If it’s about stopping a random idiot, then the existing laws should be fine.

The problem is that it’s a minor inconvenience to determined criminals. At the same time, it’s a industry-destroying law for 3d printer companies.

I also really don’t think it’s about ensuring the profits of weapons companies. Weapons companies are big and already fairly regulated. As a result, it’s easy to keep an eye on them and ensure that if there are laws about what’s legal and illegal to build and sell in the USA that those companies are following them. I think lawmakers are scared that with 3d printers in the hands of hundreds of thousands of people, it’s much more difficult to ensure that the laws are being followed. It’s about control, not profits.

I’m guessing that in Sweden the temperature at about 2m underground is probably close to a refrigerator, right? In Canada it’s typically between 4C and 10C year round. So, as long as you can keep it dry, it’s very good for long-term storage.

And, even if there’s no huge war coming, it certainly looks like the disruptions due to the Strait of Hormuz will last years at this point. We won’t even begin to see the effects of the fertilizers produced in the gulf being choked off until the harvest season comes. And if the farmers have enough fertilizer for this season, it might be next season’s crops that are hit. Living in a rich country means you probably don’t have to worry about starvation, but you might face huge prices, or a major lack of selection. People in poorer countries will probably have an even worse outcome than that. So, it’s a good idea to stock up on certain staples that you actually use before the prices start increasing.

3d printers don’t have particularly powerful computers. The 3d modeling and slicing (creating a plan to generate the model using the printer) is done on a PC. The printer just knows how to move the axes, heat the filament, etc.

If the 3d printer has to be able to recognize gun shapes and refuse to print them, it will need a much more powerful processor. And even then, what’s the point? It’s unworkable.

The person is going to be sitting at home with their own 3d printer. If it refuses to print something because it sees it as a gun part, the user can go over to their computer and modify the shape until the 3d printer no longer recognizes it. If the algorithm to detect a gun part is very strict, it will end up also blocking things that aren’t gun parts, especially gun-like props.

If someone doesn’t feel like fiddling with the shapes they’re trying to print until the printer obeys, they can probably just install their own software. Some commercial printers will make that harder, but Amazon is a multi-billion dollar company and can’t keep people from installing their own firmware on Kindles. There’s no way that a smaller printer company will be able to lock down their printers. In addition, there are the open source printers, that are explicitly designed so that you can install your own firmware. I assume California is going to make that illegal – a move that the closed-source printer companies will love.

If the law were passed, it might stop a hobbyist who wanted to try out printing a gun part just to see if they could. (Even though that’s already illegal.) But, it won’t stop anybody doing it as a business who can invest the time to get around the ban. So, all you’d do is hurt regular users while only mildly inconveniencing the main people you’re trying to stop.

There are currently 6 NDP members in the house, and the NDP leader isn’t even one of those six.

If this were anything other than performative, they’d be working with the government on a law.

I really wish the Canadian 2-party duopoly was broken and a third party (ideally the NDP) had a realistic chance of winning elections. But, IMO, performative stuff designed for social media likes isn’t going to convince anybody that the NDP should be in charge of the country.

Trump’s social media post said they were “BLOCKADING any and all Ships trying to enter, or leave, the Strait of Hormuz.” But they’ve already TACO’d from that plan less than 2 days later?

Also, this is the same president who just a few days ago lifted sanctions on Iranian oil that had been in place for many years to ease the supply shortage caused by the closing of the Strait? So, Iran can sell oil now, as long as the ships have already passed the strait, but it can’t move any more ships past the strait?

If I didn’t know any better, I’d think maybe there wasn’t a solid plan in place.

Like their mother’s what?

The human-looking part is probably just a lure, like those deep-sea lantern fish. A human gets close enough to investigate and the insect pounces.

That’s a really weird metaphor. It doesn’t really make any sense.

There’s a well known metaphor about burning your own boats so that you’re unable to retreat. But, those aren’t lifeboats.

If you’re talking about not letting people get rescued, why not “sink the lifeboats”? Setting them on fire would be annoying, but a fire would be easy to put out if the boats are out at sea. There’s water all around. The article seems to be more about not allowing people who have abandoned the sinking ship to come on board. So, why not just “ignore the lifeboats”. You don’t have to approach them and set them on fire. You can just refuse to rescue the people in those lifeboats and leave them floating out at sea.

