This thing is way too half baked to be in production. A day or two ago somebody asked Google how to deal with depression and the stupid AI recommended they jump off the Golden Gate Bridge because apparently some redditor had said that at some point. The answers are so hilariously wrong as to go beyond funny and into dangerous.
Quite true. Keeping in mind everything but the serialized frame is unregulated (and probably unregulatable) accessories, that makes assembling illegal guns even easier. Just build, machine, import, jury rig, etc a frame, and buy the rest legally including all the stress parts like barrel and slide…
Right, and don’t forget that guns are a lot easier to manufacture than drugs. All you need is a decent machine shop. So they could be made domestically with a night shift at a legitimate machine shop business, or made elsewhere and imported with the illegal drugs that are already being imported. The black market will provide what criminals want. Evil men will always find the tools they need to dispense their evil.
You aren’t giving the black market enough credit. Right now most of the illegal guns start as legal ones, and are either stolen or straw purchased. That’s the case because that’s the easiest/cheapest way to get them, NOT because it’s the only way. Even if you completely cut off that supply, even if you somehow ended all civilian gun sales in the US, it wouldn’t mean a damn thing. Guns are not difficult to make. Any decent machine shop can make guns, and unlike a drug lab, that machine shop has a legitimate daytime purpose so it can operate out in the open, pay taxes, employee people, just have a ‘night shift’ that makes guns.
And even if we could somehow cut that off too, which we can’t, we illegally import billions of dollars worth of drugs every year. The government spends $30 billion a year trying to stop this, with pretty much no effect. If it’s that easy to import illegal drugs, why do you think it would be any harder to import illegal guns?
Finally, you say gun owners aren’t being responsible because their guns are being stolen. How exactly do you expect to stop somebody who breaks into your house from stealing your stuff? You can put your guns in a safe but the thief can just steal the safe because that’s a guaranteed payday.
Comparing Tesla with Waymo is stupid. They are doing fundamentally different things, and people like this author don’t realize that. Waymo’s technology, like a few self-driving products from Ford or GM, rely on having a centimeter level 3D scan of the road ahead of time. This allows a crap ton of pre-processing so fewer decisions need to be made in the car. It’s a developmental shortcut, but it also means their cars will only work on roads that have been scanned and processed and approved ahead of time. Tesla’s system doesn’t pre scan roads. It makes all the decisions on the fly based solely on what the car is seeing as it drives. That means that it can theoretically work on any road, in any situation, without advance preparation.
Tesla’s approach tackles a MUCH harder problem. And that must be considered when comparing the two technologies.
Otherwise it’s like looking at two people at the gym, William lifts 25lb weights and can now lift them 10 times, Tom lifts 250 lb weights and can now lift them 9 times, and saying that William is in better shape than Tom because he can do more reps. No, Tom is in better shape because he is lifting a lot more weight. Even though he can’t lift it as many times, he’s doing a lot more work in his workout.
Exactly. And that’s why this won’t do shit. The people who are committing the vast majority of those homicides and other violent crimes are not using legal firearms. They don’t go to a gun dealer and pay a tax and fill out a background check. They buy illegal guns on the street.
Those illegal guns can come from anywhere. Stolen, straw purchased in other states, or simply imported along with the equally illegal drugs that the firearm’s owner is probably selling on the street.
All this text does is punish the law abiding gun owners who are not committing crimes who do fill out background checks who do follow the law and who do pay their taxes. Those aren’t the people causing the problem.
Nowhere close to enough. What we pay teachers is fucking criminal. I believe teaching should be a respected and sought profession that employs the best. Unfortunately my impression is nobody is really taking education seriously, except for the handful of teachers that haven’t burned out yet.
