• 2 Posts
  • 51 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Are you looking for an answer to a question, or are you looking for a debate?

    At any rate, reducing the utility of an item to what it’s “lowest performance” should be to lower it’s ability to harm for non-intended uses is asinine. Who sets the limits? Does a knife need to be razor sharp? I can cut a lot of things with a dull knife and some time. It would pose less danger to you if all knives I had access to were purposefully dull. To prevent me from procuring an overly sharp knife, make the material strong enough to cut foods, but brittle enough to not be one overly sharp. Knives, after all, we’re made to stab, cut, and dissect a wide arrange of materials, flesh included. This specific design poses limitless danger to you, and needs to be considered when manufacturing these tools.

    Guns are not majorly sold specifically to kill people, in the grand scheme of things. Hunting is probably the largest vector of volume gun sales in the US. How do you design a weapon that can be useful for hunting, but ineffective at killing a human? They all possess the innate ability to do so, but so does even the smallest pocket knife or kitchen knife.

    I’m also a big gun control advocate, so I’m not defending anything I like. The failings of US gun control are squarely on the idea that everyone should possess a gun until they prove they shouldnt; it’s reactive policy. Active gun control would limit who can possess a gun from the start to those that will only use it for “appropriate” reasons.


  • I bought a house (since sold, moved cross-country) literally because it was cheaper to do so. You get the asset of the house, and cheaper mortgage payment. Went from a “2” bedroom house (the spare bedroom was slanted) house from the 1930s with windows just as old, dirt foundation, no AC, and holes in the floor for plumbing (very effective for keeping mice out…) into a 3 bedroom house for $400/month cheaper. Housing market is fucking insane over the last 5 years, if not longer.

    It’s like people/companies are buying houses because “it’s the smart thing to do” against high interest rates, so they need to charge more for rent, which drives people to buy houses on higher interest rates, which pushes rent higher, and it just cycles infinitely upwards.





  • As previous student who was in school when cell phones blew up in usage, I wasn’t not preoccupied by my phone because I had to keep it hidden. I was preoccupied with keeping it hidden so I could keep using it. Texting with T9 without looking was a breeze. The only thing that slowed my usage was the fact I only had like 500 texts a month allotted to me.

    Making the kids hide it won’t make them less distracted. They just become distracted by hiding the phone. I feel like you’d almost have to just ban phones entirely, which today is pretty impractical.


  • I see enough and know a few relatively “rich” people that go against American capitalism. They’re obviously not Musk and Gates, but where they have no wants and would be able to weather most any hardship thrown their way, short of the catastrophic medical emergency (but again, that is only a function of American capitalism).

    It’s hard to point at a specific part of the American system and say “this is what is wrong”. I think a lot of millennials are coming to the conclusion that the system is broken and is absolutely stacked against them. Student loans, medical debt, the housing market, stagnating wages amongst record profits across the board, bailouts for banks, Wall St corruption, billionaires paying $50 in taxes, continued failed DoD audits and lost money. There is plenty of money in the system to be “given away” when the receiving party is a corporation or hedge fund or defense contractor or bank.

    It also doesn’t help that anyone not retiring in the next 20 years is paying into Social Security under the assumption that it’s lost money. The devil that is socialist programs is a hard sell when the population blaming you for the “collapse of American Capitalism” actively benefits from a program I’m paying into, but will likely never see benefit from. Universal Healthcare UBI, free school lunches etc seems way more palatable through that lens.



  • That is an extreme oversimplification of the issue. It would be way easier to support capitalism if the end result wasn’t continued increasing concentration of wealth with a decreasing number of people. Maybe a better phrasing for the disdain people have is that we hate American capitalism. That encompasses not just the market, but the tax system and general financial landscape Americans have currently. It’s the ability for companies to report record profits, announce layoffs, increase supply, and fight against wage increase and better benefits, all in the same breath, that creates the hatred people have right now.


  • Graduated with a criminology degree, do work with vocational rehab and have done random stints of juvenile services. I don’t have a tech background, but definitely have an interest in tech stuff, I’d say easily moreso than the average citizen.

    But like, I’ve tried to learn HTML and I couldn’t get past the first few Khan Academy lessons lol. The logic it used just didn’t jive with my brain.


  • I and another dude modded a 30k+ sub. There were 5 mods, but the other 3 are basically gone at that point, and I was brought on because I was active in the community. We both left, and within a week users are complaining about the slacking mods and wondering why spam is getting through, why discussion threads aren’t posted, etc.

    We didn’t do anything with the shutdown, as it wasn’t “our” community to shut down. We were just brought on for workload reasons. But we’re both gone now, and the cracks were showing immediately.

    Sadly, I’m fairly certain it’s literally just me in the equivalent fed community. Haven’t seen any other subs, at least.





  • Not currently, I think, but multiple are in beta and sending out invites. I use kbin as a rich web app and it works well about 85% of the time. Biggest issues are random log-outs, using the back button sometimes loses place in the never-ending scroll list, and there isn’t a good way to see your subscribed magazines (you have to go to your profile and scroll to the subscriptions section to select it).

    But I’m really liking Kbin so far. I’d rather not be on the instance that is hosting everything; just seems easier for it to get too big and fail quickly, and I’d like to stay in one location if possible. Kbin seems big enough to last but small enough that it isn’t growing insanely quick. Another option is Fedia.io, which is a kbin fork. Very similar imo, just a little different.