I'm horrified by what's going on in Gaza. It's an atrocity that deserves maximum attention and intervention above pretty much any issue.
Biden is absolutely shitting the bed on this. But Trump isn't gonna clean the sheets.
It's not that genocide is a tertiary issue. It's that both candidates will be complicit in the genocide, so it literally isn't a factor when looking at the candidates.
But the choices we have in a general election are:
Vote for the candidate you hate least
Not vote at all and accept whatever the worst candidates are doing to you
Vote for a fairytale candidate (this and option 2 have identical results)
Violent uprising
The Trump cult is hard at work on options 1 and 4 while deploying millions of bots and thousands of bad actors to encourage everyone else to go with options 2 and 3.
When I was young, my Dad simply didn't have ammunition in the house. If we went to the range or were going hunting, we'd buy ammo on the way and we'd shoot it all or give away whatever was left over to another shooter.
The idea is that a gun that's being carried for self-defense is meant to be used in a flash under stress. In that event, the manual safety is forgotten very, very often. If you pull a concealed pistol on an assailant and forget about the safety, all you've done is handed your attacker a free gun.
And accidents with carry guns due to a lack of manual safety are very rare. They tend to have longer trigger pulls or are double-action, and the real safety is the holster, which should not only protect the trigge guard, but encourage safe finger placement on draw. Some even have a release button that requires you to put your trigger finger in a safe draw position outside of the trigger guard in order to draw.
Do you think people are buying pistols from guns shops and neighboring states and bringing them to California? How about rifles that are illegal in California. Are people buying those at gun shops in other states to?
Most people reading this far are probably thinking "Yes" because people don't know shit about gun laws.
When a dealer sees an out of state license, they have to apply the laws of both the state in which the gun is being sold AND the state in which the buyer resides. When I sold guns in Texas and someone came in from New Jersey to buy a rifle, I had to do a New Jersey background check, run their Firearm Purchaser ID, etc on top of our usual process. I also had to make sure the gun I was selling them was legal in New Jersey.
Oh - and handguns can't be transferred to an individual in another state. Period. If someone from another state wantred to buy a handgun from us, we had to ship it to a licensed dealer in their state to complete the transfer. The only exception is for federal Curio and Relic license holder buying an antique pistol that's been unaltered (e.g. a C&R collector buying an authentic WWII German Luger).
Ammo: sure. People can buy that out of state easy enough. And I don't see a problem with that. The person who wants 5,000 rounds of 9mm wants it because they are practicing. If people are going to own guns, they should be able to afford to train on them enough to shoot in a straight line, which is way harder than a lot of you non-gun folk seem to think.
And I'm way less-suspicious of the guy who wants 5,000 bullets than the guy who wants 5.
Police are able to buy modern pistols in California, so there's a thriving straw purchase market in California of police officers buying guns just to sell them at insane markups.
The person on the left is carrying bags, the one in orange is a delivery driver and a couple of people are wearing backpacks. Aside from car brained, Damaris is also blind.
Throughout history, most people have lived within an hour of work.
The biggest difficulty is retrofitting cities that have developed in the last century. Places that have been around for centuries were developed with walking in mind. Places that were developed around the automobile and climate contril are very difficult to convert.
The world has both quadrupled in population and urbanized over the past century as the car became the primary mode of transit in much of the world.
The only thing that makes transitioning even possible is that the landlord class would love to return to feudaliam.
The thing about auto-centric design is that it covers transportation from end to end. Other methods require a much more complicated network of fist and last-mile solutions that aren't easily adapted.
"Just use park and rides" doesn't solve the problem. It just moves the traffic to the transit stations. And now it's more expensive and slower than the existing system.
Houston put in a light rail system that costs 1% of every dollar spent in the city, costs a ton to ride, adds 45 minutes to a trip downtown, and drastically increases the odds of your car getting broken into at the park-and-ride. So yeah - there's pushback against expanding it.
There's also inherrent difficulty when the city is so spread out (The Grand Parkway outer loop has a 60-mile diameter, compared to Paris's 15), and walking outside is a health hazard 3-4 months out of the year.
