My thoughts on this is that genocide has been common outside of America in the last ~100 years and that Americans need to act differently than the rest of the world in an effort to keep it from happening here.
I don’t think everyone in the entire world disagrees and I think many people in the world do agree with my point of view . I also think it would be more constructive for people who disagree to disagree respectfully rather than shake their head in disapproval - with the understanding that two rational actors can arrive at different and reasonable conclusions because they value parameters differently. I work with statistics and probability every day. It’s my understanding that certain assumptions and modeling were made in the statistics so that the probabilities may not apply to me in general. I also think that governments may not act generally tyrannically, but specifically tyrannically and target certain groups, and may even have the popular support of most people in the country like what’s happening with the Uyghurs in China right now. In this case a general strike wouldn’t be useful at all because the majority of people in the country would be happy and productive.
I get where you’re coming from, but I lived in Portland for years where the police were essentially suppressed by the district attorney Eric Schmidt (and other factors that were occurring during this time in Portland and in America). This led to violent criminals essentially controlling the city at night and which lead to unfortunate outcomes for my family. Simultaneously this came at a time where the previous president was threatening my job and livelihood with mandates and I was receiving emails from our national HR that we may lose our jobs if we did not comply. These two events did not make me feel safe for years, I do feel safer with the current president.
It seems you have been around violence but have concluded differently than I have.
I think that all rights are hypothetical until they are used. People in America have the right to free speech and assembly but depending on your perspective these rights are hypothetical for most people because they don’t use their speech or right to assembly very often or to the fullest extent. In some states, women have the right to have an abortion but many don’t use that right so hypothetically for them it doesn’t have any value. I think with the right to keep and bear arms it’s the same, for a good person defending themselves with a gun this hypothetical right becomes applied and has an immeasurable value to them. I don’t think we should discard any of our rights even if they are rarely used. I don’t think the risk of a genocide or civil war is infinitesimal, I think these sort of events happen often and are guaranteed over a long enough timeline. I think that people who are well armed would be better off in these situations and may even be the people who put something like a genocide to a stop.
In my case, the criminals physically left because I had a firearm. That week the police response time was anywhere from three hours to three days. This was in Portland, Oregon and our car had been stolen three times before, my girlfriend‘s bike was also stolen and my car was broken into three times, my other car was totaled by a drunk driver without any repercussions. We left Portland shortly after meeting a British person who had been kidnapped and forced to withdraw money from ATMs.
I would love to live in a world where everybody has what they want but we don’t live in that world. That being said there is no excuse for somebody taking something that does not belong to them. I was deeply hurt by these experiences and forever changed in the way that I think and act. I learned that sometimes when I told people about the things that had happened to us, I felt that that person had sympathy for the criminals and no sympathy for me. I learned that it is a fact that police cannot be everywhere, they cannot react instantly, and even if they can react sometimes they won’t for political reasons. I still think of the time where I was sucker punched by some man on the street for no reason which is what initially lead me to purchase a firearm for self-defense. I can’t fix society, but I can protect myself and my loved ones.
I am personally concerned that I may be the victim of genocide, and far more people have died from genocide perpetrated by governments than by school shootings. I’m not trying to be dense, I’m simply saying that history of demonstrated this. I’m also concerned that I will be the victim of violent crime and I’ve also had to defend myself from violent criminals in the past. Have you had any of these experiences? I’m curious to hear your thoughts if you’ve ever feared for your life in this way? Call me selfish, but I personally don’t want to be hurt. Thank you for your response.
Some years back, I had a discussion with an older woman who struck a conversation with me innocently enough about weather or something. She turned the topic to politics and volunteered an opinion, her tone and expression indicated to me that she expected me to agree with her statement. I told her that I respectfully disagreed with her and I also told her why. Her expression soured and she told me that because she was a schoolteacher she thought guns should be banned because too many children had been killed by people using guns on them. I agreed with her that it was tragic and that I hoped we could live in a world where kids wouldn’t die from people using guns on them. In my life I want to be rational and honest and I want to listen to people. I listen to people and I hope they listen to me because that’s how ideas are exchanged. I asked her how I myself could avoid becoming the victim of a genocide without guns. I wonder this myself. I’ve read about genocides, the millions of people dead in China, Russia, Germany, Poland, Africa and Gaza too, I’ve also seen rioting and violence firsthand in Los Angeles and Portland and I wonder how I can ensure that my girlfriend and I will be safe now and into the future. I have no solution except for responsible gun ownership. A few years ago our car was stolen in Portland, the police did not help and the 911 phone service was down at the time. The only way I could get the car was to physically go and pick the car up, a car surrounded by criminals, of course I needed a gun to make sure I was safe. I think about natural disasters or occasions where government is unable or unwilling to protect its citizens - how will good people defend themselves against evil people? I’ve seen violence firsthand so many times that I have a visceral reaction to the thought that someone would take my guns away - I simply wouldn’t let it happen because I know if I did then I wouldn’t be able to prevent myself from being killed and dumped in an unmarked mass grave by a 19 year old kid who thinks he’s doing the right thing because of a mandate from a politician, and I wouldn’t be able to stop evil people.
