It also effectively disenfranchises an awful lot of primary voters. If you are in One of the first handful of states, you probably get a full slate of candidates. But if you’re in one of the last handful, most of them have already dropped out and you probably won’t have the opportunity to support the one you wanted.
Making all primaries on the same day would effectively address that. I would prefer however to remove primaries entirely. Set a slightly higher bar to getting on the main ballot, but then say any candidate regardless of party who gets enough signatures can be on the final ballot. Then do ranked choice voting. That way you can vote for a lesser known candidate, without losing your abilities to support the more likely winner that you like and thus not losing your vote against the other guy.
What you see in movies is bullshit. Any explosion creates a huge fireball and people go flying in every direction. Actual munitions aren’t like that. Especially munitions that have to be carried on light little drones. That includes most hand grenades and air-dropped bombs.
I’m concept, an explosion that creates that big fireball puts most of its energy into spreading burning fuel around to create that big fireball. It’s visually impressive, but not actually very destructive. In warfare you don’t care what it looks like, you want it to be destructive. And the best way to get bang for your buck so to speak with an explosive that has to be lightweight, is with shrapnel. An explosive wrapped in shrapnel is not visually impressive to watch, but it basically sends little bullets flying out in every direction and those bullets are what does the damage.
So consider it this way. If I walk up to the jamming device and shoot it with a pistol, it’s not going to be visually impressive. Nothing is going to fly apart and explode in a shower of sparks and flames. The jammer device might not even move at all, it just now has a hole in it. But it is in fact quite thoroughly destroyed because the bullet from my pistol destroyed all of its internal workings.
Same thing is true with the grenade. The hand grenade is designed to be light and effective, so a soldier can carry it without getting weighed down. Thus it is a small explosive wrapped in a lot of shrapnel. Soldier throws it at the enemy, enemy casualties come not from the explosion but from shrapnel wounds. Drop one of those grenades next to a piece of equipment that isn’t armored, and it may not even appear to move, but it has been quite thoroughly punctured by shrapnel and is thus destroyed.
IMHO, the problem with Google isn’t SEO. It’s Google. When Google was great, it would find exactly what you were searching for. The whole point was to get you off of Google and on to whatever site you were looking for as quickly as possible. Over the last several years, their search has increasingly been drinking the ‘engagement algorithm’ Kool-Aid. Now Google doesn’t search for what you ask, it searches for what it thinks you are trying to find. Which is fucking useless because I know exactly what I’m trying to find and that’s exactly what I typed in. Selecting verbatim search and putting things in quotes helps. But it’s still displays tons of irrelevant stuff that doesn’t include what I searched for.
It’s actually easy to point to exactly when the downfall started. Years ago Google was trying to make a social network called Google+ that would compete with Facebook. Before this, a + operator in the search field meant only show results that contain that particular term. But they wanted people to search for Google+, so they changed it so the plus sign became a searchable term and quotes were necessary to include a term or phrase. That was the moment Google decided that search wasn’t their most important product. And it’s been slow downhill ever since.
Lol Don’t know anybody that does that, not since they closed in 2019 :P Amusingly, double quotes are still the standard ‘must include’ operator on Google search.
Google has also completely blown a very good opportunity to make a ubiquitous chat system. Several iterations of Google talk and Google meet and the like, only one of which federated outside of Google, none of which are compatible with each other, all of which seem to get remade or rebranded every few years.
Competitor to Facebook would have been a great idea. I had actually planned to join Google+. But shortly after it launched they started pushing it so fucking hard, like almost sneakly signing up people for it and making it damn near required to do anything, that made me say hell no. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t alone in that regard.
I don’t know what the hell is going on at Big G HQ, but it doesn’t seem like they have much of any real mission these days. Haven’t really since ‘don’t be evil’ stopped being part of their mission statement.
Stupid short sighted crap too. Complaining about excessive compensation and too much stock given away… That’s the people who build the best generation of money making products there. If they have no skin in the game and aren’t being compensated well, they aren’t going to attract and keep the best talent. The best talent is going to go to companies like Tesla and OpenAI and various startups where those people have a chance to become millionaires on stock options.
