Exactly. He has the right idea on this, but given his gun control background I don’t trust him any farther than I can throw him. Gun control is, at this point, nothing more than a way to lose votes. To an anti-gun liberal, gun control is good policy that saves lives. To a pro gun person, gun control is an unconstitutional civil rights violation that makes a candidate unlectable. This turns away an awful lot of pro-gun moderates from rural areas- these are the voters who make a difference in elections.
And as for the anti-gun base, and anti-gun moderates, what are they going to do, vote Republican in protest? Let’s be real.

Gun control is a lose lose proposition

Gun control seems to mean ‘a little more’. This comic is popular among gun owners because it reflects the feeling of constantly ratcheting ‘compromise’.

A perfect example of that is background checks. The original bill was a compromise, All gun sales at gun stores are required to have a background check, but the compromise is that private sales between one person and another are exempted. That was a negotiated compromise between the pro gun and anti-gun side. I think for the most part it was a decent compromise. But now the anti-gun side is trying to roll it back calling it the ‘gun show loophole’ which is horribly named because a gun dealer at a gun show has to do a background check anyway, and most gun shows require background checks for all sales either from a dealer or a private citizen.

The problem with universal background checks is the concept of a transfer. For example, under some proposals, if you want to lend somebody your hunting rifle to go hunting with, that might count as a transfer, which means you have to go to a gun store and pay about $50 and fill out paperwork to legally transfer ownership of the gun to them. And then when they return they have to transfer it back to you.

You should also know that an awful lot of gun owners absolutely hate the NRA. They serve a useful purpose, but their constant deranged rabble rousing fundraising makes gun owners look like paranoid morons.
What I would much prefer to do is outreach and education. An awful lot of gun control laws are based on a total misunderstanding of what guns do and how they work and what makes them powerful or not, I think if more Democrats actually understood guns you would see fewer attempts at bad laws that do nothing to increase safety but just try to turn the screws on gun owners.

If you order it well done you’re going to need some A1 to go with it.

Not at all. In fact Creality seems quite open for a Chinese company. There’s literally an option on the touch screen menu to enable root access. That gives you full SSH access to everything on the board, no hacks or jailbreaks needed.

The firmware is Klipper based, mostly open but there’s a few binary bits. There are some open source firmware forks but the one thing they haven’t got running yet is the bed pressure sensor so you need to add a separate sensor for leveling and z axis zeroing.

However the stock firmware works great and with some open source scripts you can add whatever you want to it like fluidd/mainsail.

My k1 Max has lived its entire life on a private network segment, only internet access it gets is NTP to set the clock. It’s perfectly fine. I have never registered with Creality cloud nor has the machine tried to force me too. I use orca slicer and feed it the g code and it works great.

Yeah exactly. I tried to set it up once, installed it on a NAS box, and it starts talking about me making a cloud account. Why do I need a cloud account to log into my own hardware on my own network?

I do not want the cloud
I do not need the cloud
I will say it very loud
No cloud, no cloud, no cloud.

But apparently it’s set up so the only way to log into your own locally hosted software on your own locally hosted hardware is with an external cloud account.

To that I said no thank you and uninstalled it.

Absolutely 100%. I think basic self-defense should be a required course in middle school or high school, especially for women. And I would encourage any woman or any person for that matter to take charge of their personal defense, in whatever way is most comfortable for them. Carry a gun, carry a taser, carry pepper spray, take martial arts classes like Krav, etc.

During world war II, a Japanese general was once quoted as saying “you do not invade the mainland US. There would be a rifle behind every blade of grass”.

Compare the cost of doing this, with the deterrent effect of your enemy’s knowing that basically the entire population can mobilize as a militia, it’s pretty extreme.

Go Poland!

I’ll bet they are great live. I actually have only heard one song of theirs, which I found by accident years ago when trying to find something else. Everlasting Light, played live. One of very few songs that completely makes it obvious how much mp3 compression sucks, and even if you download the FLAC (sadly not high res) you can still hear everything wrong with your speakers and if you listen to it on good headphones then you can hear the deficiencies of the mic they used to record it.

Truly a huge amount of audio information in that track. I love it!

And this is why people are pissed at Democrats.

Democrats are apparently annoyed that constituents are writing demanding they act like an opposition party, aka FUCKING EXERCISE THE FUCKING POWER YOU WERE VOTED IN TO WIELD. They act like they are powerless to stop Trump and they have press conferences talking about how it’s red alert scenario and then they GO ON TO VOTE FOR THE VERY THINGS THEY ARE SOUNDING THE ALARM ABOUT.