What's a concrete, real way to fix these cities that doesn't require millions of people to give up their homes to move into more-expensive apartments they don't own, addresses the fact that being outside for more than a few minutes simply isn't safe for a significant portion of the population for almost half the year, and doesn't significantly add to commute times?
People can't travel 30 miles from their home to the office entirely using public transit. Walkable cities and light rail are Last-mile. Heck - throw in high-speed for the majority of the transit and you still have a huge first-mile problem, which is by far the hardest to solve.
The reasons modern cities are designed around cars is because cars are flexible. Add a street for a new row of houses and every single one of those points is connected to every end point in a single step. No new scheduling, routing, or transit lines required. Problem solved with a little asphalt.
It's an easy solution, and backing out of it is very, very difficult because it must be replaced with a complicated, expensive solution that's less-convenient for most users.
I'm not anti-transit at all, but people around here seem to believe that a city can be fixed with the power of wishes and fairy dust just because another city that covers 1/10th the area and was developed hundreds of years before auto-centric decelopment ago managed to do it.
Do you think we don't have offices, schools, and C-stores in the suburbs?
We also have sidewalks, bike lanes, walkable shopping districts, etc, but in Texas they don't get used because it's 110° for months at a time and you don't want to have to take a shower every time you change locations.
But the problem is those C-stores and small offices don't bring the jobs required to support the suburbs. Most people have to work in the city, so they have to commute, and getting from their house to the office is what creates traffic.
Absolutely. I work in the planning department of a municipality that's a tiny enclave for the super-wealthy. The average new home here is over 10 times the price of the regional average. I recently issued a permit for a 5,000 square-foot guest house with a tennis pavillion on the roof.
Our residents don't want neighbors. They don't want a sense of cummunity. They want their special enclave with a police force that exists to keep out the homeless people from the major city that surrounds us.
I don't live here of course. I have to drive 90 minutes every morning because my annual salary won't cover a week's mortgage for some of these houses.
I'm a really big dude and that shit terrifies me. Some people like to target fat folks thinking they're out of shape. And I am very, very out of shape.
But the fact that I can get out of bed and walk up stairs effortlessly means I'm incredibly, incredibly strong. What most people lift when maxing out is what I lift every time I move.
Absolutely. But a broken hand can still have force behind it.
And not that it matters, but I do know how to throw a punch. And there's a big gap between "how hard someone expects a punch to be" and "world champion boxer heavyweight boxer. "
It's almost like they have a financial incentive to pull this shit.
In 2000/2001 this same shit was being done in California, leading to rolling blackouts and record-high energy prices. One company was buying all the plants and shutting them down for "maintenance" specifically to increase energy prices.
There were going to be congressional hearings over it in early 2022, but that company was Enron, and at the end of 2001 they collapsed due to other bullshit they were pulling.
Most judicial positions don't have a degree requirement - including all federal judges.
There are over 2,000 judicial positions without law license requirements in Texas alone (JOP, Municipal Judges, County Judges, and Probationary Court Judges).
1st day availability on Gamepass for all AAA games simply isn't a sustainable strategy. They can't give away multiple games with a 9-figure budget along with everything else for the price of the sub.
First off: Bush was President in 2008. The Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 (the bank bailout that started the Troubled Assets Relief Program) was signed into law on October 3rd, 2008 - 2 months before Obama was elected into office and 4 months before he took office.
Second: Obama reduced the bailout by over 30% after taking office and the money was spent a little more wisely on reinvestment instead of simply giving the banks free money, which lead us to...
Third: in the end the government actually profited over 120 billion dollars.
So, yeah. Democrats handled the economy better. Just like they have since (checks notes) all of modern history.
Somebody goes on a hunting trip. Among other things they pack ammunition. The cardboard box of ammo breaks open and 100 rounds spill all over the inside of their bag. A year later they go on a different trip and bring the same bag with them, and there's a loose round in the folds of the bag they don't know about, but the dog sniffs it out.
