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[Montague]

Actually you are wrong, clean shots are considered non-lethal. True theres a hole in your body now but they are easier to patch up as usually those shots missed any vital spots, imbedded shots however hit something and are worse. Also Montague you are not calculating energy these bullets are hitting the person, true they are small but these things are hitting you faster than a car and if you increase the diameter of the bullet you are increasing surface area of impacted. .45s are better than 9mm cause its a fatter bullet and has a larger area of impact.

A shot that goes clean through the vena cava or heart or spine are definitely considered lethal. A clean shot through the spleen or kidney will almost certainly incapacitate anybody that isn't on PCP or something. Again, it depends on what the shot hits and a round's ability to penetrate is all that really matters. Energy doesn't kill people, holes in people kill people. A shotgun slug at point blank against somebody wearing body armor will neither knock them over or 'transfer energy' enough to seriously hurt them either. Consider that body armor spreads the impact of a bullet, so why would a bullet designed to spread impact be more lethal?

A 9mm will have more energy then a .45 and the surface area, in the context of handgun bullets here, doesn't mean much. A difference of 0.1 inch isn't going to make much difference between stopping somebody or not.

Anyways, there are plenty of articles on the internet describing why "energy dump" and "knock-down power" ideas are complete bunk.

http://www.firearmstactical.com/briefs3.htm

You are entirely correct that you and a 2x4 could probably knock me down, a person can apply a lot of force and leverage to do that.

Oh, but by your own argument wouldn't that require I be knocked down as well? (Obviously not, but that was your position just a bit ago)

Montague, heck, I could knock you down with a thrown baseball if you weren't expecting it. Being knocking down doesn't take a lot of force, just enough to throw you off balance. And a bullet has the ability to do that if it exerts all its kinetic energy, and larger bullets traveling at the same speed as a smaller one, that are fully stopped, are actually carrying quite a bit of kinetic energy. Again, obviously, this isn't what people mean when they talk about stopping power, but its directly relevant to the portion of your argument I disagree with the most - namely, that you can't knock someone down with a bullet. Maybe getting knocked off your feet in a weigh that DOESN'T pick you up and physically put you to the ground is always "psychological" to you, in which case, well... you're using the word poorly, at the minimum. It would be like saying momentarily blinding someone with a flash of light is "just psychological". :/

And as I said before - the person firing the gun would presumably be braced against impact anyways - they could absorb enough force to be knocked down without being knocked down by dissipating it successfully. Your argument here is just wrong on so very many levels.

And all of this is irrelevant to stopping power, which is more about various issues (psychological ones among them) that work together to incapacitate a person. And its clear that more powerful weapons accomplish this more quickly, and there's evidence higher caliber bullets have a similar increased stopping power effectiveness.

If you were off balance when you tried to push me over with a 2x4, then you'd fall down instead. You ever try firing a gun off balance? Did you fall down?

The kinetic energy of a bullet impact is not very significant, not enough to knock somebody over. There is a video I've seen, of a guy wearing body armor standing on one foot, on toes and being shot point blank by a 7.62mm rifle. He didn't fall over, despite being off balance, despite it being a very powerful firearm.

Or consider a though experiment. You set a bowling ball on the greasy lane and shoot it. You suppose it'd go flying across the room? Or would it barely move? Now consider just walking up and giving it a slight kick, or hitting it with another bowling ball.
Even if somebody is off balance a bullet simply does not have the momentum to push them over. People weigh tens of thousands of times more then bullets do and their velocity simply does not make up for their lack of comparative mass.

[ChairmanPoo]

AFAIK shots that pass through the body are less lethal because they unload a lesser ammount of energy in the body, proportionally.

[RedKing]

http://news.yahoo.com/lemming-exodus-manufacturers-look-u-165814959.html

Ha! I knew moving all those jobs to 3rd world countries wouldn't be profitable or lack serious indirect concerns.

"You are going to see more (manufacturing) come back to the United States, and that's in part for business reasons and in part because we want to be good citizens," McNerney said.

I'm guessing 99.9% for the first part, and 0.1% for the second part, which is really "Hey maybe it'll be a good PR ploy" disguised as civic duty.

[Tellemurius]

*snip

Lol shit you serious? i never seen anyone take a shotgun slug to the chest and not feel it. Shit shotguns are considered anti-armored personnel in the first place cause they dispel too much energy in a huge surface area, armor can't cover that plus a slug will make a person explode so i don't know what slugs you talking about cause this shit is like the old muskets we used at each other only far scarier.

http://news.yahoo.com/lemming-exodus-manufacturers-look-u-165814959.html

Ha! I knew moving all those jobs to 3rd world countries wouldn't be profitable or lack serious indirect concerns.

"You are going to see more (manufacturing) come back to the United States, and that's in part for business reasons and in part because we want to be good citizens," McNerney said.

