Lol, a little while ago I had a captcha of a ghost riding a bike

lmao

2 months and a few days late, but

well, youtube have successfully added so much crap to their site I have to watch videos in embedded mode to get more than 3 FPS

I thought they tested that immediately after you're born or something

Mine is A+ because I'm very intelligent and get good grades 🤓

r/firearms's response to Biden proposing banning semiautomatic weapons is really infuriating

No civilian needs firearms, and certainly not semiautomatic weapons

Hopefully Biden actually follows through on this and we eventually get rid of all guns

Right now, even an 18 year old could literally walk into a store, buy a shotgun without any questions asked, and go kill himself

There might be store policies requiring that parents agree with someone under 21 buying a gun but that's nowhere near enough

You could just have a friend pretending to be a parent over the phone or something

We have much less to fear from the government than from homicidal maniacs

@user I'm sure they do but I'm sure Unrelated's had some other stuff on their mind for the last like 20 years :p

@user Eh, idk about the first part, hunting and sporting are both legitimate uses, as is military training.

Here's what my ideal gun policy would look like

At the age of 18, you could get a license for hunting, sporting, or both. You'd then get access to exactly one gun, limited to something practical for that activity and nothing else (e.g., a .22 long rifle with the teensy little mag they come with, and no more than one extra mag)

Or probably better, 21, and 18 year olds would be allowed to "co-own" one with someone older (like how I have a bank account as a 17 year old but it's technically my dad's too)

Then, after you've had a gun for four to six years with no incident, you'd be able to get a second license that gives you permission to buy more than one, maybe something more for self-defense, but still with limitations on things like AK-47/AR-15 style rifles

I get people who have guns as a hobby, to them it's just like cars or whatever. But they should still be restricted in certain ways, and stuff like really big magazines, fully automatic weapons, and maybe even assault-style rifles should be limited to ranges

@user Banning semi-auto stuff seems like the wrong approach, but yeah, every response there looked extremely problematic, though I didn't scroll far

Thing is semi-automatic is a laaaaarge class of weapons

Like I'm pretty sure a little Ruger .22 counts as semi-auto

And "giant shotguns are fine but .22s are not" isn't exactly the pinnacle of gun policy

@Ginger Try disabling "ambient mode"

I hear it's even giving people with like, 3090s issues

@RadvylfPrograms One of the worst ones IMO is the "then we'll guve them our bullets" types

Like, haha funny, threatening to shoot government officials for doing their job

Just that confederate-flag-waving part of rural American culture coming out

Rural American political ideology is a clusterfuck and a half. Somehow manages to glorify rebellion against the US, incorporates tons of libertarian rhetoric, while still being mega-patriotic, defense-spending-loving, flag waving "America heck yeah" all the time

And there's no cognitive dissonance since they can just blame any aspects of America they don't like on "the libtards" or whatever, since that surely can't be what America is or has always been like

Just an endless cycle of "love america, see issue with america, the lefty snowflkaes are runing everything, let's rebel"

(There's a "nothing actually changes on either side thanks to the two party system and the groupthink of rural America" step in between the first and last step there)

hey guys fun fact

There's a club at my school called "Turning Point USA"

wat

Which is apparently a branch of a very large very right wing very conservative political organization

Fun

Oh and guess who's the president

Donald Trump?

A former friend of mine who can't take a hint that he's not my friend and is an active member of the Republican Party

@emanresuA No of our school branch lol

I love how the right is always talking about how academia's "brainwashing people with left-wing ideas" or whatever, while running a school-sponsored organization to distribute conservative, right wing media

(Although I do gotta say, AP classes do a really good job of covering things like imperialism and its impacts on the world, at least compared to my expectations, so I guess the commies are winning on that front)

If I wasn't fairly open about being a dem socialist, I'd go to their meetings just to know my enemy

Oh and guess who funds "Turning Point USA"

If you guessed oil billionaires

Well yeah

I also hate how heavily conservatives push the idea that politicians are all greedy and corrupt

Like sure it's a career that attracts a lot of people who want to abuse power for their own interests, but the idea that every single politician is soulless, corrupt, and power-hungry is one that IME comes straight from the right, in a frighteningly effective guise of centrism

Also if I were to guess, I'd assume the vast vast majority of politicans who actually care about the people are on the left, so it's understandable why that idea spreads so easily on the right

Since the people who represent them probably are corrupt power-hungry oil-billionaire-stans

But it makes my job as someone who wants to convience people to go out and vote, or to care about politics, so much harder, since if they've ever been around conservatives for a while they have this stereotype of politicians so ingrained into them that it's hard to get them to believe any politician, any one at all, truly wants what's best for them

And since my goal in life is to be one of those politicians, it infuriates me

@user it's not something you just memorize :P

i think it does get printed on your driver's license for emergency reasons? but that's obviously another non factor for me

