HelixDab

You see, comrade, terrorist attack is when Nazis attack bridge we stole, not when comrade bomb Nazi apartment building.

No, you were quite clear; you aren’t actually interested in real solutions, you’re interested in gun control for the sake of gun control.

I used to be a member of the NRA too, but I’m not willing to pay for some dude’s $15,000 suits while he’s kissing the asses of people that want to overturn every part of the constitution that isn’t 2A rights. I’m slightly more okay with SAF and GOA, but they still often shill for Republicans.

The fact that a gun has a ‘purpose’ of killing is reductive and not useful. Killing is, by itself, neither good nor bad. Killing can be justified and moral, or it can be deeply immoral.

So, as I asked originally, if you could reduce the number of illegal and immoral uses of firearms without reducing the ability of people to exercise their civil rights, would you be open to that?

Fewer guns doesn’t, by itself, mean less violence. We can see that in Australia and in England, where the combined rates of all violent crimes (battery, robbery, forcible rape, murder) are comparable to the US, and possibly higher, but the lethality is reduced. On the other hand, reducing the amount of violence in society, through programs that attack root causes in the most affected communities (which, notably, is not harsher policing and sentencing, but more like community improvement and poverty reduction), reduces both rates of violence and the homicide rates. Chicago actually had a pretty good violence intervention program going for a number of years before it was senselessly defunded.

You’ve avoiding the question.

Would you be open to solutions that do not involve removing guns, or is that the only solution you would accept?

Love that people just ignore that violence doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and since violence must happen in a vacuum without any causes at all the only solution is to remove the tools.

Guns are tools. A knife is a tool. A car is a tool. Even high explosives are tools.

BTW, I do have a kitchen gun, because that’s where I need it when there’s a problem bear outside. (Yes, bear - one of those 300+ pound animals with teeth and claws that are sometimes extremely aggressive.)

I assume that you want safe communities; would you be open to solutions that increase safety if they didn’t involve removing firearms, or is that the only solution that you’d accept?

Obviously the problem is that there are too many knives in China, and it’s too easy for civilians to get knives! No one needs a knife; the only purpose of a knife is to cut and stab. The only solution is to completely ban all knives in China.

…Or they could seriously address the social issues that lead to certain segments of their population committing this kind of atrocity.

Hmmm. I wonder where else that could be applied…?

…Ah. That’s super shitty. I’m in a pretty small town–about 5000 people–but we still have three large grocery stores (if you count the WalMart as a grocery store), and a small, higher-end health food store. There’s heavy competition, which keeps prices down, but also leads to wage stagnation for workers, and means that poor people get fucked by rising food prices.

All grocery store margins are tight. Historically, grocery stores are not enormously profitable. Most of the price gouging that you’ve seen in food lately has been at the manufacturer level, not the retailer level. That’s why you don’t see a lot of price difference between substantially identical items at different stores in the same region; the same size box of Cheerios is going to have roughly identical pricing at both Piggly Wiggly and Kroger. You start seeing price differences when you go to an upscale store like Amazon’s Whole Foods (prices go up sharply), or when you’re buying in bulk at Costco or restaurant supply stores (such as Gordon Food Service). That’s also why you see self-checkouts everywhere now; once one company cuts their labor costs by introducing them, everyone has to, because otherwise they can’t remain competitive. …And then prices stabilize across the industry at roughly the same very slim margins. The company that cuts costs first sees a slight initial uptick in profit, and then competition forces them to cut their margins back again.

At the store level, there’s not a helluva lot that can be done. The obscene profits are farther upstream.

See this as an example. Grocery stores are making profit in volume, but not a lot of profit per item. Typical margins are 1-3% per item. That means that, if you cut off every single bit of profit that a grocery store makes, your $200 worth of groceries would cost you… $198. Maybe as little as $194. Saving you a whopping $2-6. But when you have hundreds of transactions each day, that 1-3% per transaction adds up to profitability for the store.

That last one is more of a problem. Grocery margins are usually very slim. In most cases, a grocery store can’t reduce their prices by any significant amount and still remain profitable.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett, in a dissent to the ruling joined by fellow conservative Justice Clarence Thomas, wrote that the decision “unjustifiably grants true threats preferential treatment.”

…What the fuck? Am I taking crazy pills? In what fucking world do Thomas and Barrett advocate for a sane and rational approach to anything?

Cooking healthy food is more expensive than eating fas foods.

I will definitely check it out. I’d love to see an open world game made now with the same kind of scale, but I don’t think you could. IIRC, it would ahve taken something like a year in real time to have your character walk across Tamriel.

…Or Oblivion. Or Daggerfall. Probably not Battlespire or Redguard though, and I don’t know if you could get Arena to run on a modern computer. Daggerfall was a bit tricky; I think it bugged out for me before I got out of the first dungeon.

I’d need a Real Attorney to chime in, but I think that, once you’re actually in a trial, you can’t dump your client without the permission from the judge. (You also can’t intentionally stop providing your best service for any reason at all, not unless you want to be sanctioned or disbarred.) So while an attorney could insist on money up front, if the money they were paid didn’t cover the real expenses, they could still end up getting stiffed. I suppose the ‘smart’ thing to do would be to have $100M put in an escrow account, and the money can only be released from the account if both parties agree. So if Trump tries to stiff you for the bill, he’s still out the money since you don’t have to release it back to him. Kinda like what The Silk Road used to do, only even shadier, since you’d be working for Trump.

Lawyers can potentially get sanctioned for client conduct. I can see a potential problem if attorney are given access to classified information for defense prep, then Trump accesses the information, and then disseminates that information. It’s a bit of a stretch, but given how bad Trump’s behaviour has been, that’s not a stretch I would ignore if I was an attorney.

THIS is what’s going to bite him in the ass.

This is a huge case. It’s going to take hundreds, if not thousands of billable hours. Any attorney that’s competent that takes this case has to know that they’re probably not going to see even a fraction of that money, meaning that they’ll be without income for a long period of time. A competent attorney that’s not ideologically motivated and independently wealthy is unlikely to be able to take the case. (An _in_competent attorney that doesn’t realize this fact might take the case, and then not be allowed to withdraw from the case by the judge.)

Second, Trump has a history of running his mouth in public. The attorneys that are going to be defending him need to have national security clearances in order to be effective counsel. If Trump talks about the cases in public, he could cost his attorneys their security clearances, which would not only impede their ability to defend him, but could also prevent them from being able to defend similar clients in the future. If I was an attorney, that would be a really big fucking deal. Not only would I be unlikely to be get paid, but there would be a real risk that Trump could harm my ability to earn income in the future.

If I was a competent attorney with a track record of defending this kind of case, this case would be radioactive.