What other purpose would it serve? It’s not like the movies where it just goes pew. It’s still loud. It just means that while hunting or at the range you don’t need ear plugs. It’s very practical on a nightstand gun since a gun fired indoors at night is basically a flashbang. The silencer quiets it and prevents the bright flash so you aren’t as disoriented.

And I would never cite the NRA. They are pretty openly fascistic and white supremacist.

Hot take: this isn’t a big deal. The main use case for silencers is hearing protection. Short barrelled rifles could already be easily made by anybody willing to not register one. The laws mainly made the people wanting to do things legally jump through a bunch of hoops.

A strong net wouldn’t be burned away that quickly. A regular explosive would still clear it away faster.

I’ve wondered how impactful it would be to pass a law allowing all interstates to also count as passenger train right-of-ways. Obviously there would have to be some engineering and modifications to turn a highway median into a train line but it would simplify the land rights probably.

Do people actually care about collecting these cards? Every time I’ve sold them, it’s been for pennies.

I’m not that knowledgeable about this stuff but I think meshtastic would have better range due to running over lora. That’s the whole reason you need a separate radio for the communication to a node. Also the nodes require very little power. You can set up one with a small solar cell for cheap and just leave it somewhere. Black Flag Civilian and Benn Jordan both have plans to make your own nodes. There are plenty of others out there.

One of my friends is a software engineer. Her first job out of college was doing a bunch of data stuff to build an LLM. She made the data processing and export take months and obfuscated every attempt to fix the problem until they took her off the project. My hero.

Hamas was also financed by Israel in order to sink the efforts of the PLO. The secular PLO looked like it might actually get some peaceful recognition of statehood and Israel knew a violent Islamist leadership would torpedo that. Israel has been fighting against Palestinian statehood, limiting movement of Palestinians, controlling resources, supporting “settler” bandits that colonize and kill Palestinians, etc.

Israel has been slowly taking over Palestinian land and killing their people for decades. The Palestinians can’t vote in Israeli elections. Their statehood has been blocked by Israel so they have limited diplomatic solutions. What peaceful option do you propose they should have done?

The Oct 7 attacks killed about 1200 Israeli civilians and soldiers. In response, Israel has killed 1200 Hamas militants and 82,000 civilians, wounded a further 174,000, blocked humanitarian aid, leveled apartments, hospitals, schools, etc. Acting like both sides are bad when one is fighting for survival, and the other is committing a genocide is just arguing in support of genocide. If you’re somehow still ignorant on this topic, I suggest you do some more digging into the history of Israel and Palestine. If you have learned about it and still support Israel then go fuck yourself.

I had to do a bunch of my own learning about the gulf war. Similarly, it happened before I was born but recent enough that history teachers didn’t consider it history. I now think it set the stage for a lot of the US geopolitically and I really should’ve learned about it in school.

If you cut up the tire, you could make it into an edge bumper. Like if you have a coffee table that keeps banging your shin, you could mount a bit of the tire to the edge of the table to make a bumper.

If it doesn’t last as long, wouldn’t it produce a higher volume of plastic pollution. Even if it does break down quicker, it might increase your impact. Also, I think your bike tire wear is truly an insignificant contributor to pollution. Your effort would be much better spent advocating for bike lanes, giving an old bike to a friend so they can drive less, etc. If you ride instead of Uber 1 time, you’re probably offsetting a month of bike tire wear.

Hell yeah. I love headtube mounted front racks. I want a black snow with one so bad.

It’s both. I knew a guy who was half black, half Japanese but he was born and raised in Japan. Despite being native born and culturally Japanese, he still faced a lot of discrimination because he was black. Among the expats, we were all discriminated against due to being foreigners, but the black people got it the worst. Even among the Japanese people, there is colorism with lighter skin considered more desirable.

And the literacy tests of the Jim Crowe era were just making sure people could read well enough to vote. It was educationalist, not racist. The purpose of this sign is to exclude non-native Japanese people.

I used to live in Japan. When I would go to a rural or off-the-beaten-parh izakaya, it was a coin flip. Either I would be told they are full (a lie, like this sign). Or the owner would be super excited to show a foreigner their culture and would personally serve me.

I lived in Japan for 2 years. I had several expat friends with stories of going to the hospital, being told they were full, their Japanese wife showing up, and suddenly they have space. Other stories of legal disputes between a Japanese person and a foreign immigrant will always go to the Japanese person. Japanese culture is very non-confrontational, but don’t think their brand of racism is safer. If we’re comparing racism and deciding one is less bad than the other, we’ve already partially accepted that it has a place in society.

I knew about Bhopal, but I didn’t know it was Union Carbide. Fun fact: Union Carbide ran the Oak Ridge enrichment site for the Manhattan project. They also created the largest American industrial disaster with the Hawk’s Nest tunnel disaster. It killed over 700 miners from silicosis by ignoring safety practices. They were bought by Dow Chemicals in 2001. I guess Dow didn’t like the competition in the “be a horrible chemical company” market.

Nice. I use SPDs with my fixed gear and it’s a great combo. Never tried bullhorn bars.

Awesome bike. It’s hard to tell from the pic but make sure you have some kind of foot retention on a fixed gear. Either clip-in type or straps.

The prose is one of the best parts imo. The main character has had his mind and body modified and drugged to the point of constantly being confused. The chaotic writing helped put the reader in that headspace.