I think I would have been a lot happier if I’d never learned that.

Can someone help me understand once and for all what an “assault style” weapon is?

So, “assault rifle” is kind a colloquial term. It’s not an actual military category or designation as far as I know. But in a military context the type of gun that people commonly call an assault rifle is a type of light machine gun which shoots what’s called an “intermediate round.” That’s a smaller caliber or lower power rifle round that is spicier and has a longer range than the pistol rounds that sub-machine guns shoot, but which are less spicy and easier to control than the bigger .30 caliber rifle rounds that regular full size machine guns shoot. It sort of splits the difference between two types of weapon to hopefully be more effective in a broader range of circumstances. AR platform rifles like M-16s and M-4s shoot a spiced up .22 caliber rifle round (.223 Remington/5.56 NATO), and AK platform rifles shoot a toned down .30 caliber rifle round with a shortened casing (7.62X39mm aka 7.62 Soviet).

The military version of these rifles are actual fully automatic machine guns, meaning that when on the full auto setting when you pull the trigger they will keep firing bullets until you let off the trigger again. That full-auto capability is pretty much the entire “assault” part of an assault rifle. And it’s kind of the difference between military rifles and any other rifle. And even though they look virtually identical, the civilian versions of the same rifles are not capable of doing that. They’re just regular semi-automatic rifles, which means they automatically re-cock themselves after each shot so you don’t have cycle the gun’s action manually, but each shot still requires a separate trigger pull. You can’t just spray bullets like an action movie. They work the same as any traditional wooden-stock semi-auto hunting rifle that you’d use for hunting deer or elk.

What makes an assault style weapon more deadly than a non assault style weapon?

They’re not. In terms of power and effective range they’re pretty thoroughly outclassed by your average deer rifle. It’s why they’re so hard to ban. .223 Remington/5.56 NATO is one of the smallest center-fire rifle cartridges that’s commonly available. If you banned every rifle that shot a larger or more powerful round you’d flat-out be banning most rifles, including the one grandpa goes hunting with every year. Since there aren’t many legislators who are willing to try to take away PopPop’s hunting rifle, most bans focus on cosmetic things like pistol grips or adjustable stocks instead of the actual capability of the gun. It all pretty much just comes down to vibes. Regardless of any evidence, people who have little or no firearms experience tend to just sort of assume “assault” rifles still must somehow be deadlier. Otherwise why would soldiers out fighting a war have the one and not the other, right? Plus, for most people, their entire knowledge of firearms comes from Hollywood movies and police procedurals, which means whatever they know about guns that isn’t flat out wrong is probably wildly exaggerated. They’ve spent their whole lives watching guys on their TV with M-16s take down helicopters and blow up trucks just by shooting at them. On some gut level they feel like there must be some truth to it, and it’s very difficult to convince them otherwise when they don’t have any first-hand experience.

There really isn’t a trend of warehouse fires. The It Could Happen Here podcast did an episode on it the other day. Warehouse fires are just really common. They happen on average of four times a day in the US. But now you have a ton of content creators trying to paint every new one as a WaLuigi copycat to get those social media clicks. And since these fires are a daily occurrence, there are tons to choose from. They’re conflating events that are almost certainly not connected at all.

While I’m sure we’re going to get a WaLuigi copycat at some point in the future, there is no evidence that’s happening right now. A lot of people desperately want to believe that it is, though. I would like to believe that it is. But there just isn’t any actual evidence that it’s true.

Not that that’s going to stop lawmakers from clutching their pearls and passing some new draconian laws that further put the screws to the working class. I’ve been paying attention to politics for over 30 years and I don’t think I’ve ever seen Congress pass up a chance to screw over poor people when the opportunity arises.

The Internet K Hole . A rotating collection of old snapshots (occasionally nsfw) presented without context. It’s weirdly enthralling. You can lose hours and hours on that site.

