ThisIsSin
Personal corporatehood
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User ID: 822
ThisIsSin
Personal corporatehood
11mo ago
that omnipresent surveillance probably makes it vastly more difficult to be the type of serial killer
CSI (and its later offshoots) unambiguously communicated to everyone alive at that time (everyone watched it or knew someone that did) that every police department had Sherlock Holmes capabilities.
Yeah, "zoom and enhance" was bullshit at the time, but people were largely ignorant of computer capabilities at the time (being that this was also pre-cellphone) and that was only a small part of the claimed capabilities of forensic science. And now those capabilities are increasingly the reality, so you get things like 1980s serial killers getting found out by DNA data they never even submitted.
Instead, you give up on observability and simply try to get all your desired killing in as quickly as possible in one big streak.
As a bonus for the new "parallel killers", you're guaranteed to be on every newspaper (TIME magazine made the Columbine killers a household name), your manifesto (or supposed manifesto) will be paraded around, and everyone in the nation will freak the fuck out.
We haven't quite figured out how to deal with that yet, since renting a truck and driving into a bunch of people is even easier and deadlier than guns are (the recent events in Texas should show that pretty clearly), and the fact that these acts are also fundamentally suicides complicates things even further.
Personally, I think we already hit upon the solution in the 70s and 80s with movie plots portraying 21st-century blood sports. It'd be a radical solution, of course, but if we can offer someone a guaranteed 15 minutes of fame and (the chance) to kill people for shits and giggles while at the same time crowding out the media attention current parallel killers receive I think it'd probably depress their numbers. Might lead to some really weird incentives, though.
ThisIsSin
Personal corporatehood
11mo ago
The signal-boosting the media gives to mass shooters is very much voluntary
Indeed, by "your rules, fairly", collective responsibility for encouraging mass shooters begins with the people who want to impose collective responsibility on their enemy for mass shootings. Of course, they've investigated themselves and found no wrongdoing.
ThisIsSin
Personal corporatehood
11mo ago
If you don't have an affirmative case for why gun rights are more valuable than X dead kids per year, I hate to tell you, but you're going to lose.
Progressives have zero affirmative case for why their policies permitting violent vagrants to kill people are more valuable than X stabbing victims per year; they have yet to lose.
ThisIsSin
Personal corporatehood
11mo ago
but anyone who wants one can certainly have a black scary semiauto .223 of some stripe.
Sure... if they're willing to wait an entire year for the license that takes a weekend, 400 bucks, and (for Restricted) knowing 2 people who'll vouch for you to obtain.
And by and large, this system works. It will still get you killed if you need a gun right now (the archetypical example of this is a stalker who isn't obeying their restraining order; angry exes kill families quite a lot and cops can't be everywhere), but even that isn't a design problem and has more to do with its implementation.
This is the "compromise" position, and if approached in good faith it works exceptionally well specifically because it keeps guns out of the hands of the poor, the stupid, and the friendless- all traits associated with criminality (European citizens are fine with this approach; the US' system of wokeness considering everyone trustworthy until proven otherwise is specifically a reaction to this!). True, existing socially-vetted owners can still become insane later, but the compromise is specifically "we prove ourselves to you, and in return you treat the people who do get through with a 'forgone conclusion, they would have just used a truck or fire instead' attitude (and as such don't launch a bunch of legislation to punish everyone else)", and by and large that works. Most European countries have more liberal gun laws than blue US states (and British Commonwealth states) do as a result- and the most liberal ones were occupied by the Soviets or on their border.
This position can't be reached in the US (and to a significant degree, the government couldn't enforce it even if they wanted to- everyone owns property and there's just too much ground to cover to stop illicit manufacturing), so you end up with a bunch of patches on symptoms like "high capacity mags" and "assault weapons" even though a single-shot shotgun and a .22 is all you need to perpetrate a mass shooting (which is how it happens in the UK). They then proceed to export this solution around the world; which is why the populations of countries closest to the American orbit (Aus, UK, NZ, CA) had licensing schemes and population tolerance thereof that were subsequently completely destroyed (the compromise that was licensing can no longer exist because the population is now too Americanized to tolerate it). For example, NZ was the freest former English colony in terms of gun law, but the population's ability to compromise had been hollowed out by exposure to American culture war until an Australian national came along and shattered it. Canada is more complicated, because it's close enough to the US that the concept of high-trust high-freedom leaks through more, but also lacks the political safeguards to keep that part of the nation safe from its largest cities that the US does... so the rest of the country (culturally closer to the red part of the US) suffers.
ThisIsSin
Personal corporatehood
11mo ago
but nobody is making all-polymer cases
Steyr has done it before with their ACR entry, Textron did it with their LSAT (which became the ammunition for their NGSW rifle, since withdrawn).
