SirEDCaLot @ SirEDCaLot @lemmy.fmhy.net

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2 yr. ago

I said that given two biased partisan researchers who produce a high and a low number, I feel the reality is probably somewhere between them. That seems pretty logical to me. If you disagree, can you explain what you think the correct number of DGUs is and how you come to that conclusion?

any situation where a person pulls a gun on a person without a gun is not a defensive use of a gun, and certainly doesn’t make anyone involved safer.

This is easily disproven. Here's one obvious scenario.
Single mid-20s attractive female is legally armed with carry permit. She is walking home from work when she's confronted by a would-be rapist who blocks her way and insists he comes with her. She draws her weapon and orders him out of her way. He immediately surrenders and does the whole 'I'm sorry I didn't mean nothing you don't gotta overreact like that'. No shots are fired. She then leaves the area and continues home unharmed.
That woman is safer and unharmed and unraped BECAUSE she carried her gun.

Or maybe we should decide that it's not the government's job to be a nanny-state and protect people from themselves; because someone might misuse a tool and hurt themself with it isn't a good reason to deny everybody the use of that tool.

I’m not prepared to base our gun policy on vibes alone

Okay now we're getting somewhere. I agree entirely, public policy should not be based on 'vibes' or emotions of any sort, no matter whose vibes they are. In a 'Free Country', if you're going to set a policy or restrict someone's freedoms (especially Constitutionally-enumerated freedoms), you need a damn good reason and some proof that your policy will have the desired effect. My 'vibes' are insufficient and so are yours.

So I as I see it, the answer, from real numbers, is pretty simple.
Per FBI Uniform Crime Report, there are about 10k-12k homicides by firearm per year.
I'll take a moment to point out that rifles, which include the 'assault' rifles everyone wants to ban as well as other rifles, are used in about 200-350 homicides/year, which is less than half the 600-700 people who are punched and kicked to death. Not a huge threat there.
But back on subject. 10-12k firearm homicides per year.
In comparison, there are minimum of 55k defensive gun uses per year. A DGU is when a law-abiding person uses a legal firearm to stop or prevent a crime. The vast majority end with no shots fired- the criminal sees the gun and runs away.
The exact number of such incidents is much harder to nail down, because unlike homicides, they aren't centrally tracked. Many DGUs don't get reported- the criminal runs away quickly so there's not much to report; and there's no central reporting or tracking as there is with homicide. Thus DGUs must be tracked by various statistical survey methods, leading to the a wide disparity in numbers. Anti-gun researcher Hemenway puts it at 55k-80k/year, pro-gun researcher Lott puts it in the millions. I say it's probably somewhere in the hundreds of thousands.

So I look at these two pieces of data. 10-12k firearm homicide per year, a large % of which is done by prohibited persons and/or illegal guns (which are already illegal). On the other side, 55k+ DGUs, the vast majority of it done by legal persons and legal guns.
And I conclude if we enact anti-gun policy, it will affect the people who follow the law more than those who don't; namely; it will reduce DGUs at a greater rate than firearm homicide. And that is not a good trade in my book.

Curious to hear your thoughts?

Don't be obtuse. I'm arguing that because America is different than Australia, what worked there isn't guaranteed to work here, and that the causes of our gun issues run a lot deeper than guns. Therefore, rather than taking a simpleton answer of 'it worked for them it'll work for us!' it makes sense to actually think about what are the underlying causes of our problems and if that solution will work or not.

This is the answer- especially if the job description explicitly states remote work. It's a significant shift in job requirements. That can count as constructive dismissal.

I heard a great quote once- this came from a guy running a maintenance operation for JetBlue back before they had labor issues. He proudly talked about how they paid their people well and treated them well and thus were one of the last non-union aircraft maintenance shops in the area, and in his words, 'Every shop around here that's gone union has deserved it'.

