Got a source for that?

Instead of pretending One Man With A Gun is going to do something

I used to agree with this train of thought, why be armed when the government has tanks?

But the realities of the past several years have shown us that an armed rebellion can be significantly more powerful. Look at Iraq and Afghanistan, look at Myanmar today where the rebel groups are literally 3D printing carbines. A guerilla group with small arms can put serious pressure on a modern military. Will lots of them die? Probably. Will they “win”? Probably not, but they could easily wear down the enemy with attrition. When you need to move a couple dozen men with rifles it’s an entirely different game than coordinating 12 tanks and 500 men, you can employ completely different tactics. Especially on your home turf that you know inside and out.

Is an armed rebellion happening anytime soon? I sure hope not. But the threat that an armed populace can at the least put some serious hurt on a military/government is a deterrent to tyranny. Just the possibility of it is a huge deterrent, compared to authoritarian countries where citizens aren’t armed and get run over by tanks.

I’m not saying gun violence isn’t a huge problem, but saying armed citizenry is zero deterrent is just factually untrue.

No one’s keeping you here.

It’s actually very difficult and expensive to leave your home country for 99% of the population.

Just in terms of cost you need a plane ticket (or other travel costs), money to navigate the country’s immigration programs and all the fees associated, you probably need to pay to learn a new language for a year or two before you’re fluent enough in that language (DuoLingo/self-learning has very mixed results), you need to pay for housing for when you arrive until you’re able to get a job. Realistically the ones fed up with our society are the ones living paycheck to paycheck, do you think they can shoulder those costs?

This is all assuming they even let you in, most developed countries won’t unless you have an in-demand skillset and/or a job already lined up in the country of question (i.e., the type of jobs that are doing well here already). And often times even if you have valid reasons and a job lined up they can still just tell you to go fuck yourself.

Add on top of that that if you somehow get that far, get past all of that, you’re giving away your right to vote in your new society for several years due to requirements to become a naturalized citizen.

Makes a lot more sense to try to improve your own country and local society when you consider all of those factors. “Don’t like America then leave” is something only the privileged that can hop on a jet to a new country at a moment’s notice think is a valid suggestion. At best it’s shit advice and at worst it’s a bad faith argument to push aside any and all criticism of the current system.

Why would Amazon want to hinder the accuracy of the price tracking in that way?

Accurate price tracking leads to people saying “Oh well it was 50% less a year ago. I’ll wait on a sale, not paying full price on that” and waiting on a sale, leading to less conversions. Amazon has pressured Camelcamelcamel into agreeing to not track specific low prices (i.e., Prime Day, if that actually had any good sales). I’m unsure if they track coupons or not, they were not clear about what the criteria for not tracking a price are.

Camelcamelcamel is unfortunately compromised by Amazon, it’s probably mostly accurate but there are price points they do not accurately log at Amazon’s request.

I’m not arguing one way or another but I want to clear up some very common misconceptions about US gun laws.

in some states, you can get semi-automatic weapons (which are completely banned in Austria) in a shop in just minutes. And that without any background checks, psychological reports, justifications, approval required, without anything like that

This is just blatantly untrue and I wish people would stop parroting it. If you go to any shop you need to pass a federal background check to buy any non-vintage firearm (pre-1899…not exactly a ton of those floating around). The exception here is private firearm sales, i.e. I go to Craigslist and sell a rifle or handgun. The law states the seller has to have no reasonable cause to believe they would be an unlawful possessor (weak, yes). With that said, almost half of the states (22 per Wikipedia) have implemented state-level laws requiring a background check for private sales.

In many states even convicted criminals can get guns like that.

Again, objectively untrue. You are not buying a firearm from any legal, licensed dealer in the US without going through a background check. And a violent criminal offense will get you barred from purchasing. For the 28 states without laws around private sales, the seller can be federally legally liable if they sell to someone that is not legally allowed to have a gun and they use it to commit crimes.