That's why I have separate bags and cases specifically for traveling with ammunition.
I'm saying that people screw up and explaining a simple way to avoid the same mistake.
Here on Lemmy saying that you have bags just for carrying ammunition will get you labeled as a baby-killing MAGA extremist because you're so into guns you accessorize with custom luggage for your murder-toys.
I'm explaining that those ammo bags and cases are there specifically to avoid accidents just like this - not as a tacticool fashion statement.
I'm a United Methodist and former clergy, and the last 5 years have been whiplash.
We've spent 50 years trying to make the denomination more inclusive and accepting towards homosexuals, but for some organizational reasons (primarily a heavy-African vote in the worldwide governing body of the church) it's been difficult, and the more "traditional" wing of the church has been dragging us backwards.
We have our global conference (basically the legislative session of the church) every 4 years. In 2012 it got very heated. In 2016 the debate got downright nasty to the point where they had to calm a special session just to debate homosexuality in 2019 simply so the church could move on with the rest of the conference.
2019 was really, really bad. The traditionalists got their way on every issue.
The biggest blow was changing how church trials worked. As it was, "practicing" homosexuals were barred from the clergy, and officiating over a gay marriage was a de-frockable offense under church law. But that wasn't that bad in reality, because Methodist Clergy are very educated and overwhelmingly disagreed with the rules, so when it came to a church trial the jury (made up of other clergy) refused to punish. In 2019, they changed the rule to remove clergy's option to not punish.
The only ray of hope was the recommendation of a path to allow individual churches to leave the church but keep their land. It was basically the admission that the church was going to go through a schism. It looked for all the world that those who wanted to be more inclusive would have to start a new denomination.
But then the weirdest thing happened.
The ultra-conservatives were still mad even though they'd won. They were so mad, in fact, that they wanted to get rid of those who had opposed them. But there was no way to kick out churches who weren't controlled by Fox News. So they huffed and puffed and got so angry they decided to start their own super-bigoted Republican church anyway. They called it the Global Methodist Church since they figured the rest of the world would follow them and they left the denomination starting in 2021 when the path for disaffiliation opened up. In all, they got about a quarter of the US churches - mostly small rural churches that depended heavily on funding from the larger organization they were leaving...
A few weeks ago the 2024 conference was held. Due to Vivid it was the first real conference we'd had since 2016.
Gay marriage, gay clergy, and accepting homosexuality as being a-OK all passed with over 90% support. Everyone who had voted against it before had either left the denomination or been so repulsed by the fringe actors who had that they changed their position.
I broke down in tears when the changes passed. Just a few years ago we were positive we'd have to leave the denomination to get change, but then the bad actors left instead, so the thousands of congregations "in the middle" that didn't want to leave their historic denomination didn't have to, so in the end way more churches are officially accepting of homosexuality.
The new rule for marriage is 2 consenting adults, where it used to be a man and a woman. So we also managed to officially prohibit child marriage in the church. On the US side that was mostly from high school kids getting married because the girlfriend got pregnant. The church will no longer recognize or participate in those marriages.
It also clarifies that clergy are free to perform or refuse to perform any marriage ceremony of 2 consenting adults, so homophobic clergy aren't required to perform the ceremony. I'm fine with that, because a preacher performing a wedding should support the marriage, and a gay couple should know that the person performing the ceremony is supportive of the union.
I've been listening to the audiobooks and more than anything else I've been struggling with keeping track of the characters due to the names being so Chinese. It's very Western of me, but I can't remember any of the names from minute to minute.
I also think the narrator is kinda meh, and that's important in an audiobook.
Yes and no. Lots of the smaller towns were already fairly spread out because they were agriculturally-based towns, so the property sizes were huge. But many of the big, old cities still have excellent public transit.
About 20 years ars ago I flew to New England on a trip and was able to get between and around everywhere I needed within Baltimore, DC, and Pittsburg using trains and public transit, very very easily.
In Texas that simply isn't possible because most of the cities here are so spread out. The Texas Triangle is an urban population center with the population of New York City, but spread over 60,000 square miles instead of 300.