She disagreed, I disagreed with her, she made points I feel were unfair oversimplifications “guns have more rights than women,” but we had a respectful discussion but she didn’t want to talk with me anymore after that. I would’ve talked with her after because I value what people have to say and I want to have discussions. I think we can have discussions but we should never take away the rights of citizens.
It might not be on the national level, but we’re fighting over here in California to maintain/take back our gun rights. A court recently ruled that the state cannot require a background check for ammunition, we also got rid of the one gun a month rule recently as well. This progress gives me hope we still have so much more work to do re. privacy, property rights and freedom of speech!
I have done research and analysis long enough to understand that we all need to remain humble and refrain from assuming a conclusion without substantial evidence.
When I read the sentence “All of which have had deep funding cuts.” I speculate that this response is a simple signal amplification without any added evidence and without critique. I think it’s an attempt at self and collective affirmation.
Who is to say that funding cuts in academia won’t have short and long-term benefits for society and also result in a net increase in happiness and productivity? We simply don’t know yet. Supply and demand of valuable thought and research may redistribute within the economy!
I think there are very political people out there, the world may benefit from forums which cater to people who are political and separately to those who aren’t very political!
I use Spyder daily for data analysis, plotting and preparing presentations. Does Positron have any improvements over Spyder? I’m not a “programmer” at all and love to use basic IDEs to analyze telemetry generated from testing.
Within the last half decade it appears like IBM overtly markets to whatever administration and party is in power, a few years ago they were marketing creepy vaccine passports [1].
It seems expensive at around $4-5 per person per year! I think a satellite could gather useful population information based on a year of observing people entering and leaving their homes. I also wonder why the government needs to account for everyone in America? Can’t it just account for taxpayers who voluntarily work with the government system at the state and federal level?
This is very similar to when the CDC stopped recording defensive gun use statistics! The pendulum is certainly swinging, on the other hand, I think we should retain data even if it doesn’t align with the current administration. I think it’s important that people should record data that they value, independent of governments, so they can maintain a source of truth throughout time. Articles from Axios, NYT and posts on X can change or be deleted, it’s important to take snapshots to go back and check for deltas.
I used the Microsoft Surface as my daily driver for years, the finish rubbed off in the first few uses and looked terrible, the screen broke as well. They do look beautiful and it was pretty fast.
Politicians and bureaucracies refuse to build up the nuclear power plants and power distribution infrastructure required to get California drivers off gasoline. I’m just concerned about all the tracking in new electric cars. Hopefully we can build up electric car infrastructure soon and “jailbreak” electric cars with nauseating telemetry. I’m also interested to see data that would correlate increasing gas prices, CoL increases and inflation with a rise in property crime. We don’t need to make gasoline cleaner, we need to make cheaper electric cars and more numerous charging stations.
It is so rare to get in-depth FEA reports like what you’ve linked us here. Here’s what Boeing states in the report:
“ There is still detail design work that will need to be completed. However, both the C4 and C11 configurations come close to an acceptable conceptual design. A small test program would be needed to address some of the outstanding questions. Additional modeling and optimization are also needed at the detail design level. The inclusion of portals, motor attachments, tanks and other peripherals would need to be included in a final analysis.
More work needs to be done to define thermal load and cure shrinkage for both the composite cylinder and for the bonded joint. This composite structure is much thicker than most of the structure currently being produced. Thermal strains may play a significant role in the design of the structure. The time required for fabrication and the extended time that the material will be at elevated temperature during cure and bonding needs to be examined. These topics were mostly avoided during the first part of the design cycle. This report describes a conceptual design and a preliminary feasibility study. The design is feasible, but will require additional work in the areas of manufacturing, cure kinetics, material allowable, assembly, and dimensional tolerance.”
In summary - even if Oceangate developed a robust design, they’d still need to manufacture the submarine. It appears they never built enough test articles to develop a baseline for robustness, because they never did destructive testing at depth with actual hardware they never knew their margins and were never able to validate their models to reality.
This is wonderful. It’s increasingly obvious that commercial spaceflight programs are going to get the most mass and people to the Moon, Mars/Venus and Europa/Enceladus. It’s really nice to see motivated and competent people get together to push the boundaries of human achievement.