In the US, guns are sometimes a presents for kids which they can just…own and use (while in Austria everything is obviously 18+).

No, a child cannot legally own a firearm. The parent can purchase and own a firearm that they are allowed to use, but they do not own it. In many states if the child hurts themselves or others with such a firearm the parents will be held liable, many states have laws around safely storing firearms when children are around.

While in the US (in many states), you can just carry any gun around in public whatsoever. So even if the police sees you having weapons in public, they can’t / don’t do anything about that

In most states if you don’t have a license to conceal carry and you do you are breaking the law and can be charged. I’ll say this one isn’t entirely false but heavily depends on your state.

A large part of why this issue gets nowhere is that neither side can even agree on what is true today, rather than what should be true to bring down the issue of violent crime. If one side says “They’re totally unregulated you can just buy one off Amazon and start blasting. We have to do something!” The other side is gonna think “Well they obviously have no idea what they’re talking about, no point in listening to what they have to say”

Even if it started out that way, where “surge” pricing is current pricing and “off-surge” pricing is cheaper, leading to consumers paying less overall, it won’t stay that way. It would only be that way to prime consumers mentally to accept that dynamic pricing. After which they’ll slowly increase prices, 10 cents or whatever every month. Soon enough it’ll cost more and the corporation can brag about how it increased profits again this quarter. Remember publicly traded companies are legally obligated to maximize profit - the only time they aren’t doing so is when they’re burning money to prime consumers to accept bullshit or building a captive base, in order to eventually maximize profits.

With guns in general, or with Polymer80 or similar products? I’m guessing he’s intentionally mixing the two to make it sound scarier than it is.

This is what I hate about the rhetoric around gun control, especially “ghost guns”

As a gun owner that thinks guns are fucking cool, I’m happy to have reasonable compromises and regulations around them. Compromises and regulations that do something to stop crime. Almost all cases of 3D printed guns being used in crime are when the crime is having a 3D printed firearm (mostly in Europe). Actual violent crime it is a fraction of a fraction of a fraction. We should focus on legislation that does something about the problem, not ban things we arbitrarily give scary names like “Ghost guns.” Look at the actual numbers, the actual types of crimes being committed, go after those things. Don’t start background checking people for 3D printer purchases of all things.

Note that isn’t illegal, it just means the company doesn’t get to get out of paying unemployment when it happens. And that’s only if someone is willing to challenge them on it.

Don’t listen to what he said… But SD cards are generally not very reliable. They might be fine they might die on you silently after a week.

Higher quality ones are better of course, but the quality of flash in SD cards varies wildly. I wouldn’t store anything on an SD card that I don’t already have a second copy of somewhere. (If I want to preserve it and it would cause problems for me to lose it)

This is a pretty big overstatement.

DO NOT USE AN SSD to store your data long-term! Solid-state storage has a very short, finite life-span.

This has not been true for years. SSDs are generally more reliable than HDDs except in write-intensive applications (and even then… It really depends on what exact models you are comparing). SSDs have a life-span mostly talked about in terms of TBW (terabytes written) rather than years for a reason, if they’re powered on and not written too they’ll last as long as or longer than a hard drive. (Note: Powered on regularly, SSDs can lose data if stored unpowered for a long time (months)). If you just have an archival drive you’re not constantly erasing and rewriting data to, an SSD is a great choice. Reads also barely affect the lifespan of at all, so you can still access the data you want to protect (hell, write-lock the drive even and it’ll last decades if powered on).

What you want to do is buy an even number of hard drives, plug them in long enough to copy your data to, and then unplug them and store them in a climate-controlled area. bout once a year, copy the data to a different hard drive

This is just plain silly. Yes, the mechanical wear of the drives spinning up and down means they’ll die faster. But we’re still talking MTBF measured in years. And replacing a hard drive that’s barely used every single year? That’s not just bad advice it’s creating e-waste for no reason. Also note drives fail on a bathtub curve… If you have two good drives that lasted a year, you are increasing your chances of a failure by swapping them for two brand new drives… The best thing you can do for your hard drives is to not power cycle them constantly, any typical usage is fine. Also mechanical parts can actually wear out from disuse as well. Even archival services don’t go to these extremes you’re recommending.

