twig

Cool

A lot of Americans do actually support some gun control measures. A lot of Americans also don't actually know how insanely hard and effectively the NRA has organized and opposed any remotely reasonable gun control measure. They basically ensure that any hearing on the subject is flooded by their members to oppose it. They just go and many sane Americans don't.

• The ATF has no ability to have searchable records of firearm sales. To run a "trace" they need to use fucking microfilm or manually go through literal shipping containers full of receipts that are scarcely legible due to water damage. Article.

• Also, measure to apply for funding for the CDC to study the effect of gun control on gun violence: no, because fuck them.

• Measure to impose some reasonable restrictions on the ability to purchase firearms for, say, known domestic abusers: no, because we just don't fucking care.

I'm not American, but I actually support sane firearm ownership. I look at the lunacy over there and I am almost shocked. I really do think, from hearing about this as much as I do, that many Americans support sane measures. But the NRA is a huge problem. It prevents people from even being educated on this issue.

Right?! I know. It's so needlessly complicated. When I first learned about this my jaw legit dropped.

I'm not even necessarily proposing a registry but this is just fucking ridiculous.

The ruling class needs a very poignant reminder that their perceived value is entirely manufactured by the working class, on whose shoulders they stand. These people have no real value if the people they exploit are able exert their own agency.

Fuck these parasites. And as a matter of course, fuck the foo fighters.

So this letter board is clearly advertising Canadian blood services. Canada's healthcare system could use a lot of work, but it is far from the dumpster fire that American healthcare is.

If you want to shitpost about this and assume as Americans do that America is the only place, maybe try to find an image that isn't so obviously from a country with universal healthcare.

I get what you're saying, kind of...

But also, most modern earbuds usually sound quite good. Quality in general has become such a bizarre moving target, but here's my take: We've become so used to constant improvement at the expense of satisfaction. I can barely notice the difference between 1080p and 4k. In my mind they're both "good quality" and therefore I'm satisfied. Same goes for audio quality. I've used a few pairs of earbuds and they have sounded "good."

As a culture, we need to stop with throwing away of perfectly good devices, because it's extremely harmful to the planet's occupants.

So the CEO of Loblaws (the parent company that owns most of the grocery chains/stores in Canada) has very explicitly been engaged in price-fixing of groceries.

These people are stealing from us. It is correct to steal from them.

Property rights being valued above human rights is kind of a mainstay of capitalism.

Everyone needs a union

Yes, trans folks tend to be pretty upfront for the reasons you mentioned.

This is just some hateful, bullshit, trans panic nonsense. Some people can't even handle the idea that they might as a matter of course be attracted to a trans person given the opportunity.

This tech will inevitably also exclude some slightly less normative appearing cis folks too, but they don't care because they just hate trans people.

This debate is asinine.

Fuck it, let's just abolish competitive sport until people can calm the fuck down about their stupid games. Maybe we could make the world better in general if we funnel some of that sporting money into something that isn't totally pointless.

Communism is an economic system, democracy is a political system. There are examples of democratic socialism and of capitalist dictatorships. Also, the word here is in fact socialism and not communism.

This just means the next wave of influencers are going to appear to be "regular people." There's no such thing as neutrality or authenticity on communications platforms that exist to sell advertising space.

This just sounds like straight up torture with extra steps.

No rehabilitation, no isolation of dangerous individuals from the general population. I'm decidedly anti-incarceration but at least there are arguments for it in place of something functional and just.

This just doesn't solve any problems and adds some new ones. It sounds unbelievably cruel.

Minority groups are among the fastest growing groups of overall gun owners, for reasons outlined here.

I think it's primarily targeting the handheld gaming market

I can only hope they get the Nuremberg treatment.

That it's actually totally possible for most people to live without a car.

You love to see it

Also... even barring hanging out with literal nazis, if your whole fucking thing is trying to deny human rights to vulnerable segments of the population, you're a piece of shit, even if you are actually "pretty liberal" otherwise.

I'm so sick of hearing about this irrelevant piece of shit and everyone who makes excuses for her.

There is nothing more permanent than a temporary solution that works

Bullets are a weird, dumb one. Yes, kind of. But also: .308, .303, .30-06, .50 BMG .30-30, .45-70, .38, .32, .44, .45, .50AE. Then nonsensically basically all "30 calibre" are the same diameter, which is exactly not quite .3 of an inch. Most of those are calibrated by the metric system (as many imperial measurements are today), but the terminology exists in the imperial system.

And then there's fuckin gauges for shotguns smh.

That is actually not true. Not downplaying the significance of these effects, but...

In the 60s and 70s a large number of planned parenthood clinics were in low-income and predominantly black neighbourhoods, aimed at reducing the number of black babies.

In the same era birth control (more appropriately termed eugenics) programs forcibly sterilized black and indigenous women. Where it was presented as an option, the consequence for not following through on these doctor's "recommendations," were threats to withhold healthcare or public assistance. The statistics through the 60s and 70s were that roughly 1 in 4 indigenous women were non-consenually sterilized.

But also, yeah, the results of this trial are fucked and people are right to be skeptical of this drug.

Even barring actual harm done against the queer community, there really should be a requirement that companies using pride flags for advertising contribute in some way to LGBTQ+ organizations. Otherwise all it will ever mean is: "we'll take your money."