The problem is now the same thing it was in the early to mid 1900s when the labor movement first took off- companies view employees as disposable cogs in the machine, so the more work they can get out of each worker for the less pay, the less overhead they have to spend on adequate relief staffing and healthcare and PTO and whatnot, the better. Thus the best situation is high unemployment with desperate workers, where everybody NEEDS the job so they can balance the pay rate with hiring so people get fed up and quit at the same rate as they hire new people. And that way if someone gets sick they can just lay them off and not pay extra healthcare or whatever.

Of course that situation is great for the company, but shitty for the country. It requires a nation of wage-slaves. And that's a bad way to run a 'prosperous' nation.

Try dd-wrt firmware. Lets you dip your toe into the water so to speak, with a lot less of the complication of openwrt. At least it used to when I last used it several years ago.

If you have a spare old PC, pfSense is a great way to screw around. Even if it only has one NIC there is (or at least used to be) basic hostap support so you could use the builtin wifi card as a base station. Otherwise spend $20 on a supported USB-Ethernet adapter and you've got yourself a router to play with.

So would a router running pfsense then also become my primary WiFi routers too? Or is it best to keep pfsense strictly as a firewall and have a separate router strictly for WiFi?

pfSense doesn't really do WiFi. So you'd use it as a router/firewall, then have something else do your WiFi. I generally recommend Ubiquiti.

It's worth noting that a 'WiFi router' is usually 3 separate things in one box- a router/firewall, a WiFi access point, and a small switch of usually 4-6 ports. In a home you usually want these things in the same place so they're in one box. In an enterprise, the router/firewall is usually in the basement where there's no WiFi, network switches may be in many places and a tiny one in the router won't help you, and WiFi is up by where the workers are. So it's that sort of setup that pfSense is designed for.

The way I have my place set up- a pfSense machine is the router/firewall. I then use Netgear managed switches (there's a few, mainly GS110TP's), and Ubiquiti WiFi. The Ubiquiti controller runs inside Docker on a small Synology box. Highly recommend this setup.

But I'd just as highly recommend going Ubiquiti all the way. Dream Machine Pro SE is a great base router/firewall, and it has a built in PoE switch so you can hang a few U6 Pro access points off it. You get a bit more flexibility with pfSense but in most home environments it's not needed.

Apples to oranges. Australia doesn't have the same society as us- nowhere near the levels of drug problems and drug cartels, and they are more likely to treat addicts like patients who require treatment than criminals who should be punished by locking them up with even more violent criminals. Australia has WAY better mental and phyiscal health care and better protections for workers. It's much closer to a socialized society than the USA is.
As a result they have significantly different problems, specifically, they DON'T have anywhere near the same level of drug problems and violent crime. Their culture doesn't glorify violence as much as ours does, and we don't have that mixed in with a much more 'FU you're on your own' type socioeconomic policy.

THOSE changes are why much of AU is a safer society. I strongly advocate for making many of those changes in USA. Specifically- health care should be a human right (including mental health care), we should treat drug addicts like patients not criminals, and we should otherwise reform our society for the benefit of the people rather than the benefit of the corporations in the economy.

It's sort of both.

Netgate is the company that develops pfSense. They make pfSense available as a download that you can run on your own hardware or your own VM. They also sell pfSense routers that have official support and a free upgrade to their slightly nicer 'pfSense Plus' version. I generally recommend the official hardware (support the project and all that, and it's good quality if a bit more expensive). However if you want to save a few bucks you can get a cheap NUC-type PC with a few Intel Ethernet ports from Protectli or similar brands on Amazon.

Ensuring that your local community is free of guns

Nice in theory, impossible in practice.

We spend $30+billion/year ensuring our communities are free of drugs. How's that working out? From where I sit we may as well just put the cash in a giant pile and set it on fire, at least that way it would keep somebody warm.

Guns are easier to make than drugs. Any half-decent machine shop can make a gun, and unlike a drug lab, the machine shop has a lot of legitimate 'day shift' uses. Hobbyists make their own (legal) guns all the time in their basements. And the advent of cheap CNC machining tools makes it even easier.

Don't get me wrong- I'm all ears for any proposal that disarms criminals. I don't believe that disarming the law-abiding will help disarm criminals, at least I don't see anywhere in our nation's history where that has worked.

