daltotron @ daltotron @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

yeah, I see all your extreme gen X nostalgia, dial-up internet browsing, floppy disk hole punching, cassette pencil rewinding, unshielded electronics interference having, family party line sharing, coin return checking asses, and I raise you something only REAL old kids will remember:

Silly Bandz. Only the real old heads will remember kids trading various kinds of silly bandz with each other. Alternatively, depending on how much the people around you believed in pseudoscience, the power balance hologram bracelets could also be found around people's wrists, at that time.

if anything, I would think it'd be the opposite. LEDs are pretty capable of more narrow bandwidths natively, but old streetlights used to be a more pure kind of yellowy color, because they were low pressure sodium vapor lamps. Those kinds of lamps give off an incredibly narrow bandwidth of yellow light, and are pretty energy efficient. I would think, as we've made the transition from that to more wide-bandwidth LEDs, more insects would be attracted to the lights, and more insects would die. But I'm not quite sure one way or the other.

I wanted to get like, a weighted jacket, so I could take it off and throw it on the ground and have it make a thud, like I'm piccolo, or rock lee, right, and maybe get jacked at the same time, but apparently it costs like 200 bucks for one. So that sucks.

Edit: Also, none of them taper at the waist, which I feel like would be a good idea since that would more evenly distribute the weight on your hips instead of just on your shoulders.

Nah, I kinda like it, keeps my mornings sufficiently spicy and grounded. I tend to be more upbeat when I get too in my shit, and so it's mostly better if I can browse around horrible doomposts and depressing shit when I need it. Certainly, I tend to like it better than cheerful nonsense that tends to either amount to played out references, or tribalistic bashing, though, that's not to say doomposts can't really be in that same vein either.

In any case, you're gonna see them because they're more likely to survive and get attention. This is good, for bringing awareness, maybe bad for explanatory power or sustained activism, but it strictly has more survival power in the attention economy, when compared to normal posts.

I always thought that narrower pressure vessels could contain higher pressure, because the curvature is more severe, meaning that for a vessel that needs to retain a similar level of pressure, you could just use less material in the walls of the vessel. Is this not the case with these new cans, and they have the same wall thickness, or is the tradeoff just one that still works out to be in favor of more total aluminum usage?

I think that most of the criticisms directed at the industrialization and mecha stuff is mostly just a byproduct of the worldbuilding in korra broadly not being very good. Not even necessarily bad a lot of the time, but just not as good as avatar.

Bending styles became more homogenized and choreography is worse, everything became a kind of 1920's hong kong steampunk, and lots of the city shots, there's basically nobody walking around. You have things like tasers and huge mechas, but huge mechas and tasers without explanations for how they're getting such dense energy storage, or circumventing some real world problems with those technologies in a 1920's context. With various forms of bending, you can kind of get around the energy density problem a little bit, since it's just straight up magic that seems like it violates conservation of energy, but with korra's stuff, that doesn't apply a lot of the time.

Lots of little things like that kinda give the impression that the world is made of paper mache, or that a lot of things are just kind of done because they're a cool idea, rather than because they're both a cool idea and make a little bit of sense. I'm not really opposed to the idea of a car in the setting, but it strikes me as quite a bit easier to power a car if you have a mobile human power plant that can produce large amounts of energy. I think it's also kind of a shame to disconnect the tech from this for a different reason, as well, and that's because it means that the bending is kind of, less broadly useful and applicable. It takes up less space in the setting, it has less utility, it's not as cool, and the show doesn't really end up giving many good replacements for it as time goes on.

That's really nitpicking, though. I think the broader point is just that there wasn't much done in the series to really show the continuity between ATLA and korra (do not mistake this for fanservice), and they really feel like different shows. Feels kind of like about a quarter of the reason why people didn't like the last jedi, but that's kind of a whole other deal. Anyways, that being the case, korra's more of a stand alone kind of deal, and I think it kind of falls flat on it's own, because it just isn't very good and I don't like it as much as the OG.

You also get a lot of people that will blame all the problems on the show that it kept getting renewed season after season without any real knowledge of the future viability of the show, but I think I would still just blame the writing, in that respect. You can make a good, contiguous series of media based only on good improv, only on good setup and payoff, external to the idea that the show has multiple locked-in seasons. I don't think it matters too much, if you're good enough. Main example there is probably just venture bros, though.