They're far from the first plastic cases; Dardick managed to get 95% of the way there in 1960 but his design makes certain compromises that make getting to 100% difficult (their triangular geometry prevents most naive approaches to seal the bottom of the case). People have tried to 3D print these cases but they can't take the pressure.
ThisIsSin
Personal corporatehood
11mo ago
After all we still have both of those in Britain.
You also still have mass shootings in Britain even with the limited type of firearms you can legally acquire there (.22s are still plenty fatal if you put enough of them into the target; that's fundamentally what buckshot is), to say nothing of more general mass casualty events typically involving trucks. Of course, you'll never fully ban shotguns, because you have enough politicians and backers that have ludicrously-expensive H&H products to get away with that- I don't believe that this is "making policy for aggregates, not individuals".
In fact, Britain appears to be so incredibly violent that the nation takes placing a bunch of restrictions on kitchen knives seriously as well and has significant numbers of soldiers and heavily-armed paramilitary on patrol (more liberal European countries have this as well, of course). Maybe it's a good thing the gun law in that nation in particular is largely "no".
ThisIsSin
Personal corporatehood
11mo ago
It does mention that one of those “special purposes” is close-quarters, indoor combat.
The trick with handguns is that they aren't actually all that great at ending threats- they aren't quite powerful enough to do this reliably and tend to require multiple rounds (the price for concealability). So you give a pistol more rounds per trigger press; this was the idea behind the pistols that fire limited bursts rather than dumping the entire magazine, but they're more mechanically complex (whereas the Glock solution is just engaging a tab that pushes the sear back down when the slide closes all the way).
Basically, machine pistols give you a less powerful but far more compact shotgun equivalent (shotguns themselves fire the equivalent of 8 rounds of 9mm per trigger press- this is usually enough) that by its nature is pinpoint accurate when needed. The best example of this is Eastern European criminal use of vz. 61 Skorpions- they're even smaller than a cut-down double-barrel shotgun is yet offer just as much firepower; dump half the 20-round mag into something and the results are not meaningfully different from what a single shell of #00 buckshot does. You have to be closer to the target for this to work with 9mm handguns, though.
Guntube doesn't really understand that point and tend to be more "dump the entire mag to blow up some watermelons, also magdumping means half your rounds are over the target" though- they're specialist weapons that basically don't exist outside of rental ranges and video games and as such the knowledge base about how they're actually used is limited to a book I've only read a review of. There are a couple things that should make the community's understanding of this concept a bit more mature, but one of them is limited to 3D printing and the willingness to file SBR paperwork and the other one isn't on the market yet.
ThisIsSin
Personal corporatehood
11mo ago
There are a few ways to convert an AR-15 with one or two drop-in parts such that it will fire in full-auto. Most of them superficially resemble the plane-type or the claw-type of bottle opener- the former also has a piece that sticks up to be pushed by the bolt carrier.
The general solution to achieving full-auto fire is "hammer must stay back until the bolt is fully closed, once it is, trip the hammer"; these parts are a mechanical linkage that makes that process possible.
It's possible to prevent this, but while it's a very low technical bar to go from semi-auto to full-auto, that trivial inconvenience is generally sufficient to stop criminals from doing that.
ThisIsSin
Personal corporatehood
11mo ago
and it didn't lead to a demand for liberalised handgun laws in any country except America
It didn't really even lead to a demand for liberalized handgun laws in America over that time either- it would take until the mid-to-late nineties for licenses to carry concealed in public to become rubber-stamp affairs (and another 20 after that would be done away with entirely), and that was also in the midst of a ban that limited the number of permissible rounds to 10 (admittedly, the '94 AWB and its 10-round limit predate even the chunky 90s-00s subcompact handguns which barely hold that many rounds in the first place).
To be fair, it also took until the late '90s for the largest English-speaking countries to completely destroy the concept of gun ownership in general; the bans in UK and Australia (and to a point, Canada) all came after the US' AWB.
ThisIsSin
Personal corporatehood
11mo ago
Why do we have laws against defamation in the first place?
Because human beings are not computers and operate with imperfect information.
Let's assume that someone makes a false complaint about the quality of work that you do- for instance, leaves a one-star review (to go with a popular example). This will affect your ability to get future business, and hence future income- you have been materially harmed by that statement. If that was done maliciously, how's that different than stealing that income directly?
Now, the US tries to play objectively, so you'll only get punished for doing it if it was false, and any reasonable person would have known it was false. But the problem is that even true-but-distasteful statements, like #metoo descriptions of sexual activities, have the same effect, which is why more conservative countries (like European ones) will punish true statements of this type as well whereas more liberal countries (by definition) value not punishing truth-telling over doing justice to liars.
That's the general idea behind it, anyway; whether those countries succeed in their aims is an entirely different matter, of course.
