yonaguska

Full auto handguns are quite popular now despite being effectively illegal.

This is true, but there is another foreign country that can send people to your door. What's to stop China from eventually buying that type of influence over our govt officials?

Have you tried sprint workouts as a complement to powerlifting?

One on one "tutoring" is the most effective way to make early education productive and it's not even close. Even the outcomes of parents spending 20 minutes a day reading to their infants and toddlers correlates with better educational outcomes. and I'm sure there are many here that share my own story. The only reason I was somewhat academically successful was because my mother took the time to teach me how to read when I was 3-4. Without that early literacy, I'm sure I would have never been able to achieve anything I've done, especially with ADHD. By the time I was in kindergarten, I knew how to read already, but, even there, reading was taught 1 on 1, with students taking turns with the teacher to learn. I don't think that's done anymore at most places, especially when you have 30:1 teacher ratios. 5 year olds can be way more capable than we give them credit for, but they need personal attention.

I think there is a lot of discord over medicare/medical, social security, and interest at least, but maybe I'm just in a bubble.

All the drone footage is actually pretty horrific to see.

If you have a blog or something anywhere, I'm very interested in your journey.

I switched to colemak, but I paired this switch with split keyboards. So qwerty is still easy to use on regular keyboards, but I'm sure I'd get super tripped up if I used qwerty on a split kb.

I switched from the moonlander to the glove80, and the low switches are nothing compared to the much more intuitive ergonomics.

Do you just buy more of the footpads online or have you figured out a more permanent solution? I pack mine up and travel with it frequently, and the rubber feet are always coming off.

Idk if I'd say that Americans like bigger vehicles. There are just a lot of incentives that push us that way.

Since the advent of EVs, its not a safety issue imo. When Tesla's first came out, and the first adopters were all people that wanted to drive FAST, I was often surprised by them, especially since I always rode slightly faster than traffic as a safety mitigation technique. I quickly learned to use my eyes more.

My eyes are my ears and you cannot rely on sound to know who or what might be coming up from behind you. Mirrors and head on a swivel are way more important.

I agree with your sentiment but not your conclusion. They don't want this administration specifically to have gatekeeping authority, what they want is any administration to say that they are gatekeeping, so that they can regulate the competition out of existence. Of course the actual checks and balances will be near pointless in effect, but expensive to implement nonetheless.

Yes, I'm well aware of how big it is, and of course there are aspects of it that I do agree with. What I came away from the conversation with was "wow, this other guy has zero understanding of how important individual liberties are in the United States"

They could have fled for any number of reasons- that doesn't mean that they aren't exactly in sync with the culture they are coming from. And even if they aren't in sync with the culture they are fleeing- they very likely still hold radically different values than you.

I met a man from Afghanistan sometime last year, however, once we got past the introductions and realized we shared things in common- he opened up to me and began trying to make me realize the value of Sharia law in America, and how much better it would be here if it became the cultural norm.

"America First"

MAGA has split hard. it's now MIGA vs AF. With MIGA being mostly boomer evangelicals and AF being younger, either outright fuentes antisemites or just anti Zionists that lean right. There is a huge astroturfing campaign to make it seem like MAGA is unanimously pro netanyahu, but it's simply fake.

Oh, I still vote. I feel that if I don't, then I have no right to complain. no matter how unhappy I am with the candidates.

It's not intellectually lazy, it's being intellectually tired.

Both parties only every get anything done in this country when it comes to voting to restrict our rights. Ideologically, I'm slightly right leaning. My primary value is individual rights are more important. But if I could, I would vote for Ron Wyden(D) despite the fact that I disagree with many of his positions, he's still one of the few that has a spine to oppose things like the federal spying apparatus.

I just don't see the point of investing myself in caring when 98 percent of our reps just really don't care and only focus on manufacturing outrage around wedge issues that they can't or won't actually address so that they can keep their jobs and continue to accrue massive amounts of wealth from lobbying and insider trading. We get Trump because the system is so thoroughly broken on both sides and enough people are frustrated the point that they are "protest" voting.

at this point I don't get bogged down in the details. They're all just different masks for authoritarianism.

I don't think it's just you or your age, per your pre-internet comment. People that grew up in this just don't understand why they're overwhelmed. And I don't think they're even aware of what their missing out on in terms of focus or mental acuity.

I highly recommend comprehensible input if you're refreshing a language. Free via youtube.

just do what I want to do all day

Are the things that you want to do productive in any way? A sizeable portion of people have an innate drive to "produce" actual value.

be the change you wish to see- share your thoughts.

I've found that for super large but simple refactors, codex and Claude struggle and will just quietly stop doing what you asked it if it's a long running task.

I actually had better luck asking codex to write temporary sed scripts based on the requirements then apply them.

AI helped me shop for some bits and tools that I needed to do my rear differential and brake fluid, and after some nudging, I also got it to do price comparisons for the tools I needed. saved me a lot of time to walk into each store with an exact list on the bits that I needed. And time with getting exactly the tool I needed without overspending.

I previously would have spent this time opening up 4 tabs on three diff hardware store sites, and an additional tab to pull up the relevant car forums for tips and advice. Which I ended up doing anyways, as well as some YouTube videos because I don't trust the results. But it still saved me a ton of time investigating and weighing out options as a decent aggregator of info.

I've had a similar experience when shopping at a gas station store that bought produce from a local strawberry patch. Unfortunately, it was on a road trip.

unions in the US aren't necessarily even comparable to in EU.

this is my workflow, converse with it to write a spec. I'm reviewing the spec myself. Ask it to trace out how it would implement it. I know the codebase because it was originally written mostly by hand. Correct it with my best practices. Have it challenge my assumptions and read the code to do so. then it s usually good enough to go on it's on. the beauty of having a well defined spec is that once it's done, I can have another agent review it and it generates good feedback if it deviates from the spec at all.

I'm unsure if this is actually faster than me writing it myself, but it certainly expends less mental energy for me personally.

The real gains I'm getting are with debugging prod systems, where normally I would have to touch five different interfaces to track down an issue, I've just encompassed it all within an mcp and direct my agent on the debugging steps(check these logs, check this in the db, etc)

unless they have ways to externalize the costs onto the rest of society

UNH stock has been tanked all year, until the govt announced that they would raise Medicare advantage reimbursement rates. The insurance companies have an incentive to pursue volume instead of cutting costs for programs that the government is subsidizing. For everyone else, they just raise the prices which is a much more complicated issue.