Totally correct and a pretty good solution, I wish more gun owners were as responsible as you sound, and I wish we could take more steps towards a reality in which they are. Realistically, I don't really want to eliminate guns altogether, I like guns perfectly fine, they're great plinking devices, they're great for controlling the populations of invasive species, they're mechanically, and sometimes historically, fascinating devices. What I prefer more is just a world in which those are the roles that guns take, rather than guns having like, such a fucked up pretense of reality, a pretense of utility, in self-defense. Rather than being an economic engine of political fearmongering. Mostly, I find this type of shit to be incredibly annoying, because my small town is constantly flooded with people who wholeheartedly believe the militarized self-defense chaff around this stuff, but have also never been to any large city in america, and are totally incurious about what the root causes of crime might be. Their concern for the world stops at the end of their fingertips, anything out of reach for them. Anything that doesn't directly intersect or connect to them, is something they don't give a shit about at all. It's myopic, it's selfish, it's a mentality that is not conducive to a good society, much less, a society at all. That's it, that's my little spiel on that.

I didn't think much about gun rentals at ranges, that's a pretty good point. It is still probably the case that waiting periods, I suspect, would cut down on suicides for the same reason I stated previously, right, making guns harder to access for the suicidal will cut down on, not necessarily even suicide attempts, but suicide lethality. Being able to walk into any walmart in the 40's and blow your brains out with a shotgun for probably less than 20 bucks is kind of, a very convenient method of suicide. It's like the suicide booth from futurama, almost. Still, the point is taken well, and it's probably a better point for more stringent precautions at rental ranges to prevent such outcomes. I don't really know what those would end up looking like. I'd imagine a lot of those generally would end up falling into the middle and latter categories anyways, of suicide, and I would assume they'd be more due to things like ptsd and stuff like that.

I'd also imagine a lot of that is just from NICS being kind of an underfunded thing, but a more thoroughly automated and more publicly accessible database would be a pretty good solution to that, I would think. I'd also think that, more than being totally publicly accessible, it would probably need to be accessible more to local law enforcement and local government, and maybe between private parties if it were verified by credentials, more for protection of personal privacy. Sort of in the same way that buying a used car works out, in lots of states. God damn if that isn't super inconvenient when you buy a car from the 1970's with the original title, though. Certainly there's quite a lot of room for improvement with NICS, but yeah, it's very hard to kind of, push in any direction, in that respect, because it's hard to move away from the propaganda about whatever you might pass being a violation of personal freedom and privacy and yadda yadda ya.

Probably not shoot them in the back, I'd imagine? If I hit them, then that's some poor fucker who might be dead cause of me, and if they're robbing me I'd expect them to not have medical coverage so secondary effects might also fuck them over even harder. It's easier for me to just take the L on my phone, wallet, or, I guess car? But I'm kinda not seeing carjacking that I might notice as much. In any case, it's easier for me to just use my car insurance, if they happen to destroy my car or it becomes unrecoverable, goes to a chop shop, what have you, it's easier for me to get a new government ID, and freeze my credit card and get a new one, and buy a new cheap-ass phone. And maybe be out the 20 bucks in my wallet, which is why you shouldn't carry large amounts of cash.

It's much easier for me to just, confront the problem through these secondary inconveniences that it causes me, rather than trying to like, "pull a hero", and shoot someone in the back. I'm not particularly educated on the intricacies of state-by-state self defense law, either, right, but I also wouldn't be surprised if it was unjustified to shoot someone in the back.

I'm also not totally unconvinced of the idea of armed self-defense, right, it can be totally viable in certain situations.

Say, someone is robbing a store with a gun, and their attention is on the cashier, and not on you, or, say, you're outside, right. Now you're totally free to pull your firearm and engage your off-duty brazilian police officer fantasy, for sure. That's, debatably, a useful scenario for a gun. Maybe a more useful scenario might be an in-progress rape, or assault, or something to that effect, though I'd imagine that most gun owners would not be proficient enough with their weapon to cleanly hit one person wrestling or engaged with another person at any more significant distance, and maybe at close distances depending on the shooter and how engaged the two people are. That's on the shooter, though, that's why regular training is necessary (even better if it's baked in as a requirement of ownership, as I said). I think in these cases it's probably somewhat likely that even the presence of the gun itself could serve to dissuade further engagement, which is a valuable function for it to serve beyond shooting.

So basically, for property crime, it's easier to just deal with the property crime as it has occurred, since usually nobody's been hurt. With interpersonal violent crime, it's still a very highly contextually dependent solution, rather than a kind of, one-size-fits-all solution that everyone makes it out to be.

