No worries, like I said in my edit, you fixed it while I was writing my comment. I’m just leaving mine unedited for the extra info.

I mean incentivizing them to invest it into things like public works and other beneficial things, but I also expect that that would go about as well as the current tax incentives do. It would be the thing that requires the least effort possible from the government, though, which I think makes it the most likely to actually occur. Actually taxing them more is pretty much a pipe dream.

That article disagrees with the second part of your comment. It says that the Welrod replicas are rare and mostly used by veterinarians, and looking them up, they’ve only been available for import to the US since 2021.

I don’t know where you got your 300 million figure from. Wikipedia puts the total number of civilian firearms in the US at about 393 million, and that includes shotguns, hunting rifles, etc. The most popular pistol in the world I think is the 1911, and I imagine that holds true for veterans as well, and there have been about 4.3 million produced in the past 110 years. The most produced handgun is the Glock, estimated between 10 to 20 million guns.

It’s also not confirmed that that was the pistol he used, just suspected. I saw people talking about how you’d potentially have to manually cycle a regular semi-auto pistol like he did if you were using a suppressor and subsonic rounds because they wouldn’t produce enough force to cycle the gun on their own.

Edit: You fixed your comment while I was writing this, but I’m gonna leave it unedited for the info.

I think part of it is the form that that wealth exists in. Not defending billionaires in any way, but they don’t have stacks of cash lying around. The way that they live is that their money is in various forms of equity that passively increase in value, like stocks and houses, which they take loans against in order to pay for things. Then, they take out more loans to pay off the previous and repeat until they die and the debt disappears due to legal loopholes.

Stuff like the yachts and all the other crazy expensive stuff is one thing, but to redistribute the wealth, it’s not as simple as handing out cash to everybody (and I think turning all their mansions into subsidized housing instead of selling them would be more beneficial anyway).

I think incentivizing them to do more useful things with that cash and disincentivize them from simply hoarding it in various forms would be a decent short-term solution to the issue without having to put in much effort on the government’s part, but I never expect to see that happen.

Did you appeal it? Insurance companies bank on people not appealing when they get denied, even if their policy should cover it.

The older I get and the more I learn about health insurance, the more I realize how accurate that scene from the beginning on The Incredibles with the little old lady really is. I just saw somebody last night say how most claims that are appealed get approved except for cases of incorrectly submitted forms by hospitals and the like, and pretty much all hospitals are required to have a financial assistance program that can end up getting potentially 100% of any debt you have from a procedure absolved. Insurance companies make their money by making the system as difficult to get through as possible, but if you know how to deal with it, you can save yourself tons of money (at the expense of jumping through plenty of hoops).

They would, but UHC deemed it unnecessary care and denied their claim.

I heard my first Christmas Carol on the radio the second week of September this year. I’m ready to burn it all down.

I feel like tech people often get stuck on the fact that most regular people don’t want to do a ton of work to browse the web, they just want content to come to them.

I think this is also true for why people gravitate towards places like Bluesky in more general terms as well. Without even getting into the details of whether or not a platform has an algorithm or whatever other features, whether or not a platform is federated means nothing to the average person and the benefits of the decentralized servers are a disadvantage to onboarding people. When the Reddit exodus happened, I was describing Lemmy to a friend, and when I told him that anybody could spin up their own instance, his response was “why the hell would anybody want to do that.” And this is a guy who ran his own TeamSpeak server for like 20 years.

People don’t want an alternative to Twitter - they want Twitter without the rightwing extremism. Bluesky offers exactly this with an easy and straightforward onboarding process and a familiar UI. There’s even browser extensions to search the people you follow on Twitter and find their Bluesky handles to make the swap easier.

I’ve also seen people praising Bluesky’s algorithm being entirely optional as well as a plus for discoverability. People really like the chronological timeline that doesn’t bury posts - especially artists. I haven’t used Mastodon, and I only used Twitter because all the artists jumped ship after Tumblr banned the porn, but I can say that I have enjoyed how Bluesky works similar to Tumblr in that regard. I’ve never liked algorithmic based feeds, so a chronological feed of the people I follow and the stuff they reblog from other people who I can then go check out as well is exactly the kind of experience I want out of a platform.

PC building is niche, yes, but do you think “almost no one” builds PCs, like OP said? And that’s not even including the people who’ve had to install Windows on a pre-built system for one reason or another.

My point is that OP sounds like a smug Linux user shitting on people who use Windows. Even 5% of Windows users is too big a group of people to be described as “almost no one” simply because of how big the userbase is. That would be like saying, “Almost no one installs Linux” because Linux only makes up a small portion of the worldwide PC userbase.

That’s what I’m saying. Windows installation is idiot-proof. And I’m sure there’s enough people who maintain their own systems or at the very least have had to install Windows for one reason or another that to say that “almost no one” who runs Windows installed it themselves is just the “Linux Master Race” talking.

Tyranny of the Early Birds: Morning People Dictate Our Society

Was trying to find that photo of the woman giving a presentation on how morning people are an oppressive class, found this article from the American Council on Science and Health instead.

You don’t think that many people build their own Windows PCs? Linux gaming isn’t that old in the grand scheme of things, and there’s plenty of people who dual boot for various reasons.

I’d almost be willing to bet that there are more people who’ve installed Windows on their PC than there are people who’ve installed Linux from a pure numbers standpoint.

“Sorry, that’s above my pay-grade.”

On Barq?

A truly visionary work, alongside the greats such as Please Don’t Invent the Torment Nexus.

Interestingly, underground lines aren’t feasible in my hometown because of how close the water table is to the surface. Any trench deep enough to bury cables in would have to worry about flooding with groundwater or saltwater in some places.

The water table is so high that not only are there many places where basements would flood 100% of the year, but the majority of homes still have septic tanks instead of town sewage lines, and you can find houses where the lawn has been raised up with 3 or 4 feet of concrete to raise the septic tank to comply with modern regulations to avoid contaminating the groundwater supply.

Having seen plenty of pixels in my time, I can confirm that those are German pixels.

IIRC, people have previously reported that Windows 11(?) switched their default browser back to Edge after installing an update.

The moment you see people who voted for Harris assaulting third-party voters, you let me know. Some of the takes are over the top, but where they’re coming from is completely understandable. Dehumanization is an attempt to rationalize away empathy to prevent guilt and trauma from what people think is the fight to come.

The moral high road is littered with the corpses of people who tried to fight fair. In self-defense, there are 2 rules: a battle not fought is a battle won, and, if you have to hurt a man, hurt him so bad that you need never fear his vengeance.

If doxxing a couple of assholes like this is enough to intimidate the bigots who are now emboldened to attack and rape people and save even a few lives, then it’s worth it - we’ve solved things with rule number one. If it doesn’t stop them, then fyi: the back of the eye socket is thin enough to push through with your thumb and into the brain behind it. There’s no such thing as “fighting dirty” when it comes to survival. There’s no room for mercy when somebody is trying to kill you, and these people have tried before and say that they’re going to try again.

We all hope it doesn’t come to that, but it is better to be prepared and not need it than to wish you had it when the jackboots are stomping on you. And when somebody has told you who they are, you believe them. If it quacks like a Nazi, swims like a Nazi, and goose-steps like a Nazi, then it ain’t a duck.

Optimism, realism, and pessimism.