The person I was responding to was talking about 100% total gun bans. Just want to make sure you realize this. Nothing you said disagrees with my take on gun control. If you intended to agree, that’s cool (but rare online ;) )

Looking at this wiki page, NZ seems to have the same kind of gun laws my home state has, with a fairly similar ownership rate (and it looks like NZ averages 5 guns per owner?). As a general rule, I wouldn’t use the term “strict gun controls” if a country’s laws match any US state. We get a little crazy here with our Second Amendment.

There’s a lot of room between that kind of control and “everyone has an AR15 and a concealed firearm without a licence”.

100%, except I’m not sure why everyone is so obsessed with AR-15s. People keep trying to ban them in the US while deadlier weapons get a pass. And concealed carry is sorta funny. In my state, all carry is concealed carry because open carry scares non-gun-owners. You can basically have your gun license challenged in my state if you open carry because it can be used to argue you’re not in the right mind to own a gun if you carry openly knowing it’ll scare people.

I do understand this is reasonably doable, but it also seems like a niche skill for someone really into their hobby

Sure, but we’re discussing a world where ammo is made artificially scarce. At the height of “wtf is going on with weed”, 1/3 of all pot-smokers I knew were growers, and some were hardcore at it. It’s far easier to make ammo than grow decent weed. And unlike weed, we’re talking serious logistics problems trying to ban DIY ammo.

I agree it’s not common now.

Police don’t need to be a hammer. They don’t need to focus on hammering skills above all else. While they sometimes do need to be, they need the judgement to correctly find those times, they need to understand better options when it’s not those times, and they do need to understand when compassion/caring is the answer

The most effective police forces in the world are in countries where they generally go unarmed… but I daresay that movements like “defund the police” are looking for that same thing - a force of social workers with at least some logical separation from the guys-with-guns.

But that’s not just about skills and the right employees, it’s about the right list of responsibilities. And frankly, I think they’ve got enough on their plate they can’t do to add animal control in areas where they currently don’t do that anyway. If you look at other emergency services, they do one thing INCREDIBLY well. Then you have police that do a dozen things terribly. And often times when they are called to do one of the peaceful things, they escalate the situation due to their training in others of the things. I am not so jaded to think that the world doesn’t need SWAT teams occasionally. But I don’t think the training that leads to SWAT teams and the training to deescalate a loud drunk are remotely the same.

Maybe we focus too much on the concerns of relatively few gun owners and too little on the victims. Bringing a weapon into a city creates more risk for more innocent victims, and that’s not ok

I tend to agree with this. I really wonder what kind of regulations could be put into place and enforced without abuse by police (who ignore guns on their friends’ hips but use it as an opportunity to take out minorities accused of being in gangs)

This has to be part of it.

“Nobody in the entire country having any gun for any reason” is a necessary part of any form of gun control? I don’t think I agree with that as it seems a bit hyperbolic. Or am I misunderstanding your context?

But a lot of those accessories make mass shootings easier. While one innocent victim getting shot is a tragedy, it’s not as bad as 4 or 20, or any larger number

Heat compensators make mass-shootings easiers? Recoil compensators? What they do is make collateral (or self-) damage harder. I DON’T understand the bills that come after heat compensators one bit, but I also struggle to see how recoil compensators are problem-contributors. If someone were shooting up my building, as terrible as that would be, I’d prefer they had a recoil compensator. They would be less likely to hit more people, while not actually being more likely to hit their target.

It has to. In my state guns are also harder to get and that’s reflected in much lower gun ownership

When I’m in a “police abuse of power” group and see people looking to drastically increase police power (and/or federal police power, since I live in a fairly left-leaning state as it is) I get scared regardless of the topic. You also point to alcohol - but I think that analogy fails because there’s somewhat limited federal regulation on sale of alcohol as long as you’re not selling to minors. My (again, “liberal”) state lets towns assign liquor licenses basically as they see fit, and you can buy alcohol on almost every street corner.

