I miss IRC.
You had to be at least a little smart to connect, and the not-smart or uninformed could be easily identified as connecting from a webirc gateway.
Of course maybe what I miss was just the old Web 1.0- no ‘platforms’, peoples web pages were unique and individual not generic, there was no ‘like comment and subscribe!!’ crap. No algorithms. Discussion was overall more intelligent.
I’m sorry but I don’t believe that privacy violations and massive online tracking is the only solution to that. There are other platforms that don’t track nearly as much, and emerging decentralized platforms where one could build a similar following if that platform got the same kind of mainstream usage. This is not a faustian deal anyone needs to make.
Nice idea, wrong technology.
The problem with QR codes is they’re a. not human readable, and b. not instantly verifiable.
Take a QR code and a stencil, spray a few of the black modules white and white modules black, and now you have a thing that looks exactly like a QR code to any human but in reality will not scan.
A better idea would be requiring a badge number to be displayed in minimum 1" tall letters/numbers on the front of the uniform, and minimum 2" tall letters/numbers on the back of the uniform, whenever on duty.
Yeah exactly. 150% is good. 1500% would be better.
Amen. Unfortunately I feel like there’s a whole generation that has come up with a different mindset. Not that you want to stand up for your rights, but that you will do whatever you want and complain about it if it violates your rights or your privacy, but not actually stop doing it.
I feel like the idea of proactively standing up for your rights or what you believe in rather than just complaining or posting online is no longer in in common parlance.
Is OpenAI likely to fold?
They bought in one day a significant % of the worlds memory output for 2026. Two huge deals with two huge companies, announced at the same time. Neither company knew of the other deal. But those deals weren’t even for chips- they were for finished wafers. I doubt very much OpenAI has the facilities to slice and package wafers. So it seems to me the only point of the deal was to kill the DRAM supply market and drive up prices for their competition.
Wouldn’t be surprised if those finished wafers are going straight in the dumpster.
“For this not to be a bubble by definition, it requires that the benefits of this are much more evenly spread,”
I would correct that to say ‘for this to not be a bubble by definition, it requires that the benefits of this a. Exist and b. Are significant enough to justify the extreme costs of building these systems’
Right now I don’t see anything coming out of this that justifies even 1/10 of the $trillions being poured into AI.
In fact I think you could make an argument that the net result is negative, even for businesses that adopt it, due to the increased prices they will pay for hardware over the next few years. If it makes your employees 5% more efficient great, if it makes your technology 50% more expensive in return, not so great.
It becomes an everybody problem when we can’t buy memory chips
So much of it relies on taking police reports at face value, no questions asked.
It’s actually somewhat worse- a great many DGUs go unreported. After all, someone comes at you threateningly, you pull up your shirt and put your hand on your gun, they suddenly change direction. That’s in a sense a DGU. But most people wouldn’t report it because there’s nothing to report.
Thus most DGU stats come from statistical analysis of phone surveys. That’s why it’s inaccurate as hell, with one smart guy saying it’s 60k and another smart guy saying it’s 4 million. It’s all in how you crunch the data.
But it’s important to note that Hemenway is SOLIDLY anti-gun, if there was a way to make the number lower he’d do it. So I take that as a minimum agreed count.
I haven’t seen anything to suggest legality of ownership translates to defensiveness of use.
Perhaps not, but it does correlate with OFFENSIVENESS of use.
The person who owns an illegal gun is more likely to be a criminal in a gang.
And none of this addresses the central problem of gun ownership - suicide. You are the person most likely to be killed by your own gun.
Correct. Each year about 30-35k people die from gunshot wounds, about 2/3 of those are suicides.
I’ll even give you that increased gun ownership may slightly increase the overall suicide rate- a gun to the head is an easy, painless, instant way to become dead. Instant is the key there, lots of people who choose slower means of suicide change their minds mid-suicide. IE, the guy who jumps off the bridge changes his mind while driving there, the person who takes a bunch of pills changes their mind and pukes / calls 911, etc. If you shoot yourself in the head, you’re dead instantly.
With that all said though, I don’t think this is a valid reason to restrict gun ownership. Suicide is absolutely tragic. But it’s also a decision that a person makes for themself, it’s not something forced upon them. And I don’t believe ‘you might INTENTIONALLY hurt yourself with this tool’ is a valid reason to deny someone from having it. I believe that’s part of having a free country- that if you decide to kill yourself that’s tragic, but it’s ultimately your own responsibility. Just the same- social media and shitty websites can drive a person to suicide, but we don’t shred the 1st Amendment to stop that.