My main problem with strict dietary rhetoric is that it doesn't acknowledge the benefit of people eating vegan (or whatever) sometimes. Like it's a good thing to get nutrition from diverse sources and there's carryover benefit to the planet when doing this.

I'm not a vegan, but I eat a lot of plant-based meals and when I eat meat, because I eat less of it, it's generally local and ethically-raised. Militant vegans will often turn people from making decisions like this, and I think that's a shame.

I was a vegan for years. And I was careful about trying to get my nutrients. But I needed to eat so much more and I was lowkey tired all the time. When I started eating some meat again I felt ashamed of myself for not living up to the rhetoric. But it's just silly to treat this as an all or nothing type thing. A person eating beans and rice one day and a small amount of beef in a stir fry the next is... not the same as a person eating fried chicken every day, and I don't appreciate when anyone implies it is.

I don't know if they're aware of this, but they're also urging users to ditch Microsoft as a matter of course.

So that's actually not true, but for reasons that I think are weirder and more interesting than anything implied by either side of this "debate."

There are actually about 50% more women who have Y chromosomes than originally expected, and also: microchimerism seems to be extremely common in people who give birth, seemingly regardless of whether or not they give birth to children with XY chromosomes. But the genetic remnants of fetuses that have XY chromosomes stay in the body for many years (possibly a lifetime), and this has a fairly significant effect on genetic composition.

I get what you're saying and I don't totally disagree, but I think the main thing that I keep learning is that "biological sex" is just not actually a particularly meaningful concept.

Jobs didn't know shit. He made a bunch of predictions, some of them right, some of them not at all right. He just took credit for other peoples' work, mostly Wozniak's. The man was every bit the piece of shit Elon is.

Worth listening to the 3-part series on Jobs from Behind the Bastards: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236323/episode/part-one-the-terrible-secret-of-156343561/

I switched to TIDAL, for this, for the disgustingly low amount of revenue passed along to artists by Spotify (the entire value of their business), and for the fact that they continue to partner with Rogan after all the disinformation he peddles.

Not a huge proponent of streaming services in general, but some are objectively better than others. Spotify is atrocious. Tidal is a lot better.

I'm of two minds here. I don't think anyone for any reason should be allowed to earn over a half million per year. But also there are people whose positions are far less important who have earnings significantly higher than this.

The carryover effect of an economic system that that has catastrophically imbalanced wealth distribution means that in order for actually qualified people occupying roles that are important, you need to compensate them at a very high rate.

The fact that generative AI is being used as a means of large corporations consolidating even more wealth rather than attempting to free the working class from shitty, menial jobs shows that we're way the fuck off with how we conceptualize of "work".

This should be a good thing, but for lots of people this will suck.

I've played a lot of different games in recent years. I'll be honest and say that I'm pretty easy to please. Also I'd say that for the times I was disappointed, it was usually by an AAA title. So much of the time they're just so boring, the files are massive, and the stories are whatever.

Some of the best gameplay I've experienced is in indie games with hand-drawn 2D or pixel graphics. So much more energy is put into games being enjoyable and interesting in these games.

It's so obvious that many of the features of larger releases are put in by non-gamers. Why do I need a 10 minute "quest" of getting drunk in a saloon with an NPC in RDR2?

There are some great AAA titles, ones that put less energy into marketing and more into polished gameplay. But I think if you want to have reliable fun, retro and indie games are the best. And the barrier for entry is a lot more manageable.

You can also sideload epubs, borrow books from libraries on Overdrive and read articles online, etc. It's way easier on the eyes than screens that rely on refresh rates (which also make them better to use before sleep), they have long battery life. And it's a lot lighter than carrying books around.

They have a lot of advantages over other platforms for reading.

So I promise I'm not trying to be a dick here. While what you're saying is essentially reasonable, it's actually not true.

The amount of emissions in these small, wildly inefficient engines is considerably worse than even a large pickup truck. The reason is because emissions standards, including the introduction of catalytic converters, etc. don't apply to lawn equipment. The result is that these don't actually burn fuel correctly, and spew out lots of harmful pollutants in a way that even large ICE vehicles don't.

https://www.edmunds.com/car-reviews/features/emissions-test-car-vs-truck-vs-leaf-blower.html#:~:text=Distilling%20the%20above%20results%2C%20the,than%20the%20crew%20cab%20pickup.

https://grist.org/technology/lawn-equipment-pollution-report/

Like sure, there are larger sources of emissions, but I'm kinda in favor of making changes that would offer a large benefit proportionate to the amount of lifestyle change needed to make the switch. As in, making this switch would be easier than not. These emissions produce no benefit to us, and they cost us a weird amount of money to produce.

So this is a horrific stereotype, and it has an even more sinister historical precedent.

Back in the era of slavery (that is specifically in the US, the slavery of Africans abducted from their home countries), there were specifically slave "breeding farms" where slavers would commit massive amounts of sexual assault of captive slaves in order to produce slaves they selected by their own arbitrary metric for specific physical qualities... and to save on what can, again horrifically, be referred to as "import costs."

I'm not saying this "worked" or produced the results that slavers wanted. What I am saying is that this specific way of subjugating and dehumanizing people has had lasting effects in both perception of black folks and in the ways that systemic racism works.

Amelie

Excellent

America desperately needs to enact policies that put restrictions on wealth accumulation. There are lots of ways to do this.

I don't disagree with the sentiment, but all of the people who are trying to hound juries are, in fact, extremists.

Xitter being pronounced "shitter" is pretty apt tho