I would say, if people are super concerned about self-defense, they'd probably want to take some first aid classes, they'd probably want good cardio, they'd probably want to carry pepper spray and maybe more easily know where medical supplies are located, or otherwise have some easily accessible to them within about a minute. They also might want to take some sort of martial arts class, which might also be good for their cardio, and good for fitness in general. Knives are not a good idea, since they remain dangerous and unpredictable, even with training, and guns aren't all that useful in a grappling scenario (and could also potentially injure you), or when you've not seen them coming. I could be persuaded on the position of a taser.

I'm also not going to discount the idea that someone might get a gun and still brandish it as a form of intimidation, illegally, in order to accomplish other goals, right, the law isn't, total morality, it's just not a good idea to do for the vast majority of people. I think the black panthers standing outside the california state capitol is an effective form of protest, and is especially effective given their smaller numbers. It's more efficient, in some ways, than a mass march.

I can also imagine scenarios where people live in circumstances where the police and law won't help them (lots of people), and would probably find it necessary to stay strapped up, if for nothing else than the fact that it's kind of just another minor tool at their disposal. I dunno, there's maybe something to be said there of possession of a gun, again, marking you as a threat, not only to criminals, but to police, but I've also seen lots of body cam footage where police just shoot a guy regardless. Because of an acorn, maybe. So, I'm not sure it matters too much.

Basically my problem with guns is that they rely too much on the ability of the end user to correctly discern the situation at hand before they begin to use them. Oh, is this person about to stab me, pull a gun on me, whatever? It's usually pretty much impossible to know. If it's impossible to know, it's usually not a good idea to pull a gun on someone, and it's usually a much, much worse idea to shoot someone. You've just shortcutted the logical chain of events, there, right? Like the guy in the video says, there are plenty of instances where crazy drugged up homeless people on the new york subway walk around screaming obscenities, even saying stuff like "you're going to die", and shit like that, and they never do anything at all. Certainly, me personally, I find it to be a more moral position, getting stabbed to death, or getting hospitalized and treated by my shitty medical provider, rather than choke, maybe more probably, strangle, someone to death, because they were making a ruckus.

It’s not a good tool if one party is likely, but not guaranteed, to win without your vote, but is much worse than the other. You should only spoil your ballot if your constituency is has a large enough majority that your vote won’t matter at all, or none of the parties are less bad than the others.

The first instance is realistically the only case in which it would really matter that you spoiled your ballot, though. In the second example of when you might spoil your vote, it wouldn't really matter at all, precisely because they have a large enough majority.

gun thread, lemme hit you with some easy unsourced stats real quick.

About a third of all people who attempt suicide will never attempt it again, about a third will attempt it pretty repetitively, and about a third fall somewhere in the middle, where they engage in multiple attempts, but stop after the 5th or whatever. This is to say that suicide is mostly a spur of the moment decision and most people who attempt suicide aren't completely committed to it as a course of action. It's mostly a decision that's made as a result of being kind of fed up and believing you have no other options in your life, it's not a conscientious, committed kind of philosophical position, most of the time. I think there's some sort of minor study about a bridge in, I wanna say canada, where they set up a net underneath one bridge, and another bridge about 20 minutes away didn't have a net set up underneath it. Still, the suicides went down by about the amount you would expect to see, had you just eliminated all the suicides taking place on the bridge with the net. The people committing suicide weren't willing to drive about 20 minutes to dive off of a different bridge, it was just something they sort of did in the moment.

So, that's all a pretty good indication that limiting gun access to the suicidal would be a relatively helpful thing to do. The most counterargument I've heard against this is that, regardless of that, we should still have free access to guns, and they shouldn't be regulated by the government, because our right to guns trumps everyone else's right to not be successful in killing themselves. I don't think I need to tell you that this is a kind of disgusting viewpoint.

I think we can also probably say that the same would be true of gun crime broadly. There are multiple factors going into gun crime, like housing prices, redlining, drug trafficking, mental illness, sure. One of these factors is also guns. Taking away any of these factors, including guns, not just lead to a reduction in gun crime, but would probably lead to a reduction in crime overall. A reduction in crime overall with no substitution in the form of increase knife violence or other forms of violence or crime.

It's much harder to secure your illegally owned high value property, in drugs, if it is more expensive and harder to access a gun. If it's more expensive, that eats into your profit margins. This alone would probably cut down on violent gun crime, and drug related violent crime more broadly.

I also feel like I'm taking crazy pills whenever people talk about how if you limited access to guns, people would just switch over to knives, and knives would be equally as effective. No they wouldn't! You have to be extremely fit and trained properly to wield a knife effectively, and even then, two or three people can easily overwhelm you and jump on top of you. People can more easily outrun you. If you wanted to try and make the leap from one technology to the other, I would think people would compare guns more to IEDs, since there's obviously more of a similarity there in terms of effectiveness, but obviously it's much harder to secure your drugs with IEDs, or to rob someone with a pipe bomb.

