24_at_the_withers @ 24_at_the_withers @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

This argument completely ignores the impact this has on regular people. People who end up late to pick up their kids from daycare and end up owing extra money when they can barely make ends meet as it is. Yeah, this may have some marginal impact on the capitalist class, but it will be far more painful for the employees who WILL be held accountable for being late to work and may easily end up fired, and certainly will not be paid for the time they miss. Let alone the life safety issues this type of demonstration creates. This is holding your peers ransom because of something you want and you take away their autonomy to decide whether or not to take part. If you can't convince people to join your cause willingly, maybe your cause isn't as good as you think it is.

But. But. But it says "do no evil," right on the box! ಠ⁠_⁠ಠ

You're talking about income tax rates, and I agree that the top tax rates should be higher, but this won't fix the problem because billionaires don't make their money from salaries. Most of their money is theoretical and tied up in ownership of shares of a company.

They can sell shares or earn dividends to make money, so capital gains should also be taxed at a much higher rate. But billionaires often choose not to sell shares either because they have a better option...

They take out low interest rates loans using their shares as collateral. The interest rates they are charged are generally going to be far lower than the interest on their stocks that stay invested,. This is where most of their liquidity comes from, because loans aren't taxed, and in some regard is almost an infinite money glitch for billionaires.

I think we need to make it illegal to use financial holdings as collateral for loans, at least for starters.

Good point, but it's not that either. I guess most of the people here don't watch the ground crews at the airport before boarding - it seems these clamshell panels are opened between every flight (or at least very frequent intervals) for engine inspections and probably oil sampling. The far and away most likely cause is the ground crew forgot to latch the panel back up after performing their inspection.

This happened in port, not international waters. Normal rules will apply. Seizing assets from a foreign company may be a little more difficult if it comes to that, but it'd probably be in Maersk's best interest to pay up rather than lose the ability to do business in the U.S.

Uh, the normal way. Fines, lawsuits and potentially sanctions, if needed.

Maybe not if it were an American company on the brink of collapse, but Maersk is a Danish company - and an exceptionally wealthy/profitable one at that. The cities, governments, and companies that are all affected by this will be eager to collect their pound of flesh from Maersk.

You're definitely right, and I kindof lumped those together - it's hard to write a complete response during a poop break at work.

I was not aware of 'athiest christian nationalists' being a thing. Fascinating.

I also didn't adequately explain that I feel 'modern' Christianity has very little to do with the teachings of Christ, much less the content of the Bible even as a whole. It seems it's much more a justification of their targeted hatred.

As someone raised in a white evangelical household, an ex-evangelical myself, and someone who lived in a number of very conservative communities and as someone who regularly works with police and military, I feel I have a very solid understanding of (and have been thoroughly traumatized by) the conservative/evangelical/christian nationalist mindset - and I think the Christianity part is way more central that you are giving it credit.

Similarly, while there is most certainly racism present, I have encountered few overtly, stereotypically racist people in those communities. They will enthusiastically accept any minority that shares their beliefs. I think it's far more about ideology than race. Where the racism comes in is they automatically distrust people of other races unless they discover there is a shared ideology.

They hate white Democrats/liberals/progressives just as much, maybe even more, than those of other races, because those are people who have "rejected the word of God" rather than being those who have simply not heard it yet and potential converts.

He absolutely isn't an expert. He may very well have done what he claims, but if so the military training he received simply teaches him to diligently read from a book and follow the steps listed there. He's no more an expert based on this training than someone is an artisan baker for following the recipe on the back of a box or Betty Crocker.

I have no idea on a metric of how frequently an "ordinary" gun jams, much less these modified ones, but I can apply some logic from my knowledge/experiences. The weapons you mention having experience with are designed with appropriate tolerances to not bind up under heavy use, so are a bit different from the 'consumer-grade' type we're talking about in this specific event.

The type of semiautomatic rifles we're talking about here use recoil to cycle the action. A bump stock allows the whole weapon to oscillate - and can have an effect similar to not securely shouldering the weapon. This prevents the needed energy from being transferred into the action for complete cycling, and that would make the weapon prone to jamming.

I don't know if I have much of value to add to or reply to your second paragraph, but yeah that fixation is weird.

It's a sequence of quotes from Fight Club

I mean, he didn't really have much of a problem with accuracy - he fired a total of 1058 rounds, and those rounds or shrapnel from them injured 413 different people. Of course, many people received more than a single gunshot wound. He killed 58 (later 60) in ten minutes of shooting -- effectively one person every 10 seconds. I think it would be difficult for a single person to injure or kill more from where he was standing with any weapon short of an RPG.

He was operating a significant number of his weapons on bump stocks. Bump stocks allow firing at a much higher rate than the weapons were designed for. Operating at a higher rate causes the weapons to overheat. Overheating causes misfires and jams (and inaccuracy and can permanently damage weapons, but I doubt he was particularly concerned about those things). He did have them all set up in a row and many on mounts. He broke out the overlooking windows of his hotel room before he started shooting. It seems he was shooting with one until it jammed and then moving on to the next rather than trying to clear misfires.

I don't know about the lack of mental health care being the "main issue." A healthy society wouldn't be in dire need of such extreme amounts of mental health care. These mass shootings are a single symptom (among many) of a very complicated and interwoven set of factors that have brought us to this place. There is no single solution that will fix the problem, and the only way out of this mess will take significant investment and likely generations to break the cycle. But humans are greedy, and particularly in the USA, we only look for simple simgle-issue solutions that can have a measurable outcome (and be economically viable) within the next couple or fiscal quarters or an election term, at most. The solutions we should be implementing don't work on that sort of time scale, and many will be very costly (in varying terms of both money and/or freedom)... So, we just don't do those things.

I mean, I'm pretty sure I couldn't organize an orgy even if I did offer to pay. I'm not a lame ass.

I don't know if I'd say it's "obvious" he was murdered without more details. Yes, it's incredibly likely - probably the most likely cause. That being said, people that appear healthy can and do die suddenly quite regularly - heart attack, stroke, aneurysm, etc. can occur at any age and even with healthy people, often with very little visible advance warning. He'd been poisoned in the past - who knows what damage that may have left. Though I would argue that would still count as murder, even if as a delayed effect.

Still, yeah, he was probably murdered.

Vizio is kindof like Costco's Kirkland brand. They don't actually manufacture anything, they just select high-margin products that they can have contract manufactured cheaply, have some reasonable QC standards applied, and slap their name on the product.

So they're already kindof like Great Value TVs, though clearly held to a higher standard than most Great Value trash usually is.

Do it. I made the switch a few months ago, and it's gone better than I'd expected. Now running Linux Mint on my desktop and laptop. I set my laptop up with dual boot, just so I can easily and natively run Windows apps if needed.

Just think of the downvoters as cops giving you some street justice for your disrespectful use of an emoji!