121 karma · joined January 17, 2008
A quick google gave me this as a top result: https://www.npr.org/2022/02/21/1082124528/ukraine-russia-put...
We should have given them this support when Russia took crimea, but didn't. The least we can do now is follow through on our agreement.
(Plus all of the other reasons in this thread -- there are fantastic reasons for the western nations to support Ukraine's defense separate from those I'm referring to here)
In the UK, where you're not allowed to use firearms to defend yourself, home invasions where someone is home is 64%. In the US, where it is permissible, home invasions where someone is home is 27.6%.
You're over twice as likely to be robbed while you're home in the UK as you are in the US. I'm sure the factors are complex, but knowing that you're actually risking your life when you break into a home in the US has to be one of the factors.
https://www.nimblefins.co.uk/home-insurance/burglary-statist... https://www.thezebra.com/resources/research/burglary-statist....
This is exactly the scenario the 2A is designed to thwart.
It doesn't guarantee a win, but it gives civilians a chance to group together to protect themselves. I've got friends from Hong Kong, and what the government did there to a helpless (disarmed) population in order to crush any unapproved views absolutely blew my mind. People being murdered, rounded up and vanished, thrown from buildings, beaten in the streets on a wide scale. If the troops are given false information, and move in to attack, then they're going to be made to pay dearly for every mile they advance. There's a lot more people out of uniform then in it, and I mean a lot -- winning against a mostly disarmed population (in the middle east) is more than we can handle. Attacking a heavily armed population in its home area is suicide for the attacking forces.
To use a real world example: Columbine was a failed school bombing because their detonators didn’t work because the product they used for the detonator’s changed between their testing and when they purchased the final “real” devices.
The guns were intended to keep everyone terrified and in place until the bombs could kill everyone.
A fluke manufacturing change to the product (I think a clock) between their detonator tests and their actual attack is the only thing that stopped nearly everyone in the school from being killed that day. They even set a bomb outside of the school to kill the first responders when they arrived — again, it was a horrible tragedy, but what happened was so much less than what was intended.
The missiles are separately regulated, and likely not legal for private ownership. Missiles and high explosives are licensed and legislated for separately.
Any weapon that’s part of a standard infantry soldiers load out should be available, new from the manufacturer. I don’t have a problem with the background checks that are required for a class 3 weapon, like an m16 or a Thompson sub machine gun (https://dealernfa.com/product-category/machine-guns/all-tran...), but as it stands only wealthy people can still afford to purchase them.
In my local community groups I see people demanding metal detectors be installed in our schools.
This is in response to: An attempted murderer being chased by police, going into a school he doesn’t belong in, barricading himself inside and murdering children.
It’s feel good security theater. If you’re in the middle of a killing spree you’re not going to stop because of a metal detector. If you’re dealing with kids bringing weapons to school, that’s different — but the responses to this event from people local to me are about 90% make-believe security.
California, Illinois and New York have different populations and different issues than Ohio, Texas, and Alabama for example.
I believe fully automatic assault weapons and machine guns should be available for purchase, new, just like any other weapon. (Fully automatic weapons are legal to buy and own right now in the US, if you pay a $200 stamp tax and wait 9 months for the ATF to process the paperwork, but you can only buy "NFA" regulated machine guns that were registered in 1986 or before ... which means they're all collectors items now, and the cheapest machine guns are $15-20k and up).
Most people I know would like to see the existing laws enforced, and don't want anything new passed or put in place.
The conservatives I know believe everyone should know how to handle a firearm safely, and believe people have a right to defend themselves from criminals, as well as the government. It appears to be liberals trying to disarm fellow citizens and make sure the government has all encompassing powers.
To state that differently: one side appears to believe that if we pass law "A" or ban object "B" that everything will be better. The other side seems to believe "bad" or "evil" people/governments will always exist, and that everyone has the right to actively defend themselves and their families. Including the people that don't like "B".
"The National Guard is a state-based military force that becomes part of the reserve components of the United States Army and the United States Air Force when activated for federal missions."
It may be organized by state, but it's a federal force.
The 2A exists to give people tools to fight the government (or support it), it's not a gun fetish, it's literally a tool to empower citizens. If you doubt that people armed with rifles, shotguns, and semi-automatics can overcome the Worlds Biggest Armed Forces(tm), then look at the most recent example: Afghanistan (repelled the US -and- the USSR).
Fox News is the echo chamber of the right, while everything else is either extremely left or mostly left echo chambers. CNN, NBC, NPR, ABC,CBS spew just as much trash, however it fits the politics of the left.
It’s all biased, it’s all garbage. The only different is the politics of that channel.
I have run ad supported services in the past, and I could easily see how non-identifiable traffic might actually have less than a zero value to my operation (as in, they’re costing me money to service).
The biggest difference between a spam e-mail and website access is the client is actually making the request, the website isn’t pushing itself on you.
Maybe it's important to you and maybe people you support -- but that has nothing to do with your right to make demands against someone who put their work out there for free.
If you need a guaranteed support model, you either do it yourself or hire a company to provide that for you. I've used _supported_ commercial software that's garbage, and I've used FOSS software which has been absolutely rock solid. Also, commercial or not, just because it's supported doesn't mean the problem will be fixed or a feature added.
