I've never been this embarrassed and frustrated by America, and really the whole western World. We pulled out of Afghanistan knowing full well their government would collapse, wrong only about the speed it would happen. Ignore for a moment the Americans and Afghan allies trapped there because of the speed of the collapse. Think about the everyday citizens. Already there's reports of a woman shot in the street because she wasn't wearing a head covering, girls already being prevented from going to school, neighborhoods disarmed so citizens can't defend themselves. We know how this ends; a country of 38 million will become enslaved to "Sharia Law", they'll once again live in a world where every day they're at risk of dying if they dare speak an opinion contrary to fundamentalist Islam.

    America has spent the last several years bitching about "systemic discrimination", with Democrats ensuring us Trump wants to make "The Handmaid's Tale" come to life. But it was Biden who has actually (and knowingly) put a country of women back at the mercy of the ruthless, woman-enslaving, child-raping Taliban. And we've heard <crickets> from the Democratic base. The Taliban will kill woman at will, and yet the Democrats have no desire to save them. The Taliban will kill gays outright, and yet the party of LGBTQ+ can't be bothered to act. The party that complains America is too sexist has turned their backs on girls our troops have protected from birth, letting them be forced away from schools or even worse, into "marriages" to Taliban fighters(i.e, raped). The party that thinks that America built its wealth upon the abuse of the poor has no desire to spend a small portion of our annual budget to at least try to bring security and freedom to 38 million people in one of the worst areas of the world. The party that regularly slanders our military as full of right-wing racists thinks the security of 38 million people is worth less than keeping a few thousand American troops there continuously.

    While Democrats are especially hypocritical due to the nature of their untrue attacks on Republicans, Republicans are far from innocent in this. Trump ran on a "Leave Afghanistan" platform. Republicans have elected Congressional members opposed to any so called "nation building" at all, such as Rand Paul. According to them, we should have bombed Afghanistan and then just let them be, and we'd be better off. This was always an idiotic position, proven more false as time goes by specifically due to how hard it was to fight Al-Qaeda and the Taliban with troops *in* the country. Dropping a few bombs and leaving would have allowed them to continue planning and launching more attacks. Then, GOP voters nominated Trump and got him into office. Trump kept his word and created the plan to leave(conditionally), despite the fact there was no expectation Afghanistan was ready for us to leave. Biden ignored that plan and simply left in chaos. But voters got what they asked for either way. A majority of Americans wanted to leave, but were either too uncaring or ignorant to consider the impact on millions of innocent people, or the impact on our security when the Taliban and Al-Qaeda are free to launch new attacks with near zero ability for the U.S. target them at the source beforehand.

    And the rest of the world? I expected their condemnations of the Taliban and the U.S. alike as we dealed Afghanistan right into chaos, but they don't seem to care enough either. Perhaps they're too afraid to condemn us because then the question will become, "If The U.S. won't do it, why don't you send your military in force and save the Afghans instead?". Nope. Virtual silence.

    The West failed by choice. We lost an average of 180 soldiers a year to Afghanistan, every one a tragedy; but that number had dropped significantly  since combat operations were turned over to the Afghan military. It wasn't going great for Afghanistan, but it was going. Despite huge losses of their own they had a military willing to fight so long as we were there to help. When it turned hopeless upon our exit, they crumbled. 

    From this point forward, every Taliban murder of a former Afghan ally, or stoning of a woman for violating Sharia Law, or forced "marriage" of a barely teenage girl to a Taliban fighter, the West had a role. We walked away. Shame on us.

Experiences with Rain-Bird 5000, K-Rain 4-inch/5-inch, Orbit Voyager II

 I've been doing repairs on my in-ground sprinklers, and preparing to expand sprinklers to areas not currently under a proper watering regime. I have some areas I've moved mobile sprinklers to, which is both annoying and water inefficient; instead of being watered in the wee hours of the morning like my automatic sprinklers, for a fixed and optimal period of time, they're watered in the afternoon from whenever I get around to it, to whenever I wake up and say "gah, I forgot the sprinkler again!". 

    Trying to resolve some issues with reach on the existing system, I had tested a K-Rain four-inch sprinkler head. I had previously had good luck with a K-Rain 5 inch model that I used on a spike, for a large semi-circle area. The four-inch didn't work well in that location so I moved it to a spike as a mobile sprinkler. I have it watering an approximate 60x30 strip, but this requires me to move it three times for complete watering. I don't like this. Since I was dissatisfied with the K-Rain 4-incher, I bought an Orbit Voyager II to test. Specific reasons for buying it were the distance was rated higher than the others, and the nozzles appeared possibly compatible with the Rain-Bird 42SA and 5000 series, though I haven't verified this yet, and it was cheaper than the Rain-Bird 5000. Again, this is being used above ground for now: I could have bought a gear-driven above-ground sprinkler but I assume I will eventually move these below ground in the near future.

