I don't think that's true. I imagine the people with the highest chance of survival are the ones whose governing/ruling people seek peace and the rule law quickest. Second would be people who flee to the nearest safe and lawful area. A fortification is probably the third best option if you can't have either of the first, but the probability of that structure keeping you alive is very low, especially if the conflict lasts long enough to become a siege. Entire cities managed to hold out from sieges that lasted for years, but the ordinary people inside did not.

Rifles are great for many things aside from roving bandits. First thing is that hunting is an excellent capability to have and rifles are much easier to use than bows. Another thing is the deterrence one provides. If you're moving around the end times with just your fists, you're an easier target than someone equipped. The final bit is if your point is right and living in a fortified structure is the way to go, someone with a rifle and the knowhow to use it is going to be immensely more useful to the group than someone who just knows how to use a computer. In the absence of law, you will be obliged to defend yourself whether that's individually or in a large group.

In real life melee weapons are readily available and far more overpowered that you'd think, but what matters more is that robbery is risky. Winning most of the time isn't enough; you'd need to win all of the time.

Really, modern first-world countries are just the descendants of warlordships that ran out of kingdoms to consolidate with and instead switched to taxation, either relinquishing enough power to their citizens to maintain a stable but effectively symbolic monarchy or overtaxing then losing to a rebellion.

I rather have a few weapons, than no weapons at all.

Source?

I'd rather have 10 people with 10 guns than 3 people with 30 guns, esp. if of different calibers and configurations

and in a collapse situation I'd rather have excessive water purification and just enough firearms, than excessive firearms and little to no water purification

With thy said, I’ve had a few enthusiast friends the years, and for most of them the amount of ammo was more staggering than the number of firearms. Most also had a fairly well throughout strategy around what the shtf related arms should be chambered in as well as reloading presses. Further, that made sure their trusted group of friends were familiar with their shtf firearms. To be fair, the most excessive of these friends also had an equally excessive build out for water storage.

Pfff, what a laughable claim. Meanwhile, just because people CAN use to learn something doesn't mean it's good. Touchscreen computers, especially laptops, are dumb for a few reasons. They already have a touch interface (the trackpad), and touchscreen on a computer requires dumbed-down interfaces with oversized controls and an M.O. that tolerates your hand and arm blocking your view of what you're trying to work on.

And also the screen's hinges must be (and perpetually remain) stiff enough to sustain people pressing on the screen the whole time.

With people doing so much on phones and tablets now, you can bet that when they fire up a legitimate computer, they want a computer's capabilities. That means a real keyboard, a precision pointing device, and software with a proper computer UI.

You do know why these laws exist, right? And they are not useless. Many terrible things happened, and tens of millions died, because an extremely hateful ideology was allowed to take hold by assaulting civil society and democracy.

Banning anything related to that ideology is not only needed, not only common sense, but I'd argue the moral duty of the German people. And everyone else who witnessed it (so everyone). And for what it's worth, most developed countries have banned Nazi-related things. The US is an outlier in thinking that Nazi opinions matter, and allowing murderous types to express their desire to murder others is somehow a virtue.

And to be clear, yes, National Socialism is extremely agressive and murderous. One of its core tenets, probably its main one, is violent antisemitism and "master race"-ism, with their solution being exterminating "lower" "races". Nothing useful, nothing good, nothing redeeming. Just pure hatred and genocide.

Nothing good can come out of "debating" a Nazi in the "marketplace of ideas". Goebbels himself said so back in the 1930s, that they do not intend to play by the rules of democracy, but if democracy wants to give them the tools to spread their ideology, they'll happily use it. The world saw this happen and saw the results. Nazis have no place in any civilised society, and anyone espousing Nazi ideology or sporting their insignia deserves to ostracised at least.

radio/tv share the bands which are very narrow resource so licensing pretty much have to exist else there would be interference abound (imagine competing TV station just driving around with a jammer on competition

cars have that + the fact infrastructure is built by public money. Allowing anyone on anything with no training there literally costs lives

Or, copyright wise, to earn money in before digital world you kinda had to not have too much of copyright infringement - while artist today might get popular enough to subside on patreon/other form of digital tips, before it wouldn't be possible

Any significant technological advancement necessarily uses some shared public resource which will drive people to regulate it. For AI folks are trying to get a lot of random things to stick: the power grid, water usage, public safety, disinformation.

Anyway, those are usually avoided in comments unless they are particularly egregious, because as per the guidelines:

> Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html