Maryland bill would force gun owners to get $300K liability insurance to wear or carry
abraxas @ abraxas @sh.itjust.works Posts 0Comments 780Joined 2 yr. ago
abraxas @ abraxas @sh.itjust.works
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I agree that their interpretation would work that way, however, I don’t see how they can pretend their interpretation of the second amendment is anything like that of the first
Unfortunately, the highest law of the land disagrees with your interpretation at this time. They have this whole "plain meaning of words" mindset. The typical 3rd grader reading the 2nd Amendment would think "oh ok, I can have a gun". Therefore, that's what the 2nd Amendment means now.
They restrict time and place of first amendment rights constantly.
Yeah, that's covered by jurisprudence based around the needs of the country. And the law is right that the First Amendment doesn't say the freedom of speech is the freedom to disrupt (preventing people from going to their destination, vandalizing property, etc). But if you needed to buy Free Speech Insurance, that would get shot down as unconstitutional.
Then fucking come up with gun control that doesn't focus on the poor.
The Left says "we should do this because it's better for everyone". The Right says "Yeah, but ONLY do it to the poor! Thank you"
You're Right. The Second Amendment is only a right for rich white people. Just like the 4th and 5th Amendments.
There are some serious downsides. In this case, this should get progressive alarms going off.
But before we get to the bulk, I'm going to repeat my last line's question first. Why invent new ways to fuck the poor in the name of gun control when we have solutions that work?
- It encourages transitioning gun ownership percentage to wealthy white people and less gun ownership to less-wealthy and non-white people (who, on average, make less money). This is the big one
- People don't like to admit it, but gun ownership DOES have a deterrent effect in high crime areas. Home invaders regularly mention avoiding houses of armed people when interrogated. I don't want ANYONE robbed on my street, but I definitely don't want my family victimized. My road has a dramatically lower home invader rate (based on value of property) than surrounding areas. Why? Outspoken gun owners due to the hunting culture (we have too many deer)... Do we really want to pretend to justify all the upsides of gun ownership to going to rich white people?
- Over 90% of gun crimes are committed with illegal weapons, a majority of which go back to legitimate owners and were stolen/given illegally. That means the liability insurance chain is already broken (or the rates go up, further alienating poor folks)
Simply tracing, background checks, and better regulation all-round would be more effective than a regressive tax on gun ownership. And those things are well-established and well-tested in society. Regulations WORK. So why invent new ways to fuck the poor in the name of gun control when we have solutions that work?
EDIT:
And some other thoughts that kinda go both ways at once. It looks like $300k is the quoted amount by most 2A firearm insurance companies. Almost like they lobbied for the bill. It makes me wonder if they would also lobby for weakening other regulations because "well gun owners are insured".
And part 2 as a flipside. It looks like the costs might not be terribly high. I'm seeing quotes as low as $30/mo. It's hard because they are all EXTREMELY shadey companies and (like other insurance companies) they like to hide their rates from potential buyers. As well as their fine print since the rates are so low from them avoiding paying out. By their fine print, it looks like they don't pay out if your action might have been criminal. So the insurance doesn't actually pay the victims of anything except accidental discharge.
But then, do we want to empower another questionably corrupt industry by mandating gun owners be their customers?
He's basically threatening to move to a subscription-instead-of-purchase model. They've toyed with this idea for years, and have been trying to normalize it.
These memes are always using terribly structured logic to justify piracy.
Agreed. Nobody needs to justify piracy. Piracy is automatically justified because the reasons people justified banning piracy were bad-faith. Digital IP is theft whose only purpose has failed.
Subscription models are great when they're not trying to fuck you. There are upsides and downsides, but if you have options between subscribing with a one-click unsub or buying games and you choose subscribe, it might just be for good reason.
I got Game Pass because I wasn't sure I'd like Starfield. I now have 20 games installed (including Starfield) and just pause game pass when work is too busy for me to get value out of it. I'm at about $70 total spend. Yeah that's more than starfield, but I've enjoyed close to $500 in games, some of which I either wouldn't have bought and love or WOULD have bought and am glad I didn't.
But if somebody makes you pay $20/mo for Dildo Simulator, and colors and sizes are paid DLC, then they're just trying to fuck you.
a game i actually played on epic.
Here's a few of mine (not sure if any come from Amazon): Control (this was awesome!), shapez (almost bought it, then it was in my inbox), loop hero, Guardians of the Galaxy (Christmas free games), Outer Worlds (ditto), Evil WIthin 1 and 2, most of the fallout games, Death Stranding, Gloomhaven... I'm only on page 5 of 20 lol. Only 1 out of 5 of their free games are any good, but between big giveaways and the like, that's still ~15 good free games a year lol. So needless to say, Epic is always installed on my computer.