Nobody's ever told me my blood type. Like sure I could probably find it somewhere, and once I did learn it I'd know it forever (my dad's O+, saw it on a paper seven years ago), but just never have

@UnrelatedString Not in Texas at least

At least I think? Lemme go check

I know it has organ donor information but that's the only medical stuff I'm aware of on it

@UnrelatedString Fair

@RadvylfPrograms That's better than nothing, but even if you've been a responsible gun owner for your entire life, there's still a chance of you snapping and killing a bunch of other people

fwiw I feel like driving licenses should have heavier restrictions too given how dangerous cars are but that's another discussion

Yeah no blood type on mine

I think mine also has just a heart (or something, don't have it right now) to signify organ donor but nothing else

I love how one of the things they told me when asking if I wanted to be an organ donor (which I do ofc, my organs are the shit) was "doctors won't try less hard to save you if you're an organ donor" and like, that's just so funny to me. Like I see why someone could think that, but doctors being like "well I could do CPR but he probably has some nice kidneys" is just so funny (especially since the paamedics or surgeons or whatever have like, zero to gain from your organs being donated)

@user Maybe, but I think the vast majority of cases aren't like that

You never know, the doctor might've minored in Philosophy :P

One-off murders could be tho, idk, and those are the real danger of guns (in addition to suicides), mass killings are super rare in comparison

If I owned a news organization, just for one day, I'd publish an article for each gun death as it happened. Flood the entire site with them

While the large mass shootings are good for widely publicizing the risks of widespread gun ownership, I think they kind of reinforce a misconception that gun violence is rare and shocking rather than something...normal

Do it on HackerNews

idk, I feel like I hear about one or more mass shootings every couple months

Like, a common argument against gun control, and one I bought into way too readily not too long ago, is that people who really want to cause damage would just obtain guns illegally

Problem is, 45000 people died from gun violence in 2020

Maybe 1% of those would have obtained guns illegally and still happened, maybe a few % or even 10s of % would have switched to another weapon

But that's still tens of thousands of lives saved, every year

The deadliest mass shootings in American history hardly compare to a single day's worth of "ordinary" shootings

Meanwhile in japan, with a population half the size of the US, a fraction of a person dies from guns every year

I don't think the US could ever reach that point, it's just so much more rural and guns are so much more integral to its culture, but I have no doubt that a single law could easily save tens of thousands of people right now

> easily

Easily as in numbers, not difficulty of it passing, sadly

I get why gun owners don't want gun control. It's your hobby, your (perceived) safety, your freedom, all being thrown away because of the actions of people you don't know. But it's just selfish. Accepting, because you don't want to give up a hobby, a one in a million chance of protecting your family against some fatal encounter, or a bit of pride in your freedom, that thousands will die, that's just nothing but selfishness (and typically equal parts ignorance).

I mean, I guess it's understandable if you really distrust the government and think it wants to control you and that bad people would easily get illegal guns even if they were banned

Distrust of the government, forgot about that one

I've got mixed feelings on that

The fact that the constitution is so broken that it would allow a party to seize complete control over the government doesn't help things

In fact, one person can seize complete control over the government, indirectly

wat

The president can effectively use pardons to have anything they want done, perfectly legally and within the constitution. With some trusted people, they could pad the courts, which would add even more insurance.

@RadvylfPrograms I doubt anyone trusts the government completely, but it's unlikely you'd be able to defend yourself against the military or even the police even with a gun

Control over the senate would be necessary still

Honestly not sure why pardons are a thing

@user Yeah. The idea of the people being a check on the government is a very flawed idea. January 6th was that principle in action.

A group of people led to believe that the government was unfairly in power, rigged against them, working to destroy their rights

And January 6th is how that would go. Do we want that to be the only thing keeping the people in power in check? I don't.

I'd love it if politicians stopped caring so much about what's constitutional and what's not

But yeah if the government did seize control and start being all totalitarian and stuff I also don't think I'd want it to the conservatives and far right who are the heroes fighting back

It'd be a true star wars prequel situation

there are armed leftists

just... not many

And it's quite likely that gerrymandering will be legalised if something doesn't happen

@user I wish they cared and the constitution was actually good

@UnrelatedString Yeah but they also don't tend to be the ones I'd want in power

It's not. They can make it good and then start caring, but right now they need to stop acting like it's the word of god

probably one of the biggest symptoms of the whole bipartisan divide is that gun ownership itself has become politicized

Are issues like this less heated in countries with more than two major parties?

i know this exact issue is pretty unique to the us to begin with but yeah good question

@user It tends to be the right who does that, in addition to glorifying the founding fathers (they seem to believe they were all in agreement, conveneintly in support of the exact same things conservatives want today, rather than a massive ideological shotgun spread)

Like, the founding fathers were people who had just escaped from a totalitarian monarchy. They had never seen a democracy. They had all sorts of out-there ideas, all over the place ideologically.

I mean, conservatism is about preserving old values and stuff

There were socialists, libertarians, Alexander Hamilton, etc.

