MollieTheMare
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User ID: 875
MollieTheMare
15d ago
Re:
diners in movies
Maybe @BahRam You can chime in with what he meant more specifically.
As some general US-based commentary, it is true that the charming, cheap, accessible, "everyone knows your name" movie diner is virtually gone now.
That's not to say there is no residual of the 24-hour diner left. Notably, Waffle House continued this tradition well into the 90s and is still extremely common in the American South.
In that era it did serve as a third place sociologically. Describing the eponymous song:
... it's about coming together with the people you love and making your dreams come true.
Dreams don't come true anymore.
Through a combination of prices rising, penny-pinching degraded service, and more widespread public drug use, it has now developed a reputation as a place for vagrants, not a place to hang out.
... promising cheap affordable food at all hours of the day. [B]ecause of this it attracts homeless people, drug users, drug dealers, gangsters, and generally drunk people
Being open 24 hours a day is part of the draw. They are often on the side of the expressway. And if you need a cheap(ish), filling place for food, you can be assured they will be open. Even after a hurricane.
Waffle House manages to survive because of highly highly optimized supply chains, and dirt-cheap wages. An independent diner with highly competent, friendly staff would have much higher overhead. Particularly a problem is that classic American diner staples have seen a dramatic increase in input costs. Eggs, chicken fried steak, coffee, etc. have all seen price increases that vastly outpace broader inflation. You still find some small diners limping along, but it's often more of a boutique, higher-priced thing.
MollieTheMare
19d ago
For incline it should be easy to set up where the safeties don't get in the way. For flat bench you should also be able to set up with a modest arch and find a decent spot to put the safeties, if you have Westside hole spacing. If you don't have tight hole spacing or dislike hard stops, I like safety straps or soft safeties. They feel better if you make a soft accidental touch while moving.
It's also easy to customize a DIY solution if you are too cheap or they do not sell safeties for your rack. Make sure to set them where you will never get a finger or hand caught. I misracked 405# once. Those $20 Harbor Freight recovery straps saved my life, or at least prevented getting seriously maimed.
MollieTheMare
23d ago
The short version it's not something I would mess around with. You are probably just screwed. But that's easy to say for someone that doesn't have this problem.
A few thoughts:
- I think there are buffer tubes with fixed or integral stocks. I have no idea if this qualifies
- Have you considered a M1A, I mean if you can't get a good deal on a Mini-14, why not go for it's full grown brother. Longer effective range than an AR-15. Closely related to the "Greatest Battle Implement Ever Devised." I assume that means it doesn't suck
- For your use case maybe a pistol caliber carbine. There must be a qualified model somewhere. Cheaper to shoot and less ammo to stock if you go for 9mm
MollieTheMare
24d ago
It is quite obnoxious to be using a different unit than the locals. A better test might be how long it takes the average person to develop an intuition for the alternative unit. Such that they no longer have to explicitly or mentally calculate.
MollieTheMare
24d ago
It's quite interesting to see the metric absolutists come out defending using ½ as a base unit of increment. Maybe powers of two fractional inches aren't so bad after all.
MollieTheMare
25d ago
Everyone here talking about the bridge. The bridge only cost $35 million (nominal 1933 dollars), the real thing to 'mire is the $400MM net, an unparalleled tribute to cost disease.
MollieTheMare
26d ago
I am not a gun expert
And it does show.
we don't have firepower right now ... It's all pistols
This is always going to be a problem when you bring only your sidearm to a gunfight. Even if your opponent only has handguns (which have the problem of being easier to conceal), you'd still be better off grabbing your long gun from the trunk. Or, more likely, for modern departments running Ford Explorers from a center console mount.
See rule 6 of gun fighting:
If you can choose what to bring to a gunfight, bring a long gun and a friend with a long gun.
Yes, any rifle cartridge fired from a rifle-length barrel will have more kinetic energy than a pistol caliber fired from a pistol-length barrel. No, this is not unique to guns that look particularly scary. No, there is nothing magical about 5.56; FMJ, varmint rounds, soft points, steel cores, etc., exist for all sorts of rifle rounds. The various American .30s used ubiquitously for game like deer in North America are all capable of being more powerful than the 5.56. The main advantage of the 5.56 is a flatter trajectory at intermediate distance, which doesn't matter indoors.
For home defense, there are different philosophies. The advantage of the 5.56 is the velocity gives you the ability to use frangible ammunition, which reduces the risk of overpenetration. There is also no need for portability or concealment for home defense, which favors the more effective long gun. See rule 6.
The cops do have other slight advantages in an indoor environment. Mainly, they can use carbine-length barrels, which are more wieldy for clearing work. The rest of us would have to fill out an eon's worth of paperwork to get permission from the ATF to make an SBR.
The AR platform is far from cutting-edge at this point, being designed in 1956 (70 years ago). They have, in fact, made a difference even if a government has armor, see, for example, the Troubles.
MollieTheMare
27d ago
Gin Rickey... bartenders feel like they should know how to make them
Or they will ask if you just finished reading The Great Gatsby. But seriously underrated.
G&T also solid, but only if served by a pretty British Airways flight attendant with a slight scowl but otherwise impeccable manners.
MollieTheMare
29d ago
adds cost to virtually every single consumer product currently in existence
I assume it was someone else who said they were a Gmail user? YouTube and Gmail are both extremely common and valuable consumer products. Equivalent levels of email service were and are much more expensive if not ad supported. YouTube provides you access to more media for free than you could ever consume, far more than premium paid services like pay-per-view or classic HBO. You can use both ad-free if you want to pay for the premium version or are okay with ad-block. There is clearly a category of products that is cheaper because of being subsidized by advertising.
To address your other point about polluting the information commons: it is a simple fact of life that the information commons is polluted in far more pernicious ways. People once espoused the idea that an object’s acceleration under gravity was a function of its mass. This was the accepted wisdom of both experts and the masses. There is wrong information out there. It's up to you to figure out what to believe; there's no oracle to consult for truth. Except, if you want to filter out advertising, then there is an oracle, and the pollution is trivial to filter out. A machine can literally do it. Ad-block at the browser or DNS level has nearly perfect accuracy.
You also assert that this hinges on:
advertising dollars from other productive uses
It's not at all shown that this is a zero-sum game and that advertising is net negative in sign. The marginal cost of actually delivering the advertisements on the internet rounds to zero. The question, then, is where the dollars used to produce and target ads would have gone. If your counterfactual is curing cancer, sure, but that seems unlikely. If the marginal dollar goes into producing Lululemon as a status and social signaling device which simultaneously makes my wife's butt look good, that has positive utility to me. If the counterfactual is my tax dollars go to support yet another starving artist who would have been a marketer at Lululemon, that's net negative utility to me.
I hate advertisements too. So I pay for services I value and ad-block everywhere else, because FM, they're still getting the analytics at least. I don't think anyone needs to come and save me from advertisements, and I don't think enforcing any sort of ban would be at all practical. Your assertion that it would be practical assumes:
because marketing by its very nature needs to be noticeable.
No, these are just the most annoying ads to you. Guerrilla advertising and astroturfing are real things. And no, ads in general are not "noticeable" to normies; they are just part of the background fabric of life. Have you ever watched a normie browse the web? There are advertisements that would make my eyes bleed, but they just scroll along happy as a clam. They do not feel bothered by them in the same way you or I feel bothered by them.
Yeah, I have the mental defect of thinking things that are slightly grungy are charming. The fact that purpose-built as nostalgia versions are not grungy is partially why I don't like them. In addition to not cheap.
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