were going in such a hurry rather than handing out tickets. Having established that the driver isn’t fleeing the scene of a crime or something like that, they’d generally be let off with a warning - often just a verbal warning, but even sometimes a written warning on the official forms.
I don’t know, do the Falklands have a lot of goats?
The crazy town express is a circus show to divert attention from the real shifts of wealth and power that are being orchestrated. The clowns in the spotlight do whatever it takes to keep the party in power so the railroad leaving trickle-down station can proceed straight to Oligarch hell (for everyone but the Oligarchs.)
Uninhibited? like colonized by Brits trying to escape Victorian prudes’ oppression?
The Bible is a bit like the internet - it’s large and obscure enough that if you dig long enough, you can find just about anything you want to “back up” any point of view you want.
Fucking school is the part that students naturally seek after class.
I’ve seen plenty of arts and humanities that could benefit from a bit of STEM just so they can “express themselves” more effectively in our technology laden world.
At University, I participated with a bunch of 3rd and 4th year Mechanical Engineering students in building 3D cardboard figures for a parade float, their cardboard car kept falling over. I showed them how to make a rigid box section out of cardboard to support the objects’ structure… that hands-on “artsy” experience probably taught them more useful application of structural geometry than six semesters of engineering classes had.
Or, you could promote more well rounded people who don’t just hyper-focus into science/math type problems but also take on the harder “squishy” problems like relating to / making impressions on other people.
The efficiency of agricultural use of water has been an actual problem since forever. Knew a guy who ran a Tilapia farm outside of San Antonio, TX - secured all the legal water rights, was encouraged by the Dept. of Agriculture to develop the project with all kinds of tax breaks, ran successfully for a few years then a drought came and the city of San Antonio realized this guy’s fish farm was using more water from their aquifer than the whole city. They bought him out / shut it down imminent domain style…
I agree about seatbelts - though if I lived 3 or 4 near-death experiences where seat belts made my outcome worse instead of better, I’d probably say to hell with the odds…
I know a lot of people who have spent time in the court system, other than ambulance chaser backed situations, I don’t know many happy with the outcomes.