The pit bull groups of dogs, as breeds, are not the nanny-dogs that people claim they were. They are mastiffs; they were intended to guard, and were used for hunting and war. You can train the shit out of them, and they can still revert to breed characteristics.
A study in the US concluded that greater than 60% of all fatal dog attacks in the US were from pit bulls or Rottweilers, but those two groups don’t make up nearly 60% of all dogs in the US. These simply aren’t breeds that should be left alone with children.
Currently have 6. I need to get more, and larger ones. We live in a log house, in an area that takes a minimum of 20 minutes for emergency services to get to, and heat with a wood stove. We absolutely need to practice fire safety all the time.
When I look at Dr. Steven Hassan’s BITE model for high-demand religions, the Mormon church ticks most of the boxes to some degree. Take behavior control: “4.Control types of clothing and hairstyles”. Okay, you don’t have to wear only white, and a specific model of white sneakers. But you are expected to wear opaque clothing that covers temple garments completely, and wear clothing that is free of an ‘offensive’ imagery or text. Beards and long hair are strongly socially discouraged, and will get you kicked out of BYU, as will visible tattoos and piercings. When you skip to “4. Regulate diet – food and drink, hunger and/or fasting”, well there’s the word of wisdom, and fast Sundays. And it just kinds goes on and on. They don’t do some of the things (murder, rape, etc.), but they do a lot of them to some degree.
At a minimum, it’s an unhealthy degree of authoritarian control.
150M isn’t even close to covering a functioning public transit system in any major US city. Expansions of the subway in New York routinely run into the hundreds of millions of dollars, and that’s just expansions. Even if you’re looking at buses only, if you start with the assumption that each bus runs about $100k, that’s a mere 1500 buses. The CTA in Chicago uses over 1800 buses–that only counts the ones currently in operation–so you’re still short on building bus stops, bus lanes, any kind of light rail system, and so on. Oh, and lots of the bus lines in Chicago stop running after a certain time; I couldn’t take the buses to go to any concerts, since nothing operated in my area between midnight and 5am.
Plus, you have ongoing operating expenses. Once a stadium is built, it’s usually operated by someone other than the city.
I’m not saying I’m in favor of stadiums, but whoever costed this needs to consult with a civil engineer to come up with a more realistic figure for comprehensive public transit for major cities.
Thank you for your more informed numbers! I had no idea that a basic city bus was half a million dollars; that seems outrageous, but it also seems outrageous that an F-150 can easily cost $80k.
It’s a pity that it’s so damn expensive to run light rail in established cities; it seems to make a lot more sense in the long run, but those numbers are really hard to swallow in the short run.
For the most part, people change based on relationships, not raw information. In general, you can’t counter a belief simply by presenting overwhelming information. (This is one of the only areas where Trump is a savant; he’s actively fostered a parasocial relationship with his cultists. They believe that they have a strong social relationship with him, so they’re inoculated against information that’s critical or negative of Trump.) What this means is that ideas can be contagious, and can spread through relationships. If you are able to use you relationship with your parents to help them understand why e.g. Trump is terrible for the country, then they can, in turn, spread that to their friends.
While I appreciate your desire to abolish capitalism, in the case of fascism, it’s not money, but power that’s at play. Even if you eliminated all profit motive, people would still shill for Trump because they think that they can get some kind of benefit that isn’t necessarily monetary.
You can. But you need to engage them one on one, and you need to find out what’s important to them, what frustrates them, and why. And then build on that. It takes empathy, and not faked empathy. It’s not a short conversation, like asking someone to donate to Greenpeace on a sidewalk in Brooklyn. It’s deep canvassing.
Instead of complaining, get active at a local level. Start doing shit, instead of complaining that other people should do shit. Be a local activist. Run for office. Work in person to persuade people. Get backing. Shake hands, kiss babies, meet people. And then? Vote for the best choices that you have.
If you want shit to change, you can’t complain on-line, you have to get off your ass and do something.
I assume that you aren’t doing more because almost all of the people bitching about the Dems only aligning with 95% of their views and therefore don’t vote for the Dems because they’re just as bad are accelerationists; they just want to make the system function even less well than it already does so that the whole things crashes and burns. Or, worse, in the case of someone like Jill Stein, are actively working against the interests of the country. Best case scenario? They’re speaking to an in-group to harden people in a position so that they’re less likely to engage with political opponents.
If you really, truly want things to change, you gotta do that shit on a 1:1 basis, in person. If you’re serious about changing people and fixing shit, I’d suggest looking at techniques of street epistemology and reading David McRaney’s “How Minds Change”.
It’s unlikely to happen without some kind of apocalyptic event. Communist societies works very, very well on a small scale; you can have communes with maybe as many as a few hundred people, because everyone is connected to everyone else. That all falls apart when you start talking about anything bigger. Capitalist societies don’t seem to need that direct relationship in order to function.
I think that the best we can hope for is some kind of reform that blends parts of capitalism with socialism, and sharply constrains that rights of the capitalist class.
I don’t think that we’ll even get that though; I think we’ll get Cyberpunk 2077.
A domino joiner on a job site would be good for things like putting together pieces or a banister (railing) where you needed both the strength or something like a doweled joint as well as the alignment capability of a biscuit joiner. It’s going to add strength to any kind of mitered joint that would be glued/where you don’t want to see nails. Most of the uses are going to be in cabinetry or furniture rather than in general carpentry and contracting, but it definitely has a few very specialized uses on a job site.
I am not a contractor, but I did it for a very brief period of time (until the business owner stiffed me of about a thousand in pay, and I realized it wasn’t a good side gig).
