That sounds to me like a trivial administrative detail, in how the buyback program defines "gun", and the amounts paid. They might accept glue guns, squirt guns, paintball guns, pellet guns, rusted-out muzzle loaders, and more - but only pay $0 for 'em. If some folks bitch about that - tell 'em the city is spending money to reduce crime and social problems, not to subsidize their 3D printing hobby. Go sell take-it-apart puzzles on Etsy, kid.
(From what I've heard: Printed guns are a huge thing in fiction, and ideological and legal battles. But actual usage in real-world gun crimes / accidents / suicides is stuck at 0.0%)
I suspect in-ear buds worsened this. The risks need to be told to people multiple times through childhood.
Also, imo, ear-plugs should be offered at the door at live shows for free. Any stigma against self protection in social circumstances should be removed.
I went to an Ozzy concert years ago, and damn am I ever glad I thought about ear plugs. We were about 30 feet from a stack of cabinets. It was loud. Enough that certain notes made specific internal organs vibrate in a way that could easily make one panic haha.
Even with the plugs, my hearing was super-numbed for hours after we left.
I agree also, that I think ear buds are part of the reason. People don't ever take them out, and that constant sound pressure can't be good.
"The sample included n = 233, n = 66, and n = 44 participants at the three time points, respectively. Trait mindfulness, specifically description and non-judging of inner experience, was increased, and neuroticism was decreased after 4 weeks of microdosing compared to baseline."
In Western Australia they are a racket. Land is burned for burning's sake as an area of required burning is defined and people rush to hit a quota. Studies are showing that land left untouched for years is actually less flammable than land in the medium turn after burn-off. Additionally, the effects on air quality cannot be discounted either. It is a politicized issue and people are terrified of being seen as not doing anything to combat bushfires that would otherwise threaten homes.
this comment is useful to show how opposed various parties can be.. I have > forty recent, peer reviewed forestry sciencepapers on this topic here in California, where I share them with others who want to educate themselves on the topic.. here we share some characteristics with some parts of Australia regarding wildfires.. in recent years, the severity and scale of some fires have shattered previous records.
nobody forced him to submit a real, ridiculous offer for twitter when he was clearly not serious
nobody forced him to take direct control of it and proceed to run it into the ground
nobody forced him to do a costly rebrand that added no value and made it look like a porn site
nobody forced him to besmirch his reputation by conducting a scorched earth cull of twitter staff, having numerous public brawls and spats, making him look like a bad leader
nobody forced him to pick a fight with city councils and the owners of buildings he was renting over nonsense, cementing his reputation as erratic, untrustworthy and belligerent
nobody forced him to be repeatedly, vociferously transphobic, to complain bitterly about leftism, or to talk about how pizzagate was real and scare away all the wealthy twitter sponsors
nobody forced him to promote conspiracy theories
nobody forced him to openly court the alt-right
nobody forced him to do anything. He has been messing around and finding out for a while now, and now that he bought his own kool-aid and the stakes are so high that even a skilled team of people managing his numerous, constant screw-ups are not able to help save his image. This man went from seemingly a beloved Tony Stark like figure to a ranting lunatic all of his own accord.
Because they commonly swap to profit extraction models when they fail to integrate the acquisitions, and after that they typically shutter otherwise viable businesses. Most recently seen with Unity and Weta Technologies
Survive. My survival is my own will. My parents didn't have me to benefit themselves in industry, they only want me to survive in the best capacity possible. I'm not sure how that distinction is not 100% obvious in 2023. It's not the 1700s in a planet covered in subsistence farms who need kids to work.
This is handwringing over the decline of paper or pencils after computers came about when paper didn't magically come about by itself. Horses were not wild animals in North America at any point in modern history and barely in other continents. They were purely bred for industry, travel, and hobby. When industry and travel no longer became a thing we stopped producing them: a clear 1-to-1 correlation.
There's already been reductions in human populations without AI from leisure, abundance, culture, etc, - a very very different causality than horses.
> My parents didn't have me to benefit themselves in industry, they only want me to survive in the best capacity possible. I'm not sure how that distinction is not 100% obvious in 2023. It's not the 1700s in a planet covered in subsistence farms who need kids to work.
You make a very compelling argument. It made me think from another angle. Consider that there's evolutionary pressure on humans to want to procreate. So in a certain sense, we are conceived to serve the gene and to survive we have to labor.
To wrench the metaphor, if horses had banded together, they could have fought back against humans and seized some power and rights for themselves. Instead they were conditioned to accept their bad conditions. The same is true of humans. Most humans accept terrible indignities and injustices routinely through apathy.
No, horses could not have banded together and fought back. Humans have almost never accepted a backslide in quality of living. All the examples I can think of are because of short lived war time austerity.
Here's an example of a decline in living that persisted in the long-term, although it was a long time ago:
Britain experienced an economic collapse in the early 5th century AD after the Roman Empire left. Economic activity and urban life decided, and buildings were abandoned. Their supply chain was suddenly much more limited, and localized to specific areas, whereas before, the Roman Empire had allowed them to trade with other countries more. Their standard of living didn't really change for the next few centuries. I won't compare beyond that.
What is your basis for this statement? We have absolutely _numerous_ examples of people throughout history receiving and accepting horrible conditions cast upon them. Even today. And as far as I can tell, we still have similar power structures that would enable those situations to continue occurring.
Name some examples of large, militarily powerful groups accepting living conditions that were worse than the previous generation experienced, not due to natural disasters. People have never accepted that. Sure they've had shitty living conditions, but they started shitty, they didn't get worse. Sure they've been enslaved, but the civilians in this country are heavily armed enough to fight back against a government they see as allowing living conditions to slip.
In many societies, the rights of women have declined from one period to the next, although I guess "women" don't constitute a "large, militarily powerful" group.
For example, in Korea during the Joseon/Chosŏn period, the status of women gradually declined due to Neo-Confucianist ideology. Women stopped inheriting property in the seventeenth century. They lost the right to intiate divorce, while men could still intiate divorce under seven grounds (disobedience to parents-in-law, failure to bear a son, adultery, jealousy, hereditary disease, larceny, and talkativeness). Widows lost the right to remarry, and were seen as inconvenient for the family. Women were forbidden from playing games, partying outdoors, and riding horses.
The decline of women's rights happened in other societies, too; I just happened to have a book about Korean history on my desk.
North Korea, after the Korean war, their living conditions got way way worse than when under Japanese occupation, even though their military has improved.
Afghanistan, since it's been overtaken by the Taliban, even though they are mightier from a military standpoint, the living conditions have become worst.
The Soviet Union post WWII, they came out of it as a military superpower, but the damages from the war meant their living conditions were way worse.
You keep coming back to armed civilians will not accept worse living conditions. If some calamity comes, like global warming removes say the us ability to grow enough food or we run out of oil and there's not other energy sources, the guns aren't going to fix things. You are going to have a revolt against the govt because inflation is too high or China nuked us and ruined our country?
I thought the point of the horse analogy is that total wealth will increase but some large group of people will be so left out that their quality of living actually decreases. Like mass unemployment due to robots doing all the jobs. In that scenario I do believe there would be an armed revolt without the institution of a massive welfare state.