The most compelling argument against gun regulations, and especially more extreme gun regulations, is that it's really hard to get them passed, and especially at the federal level, which is what would really cut down on their trafficking. You also have a problem with law enforcement, since most law enforcement, and probably federal law enforcement, wouldn't really be willing or effective in stripping americans of most of their guns. You'd probably see more success with something like limiting ammunition sales or gun manufacturing, but you'd obviously expect to get lobbied against pretty hard, and, at least if you were to limit gun manufacturing, you'd only expect to see results on that maybe 10+ years down the line, in decades, and, depending on how that was passed, you might just see it get repealed before you could see anything from it.

Of course, the caveat with all of that is that most americans are actually perfectly willing to conform to, and vote for, reasonable restrictions on guns. This includes universal background checks, mental health checks, wait periods, obviously limiting things like automatic capabilities and magazine size (though to what extent this limits unlawful use, I'm not quite sure). Probably at the farther end I'd guess americans might vote for requiring licensing from gun owners, and secure handling and transportation, like most european countries, which might limit unlawful use by limiting theft.

I think also lots of gun owners are straight delulu when it comes to how effective their gun might be. They come up with lots of little hypotheticals and heuristics to try and train for, but in a gunfight, it is usually the person who shoots first who wins, the person who has the element of surprise. If you're getting robbed at gunpoint, you've already lost. You almost have to wield your gun like a lunatic, brandishing it at people for intimidation, in order for it to be an effective form of self-defense (this is illegal in most places). There's also the idea that open carry can prevent crime, but that it might also mark you as an easier, higher priority target, so I'm kind of skeptical of it. Maybe it's better for home invasions or something, but that's not a particularly high likelihood anyways, and you have problems with wall penetration and such. Most home robbers are going to want to hit your place when you're not in it anyways.

short-barreled rifles aren’t any more deadly than full-length rifles (they tend to fire the same bullet louder and slower), and they aren’t any more concealable than handguns.

You know, I would push back on this a little bit. It's not really a necessity that they're more lethal than rifles, and more concealable than handguns, they can still do plenty of damage while occupying the middle category.

Handgun cartridges usually travel at below the necessary 2100 fps required to create permanent hydrostatic wound cavities, which means they need more shots on target to do a similar amount of damage. Unlike sawed off shotguns (which I think are registered as destructive devices? idk), which tend to be unwieldy to fire, especially at range, an SBR can be fitted with a suppressor, and has the potential to fire hotter and lighter loads capable of defeating level 3+ body armor, unlike a handgun. Probably not at the same time as a suppressor would be used, but, dealer's choice, I guess. All of this is in a package that can potentially be carried, somewhat easily, in a large to mid-sized coat along with spare magazines. Unlike a normal rifle, which might require something like a larger trench coat, or poncho, or what have you. SBRs are also going to be much more usable at range compared to your conventional handgun, it's sort of along the lines of an advanced PDW in that respect, with maybe a slightly larger form factor.

So, if we're kind of, thinking about the possible attack vectors that this could be used for, I think it's understandable why federal law enforcement might be a little bit more concerned about this, compared to long rifles, handguns, or shotguns, which occupy more distinct niches that are perhaps a little bit easier to safeguard against with conventional tactics. No comment on the pistol brace thing, that was kinda stupid, but the SBR ban doesn't make absolutely no sense, as long as you're evaluating it from a very particular perspective.

I have heard it before that the hardest part is getting access to reliable chemical primers. But I think if you were looking at all available options on an equal footing, you'd probably be more likely to go with some sort of electronic ignition system, or something of that nature.

I see this sentiment a lot, and I mean, realistically, would you? Getting splashed with acid mostly equates to a flesh wound, maybe with side effects like blindness, or muscular numbness. There's necessary skin grafting and things of that nature, sure. But that kind of attack, generally, strikes me as having much less lethal potential compared to, say, a shooting or a stabbing. If you get a hole poked in your heart, you're basically guaranteed dead within a minute, and if you get a hole poked in many of your major organs, arteries, veins, you could bleed out within the next couple minutes.

Compare that to an acid attack, which, granted, is extremely unpleasant as it burns away at your nerve endings, but would seem much less likely to be lethal, and has a much more straightforward path to recovery, in lots of cases.

I honestly think that anything short of straight up banning the sale of gunpowder will have a temporary at best effect on gun violence, and do less than nothing at worst.

