Comments by "Sar Jim" (@sarjim4381) on "The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered"
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Michael, the Carson City Mint dollars came from the Treasury Department. They were being held in reserve for those exchanging silver certificates for silver dollars. That's how I got started collecting them back in the late 50's. Hard to imagine now, but a common date silver dollar was worth exactly one dollar.
Convertibility of silver certificates to silver dollars ended in 1964 as the price of silver was rising above the value of .77 ounces of silver in the dollar. Treasury still had almost 3,000 $1,000 face value bags of silver dollars in 1964, and this supply was shipped to the West Point (NY) Bullion Depository until a decision was made on how to dispose of the coins.
The process started in 1970 when GSA employees, with the guidance of a committee of professional numismatists started separating the coins into grades from uncirculated to circulated. It was decided to offer these in mail bid sale in 1972 with a minimum bid of $30. Almost all were CC coins, and the date and quantity lists sent shockwave through the collecting community. Some of the most expensive date like the 1879 and 1882-1884 were considered rare because so few were available, and the assumption was most had been melted in great silver melts of the 1920's. In fact, they were rare because Treasury was holding enough of them to make it seem like so few were left. CC dollar prices collapsed almost overnight once the lists were released. Without knowing how many more of each date were left in the hoard, many collectors left the CC dollar collecting hobby in disgust. Bidding was much less than had been anticipated. Only 700,000 of the 1.7 million offered were sold. It took the rising price of silver, six more sales, and renewed collector interest before all the silver dollars were finally sold in 1980.
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He may not have been a test pilot before he took off but he surely was when he finally managed to land. Holden had flow more than the Tiger Moth. He qualified on the Harvard, or T-6, a much more powerful airplane, although still a tail dragger. He was qualified on the twin engine Airspeed Oxford, yet another tail dragger, and had flown as the co-pilot on the P-2 Neptune, a much larger twin engine aircraft, and one which finally had tricycle landing gear. He had flown as a second seater in the Javelin, a subsonic British fighter, and the Canberra bomber, but only assisting other qualified pilots. The whole concept of safely taking off and landing an aircraft like the Lightning is like a ten year old being able to successfully drive a Formula One car.
One bit of correction. Holden didn't spend two years in the hospital. He spent two periods of a couple weeks each in the hospital over a period of a couple years getting psychiatric help for the extreme anxiety of that 12 minutes of flight. [Edited to correct my usual typos]
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There really isn't a need for precision beyond 15 cm, 150 mm, or 5.9", all of which were used to describe the deck guns on the U-156. Only those companies manufacturing the ammunition needed more precision than that.
The HMS Swift only carried a single 6" (15.24 cm) gun for a short time, and then as replacement for her two weak 4" guns. The RN hoped the 6" gun would be able to lob shells into German destroyers armed with 105 mm guns at ranges safe from German hits. The Germans has been shelling the Dover coast and the RN needed a large destroyer that could stop the smaller German vessels. Unfortunately, the additional strengthening need to resist the recoil of the 6" gun took a knot off the top speed of the Swift, making her 1.5 knots slower than the German destroyers. Even more unfortunate, the six inch gun wasn't provided with a good fire control mechanism or a crew experienced with the large gun. In her one battle with German destroyers in the Dover Strait, the Swift fired off 50 6" rounds without a single hit while sustaining several hits for the handier and more accurate German 105 mm guns. The Germans were able to outrun the Swift and made it safely back to German ports. The 6" experiment was deemed a failure and the Swift was rearmed with her original weak 4 " guns. She was the only large destroyer leader type ship of the RN in the war, was judged an all around failure, and was "swiftly" scrapped immediately after the war. Sorry, couldn't resist the pun. :-)
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@brucesmith54 You really have no idea about the US besides whatever left wing sources you seem to use. Most Americans don't have a gun at arms reach. Even CBS, not usually known as a right leaning outlet, reported the actual numbers (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/despite-mass-shootings-number-of-households-owning-guns-is-on-the-decline/) that show less than 30% of US households have even a single gun, and over 65% don't have even one, and thee number of gun owning households has been on a constant decline sine . About .02% of people own an automatic weapon of any kind, and almost all of them are collectors of obsolete weaponry. I'm sure you meant semiautomatic, but your unfamiliarity with firearms means both have that same word in them, so close enough. Kind of like a Kia and Ferrari being the same thing since they both have an engine and four wheels.