It’s one thing to pull the Netflix strategy, keep only the very best of the best people, pay them a lot, and get rid of everybody else. But treating labor overall like a cost and not an investment is not a good long-term strategy.
Wayne LaPierre, the leader of the National Rifle Association of America who served for decades as a fierce protector of the Second Amendment, advocating for firearms owners and manufacturers, is resigning days before his civil trial is set to begin....
Gun owner here.
This is a very good thing.
Like many gun owners, I have a love-hate relationship with the NRA. On one hand, they do a lot of political action, on the other hand, I think they do almost as much to set gun rights back as many anti-gun groups do.
Look at the message they send out, it’s always panicked rabble-rousing to raise funds. It makes gun owners look crazy. I get the need to raise funds, but if they focused more on educating the general public about firearms and what makes a gun more or less dangerous and why people own and how they use guns, I think that would do an awful lot more good for everybody. I don’t think most anti-gun people are evil, I think they are fighting for what they believe will bring about more safety. Same thing with pro-gun people. Thus, good faith education helps everybody.
It’s also become fairly obvious that Wayne and a band of his cronies who have basically a stranglehold on NRA leadership are more or less totally corrupt and are using an awful lot of NRA donations to enrich themselves rather than to further the mission. Maybe that’s why they keep sending out rabble-rousing fundraisers.
Anyway here’s to hoping that a new chapter brings some new leadership that aren’t a bunch of corrupt assholes.
Good faith education means understanding that “belief” has absolutely zero relevance to this conversation. Beliefs can be wrong. The only thing that matters is objective material evidence that one’s position is correct.
On this I agree 100%. Feelings don’t matter, data matters.
Here’s the most important data point I have, that’s responsible for an awful lot of my beliefs.
Murder victims by weapon, 2015-2019. Following years are on a newer site that doesn’t easily deep link. The result is more or less the same for most years though- each year about 10k-12k people are killed with a firearm. This data is centrally tracked by FBI and can be considered very reliable.
Defensive Gun Uses in USA. A Defensive Gun Use, or DGU, is were a lawful gun owner uses a legally owned firearm to stop or prevent a crime. The overwhelming majority of DGUs (90+%) end with no shots fired; the criminal sees the gun and runs away. DGUs are often unreported (as there’s often little to report) and those that are reported are not centrally tracked in any way. That means the only way to estimate their frequency is statistical analysis of victimization surveys. That of course means there’s wide disagreement on the overall number of DGUs.
To save you a long read- anti-gun researcher Hemenway estimates 55k-80k/year; pro-gun researchers Kleck and Gertz say it’s 2.1 million/year, Cook and Ludwig took a different analysis method and came up with 4.7 million/year. Other analysis of government NCVS data suggests between 100k/year and 370k/year.
The point is, even if you go with low end estimates from Hemenway, Firearms are used 5x more in defense than as murder weapons.
I recognize that’s not a perfect comparison, as many of those DGUs wouldn’t have resulted in death had the victim been unarmed, and that also doesn’t consider non-fatal shootings.
However, the general argument for why ‘guns are bad’ is because a criminal can kill me with one; I look at this and see another side of that coin.
The other thing I’ve found as I learned about guns, is that not all gun owners are the same.
I was surprised to find that gun ownership in most areas has as much of a safety culture as pilots. Sure there’s a few idiots, but the vast majority of people I’ve interacted with in the gun community are VERY safety oriented. These are not the people who would threaten you.
The lion’s share of gun violence is committed by prohibited gun owners, people who due to previous convictions are already ineligible to possess a firearm. And it’s usually committed with an illegal firearm too.
Unfortunately, in these stats you can’t easily screen out gang-related violence. But you CAN use your brain.
