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A judge has proposed a nationwide programme to file down the points of kitchen knives as a solution to the country’s soaring knife crime epidemic.
Last week in his valedictory address, retiring Luton Crown Court Judge Nic Madge spoke of his concern that carrying a knife had become routine in some circles and called on the Government to ban the sale of large pointed kitchen knives.
[...] He said laws designed to reduce the availability of weapons to young would-be offenders had had “almost no effect”, since the vast majority had merely taken knives from a cutlery drawer.
[...] He asked: “But why we do need eight-inch or ten-inch kitchen knives with points?
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Knives are too Sharp and Filing Down their Points is Solution to Soaring Violent Crime, Judge Says
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The plot was designed in a light vein that somehow became varicose.
-- David Lardner
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday June 01 2018, @07:00PM (5 children)
How about self control? That covers all weapons at once.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday June 01 2018, @08:14PM (3 children)
Most people don't have your level of self-control (and there is a sentence I never thought I'd type about you...). Face it, most people suck. Smart people tend to be a bit solipsistic about this, as we sort of assume everyone else thinks more or less the way we do. Not true, unfortunately.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday June 01 2018, @11:28PM (2 children)
Think back to the whole "ADHD folks experience emotions more strongly than normal type folks" thing a while back and you should see why. You either get good at self-control or you spend your life in prison.
Incidentally, this is what you're always on my ass over as well; the whole forcing my emotions to remain under the control of my logical mind thing. Believe me when I say that you really don't want me the other way around. Consider what a motivated someone way off on our end of the intelligence bell curve could do if their reason served their emotions rather than the other way around. As an intellectual exercise and for a few laughs, I like to try to figure out how to release a million chickens in NYC some night. There's no real reason the chickens couldn't be used as a ricin delivery system as well though.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday June 02 2018, @04:21AM (1 child)
Hmm...you'd need to commandeer a few thousand delivery trucks on the way to slaughterhouses. This would require either a very large social-engineering hack or somehow having hundreds of your buddies hijack every live-poultry shipping vehicle for 50 miles around the city. Actually releasing them is the easy part; it's just a matter of where. "The subway" sounds like a lulzy first idea, but the birds would mostly just get smashed or electrocuted. Central Park would be hilarious.
One possible alternative: dress up in a green forest ranger costume, steal exactly *one* chicken, and smack it with a sword a few times. Reliable sources (and bitter experience...) tell me that you'll be absolutely swarmed with chickens in no time flat.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday June 02 2018, @11:20AM
You'd think so but no. Getting a million chickens surprisingly isn't all that difficult. You'd be amazed at how many yard birds are sacrificed upon the altar of dinner just in the US every single day. Most of them come from Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, South Carolina, and Louisiana too, so easy access. Buy them up over the course of a year and the poultry industry would only notice a small uptick in profits.
The biggest problem is you can only get about two thousand per trailer and expect most to survive the trip. That means you need around five hundred twenty-five (5% loss margin) tractor trailers full of birds all getting to their respective destinations around NYC within no more than two hours of each other. Any longer a time span and the authorities are going to catch on and start stopping trucks.
Now you could bring some or all of them in via cargo ship but that's not without its own problems. You'd still need them moved around the city in a very short time, so you'd still need just as many trucks but now you have to get them all loaded and moved from the docks to various spots in the city within a pretty small window. It's a bit of a pain in the logistics. And it's a single point of failure that could get you busted and or at least delayed long enough to bugger up the plan.
You also have everyone who isn't in the know on the joke. Five hundred twenty five drivers and loaders if you don't use a ship and that plus everyone else involved on the shipping side of things if you do. That's a pretty vulnerable attack surface.
You could cut the attack surface down some if you used two separate logistics companies (one to haul birds to the second while the second delivered and released them) and enough of a bribe to make sure the logistics companies lost the paperwork as soon as the last truck rolled out. That's better but hardly foolproof. You'd probably also need to include time-delayed bribes for each driver to make the chance of them getting busted while unloading worthwhile and reduce the chance they'll talk.
All that to say, it's not nearly as easy as it sounds.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday June 01 2018, @08:50PM
Wouldn't that be nice.
Every performance optimization is a grate wait lifted from my shoulders.