If this truly is a red alert situation as another Connecticut Congressperson called it, then stop voting for this shit! Throw a wrench into the works, refuse to confirm anybody, make use of the shitty procedural filibuster and grind things to a halt.

Because if you are voting in favor of any of this you don’t get to fucking complain.

When you say footage, do you mean like actual combat footage? If so I think that’s excellent. You are absolutely right the US is completely isolated from the reality of unpleasantness that is often in the world, often because of us. Our only exposure to real evil and violence is in movies and TV and everything else is ‘tastefully’ censored. So we debate policy like war and diplomacy completely isolated from the actual reality that those policies create.

Ukraine has had a lot of success using remotely operated suicide drones. They are cheap, built mostly from off the shelf hobbyist grade components, but with a few inexpensive upgrades the signal goes for miles. Strap a grenade on the bottom or any kind of bomb with an impact fuse and you have an excellent remote control weapon.

So of course the Russians start deploying radio jammers to block the drone signals.

The solution to this is fiber optics. The drone carries a giant spool of hair thin fiber optic cable which sends control commands from the operator and video back from the drone. Because it’s a cable, it’s immune to jamming.

The cable is insanely thin, usually in the tens of microns thickness. So they don’t bother recovering the cable, drone flies out spooling out cable behind it, hits its target and blows up, operator just detaches that fiber and pulls out another drone with another spool of cable to start again. This leaves tons of little fibers laying around on the countryside because every drone leaves one in its path.

That’s the point of this video. Most of those fibers have a dead Russian soldier at the end of them.

It’s frustrating that so many people downvote this sort of thing rather than considering it. It’s like if you say anything at all other than TRUMP NAZI ELON NAZI REPUBLICAN NAZI ALL BAD you are obviously wrong and fuck you.

Trump may be an asshole. He may be a horrible president. But during the campaign he promised to hack and slash away at the federal government, and that’s exactly what he’s doing. It may be a bad idea, it may cause a ton of its own problems, but he is doing exactly what he promised his voters.

Democrats need to learn some hard truths from this. Specifically, that while life may be great up in the ivory tower, the people on the street are hurting. The people on the street are angry that their struggle has been ignored and marginalized for so long. And when people with two incomes are struggling to afford groceries, they will always vote for the guy who says ‘there’s a problem and I want to fix it’ over the person who says ‘everything’s peachy’.

That doesn’t make them racist or sexist or Nazi. It makes them desperate.

Not asking for instruction on the issue, only clarification on your assertion that I don’t understand.

For example, if you argued that video games cause violence, I could say ‘you obviously don’t understand the issue, specifically, the sort of attitude players take toward the game. Nobody plays like ‘yeah I wish I could do this IRL’, rather, it’s just a game and there’s friendly banter between both teams.’ I don’t have to write a page on video game culture or statistics to do that.

Saying ‘you don’t get it’ on a huge broad subject while offering zero detail on what specifically I don’t get or even a counterpoint is lazy debating. If you think I’m wrong, explain why I’m wrong. Otherwise you are just a low effort shitpost that contributes nothing to the discourse. Do better.

Because the man you don’t like got elected we should shred the 1st Amendment right of free expression? Or do I misunderstand you?

Well there’s a lot of information and different positions, most of which doesn’t fit into a single post. Can you explain what specifically you think I’ve missed?

You are mixing up your 'they’s. There are multiple theys each with their own motivations. Frequently their interests align. Not always.

I don’t expect anybody with money and power to play by THE rules, but everybody plays by SOME rules. Understand the rules each player is playing by, and you understand the game a lot better.

I don’t for a second think Trump’s motivation behind deporting people is pure as the driven snow. I’m sure for many people behind that policy, perhaps including Trump himself, there is a lot of thinly veiled racism or not so thinly veiled racism and a bunch of xenophobia too.

That doesn’t mean it’s impossible that it will work, and bring about some sort of positive result.

For me, the big problem with illegal immigration is it creates an easily exploitable underclass. A group of people who will work themselves to the fucking bone for peanuts, who can be exploited at will because they can’t call the government to enforce labor regs. That creates a situation for employers that they can hire these people by the thousands, treat them like dirt, pay them barely anything, have them work in horrible conditions, and then basically toss them on the street. That situation is bad for everybody. It’s certainly bad for Americans because if those exploitable people are available as labor why wouldn’t an employer hire them rather than an American who will demand higher wages and better working conditions?