For efficacy, you bring up “when someone can visit a Walmart over the border”. This doesn’t seem workable to me. It’s not that there’s a Walmart in the next state, it’s that you can buy a gun in the next state without training, a background check, or any other validation. I’d actually use this as an example of the “throw paint at the wall and hope” form of legislating my side does on gun control that we will not do on any other topic. We KNOW what will work. We can’t get what will work to pass, so we spend months talking about other things that both won’t pass and won’t be effective. What will work is to stop the wrong people from buying guns by making them show they’re not the wrong person before they do.

True, but there’s a vast quantity of illegal guns already out there, and you can’t control illegal sales. You can make those more expensive to use, and maybe some won’t

How much more expensive? Are we talking $20/bullet? That won’t stop violent crimes or most mass-shootings. Are you talking $200/bullet? That’s going to prevent legal gun owners from actually knowing how to use their gun. Remember, far more people die from gun accidents and suicides than homicides. Raising the price of the bullet is unlikely to decrease homicides, will not affect suicides, and is likely to increase gun accidents drastically.

A homicide takes just one bullet. Practice and training takes thousands. The increase of price will disproportionally affect the desire to be a responsible gun owner over the reduction of gun violence altogether. If anything, increase the price of guns while offering waivers for a first gun of someone who has been background-checked and lives in certain “right to farm”-style communities.

Side 2 of this. A lot of people make their own ammo. Not exactly hard. It’s currently more expensive than buying ammo, but home-made bullets are not unlikely if that changes. They ARE more likely to do spectacularly bad things in general. And then you could try to regulate the powder (only ammo-specific ingredient), but any criminal and many DIYers could make their own powder with readily available ingredients.

I understand the urge and there are certainly good reasons, yet I don’t think the statistics really bear that out. For all the news about police shootings, the vast majority never do

I’ll leave police accountability questions to everyone else in this group that I am sure will come running to my aid. That said, how do you suggest small towns without a police force budget for police? Let’s say you live in a town that has had zero gun violence in the last decade and has not found the need for a police force (I did for several years!). Now you seem to be suggesting they budget out salaries for enough officers to replace all the people who use firearms to protect their farms from wildlife. What would be a reasonable response time for those police if an animal starts wreaking havok and killing pets/livestock? When I lived in that town, the Fire (only local service) response time was still 15 minutes.

Not a “gun rights” point, but I’ll make it. Police are a hammer. They do a few things VERY well. But no matter their training, they will always be inferior at everything else. In the US (and many other countries), we use police for those other things anyway. With all due respect, in no reality is an armed man with a gun the right first person to de-escalate a verbal domestic dispute. Paramedics deal with situations that start and/or become more volitile than police on a regular basis, and most refuse to carry a firearm even if they are allowed.

How about zero guns in populated areas?

I’ve argued for that before, differentiation of regions. It went over like a fart in church with literally everyone. The gun control crowd seem to think “rednecks will figure it out or should move to the city”, and the gun rights crowd thinks “cities are more dangerous than the country”. I’ve seen knife restrictions in big cities, so firearm restrictions seem more reasonable. Many countries require guns to be locked in cases instead of worn on the person. In cities, that seems pretty reasonable.

How about getting serious about consequences for harm caused by unsecured weapons?

I’ve always fought for that. But this isn’t “no guns at all”, which is what I was asking about. Most of your suggestions are not “no guns at all” and seem worthy of discussion.

How about limited gun types to what is useful for expected scenarios?

For me, this is a nonstarter. If someone is at their house and dealing with a coyote attacking family or pets, a semiautomatic rifle is the best tool. If they are using their firearm preventatively, that would be a shotgun. If they need a firearm while travelling and not hunting or anything, semi-automatic pistol. I just named basically every kind of gun somebody wants to ban. Well, that and guns that look especially scary, which I think is stupid. We already limit the guns types to what is useful, and I’ll be the first to fight for keeping machineguns out of civilian hands.

I’m also all about banning things like bump stocks, of course. But being honest, many safety accessories people suggest banning aren’t contributors to gun violence.

How about fewer places to get them?

Are you suggesting the Federal government step in? In my state, they’re fairly difficult to get. Should the Fed try to mimic our laws and policies? That doesn’t really seem to be the problem to me, though. If people want firearms and they’re legal to purchase, they’ll get them whether there’s 1 store in their county or Walmart sells them.

How about more expensive ammo?

