• 0 Posts
  • 196 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 22nd, 2023

help-circle



  • Don’t forget that when an amendment does get ratified, you’ve got to really nail it or else people will still be fighting over the verbiage.

    You’d think “keep it simple stupid” would suffice, but look at how we interpret this:

    A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

    IANAL, but I see a few things as I read it:

    • Militias must be well regulated. I agree.
    • Militias are necessary to the security of a free state. Sounds a bit dated but I don’t disagree.
    • The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. Ok…so…is that “the right” can’t be infringed, or “the arms” can’t be infringed? Who are the people, and are they separate from the well-regulated militia? Because you can have a right to bear arms, but still limit what arms are available for civilian use. Non civilian use would be either military or para-military, the latter would be a militia, which ipso facto must be well-regulated, and as such there must be restrictions on arms because how are you going to regulate a militia if not its armaments? It’s not well-regulated if it’s a free-for-all. This is law. There are rules.

    Should I be able to buy a nuke? An ICBM? A tank? Live grenades? Where is the line drawn? When does it transition from “civilian hunting and defense” to “military fetishism” to “para-military/militia” to “military”. Because it must be somewhere. And I feel like there’s one group of those four that’s really being a stick in the mud over it.



  • NFTs are supposed to be cryptographically secure and blockchain-tracked certificates of authenticity for digital goods. “This is a unique original work by so-and-so”. Any duplication wouldn’t have the same hash and thus is not legitimate.

    There are plenty of good uses for this if you are of the mindset that digital goods need to be protected and proven as unique and original works. In a proper setup, it would negate the need for DRM and enable the legal sale and trade of digital media/games in the secondary market, by preventing unlawful duplication (piracy). This is beneficial because piracy, as GabeN prophesized, is an issue of service, not price. Consumers are typically willing to pay good money for good entertainment. They do not want to pay good money and find that a game is incomplete or poorly optimized, or to have less product (digital good) for the same price (physical good) (i.e., not being able to re-download after an arbitrary date, not be able to resell, lack of boxart, bonus content, etc).




  • Do these nimcompoops realize that the existing wealthy elite, few in their number, got that way by exploiting social safetynets and taxpayer funded infrastructure for their gains?

    So cleary, if we want to be able to generate more wealth and more millionaires/billionaires, better social programs and infrastructure will get them there. Imagine how much easier it’ll be to become wealthy if you don’t have to give employees insurance, or tuition reimbursement? Or if there’s an amazing system of roads, rails, and ports to move your goods to consumers? God, you could become a successful businessman and still have a conscious. Best of both worlds.


  • It absolutely is. Trump isn’t a person. As long as most of the GOP is emulating him, Trump, himself, is an ideology.

    “We are not Trump” is shorthand.

    Not that that is literally a part of anybody’s campaign. Biden has had a pretty accomplished first term given the split Congress and the stacked court. That “we are not trump” is some phrase coined against dems by some right wing blogger years ago.

    You wouldn’t know that from watching the news, since every channel picks and chooses what they show and they are building their brands not just through the news that they are airing, but also by the news they are not.


  • Gore should’ve won. It’s plainly obvious that there were multiple plan-Bs to assure Bush’s win, between his brothers obviously flawed ballots and the Supreme Court and who knows what else never made national news.

    It’s like gerrymandering, voter suppression (by means of strategically making polling places in predominantly Democratic areas more crowded making and blocking mail ballots/early voting difficult if not impossible), and voter purges aren’t enough of a leg up for them…we then find out that they actually have multiple layers of plans to help get a victory one way or the other.

    We saw it in 2000, and we saw it in 2020. And we saw how deep the rabbit hole goes when we realized that by crippling the USPS to prevent mail voting, they managed to delay getting their own fake ballots into DC in time.

    At what point do we stop calling what the GOP does “politics” and start actually calling it “organized crime”?