It just never occurred as a prime (no pun intended) reason to pay… Errr… Prime
Perhaps THE problem with Prime right now is that none of their services except maybe TV is worth $11/mo on its own. Their free games aren't Humble Monthly, but HM is just games. Their TV isn't Netflix, but it's $4/mo cheaper. You can get free shipping without Prime now (that wasn't true before), but next day is phenomenal. As for books, there's not really any replacement I know of. It's not perfect (has this annoying thing about having books 2 on in some series, without book 1), but if you read a book a month, it pays for itself.
Warez were never convenient. Just “free”. Yet, with a tiny amount of “work”
For sure. It's always been a baseline of convenience. I remember the old days of curating my mp3 collection every 6 months, removing dupes and fixing organizational shifting. But if I do that stuff for apps, I have to maintain freaking sandbox environments for each app, make sure my computer is backed up in case I have to wipe it, make sure nothing auto-logins so a remote attack doesn't happen, etc. About 1 in 2 cracked apps show up as a virus and you can never know whether it's a false positive, so you have to use a computer condom and then STILL get tested.
Dishing out 100 bucks would need a lot of benefits to convince me. Though i get you. Trading money for tinkering-time. All depends on our preference and skill and nerdiness 😂
I'm in an ok place right now. And Amazon is still the cheapest place to buy anything, for me. If I spend over $1000/yr there on everything, a lot more if you count the holidays, then Prime has already justified itself. And slower or not, Amazon with Prime is STILL the fastest Christmas shipper.
Anecdote... We bought Ring cameras from the Ring site for a family member in November. By mid-December, they still hadn't shipped because Christmas orders were so backlogged. So we bought them again on Amazon and they were on our doorstep 2 days later, just a couple days before Christmas. Was it next day? No. Was it worth it? YEAH.
Then we had to fight with Ring for 2 weeks because they wouldn't cancel the order. We got the Cameras the 2nd week of January and my wife was on the phone with them 6 or 7 times before they finally approved a return. Amazon has this thing called "Free Returns" on most items. You can literally write in "I was drunk shopping" for your return reason and nobody bats an eyelash.
But i doubt it just downloads and that’s it. No tracking? No phoning home? No play-statistics? Hmm
I can't be positive. I've never run any network traces on it. But it doesn't have any of the hallmarks of service DRMs. No "connecting" popup or login prompt. I've played Amazon-downloaded games offline. If there's a hidden DRM, it's more-or-less obscured.
Let's be honest, though. Amazon gives the games away for free in an app that will never be used to sell products; and they do it as a bullet-point for Prime and to nudge people towards Luna. It's obviously the games they get for free that they give away. I see no reason for them to do more work than they have to, plugging in a DRM.
But i never heard of anyone actually using the app instead of maybe even playing one of those freebies and then quitting the app again 😁
It's hard to remember what games I got through Amazon vs Epic, but I clearly remember a few times I was excited about an Amazon Games offering added an Epic game.
In Amazon Games natively, my happy games are Autonauts, Terraformers, Close to the Sun (recently), and a few of those short adventure games I completed that nobody wants to spend $20 on but everyone loves to play.
I tried watching like 3 things. And one i could rent, the others pay extra and i was like “wtf? This is prime? Fuckit”
Their rent thing sucks, but I *never *see rentals in front of me when I use Prime Video on my TV. I named 3 of their big exclusives, but there's plenty more either exclusive or just licensed. It's never the most awesome shows of any service, but I could still find a few hours per day of video if I tried.
It just sucks that you’d need like 5 services and still can’t watch EVERYTHING
Yeah, I'm with you 5000% on that. That's where Gabe Newall is right. I'd probably be willing to drop drop $100/mo or more on a service if it had EVERYTHING on-demand, convenient, with no DRM of any kind. And I'd never once think to download-and-unsub or distribute or anything.
...as for your experience, I say wave that damn Jolly Roger. Gimme convenience or give me death. I pay because things are convenient for me. If it wasn't, I probably wouldn't be paying either.
The games are on their app (nope, thanks) or epic (no thanks).
Their app is surpisingly fair. No inherent DRM, just click "download" and it downloads. Epic... well, I have 100+ games I got for free, so I have it anyway. I probably have a $1000 collection of "free" games on Epic at this point.
The tv stuff is the worst I’ve seen back when i actually paid for my series/movies
With all the subscription services, I think that's the rule. If you like what they have, you love it. If not, you go elsewhere. At least Prime is cheaper than some of them, but at the end of the day it's about the stuff you enjoy.
