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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 13th, 2023

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  • I hate making something like that mandatory, but another benefit would be to reduce the stigma of guns in general.

    It always surprises me how frequently I hear from otherwise pretty open minded people some version of, “I don’t own guns and I’ve never needed a gun. Therefore nobody anywhere needs one or should have one for any reason and I’d fully support completely banning them, and if that violates the constitution, so what, it’s what I want.”

    Further, gun education would reduce the ideas and legislation to restrict guns based on nonsense. There’s a lot of fear of “scary guns” based on little more than superficial appearance, and I even see a lot of ideas from people claiming to want compromise, but it usually comes down to one of a few things: some arbitrary delineation between guns they’re okay with because they don’t look scary, something that would do little more than make criminals out of otherwise law abiding people, or depriving law abiding citizens of constitutionally guaranteed rights without due process.







  • hydrospanner@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlthe debt
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    25 days ago

    Ignoring, for a moment, the inherent and fundamental differences between an individual and a state…

    …in my late 20s and early 30s I bought a new car.

    At the time, that car cost more than I had in my accounts plus my other possessions at the time. In fairness, my annual income was more than the total cost of the car, buuuut I also was carrying tens of thousands of dollars of student loan debt as well, meaning my overall total debt was significantly higher than my annual income, or my “personal GDP” if you will.

    Yet when I applied for my car loan, it came through with easy approval and I even qualified for the best possible interest rate.

    Why? Because I’ve always paid on my debts adequately and promptly.

    Nobody bats an eye when a couple buys a house that costs more than what they can cover with their combined income in one year. Why? Because that’s an arbitrary and unrealistic yard stick of comparison and nobody expects them to pay off a house in a year. They’re able to buy their house and live in it immediately, and pay for it incrementally, over time, as they earn over the coming years because of debt. And the bank is willing to lend the money because they’ll make money in the long run through interest.

    Similarly, it’s unreasonable to imply that the US shouldn’t carry more debt than it’s GDP because the two metrics aren’t directly linked in any way. And since the US has excellent credit worthiness, that debt is far safer than the bank’s loan to the homebuyers. And the US gains access to borrowed funds by setting it’s own interest rates through the Fed, which tells lenders exactly how much they’ll make in interest if they let the US government borrow some of their money.

    And since the US is a safer bet than homebuyers, that’s why home interest rates are higher than the rate at the Fed: if they were equal, banks would never lend to homebuyers since they could get the same return by lending to the government. So instead, they set their own, higher rates for homebuyers, to account for the higher risk of lending to a party who has a much higher likelihood of default.





  • The Autodesk forums are 40% this, 20% “just learn to program, spend a few years getting good at it, then write yourself a custom script to do what you are struggling with”, 20% “you are wrong for wanting that in the first place” or “you are wrong for having this issue”, 15% “this has been brought up once at some point in the past two decades, try searching”, 4% “OMG yes I have this issue too!”…

    …and 1% split between actual helpful answers, and confirmation that it’s a known issue.





  • Not to mention the entire premise of the post being, essentially, “I don’t approve of the entertainment my sibling chooses to consume. Please make suggestions for me as to other entertainment that I can then use to regulate said adult sibling, removing their entertainment that I don’t like and forcing them to consume something I find more acceptable.”

    Like…I think Rogan’s whole thing is stupid and most I’ve talked to who like his stuff are similarly ridiculous…but to go from that to full out “I plan to take it away from them and force them to do something I find more acceptable” is really quite a leap.




  • Yep, I had a bully in elementary school and my mom tried to work with the system of teachers, principal, admin, etc. for months, and nothing at all was ever done about it.

    Finally when the bullying escalated to physical levels and started to impact my personality outside of school, my parents basically told me that while I might still get in trouble at school, they wouldn’t be upset with me at home if I did decide to stand up to the kid. They stressed to me the fine line between standing up for yourself and becoming a bully yourself, and sent me on my way.

    A few days later, my bully found me at lunch and started messing with me. Pushing over my stack of booking, taking some food off my tray…I didn’t do anything until he tried to push me out of my seat then it was kind of blurry, but basically I just took a swing at him and knocked him back out of his seat and he hit his head against the wall and started crying.

    I did get in some trouble at school but nothing too bad (especially once Mom was called in and she explained how if they tried to suspend me, she’d put them on blast for how they’d ignored the situation for so long), and that kid was nice as pie to me for the rest of our schooling.