I'm guessing 99.9% for the first part, and 0.1% for the second part, which is really "Hey maybe it'll be a good PR ploy" disguised as civic duty.

The funnier part was the offshore factories started wanting more like US workers with benefits and pay. there was a company that estimated that now companies only save 15% in moving manufacturing from the US to China, and thats steadily going down.

[Bauglir]

On the gun thing. Really, guys? How many pages is this gonna go on for. I don't think progressivism is concerned when the argument hinges on whether or not a bullet can knock you over or not, so possibly new thread?

[Truean]

*snip

Lol shit you serious? i never seen anyone take a shotgun slug to the chest and not feel it. Shit shotguns are considered anti-armored personnel in the first place cause they dispel too much energy in a huge surface area, armor can't cover that plus a slug will make a person explode so i don't know what slugs you talking about cause this shit is like the old muskets we used at each other only far scarier.

http://news.yahoo.com/lemming-exodus-manufacturers-look-u-165814959.html

Ha! I knew moving all those jobs to 3rd world countries wouldn't be profitable or lack serious indirect concerns.

"You are going to see more (manufacturing) come back to the United States, and that's in part for business reasons and in part because we want to be good citizens," McNerney said.

I'm guessing 99.9% for the first part, and 0.1% for the second part, which is really "Hey maybe it'll be a good PR ploy" disguised as civic duty.

The funnier part was the offshore factories started wanting more like US workers with benefits and pay. there was a company that estimated that now companies only save 15% in moving manufacturing from the US to China, and thats steadily going down.

You mean people won't willingly stay at sub slavery level forever? This is the problem with the "save money" mentality. Cost is an absolute, like gravity. You can't avoid it. You may be able to delay it, but that just sets you up for a fall. Anything to the contrary is the reason this country is falling apart, whether its not paying taxes for roads, not paying taxes for accountants to see the taxes are spent properly, or any number of other things. The illusion of choice hides the cliff we so gleefully and stupidly run over and unknowingly plummet off called "savings." Being mad at cost is like being mad at gravity: futile and stupid. You never get something for nothing.
Though failing to properly pay for something will get you nothing....

[Virex]

*snip

Lol shit you serious? i never seen anyone take a shotgun slug to the chest and not feel it. Shit shotguns are considered anti-armored personnel in the first place cause they dispel too much energy in a huge surface area, armor can't cover that plus a slug will make a person explode so i don't know what slugs you talking about cause this shit is like the old muskets we used at each other only far scarier.

http://news.yahoo.com/lemming-exodus-manufacturers-look-u-165814959.html

Ha! I knew moving all those jobs to 3rd world countries wouldn't be profitable or lack serious indirect concerns.

"You are going to see more (manufacturing) come back to the United States, and that's in part for business reasons and in part because we want to be good citizens," McNerney said.

I'm guessing 99.9% for the first part, and 0.1% for the second part, which is really "Hey maybe it'll be a good PR ploy" disguised as civic duty.

The funnier part was the offshore factories started wanting more like US workers with benefits and pay. there was a company that estimated that now companies only save 15% in moving manufacturing from the US to China, and thats steadily going down.

15% is still a big difference. However, what I've picked up around the chemical industry is that a big factor for moving to China (or India, that works too) is that that's where the market is growing. Want to sell paint? China. Food additives? China. Detergents? China. Glass? China. Construction materials, base chemicals and polymers? China, China and China.

[RedKing]

The sad part is that you could have just listed all of those under "food additives". 

And yeah, the gun discussion is starting to border on a virtual wang contest.

[Truean]

Truean's Idle Musings: I wonder if it is actually possible to have a new American Business compete anymore. Also labor automation and commerce feedback loops and the unseen consequences thereof. Finally, furniture is something DF is all about.

You know, the more I think about it, the more I realize we need something that people can do that covers the total costs of the activity without a large amount of education. We're talking capital, interest, labor cost, the works. I'm really starting to wonder what that would be. The current business analysis seems to leave out any sort of "sustaining your customer base" analysis in favor of "can it be done cheaper." This of course leaves the very real question of what people are supposed to do with themselves (read: the unemployed, or really just anyone).

I wonder if that would really work. Let's take dining chairs for a moment, keeping in mind that this is really rough/I don't see anybody else doing it....

http://www.walmart.com/search/search-ng.do?search_query=chair+dining&ic=16_0&Find=Find&search_constraint=0 It appears you aren't gonna get a chair for under $40.00 at Wal-Mart. Clearly I mean like a dining room chair or something like that, a wooden one. Many of them go for an average of $50 or $60 depending upon the model. There must be a market for these things, because Wal-Mart has been selling them for years.
Hell, the dinette sets aren't even really cheap....