    So to this point I've used the Rain-bird 5000 series(older ones, ~ 18 years old), K-Rain 5-inch, K-Rain 4-inch, and Orbit Voyager II. Cost was a primary driver of experimentation, with the exception of one location where I needed different coverage. If I could reduce a $15 head to $10, it would make a reasonable difference if I'm installing a new in-ground section. Here's my experience with each.

• Rain-Bird 5000: great sprinkler. I started replacing them after about 13 years as they began to fail. None of this failure was their fault; the soil-line raising over that period caused some to be sunk under-ground and get flooded with mud constantly. I had coverage issues with one area that was just never quite right, and so moved away from this head in attempts to fix it. I ended up moving the head and replacing it with a new Rain-Bird 5000. They've changed the design of the nozzle in the intervening years but I think they all still interchange. I feel like they've improved these over the years. I recall our oldest ones being difficult to adjust: requiring setting the left-position which is fixed, screwing the cap down, then adjusting the right-position; this is finicky if there's any movement in the sprinkler body itself(as there was with the flex-hose they were attached to the PVC with). With the last one I was able to grip the extended part of the sprinkler and move it as needed, then do pattern adjustment as normal.
  
• K-Rain 5-inch: Bought for above-ground usage on a spike to test covering an irregular but approximately 55'x25' area. This worked quite well, actually. I'm watering a not-quite trapezoidal area with a semi-circle spray, so it's less than perfect coverage, and truly needs 4-6 heads i think, but since it's a less-than-manicured section it has worked well enough for now. I'd like to use different nozzles but the big-box stores I frequent don't carry them and they appear incompatible with Rain-Bird. If it wasn't for the lack of support from the store, I'd choose these for large coverage areas. They're super-easy to adjust. I do worry about their durability, but haven't had issues yet.
• K-Rain 4-inch: Like their 5-inch brothers, the spray nozzles are hard to find. It seemed to drip a lot more water near the spray head than I've seen with other sprinklers, flooding the area near the sprinkler too bad to leave as an in-ground sprinkler. I moved it to a spike. After less than one season, it stopped rotating properly. I won't buy these again.
  
• Orbit Voyager II: This seems to have the difficulty of adjusting like the original Rain-Bird 5000s. The distance is better, and I feel like it has possibly better coverage in the middle of its spray range. The apparent inability to adjust the fixed-side pointing after installation means I won't likely use these going forward.

I hate when you spend much effort looking for better alternatives, then find out you had the best all along. After experimenting with the others, I'm back to the good-old Rain-Bird 5000s. They're the priciest of the ones I've tried, but the price difference of the others do not make up for their shortcomings.

Maybe Some Ad Discretion, Youtube?

  I get it, Youtube. I watch some "grown-up" content at times, such as music videos from the likes of Kid Rock, Pink, or even on occasion really weird stuff like Die Antwoord. It is a guilty pleasure. Youtube might be forgiven for thinking I would be interested in commercials of an adult nature. In no case should they ever show such commercials prior to wholesome videos. There is absolutely no reason I should turn on a video about rocket launches and be served an ad with the opening seconds being women talking about [independent bedroom activities]. It's like Google has never considered that people might watch different content based on who is in the room together, or simply might want to decide for themselves when to indulge in indecent topics.
  I immediately checked my google ad-settings to see if there was some category that listed me as interested in adult topics. There is no obvious category for such things. Nor should there be, really. Content providers should realize they cannot see into the homes and should never make assumptions about the current audience's appropriateness for adult content. Commercials should never be more indecent than the viewer-chosen content they are playing beside, to ensure viewers desire such material at the moment. I'm tired of content companies across the board not respecting their viewers.

Apparently, we're too pathetic for simple rules

https://townhall.com/columnists/gabriellahoffman/2020/05/29/northams-mask-edict-puts-suffering-businesses-in-a-nowin-situation-n2569634

It seems an argument against requiring masks is:
“It will be up to the businesses and their untrained employees to confront someone who isn't wearing a mask to either compel the violators to wear a mask or expel them from the premises. As we have seen in other states, this has led to confrontations between businesses and their customers, even in one case leading to a shooting death at a Dollar Store.” 

