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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: November 22nd, 2023

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  • Similar to selling your car privately. There are some forms involved to recognize that you no longer own nor are responsible for the gun in question. It’s probably a little more strict and polished now (maybe not), but it wasn’t that long ago that you kept a copy in case the cops came knocking looking for the gun and a copy got filed away in a drawer somewhere for basically the same reason. I can’t remember if gun stores were in charge of the records for private sales (which wouldn’t make sense) or if they were filed with the town/state, but it was all physical paper in a drawer somewhere regardless. There wasn’t like a system actively tracking ownership - so long as both parties had a LTC, they were okay and third party sales could be done anywhere.


  • True, but it’s the one that I know and up until around the early to mid 2000s, you could buy a shotgun in Wal Mart. They had a whole section dedicated to firearms.

    Plus, the whole selling an AR out of the trunk of a car in the Wal Mart parking lot is something that a kid I went to school with actually did in Mass. There’s still plenty of regulation involved (and increasing by the sounds of it based on what you said), but at the time it basically boiled down to signing the paperwork signifying the change in ownership and resale of the firearm. The only time the state would’ve been made aware was if they requested to see the paperwork, AFAIK.

    Besides, the vast majority of people 3d printing guns are people with an LTC anyway, and the most frequently printed things are furniture and accessories. 3d printed guns are still largely a novelty, despite how much they’ve improved over the years. Even the much feared gun that Luigi Mangione supposedly used was bought legally, and any 3d printed parts were merely aftermarket grips or the like. The only large scale use of them that I’m aware of is in Myanmar, where they’re using 3d printed guns to fight against a genocidal regime largely because they can get 3d printers and ammo, but no country is willing to support the resistance and so they can’t get any actual firearms. You’re much more likely to see a Garage Gun like the one used to kill Shinzo Abe, and those are completely legal by federal law - largely because it would be impossible to prevent somebody from just gluing a PVC pipe to a 2x4 and using a nail as a firing pin.

    But firearms are so easy to obtain in so many states that it’s much easier to buy one than to build one from scratch (whether that’s buy one in the state or one with more lax laws nearby). There used to be a ban on gun stores within the city limits of Chicago, but Republicans got elected into office for like a decade and not only repealed that ban but also took the bite out of the gun laws, and now they claim that Chicago is proof that gun laws don’t work when the city used to have some of the lowest rates of gun violence in the country. When they’re not being bought right in the city/state, they’re being smuggled in from the next state over with little concern for punishment.






  • Even before renewables/green energy, we’ve had problems with surplus power in the grid. It’s actually one of the biggest issues for infrastructure to solve in moving away from fossil fuels. We simply don’t have the storage capacity, and nobody has any real plan or path toward a solution as of yet, as far as I know.

    For probably a century or so now, power companies have been paying manufacturing industries to run their heaviest equipment with nothing in them just to bleed extra power out of the grids during lows in demand because power stations can’t change their outputs fast enough, especially things like nuclear energy. Even stuff like coal or natural gas plants have a spool up or down time that can’t keep pace with the changes in demand.


  • TBH, it wasn’t that far outside of the basic corporate Dem playbook. Incredibly stupid and definitely lost her the election, for sure, but Dems have been “courting the moderate Republican” (is this “moderate Republican” in the room with us right now?) since Clinton left office - if not longer. It was the most strange and open version of it I’ve ever seen, but I wonder how much of it was her doing and how much was pushed by the party and the party’s campaign managers. Practically all the party ever talks about is how they have to reach across the aisle and convince conservatives to vote for them. We saw it with Hillary as well. They alienated the leftist vote and their own voters to push more conservative policies and lost themselves the election.

    Kamala and Walz had a goldmine when they started calling Republicans weird, and they suddenly stopped like 8 days later. If that wasn’t the party muzzling them, I don’t know what is.


  • To be fair, they did specify right-wing Lemmy instances, not right-wingers in general, and I can’t think of any instances that would meet that definition off the top of my head.

    But Hexbear definitely has a reputation as some of the worst of the worst of the normal instances. Blahaj defederated from them despite Ada trying to get the trans communities of both instances connected because of the harassment, brigading, and outright transphobia Hexbear inflicted on Blahaj users for not being the right kind of leftists. You can still find the community discussions on the topic in the general instance posts. They even tried to claim that Blahaj was being transphobic to them. You know, the LGBTQ instance created and ran to be a space for trans people and others first and foremost.

    Hexbear is also known to have at least once tried to convince their mods to “take over other instances and ban all the non-communists.”

    I believe that at this point if you were to download the stuff to spin up your own instance, Hexbear is on the list of instances that are defederated by default because so many instances have defederated them because of their behavior.









  • Short answer? It’s normally used against conservatives, but cliques and purity politics (both literal politics and not) do come into play on occasion.

    Longer answer: Lemmy was originally founded by a bunch of Marxist-Leninists and socialists of similar stripes (that’s what the .ml stands for), and early adopters often made up some form of minority group/outcast - LGBTQ and the like. This has led to a very zero tolerance policy towards conservative “talking points” and the usual bag of tricks that they employ when attempting to colonize an area/group. Especially as Reddit has further enshitified, but even before then Redditors were generally thought of more in terms of r/the_Donald subscribers rather than as disparate groups from across the political spectrum.

    There are of course the “joined Lemmy before it was cool” groups who resent the growing popularity of the platform - especially after the Reddit API exodus that brought you and me here - but I think they’re largely relegated to the parts of Lemmy that most of the instances defederated from. Some of those places are basically the leftist equivalent of 4chan, and would absolutely use it as an insult if you failed their political belief purity tests.

    In short, basically everybody would use it for a Trumper, but a small few might use it on me if I were to say something like that I think that dbzer0’s support of genAI inherently makes the instance pro-corporatism so long as they’re the ones benefitting from stealing labor from workers, and an even smaller few would probably use it simply because I started using Lemmy during the Reddit API fiasco.


  • The one thing I will say is that there does seem to be a generalized dislike for AI that has all the investors and upper management types nervous. Even by their own studies do people generally either not care about AI in their products or actively dislike it/find it intrusive. There was a study by a phone company from this past summer or fall that concluded that 80% of their users had no interest in AI or found that it actively made their experience worse, and there have been plenty of pretty damning reports about how useful it’s been in various industries (just look at Microslop). That is not conducive to convincing investors to fund your product and does not show a viable path to making a profit in the future.

    We’ve seen similar things happening recently with car manufacturers walking back on their big touchscreens (with some help from regulation in civilized places that care about things like “pedestrian fatalities” - like Europe) due to consumer sentiment. They tried for nearly a decade to push bigger and bigger screens into cars and remove physical buttons, and now they’re moving in the other direction. Completely anecdotal evidence, but the last time I went to buy a car I told the salesman at the dealership that I wasn’t interested in cars newer than a certain year because that was when they increased the size of the screen and put them in a more obnoxious spot on the dashboard, and he said that he heard similar sentiments from practically everybody who came in looking to buy a car - everybody hated the bigger screens.


  • If you think about it, it is very wasteful for you to have that chocolate bar in your food pantry. So many wasted calories as most bodies can only burn a fraction of them before converting the rest into fat. Same can be said for pasta and many other foods. We even spend a full third of our lives asleep, consuming even less calories! Incredibly inefficient!

    Maybe the solution is aerosolized calories that can be sprayed via plane over vast regions of the country instead of food so that calories are owned by the people on a local, regional, or national level?