In my personal experience I found the Portland healthcare system to subpar and adversarial to their patients. It was difficult to find doctors, impossible to find in-person therapists (I take on high-stress jobs and talking to others about it helps keep me focused). I’m not surprised this exposure occurred, I noticed an atmosphere of carelessness and incompetence during my entire time in Portland.
I support a person or organization’s right to invest in whatever they want. I also think that maybe people are being deluded or misguided by some media outlets so they think that Tesla is in a worse position than it is, or maybe they just didn’t time the market correctly. I do think it’s un-American to short sell a great American company like Tesla though. Many people work for the company and they make great products. I’m reminded of the fact that Bill Gates was shorting Tesla while asking Elon for philanthropic donations.
I use PCBWay professionally for simple fixtures and tooling. I once had parts fabricated from them and on my desk quicker than the time it took our usual domestic supplier to provide a quote - and their quote was more than 10X what PCBWay quoted. I really like their CNC service and I’ve only had one issue where a large part had a bent corner when it arrived due to shipping damage. I quickly removed some material from the fixture and put it in service.
If I own a business with a bathroom it costs me every time someone uses the bathroom. Bathroom use is never free, someone is paying for maintenance and consumables.
That may be true but the people who broke into my car twice didn’t do it because they were addicted to nicotine - they did it because they were addicted to opiates.
I live here. Do not leave anything in your vehicle or it will be broken into! The springtime brings so much theft and crime from what I’ve personally seen. If you go downtown ~50% of blocks have evidence of recent break-ins. It happened to me a few weeks ago right when the weather was getting warmer, a very apparent rise in crime this season.
I’d love too but I dislike using payment processors as middlemen for online transactions! I see you’re using Stripe which is one of the worst processors because they opaquely block all sorts of transactions. It would be great to use a system like this to promote and fund open source projects and fuel cottage industry without having to include megacorporations. Make a mail cash option for people who don’t want to show their papers to a payment processor!
I’m sure that India used its own observation satellites to predict weather patterns and storms but western weather observation satellites monitor the whole Earth and share the information. Not every country should (or can) have its own national weather satellite installation.
The internal mechanisms are quite different, yes, however, the inputs and outputs are for the sake of this discussion, identical. The people, regardless of the system, would probably be performing the same types of operations. I’m not sure you read my original point as I intended it to be understood. A worker making tires under authoritarian communism is still going to be making tires under democratic capitalism - the differences in this worker’s experience may not be the result of these political and economic systems but rather policy at the corporate, departmental or state level which are not unique or exclusive to a particular government or economy.
Any system will self propagate at the expense of other systems and individuals like workers.
There are no alternative economic systems without questionable environmental and safety records. Any production system will be designed to maximize outputs at the quality the customer requires while minimizing process inputs. Whatever psychological and social framework is used organize companies, governments and individuals, the individual workers will still be performing the same assembly processes on the factory floor.
I live in a city (Portland, OR) with an extensive public transportation system, and I own and drive a car for my daily commute. Whenever there are presidential visits or public holidays the public transportation system often grinds to a halt, leaving people late for work by hours. The public transportation system here also exposes people to secondhand smoke from hardcore drugs and also exposes people to violent crime. Commuters and families are often witnesses to public drug scenes. Last year more than a few people were violently assaulted on our public transportation. I am someone who very much likes to take the train or the bus or even ride my bike to work but I recognize that public transportation often fails at the margins. I am a person who values reliability and consistency - public transportation just doesn’t have the uptime or resiliency that I require. Because I live in the northwest and like to enjoy the great outdoors I need a vehicle to get me to trailheads that buses and trains cannot access. I also need a vehicle to carry my large art supplies I take into the wilderness.
I’m not sure your argument is valid, I’m not sure of the point you’re trying to make as it relates to the point I was trying to make.
That being said, a government isn’t infringing on the rights of citizens when the government incidentally creates a situation where the citizen’s ability to exercise their rights is limited. I as a free person have the right to protest, that doesn’t mean the government is obligated to pay for my posters or advertisements, nor are they obligated to protect me, that doesn’t mean they’re infringing on my right to assemble and protest. I’m also not sure that reading books or news is a constitutional right, although writing and reporting is a constitutional right. A government not providing a means for prisoners to purchase or read books does not mean they’re actively infringing on any rights, it’s purely incidental if the prisoner has no access to literature because the government has no obligation to provide literature to prisoners. There is the question of cruel and unusual punishment, but if we go by historical precedent which is important to consider then not providing literature to prisoners is not a cruel punishment.