Go to a site like mass shooting tracker and pick a few stories at random. You’ll find an awful lot like ‘victim 1 and victim 2 were leaving a house party on whatever block of whatever road, suspect 1 opened fire from a moving vehicle operated by suspect 2. Victim 1 and victim 2 were both injured, as well as bystander 1 and bystander 2. Victim 1 returned fire and injured suspect 1.’ AKA, gangland drive by shooting.
My point overall is this- having studied the stats and the reality of guns and gun ownership pretty extensively (more so than most I believe at least), I believe the ACTUAL HARD EVIDENCE (when you don’t massage it for example by including suicides in 'gun violence) clearly shows that in the US at least, private civilian gun ownership and concealed carry are NOT the evil that anti-gun people make it out to be, and may even be an overall net benefit for society.
When you see gang related gun violence, ask if those gun owners were legal gun owners who filled out a background check form and took a training class, or if they weren’t legally allowed to have guns in the first place and bought an illegal gun on the street?
Most defensive gun uses go unreported because there’s nothing to report- the criminal ran away when they saw a gun.
FWIW, I’d generally agree that I hate when people on either side parrot the party line and have no ability to debate their own positions other than spouting talking points.
However I think the Constitution is an exception to that-- someone can be ‘I support guns because the Constitution’ and be meaning ‘we should follow the Constitution as written and intended by the Framers’ (which I think is a valid and learned POV) rather than ‘I blindly follow whatever the old document says and I don’t think for myself why it’s good or bad’.
The Constitution is the law of the land, period. You can disagree with it- you can say it’s wrong, that its ideals no longer serve modern society, etc.
But simply ignoring it or ‘interpreting’ it to mean whatever we want it to mean in that moment is a VERY slippery and dangerous slope. That’s how you get warrantless wiretapping, torture memos, extraordinary rendition, civil asset forfeiture, and a whole host of other awful things.
If you disagree with the Constitution, there’s a process to change it. But until it gets changed, we MUST follow it as it was written and intended by the Framers.
If we don’t do that, then we go down a very dark path- free speech only applies to things said in person and paper printed publications (not the Internet as it wasn’t around in the 1700s), the 4th amendment only applies to hardcopy files and not computer files or cloud storage as those are new inventions not envisioned by the Framers, etc etc, It’s really NOT a good direction for us to go.
OGUs as you call them are almost certainly tracked, if only because they are almost all reported to the police and a crime has actually occurred so a record will be kept. I would be interested in looking at those numbers if you have any? I may search for that myself later on.
However when considering how to address this, we must keep in mind that laws don’t affect everybody equally. For example, if somebody is drag racing on public streets, lowering the speed limit from 45mph to 35mph will have no effect on them because they will continue to ignore the speed limit while driving at 90mph. But the law abiding people trying to get to work who follow the speed limit will be slowed down. Thus the good people are restricted and the criminal is unaffected.
Same is true with guns. The person who commits the OGU is already breaking the law, both in committing their crime and in using their gun to do it. You can make concealed carry illegal for example, but do you think that is going to reduce the number of criminals who carry guns? I don’t. It will however reduce the number of their law-abiding victims who are armed.
So when we consider what gun policy we should have, it’s helpful to remember that we’ve been trying to keep drugs out of criminals hands for about 50 years now, we’re spending tens of billions a year on it, and we’ve little progress to show for it. Drugs are still widely available. Guns are easier to make than drugs. Drugs require growing certain crops, processing them in a lab, etc. This takes weeks or months of grow time and specialized equipment and chemicals that don’t have legit ‘day shift’ uses. In comparison, schematics for just about any gun are available online, and any decent machine shop can turn out a workable copy. Unlike the drug lab, that machine shop has a legitimate ‘day shift’ use and can operate in the open.
Point being, I don’t think that you can prevent criminals from having guns by restricting the ability of law abiding citizens to own or carry them. Didn’t work with drugs, doesn’t work with guns either.
I agree there’s plenty of unjust laws and unusable processes. But ‘it’s too hard to change the Constitution so we should just ignore it’ is a real bad way to go.