Seriously? Ever see the signs in stores, "No Shoes, No Shirt, No Service". It's a simple system: abide by the rules or we're simply not dealing with you. We don't even need to ask violators to leave, just don't serve them. That's all it takes. I can't imagine that not meeting the responsibility expected from businesses. "You're not wearing a mask, so I'm not serving you".  Most people will get tired of not being served, and comply. If people get angry over that and start shooting, chances are there's more to their instability than just the masks. Many in the anti-shutdown crowd are keen to say, "it's mostly old people who would have died soon anyway". Well, that shooting probably was going to happen anyway; scattered violence from random lunatics is not a good argument against any policy.
  And what's with this "untrained employees" part? Are we really so pathetic of a people that we can't understand and enforce a rule as simple as, "You must be wearing a mask to shop here"? Since when did basic communication require training? I'm sure someone will say, "But what if someone refuses, and gets angry...they clearly need training!" Most business already deal with unruly customers and have training in place for such issues. Just continue doing whatever you already do.

Extrapolating Early Numbers

Reference:
   https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/27/upshot/coronavirus-deaths-new-york-city.html
  
I've so far been unwilling to join the crowd that says "COVID-19 was overblown". The numbers seen so far support plausible values(had we done nothing), close to their original predictions. Originally the government gave a potential number of deaths on the order of 2 million, then on the order of 250k, then 67k, and now(with 79k official deaths) it's back up to a predicted 140k by August.There is of course controversy over which deaths to count as COVID-19, which to count as other causes, but there's one statistic that is most useful right now: excess deaths(expected deaths for an average year vs actual deaths). This value can't separate deaths caused from the virus to deaths caused potentially by the response, and can underestimate deaths from the pandemic if we had a drop in deaths due to other causes, but if we assume our actions didn't significantly raise the death rate by accident then it gives a reasonable ball-park figure to how bad this virus is.

New York has been hardest hit in the U.S. by COVID-19. They were hit early, hard, and long. They've likely seen an overall infection rate far beyond what the rest of the U.S. has seen so far, but obviously not beyond what is possible. Let's use them as a bellwether for the rest of the U.S., with a few assumptions:

1. Our response did not itself cause significant extra deaths. There's likely some who did die due to new delays in treatments for survivable ailments, but lacking data suggesting otherwise, we should assume this isn't a large percentage of excess deaths.
2. There's nothing special about New York's COVID-19 or their population that makes COVID-19 more deadly there than elsewhere. It isn't a more dangerous mutant version. The population is close enough to average demographics and risk profiles. Comparing deaths per cases there(if we knew the "true" count), would result in similar death-rate in other states. It is true that they have a higher population density than other areas, which will impact the rate of spread, but shouldn't on its own change the death-rate.
3. There's nothing special about their handling of COVID-19 that would result in a death rate different than throughout the U.S. Their hospitals, while overworked at times, could do little else to save lives. Those who died would have died anywhere else in the U.S. There are of course the accusations that sending stable COVID-19 patients back to their nursing homes has increased deaths by exposing vulnerable populations; while this can increase the apparent death-rate in the short-term, if we assume most would eventually get infected anyway, then it changes little in the long-run.

With these assumptions and some real-world values, we can do some basic math. New York City has had over 20k "excess deaths" as of April 25th(more deaths than expected over the duration of the COVID-19 pandemic; keep in mind these values are weeks out of date and are now higher). 16k of those have been attributed to COVID-19; some of the rest may also be COVID-19 caused, or may be side-effects of the pandemic(such as reduced treatment access for non-COVID-19 ailments). In any case, NYC has 10 million people. The U.S. has 320 million people. So...(320m/10m)*20k = 640k. Were the rest of the U.S. to see the same percentage of their population infected, with the same death rate, we would have 640k extra deaths. Even if we limit this to the 16k deaths attributed to COVID-19, that's still 512k deaths. 512k deaths may not be close to the original fears of over 2 million deaths, but keep in mind this is with a successful "flatten the curve" campaign to prevent severely overloading the hospitals. Those who needed treatment largely got treatment. New York City's experience validates the scale of the original national predictions.