Hamilton in his own category lol

@user Yeah but 250 years ago wasn't any more consistent in its values than today

Yeah

It was even less consistent I'd argue, since we had no idea how a democracy worked

Didn't some of them literally consider calling the president "His Majesty"?

Yeah

Right after fighting one of those

People thought the switch from Federalists under Washington/Adams to Democratic-Republicans under Jefferson would be a violent coup, even with the election

People forget they initially way overcomitted to the states' rights thing with the Articles of Conferederation and had to backpeddle like crazy to get something that lasted more than a few years (the Constitution)

States haven't been becoming less powerful because the US's political structure has been devolving from the perfect system it was when it was created, it's been naturally settling into a more stable configuration

That being a strong central government

Governments centralizing power and getting stronger has been a consistent pattern throughout history, while the opposite direction tends to be violent, problematic, and rare.

And with the modern rapid availability of information worldwide there's no point in giving autonomy to provincial or regional governments except for things which occur solely within their own boundaries and are not generally applicable or impactful elsewhere

Which are very rare things

Disaster relief? Easier to fund and coordinate at a national level. Murder and drug and voting laws? No reason not to make those standardized rather than state-by-state. School funding? No reason not to smooth that out.

People can argue things like cost of living, climate, or local culture being better accounted for when things are done at a smaller scale, but we have all the information in the world available to account for those things at a larger scale.

Someone should spend ten million dollars buying shipping containers of insulin in countries without stupid patents on it, smuggle it into the US, then sell it all for the same price they paid

I mean they could make millions in profit and still be saving lives by cuting the costs to a fraction of what people pay even with insurance

And if they get arrested like, seems like a great opportunity for jury nullification

Okay can we talk about how stupid arming teachers is

Given that schools are becoming increasingly secured and fortified, getting a gun into a school in the first place (unless you're a student) is probably the hard part

Putting thousands of guns in schools intentionally seems like the worst possible thing to do

Especially since workplace shootings are one type of mass shooting, and a school is a workplace for the teachers that would be armed

And if students found out I'd imagine that'd create a lot of fear and distrust

I mean it already makes me nervous having SROs walking around my school with clearly visible guns

Also school district police departments being armed

IIRC the Los Angeles School District Police Department has assault-style rifles, grenade launchers, and a mine-resistant armored car

"School" and "grenade launcher" shouldn't be in the same sentence

I feel like clear terminology is underappreciated

There's a lot of concepts that I feel would be far easier to understand if the terminology was just better

E.g., redox reactions, feminism and toxic masculinity, or forces in physics

Like "oxidizing" and "reducing" sound like totally unrelated phenomena. They also sound totally unrelated to electrons. Oxidation sounds related to oxygen. Reduction sounds like the number of something should be physically reduced.

I get where the terms come from, but if they were called something cryptic like "electropickupification" and "electrodropification", it would force you to stop trying to intuit what they mean and be thrown off every time by the words' typical meanings, and just learn what they mean.

I'm in physics I right now and the amount of confusion around how forces work is so high, just because it's so different from our typical non-spherical-cow intuitions around forces and stuff, given that we live in a world with friction

So using a different term which lacks that existing familiar meaning would simplify it so much

Like the idea that a wall exerts a force on me when I lean on it, that's not a way people typically think about walls. But if you used a made up word specifically for the physics version of forces, it'd be easier to separate intuition and how things really work, before your intuition has adjusted to your new understanding of Newtonian physics

Alternatively, go the abstract algebra route and choose a word so vague that it doesn't cause any confusion at all since it could mean so many things your brain just knows to pick the math one

Like group, category, set, field, ring

@RadvylfPrograms And it gets worse when oxygen is one of the things being reduced and/or oxidized

honestly I think you're right

particularly with the common non-science terms like toxic masculinity

it's unrealistic to expect people will actually spend the like 2 minutes necessary to research what someone means instead of jumping to a conclusion just based off the name alone

I feel like CS is fairly good about terminology. Some things like "object" or "heap" are a little vague maybe, but "compiler", "interpreter", "loop", "tree", "stack", etc. are all pretty easy to understand metaphors

My guess is that there's not as much history, so terms like "oxidation" can't be invented before something's fully understood and then stick around just out of tradition or habit

A leaked upcoming AMD GPU is codenamed "Hotpink Bonefish"

pfffffffffffffffffffffff

I feel like even Canonical can't top that

...what the fuck is an Eoan Ermine

but yeah hotpink bonefish still beats out every ubuntu version combined

This sheer brilliance cost me 3/19 questions on my Calc III exam lmao

Oof

I don't get my schol calc results until I think February?

This was just a unit exam for me

Luckily

And the stupidest part is that I did not know what I was supposed to be doing here. s(t) was some complicated thing related to arc length, and I had skipped that part of the lecture. I got lucky and managed to guess exactly what I was supposed to do...and forgot how to add