US males don't commit suicide with guns more often than Australian males hang themselves. Ironically, given your penchant for making things up, the number of hangings has increased as the supply of guns has decreased. Apparently, having to go to the store to buy rope hasn't stopped men from hanging themselves. Maybe you and the other leftists can start a movement to make any rope with more than a 100 pound test illegal too.
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@brucesmith54 Even the "small towns like Chicago", a city with a population almost twice the largest city in Australia, Sydney. Your country is one with only five cities with a population of more than a million. We have fifty-three with more than a million and 361 with more than 100,000. Australia has seventeen. do you think that may be a factor in murder rates?
You keep moving the goalposts while adding in more snarky shit to bolster yourself. Wollongong and Cairns have the third and fourth highest crime rates in Oceana...which proves what? Bodies laying the streets. You can't even get your own country right. Adelaide is not now nor has ever been the murder capital of Australia. A story from the ABC, (https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-12-15/why-cant-adelaide-bury-murderous-capital-reputation/9249142) as left as you can get there, proves this. The place with the highest murder rate in the Northern Territories and it has a murder rate equal to the US. Any kind of similarities between there and Detroit or Chicago? No place in the NT that would be kind of like a war zone?
And then you want to tell me about US cities and school me about how they really are because, you know, I really might not live in one. I've lived in three of the four largest cities in the US, all way larger than Sydney. You, however, being Australian leftist who I doubt has spent as much time in the US as I have in your country, shows me you don't know your ass from your elbow about the US. GTFO.
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Humberto, Thanks. My dad wanted to be a pilot but, like you, he was washed out because of his eyesight. He spent his three years in the Pacific as a motor machinist mate on a PT boat. That's cool that you managed to get all the way up to your commercial transport license and are flying a later model of the plane that my dad helped to engineer. He started working on the 747 gear when it was still a design project for a military transport. When that contract went to Lockheed for what became the C-5 Galaxy, he thought he was done with that project. He would have been if not for Juan Trippe having the vision to see this monster as a viable airliner. I believe the basic structure and hydraulics of the gear is still the same as it was on those original Pan Am 747-100's.
Ironically, the best flight I ever had on a 747 was six days after 9/11 on an Air New Zealand flight from LA to Fiji for a dive trip. We had planned the trip for a year, and we were going as long as they could get the flights restarted. IIRC, there were a grand total of 18 of us on that almost brand new 747-400, all of us in free first class seats and eating free first class food. The number of pax's must have been close to the number of flight attendants on the trip since it seemed like I had my own personal attendant for the flight. Marilyn was her name...but I digress. It's a long ass haul to Fiji but, with the main cabin virtually empty, we all had our own beds, stretched out across that whole center row of seats. Marilyn bought me blankets and extra pillows to make sure I was comfortable. What flight that was!
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@brucesmith54 No, 'only money" isn't the only determinant of what affects a person's life, but it's a pretty huge part. Not having enough disposable income to have some freedom to make your own decisions in life can suck pretty bad. However, if you feel that money isn't all that important, feel free to follow the AOC path of sharing your money with those who'd rather not work.
I don't know what you mean by "American males and females are killing themselves at a higher rate" but if you mean compared to Australians, the standardised rates per 100,000 compared to the US are nearly identical and fluctuate from year to year. There are also significant differences in how suicide is recorded in Australia compared to the US. The ABS tends to underreport suicide because it only classifies it as suicide when the the cause is incontrovertible compared to US more often classifying it as suicide when the evidence is such any other means of death is unlikely. Nevertheless, rates are close enough that they don't tell us much about either country. Suicide rates are higher in Finland, Japan, and Belgium than the US, so does that mean people there are even more unhappy than the US? Hardly any statisticians are willing to use suicide rates as a sign of anything since the reporting rates vary so widely around the world, and a rate of even a couple people per 100,000 higher or lower is just noise.
But sure, go ahead and make up statistics as if they are real and telling us anything.
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