It’s suicides. Almost 60% of gun deaths are suicides.

Gun deaths reached their last peak in the US around 1975. At that time the rate between homicide and suicide was about 50/50. So it’s not like suicides were very low with guns, guns are probably the most quick and effective way to kill yourself and if you want to be dead, using a gun is the gold standard. Still, from 50% to 60% is a very significant change. It’s also important to note, there is more variability in gun homicide than there is in suicide (though there is still a little bit of a positive correlation), so in times of low violent crime the disparity grows.

Good god the methodology.

If you count abortions as deaths, which the state of Texas would, hence making it illegal, it’s impossible that they went up. But even without that…

If more infants are born, because less abortions are happening of course, some of those are going to die.

Neither of these are particularly noteworthy.

Did deaths as a percentage of births go up? If not, this isn’t news at all.

Yup, and I won’t buy a new gas car either.

I’ll tell you why I won’t buy one.

I’m not going to go into debt as much as a house would’ve cost me 20 years ago so I can drive a 10,000 pound explosive that I spend several hours a day charging, be asked to pull over to turn on Bluetooth, have a tracking device in my car, which the government can turn off if they like, have to fumble with a touch screen to turn up the air conditioner, have to pay rent for features built into the car and then have any features I purchased be non transferrable on the secondary market. These are all fuck you’s to me, so I say fuck you to them. Take your vendor lock in SAAS product and shove it up your ass. You want me to give a shit about emissions, fix all that, until then I’m driving a 20 year old beater.

It will hurt US manufacturers, because their budget gasoline cars won’t sell.

I’ve been trying to figure out exactly what the point of this is. I haven’t asked Alex (haven’t talked directly to him in a long time as I have mostly abandoned fedi) but I know he’s the first prominent fedi dev to sort of pivot to nostr (a good sign; too many prominent fedi people are more interested in preserving their fiefdoms than the ultimate goal of all this) and has been building some interoperability stuff.

What I see at first glance is an attempt to slap fedi social model onto nostr? Trying to create a client that gives users a TWKN and local feed of some kind? I don’t know, perhaps someone can clear it up for me.

Anyway, I don’t really see the point, a primary benefit of nostr is the lack of network fragmentation and siloing. There’s some fragmentation that does occur with failures to fetch notes from relays and things, but not the network splitting and banlist passing and siloed networks like you get on fedi. Trying to shoehorn that UX back into nostr kind of misses the point IMO. I like the idea of community creation as a sort of organizational thing for feed curation without direct follows, it helps discoverability, particularly along lines of shared interest, but I don’t really see how the “web ring” like follow structure doesn’t achieve that already without the downside of building silos. A global feed, I see no point of that at all.

The internal microphone is on the same board as the webcam in laptops.

Pop the bezel and disconnect the cable when not in use.

Next up: all web pages are full resolution bitmap files.

So I was responding to the parent statement, he said when there’s disinformation democracy doesn’t work. Well in order to avoid disinformation, you need strong control of information flow. That sounds a lot like a dictatorship. The people you vote for control what you know about them, that’s not democracy. So if democracy doesn’t work because people lie, and democracy doesn’t work if information is controlled, then democracy doesn’t work, right? Interestingly, he confirmed lower in the thread that he does not believe in democracy.

I’m with you, all news is controlled propaganda. I don’t follow any of it as a result. It is sad, but all we can do is try to live in the world we are in. I don’t let it get me depressed, I just carry on.

The republicans and Democrats were all basically pro gun control until about the late 2000s, and particularly so in the 80s and 90s.To give you a prominent example, Texas was a “may issue” state in 1995. That means that you had to have a permit to carry, and the state didn’t have to give you one and could refuse you for no reason at all. Practically speaking, only cops and security got issued permits. Even Puerto Rico has more lax gun control than Texas did 30 years ago, and even a few years ago at their peak, they were may issue and you needed a reason to request one, marginally worse than Texas in 1995.

Now gun control is dead in America, but not because politicians saw the error in their ways. To remain relevant they have to pander, and america by and large abandoned gun control.

I don’t know why you’re getting down voted. This is more than a shower thought, understanding this and exploring the ramifications of it will change your life. I’m serious.

Albedo, black body radiation, energy gradients, inverse square law. Learn about that stuff.

On the rock there’s a thin layer of slime that changes the albedo of the rock. It redshifts the light that emanates from it just a little bit. But that little red shift, that light that radiates in a slightly higher entropy state, that difference accounts for the entire biosphere, and all the attendant beauty that comes along with that. You love your mother with that energy.

It makes me wonder, are we really separate from the sun?

An anarchy is an environment where no one controls the application of force. Information has nothing to do with it.

Seems to me you don’t like democracy and only use it as a means to an end.

Well, that’s dismissive. You don’t think that these people are reacting to genuine concerns they have? Not even some of them, some of their concerns?

In an environment where nobody controls the information, people will lie. If democracy doesn’t work when information flows freely, doesn’t that mean democracy doesn’t work?

OK well then why does he have it?

Oh it’s a replica? Why do you have it in the first place?

Who cares if people think you’re a Nazi sympathizer. You know who you are. Anyone who thinks you are without knowing you is a dumbass.

It’s a historical collectors item, nothing more. Keep it. It’s probably really cool.

Sure, but that’s not how it starts usually.

Yeah, when you have criteria like that, sure. That’s like trying to find a specific engine configuration on a used car. You’re basically looking for a custom specific used thing.

My criteria for thinkpads is “is it a thinkpad.” Usually I can find one for dirt cheap that works really well. Swap out the drive, if it supports libreboot, add some ram, as long as the CPU is OK it doesn’t really matter to me. I bought an x260 the other day from a rando on the fediverse for 80 bucks that I was going to give to a kid but is now my main workstation. I didn’t even change anything, it’s as powerful as I need.

When people feel ignored in a democratic country, they begin to feel like the democracy they live in is a sham or that democracy itself doesn’t work.

Votes like this aren’t necessarily about “we need a different direction” and more about desperation and/or anger. They want to show the elites of their country that they still have the power, they want to cost them something for treating the population like it’s there to be harvested from, they want to shake up the status quo at all cost.

They want to prove to themselves that their vote still matters.

Letting it get to this point is really bad governance. Once you get here, either they win, or they don’t. And of they don’t, most of the people who support them have their suspicions confirmed, they don’t live in a democracy, they voted and didn’t get what they want, again. This creates a division that is difficult to come back from.