Notices by mike805 (mike805@fosstodon.org), page 4

@thatguyoverthere well then they are pretty good at faking it.

@philtor it was actually higher than the eight-week in today's auction. I got the 8 😞 oh well.

If T-bills really default (not just delayed pay, but lose your money) then nothing denominated in dollars is worth more than its heating value when you burn it.

@FOSSForce requiring just a bit of effort to get on Mastodon is one reason Mastodon is not a dumpster fire like, well, most centralized social media.

The internet as a whole was a nice place when it took a moderate bit of effort to get on the internet.

@freemo @AmpBenzScientist @MelodyCooper @stormy178 Just about all tech is descended from weapons! The two basic human technologies are fire and sharp objects; everything else comes from those two.

More specifically, engines are descended from cannon. Newcomen was having no success with his steam power experiments until he hired a cannon maker to produce the cylinders. Then he finally had a good enough seal to make his engine work.

However, I read that cannon are descended from church bells.

@r000t things will get interesting when an AI is tasked with MAKING A LIVING. Tell it to use its access to the Internet to earn money and pay its own electric bill. See what happens.

@thatguyoverthere "I think the telco glitched out for about a minute, but it's fine now."

@thepracticaldev well, option 1 is to pass a callback.

The rest of the options, like async/await, are ways to hide the fact you're passing a callback. 😆

@admitsWrongIfProven @pj @freemo @thatguyoverthere @lmrocha in politics, as in war, there is the concept of defensible ground.

The minimal defensible ground for gun rights is the right to defend one's own home with deadly force.

Surrender that, and there is no defensible ground in the way of confiscation.

Example: the UK. They had long since given up the right to self-defense, but collectors could own pistols.

One long-time collector went homicidal. Result: total handgun confiscation.

@pj @admitsWrongIfProven @freemo @thatguyoverthere @lmrocha well the classic counter example for a gun registry was Germany in the 1920s. They had a crime wave, and a gun registry was one thing they decided to do to fight it.

The next administration found other uses for the gun registry: disarming anyone they didn't like.

The UK had a complete gun registry and was able to confiscate all the legally held handguns in the country. Now look what the UK has turned into.

That's why we oppose it.

@admitsWrongIfProven @freemo @pj @thatguyoverthere @lmrocha yes it's the extreme case, both individually and collectively, that requires a gun. But if one of those cases comes up, a gun is often the only thing that will solve it.

Moreover, those extreme cases are less likely to come up if guns are available.

Switzerland doesn't get invaded for a couple of reasons. Terrain is one, armed citizenry is another.

Police stations and gun stores rarely get robbed for the same reason.

@thatguyoverthere @freemo @lmrocha @pj well the ancient Greeks summarized the logical fallacies. And probably about 90% of the media's content would fall into one of these categories.

@freemo also "the people"in the 2a definitely refers to the actual human beings living in this territory. So that quashes any "collective right" claim.

The use of "the people" to refer to some theoretical group right is really a Marxist invention. The founders said what they meant and meant what they said.

@lmrocha @freemo Voight-Kampff test, that's interesting (and a great scene.) As I recall the test was to provoke an emotional reaction to see if the subject had human-style emotions.

Anti-gunners, and other types of prohibitionists, often try to drive the argument toward emotion and away from logic and reasoned debate. And they HATE it when they run into someone who cannot be moved to emotion, and just keeps arguing the logic.

@freemo @lmrocha kids don't generally get shot in Japan. Yes that is because the Japanese public has no guns. Nuts occasionally get stabby in Japan, but kill fewer victims.

But 100 years ago we had a society with guns everywhere (even kids owned them) and mass shootings were practically unknown. Gang violence yes. Personal revenge yes. Rage-fueled mass shootings, no.

SSRIs are known to produce a hypomanic rage-monster state in some males under the age of 25. Most mass shooters were on SSRIs.

@lmrocha @freemo well most of the weapons used for mass shootings are either (a) pistols evolved from the 1911 patent, often with modern materials and additional safeties or (b) self loading rifles descended from the WW2 era M1 by way of the Vietnam era Armalite.

So both of those general types of weapons were available to the public by the 1940s. Kids got bullied then too. Why no rage monster shootings? That is the question the gun controllers ignore.

@lmrocha @freemo you are arguing this from a statistics point of view. You may well have a point. If you want to debate with gun rights supporters, please understand: many of us believe in natural rights which existed before civilization and which civilization cannot legitimately take away. Personal defense is one of those.

People with that POV will not be swayed by numbers. Our response is, why was this not a problem 100 years ago? Personally, I suspect psychiatric drugs play a big role today.

@lmrocha @freemo no automatic weapons 100 years ago? As I recall, there was a pretty big war in Europe that ended in 1918. Automatic weapons played a significant role in that war.

The modern self-loading pistol - which seems to be the main mass shooting weapon - was patented in 1911.

The restrictions on Evil Machine Guns started after Prohibition and corresponding mob violence became a problem.

@lmrocha @thatguyoverthere @freemo @pj God is never beside the point. A person's position on that question reliably predicts most of his other views. There is a "root" or top level in everyone's mind, and what resides there decides everything else.

Jesus was advising a small group of traveling evangelists, for whom getting into a violent confrontation could not possibly help them in their mission. Thus "shake off the dust of that place." He was not referring to all people for all time.

@freemo @lmrocha @thatguyoverthere technically true but requires some brainpower.

An idiot can commit mass murder with a truck or a gun or with fire. And most of the mass murderers are idiots, fortunately. If really smart people went homicidal, we'd have body counts in the tens of thousands.

@thatguyoverthere @freemo @lmrocha yes the whole "smoke a joint lose your license" thing ought to be declared unconstitutional.

As for licenses to start moving, don't tempt them. :-) they are already trying to put lockout devices for alcohol and sleepiness and so on in all cars. Gee, I hope those never malfunction in an emergency.

The same people who would disarm us absolutely would put car ownership out of reach for the average person, given a chance. They'd prefer a world of robo taxis.