Sounds good to me. You should also look into cryonics. Basically you sign up with a company and donate your body to them, when you die they pump you full of antifreeze and then vitrify you in liquid nitrogen. Right now there’s no way to recover from it, the antifreeze is toxic and we don’t yet know how to undo the cell damage from freezing. But the idea is someday in the future we will figure those things out, and then hopefully be able to thaw the frozen dead person, fix the damage caused by the freezing process, fix whatever problem killed them in the first place, and reanimate them.
For a lower fee, they will cut off your head and just freeze that. Idea being that someday in the future they will be able to transplant your brain into an artificially created body.
If a company ruins people’s lives, I’m okay with them disappearing and all their investors losing their shirts.
I agree that a company that can’t afford to pay for the damage it is causing is doing more harm than help and should go away.
What I think we can both absolutely agree on, is that the current system where companies forcibly collect all kinds of information on people, don’t take security seriously, get breached, and the only punishment that happens is a few million dollars fine they can just write a check for and everyone affected gets a year of credit monitoring, is a broken system. In many of these breaches, they happen because the data was stored so poorly one could make a serious argument for gross negligence. When a company does this and the punishment is a wrist slap, I have a problem with that. It becomes a cost of doing business, not something company management is actually afraid of.
Also, as somebody who actually works in IT, I can tell you cyber insurance is a thing. For small businesses it covers this sort of breach. When you sign up for it they send you a whole questionnaire that asks about your security practices. It’s all boilerplate bullshit. Real cybersecurity involves an insane amount of complexity and required understanding at every level, and the insurance questionnaire is like do you use multi-factor authentication for your email y/n?. If you check no you get a higher insurance premium.
Perhaps a solution would be a mandatory payment of $250 per person made directly to that person if their information is breached. And if the company fails to report it within 60 days, it triples. If the company intentionally conceals it, it quadruples. And should the company go bankrupt and liquidate, these payments to users will be considered the primary creditor and take priority over all others. So no more of this ‘$10 discount on your next purchase and a year of credit monitoring’ class action settlements, put some real fucking teeth in a law. People would get some real compensation. And personal information would no longer be seen as a $20/person asset but rather as a potentially destroy the company liability.
Huh? This might be a different wording thing. In the US, entree is another word for main course. So the meal I am illustrating is for two, has two starters, two main courses, two desserts, four drinks in total.
Servers deserve a lot more than minimum wage. Servers would generally not accept anything close to minimum wage, especially when with tips they can be making $50 to $100 an hour on a busy night.
I am simply pointing out that it is difficult to compete with that.
Take your basic non super fancy restaurant, dinner for two with appetizers, entrees, desserts, a two rounds of drinks will probably be $100ish. And that table of two will be there for an hour. Assuming server gets 20% tip average, that’s $20 for the table. An average server will have four tables in their sections. That means if the restaurant is full, they are making $80 an hour in tips. They will get to keep 60% to 80% of that, the rest going in a tip pool that benefits kitchen staff, bussers, barbacks, etc. But they’ll still be making pretty good money.
Of course if the restaurant is empty or they only have one or two tables with people seated, they are making less.
The problem comes that if you get rid of this system, there’s a lot of financial risk for the restaurant owner. Currently they don’t have to pay the server or the staff very much, most of their compensation comes from tips, meaning there is less risk to them keeping the restaurant fully staffed if it’s not going to be busy. If you pay all these people are constant hourly, now there is risk on the restaurant owner in terms of staffing. Bring on too many staff when it’s quiet and they will lose a bundle. Don’t bring on enough staff when it’s busy and those people don’t have a financial incentive to bust their ass. It also becomes solely their job to ensure quality, because the server that spends half the time on their phone in the back room is making the same money as the server who is attentive to their tables. It also means less risk for hiring an inexperienced server, because if the server does a bad job they just won’t make good tips.
All that said, I agree something has to change. I think perhaps one answer would be a law requiring that each restaurant put 15% of gross receipts into a virtual tip pool. That way they aren’t paying through the nose to staff and empty restaurant, there would be a line item on the check like ‘automatic gratuity paid the staff $whatever on this check, further tipping is optional’.