ThisIsSin
Personal corporatehood
11mo ago
they sit in really odd ways despite never having stretched once in their lives
To add to this, women tend to be more flexible than men.
Given that, it's probably natural that men with that trait would find themselves preferring a posture that women use (since it could naturally be assumed that kind of posture accounts for both that flexibility and the inherent weakness it trades off with).
Maybe flexibility (sits like a girl) drives socialization (mocked for sitting like a girl) drives sexuality (with overclocked sense of pattern-matching, decides he'll just be a girl) more than we want to admit it does, but this is probably also only true for these men.
ThisIsSin
Personal corporatehood
11mo ago
The best example of this right now are arguably the Kurdish.
ThisIsSin
Personal corporatehood
11mo ago
I want this, but for clamping down on safetyism-as-excuse-to-do-nothing; I think directly pricing in the cost of inaction or prohibition on certain activities (through policies and otherwise) would be a great way to force the paranoid to have to directly pay for it, limiting the moral hazard inherent in the concept of safetyism by attaching a price to it, paid to those affected as a redistributive tax on delaying development.
I’ll have more to say about this later since I don’t currently have time to make this more coherent, but know that I believe this concept is sound at its core when it comes to things that don’t have direct and obvious costs; or in other words, society should have a hard limit on how much hysteria it is allowed to exercise.
ThisIsSin
Personal corporatehood
11mo ago
aid digestion
Translation: it's an excuse to drink more.
CNS depressants/muscle relaxants generally exacerbate heartburn, which is why recommendations if you get it tend to be "don't drink so much then"- so I find it very difficult to believe that alcohol can be any kind of digestive aid.
Another contributor to my interpretation is the typical ABV of the digestif- about 40%- whereas aperitifs tend to be about half that. A full stomach inhibits alcohol absorption, so it makes sense that the after-dinner drink should be stiffer than the pre-dinner drink for the same effect.
Maybe "keeping the party going" is a digestive aid all its own, though.
ThisIsSin
Personal corporatehood
11mo ago
that a 15 year old who's pushed out of school necessarily gets a job and a career
This was a widespread course of action 60 years ago. We decided that it was more cost-effective to farm out the job that cohort did to other countries while warehousing them for a few more years- missing that developmental milestone has consequences, but ones that have been successfully privatized (it costs society nothing to have them sit in their parents' basements and lie relatively flat instead).
is not something teenagers tend to be good at
>gives [demographic] zero chances to develop a trait to the point they're actively discouraged from doing so
>complains that [demographic] don't exhibit that trait
>claims it's immutable biological fact of [demographic]'s inherent inferiority even though history of every time period outside of the last 40 years conclusively proves otherwise
>confused_nick_young.jpg
ThisIsSin
Personal corporatehood
11mo ago
But we attempt to prevent abuse by some combination of conditions that the threat be, for example, immanent, articulable, and clear to a reasonable person.
The last 3 years of sociofinancial policy disaster pursuant to Covid is a recent lapse proving otherwise.
Catastrophism (an attack on what it means to be "reasonable") works; that's why the last 40 years of social policy have been primarily driven by it- "if you let your kids outside they'll get kidnapped", "deadnaming is literally killing trans people", etc.
"Preservation of life" has transitioned from being a social value to an overriding social value, and appealing to it has improperly elevated those claims to veto power.
ThisIsSin
Personal corporatehood
11mo ago
I think the Moon landing footage as broadcast to the public were definitely faked with the help of Stanley Kubrick; it's functionally indistinguishable from the real thing because he insisted that it all be filmed on location.
I do think it's pretty weird that the people that are working on the current project don't really seem all that confident that going to the moon is something they can actually do
Yeah, that's what the people who actually managed to do it said too- though if they had their doubts it's not like they would have really been permitted to air them at that point. It's not like we don't understand the physics of landing on other celestial bodies, given we throw stuff at them all the time (the Moon, Mars, and on occasion others too)- but the vast majority (all?) of the institutional secret sauce when it comes to engineering manned spaceflight with nothing but a slide rule and mid-20th-century materials science is 6 feet under now. And that goes for the Soviets just as well as it does the Americans; at least the Soviets didn't really stop cranking out Progresses.
And really, Artemis seems to me to suffer from F-35itis given they're both peacetime craft; there's a lot more bullshit they want/need the computers to automatically deal with now. "Just hit it with a hammer" and "turn it off, then back on again" was fine for Apollo (the fact that the people they sent tended to be test pilots meant they expected training to take up a lot of the slack)- and the telemetry they had was, I suspect, relatively minimal. But that's not fine for Artemis, built to a tighter budget with pilots that don't have the 20 years flying prototype fighter jets to fix anything too technical that goes wrong up there. And considering that they had to re-invent literally everything I'd say the project is coming along about as quickly as one would expect.
not nearly as weird as it being such a solved problem that we were sending golf equipment along for the ride!
