Man you seem to be very negative about this.

I guarantee you that most tourists don’t even leave the rim of the grand canyon at all. They walk around the visitors center for an hour and go home. Go more than 1000’ down from the rim and it’s not particularly crowded at all.

I can’t comment on Europe, like the previous poster—America has far more wide open wilderness than Europe does in general—but if in the USA there are still countless places where you can backpack for days without seeing a single person. There are also plenty of easier hikes with beautiful views that only see a few visitors a day. Just need to put in the footwork to find them. You won’t find them by staying at home and complaining about other hikers.

Male birth control has to be safer and have fewer side effects than letting women carry the burden of birth control.

I mean, I don’t think this is such a high bar to pass.

Pregnancy is bad but I’d argue the consequences of 18 years of unwilling parenthood far outstrips the consequences of 9 months of pregnancy. The consequences for those 18 years impact both parties.

Furthermore, men have almost zero agency of what happens in the case of an unintended pregnancy. A man can’t say, “this would ruin my life, I am going to choose not to have the baby.”

That makes the risk quite high for a man, IMO, and the only way to take agency over that risk is male birth control.

To be fair, right around 50% of us are vehemently opposed to this sort of thing. Far from all America

Since when could you hold a musket on your belt?

They typically had barrels over three feet long, with a total weapon length over four feet.

Guns also are not manufactured clandestinely en masse, anywhere, because it takes a lot of precise industrial machining to do at scale. They are not like sex or weed that are impossible to ban, when you stop manufacturing them for nonsense reasons, they stop circulating and criminals stop being able to get their hands on them.

This is false. There are multiple Latin American countries where street gangs have been manufacturing reasonably sophisticated all-metal submachine guns at scale in clandestine factories for over a decade. Even prior to the 3d printing boom, open bolt submachine gun were fairly simple for an individual to manufacture with common hand tools, and quantities scale rapidly with improvised tooling and readily available machines like benchtop lathes.

With 3d printing, it has become even more accessible. Printers can be used to manufacture tooling in addition to parts, and the DEFcad community has been remarkably resourceful in developing new methods utilizing 3d printers. Everything from electrochemically etched, rifled, barrels to recoilless rifles with shaped charge warheads can be made at home if a person has no compunctions about breaking the law.

You can see the impact of 3d printing overseas, where there are a number of rebel groups using 3d printed firearms as their primary armament. Banning guns might reduce the quality of what is available, but it definitely won’t end production in a country full of gun enthusiasts with the interest and skills to make firearms.

I do not understand why Americans think they are such unfathomably unique snowflakes that none of the evidence or lessons learned from every other developed country could apply to them.

As I said, our gun culture ensures people continue to make firearms regardless of what the law says. We have countless machinists, gunsmiths, and hobbyists that would manufacture guns as a form of protest if they were banned. Furthermore, we already have more guns than people and the vast majority of them would remain in civilian hands if the government tried to seize them.

But most importantly, many Americans believe that the equalizing force of firearms—something that allows the citizenry to defend themselves against tyranny and for the weak/frail to defend themselves against the physically strong— is philosophically worth a small reduction in public safety.

Never suggested they didn’t. I’m suggesting that the country would have been better off if they both had weapons and chose to resist.

We aren’t Germany. The founding fathers made sure we could arm ourselves. The choices we make are our own.

This is honestly, the dumbest, most American take in the world.

Hell yeah brother 🦅🦅🦅

It literally ignores the plainly obvious fact that not a single other developed country allows gun ownership, and yet, still have rights and democracy and freedom.

Many other developed countries allow gun ownership. Educate yourself, my man.

But more importantly, I literally do not care if they do or not. The point was never that democracy cannot exist without firearms, but rather that in the worst case scenario an armed citizenry can act as a force against tyranny. It’s a rare thing that it might be needed, and a last resort. No sane person wants a civil war

Guns did not get your rights

Except they literally did. How do you think the revolutionary war was won, softly spoken words?

they do not protect you from a government that has AI powered drones with anti tank mines on them. Hell a fucking APC with a sound cannon will make your AR look like a child’s toy.

Guerrillas with small arms in developing countries have repelled the US military repeatedly over the past half century. More importantly, if you don’t think a combination of small arms and low cost homemade munitions are effective against a modern military you haven’t been paying attention to the war in Ukraine at all.