As for the text of it, you should be aware that if you are a male citizen between 18 and 45 years of age, legally you are part of the United States Militia. Google it.
As for why we have so much violence, I find it amusing that you look only at guns and not at the many other causes or predictors of societal decay. For example, most civilized nations have some form of socialized health care. Few others have families going bankrupt because someone gets cancer. Most civilized nations have strong social safety nets, and actively work to bring people out of poverty. Most civilized nations treat addicts like patients to be treated rather than animals to be caged. Most civilized nations have decent paths out of addiction and poverty that don’t require you to be already rich to afford them. Most civilized nations have strong worker protections and unions, which combined with a good social safety net, make real upward mobility an achievable goal.
Evil men will always find the tools they need to dispense their evil.
I saw this post and wanted to ask the opposite. What are some items that really aren’t worth paying the expensive version for? Preferably more extreme or unexpected examples.
the top end models of the good brands are just scams, they just look a bit nicer and have some shitty “AI powered” app you’ll never use.
This is literally a scam.
There was an article a while back which I can’t find right now, a few of those product designers were saying that past $100-$150 they really weren’t sure what benefits could be added so they just throw a bunch of useless whiz bang shit in that serves no useful purpose but they sell it for $300 or whatever and enough people buy it to make it worth building another SKU.
In most cases the super top end one has the same motor as the midrange or low-midrange one, and takes the same brush heads, which means it does exactly the same thing. Buy that one for $85 and be done with it.
This is the answer. And it comes with other benefits also.
I do okay financially. I don’t have problems affording necessities. But I have found there is also a lot of satisfaction in being more self-sufficient, in relying less on supply companies to deliver my every need. And it saves a ton of money.
Food is a big one. I used to spend a ton of money on takeout, delivery, junk food. But here’s the thing, basic cooking really isn’t that hard. It doesn’t have to take up a lot of time, especially if you meal prep. And the resulting food is both better in quality and better for you.
On that same thread, the grocery store is not always your friend. Especially if it’s one of the big national chains. You will find much better quality produce at your local farmer’s market, and it’s often cheaper too. Certainly way more flavorful, the vegetable that was in the dirt yesterday tastes way better than the one that’s been in a warehouse for a month. Happier chickens lay tastier eggs. Etc.
And there’s a lot of stuff you can do yourself. A vegetable garden is a great place to start, if you have even a tiny backyard. Think folding table size. Plant yourself some tomatoes and put up a net frame so animals don’t eat them, they will be the best tomatoes you’ve ever had. But planting and growing stuff is one of the most efficient ways to get food- Stick it in the dirt and water it and you get food for free!
Then think about all the shit we buy. How much of it do we really need? How much of it ends up in the landfill in a year or two? When purchasing things, think about the product entire life cycle and how each step will affect you. IE, Don’t just think about the dopamine rush you’ll get from unboxing your shiny new toy, or the novelty of using it the first couple times, ask yourself is it going to enhance your life owning it over the long term, and is that amount of enhancement worth its purchase price and the space it consumes?
On the merits of nitrogen hypoxia as a method of execution:
Nitrogen hypoxia is one of the most peaceful, least painful deaths available, and the concerns of a tortuous death are pretty unrealistic.
The air we breathe is 80% nitrogen 20% oxygen, so the body has no adverse reaction to nitrogen. Remove the oxygen, so the person breathes 100% nitrogen 0% oxygen, and the air will feel normal, there is no feeling of suffocation or shortness of breath. However without oxygen one will lose consciousness within a minute or two, and be dead in 5-10 minutes.
For reference, airplanes are pressurized at high altitudes because the less dense air contains fewer molecules of oxygen per lung volume. Past about 11,000’ above sea level, there’s not enough oxygen in the air to sustain full consciousness. Here’s a video of that- the alarm is going off in that guy’s airplane because the pressurization system failed. But in an oxygen-deprived state, he happily reports to the controller with a smile that he’s totally unable to control his aircraft but other than that everything is peachy. You’ll note he is totally unbothered by his condition.