The national security objective was achieved, and they managed to pull it off the first try. If your project isn't getting renewed and you know it, but the fuel and development costs are already paid for, why not go for victory laps?
Oh well, at least you can shoot the laser at it and determine that there's definitely something there from the reflectors they left behind.
slavery obsoleted by those revolutions
Slavery (and its relatives, like serfdom) was obsoleted by the Industrial Revolution making the institution economically unviable; claiming that it was the Enlightenment that made the British (the most industrialized nation at the time, and as such the one for whom it would have been the most unviable) turn around and abolish it is the literal definition of Whig history.
People really like pretending that business marches alongside honor (an attitude that persists in the US to this day) but it's rare for that to ever happen.
human sacrifice
We still perpetrate this, we just try our best to distribute it over the entire population (i.e. the root of modern socialism) even if the negative effects are many times worse. Whether or not that's better... well, that depends on whether or not you're disproportionately affected by that- classical liberals are not-coincidentally generally the people whose have innate attributes that socialism seeks to redistribute the most (as much personal attributes, like self-control and the ability to act in good faith, as economic attributes).
When Bicensorship protects itself by censoring Monocensorship all of the Elders are in on it and know what they are doing and why.
Or in other words, it's the paradox of tolerance; the idea that a tolerant bicensoring society is a contradiction in terms, since a bicensoring society will be destroyed by tolerating monocensorship yet cannot truly claim to be tolerant of everything if they censor it. This concept is intentionally misused by monocensorship proponents when it comes to certain things bicensorship permits elders to view.
There will always be a temptation to make the qualifying requirements for being an Elder a little bit stricter, and a little bit stricter, and a little bit stricter, until after a hundred years it has turned into Monocensorship.
It helps if the old aren't provided with excuses (in this case, economic) to hate the young in this regard; our requirement for "elder" was "physical adulthood" in the 1900s, was 18 by 1980, and we're closer to 25-30 now (the meme about "fully developed brains" is specifically designed to evoke and reinforce this viewpoint).
ThisIsSin
Personal corporatehood
11mo ago
I did know a guy who used to get goosebumps when he saw an otherworldly set of ass or tits and my thought was always, "get a boner like the rest of us!"
I guess that anime nosebleed trope actually might have something to it.
ThisIsSin
Personal corporatehood
11mo ago
I wonder what the Germans do about GDPR.
They (and Europe in general) get around it by not having any meaningful tech industry.
ThisIsSin
Personal corporatehood
11mo ago
If you don't know how to handle boiling water, you should not be recognized as a legal adult.
It is probably worth pointing out that it only takes slight incompetence of the serving employee to end up with that cup of coffee in one's lap (doubly so with the shitty thin lids of years gone by). That's an inconvenience for cold drinks, but every place that serves hot drinks serves them at a temperature that will scald you if you attempt to drink them immediately.
and the lawsuit resulted in everyone else dropping the temperatures to avoid being sued as well.
It utterly bewilders me why the norm for hot beverages is to be served at temperatures that will physically harm you should you attempt to consume them within the first half hour of preparation; clearly the reason fast food chains serve their coffee that hot is specifically to ablate the outer part of your tongue, thus you won't be able to taste how shitty the beverage actually is (which I suspect is why McDonalds in particular was doing this; the coffee they serve in the US is quite literally just hot water with some coffee grounds dumped directly into the cup).
It's clearly not "so that the coffee stays hot later so that when you're ready to enjoy your meal it'll still be hot", because they don't care about the meal itself staying hot for that period of time (the food containers would be just as insulated as beverage containers are now). Guess jury selection should have included people who actually believe that burning themselves is a valuable and immutable part of the experience of consuming tea and coffee?
ThisIsSin
Personal corporatehood
11mo ago
and the legislators making laws (like speed limits on uncongested freeways) which would undermine the other two
There's an underrated concept that I heard once about this concept generalized as having to make laws there be "beneath the dignity of the State".
Contrast the law in the neighboring countries and most of the English-speaking world where everyone recognizes that speed limits are not one of those laws that codifies pro-social behavior (because, quite simply, they're set far below the maximum safe speed of the road) and everyone drives 10 over as a consequence. It's almost like respect for the State is a two-way street or something.
Well, yeah. The Allies absolutely beat it into the Germans that being a Nazi was wrong and the polite opinion there is that it's still wrong today; unfortunately, there are no Allies to beat into the Western public that their Nazi-like response (forced vaccinations under legal penalty, concentration camps, rejection of science in favor of the regime's approach, internal border checkpoints, etc.) to Covid was wrong.
Society has
qualifiedsovereign immunity, just like its corporate arm (government) does.More options
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