Automatic Speed Limiting Systems and Regulations

"New cars sold in Europe from 2022 will have to be fitted with systems to limit their speed.
Under new safety rules agreed by the European Union, all new vehicles are required to have “intelligent speed assistance” systems as standard equipment.
The EU rules don’t mandate specific technology for the systems, which can be temporarily overridden by the driver. Some carmakers have already developed ways of using GPS or cameras to detect posted speed limits and make sure vehicles adhere to them."

http://asq.org/qualitynews/qnt/execute/displaySetup?newsID=25434

   I'm sure this will eventually come to the U.S(or at least California), so I'm quite interested to see how implementations of such systems and regulations go. My first reaction is that I wouldn't trust such a system to not kill me. It's pretty common to need an extra 10+mph quickly when you're dealing with merging and passing on a busy freeway. Even if such a system can be overridden by the driver, I can imagine it being an issue: if you're not regularly overriding the system, when you suddenly find you need to do so there can be some dangerous delay in doing so. I also worry the system may cause worse problems by drivers becoming accustom to just holding the pedal down till the car stops accelerating.
   It is pretty clear that excessive speeding is a major contributor of deaths, and I fully expect a system like this to eventually be a component of solving that problem. I'm therefore quite open to seeing some real-world experiments with such things, but it seems far too early to mandate it. I would love to see it as an option(especially an after-market add-on), primarily to be used on cars driven by teenagers; or even as an enforced add-on for repeated reckless speeders. But a blanket requirement on all cars when we haven't even seen them really tested seems premature. Maybe the article linked above leaves out nuances of the law: for example, if it was a slow-rollout where only some require it the first few years as the system is evaluated, that seems reasonable. But three years is too soon to expect the kinks and dangers to be resolved(or perhaps even discovered). I worry that perhaps the hype of self-driving cars has made lesser, still-complex components seem so clearly "doable" that the regulations are going to push too fast against cost, reliability, and unexpected driver adaptations.
   Of course, with speed-related deaths being around 1/4th of vehicle-related fatalities, it's quite possible that even if such a system is flawed it could still result in fewer deaths. This alone could save tens of thousands of lives over the next 10 years if successfully implemented in the U.S. That is a staggering number when the solution could potentially be as straight-forward as comparing GPS coordinates against a database of speed-limits.  In such a case, it would be important to move the system to production as soon as possible. I would be 100% behind a near-term requirement for this in the U.S. if it included reasonable conditions for delay or was built using thresholds that help protect the consumers against cost increases. For example, if such a system is sold on 50% of vehicles of the same class in a given average price range(such as within $2000 of final sale-price), it should then become mandatory for all within that bracket the following year. Manufacturer's would ensure they're getting ready to install it, as they wouldn't want to find themselves without a solution and unable to sell cars, while actual deployment is limited by demand and reasonable market conditions. Perhaps better would be to quickly mandate an open interface where an after-market system could be fitted in the future. Then, you could either have it dealer-installed with the new car or added to it later when prices drop. I can't imagine such an interface costing any noticeable amount: just a simple hook into the control system where the outside controller plugs in and dynamically tells the car the max speed to allow, and the car obliges.

People are Stupid over the Stupidest Things

I read an article about new car-safety technology(specifically intelligent speed-limiters being required in the EU), which lead me to look up highway death statistics, which led to the fact that over 50% of teens and adults killed in car accidents were not buckled. Not only that, less than 80% of those involved in accidents were wearing a seat belt in 2016. Every time I hear seat belt statistics, they astound me. I can't imagine *not* buckling a seat-belt. I would simply feel stupid to not wear it. I've had to readjust a seat belt on occasion while the car is moving, and especially find rear Toyota seat belts consistently lock in the most troublesome manner; still, I've never felt the need to not wear a seat belt. In fact, In my life, I've only known of a tiny number of people who don't always buckle(three in my recollection...one an oldie who grew up without them and frequently wouldn't think about it until prompted, one who had medical equipment the belt interfered with, and one generally stupid person).
  More amazing is that seat belt use among children is *not* universal. Isn't it a crime to not have a child properly restrained? Shouldn't we have hundreds at least per year of high-profile cases with parents prosecuted when their children are killed in a death preventable by seat belts? I've heard the same PSA's all my life about seat belts and preventing injury and "Buckle Up. It's the law." Yet we're still no-where near 100%? Maybe it's time to change tactics. Advertisers long ago found out that you have to make a message "personal" or emotionally memorable. That's why we're given ads with cute kids selling snacks and the "previously suffering-grandpa" selling pharmaceuticals. We need to start stricly enforcing the law, prosecute parental negligence almost mercilessly; and advertise every single instance of needless-death.