True Dough
True Dough's Journal
State trooper convicted after kicking handcuffed man in the face in Pennsylvania
Good to follow up on these incidents when we can. Justice (or the miscarriage of it) often takes years to play out.
In this instance, the cop has actually been found guilty. Now we'll just have to wait to see what sort of punishment he gets.
It took a Dauphin County jury just 45 minutes to convict him of simple assault and official oppression.
And Senior Deputy District Attorney Stephen Zawisky said he'll probably seek jail time when Judge Scott A. Evans sentenced the 37-year-old Mechanicsburg man in April.
Christopher Siennick, the recipient of the kick Luckenbaugh landed on May 16, 2015, had a one-word reaction to the verdict. "Cowabunga!" he said.
http://www.pennlive.com/news/2017/02/jury_quickly_convicts_state_tr.html
The crime occurs shortly after the 4 minute, 10 second mark of this video (the contact occurs to the left of the frame, but the kicking motion is clear):
You can only purchase one ticket...
who do you go see in concert? (And, yeah, they're all dead but it's an imaginary thing.)
Saw this on Facebook.
My pick would be Freddie Mercury, BTW.
Should the robot that takes your job have to pay taxes? Bill Gates says yes !
An interesting proposition from the head of Mircosoft...
It’s a striking position from the world’s richest man and a self-described techno-optimist who co-founded Microsoft, one of the leading players in artificial-intelligence technology.
In a recent interview with Quartz, Gates said that a robot tax could finance jobs taking care of elderly people or working with kids in schools, for which needs are unmet and to which humans are particularly well suited. He argues that governments must oversee such programs rather than relying on businesses, in order to redirect the jobs to help people with lower incomes. The idea is not totally theoretical: EU lawmakers considered a proposal to tax robot owners to pay for training for workers who lose their jobs, though on Feb. 16 the legislators ultimately rejected it.
“You ought to be willing to raise the tax level and even slow down the speed” of automation, Gates argues. That’s because the technology and business cases for replacing humans in a wide range of jobs are arriving simultaneously, and it’s important to be able to manage that displacement. “You cross the threshold of job replacement of certain activities all sort of at once,” Gates says, citing warehouse work and driving as some of the job categories that in the next 20 years will have robots doing them.
https://qz.com/911968/bill-gates-the-robot-that-takes-your-job-should-pay-taxes/?utm_source=qzfb
Hillary Clinton has dinner with Kate McKinnon
https://twitter.com/jeneps/status/832432478413606913Before seeing Glenn Close in “Sunset Boulevard” on Wednesday, Clinton was at dinner with McKinnon at Orso restaurant. “Lots of laughter emanated from their table,” said a spy.
One rowdy diner began chanting “Lock him up!” as a riff on the anti-Clinton cheer.
We’d pay good money to see Sean “You are a cheap Page Six reporter” Spicer and Melissa McCarthy break bread — and then possibly each other.
http://pagesix.com/2017/02/16/hillary-a-big-fan-of-her-snl-impersonator-kate-mckinnon/
CNN going overboard with "breaking news"?
Anyone else notice this? It used to be that "breaking news" was literally something extraordinary that happened moments earlier. For a while now, CNN has been starting every hourly show with "breaking news" that recaps the previous show's breaking news (maybe the previous two or three shows). Then they come back from commercial and put "breaking news" back on the screen (with the accompanying sound effects) and then proceed to analyze news that broke hours earlier.
It sorta irks me.
The thimble gets the boot from Monopoly!
It was voted out. Sounds like the dog and the cat could both be in jeopardy! Better start a campaign to save them!
Voters have rejected the thimble, an integral part of the game since being added to Monopoly in 1935. The move is part of a campaign to select the next generation of game pieces.
Hashtags, emojis and even a rubber duck may replace dogs, cats and hats in an upcoming version.
Hasbro Inc. is holding a worldwide contest to let people choose the eight tokens to be included in the next generation of the property acquisition game, based on the real streets of Atlantic City, New Jersey.
http://www.ctvnews.ca/lifestyle/thimble-tossed-game-piece-voted-out-of-monopoly-board-game-1.3288256
In France, they're training eagles to take down troublesome drones
The training for the eagles starts before birth. The birds are placed on top of drones while still in their shells and kept there after hatching. The birds are trained to see the drones as prey and receive meat as a reward for bringing down a drone.
The use of eagles was prompted after drones flew over a French presidential palace in 2015 and sensitive military sites in 2016.
The French aren't the first to add eagles to their arsenal. Dutch police have also trained eagles to snatch drones from the sky.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/france-eagles-drones-1.3985973
Penny stocks. Have you ever played them?
I have stories. Quite a few stories.
Got started with self-directed investing eight years ago at age 36. It was 2009 and the recovery from the recession was underway. I started out with an oil index fund, figuring that was a sure thing. The problem is that it moved slowly. Meanwhile I was watching some other "blue chip" stocks at terrible lows moving faster, namely Visa and CBS. I was like a kid in a candy store. I wanted a little of everything. Of course I didn't have enough funds to buy 'em all, so I jumped around and then jumped around some more. Most often I took a small loss or broke even, then I was off pursuing the next possible big mover. Boy, did I lose a lot of money in commissions getting in and out like a revolving door!
Anyway, I started reading stock trading discussion forums and became convinced that penny stocks were the way to go. I bought many, but my two largest holdings were a base minerals exploration company with a promising project in Canada and a micro-cap tech company that was developing an online translation program. The former put me up six times my initial investment within several months. The latter had me ahead seven times my buy-in within a couple of months. In both cases the "most informed" investors on the discussion forums were insistent that much better things were to come. I watched the tech company nosedive and pulled out most of my money just a few cents above my original purchase price. With that cash on hand, I started sinking it into the mineral exploration company, which was also experiencing a stock price decline, but at a slower rate. I figured I was getting these shares at a bargain basement price.
Years go by. There have been some positive developments (including a partnership with a mid-cap developer) and the "pounds in the ground" are still there in that promising mineral site, but the stock is worth only a fraction of what I had paid for even my cheapest shares. I continue to hold it because I won't make these paper losses real and I believe, perhaps stubbornly and in futility, that the stock will once again resume its upward climb when this commodities cycle plays out.
So, yeah, many painful lessons. Many golden rules of investing broken, primarily "don't put all your eggs in one basket" and "don't get greedy." Fortunately I didn't get in over my head. A couple of the posters on the discussion boards said they were taking out second mortgages to free up more money for their investments. Yikes!
Other stumbling blocks that come out of nowhere, particularly with penny stocks, are share dilutions to raise finances, "short" reports that cast companies in a poor light and cause their shares to tumble, lawsuits that can drop share value by 10% to 50% in a single day and disappointing drill results/sales figures/quarterly revenues that put a large dent in share performance, and share manipulation that can cause a "whipsaw" effect, whereby shares plummet 20 to 50% within hours and then recover before the end of the day.
It's not for the faint of heart. And yet I still find myself tracking the latest flash in the pan, still fascinated by the potential to make big money quickly, even though losses are the more likely outcome, just like Vegas.
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Member since: Mon Jul 18, 2016, 12:36 AMNumber of posts: 17,384