Depending on what you’re doing, you absolutely want Festool on a job site. A Rotex sander is fantastic for doing the edges when you’re refinishing hardwood floors, for instance. (Goddamn incompatible sanding discs though… You have to buy the Festool discs if you want the dust management.) For some jobs, there really aren’t any viable alternatives to Festool; no one else makes a domino joiner, which is somewhere between a plate joiner and a mortise and tenon joint. (You can get close by using a precision doweling jig, but the domino joiner is fast. Mortise and tenons are fantastic joints, but a mortising machine isn’t terribly portable, and cutting one by hand is far, far more skill than I have.)
There are some relationships where that’s part of the T&Cs, and what both people want. I’m not into a lifestyle D/s kinda thing, but that’s what some people want, because they don’t want to be “responsible” for making life choices. I’m not convinced it’s healthy, but it’s still their choice.
Like having a good life insurance policy that pays out even if you die doing something stupid? And maybe having a fake tooth filled with cyanide so you can go out quickly instead of dying of exposure?
The Appalachian foothills in Kentucky are pretty geologically dead; there aren’t any fault lines anywhere close by. It’s about as safe as any cave network can be.
I do recommend going to that are and taking some tours, especially in the middle of summer where you can see the inversion layer where the air goes from being 95F to 60F. Even the fully-accessible tours that don’t go through any tight spaces are pretty cool.
SCUBA is even worse because any movement kicks up sediment, so that visibility quickly turns to nil. Cave diving has a very, very high mortality rate; BASE jumping is safer.
Honestly, they’re pretty neat. I’ve gone through tours of Mammoth Caves that require waivers, and they strongly recommend that you not take that tour if any part of you has a circumference of more than 42", because you won’t fit. There was a spot that was about 12" high, and 72-ish wide that you had to crawl through that took a sharp right; you had to take your helmet off to get through. But then you get out into this enormous cavern filled with rock formations that are seen by less 100 people/year.
But if I didn’t know that that crack was passable, that I’d be able to get through or get back out again? Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck no.
I hate the design, but that’s really well done. Angled tile going around a corner? That’s some challenging work! I don’t even know how you’d cut those tiles, and you can’t bend tile.
I like huntin’, fishin’, farmin’, shootin’ the revenuers that try to bust my still and steal my 'shine, and I stand in solidarity with my fellow workers against the evils of capitalism.
Is that sufficiently redneck?
(I don’t actually like fishing; I think it’s boring, and I don’t like fish very much.)
Gonna be straight, the hand guard doesn’t scream MAGA, but it’s kinda borderline fudd-y. :P A carbon fiber M-LOK hand guard and a low-profile gas block would be better, unless you’re reeeeaaaaaalllllly attached to that A2 front sight post.
I still prefer the 30 round magazines, since they’re cheap, easy to find, and are better for making it through high round count matches without lots of reloads. :)
As an aside to all of that, when I talk to younger people at matches–I’m probably about your age, maybe a little older–many of them are in favor of things Dems say that they’re in favor of (except gun control). I think that’s one of the sticking points for a lot of the younger rednecks in rural parts of the country.
Apolopgies for this wall; I’m literally autistic, and guns have been one of my particular areas of interest for, um, 40-odd years.
That style of hand guard, AFAIK, doesn’t accept M-LOK or keymod accessories. I can’t be sure though; what you’d be looking for is something like this -> aeroprecisionusa.com/ar15-atlas-s-one-m-lok-handg… The slots are what the M-LOK mounts go into. (Aero Precision is kinda pricey, IMO.) The added benefit is that it floats your barrel; it’s only connected to the upper receiver, and not the barrel, so you can get slightly better accuracy out of it.
You can get the metal parts of the rifle cerakoted white, if that’s of interest to you.
You can get a gas block that fits under your hand guard. That allows your hand guard can go all the way to the end of your barrel which gives you more options for mounting accessories and hand positioning. Gas blocks come in a variety of styles, but a fixed and pinned (e.g., held on with a roll pin) block will work for almost everyone. An adjustable gas block may be better for people that are running silencers, since that affects gas pressure in the system, but I have no direct experience with them since silencers are $$$. If you replace the hand guard with an M-LOK hand guard, you’ll need to replace the front sight with a low profile gas block.
I’m personally not a fan of iron sights because my eyes suck. I use an LPVO and a canted red dot, and that’s worked very well for me. I can reliably hit targets out to 340y (or, that’s the longest I’ve shot to, and that was at a match), and there’s no way in hell I’d be able to to that with irons.
FWIW, AR-15s are basically like Legos for adults; they’re almost infinitely modular, and most parts work just fine with other parts as long as they’re from reputable manufacturers.
I don’t know about Olight adapters specifically, but I’ve seen LEP heads for Surefire bodies. IIRC the Blazer LEP Z-Bolt is good to at least 300y, and it’s bright. There’s very little spill; it’s very, very focused. I’ve shot out to 150y with a Streamlight ProTAC; it’s not great at that distance, but it works. It’s got a lot of spill and decent throw, so you still have peripheral sight.
China is socially conservative–and deeply authoritarian–but economically is officially communist (although not so much in practice, given that they have billionaires).
Sophie's choice 70s edition (lemmy.world)
Do You Have a Fire Extinguisher in Your Home and is it Still Pressurized?
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/cb850349-4d78-417a-b3e7-3a0d23f7e864.jpeg
Former religious lemmings, what made you quit religion or stop being a believer?
Mostly trying to relate.
Funds (lemmy.zip)
Remember, if Fascism wins it is YOUR FAULT. (slrpnk.net)
When/how do you think capitalism will be defeated?
The four houses dads belong to. (lemmy.world)
Healthy relationships don't control the clothes their spouse wears (lemmy.world)
Why do it (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
Just fuck my shit up (lemmy.today)
Contractor: how do you want the bathroom done?...
They’re the same (lemmy.world)