I wonder how many chairs a person could make in an 8 hour day. This would be complicated by cost of applicable machines and tools, as well as materials (lumber), and presumably space to do the work/store stuff. Let's go with four chairs a day with each chair taking about 2 hours to make. Assuming you sell all four chairs for $40, that's what? $160/worker per day in productivity 

If each one is paid.... I dunno. $100/day? ($12.5/hour) It's a nice round number. That'd be about $110/day after payroll taxes for the company cost. It would really come down to material and equipment costs as well as other overhead. You're talking about a fairly tight margin of $50/day/worker to cover that. Then of course that assumes you actually sell the damn things. Things would be much easier with 5 chairs per worker per day with a margin of $90, if  possible. Clearly, this doesn't even consider things like tables and/or other furniture pieces/related goods/various styles. We're not even touching delivery or the fact that they're already put together.

I guess even if you could produce the damn things, you'd have to somehow create a market for them modeled after some kind of demand curve. I dunno what would make people chose to buy them because I somehow don't know if it would be a priority purchase right now.

It should be fairly obvious that "Chairs" can be substituted for nearly any product or service in theory and that's the point. It'd be a wonderful thing to find something productive for people do do that's a labor intensive industry, but damn that just seems rather difficult currently.

A part of me really truly hates machines and robots because they cost the company and the economy an immense amount of money by breaking the commerce cycle: they don't buy things like workers do. They aren't "Smart" they are short sighted. Using automated machines takes a consumer out of the loop. I'd rather have an operation where 50 people make 200 chairs/day than a robot making 1000/day, because now as a society, we've got 50 people who have no livelihood and who can't afford to buy things from other businesses/companies. This creates a negative feedback loop that damages the economy and it cost several businesses 50 customers, which could and does break those other businesses.

I dunno, I just find this amazing in a certain light that it's impossible for craft shops like this to be a reality anymore, especially if you could have them made to order from real wood (not that cheap shit they sell now). Feh, I'm just frustrated by this whole "we have crazy high unemployment" thing and my mind always defaults into problem solving mode. I just can't comprehend that there is literally NOTHING we could be having all these unemployed people do for work/jobs. Though that unfortunately seems to be the case.

[Frumple]

*vague shrug* That's capitalism. If a robot can pump out 5x the productivity of 50 workers for a fraction of the price, that's what the system says do. If the methods to create that robot doesn't exist, capitalism says invent it, because that's the best way to make a profit.

Th'fact of the matter is that automation's has/is going to make it so a fraction of the population can, very easily, supply the material desires/necessities of a much, much, much larger slice of the population. At which point the only jobs left over are service, either via education, maintenance (of machines doing the manufacturing) -- which may phase out even further as we design machines to fix and manufacture machines -- or leisure.

Then comes that feedback loop you talked about and suddenly all that production can't be bought, because those 50 workers (multiplied by all the other industrial job loss brought about by automation) no longer has jobs.

The only reason there's any wide-scale manufacturing jobs in other countries is because they pay their workers shit and treat their workers like shit (as a result of paying them shit), which isn't sustainable -- the exact same thing that happened in the states is going to happen there. Call it a slow growing industry bubble.

Technology has struck the death knell for unskilled labor; it's either mostly dead, comparatively (such as in the states), or going to die in due time (such as in places like china). It remains to be seen whether this will ultimately be a good thing, but it's definitely a bad thing for unskilled labor in pure or near-pure capitalist systems.

... though all that is horrible disjointed. I have no idea what hell overarching point m'trying to make.

[Truean]

... though all that is horrible disjointed. I have no idea what hell overarching point m'trying to make.

That its inevitable, that the system dictates lowest cost (which it is) and that the only reason it hasn't entirely happened yet is third world slave labor is somehow cheaper still, sounds like a start. From there it's "unskilled labor is screwed," seems to be the gist of what you were going for. Am I wrong?

You're right, but I just don't see that system sustaining itself, because who is going to be able to buy the damn chairs if everything is mechanized and there are no jobs/wages? Shit, it can't all be service industry can it? Moreover, I'm pretty sure the service industries of our economy took a fairly large hit in this most recent recession.

I just honestly don't get how this system isn't going to implode via automation as it currently stands. Ok, you're more productive, but who's going to be able to buy those chairs/why make them in the first place? Then there's that ripple/feedback effect we were talking about with all the other businesses not having customers to pay them. How are we going to afford "services," without a laboring group of people to support those services?

Paying for services? That's not a lot of what I'm seeing today at least. Fewer and fewer people seem to be able to afford that/consider it a luxury to have somebody else do something for you.

I guess I just don't see how you can sustain a paying customer base, vital to any capitalistic industry, like this. it just seems like weakening the foundation of a house or the fertility of farmland. What's supporting this crap?

[G-Flex]

I really do not see the problem with automation. If society (as a whole) can create the same goods/value with less overall human effort, that is, to me, not a bad thing at all. If anything, the problem is how that value is distributed.