I don't even think that would really help all that much. You would maybe increase the relative complexity required to build a gun, but I think you'd still get plenty of people who are able to utilize improvised home explosives in their homemade firearms designs. Of another variety, you'd also probably see a rapid influx and growth of the airgun market, which is already pretty far along in it's ability to substitute and even outclass normal firearms, in some respects (mostly in cost, and consistent shot over shot accuracy, rather than in "combat efficacy", depending on what you mean by that). I'm also sure you'd see designs that adapt more mundane forms of explosives. Propane strikes me as a particularly good candidate, but you could also probably just use normal gasoline as a propellant, hydrogen peroxide, H2O2, butane, you could probably even use wood gas.

I think there are too many machine shops in america to realistically stop america's position globally as a firearms manufacturer, in a vacuum. As you say, you'd need to more combat the external factors going into it, rather than trying to kind of, try to make sweeping bans around it. Especially as those sweeping bans can be more selectively applied to particular communities, to increase their criminalization, as we've seen time after time.

The caveat I would place around that, is that handguns are a pretty terrible suicide vector, I think it's something like half of all gun deaths are suicides. Of suicides generally, about a third will never try again, and it's a spur of the moment decision, and about a third will repetitively try over and over, with the remainder falling somewhere in the middle of multiple attempts. So preventing guns from falling into those, at least third, of hands, could be a good form of regulation. Though, that point is somewhat unrelated to the conversation at hand, here, I just think it's a pretty good point I don't hear people bring up a lot.

Yeah. I just kinda write how I talk a lot of the time. The commas end up being necessary because I kind of naturally talk backwards, yoda-style. If I had/wanted to commit more time to this, I also probably would've written a shorter letter.

Neither should lots of short haul trucking, more specifically drayage trucking, that industry sucks. We probably need to move more towards vans and stuff.

as long as those transactions can be faithfully linked to the event on the blockchain.

That kind of seems like the big glaring video game boss style weak point, to me. I feel like you'd still need some external third party to verify that everything is properly linked up to the blockchain, or like, someone could just impersonate someone else through whatever things are used to link something to the blockchain, and then it's just kinda back to square one, I would think. I dunno, I think also maybe I just don't really quite get it.

I read all the replies in kind of, an order going from simplest to what looked to be like the more complicated ones, and this seems like the least charged and best explanation of the sort of, externalities, and it seems like a pretty good overview of it. The other guy did a good summary of how the technology works for a dumbass like me but I'm still not sure I got all of it.

So, like, you could kind of conceive of a use for these technologies generally, right, but it would seem like, even from your explanation and also from what I kind of passively know already, this is kind of, reliant on a libertarian conception of society, which isn't necessarily bad. I think more concerningly it also seems like both of the basic technologies, there, PoW and PoS, are vulnerable to abuse from the powerful, or from those who have more resources, with maybe PoS being less so, I dunno, still don't really get how that one works specifically which might change it. Which is sort of, antithetical to a libertarian conception of society. I mean unless you're an ancap but those guys are dumbasses.

So I dunno. It seems like a kind of inherently conflicted technology to me, like, paradoxical. I kinda hope someone can conceivably work out the problems of power abuse, but that would seem to be what I define as a "whole enchilada" style of issue, there.

Still, I do like the ability to freely buy drugs and circumvent the government, that's kind of epic. Well, most of the time, anyways. Maybe not when the CIA does it, or when narcos and cartels do it, but I dunno how much either of them have tied up in crypto, it'd probably make more sense for both of them just to deal in fiat currency or trade resources or something.

Good explanation. I am extremely bad at math, I never made it past kind of, high school algebra, and I still can't do basic math very well, but this explained it pretty well, thank you. So, someone has to start a transaction before mining can start, if that's how it works?

I just wrote out another comment, and I think I kinda figured out my core question, but, is there a way to save my medical information without doxxing myself, if this is supposed to be like, a public database, you know, if that's kinda the point, is that everyone can look at everyone else's stuff? I got the impression that a lot of the current blockchain stuff wasn't capable of the necessary levels of storage that would be required for like, health records, on their own.

I dunno, maybe you could have some situation where you have a key, that opens up some cryptography on the blockchain, and that blockchain piece when unlocked gives you another key that lets you access your medical records, or something like that, and that might be able to fit. But, then, I don't really see how that's any different from just having like, the key to the person's medical records be contingent on person. Like biometric security, or government ID, or something.

Point out wherever I've made wrong assumptions here, I'm just kind of talking out my ass, and hoping that I'm correct inso that the conversation can continue and I can scrape more out of it, I don't really expect to be right.