Always remember that 50% of the population is more dumb than the average American.
Which begs the question of whether or not the median would be pushed up by conservatives actually being a minority in the US (studies claim that 60% of the population is more left leaning than the government regardless of who is in office), or if it would be even worse because we’re all actually just that dumb.
Similar to selling your car privately. There are some forms involved to recognize that you no longer own nor are responsible for the gun in question. It’s probably a little more strict and polished now (maybe not), but it wasn’t that long ago that you kept a copy in case the cops came knocking looking for the gun and a copy got filed away in a drawer somewhere for basically the same reason. I can’t remember if gun stores were in charge of the records for private sales (which wouldn’t make sense) or if they were filed with the town/state, but it was all physical paper in a drawer somewhere regardless. There wasn’t like a system actively tracking ownership - so long as both parties had a LTC, they were okay and third party sales could be done anywhere.
Don’t worry, they want to replace your hardware with a “cloud based computing solution” as well.
When did that absurdity come back? I thought we killed the cloud computer nonsense a decade ago.
True, but it’s the one that I know and up until around the early to mid 2000s, you could buy a shotgun in Wal Mart. They had a whole section dedicated to firearms.
Plus, the whole selling an AR out of the trunk of a car in the Wal Mart parking lot is something that a kid I went to school with actually did in Mass. There’s still plenty of regulation involved (and increasing by the sounds of it based on what you said), but at the time it basically boiled down to signing the paperwork signifying the change in ownership and resale of the firearm. The only time the state would’ve been made aware was if they requested to see the paperwork, AFAIK.
Besides, the vast majority of people 3d printing guns are people with an LTC anyway, and the most frequently printed things are furniture and accessories. 3d printed guns are still largely a novelty, despite how much they’ve improved over the years. Even the much feared gun that Luigi Mangione supposedly used was bought legally, and any 3d printed parts were merely aftermarket grips or the like. The only large scale use of them that I’m aware of is in Myanmar, where they’re using 3d printed guns to fight against a genocidal regime largely because they can get 3d printers and ammo, but no country is willing to support the resistance and so they can’t get any actual firearms. You’re much more likely to see a Garage Gun like the one used to kill Shinzo Abe, and those are completely legal by federal law - largely because it would be impossible to prevent somebody from just gluing a PVC pipe to a 2x4 and using a nail as a firing pin.
But firearms are so easy to obtain in so many states that it’s much easier to buy one than to build one from scratch (whether that’s buy one in the state or one with more lax laws nearby). There used to be a ban on gun stores within the city limits of Chicago, but Republicans got elected into office for like a decade and not only repealed that ban but also took the bite out of the gun laws, and now they claim that Chicago is proof that gun laws don’t work when the city used to have some of the lowest rates of gun violence in the country. When they’re not being bought right in the city/state, they’re being smuggled in from the next state over with little concern for punishment.
No, but if the laws are anything like Massachusetts, then you can buy an AR-15 out of the trunk of the car of a dude who was selling it on Facebook.
Completely legal resale so long as you both sign off on the ownership paperwork.
Artistic? I see nothing in their posts to prove that they haven’t been reposting from other sources or straight up posting slop. Not that post history is everything, I’m not one to post myself, but based on the pro-AI stance, I am fully willing to believe the latter.
You should hang onto it. They dug up some of the ones that were buried a few years back as part of a documentary and sold some of them at auction while the rest were donated to museums for preservation.
I think we also experienced a few unusually high number of school shootings for a few years around 2016, and the media probably reports them less because Trump has taken up all of the media spotlight.
I seem to remember noting about a decade ago that we had a very high number of school shootings in the first 6 months of a year, and doing the math out it was something like 1.5 a month. I definitely remember talking to people about how crazy it was that we had one basically every few weeks.
This is similar to how many of the big names in the video game industry were built. Disgruntled designers leaving companies like Atari to start their own company. It’s how Blizzard got their start, and I believe Ubisoft, EA, and at least a couple of the other big names were founded the same way.
Then, of course, the bean counters started taking over and it all went downhill from there once they went from keeping the designers on task with realistic goals to maximizing profits.
If anybody wants to know just how bad the crash was, Atari buried about 700,000 game cartridges and consoles in a landfill in New Mexico after the release of the infamously bad ET game for the Atari. A game that supposedly had more cartridges manufactured than there were existing consoles for them to be played on at the time.
It was so bad that the home console effectively disappeared from the US market as investors and customers believed that the fad had run its course and companies went back to focusing exclusively on arcade cabinets until Nintendo came in about 3 years later and proved that there was still a market for home consoles. It was so bad that Nintendo changed the name of the NES for the Japanese market to the Famicom - advertising it as a “family computer” system, not a game console.
Step 1: Ban “assault rifles” (no clear definition so specifics will vary greatly from place to place)
Step 2:??
Step 3: Mental health crisis, economic crisis, and various other underlying causes of gun violence are solved
Not to say that guns aren’t an issue. They are, but this is no different than arming the police with military surplus munitions and vehicles instead of decriminalizing drug use, improving social security programs and education, etc. It does nothing to actually address the issue - especially since these gun laws never actually target the guns most frequently used in gun violence/crime (pistols), and are never followed up by any step 2.
It’s security theater to look like they’re doing something to address the issue.
I think it’s more accurate to say that the majority of people are indifferent to AI and that businesses are caught up in the hype of cheap genAI being good enough to replace specialized workers for specific fields like graphic design.