I don’t think it really matters which models have officially be recalled. No matter how well made that type of brush is, you’re going to have bristles break off eventually. It’s just the nature of that type of tool. I have a couple of friends who are ER nurses, and it seems like every time I see them at a BBQ they’ve got a new story about people accidentally swallowing a metal bristle that broke off one of those. Apparently it happens a lot, so I stopped using them a long time ago. There are so many other safer types of grill brush out there that there really isn’t any reason to. I’ve got one that’s basically a chain mail scrubbing pad on a stick, and another one that’s like a loosely coiled spring that can conform to the shape of my grill and clean the gunk in between the grill slats. If you don’t have anything else, a ball of wadded up aluminum foil does a pretty good job too. The foil does tend to leave a few flakes of aluminum behind, but at least if you accidentally swallow one of those it won’t embed itself in your throat or cut up your digestive tract.

Lemmy isn’t really the platform for that. If I were trying to sell a phone I’d probably list it on Swappa, eBay, or Facebook Marketplace. It wouldn’t even occur to me to try and sell it here. And if I were buying a second hand phone, of those three I’d be most inclined to buy off of Swappa.

I Will Pay Any Amount To Not Pay My Taxes.

This + some kind of chile powder. I put it on damned near everything.

My parents have belonged to one of those for years. One of the cool things about theirs is their farm usually grows much different varieties of vegetables than you can find in regular grocery stores. They regularly get white and purple carrots, and some variety of orange carrot that has a little bit of a peppery/gingery bite to it. One year they got some heirloom variety of celery which had too much flavor eat raw. Imagine biting into a stick of celery and being physically overwhelmed by the amount of celery flavor you’re experiencing, like, “Jesus Christ… the celery… too… powerful…” It was absolutely killer in soups though.

Circusized Peanuts by Warlock Pinchers

Don’t worry, once the camps are up and running there will be plenty of “free” labor to make up the shortfall.

Ironically us plebs who work with our hands are the people with the skill set necessary to build those things.

Windows 11 feels like Microsoft is actively punishing me for being foolish enough to keep using their products. Adding some janky AI bullshit machine to this garbage fire feels now they’re just taking the piss.

It’s just a regular ol’ smoke grenade like the military uses for signaling. At least so say some people on the ground in Minneapolis who recovered one of the canisters.

Usually when the news media talk about “the economy,” they’re not talking about the financial well-being of workers, or the average citizen. They’re talking about how much extra money corporations and the ultra wealthy are making. If every time you read about the economy you mentally transpose the words “the economy” with “rich people’s yacht money” what they’re writing about becomes a lot clearer.

1. “Everyone is being paid such ridiculous poverty wages that they are functionally unemployed.”
2. “Rich people have tons more yacht money.”

They’re not actually opposing statements. One is a direct result of the other.

It wasn’t so much that there was a stigma against watching Monty Python per se. It’s that it became sort of inextricably linked with a certain type of kid who became obsessed with it, could (and frequently would) recite all the lines of the movies from memory, and would tend to be a little obnoxious about their fandom. They were usually nerdy kids who already weren’t well liked by the more popular cliques, and aggressively shouting lines from Holy Grail at people wasn’t helping matters. Like, my friends and I loved those movies, but I guess not as much as the theater kids who were galloping around the school on imaginary horses shouting, “Ni!” at people and demanding a shrubbery.

It really shouldn’t be that bad. At worst it’ll be moldy, but it’s entirely possible you’ll come back to find it just kind of shriveled and very squishy. It depends on how ripe it was when you left, and how warm and humid your apartment is. But even if it smells, it won’t be the kind of smell that hangs around for very long after you throw it out.

Of all the food you could have left out and forgot about you really lucked out with it being an avocado. If it were milk or raw fish you’d probably be coming home to something truly horrific.

This group sounds like something that would have been made up in a Hollywood writers room for a mid '00s comedy police procedural. Like someone who would have been foiled by Shawn Spencer on an episode of Psych.

At this point I can only assume that Microsoft is actively trying to punish me for using their products.

Don’t worry they’ve included a free year of credit monitoring from a company they recommend.

It’ll be Experian, and you’ll get ten times as many emails trying to get you to sign up for some credit card than anything related to your credit status.