[Truean]

I really do not see the problem with automation. If society (as a whole) can create the same goods/value with less overall human effort, that is, to me, not a bad thing at all. If anything, the problem is how that value is distributed.

Ok if you want to go that route then yes. There are numerous problems and distribution of finished product is only one of them. Maintaining the system of production (those machines), ownership of them, determining what they produce etc, all become huge problems. In this instance, I doubt scarcity has been eliminated so yeah, who gets stuff...?

Moreover, what incentive does the person who owns/controls the machines for production have to keep them producing? At some point, those machines probably aren't free to run/maintain. You're talking electricity, lubricating oil, probably hydrolic fluid, and who knows what else it takes to make an automated factory run. Then what about the raw materials and their costs?

See how the basic problems remain, but they're just altered? You still don't have an infinite supply curve that makes production free and who pays that cost, especially given a reduced ability to pay due to no labor/wages, becomes another question. Who has the duty to make sure the machines keep maintained and supplied and producing (and producing what)?

That doesn't even touch the problem of experience. Knowing how things are made gives you an appreciation for them. We already have customers being completely and utterly terrible. We are nowhere near the point where people don't have to work and they are already this bad; imagine what it'd be like when.... http://demotivationalblog.com/demotivational/2008/09/moar-because-moar.thumbnail.jpg

[Frumple]

I really do not see the problem with automation. If society (as a whole) can create the same goods/value with less overall human effort, that is, to me, not a bad thing at all. If anything, the problem is how that value is distributed.

Well, yeah, that's a good thing unless you only assign value to human effort -- that is, you can only function with a job. Less human effort necessary == less jobs. There's a set amount of human effort to go around, so you're going to have excess as you reduce the requirements of it. Which... leaves some people on the curb, in a system that only assigns value to human (individual, especially) effort.

You're right, but I just don't see that system sustaining itself, because who is going to be able to buy the damn chairs if everything is mechanized and there are no jobs/wages? Shit, it can't all be service industry can it? Moreover, I'm pretty sure the service industries of our economy took a fairly large hit in this most recent recession.

Well, you're right. It can't sustain itself. That's pretty blatantly obvious if you're taking an even remotely long-term viewpoint, but pure capitalism is almost strictly about short-term profit. Some people take the long term view and accept lesser short-term profit for more sustained long-term profit, but they're almost inevitably out-performed and annexed/squashed by those doing cut-throat (as in, cutting their own throat, really) short-term maneuvering.

As for the all-service, well.. eventually, yes. It will reach the point where there is literally no aspect of manufacturing that can't be done more cheaply via automation*. At that point, service will be all that's left unless folks are being intentionally inefficient -- and there's little profit incentive to do that.

*We're definitely not there yet, and there's a powerful social aspect involved (refusing to work in shit conditions), but it's rather inevitable assuming we don't have any massive knowledge/tech base loss in the future.

I just honestly don't get how this system isn't going to implode via automation as it currently stands. Ok, you're more productive, but who's going to be able to buy those chairs/why make them in the first place? Then there's that ripple/feedback effect we were talking about with all the other businesses not having customers to pay them. How are we going to afford "services," without a laboring group of people to support those services?

Well, the unskilled/lower end folks won't. They're largely screwed. You'll have a body of skilled labor, which will support an (overall smaller) amount of commodity consumption, and unskilled labor will exist only to the extent that it supports the maintenance and pleasure of the skilled labor. I mean, the states is kinda' the example of what's going down. If you don't have education and some sort of skill training, you're right fooked.

Paying for services? That's not a lot of what I'm seeing today at least. Fewer and fewer people seem to be able to afford that/consider it a luxury to have somebody else do something for you.

I guess I just don't see how you can sustain a paying customer base, vital to any capitalistic industry, like this. it just seems like weakening the foundation of a house or the fertility of farmland. What's supporting this crap?

Eh, bubbles, from what I see. Short-term gains allow for short-term profit and eventually undercut the whole system -- gaze in awe and wonder at the almost across the board increase in wealth disparity. It's kind of the inevitable results of strict short-term profit hunting. The ideal is that the ups and downs sustain itself in a general sense (the average is alright, you get highs and lows as you go along); boom bust and all that crap.

Of course, you hit the ahahaha-dumbass-m'fookers wall of finite resources eventually, but eh. No one seems to really care, or rather the ones that care can't really compete to the point they have influence -- see the above about short-term out-performance.

And I'm rambling kind of oddly right now, so take the statements with salt, or something.

[Nadaka]

Hypothetically, enhanced automation would not put people out of work, just reduce the amount of work we are asked to do. We could most likely sustain the lifestyle we had 50 years ago on less than 3 days of work each week. And we could probably sustain today's lifestyle on 3 to 4 a week if the top 1%-2% were not leaching wealth away from everyone at the insane rate that they currently are.