If you aren't directly paying someone to be there for you, then you're trusting goodwill and/or the community at large to fill that role for you. If you need that assurance, pony up to one of the consultancies like IBM which will support "X" for price "$Y". That support you're referring to is available, at a price -- but doesn't necessarily involve the original contributors.
I've had far better luck with FreeBSD on servers for the past 20 years than I have with Microsoft Windows, but I also understood the deal: "Fix it yourself, or submit a bug report and see if anyone else wants to work on it."
The corporate software method: "Pay us lots of money to look into the bug report, and maybe we'll fix it, maybe we won't -- but you'll need to pay hourly until we determine if its a bug. Then MAYBE we'll refund your money."
The primary difference is that OSS gives you the source and the ability to fix problems on your own, without any involvement from the original contributors/projects. You can also hire any number of other companies to provide support. With a traditional commercial model, you're entirely at the mercy of the company which originated the software, and you likely have no rights to the source or tools which would enable you to fix the problem yourself.
Some people (we call it addictive personalities, not sure if there’s a better term) seem to get hooked almost right away. Others, can stop whenever they want with little trouble.
The problem is that you don’t know which of those possibilities applies to you without trying it, and then it’s too late. Since my immediate family members have had issues with substances, I assume I would be one of the people with a problem.
That’s the message I’m trying to pass along to the next generation too. You might not have a problem, but you won’t know if you do until it’s too late.
YMMV
I dread seeing a Teams meeting put together, because almost always, at least 1/2 of the people on it will struggle with sound, video, random crashes, and inability to share.
Zoom, for the same people, on the same equipment, doesn't have any issues. It's night and day.
From 1995-2000 (maybe -2002, -2003), it was absolutely relevant, even prevent in the industry.
After that point, it felt like Java/PHP/Asp took the lead.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/do-the-right-thing/2...
Which discusses the fact that the abuse isn't any more prevalent than with school teachers or other denominations.
Me spending more time with my child doesn't take away from what other children receive. If I wasn't working with my child, then I certainly wouldn't be working with all of them in place of that.
Any performance based comparison between school performance and life outcomes needs to include stats broken out by the homelife of the child. You could call it "Parental Responsibility" in most cases -- and that figure/statistic will represent most of the issues that everyone wants addressed. The thing is, it's the most impactful to the child, and it can't be meaningfully addressed without massive government control of family life.
Parents are responsible for their children's education. Success in anything is a mix of effort, knowledge, ability and luck (I consider timing part of luck).
I am going to give my children the best opportunities I can give them, within the bounds of my values and life experiences.
It's irrational to believe the outcome of an education should be identical between children. Unless you remove parents and have children raised by institutions, then parental involvement will always have a major impact on academic performance.
Strawman: If my child is interested in computers, and spends all their free time reading about and learning to program them, while their contemporaries choose to watch TV and play video games, should they be limited by what the "average" person in their class is able to do? Of course not!
It's akin to the school district that noticed that not enough black kids were in a gifted class, so their solution was to get rid of the gifted class. That's insanity.
Public schools should provide a solid education to children, and society needs to expect that the outcome of that will be based on the actual performance of the children and their circumstances. A school cannot fix everything that comes from single-parent households and broken families. It can (and should) try and help, but I think it's ridiculous to hold back other students that perform better because they have parental involvement that other children don't.
I can say that the mandatory training programs and background checks that are required to work with children (now) far exceed anything I’ve seen from other churches.
How often do people leak things via S3 because they couldn't set the permissions properly? Same thing as you mention, except it's yet another layer that has to be maintained.
I went from Perl to PHP, and my productivity definitely improved, and the speed of execution also improved significantly. mod_perl was available, but I was pretty well switched to PHP by the time I really looked into that.
Even on basic hardware, hundreds of requests per second are trivial -- assuming you aren't loading a bunch of files ("require") or making 800 trips to the database to load the site.
I've never found PHPs performance to be a limiting factor, even when I was dealing with dynamic page loads coming in at sustained rates between 50 and 100 per second, and this was on PHP4/5, slow (400MHZ), single core, low ram system. FAMP stack.
I assume Java apps are the same way -- I've never encountered (to my knowledge) a java-based website that wasn't slow. I assume anything that relies on a huge framework probably also had that framework to blame for most performance problems.
I know it worked on System 7, and I think there was a variation that worked in System 8 as well.
It’s not some special loophole.
If you use $1000 of electricity to harvest your crops, that $1000 would be equally as deductible because it’s just a cost of production?
I’m not aware of any studies, and most would have taken place well before the internet and electronic records were a thing.
I can state that my hives have swarmed several times, so those bees were “out there” — and the genetics I see in 2nd and 3rd generation brood show there’s quite a few different breeds in this area.
I’m in Ohio, and I’ve only been keeping bees for 3-4 years now, but I’ve attended lectures and talked to many longtime keepers in my area (Ohio).
I specifically asked about wild bees, and the answer I got was unexpected, but made sense once it was explained to me.
The PhD speaker, who’s worked in pesticide research his entire career, explained that around here American Foul Brood wiped out > 95% of hives in many areas over the span of a decade (70s or 80s?) — and he said there’s no reason to believe that the “wild” bees fared any differently. In fact, he believes we still have wild bees because of natural swarming behavior — meaning our wild bees are heavily linked with the commercially managed hives.
I can’t speak to anywhere else, but it wouldn’t surprise me to discover that the wild and managed bees are essentially the same.