I hear you, and like you said it all depends on your scenario. Someone on a ranch compound with multiple buildings they need/want to check on versus a RV/boat living alone are dramatically different ends of the home defense spectrum.

Your scenario may be vastly different from mine or someone else’s - which is why I have a hard time giving universal advice. Pick your platform, and test it. See if it’ll will or will not work out at 3am when you’re carrying a frightened child back to your safe area, or if your long gun needs a sling added, or if that 33rd Glock magazine is actually kinda massive and gets in your way.

IIRC the bump stock was designed as an aid for veterans who had lost a limb to allow them to use a pistol one-handed.

The bump stock is derpy and just for simulating full auto. You’re thinking of the pistol brace that you strap to your arm - they both were in discussion for bans around the same era, that’s likely where you got them mixed up 🙂

Pistol braces are in a “legal but the ATF doesn’t like that fact” area atm. Tl; dr they made an interpretative rule change out of whole cloth, got slapped in the courts, and have a permanent stay on enforcing their rule change.

I have mixed feels on that 9mm v pump shotty for the home debate. Personally I’d argue for an AR over the shotgun, but that’s less universally legal and doesn’t have the same binary roadmap of “870 or 590, who cares” and the AR field is FILLED with vendor trash.

But. If it’ll literally never leave the house and you can shoot it, a 12 gauge pump beats the pistol every day imo. Pick a hallway/stairwell, and camp your chosen angle with said shotgun. Compared to a pistol it’s hands down better; shooting handguns quickly and accurately is HARD. The handgun gives up a stock, longer sight rib/radius, use of slugs, and a much better trigger without throwing money away.

The handgun’s primary benefit as a platform is concealment. That’s it. So if someone literally only has $600 and needs a catch all solution - police trade-in Glock 19/17, a real holster, and (plz please puleaze) a lockbox of some kind. If they can swing another $300 or so, then add on a shotgun.

There’s at least two jokes/British cultural memes that almost no Americans are going to get lmao divided by a shared language

What information are professors giving you that you can’t get anywhere else?

A reading list and critical analysis.

Because an autodidact will end up reading the ‘good’ books and not reading the critiques or counter-narratives. An algorithm feed will serve you the consumable content that keeps you engaged, not the information that you need to sit with to digest and re-examine what you thought you knew to be true.

You gain the most understanding during the un-learning and analysis process. Reading one book won’t do that. Hence, a reading list.

Their point was that nobody knew they wanted an iPhone back then.

• Why would I want a gimped web browser on LTE data rate when I have a laptop with Wi-fi?
• Why pay all that money for what is just a phone?
• Does this make better calls than a beater 3310? No? So what’s the point?

Back then the most feature packed phones were either some psuedo-gaming device, or a Sony Ericsson you acquired from Japan with no warranty and likely region locking.

Netanyahu claimed foreign leaders who “public condemn us privately thank us. They tell me how much they value Israel’s superb intelligence services that have prevented, time and again, terrorist attacks in their capitals.” He did not say which countries’ leaders had privately thanked him.

“So Benjamin, are those leaders in the room with us right now?”

Even the US pulled their senior diplomats who’d normally be there and sent the interns instead lmao

What’s actually funny is how yall swallow this performative jackassery whole, as if it’s actually improving military readiness or ‘lethality’, instead of demanding accountability from government. Super glad that they’ve clearly solved all the big issues like the PFAS contamination on multiple bases poisoning soldiers and their families, or the entirety of the VA dumpster fire, or the Pentagon not being able to pass an audit for decades.

But nah, let’s fire a 21 year careerist because some terminally online losers got triggered by pronouns and her billet. I’m sure those considering re-enlisting won’t mind the risk of losing their pension overnight because Twitter demanded a blood sacrifice.

I do not want to normalize murder as a trump card in political discourse - not any further than the right has already mind you.