Of course people tend to get better with experience. But the retail worker who gets trained in 2 days can be reasonably good at the job within a few weeks and an expert in a few months.
Compare that to the years of training required prior to the first day on the job for an engineer or a doctor, who also get better with experience.
House Speaker Mike Johnson describes himself as a Christian before anything else. He has said his “faith informs everything I do.” He has told people curious about his views to “pick up a Bible.” His wife reportedly runs a counseling service whose operating agreement, which he himself notarized, states, “We...
The FTC estimates about 30 million people, or one in five American workers, from minimum wage earners to CEOs, are bound by noncompetes. It says the policy change could lead to increased wages totaling nearly $300 billion per year by encouraging people to swap jobs freely.
Hamas is evil. But who have the Palestinian children been killing?
Of the 35,000 official deaths (the real number is likely much, much higher), 25,000 have been positively identified as innocents - 15,000 of which were children.
More than 50% of all homes in Gaza have been destroyed.
Hospitals, schools, and refugee camps have been intentionally targeted.
International food and water are being withheld while aid workers, UN personnel, and jornalists are being targeted.
There's no way to justify this as an appropriate response to Hamas.
Dunes vs Star Wars ( sh.itjust.works )
Someone stop the ride, I want to get off ( midwest.social )
The starting salary for a new American Airlines flight attendant is low enough to qualify for food stamps in some states ( fortune.com )
[Thread, post or comment was deleted by the moderator]
California is about to tax guns more like alcohol and tobacco − and that could put a dent in gun violence ( theconversation.com )
Missouri senators, not taxpayers, will pay potential damages in Chiefs rally shooting case ( apnews.com )
How convenient! ( lemmy.world )
Cycling isn't legitimate transportation...apparently ( sh.itjust.works )
The person on the left is carrying bags, the one in orange is a delivery driver and a couple of people are wearing backpacks. Aside from car brained, Damaris is also blind.
Same day shipping ( lemmy.world )
Students’ Leaf Blower Suppressor To Hit Retail ( hackaday.com )
Texas power prices briefly soar 1,600% as a spring heat wave is expected to drive record demand for energy ( fortune.com )
“Out of control”: Legal experts call for recusal, reform over Stop the Steal symbol at Alito home ( www.salon.com )
Legal experts say its time for the Supreme Court's ethics code to grow some teeth...
Rule ( lemmy.blahaj.zone )
bUt BoTh SiDeS dA sAmE ( lemmy.world )
U.S. governors urge Turks and Caicos to release Americans as Florida woman becomes 5th tourist arrested for ammo in luggage ( www.cbsnews.com )
As conservatives put religion in schools, Satanists want in, too ( www.nbcnews.com )
Those poor jeans had it rough ( lemmy.world )
‘3 Body Problem’ Renewed for Additional Episodes to Conclude the Netflix Series ( www.hollywoodreporter.com )
Transportation mode, World vs USA ( jlai.lu )
Is that some sort of non-profit? ( lemmy.world )
Skill ( lemmy.dbzer0.com )
Ever seen someone doing their "unskilled job" all their life? It's just fucking magic!...
Solve a puzzle for me ( sopuli.xyz )
Source
Devout Christian Mike Johnson shows up to hush money trial to defend a guy accused of cheating on his wife with a porn star ( www.vanityfair.com )
House Speaker Mike Johnson describes himself as a Christian before anything else. He has said his “faith informs everything I do.” He has told people curious about his views to “pick up a Bible.” His wife reportedly runs a counseling service whose operating agreement, which he himself notarized, states, “We...
Either way, I'm getting super drunk. ( lemmy.world )
FTC bans most noncompete agreements between employers and workers ( www.npr.org )
The FTC estimates about 30 million people, or one in five American workers, from minimum wage earners to CEOs, are bound by noncompetes. It says the policy change could lead to increased wages totaling nearly $300 billion per year by encouraging people to swap jobs freely.
It Do Be Like That ( lemmy.world )