This is a nice idea, unfortunately it's not generally realistic. It's very ivory-tower idealistic.

Between rational people like you and I- yes I agree, violence is a failure. But not everybody is rational.

The fact is there ARE people in society who would harm their fellow humans, either for fun or for profit or because they just don't know any better. I wish that wasn't the case, but it is.
Ignoring this fact does not prevent such people from harming others, or protect those victims. And saying we should remove the means of self-defense because violence is failure is like saying we should remove airbags and seatbelts from cars because crashes are failures. Sure crashes and violence are failures, but sometimes failures happen and you are either prepared for the consequences or you're not.

The other issue is that 'remove guns entirely' is simply not possible. You can disarm the law-abiding, but that will NOT disarm the criminals and those with no respect for the law. If you feel the law will prevent them from obtaining guns, then please explain why an anti-gun law will be any more effective than anti-drug laws (which we've been trying at for 30+ years, with little or no success).

I wish I could say you're wrong and that's tinfoil hat paranoid... but sadly maybe not.

Right now there's a resurgence of the workers rights and unionization movement, and low unemployment helps push that. Businesses need their employees more than the employees need their employers and the smart employers are skimming the cream of the crop.

I don't think federal government gives a crap but local governments in business districts are pushing return to office as hard as everyone. They see their (way overvalued) commercial office districts sitting empty, and every worker that doesn't commute is a worker not riding the metro / buying Starbucks / buying a paper / otherwise stimulating the downtown economy.

Smarter cities are starting to realize that their downtown property values are a fucking bubble that is not sustainable, and they're exploring turning office space into desperately needed apartments. But that takes time and isn't easy and it involves hosing a lot of commercial real estate developers and their investors who invested on absurd property values.

Fact is though- real estate (especially in downtown districts) is a bubble that's long due to be popped. There's no valid reasons humans have to cluster together like that, the country's more than big enough to spread people out and not have people paying through the nose for shitty apartments.

This exactly.
A year or two back there was an article about companies trying to return to office- the CEO of some upstart engineering company had a quote like 'every time one of our competitors announces return to office we kick our recruitment into overdrive. We get all the best people that way'.

The companies that push return to office aren't going to keep their most productive and intelligent workers. They're going to keep the ones who can't find anything better.

It's really kind of funny... this is a combination of short-sighted management who think that being able to physically see their employees working somehow makes them more productive, and real estate- lot of dollars invested in commercial real estate and CEOs don't want to admit their flashy new HQ in Silicon Valley was wasted money.

Interesting. And also concerning for Russia. As @DarkThoughts pointed out below, if they are pulling air defense from anywhere it suggests they are running out of equipment. Which is surprising, because air superiority is critical for them to maintain what they've taken in Ukraine let alone prevent strikes on their own territory.
I would think that whoever's in charge of RU's military would understand this and prioritize it, and/or could explain to Great Leader how important it is that no matter what else happens that UA not own the skies. If that's not happening then either that guy's a moron, or Putin isn't listening, or the RU air force / military procurement system is in much worse shape than we thought.

If UA gets air superiority over their own held territory, and especially over contested territory, then the 'special military operation' might as well be over.

Routers - Netgate / pfSense. Best router GUI I've found. If you understand what you want to make happen, chances are you can figure out how to make it happen without touching a CLI. And generally free of Cisco for license bullshit.

Routing and WiFi- Ubiquiti. Not as flexible as pfSense but even easier to use and if you do both routing and WiFi with them you get a bunch of cool analytics. Their surveillance package is great too as long as you use their cameras, pretty much the best mobile surveillance app I've found. Door access system also gets a mention.

Synology for almost everything they do, but particularly storage, backup, surveillance (they support almost every camera, albeit with a license requirement) and hosting of self hosted apps using a nice docker GUI. Not as much bang for buck vs. an old PC in terms of CPU power, but very easy to use.