That seems worth discussing. I have some concerns; unless there’s a firing range exception, it means gun owners will have less experience and comfort with their firearm. A person with a gun and no regular practice/training is like a dull knife. It sounds less dangerous for all of 5 seconds before it leads to some accidental tragedy. I’m actually a believer in requiring con-ed including target-shooting for someone who wants to own a gun. A gun that shoots its target can be horrible. A gun that misses its target IS horrible.

How about just an order of magnitude less?

An order of magnitude less what? Less ammo? How does that reduce gun violence? A magnitude fewer guns? How do you intend to execute on that? I do think there’s way too many guns in the US. And I think a lot of people own guns that shouldn’t, regardless of the gun. I’m a strong believer in background check and psych check to own a gun.

And yes, for the love of god, require the cops in your area to have training, skills, mental health.

We don’t have many of those (cops in our area). And unlike the conservatives out there, I kinda like to keep it that way. My not liking cops is why I do like access to firearms. They’re simply not qualified or trustworthy in many real-world cases where a firearm solves a problem without ever being pointed at a human being.

Do you have “naturally dangerous” areas in your country? I’m a gun-control-but-not-ban Progressive, and my reasoning is that most of the towns I’ve lived have had wildlife issues that are only reasonable resolved by firearms. Our coyote breeds attack large pets, small children, and (rarely) adults. We are a free-range-chicken state (chickens must be allowed to run free). My last road, coyotes ran rampant hospitalizing my next door neighbors 100lb+ lab (he was huge). It’s not safe to be out alone or in your woods at certain times of year. Not to mention the occasional black bear who usually runs away but sometimes charges… A coyote charged my wife once and her german shepherd fortunately scared it off without bloodshed.

In the last town I lived, we didn’t have police, only mutual aid contracts. The mutual-aid department didn’t have animal control. Their standard answer to a dangerous predator running amok was “shoot it”.

Now… I firmly believe our police is way over-financed, and think the last thing we need is MORE police officers. ACAB and all that jazz. Being honest, I have little respect for police in general, if marginally more than some on my side. So assuming you have areas likes that, how do you resolve it? The last answer I was given was “everyone should move to cities”. Needless to say, I was not amused.

I’d love to be convinced that zero-guns-allowed-for-nonhunters at the national level is physically possible in the US, but I just can’t.

I don’t really get people saying fuck Nintendo. It’s their IP, and Yuzu team was pretty blatant it’s made for piracy

Because a significant percent of people have always seen IP as theft and IP lawsuits as shakedowns. Real Talk - IP was codified to solve one problem (it wasn’t casual piracy, it was inventors being ripped off by evil businesses), and it made that problem worse. We should’ve just thrown it out from there and tried something else, but then the evil businesses convinced the soccer moms that their little Billy listening to Metallica on Napster was everything wrong with this country.

It’s not what you do when you try to stay under the radar

And people walked down the street smoking pot in my state before it was legalized. We still said “FUCK the war on drugs” when they got harassed by cops.

. I use MediaMonkey since v0.1

I think that’s one of the ones I tried. It’s just more convenient to have unlimited access to music, whether I own it or not.

as she runs into walls now when the system is down because there is no light.

What do you do for lights? Like motion/position detection into each room? Or voice control?

I’ve wanted to get into automation several times, and I’m never settled enough in a house to spend the money. There’s always some reason we want to move and I don’t want to do all that permanent work to move. I even worked at an IoT company for a few years on backend and embedded code, so I have literally no excuse…

At least we have that mandatory 14-days-return-policy.

Not sure where that is. That would be nice (except that they could reduce the cashback anyway). Consumer Protections these days have been eroding in the US. Even our so-called consumer protection laws have landmines to protect the businesses.

I’ve used playnite a few times. I always forget about it for some reason or another. Gog has a built-in tool like playnite and I fail to use that, too.

Still do that. For over 25yrs I nourish my library. Just the MP3s made room for FLACs.

I still have it somewhere I’m sure, but I really gave up on it, for the convenience of youtube music of all things. Literally every song I ever had including a couple super-obscure albums I’d lost. And it’s SO convenient. It just works for me everywhere I want it.