But I am enjoying seeing these hate mongers feel some of that turned back their way, in a very public manner. Having the outside world ‘cancelled’ for themselves for fear of assassins and high powered rifles. Always having to travel with security, constantly worried if their next organic street encounter will be with a genuine fan, or ‘a fan’ with a vendetta.

Tolerance paradox aside, I still condemn this though - because political assassination does not bode well in the immediate term, nor the long term if this kind of activity keeps repeating… it ultimately only leaves the most hardline and ideological voices on the soapbox.

Different Ghandi

As prime minister, [Indira] Gandhi was known for her uncompromising political stances and centralization of power within the executive branch.… Responding to separatist tendencies and a call for revolution, she instituted a state of emergency from 1975 to 1977, during which she ruled by decree and basic civil liberties were suspended. More than 100,000 political opponents, journalists and dissenters were imprisoned. She faced the growing Sikh separatism movement throughout her fourth premiership; in response, she ordered Operation Blue Star, which involved military action in the Golden Temple and killed hundreds of Sikhs. On 31 October 1984, she was assassinated by two of her bodyguards, both of whom were Sikh nationalists seeking retribution for the events at the temple.

Ding ding ding

The same is done with commercial property too. Holding out (or more correctly, withholding a property entirely) vacant for X months is more profitable overall as it keeps the supply low for office/light industrial space, driving the same demand to fewer units until ✨ a newly renovated unit ✨ is available on the market.

Until X months inoccupancy exceeds the profit of Y units generating Z extracted profit each, they come out ahead. And not even ‘we covered the mortgage and local tax’ ahead of break even, but the potential earnings if all were listed and rented.

They literally make more money keeping housing vacant. And that needs to change.

I’ve had decent luck with CL in the past for rentals, but understand that it’s generally: an illegal listing (eg no windows or the like for fire egress), sex traffickers targeting desperate women, or scammers - and you need to be able to jump on the legit leads ASAP.

But yes as a renter, sifting through Craigslist was vastly preferable to paying whatever some private equity firm decided “market rates” are (we are the market, teehee 🤭) for a hovel in a 1+5 complex, or dealing with the myriad of cutouts that paywall listings or communications like the OP.

Yes. For a non space-tier power. Their utility for space/LEO comms are valuable, but peripheral. Never going fully high tech, keeps the legacy systems in use and in current practice. Whereas a power like the US doesn’t do shit without a LINK net established and maintained, because we’ve forgotten/are unwilling to use the old methods.

It’s the Ukraine-Russo problem in the Black Sea, but applied to space. Denial is easier than presence, and even easier than dominance. If you can’t compete, why let them use it they way they want, or at all?

There’s a lot of strife inside the tech world from people who work for both big multinationals and startups, over their company’s continued dealing with Israel, and especially so with their armed forces. It’s not well covered, because tech journalism is - frankly very corporate friendly - because it relies on access to sources, and so is very subject to access journalism that self-censors and chills dissent or criticism.

Someone who joined on to work on population mapping for vaccine coverage planning, or a cloud service engineer, may strongly object to their work being contorted and sold off to enable and supercharge a genocide.

for some absolutely absurd reason, it usually isn’t illegal for the government to lie. Like on the subpoena.

Wait, seriously? They can outright lie, not like “our investigation leads us to believe that you X and are charged with Y” like an arraignment?

This is so mind bogglingly insidious to actually roll out because Delta is a regional hub monopoly and major common carrier nationwide, they very well could be the market setters for this kind of AI-price scalping. Like, we’re just going to throw out the concept of serving ‘a market segment’ and trying to land on a certain price:offering ratio to capture market share via demand curve plotting, inherently leaving space both at the fringes and center for competition.

Now there is no competition. How does American or United price compare on routes or seat category, when there is no public price, but a personalized formula to maximize value extraction from each person? It’d be like trying to price compare at a close-envelope auction - you can’t.