The other countries can simply not oblige (and thus kill NATO). That’s the more realistic option.
I don’t see it.
Sure, the various NATO countries who aren’t Denmark can simply say ‘sorry man we’re out’ and dissolve NATO. Or just refuse to comply, damn the consequences.
They won’t though, because in many cases the threat of NATO is the only thing protecting them.
Look at Eastern Europe on the Russian border- Finland, Estonia, Latvia. Belarus is a RU puppet and Ukraine might lose their war so we can include Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania too. Russia has Navy assets in the Black Sea so you can also consider Bulgaria and Turkey.
If NATO went away tomorrow, do you really think Russia wouldn’t try to gobble one or two of them up? You really think they wouldn’t succeed in at least one or two cases?
And what about Canada? They’re a NATO member and they have real military force. Same with UK, Norway, Sweden, Germany.
Do any of them WANT to go up against USA? Of course not.
If the US truly went rogue and invaded a sovereign nation, would they do it? Probably, because if they didn’t, there’s no guarantee they wouldn’t be next.
Lol no they wouldn’t. Neither would they care about who owns Greenland (except probably Russia), neither would they waste immense amounts of money and manpower to fight the biggest military and economy in the world for no real gain, and neither would 2/3 of the listed countries (Ru, NK) be able to do anything serious against US anyway (outside of suicidally throwing nukes at it).
They DGAF about Greenland. Greenland isn’t worth shit.
But for any of them to reduce the US’s role in the world economy or worldwide diplomacy, that’s a golden opportunity.
Thing is they needn’t commit huge resources to the war. Just a small force that would be able to make it hurt for the US, and the real war is fought in the media. It gives them a chance to be the heroes and paint US as the villain.
Sounds like a fantastic deal to me.
I’ll add to that- within a year’s time, less than 50% of the affected devices will even have a patch available.
Determining the exact count is difficult. If you look at the wikipedia page on defensive gun use, you see that since it’s not centrally tracked and many go unreported, the only way to get any sort of number is with phone surveys and statistical analysis. That leaves a lot of opening to interpretation of the data.
Thus you have anti-gun researchers like Hemenway who put it at ~60,000 incidents/year and pro-gun researchers like Lott who put it at 2-4 million incidents/year. (I say anti/pro gun because Hemenway’s other writings advocate for gun control, while Lott’s other writings advocate against gun control). Obviously the number is somewhere in the middle.
But the firearm homicide rate (excluding suicides) is around 10k-15k/year, which means even if you only go with worst case data it means there’s 4x more DGUs as there are firearm homicides.
I’ll give you that’s a slightly apples to oranges comparison, as many firearm assaults don’t end in death.
But the real issue IMHO, which is unfortunately not tracked AFAIK, is how many gun crimes are committed with legal guns. IE, legally purchased/owned guns by a non-prohibited gun owner. That IMHO is some data that would really help settle the issue.
I’d argue that the lion’s share of those 10-15k homicides per year are committed with illegal guns / prohibited owners, they are gang and drug related. The problem is that’s often hard to prove and it doesn’t show up in data sets. For example, you have incidents in sites like ‘mass shooting tracker’ like:
‘On friday at 11pm, victim1 and victim2 were leaving a house party in the 12,000 block of Nowhere St. Two unknown males opened fire from a moving vehicle. Victim1 and victim2 were wounded, along with bystander1 and bystander2 who were injured non-critically.’
Now that’s a ‘mass shooting’ because 4 people got shot. Read between the lines and it’s ‘gangland drive-by’. But you can’t prove that as the victims won’t admit to being in a gang and the perps weren’t caught. But you can bet those guns were illegal and the car was stolen.
American here (not a Trump fan).
There’s three things we should be looking at IMHO.
First- Trump is a publicity man, an actor. He understands the camera.
Think of a magic show. You have the magician and the cute assistant in a swimsuit. So when they set up the trick the assistant is flourishing her hands and dancing over the stage to distract you from noticing that the magician palmed your card instead of shuffling it back into the deck.
Trump understands this. And he knows how to play both the magician and the assistant.