And if it is trump cultists who write the history books, they’ll openly admit to a lot of stuff that only their cult thinks is OK. (And the writing in crayon will be a dead giveaway.)

What we need to do is convince them never to vote again.

If you were fooled by mango mussolini, you don’t have the brains to make good decisions when you vote. Surely you have family or friends who have been warning you about Trump for a decade now. They were right, you were wrong. Take your hands off of the steering wheel and let those more informed people drive.

Which church would you go to?

Even if you believe that the only way that Trump could possibly die within the next 24 hours is the act of a god, which god was it? Maybe you’re supposed to go to a Hindu temple, maybe it’s a Jewish one, maybe it’s Ra or Thor.

Yes… I know what will make people respect me. It’s getting some MAGA stooge to pretend to be a delivery worker and give me a bag of McDonalds product in the Oval Office, as if that’s a thing that can actually happen.

It’s posts like this that just reinforce the idea that centaurs are freaky creatures.

Why a six-limbed creature? Actual mammals have at most 4 limbs. What does it eat? Is the stomach a horse stomach or a human stomach? Does the human head have to eat 15 kilograms of grass per day, munching it inefficiently with its human teeth? Can it just blend it up and drink vast quantities of smoothies instead? Are the centaur’s front limbs massively strong, unlike a horse, because it has to support a whole secondary torso right at the front of its body? Does the whole body have the same notoriously finnicky immune system and fragility of a horse? Where’s the heart, is it in the human chest or the horse chest? If it is running hard will it be the human chest that’s panting, using those tiny lungs to power an entire body? Or is there just an air tube down through the useless human chest all the way to the horse’s mighty lungs? If the lungs being used are the horse ones, what’s all that room in the human chest being used for?

Imagine a guy crawling along on the ground, except where his neck would be there’s a second torso attached, and it goes upwards so that as the guy crawls the second torso is vertical.

You don’t even have to get into the weight.

Mammals have at most 4 limbs. Centaurs would have 6 limbs, and the mammal brain never evolved to handle that many.

What makes you believe this is real?

He’s not “extreme far right”. He might be more right-wing than the average EU leader, but that’s what you’re going to get in a country that has been flooded with right-wing propaganda for decades.

Realistically, what matters is that in this election Hungary had a choice between Orban and not-Orban, and not-Orban actually won. Because someone else won in a relatively free and fair election, it’s possible that the next election can be between a left wing option and a right wing option.

Wow, I’m impressed, you actually managed to mention one city that isn’t either in the far north or on the beach. (And it’s not Mexicali, even though you mentioned it twice). It’s almost like you’ve actually visited Mexico before!

When a public utility or something is sold off, then yes, as soon as the privatization happens the service has to get shittier.

But, I don’t think it’s true that the moment there’s a private alternative the public version stops working. I think it’s often just that the public version starts to decay because it doesn’t get the investment it needs.

For example, if you sell the postal service to a private company, it’s going to get either more expensive, or not work as well, or both.

But, if you allow a private parcel delivery service to compete with the post office, for a while you can have both working fairly well. The private service might offer much faster delivery that you can track, while the post office offers slower delivery for a much lower price. For a while the two services can coexist, and people can choose which one they want based on their needs. But, over time you’ll get underinvestment in the public postal option. People will demand that it be run as a business and won’t take into account that it acts as a public service and does things that are unprofitable but good for society.

Sorry if I wasn’t clear, I meant to say that if the public system and private system were equal but you had to pay for the private system, nobody would use it. Sure, if the private system is faster then people will use it even if the public system is free.

In places that allow a mix of private and public, the private system basically finds some flaw in the public system and allows people to pay to bypass that flaw. Things like wait times are one of the main issues. But, it’s sometimes something like certain expensive tests being hard to get in the public system (CAT scans or something). In the public system they might only order those when they’re obviously needed. The private system can let you have one whenever you want, so if your doctor says “well… it could help, but it doesn’t meet the threshold the public system sets” some people will pay for it out of pocket. Or it can be more privacy, or more luxurious hospital rooms. Even if the treatment is otherwise identical, some people will pay for that.