Yeah ok, I get that. I’ve got 2 servers running 24/7 with proxmox/hyper-v, so those tools all run in seperate VMs. But especially in this case, it’s practically no maintenance

Every time I mean to start setting up servers, some reason (or my wife) talk me out of it. I’m jealous. It’s on my bucket list. I’m the only guy I know who has run server clusters professionally who has never had his own.

I must say that i’m in the warez-scene since the early 90s and I never had a virus-problem.

I have had a couple over the years; usually use the “nuke and restart” solution. Only one was REALLY major and I was never sure whether it was software or a dumb family member. My password-protected screenshare app went live one day and started buying Chinese gift cards with a clearly automated script. Thank god someone was in the office when it happened and they only got through a couple hundred dollars before we pulled the plug and called our bank.

You won’t see that elsewhere here. No way. First you gotta prove it wasn’t YOU that broke it at home. I could on for hours…

I know resellers hate Amazon returns, but they agree to them. I will literally make buying decisions based on the presence or lack of the “Free Returns” flag. I would literally pay for “return insurance” if AllState started to do that, too. I hate return hassles.

a game i actually played on epic.

Here’s a few of mine (not sure if any come from Amazon): Control (this was awesome!), shapez (almost bought it, then it was in my inbox), loop hero, Guardians of the Galaxy (Christmas free games), Outer Worlds (ditto), Evil WIthin 1 and 2, most of the fallout games, Death Stranding, Gloomhaven… I’m only on page 5 of 20 lol. Only 1 out of 5 of their free games are any good, but between big giveaways and the like, that’s still ~15 good free games a year lol. So needless to say, Epic is always installed on my computer.

It just never occurred as a prime (no pun intended) reason to pay… Errr… Prime

Perhaps THE problem with Prime right now is that none of their services except maybe TV is worth $11/mo on its own. Their free games aren’t Humble Monthly, but HM is just games. Their TV isn’t Netflix, but it’s $4/mo cheaper. You can get free shipping without Prime now (that wasn’t true before), but next day is phenomenal. As for books, there’s not really any replacement I know of. It’s not perfect (has this annoying thing about having books 2 on in some series, without book 1), but if you read a book a month, it pays for itself.

Warez were never convenient. Just “free”. Yet, with a tiny amount of “work”

For sure. It’s always been a baseline of convenience. I remember the old days of curating my mp3 collection every 6 months, removing dupes and fixing organizational shifting. But if I do that stuff for apps, I have to maintain freaking sandbox environments for each app, make sure my computer is backed up in case I have to wipe it, make sure nothing auto-logins so a remote attack doesn’t happen, etc. About 1 in 2 cracked apps show up as a virus and you can never know whether it’s a false positive, so you have to use a computer condom and then STILL get tested.

Dishing out 100 bucks would need a lot of benefits to convince me. Though i get you. Trading money for tinkering-time. All depends on our preference and skill and nerdiness 😂

I’m in an ok place right now. And Amazon is still the cheapest place to buy anything, for me. If I spend over $1000/yr there on everything, a lot more if you count the holidays, then Prime has already justified itself. And slower or not, Amazon with Prime is STILL the fastest Christmas shipper.

Anecdote… We bought Ring cameras from the Ring site for a family member in November. By mid-December, they still hadn’t shipped because Christmas orders were so backlogged. So we bought them again on Amazon and they were on our doorstep 2 days later, just a couple days before Christmas. Was it next day? No. Was it worth it? YEAH.

Then we had to fight with Ring for 2 weeks because they wouldn’t cancel the order. We got the Cameras the 2nd week of January and my wife was on the phone with them 6 or 7 times before they finally approved a return. Amazon has this thing called “Free Returns” on most items. You can literally write in “I was drunk shopping” for your return reason and nobody bats an eyelash.

But i doubt it just downloads and that’s it. No tracking? No phoning home? No play-statistics? Hmm

I can’t be positive. I’ve never run any network traces on it. But it doesn’t have any of the hallmarks of service DRMs. No “connecting” popup or login prompt. I’ve played Amazon-downloaded games offline. If there’s a hidden DRM, it’s more-or-less obscured.