When the controller orders him to descend to 11,000 feet, air density increases, his brain starts working normally again, and he starts making coherent radio calls.
The point of this isn’t to be funny, it’s to illustrate that in a hypoxic state he was totally calm and happy and not in any distress at all, even though his aircraft was out of control. So if anything, nitrogen hypoxia might be the most peaceful way to die, as in their final moments the condemned may be less concerned about the fact that they are being executed.
The only possible ‘botch’ I can imagine, is if either the condemned isn’t breathing 100% nitrogen, or the nitrogen is shut off before breathing stops, that could leave the condemned in a state of hypoxic brain damage. That could leave him a vegetable, or alive and awake but brain damaged (low IQ, cognitive problems, etc). That’s the sort of state most places consider ‘unfit to stand trial’ and he gets remanded to a care facility probably for life. And that would require a pretty bad botching to create that situation.
But I still hope the complaint stalls things:
On the other hand, I think execution is a barbaric punishment, and I think we should do all we can to abolish it anywhere it still exists. So I support this group, even though their concerns are unscientific to the point of ridicule.
I also suspect I’m very much not alone here. I’m not a doctor, but I am a private pilot and a scuba diver, so I understand what a body needs in terms of breathing gas a bit more than average. I know for a fact I could write a totally bulletproof execution protocol that would provide a reliable, quick, humane, pain-free death. But if I was asked to, I’d refuse, even if it meant giving the condemned a less painful death. Because if such a protocol existed, if the legal system as a whole recognized nitrogen hypoxia as a quick and painless method of execution, that then removes a hurdle for pro-death-penalty states to start executing people.
I suspect I’m not alone because the knowledge I have is far from uncommon. Ask any pilot or astronaut or person involved with breathing gas systems and they’ll tell you the same thing. Yet, few if any seem to be stepping up to ‘solve’ the problem of a humane execution protocol.
My thought exactly. What I guess was an attempt at a saturation bombardment, costing at least half a billion dollars, and it achieved literally nothing. Meanwhile in Russia you hear shit like the story the other day where a man got shot in the knee, and instead of getting him knee replacement and disability payment they sent his wife a bag of vegetables and they’re sending him back to the front line (even though he can barely walk). This whole situation is so fucked.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un said his military should “thoroughly annihilate” the United States and South Korea if provoked, state media reported Monday, after he vowed to boost national defense to cope with what he called an unprecedented U.S.-led confrontation....
This is not particularly interesting news From what I have read, North Korea is constantly sending extreme threats to South Korea, we will annihilate you, we will kill all your citizens, we will destroy your government, there will be nobody left when we’re done, etc etc etc. And by constantly I mean on a near weekly basis, to the point that South Korea basically stuck a trash can under the fax machine and stopped paying attention. North Korea can barely even feed its own citizens. And when you see the photos of Great Leader inspecting their amazing new military technology half the time it’s computers from the 1990s that aren’t even plugged in correctly.
This isn’t about appealing though. This is about jurisdiction. An Indian Court has no jurisdiction outside of India, and for that court to suggest otherwise is a significant overreach. So while they should absolutely appeal this up the wazoo, in every other country, the correct answer is to ignore it. And they should tell the Indian court that they will follow Indian law and Indian judgments inside of India but their operations in other nations are not subject to Indian law any more than their operations in India are subject to American law.
This right here is the answer. The fact that you have an outlet means you also have a neutral. That guarantees that you can use literally any Smart Switch you want.
Just replace the outlet with a decora style outlet, install two Smart switches, and put a three gang decora wall plate on. And you’re done.
Can we please fucking not? Unless everyone in charge of discovery gets fired… That might be a good thing. Not holding my breath for that though. Hopefully some regulators can stop this
Hopefully this judge doesn’t come down with a case of severe depression that causes him to shoot himself twice in the back of the head and then drive his car off a cliff, as usually seems to happen to those who threaten a certain political family…
A former Mississippi political candidate is facing criminal charges after a bedazzled statue of Baphomet, a figure associated with the Satanic Temple, was discovered decapitated at the Iowa State Capitol....