For me, it's WoT, Reacher, Good Omens on top, along with a few of their FreeVee partnership shows. But I have to respect they also have The Boys, which I've been meaning to get into.
I mean, to me they beat Apple+ and Hulu, lose to Disney+ and Netflix. At $11/mo, I get all those things along with the expedited shipping and the books. Convenient, but also not overpriced.
And when the other website costs more, has worse return policies, slower shipping, and possibly is even a scam site? The problem with Amazon is how good it is even when it's being evil.
As I said elswhere, I look EVERYWHERE before Amazon first. That involves me checking out BBB on mom&pop storefronts and trying to filter out the scam stores or the ones with significant issues. It involves me price-checking, coupon-checking, seeing if services like Rakuten can get the price to match Amazon's. I don't expect most people to do all those things and neither should you.
And even then, I end up buying from Amazon about 2/3 the time. Because I won't pay 20% more in some meaningless protest that isn't going anywhere.
It's an extreme-case prisoner's dilemma. For shoppers to prevent a Walmart/Amazon monopoly, people would have to both give up convenience AND affordability in hope that everyone else had the same radical values. There were PLENTY of boycotters for both, but they just weren't anywhere near enough.
At some point, when you're starving and Sam Walton comes by and offers you food your family can afford, you pull the trigger. And I don't fault someone who does that.
It's the Walmart problem. People buy from Amazon because they can't afford some necessities at MSRP when going to a local store.
Some of the stuff I can get in bulk on Amazon are as much as 50% cheaper than getting those same things in bulk from a restaurant supply (which is cheaper than buying them at a grocery store). And that's before Subscribe&Save's 15% off. Coffee (for example) costs would drive me into the poor house if I didn't get my beans from Amazon... and I end up getting higher quality beans than my grocery store at that lower price.
Do I NEED coffee to live? No. But it's not exactly a luxury in the modern world, and beans are much cheaper than going to Dunkin. There are things I buy that I need; there are things that I buy that I want. And as much as I hate it, most of them are not available locally or are FAR more expensive locally. I never go to Amazon first, but I very often find myself landing at Amazon last.
And yes, that doesn't justify Prime on its own. But because I have Prime, I get those things that I couldn't find cheaper elsewhere the very next day. Prime will never be necessary when there's free shipping options, but boy have they packed it out with more features than (for example) Walmart's subscription model.
Here's what I get with Prime that I appreciate:
- Free games every month, some of which are pretty awesome
- that fast shipping
- A fairly average TV service with a few of the best exclusives out there (imo THE best but I'm a WoT-head).
- Tons of included books and I live in a family of readers
I mean, a lot of it I could get on the High Seas as it were, but it's the law of convenience. They make it easy and there's a value prop there for me.
If I JUST wanted free shipping, Prime would be a complete waste of money to me. But I'd still end up giving Amazon my damn paycheck because the alternatives are just not there where I live.
Intimidation and threats is the whole plea deal system by definition. "We're going to charge you with all these crimes and get you 20 years if you don't plead guilty to jaywalking". Doesn't matter if you have a strong case, or if they don't have a case at all, when they have even a weak case to ruin your life. As my attorney (long story, civil case) puts it "once something gets to the jury, it can always go either way".
But, as the bootlickers will say, the courts will be overwhelmed if EVERY person we lock in a cage has their day in court!!! They can cry me a fucking river.
There will never be justice in our country as long as there's a plea deal system.
When you do, you'll find out he did more things (more folks' tax returns, though he didn't publish those AFAIR). I'm sure he pled to this crime because of those other things. But that doesn't really justify maximum sentence for what he was found guilty of.
You laugh, but the only other 5 year sentence I can think of in this whole situation is Reality Winner, the biggest unspoken hero of the last decade who leaked the Russian Interference information to the press. I guarantee we wouldn't know that happened if it weren't for her. And yet, quoting the wikipedia entry on her: "No one has ever received a longer sentence for leaking classified information to a media outlet"
Now I can name somebody else who has (if the crime was technically different).
Some people will stop at nothing to defend the 1980's crime tv status-quo where police are the good guys where no broken law is ever justified except their broken law
He pled guilty. There wasn't a jury.
Because it's like a traffic jam when you're already late. Or a no smoking sign on your cigarette break. Obviously.
I can't speak for whether the judge was pro-Trump. It doesn't sound (from other replies) like that was the case.
I think it's more that the everyone in the System (from prosecutors to judges) have a strong dislike for whistleblower crimes.
In your opinion, are poor people inferior to rich people as to whether they have the right to protest or protect their families? Do you cheer when a poor person's child dies?
I'm sorry, I'm just gonna block your alt-right ass now. I don't talk to monsters and idiots.