There already is a lot of opacity in the buying process like phased seat releases creating artificial scarcity, but this is next level. I can absolutely see Delta holding back seats instead of selling them to ‘low value’ individuals who have very elastic demand, and releasing seats early/only for those who’ll pay the fees. Want peace of mind knowing you locked in your flight 6-9mo ahead? Pay up 🔫

I spent a few messages doing that, even though you were pretty hostile with me out of the gate

You read my exasperation as hostility, because my initial reply was to a lot of your hand waving that ‘anyone would have been as bad as Biden’ completely sidesteps his obvious cognitive state, and the withering voter enthusiasm he carried both in and out of the party.

Sounds like you’re not into the idea of doing the homework in order to learn what you would need to in order to be able to continue the conversation and have it be productive.

Does this actually work on people? Like do you genuinely think telling someone that they’re too dumb/ignorant to participate, that that is effective rhetoric that communicates with others?

You got challenged on a massive point of context, confirmed your actual position, to which I agreed and then pivoted to their doomed strategy of ‘I wouldn’t do anything differently’ was a failure from the jump, and your response is cynical elitism? Good luck convincing others dude

Like I said, I’m not real into continuing the conversation then. Best of luck to ye.

👋

Honestly, I’m just sick of having the exact same conversation an indefinite number of times every time I come to lemmy.world.

…then stop posting/lurking in .world then? Or accept that it’s not your backyard, and you have different views?

The DNC is not on Lemmy

Doubtful, though I’d still hold out for some Linux-hatted staffer Venn intersection. But I’m sure that web crawlers and API scrapers are, which do feed into data sets used to judge people’s opinions. And there’s definitely a lot of neoliberals who lurk and comment, amongst other political stripes.

I’m happy to talk with you, if you do some homework first

Lmao if you actually want to genuinely talk to some, that line is condescending as fuck and you should never use it. And re: Gaza? Just scroll up, you brought up Gaza in your first reply in this comment thread - unprompted. Instead of demanding I do the mental labor of deciphering your (seemingly mutable) politics, and just lay out what you actually believe?

hand-wringing about how these specific Democratic candidates fucked everything up, should be sparing at least one or two words for thirty years of Democratic fuckery laying the groundwork

I agree (and did), but posting that context often was dismissed with “it’s election season, quit posting FUD if you’re not a troll/bad-faith”. Y’all weren’t there for the discussion even - as was shown with Gaza.

But the basic fact is that the candidate(s) and party apparatus either: A) Fundamentally failed to read the room and see the obvious discontent and voter backlash over several policy stances and material realities, or B) Knew all that and still decided to run the campaign they wanted to, whilst cynically wielding the Republicans as a worse option to impel democrat voters on the left, so they could run to the center and abandon the working class to the Republicans

Nobody forced them or their staffers to pick option B, even as their own internal polling showed their defeat was all but assured under option B. And here we are.

Biden was old as fuck and it was a massive problem, even before the debate. I’m saying that none of the most serious problems got solved when he was replaced. And look… they didn’t.

So when do I get to play the ‘Quit spreading FUD’ card then? Because as you said, if nothing was going to fundamentally change re:platform, why not present a new and younger candidate after Biden’s cognitive meltdown, and claw back some of the party’s reputation with the electorate? Why not hold a ‘speed primary’? Why let cynicism win out and accept Biden drowning the party with him, because ‘nobody else can do better’ while he’s an elder lich that refuses to let go of power?

I said that with replacing Biden, we’d lose the election, because the exact same arguments that applied to Biden would get applied to Harris, plus some new ones,

Are you genuinely, seriously, trying to pretend that Joe “We beat Medicare” Biden was the better candidate to beat Trump? Bruh.

This absolute baldfaced refusal to accept reality from Democrat loyalists up and down the party structure, makes the whole party look unserious. Team sports, ‘my guy can do no wrong’ horseshit that they also see from the MAGAs, but team red talks game about inflation and the economy - and isn’t the incumbent seen as responsible for it.