Let’s be honest, though. Amazon gives the games away for free in an app that will never be used to sell products; and they do it as a bullet-point for Prime and to nudge people towards Luna. It’s obviously the games they get for free that they give away. I see no reason for them to do more work than they have to, plugging in a DRM.

But i never heard of anyone actually using the app instead of maybe even playing one of those freebies and then quitting the app again 😁

It’s hard to remember what games I got through Amazon vs Epic, but I clearly remember a few times I was excited about an Amazon Games offering added an Epic game.

In Amazon Games natively, my happy games are Autonauts, Terraformers, Close to the Sun (recently), and a few of those short adventure games I completed that nobody wants to spend $20 on but everyone loves to play.

I tried watching like 3 things. And one i could rent, the others pay extra and i was like “wtf? This is prime? Fuckit”

Their rent thing sucks, but I *never *see rentals in front of me when I use Prime Video on my TV. I named 3 of their big exclusives, but there’s plenty more either exclusive or just licensed. It’s never the most awesome shows of any service, but I could still find a few hours per day of video if I tried.

It just sucks that you’d need like 5 services and still can’t watch EVERYTHING

Yeah, I’m with you 5000% on that. That’s where Gabe Newall is right. I’d probably be willing to drop drop $100/mo or more on a service if it had EVERYTHING on-demand, convenient, with no DRM of any kind. And I’d never once think to download-and-unsub or distribute or anything.

…as for your experience, I say wave that damn Jolly Roger. Gimme convenience or give me death. I pay because things are convenient for me. If it wasn’t, I probably wouldn’t be paying either.

The games are on their app (nope, thanks) or epic (no thanks).

Their app is surpisingly fair. No inherent DRM, just click “download” and it downloads. Epic… well, I have 100+ games I got for free, so I have it anyway. I probably have a $1000 collection of “free” games on Epic at this point.

The tv stuff is the worst I’ve seen back when i actually paid for my series/movies

With all the subscription services, I think that’s the rule. If you like what they have, you love it. If not, you go elsewhere. At least Prime is cheaper than some of them, but at the end of the day it’s about the stuff you enjoy.

For me, it’s WoT, Reacher, Good Omens on top, along with a few of their FreeVee partnership shows. But I have to respect they also have The Boys, which I’ve been meaning to get into.

I mean, to me they beat Apple+ and Hulu, lose to Disney+ and Netflix. At $11/mo, I get all those things along with the expedited shipping and the books. Convenient, but also not overpriced.

And when the other website costs more, has worse return policies, slower shipping, and possibly is even a scam site? The problem with Amazon is how good it is even when it’s being evil.

As I said elswhere, I look EVERYWHERE before Amazon first. That involves me checking out BBB on mom&pop storefronts and trying to filter out the scam stores or the ones with significant issues. It involves me price-checking, coupon-checking, seeing if services like Rakuten can get the price to match Amazon’s. I don’t expect most people to do all those things and neither should you.

And even then, I end up buying from Amazon about 2/3 the time. Because I won’t pay 20% more in some meaningless protest that isn’t going anywhere.

It’s an extreme-case prisoner’s dilemma. For shoppers to prevent a Walmart/Amazon monopoly, people would have to both give up convenience AND affordability in hope that everyone else had the same radical values. There were PLENTY of boycotters for both, but they just weren’t anywhere near enough.

At some point, when you’re starving and Sam Walton comes by and offers you food your family can afford, you pull the trigger. And I don’t fault someone who does that.

It’s the Walmart problem. People buy from Amazon because they can’t afford some necessities at MSRP when going to a local store.

Some of the stuff I can get in bulk on Amazon are as much as 50% cheaper than getting those same things in bulk from a restaurant supply (which is cheaper than buying them at a grocery store). And that’s before Subscribe&Save’s 15% off. Coffee (for example) costs would drive me into the poor house if I didn’t get my beans from Amazon… and I end up getting higher quality beans than my grocery store at that lower price.

Do I NEED coffee to live? No. But it’s not exactly a luxury in the modern world, and beans are much cheaper than going to Dunkin. There are things I buy that I need; there are things that I buy that I want. And as much as I hate it, most of them are not available locally or are FAR more expensive locally. I never go to Amazon first, but I very often find myself landing at Amazon last.

