Author: hsoi

Everyone has a breaking point

/ hsoi

It’s so popular to tax the rich…. oh they’ve got all that money, they can afford it. Maybe they can afford it, but it doesn’t mean they’re any different from you or I and don’t like it.

And so, it seems the practice of milking and abusing those that have for the sake of those that haven’t earned it is coming back to bite ’em in the ass. The rich are leaving New York.

“You heard the mantra, ‘Tax the rich, tax the rich,”’ Paterson said Wednesday at a gathering of newspaper editors at an Associated Press event in Syracuse. “We’ve done that. We’ve probably lost jobs and driven people out of the state.”

[…]

[New York Lt. Gov. Richard] Ravitch said last year’s surcharge on income taxes for the next three years won’t likely meet budget expectations. He said Albany must look to politically difficult spending cuts, rather than more taxes, to meet a deepening shortfall that Paterson estimated Wednesday could reach $3 billion.

“I don’t think they have any choice,”  Ravitch said. “In my personal opinion, we’re at the outer limits of the elasticity of our tax system.”

Wow. Politically difficult spending cuts… as opposed to the really easy and popular tax increases, especially if I’m not the one being taxed, right? Always good when people aim low.

Just amazing. The implied mindset is we can keep forcefully taking what isn’t ours from some people (as long as it’s not me) so we can pay for whatever we want. And that we can just keep doing it with no consequence…. the party will never end, and if we want more, we’ll just forcefully take more.

And now, it falls apart.

And now, they may not be able to afford everything and may have to make cuts, like any responsible household would have to consider. I’ll bet most of the stuff they want to afford the government shouldn’t be dealing with anyway.

Some taxation may be necessary to pay for those Constitutionally outlined tasks, but we’ve all got a breaking point. Abuse things and eventually you lose things.

SR-22 side-effect

/ hsoi / 7 Comments

As I noted a couple days ago, Ruger just introduced a new rifle, the SR-22.

The SR-22 is simple. It’s essentially a Ruger 10/22 with the wood stock removed and black plastic stuff attached to it.

Pictures would help.

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DVD Review – ShivWorks’ Reverse Edge Methods, Volume 1

/ hsoi / 2 Comments

This is my 3rd of 4 reviews of the ShivWorks DVD series. I previously reviewed the Practical Unarmed Combat DVD and the Fighting Handgun Volume 1 DVD.

The intent of this DVD is to provide an introduction to ShivWorks’ reverse-edge knife skills, for use in extreme close quarters combat situations.

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Housekeeping

/ hsoi / 4 Comments

Fiddling with the blog settings.

Comments should show avatars. RSS feed should show summaries instead of the full text. Fiddled with the CSS slightly. Other little settings changes.

All of this continues to be subject to change.

That is all.

Updated: Went back to full-text RSS feed.

Let Recoil Happen

/ hsoi

Courtesy of Rob Longenecker, an article titled “Let Recoil Happen.”

The article discusses handgun shooting and flinching. Author Ron Avery’s response? Let recoil happen.

Granted this is simplifying things, but his point is sound. Recoil is going to happen. We cannot stop recoil. As humans we don’t like these loud explosions going off just a few feet in front of our faces, and naturally we flinch, naturally we tense up trying to fight and stop the recoil. You can’t stop the recoil; the best we can do is manage the recoil. This can happen through good technique: e.g. modern isosceles stance, “nose over toes” (putting your weight on the balls of your feet, weight forward, butt sticking out), using equal and firm grip pressure but letting the rest of your body be more or less relaxed, etc.. It’s a good article on helping to manage recoil and stop flinching.

Mr. Avery briefly touches on an interesting topic:

With the trend towards smaller and lighter handguns and more powerful cartridges, I have noted an increase in flinching among students shooting these firearms. Weight is not a bad thing if it is kept in a range that allows for controllability along with ease of carry.

I’ve observed newbies shooting a Kahr (i.e. very small and lightweight handgun) chambered for .40 S&W (i.e. powerful, snappy cartridge) for the first time. Invariably the newbie shooters do not like it. Small guns are harder to control: you can’t get enough grip on them, they have less weight thus less mass to help absorb and manage that recoil. But, people want small guns because they believe that’s the only way to carry concealed, so the first gun they get and try to learn to shoot with is a small gun and inevitably it leads to a lot of frustration because they can’t shoot it well. Frustration then equates to not practicing, and not practicing well… you know what that means.

I made this mistake. I started out with a small gun. It wasn’t too bad, but upon the recommendation of a good teacher I put the gun on the shelf and bought a big full-sized gun. I’m glad I did. It was much easier to shoot a full-sized gun and consequently I learned faster, practiced more. Once I had competence with the larger gun, it wasn’t as difficult to go back to the smaller gun and be successful in shooting it because I had the technique fundamentals down. Hence my opinion that small guns are better for “advanced shooters” and beginners should stick with full-sized guns. Get through the learning curve, get a solid foundation, then move to the small gun. Besides, yes you can conceal full-sized guns.

Snow Leopard’s file system changes

/ hsoi / 2 Comments

Mac OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard” brought a slew of under the hood changes. There are two distinct but related changes that Apple made that most users will probably never notice and many developers probably never will either. But if you happen to be someone who works with the file system, these changes may affect you. These changes are:

1. KB vs. KiB. That is, is a kilobyte 1000 bytes or 1024 bytes.

2. file-system-level compression of files

Since I recently went around with these, I felt it’d be worthwhile to share what I discovered, since there isn’t much information out there on the topic. The only thing I found that remotely discussed the matter was this page of Ars Technica’s Snow Leopard review.
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