So if he says something wild like this, understand he WANTS attention on that statement, which probably means he DOESN’T want attention on something else. Like Epstein. If those files have any kind of actual proof he partook in Epstein’s services, there’s a good chance that an impeachment might actually succeed to conviction. Because it’s easy to ‘stand with your party leader’, it’s a lot harder to say ‘yes I stand by my vote that the guy in the picture with his dick in a 14yo girl should stay President’.
Point being- whenever Trump says something outrageous like this, your first question should be 'what DOESN’T he want me paying attention to?
Second- understand that USA literally cannot annex Greenland by force. Greenland is a territory of Denmark, and Denmark is a member of NATO. If the US invades Denmark, all other NATO companies are OBLIGATED to provide military support. So that would basically kick USA out of NATO, and you can bet your bottom dollar that not only NATO but also Russia, China, North Korea, etc would all fall over themselves to ‘help respect and defend the sovereign territory of Denmark from illegal invasion’. That very quickly becomes a ‘US vs Rest Of World’ war and even with our giant military there’s NO chance we win against the entire rest of the planet combined. Plus militarily we would be isolated, ostracized from the world economy.
Americans understand this. Our government understands this. Congress understands this. Even if Trump does not, Congress would not authorize such a war.
As for tariffs- Congress is much more hesitant to curtail Trump’s tariff powers, but their tolerance has a limit (somewhere). It’s one thing to enact tariffs ‘to protect American manufacturing’, they’ll generally tolerate a ‘good faith’ effort like that. But when the tariff becomes punitive to countries that aren’t supporting an annexation that obviously isn’t going to happen, I think Congress might step in.
Third- While this all may well be a distraction or a strategy, it is doing actual harm to our international relations. If I was a citizen of EU, AU, Asia, etc, I would be saying 'the US can no longer be trusted to lead the world economy, the rest of the world needs to find a solution where the US is ‘one among many’ not calling the shots. And a big part of that would likely be a different worldwide reserve currency. Because right now this is like being on a bus where every few minutes the driver jokes about swerving in front of an oncoming semi truck- even if he won’t do it, you still don’t want to be on that bus.
What this also means is that the next Presidential election is important not just for American internal politics but for determining what our place in the world will be going forward. While Trump is ineligible to be re-elected, I think it’s important that the US send a clear message this isn’t the sort of statesmanship that we want representing us. That DOESN’T mean blindly vote blue. It means vote in primaries, vote for candidates who act like statesmen.
As a gun owner, and someone who has studied many use of force situations, I know all of this.
However someone who takes 10 rounds and keeps coming is extremely rare. And that will generally only happen when none of those rounds hit critical areas.
Part of responsible gun ownership is understanding that you are responsible for every bullet you fire, and it will keep going until something stops it.
However I would challenge your position really with two core concepts:
The overwhelming majority, 90+%, of defensive gun uses end with no shots fired. The criminal sees the gun and runs away. In those situations, the gun did not kill, it protected.
Look up the Wikipedia page on defensive gun uses. Depending on which researcher you go with, there are somewhere between 60,000 and several million defensive gun incidents each year. If what you are saying is true, even if you assume that 90% of them have no shots fired, there would still be tens of hundreds of thousands at minimum incidents where the gun killed rather than protected. Because it didn’t stop the assailant, because an innocent bystander was hit, etc. Why is this not major news? Why are the anti-gun lobbyists not showing up to Congress with a stack full of news articles?
I would argue that is simply because it does not happen the way you say.
It’s important, but also vital to provide context, as the headline makes it sound current.
I’m not so sure. There are numerous widely circulated videos shot by members of the public that are easily available online. Any of those could be entered in as evidence. You just have a question of strength of case. If the video original starts 30 seconds previous and shows the agent not identifying himself and charging at the car, then you have a pretty open and shut case. The only question becomes identifying the specific agent. If ICE will not turn over the identity and it’s not clear from the video, it may be more difficult to charge that person. That would lead to an interesting State versus Federal showdown where the state court would try to subpoena a federal agency, and I’m sure the federal agency would do everything possible to stop that subpoena.
That’s a legal. Metered utilities can be either included in the rent, or metered on a per unit basis. In this setup, if your neighbor uses a lot of utilities your bill will go up. That’s why this is illegal.
I’m usually not in favor of this sort of thing. But I think there are some instances where that may be justified. This screen serves ZERO public benefit. It’s just there to annoy you. So IMHO doing something like 3d printing a cover that you leave on the screen is a public service.