That’s a fair statement.

I don’t think we are there yet. It will be far better for our country if our problems can be solved by diplomatic and political means, and we are far from running out of levers to pull.

The founding fathers have written at length on their reasoning for including the right to bear arms in the constitution. It is very clear that they believed in the people’s ability to resist and overthrow the government if needed.

After all, this was a group who escaped the grip of the monarchy through force of arms. It’s odd to think that they didn’t see value in the ability of the people to do the same, especially when they repeatedly wrote about it in period.

However, all that being said, I agree with your sentiment that leftists should be arming themselves. Just because the 2nd amendment has almost completely lost it’s original intent or meaning, doesn’t mean we can’t take advantage of the fact that it exists with tons of legal precedent to strap up in preparation for what might come next. Things are unlikely to get better from here, and if things get worse you will be glad you have a firearm for protection.

Also this here is kind of the point. The original intent is not important; many people believe in the modern era that an armed citizenry is important as a last ditch balancing force to government overreach. We are all better off if left leaning people arm themselves instead of using pro-gun arguments as some sort of self-righteous gotcha against the right.

I believe it’s fundamentally important that we keep that right to an equalizing force.

Acting like we are going to directly fight a tank with an AR-15 is either a straw man or just frankly ignorant. The US military has repeatedly been repelled by guerrilla forces with small arms, and if you have been paying any attention at all in Ukraine you will see what can be done with very little technology in terms of drones etc.

If we ever need to raise arms against the government, it will be a dark day indeed. No reasonable person wants that. We have many methods of recourse before that even enters the conversation IMO.

However, there can eventually come a time where resistance is appropriate. Hitler never would have taken complete control of the country, exterminated so many Jews, and started Europe on the path to a world war if the Germans were armed and actively resisting his rule.

It seems self evident that the German people would been better off resisting Nazi rule than allowing the death camps and WW2 to come to fruition.

That’s still the purpose of the second amendment, for people to own guns to defend themselves and others against tyranny

You can’t expect everyone to agree with you ideologically, and obviously they won’t rise up against a government they agree with. Conservatives don’t see the current administration as tyrannical, so there is no conflict for them between the ideals of the second amendment and their actions.

However, you can absolutely choose to exercise your second amendment rights.

As a gun owning liberal, I’m tired of my peers acting like the second amendment is some conservative agenda. The right to firearm ownership is an eminently liberal ideal. More liberals and leftists should own guns— the second amendment is more important now than ever before.

If you think there is a pressing need for an armed liberal/leftist citizenry, go buy guns and arm yourselves.

As someone who worked from home for almost a decade before being pulled into the office, I regularly got flack from my peers for it as well as older boomer types. IME, people who are forced into the office frequently feel a sense of “fairness” where they want everyone else to come in as well.

“If I have to be miserable, you should too”

Sadly, getting more places with less money is absolutely possible, but the key to making it happen is abandoning planetary science. It’s a shift from a paradigm where engineering exists to support planetary science efforts to engineering for engineering’s sake

Yup

I think the most under appreciated aspect is that ink can dry out just from sitting around. A lot of the time and “empty” ink cartridge just evaporated off its solvents

Toner lasts forever. Perfect for occasional use

The key is to buy a brother laser printer

It’s black and white but most people rarely have a need for color. Meanwhile, the toner doesn’t dry out like an inkjet printer will

You buy that one $150 inkjet printer and you’re set.

Simplicity and precision.

Who said it was only measured as an integer? Seconds are a decimal value and many timekeeping applications require higher precision than to the millisecond. Referencing an epoch closer to our current time allows greater precision with a single double-precision floating point number.

Want to reference something before J2000? Use a negative number.

It’s independent of earth rotation, so no need to consider leap second updates either unless you are converting to UTC. It’s an absolute measure of time elapsed.

The BEST way is to use the number of seconds after the J2000 epoch (The Gregorian date January 1, 2000, at 12:00 Terrestrial Time)

There is a very reasonable explanation for this: If we are a topic of research for them, they could have simply stopped studying us in the same way

Take our own science for example. We pull out of studies when the funding dries up. Maybe the aliens’ government grant ran out. Or, perhaps they have a policy of avoiding interference with the subjects. They could have changed methodology in response to the threat of high resolution recording equipment

Yeah there is a reason why plane spotters use 400+mm lenses