Ending that system of exploitation will suck, it will be a painful process that will destabilize food and labor markets. And knowing Trump, I’m quite sure there will be a lot of civil rights abuses, which I am strongly against. Everybody deserves to be treated with humanity and respect, including undocumented people who are being deported. But I also think that before we dive 100% into saying the whole thing is a bad idea, we should consider potential long-term effects. And if the result over the entire American labor market is there is no longer a cheap exploitable under-class, I think that’s a good thing for everybody.

100% this.
I’m not a fan of the hamfisted way Trump and Musk are going about all this.
But at the same time, I look at this and have to wonder the outcome…
If agricultural corporations can’t hire cheap undocumented Latin American people to work the farms, they will have to pay more to hire Americans to do the same job. Yes that will drive up grocery prices, but on some level, if that means more Americans are able to afford those groceries isn’t that sort of maybe a good thing?

Every time I see a company complain of labor shortage, it is obvious to me that the problem isn’t labor the problem is the company doesn’t want to pay what the labor market demands. You tell me you can’t find anybody to hire, so I ask if you offered $100/hr for this job would your inbox be overflowing with applicants? If the answer is yes, then the problem isn’t that you can’t find anybody, it is the supply and demand of the labor market and your only problem is you don’t want to pay the market rate for labor. That’s not the market’s problem.

My thoughts exactly. I have absolutely no sympathy for Nazis, or anyone else who thinks mass murder and genocide were good policy. But one of the things that makes a free society different from Nazi Germany, is free expression. If we limit free expression to only things the people in charge want expressed, no matter how noble the intent that starts us down a very dark path very quickly.

The way we fight Nazis and racism is not by beating them up or jailing them. It’s by teaching each other and our children why they are wrong, by learning and understanding what it is like to have racism directed against you. And thus, we defeat racism not with force but with empathy.

As far as I’m concerned, this is the sort of policy that would make Hitler proud. It’s the sort of policy that would be enacted in Nazi Germany, or Soviet Russia.

Quite true. Especially since we don’t seem to study history anymore. Forget world history, we barely seem to remember our own history past 6 months ago.

Problem is, the status quo of the last 20 to 30 years is significantly different than the status quo shortly before that. Income inequality is through the roof. The middle class is stagnant. There’s much less upward mobility than there previously was. And for the majority of the people, that are on the lower half of the income spectrum, costs have gone up and up and up and wages have not. For 15 to 20 years people kind of dealt with it because standard of living was pretty decent before that. But you can only squeeze so much blood out of the turnip. People see boomers who were able to have a house and a family on one average 40hr/week income and they say what the hell we now have both partners working full-time and we can barely afford ourselves let alone a kid. That’s why make America great again is such a great slogan, because it invokes those days when the American dream was still alive.

I would say Republicans are much more responsible for the extraction of the nation’s wealth, but Democrats happily sat by and fiddled while Rome burned and were eager participants in the extreme offshoring of all American manufacturing type work in the '90s and 2000s. There was a ridiculous idea that this would somehow make life better for Americans, that everybody would get retrained to do computers or something like that, and we would become a nation ‘better than’ having to build our own stuff. Obviously that didn’t work out.

Come to today, and while Democrats I think have better policies for the average worker, none of their messaging addresses the major systemic problems that need to be fixed.
Obama’s did. Hope, change, yes we can. That was what the country needed. He won on a platform of radical change. Unfortunately he turned out to be a moderate change president but I think he generally did a decent job. What was Hillary’s platform? The only thing a lot of people learned about her is that she’s too stupid to hire decent IT people who use encryption, and that she has a private and public position on things, in other words don’t tell the plebs what you really think cuz they won’t vote for you. Then you have Kamala, magically frocked by some DNC elites to sit in the big chair, who ran a pretty boring campaign that seemed to, like Hillary’s, be based on ‘I’m not Trump so of course I’m going to win’. Obviously that wasn’t good enough.

If the DNC wants to start winning the White House, they need to clean their own house. Get rid of all the status quo dinosaurs like Pelosi and reform the party into one of the people. Find someone like Bernie and put him in charge. Ditch wedge issues like gun control that only cost votes. And make a party platform that focuses on the common man. Not just the blue man, every man. Then you win elections.