If you really care about saving your data follow 3-2-1. 3 copies of your data (live, archival (external HDD or similar), off-site), two-different forms of media (HDD, SSD, cloud (yes cloud is an HDD or SSD but they have their own redundancy)), one off-site (in the event of a fire etc.)

Honestly 99.9% of consumers would be fine with a 2-2-1 scheme, 2 copies (live and off-site/cloud), 2 forms of media, 1 off-site. If you don’t trust Google or don’t want to pay for cloud storage, set up a server with redundant disks at a friend’s house. Just keeping a second copy on a server with redundancy is plenty of fail over for most use cases. 3-2-1 is for data centers and businesses (and any cloud service you rent from will follow 3-2-1…) Let’s not overcomplicate how difficult it is to keep data intact, if I tell someone to buy a new 12tb HDD each year they’re just gonna give up on keeping it safe.

They can be or they can be paid through “escrow” and your mortgage servicer will pay them.

Usually sites like these want to show total monthly cost though, so they tend to include estimates for property taxes and insurance in the monthly payments. Whether it gets paid through your mortgage servicer or directly by you doesn’t change much.

I’ve heard that, but once I tried to refund a game at 3 hours and got nothing but an automated response (denial) everytime I requested a refund.

In this specific case it was actually a game I played 2 hours of during a free weekend approximately 4 years before buying it, played one hour after buying it to see if it had gotten better, decided it hadn’t and refunded it. But Steam counts free weekend playtime towards the refund window…

If there’s any actual way to ensure a human reviews it, that’d be neat. 100% it was automatically denied by some code just checking my playtime and seeing it was past two hours.

On one hand I get what you’re saying, on the other hand is Mexico going to start a war with the US because a handful of National Guard members saved a mother and child from drowning in “their” water?

I get that wars have started over more stupid shit, but I’d hope we have enough brain cells in the modern day to understand that that would be in no way an incursion or intentional act against Mexico.

No doubt the “next-gen update” is just an excuse to slip in paid mods like they just did with Skyrim

You’d think those giant loop videos would be taking up far more space

Someone above posted an article saying they aren’t actually. But you’d be surprised at how little space those 10 hour videos can actually take. They’re highly compressible since they’re just the same still image and the same audio on repeat. A good compression algorithm (which Google certainly is using) would basically compress it into one instance of the song and how many times to repeat it (more complex than that, but that’s the idea)

They did some minor hardware revisions and “Slim” models, but yeah they were never intended as a “Pro” model with increased performance/graphics. Definitely not a “tradition” by this point

If it was part of the initial work agreement that it would be remote then almost certainly it would count.

A rapid shift in job responsibilities or expectations (such as commuting two hours a day vs. 0) can be considered as “Constructive dismissal”

Even if it wasn’t part of the original hiring agreement, if it’s been that way for years or you have direct emails stating it’s fully remote from now on you likely have a good case.

Agreed, they both suck but I’ll at least stick with the one that begrudgingly lets me install what I want vs. the one that tells me what I’m allowed to install completely.

Insert “Your mom let them ride her that long?” Joke here

I have not researched these specific cases, so may be wrong about them.

You’re not obligated to do research on every individual bill the political parties push and what rider clauses they slip into unrelated bills. That’s fine.

You, however, should have research and examples to back it up if you’re gonna “both sides” this. The Democratic party is far far far from perfect or what I would want, but at the very least most of them seem to be campaigning in good faith or at the least not inciting actual violence and treason.

Saying “so may be wrong about them” isn’t a free pass. Know that people read what you say, and we have a huge problem of political apathy (circa 2016) due to the constant repetition of “but both sides are the same.” Let’s please not exacerbate it unless we’re bringing facts and evidence to the table.