For home automation- Home Assistant or HomeSeer. Both are open platforms that support almost everything. Home Assistant pulls lightly ahead for me because it's free and has more 3rd party integrations, even if it has a steeper hearing curve in some areas and some rough edges that require tweaking for basic usability (specifically, Z-Wave requires the 'z-wave js ui' plugin to take real control over a Z-Wave mesh, and Z-Wave door locks need the Keymaster plugin to get any sort of user code management, neither are straightforward to install). That said- pair Home Assistant with a Z-Wave dongle and some Inovelli light switches and you have a really beautiful setup with insane flexibility.

This is not good news for Russia.

The TB2 drone is slow and not stealthy. It's relatively cheap compared to something like a Predator or Reaper, but still isn't anywhere near disposable. It's a sitting duck for any sort of serious air defense, and it's most effective when air defenses are little or none.

If UA is succeeding in harming RU's air defenses, that could signal a larger shift in the war. UA has had a very successful 'dial for bullets' campaign getting more and more modern munitions out of Western allies, and from what I've heard that is starting to include actual combat aircraft. If UA is dismantling RU's air defenses, and if UA gets modern aircraft of their own, there's a possibility that UA could end up claiming air superiority over much of their territory. And THAT is a game changer.

It seems unlikely on the face of it, as RU has a great many modern aircraft and pilots to match. But then again, since the start of the war, RU has gone from the 2nd best military in the world, to the 2nd best military in Ukraine, to (up until Prigozhin blinked) the 2nd best military in Russia. So maybe their reserves of functional combat aircraft are overstated.

Either way though, this is NOT good news for Russia.

Yes exactly. And that's why I don't jump to the assumption that Zelenskyy himself is corrupt or he is covering for the corruption of others.
A dude that would tolerate corruption doesn't say 'I need ammunition not a ride'. He could have bailed at any point, still could. But he shows no signs of losing resolve.
If Zelenskyy is trying to keep inner circle corruption private to avoid public spectacle, I suspect that whoever is found guilty will probably end up wishing they were arrested publicly rather than dealing with the security service.

Most welcome :)

They are right that Shorts are harming YouTube, in the same way that Windows 8 harmed Windows.

YouTube and TikTok are different things. People go to TikTok for a specific thing, people go to YouTube for something else. And YouTube sees a bunch of people on TikTok, and says 'if that's what people want we should be the ones to give it to them'. But in doing so, they are ignoring the people who WANT YouTube and NOT TikTok, by making YouTube more like TikTok.

This is just like Windows 8. Microsoft saw a bunch of people ditching desktop PCs in favor of iPads, so they said 'let's make Windows more like an iPad'. Thus, Windows 8- only one app open at once, touch-focused interface that was frustrating with a mouse. It ignored the people who WANT Windows and NOT iPad, by making Windows more like iPad.

The simple fact is, Shorts are frustrating. The lack of a scrub bar and volume control are a big part of why I DON'T like TikTok, especially on PC. And seeing that same crappy format on the desktop YouTube web interface is a big turn off.

If there was an option to just 'never show me Shorts' I'd click it in a heartbeat.

There are much bigger problems with YouTube than Shorts though. One of the biggest is their content moderation. I get it, there's 50 hours of video uploaded every minute and you can't watch it all so you let automated system handle it. Problem is, people RELY on YouTube to make a living in many cases. And when some asshole can destroy their livelihood by filing a couple hundred obviously false bot reports, that makes creators think twice. Same thing when the policies you DO have seesaw between allowing some really offensive stuff, and persecuting types of content that people in California dislike.

What YT needs to do is rethink the whole way demonetizing works. Rather than being a single flag that instantly makes a video ineligible for monetization, they should have categories of advertisements. So that way if someone wants to post a video that has controversial themes like (for example) firearms or marijuana use, rather than being entirely demonetized, the video can show ads from gun companies or smoking supply companies. Advertisers could specify what sort of controversial content they are willing to be promoted alongside, so everybody could win.

Another huge problem is their awful 'engagement algorithm'. It seems expressly designed to make low quality content bubble to the top, while the really good stuff is harder and harder to find.