And yes, that doesn’t justify Prime on its own. But because I have Prime, I get those things that I couldn’t find cheaper elsewhere the very next day. Prime will never be necessary when there’s free shipping options, but boy have they packed it out with more features than (for example) Walmart’s subscription model.

Here’s what I get with Prime that I appreciate:

1. Free games every month, some of which are pretty awesome
2. that fast shipping
3. A fairly average TV service with a few of the best exclusives out there (imo THE best but I’m a WoT-head).
4. Tons of included books and I live in a family of readers

I mean, a lot of it I could get on the High Seas as it were, but it’s the law of convenience. They make it easy and there’s a value prop there for me.

If I JUST wanted free shipping, Prime would be a complete waste of money to me. But I’d still end up giving Amazon my damn paycheck because the alternatives are just not there where I live.

That happened to Comcast for a while. They milked it for a while, but it it led to them having a 10-year stock low. They’re paying a price for being the most-hated company in America. Not the price they deserve, but it’s not all sunshine and roses.

Ubisoft will have its day the same way, eventually. It won’t be the day they deserve, but it’ll still make them cry. And it’ll be their own doing.

My tool experience is limited, but with Makita you seem to be describing the same anachronism principle you find in espresso machines.

Arguably the best espresso machines in a class are reminescent of the same model you found 40+ years ago. If you’re looking for the B+ range, everything worth buying has a big metal E61 grouphead with manual levers. In the S-class range, you tend to have more manual levers as often as bells or whistles. My new machine that cost more than I deserve (wife bought it) is basically an oldschool machine with nothing modern in it but a PID controller. Legend has it, it will be passed down in my family for generations to come (exaggeration, but not much).

What’s Ubuntu’s “particular madness”? They used to be a little FOSS-only, but they’ve chilled out on that.

I agree on the other points, though, with one caveat on both.

No matter how many games run on linux, it won’t be enough because there aren’t ever going to be linux exclusives. Without linux exclusives, there will always be more games that run in Windows than Linux, even if the majority of them run in linux AND run better than in Windows.

Office sounds like a big deal, but Apple managed to prove you don’t need it. The real problem Linux has with office is that it has no well-marketed office suite. There’s nothing wrong with Libre- or Open- except the complete lack of advertising and passive training to its nuances that we get from MS and Apple office products.

It’s not that linux can’t win on games or office. It’s that the game is rigged against it on both. It took me a few years back in the early 00’s, but I quickly realized that there will never be a “year of the linux desktop” regardless of how good Linux gets at games, office, user-friendliness, or anything.

And that’s ok because MY life is easier when I use linux.

I don’t know if we know it’s shrinking back for sure. With the exception of Q1’23, there seems to be a balance around 19M sales per quarter. There’s a way to read it as shrinking, but there’s also a way to read it as stabilizing. There’s just not enough samples to be certain.

What we have to remember is that we’re finally reaching a turning point in GPU pricing. Laptops that were in the $2000+ range a year or two ago are closer to the $1000 commodity price. There had been a “value stall” that just broke, where a new computer used to not be a significant upgrade on an old one, and so people might hold onto their current computers a year or two longer.

I mean, I sure I pulled a few discounts out of my ass, but I just landed an i9 laptop with a 4090 for just over $2k as a replacement to a computer that died. Two years ago almost to the day I bought a middle-of-the-road gaming machine with a 3070 in it for about the same price.

I wonder at the various nuances of that. My wife and I have 4 phones and 3 tablets between us between home and work. It would seem any multi-person household would be likely to have more mobile devices than PCs due to the variety of the former. So that chart seems to be that there are more mobile devices per person, but perhaps no reduction in PCs.

In fact, PC sales rocketed up in Q3’20 for very obvious reasons, and have largely not come back down to pre-COVID levels.

If I had to guess, probably for the same reason you can’t sue for not being able to pick what apps you install on your toaster.

Google probably opened themselves up to this monopoly shit by trying not to be as much of a monopoly as Apple is trying to be.

I’ve heard a lot of lawyers say that the law punishes virtually every good behavior because that behavior can be construed in a way that you can be sued for, and that it favors being a dick more than anything. In this case, that might be what happened?

I mean, not that Google is a saint at all.