People use it for certain things that they lack skills in or don’t want to spend effort on but seem to generally see a lot of it as a solution looking for a problem and resent how it’s being forced into everything. Similar to the resentment towards cars moving to put everything on giant touchscreens. The last time I bought a car I was talking to the salesman about how I had no interest in the newer cars with the giant screens and he said that practically everybody that came in said the same thing and that car manufacturers are pivoting back to physical controls because nobody wants the touchscreens. Enough people would rather buy 10+ year old cars than newer models because of the lack of physical controls that it’s forcing car companies to reconsider their push for touchscreens for everything.
Cell phone companies were quaking in their boots (okay, not really, but you know what I mean) over the fact that even in their own polling they were finding that 50% of users either didn’t use AI features or didn’t find them useful in their day to day phone usage and 30% found it actively made their user experience worse. 20% positive feedback is not a good sign for a healthy market with potential for growth.
Add in that kids are conflating AI with low-quality and false information. Literally using the term AI when they don’t believe something like the way we used to use Photoshopped or “fake news,” and using “slop” liberally and frequently.
Even experts in various industries seem to have a weird paradoxical opinion on AI despite being pro AI. There’s been consistent polling that has shown that experts say that AI is good enough to replace people in any given field except for their field of expertise, where it’s too unreliable to ever be able to do the job. It doesn’t matter what the field is, the opinion is the same.
It’s probably safe to say that people don’t really care one way or another about AI, but dislike the companies involved in the AI bubble.
By 2003, I believe EA and Microsoft had also implemented CD Keys with a limited number of uses, usually 5 or so. If they hadn’t by then, it would be by 2010 at the absolute latest.
The war on secondhand sales of games and software had been going on since CD Keys themselves were introduced in the 90s, and probably in some other format in the 80s that I’m not aware of. Digital marketplaces were just the next logical step in the fight and the carrot of convenience for people to sacrifice their sense of ownership.
I think this is why Steam is well-loved today and why people say that they keep winning by doing nothing. When Steam came out, everybody hated it. You gave up ownership of your games and the online aspect was obnoxious with early 2000s internet. But they continued to add features of convenience - friends lists, achievements, stable servers for all kinds of games (like indie games), modding support and tools, the ability to download patches in the background, a user score/review system, frequent sales, etc. And now, Steam has so many features that it’s become a positive feature for a game in people’s minds while so much of the competition only has the lack of ownership and forcing people to download their launcher to offer.
In a comment on another post about this the other day, I saw someone claim that they had to resort to CCleaner to remove Chrome off of their system after this update. Chrome wouldn’t let them uninstall the browser manually.
Whether that’s true or not, I don’t know, I haven’t used Chrome in a while and I’m not gonna install it just to try (or ever again - I like my ad blockers, thank you very much). But, with the current state of the software landscape, it wouldn’t surprise me if it were true.
I mean, they were at one point urging their admins to “take over other instances and kick out all the non-communists,” so…
Plus, there’s a reason that Blahaj defederated them. Toxic people will be toxic.
Even before renewables/green energy, we’ve had problems with surplus power in the grid. It’s actually one of the biggest issues for infrastructure to solve in moving away from fossil fuels. We simply don’t have the storage capacity, and nobody has any real plan or path toward a solution as of yet, as far as I know.
For probably a century or so now, power companies have been paying manufacturing industries to run their heaviest equipment with nothing in them just to bleed extra power out of the grids during lows in demand because power stations can’t change their outputs fast enough, especially things like nuclear energy. Even stuff like coal or natural gas plants have a spool up or down time that can’t keep pace with the changes in demand.
TBH, it wasn’t that far outside of the basic corporate Dem playbook. Incredibly stupid and definitely lost her the election, for sure, but Dems have been “courting the moderate Republican” (is this “moderate Republican” in the room with us right now?) since Clinton left office - if not longer. It was the most strange and open version of it I’ve ever seen, but I wonder how much of it was her doing and how much was pushed by the party and the party’s campaign managers. Practically all the party ever talks about is how they have to reach across the aisle and convince conservatives to vote for them. We saw it with Hillary as well. They alienated the leftist vote and their own voters to push more conservative policies and lost themselves the election.
Kamala and Walz had a goldmine when they started calling Republicans weird, and they suddenly stopped like 8 days later. If that wasn’t the party muzzling them, I don’t know what is.
To be fair, they did specify right-wing Lemmy instances, not right-wingers in general, and I can’t think of any instances that would meet that definition off the top of my head.
But Hexbear definitely has a reputation as some of the worst of the worst of the normal instances. Blahaj defederated from them despite Ada trying to get the trans communities of both instances connected because of the harassment, brigading, and outright transphobia Hexbear inflicted on Blahaj users for not being the right kind of leftists. You can still find the community discussions on the topic in the general instance posts. They even tried to claim that Blahaj was being transphobic to them. You know, the LGBTQ instance created and ran to be a space for trans people and others first and foremost.
Hexbear is also known to have at least once tried to convince their mods to “take over other instances and ban all the non-communists.”
I believe that at this point if you were to download the stuff to spin up your own instance, Hexbear is on the list of instances that are defederated by default because so many instances have defederated them because of their behavior.
It’s all conjecture at this point, but there’s an argument to be made that increased funding (like when Biden quadrupled their budget, as someone else said he did during his term) could have pushed it back as the Darian Gap is a natural choke point that provides much better bang for your buck compared to having to fight it back across what could potentially be the entire continental US in a few years (or less).
If the feral hog population is a vector as well, we could see it explode like a wildfire out towards the east coast, and with climate change who knows how far north they will go. I don’t think there’s a snowball’s chance in hell of us ever being able to contain it like that again. In 5 years time Canada might be allocating funds towards trying to contain it at the US border.