The obvious warning - be very careful if you intend to fire it, do your reading first, yadda yadda. It's legal in America, though some states restrict production of certain things. Yes, you can absolutely make a non-replica, but if you want to actually design your own weapon, I recommend reading Chinn's The Machine Gun which has most of the requisite mathematical details.
And you want us to believe it will be okay if the government just "does something"? When will people quit turning to the federal government to solve their problems and take responsibility for themselves? Everyone ought to make his own decision whether to stay home or go to work and deal with the consequences accordingly.
Well lets see, you go engage in unnecessary activities in an area where the infection is spreading. .. and as a result you become an asymptomatic carrier and infect three people. Those three people infect three more each, those nine people infect 27 more, those people infect 81 people... who go on to infect 243 people...
And not so far down the line your actions have resulted in the deaths of-- say-- 80 people (including a few people who didn't die of covid19, but because they couldn't get treatment due to hospital overloads that you created). People who wouldn't have died if they weren't infected or if the infection came later when treatments were improved or hospitals weren't overloaded-- who wouldn't have died if you'd avoided creating an unnecessary exposure.
So, on that basis, since you're planning on taking responsibility for your actions, we can assume that you're prepared to pay out about a half a billion dollars
(OMB values a human life at 7-9 million dollars) to the surviving families of the people your actions were responsible for killing?
I knew that there were some high rollers on HN, but I find myself surprised to encounter someone so eager to "take responsibility" for the consequences of choosing to expose other people to a deadly contagion.
I imagine most people, instead, would find it much more attractive to obey the mandated best practices and thereby be morally and legally absolved of the consequences of whatever infection they inadvertently spread in spite of those efforts. And... hopefully spare themselves an excruciating (and potentially debilitating or deadly) illness at the same time.
I hope this convinces people to become more self-sufficient overall and grow a little of their own food. Living farther out from dense urban cores on more land will help, and conveniently, it will also make one less likely to fall ill. Telecommuting will hopefully enable people to live much less densely and avoid something like this recurring at its present scale.
The climate impact of individuals living in the city vs those living in the suburbs is considerable. More people living away from the city increases deforestation and is a net negative as far as lifestyle is concerned. Telecommuting is a nice option but most businesses don't work that way. I work in the commercial arts world. A lot of it is sensory stimuli and requires paying butts in seats. I can't dropship an experience through Amazon working from bungalow in Chiang Mai.
>The climate impact of individuals living in the city vs those living in the suburbs is considerable.
Yes, but in the opposite direction of what you imply.
>More people living away from the city increases deforestation
Why would that be the case? Almost all deforestation is for land for farming, not for houses. How much oil is burned growing food and shipping it and storing it and lighting and cooling stores to sell it?
>is a net negative as far as lifestyle is concerned.
Not everyone values the same materialistic things you do.
>I work in the commercial arts world
That's a make-work industry that doesn't need to exist. Consider the massive environmental impact of your industry, and how it adds absolutely no value to society at all. Yet you want to stop people from living further away from massive disease spreading urban centers and growing their own food at a cost of zero burned oil?
> Consider the massive environmental impact of your industry, and how it adds absolutely no value to society at all.
What massive environmental impact? Commercial art sounds like one of the least energy intensive occupations. You just sit in front of a laptop with low energy consumption. You are sharing a building with hundreds of other people. You probably take public transport instead of commuting by car, live in a small apartment and share heating with other people. Really the biggest pollution source is the food that you are eating as an artist and that's not your fault. It's the fault of the farmer that is using diesel tractors, fertilizing his plants with artificial fertilizer, shipping his food with diesel trucks. All of these pollution sources will have to switch to renewable energy one day. What about that laptop? It's probably running on Renewables today!
The one you describe in the rest of your post. Billions of tons of CO2 emissions and the outcome is a negative burden on society rather than a benefit.
>It's the fault of the farmer that is using diesel tractors, fertilizing his plants with artificial fertilizer, shipping his food with diesel trucks.
None of those things are the farmer's fault. They are the inevitable and mandatory cost of urbanization. Were you planning to just starve while making ads?
>All of these pollution sources will have to switch to renewable energy one day
That is physically impossible. What will have to happen is techno-industrial society will collapse as we exit the tiny blip in history of abundant energy.
Dark sky is not a public good, it's a for-profit business that puts a shiny interface on the same information available to everyone. It also added user reporting and analytics, so added material value. The app cost money. Why don't you lobby your congressman to have NOAA develop a better app instead? You can't make a privately-developed program a "public good"; citizens can't just "demand" that dark sky remains independent and expands because they didn't pay for it. Either lobby the government for a better app, wait for the private sector to develop a better app, or lobby the government to attach a license to the data prohibiting commercial use (though this would kill the other apps, too).
You might re-read my comment. Nowhere do I say Dark Sky is a public good. I do lobby my congressperson for NOAA to have more open data practices and better funding for app development. Citizens can demand products from government be at parity or better than private corporation products, and government has the funding to do it. So why not do it?