I think it should become customary that if a politician advocates for a certain punishment for a crime, and then commits that particular crime, that they receive the punishment they advocated for (within the bounds of current law of course). He wants a 10-year prison sentence for destroying a statue, he should get a 10-year prison sentence for destroying the statue.
Keep in mind the platform. This isn’t an attack helicopter, it’s a little drone. The more weight it carries, the less range it has, and it doesn’t have much capacity to begin with. At most a pound or so. As a result, these little bombs are small fragmentation grenades. The explosion itself doesn’t do much damage, in this case it blew the soldiers hand off because it was a direct hit, but that’s pretty unusual. Most of the damage comes from shrapnel, the explosive is wrapped with metal and bits of that metal will go off at high speed in every direction like little bullets. The shrapnel doesn’t produce much obvious damage when seen from the air, not compared to a normal bomb that sends stuff flying in every direction. But it is quite lethal.
Joe Biden wins primary election in New Hampshire despite not even being on the ballot (www.businessinsider.com)
Russia deploys Silok jammers to ground Ukraine’s drones. Ukraine hunts down the Siloks with, you guessed it, drones (www.forbes.com)
Russian force in Ukraine deploy Silok radio-jammers in order to disrupt the radio links between Ukrainian drone and their operators....
Google search is losing the fight with SEO spam, study says (arstechnica.com)
I guess we all kinda knew that, but it’s always nice to have a study backing your opinions.
Authy authenticator apps for desktop are being discontinued in August 2024 (Apple Silicon not included) (www.ghacks.net)
Alaska Airlines flight forced to make emergency landing after window blows out in mid-air (www.cbsnews.com)
Wayne LaPierre resigns as leader of the NRA days ahead of civil trial (www.cnn.com)
Wayne LaPierre, the leader of the National Rifle Association of America who served for decades as a fierce protector of the Second Amendment, advocating for firearms owners and manufacturers, is resigning days before his civil trial is set to begin....
What are some items that really aren't worth paying the expensive version for?
I saw this post and wanted to ask the opposite. What are some items that really aren’t worth paying the expensive version for? Preferably more extreme or unexpected examples.
What is an average person living in the US supposed to do about corporations raising prices?
They keep raising prices, stating that it’s due to inflation, but then they keep having record profits....
UN experts alarmed by Alabama plan to kill prisoner using untried gas method (www.theguardian.com)
Ukraine’s Air Defense Repels World’s Largest Combined Missile Attack Using Hypersonic Weapons (www.kyivpost.com)
North Korea's Kim orders military to 'thoroughly annihilate' US, South Korea if provoked (apnews.com)
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un said his military should “thoroughly annihilate” the United States and South Korea if provoked, state media reported Monday, after he vowed to boost national defense to cope with what he called an unprecedented U.S.-led confrontation....
Reuters has taken down -- globally -- an important hacking-for-profit investigation that included details about an Indian hacking entrepreneur -- because he got a court in that country to say so. (mastodon.world)
Is there any hope to replace this switch? (lemmy.ca)
Hello folks! I have these switches in my bathroom....
Paramount, Warner Bros Discovery are in early talks to merge (archive.today)
Federal judge orders documents naming Jeffrey Epstein's associates to be unsealed (abcnews.go.com)
A Political Candidate Beheaded a Satanic Temple Statue. Now He Faces Charges. (www.vice.com)
A former Mississippi political candidate is facing criminal charges after a bedazzled statue of Baphomet, a figure associated with the Satanic Temple, was discovered decapitated at the Iowa State Capitol....
She’s with him: Hillary Clinton steps out as a key player in Biden’s re-election effort (www.nbcnews.com)
18+ [NSFL] "Shadow" unit Mavic pilot reminds the enemy he's not in Russia. (streamable.com)
Mirror:...