I'll note that you edited your comment after I posted my reply, and are now making it sound like you didn't. It originally included something to the effect of, "This shouldn't be allowed to happen."
I made no such edit, and at no time made such a statement. I take no issue with Dark Sky being acquired (EDIT:) and my comment is only to vocally advocate for government-run services that cannot be acquired (to provide continuity of quality service and delivery of data products to citizens and the systems and apps they use to consume said services and data products).
So sorry to hear that; praying he gets well, along with all others sickened. Thanks to him and to everyone else who worked on the internet; they're the reason why we can still function and communicate at all.
This is exactly right. The economy has grown to unsustainable levels based on the economic habits of the average American who can't be bothered to save, hence the crash we're seeing now. At sixty hours a week, that guy should be making six figures, pre-tax. There is zero excuse for not saving. Everyone should save at least six months of salary for emergencies; though a few people legitimately can't, most Americans simply don't bother because they'd rather spend that money on the new i phone.
Edit: Williamdclt, I'll answer your question here due to rate-limiting.
Yes, lots of us do; I've been working that way since internships in high school. Same with many others I know. Usually, though, it's close to 12 hours a day and none on Saturday, or maybe 11 a day and a little on the weekend. Not an issue so long as you plan about an hour a day for something fun and mindless, and leave weekends free to do chores/relax.
Edit: Consz, responding here due to rate-limiting.
Not all of us live in the same world. I'm glad to hear you and your friends are doing well, but that's not representative of everyone. I do because I'm currently hourly, and that's true of many of the people I mentioned. When every additional hour worked has more money associated with it, most people will work more; that's not silly. The downside is, of course, there's a distinct opportunity cost to taking time off, so I don't do so much of that.
I'm British, but used to work with a lot of Americans, all white-collar workers in the oil and gas industry, across a few different companies.
It seemed to me that the US has a toxic overtime culture, where your perceived value to the company was based in large part by how much time you were at your desk. And of course, you didn't get paid for that overtime. I don't think I met a single person who worked less than 50+ hours a week, every week.
I did ask about this, and was always told it was "normal".
Also, and I might be remembering this wrongly, I think employees only got ten days annual leave.
This was all in a single industry, in a single state, so I don't know how well the observation extrapolates, but it was my perception at the time.
Not all, no, but a good few do (I'm sure this varies by industry, region, etc.) Ambitious people tend to do so more than others; there are only so many promotions/pay raises/etc. to go around and I'd rather I get it than one of my co-workers, so it becomes a bit of a positional arms race.
This is silly. My professional cohort doesn't have anyone working sixty hour weeks, and these are people making mid-6 to mid-7 figures. Lot more to life than working, buddy.
How is shrinking the government to blame? It's expanded colossal ever since the new deal. Grover Norquist, the guy you're quoting, is not an elected official. He was just saying what he believes. That's pretty weak evidence for "the problem". The only nation that ended up containing it was China, because being able to tightly control what your population does is one of the perks of authoritarianism. That said, it doesn't make it a good trade-off.
I live in the US, I would prefer being anywhere else in the world right now. Even Italy is currently in a good position since they peaked and will likely recover in April. In the US, sky is the limit. There are almost 0 precautions to limit the spread. Even states that pretend to do something, actually does nothing. I live in MA, which has a shelter-in-place order, but all the businesses that I know of are classified as "essential" so all my friends are working business as usual. We're talking about people who work in random mailrooms, in random thrift shops etc. Businesses can do however they please because there is no regulation. And I think it's pretty clear US will likely experience millions of deaths by the end of April.
My point is, there is a huge spectrum between "China level authoritarianism" and "making government fit your bathtub". It's really frustrating to explain this again and again. We should not allow government to invade our private lives, but we also should have government regulating businesses, especially in time like this.
the welfare state expanded dramatically after the new deal, but that reversed with the turn toward austerity in the late 70s. "the government" is an overly broad way of speaking about this, as it places budgeting for defense contracts & bailing out finance capital, or monetary policy geared toward preventing the labor market from getting tight (as opposed to full employment) under the same umbrella as tanf & snap.
The only time the welfare state in the US has actually gotten smaller was Clinton's welfare reform in the 1990's. That was easily offset by things like Medicare Part D in the 2000's.
People keep talking about "stripping away the safety net", but when I look at entitlement spending, it just keeps getting bigger.
clinton's slashing of the welfare state is a matter of degree, not the only instance of purported beneficiaries losing benefits.
medicare part d doesn't allow the government to negotiate prices and thus functions more as a subsidy for the pharmaceutical industry than people for whom it is ostensibly intended to prescription access.
lots of games can be played with budgets (such as block grants, one notorious example being the 1981 repeal of the mental health systems act) so the raw dollars of entitlement spending can grow without representing a true shift in resources.
when cost of living (eg rents, healthcare) outpaces spending, all while units of public housing are destroyed without being replaced, and the terms of occupation have grown ever more stringent (for example, requiring maintenance come out of tenants' rent while lowering the maximum eligible income for tenants), the mere dollar amount of spending becomes a less definitive measure, i think.
