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Just some context because gun violence studies are probably the most manipulated data sets in history. The two numbers (auto deaths and gun deaths) are pretty close to each other and different policies can and do push one above the other.

- Most of those gun deaths are suicides and the vast majority would happen anyway without guns.

- This wasn't true before about 2015 and the change (increase in non-suicide gun deaths) over the last decade is largely the consequence of 'defund the police' policies.

- 90+% of gun violence happens in about 4 urban zip codes, all of which have some of the strictest gun control laws in the US.

There is a reason you have never heard a criminologist rail about guns (its usually a sociologist). The data points to problems with other policies. Also gathering the data honestly is difficult; people stop reporting types of crimes when the police stop investigating those types of crimes.

PS A "curve-off" public welfare policy is far more effective than banning guns.


Not to get into a gunfight in the gambling hall, but:

> Most of those gun deaths are suicides and the vast majority would happen anyway without guns.

Apparently any form of obstacle between a suicidal person and their gun greatly reduces successful suicides.

Things like the gun being in a safe that McSuicidepants owns, operates, and can get in with a fingerprint. Things like the bullets being on the other side of the room.


Americans desperately trying to justify their firearm fetish is embarrassing.

> PS A "curve-off" public welfare policy is far more effective than banning guns.

Roll eyes emoji.


It depends, if the morals cause more harm than they prevent, then no, the people espousing those "morals" don't deserve respect. They should be treated as naive which is what they are. Also, this is why we have the phrase, "virtual signaling" which specifically means a "moral" which causes more harm than good and seems to exist mostly to make the speaker seem more ethical than they actually are. Ignorance isn't a virtue and it shouldn't be treated as such.


Can you provide examples of morals that cause more harm than they prevent?

Why do you think virtue signaling causes harm?

Can you explain the relevance of 'ignorance isn't a virtue'?


> "virtual signaling" which specifically means a "moral" which causes more harm than good

Literally not what that means, at all. What a ridiculous assertion.


Do me a favor. Go to Ukraine with someone who worked on the Javelin anti-tank missile and tell them that. I bet the guy who worked on the Javelin will be considered a hero. You will likely receive a kick in the balls for ever daring to criticize him or repeating your post. Your take is naive in the extreme.


The problem isn't capitalism. That's just poor thinking from someone who has spent too much time thinking about political ideology. The problem is how we finance campaigns combined with gerrymandering. And if you want proof, look at corruption in communist and formerly communist countries. It makes the US look like a bunch of choir boys by contrast. Thinking that it is about capitalism is just an attempt to wedge in some political ideology into a practical problem of governance and a sign someone has never actually had to lead real humans before.


I knew a couple of McArthur Genius grant recipients (they were students like me) when I was in college. I wouldn't put any of them among the top most intelligent students I went to school with. The way they are chosen isn't exactly bad but it doesn't end up with giving the grants to "geniuses". If you aren't in one of the top most competitive fields, its more about applying and getting the right recommendations. If you get one in math or CS, then yes...that's very impressive. Professor Cotton (sp?) isn't in one of those fields.


Bro. You don't apply for the McArthur.

And why would you go out of your way to misspell her name? What do you gain by that aside from just looking petulant?


Its metallic sodium. Its about 30 times more volatile than Lithium. We don't use metallic sodium for almost anything industrial because of this volatility. I assumed there would be some mixed Li-Na-ion batteries. A pure Na-ion battery is an explosive waiting to go off. Putting these in a car...seems rather like a poor choice unless you are a personal injury lawyer.


I doubt that it is metallic sodium, for the same reason why the rechargeable lithium batteries do not use metallic lithium electrodes like the non-rechargeable batteries.

During charge-recharge cycles, a metallic electrode is likely to be degraded quickly.

So it is more likely that the reduced sodium atoms are intercalated in some porous electrode, e.g. of carbon, while at the other electrode the sodium ions are intercalated in some substance similar to Prussian blue.

The volatility of sodium does not matter, because it is not in contact with air or another gas, but only with electrolyte.


This is incredibly misleading. It's not like there's a bunch of metallic sodium sitting in the battery waiting to react. It's a lot closer to a solid solution. Do you have a personal injury lawyer on speed dial for your table salt?


Your response is even more misleading than the misconception you're trying to correct. The complexes formed in (charged) lithium batteries are unstable and reactive in ways quite similar to the base metal. The salt molecule, in contrast, is pretty unreactive. Salt shakers don't catch fire if dropped.


Which complexes are reactive?

The substances similar with Prussian blue are very stable. During charge and discharge, the ionic charge of iron ions varies between +2 and +3 and the structure of the electrode has spaces that are empty when the charge of the iron ions is +3 and they are filled with sodium ions when the charge of the iron ions is +2.

Both states of the electrode are very stable, being neutral salts. The composition of the electrolyte does not vary depending on the state of charge of the battery and it is also stable.

The only part of the battery that can be unstable is the other electrode, which stores neutral atoms of sodium intercalated in some porous material. If you take a fully charged battery, you cut it and you extract the electrode with sodium atoms, that electrode would react with water, but at a lower speed than pure sodium, so it is not clear how dangerous such an electrode would be in comparison with the similar lithium electrodes.


Fine, now show a video of what happens if you pierce the Na-ion cell with something metallic. Because explosion doesn't even begin to cover what happens next in that situation. And you are suggesting that everyone should be 2 ft from such a cell, traveling at 60 mph, in all weather conditions. These things should be restricted to grid stabilization batteries and nothing else and you know it. Don't mislead people on such things.


Piercing a Na-ion cell is not good, but the effect is pretty much the same like piercing a Li-ion cell.

In both cells the electrode that stores alkaline metal atoms has high reactivity, but in both cases the reactivity is much smaller than for a compact piece of metal, so the reaction with substances like water would proceed much more slowly than in the movies when someone throws an alkaline metal in water.

If you pierce the cell, but the electrode does not come in contact with something like water or like your hand, nothing much happens, the air would oxidize the metal, but that cannot lead to explosions or other violent reactions.

The electrolyte of lithium-ion batteries is an organic solvent that is very easily flammable if you pierce the battery. The electrolyte of sodium-ion batteries is likely to be water-based, which is safer, because such an electrolyte is not flammable. It would be caustic, but the same is true for any alkaline or acid battery, which have already been used for a couple of centuries without problems.

Overall, sodium-ion batteries should be safer than lithium-ion batteries, so safety is certainly something that cannot be hold against them.


Keep in mind that the UK government is currently locking people up for FB posts. Not exactly a police state but close enough that its a distinction without a difference. Oh, and they are debating if to get rid of jury trials so they can just lock up people for FB posts without a trial. If it quacks like a duck...


This is paranoid bullshit.

Firstly the incumbent legislation is actually being rolled back at the moment by Mahmood. The FB posts are all inciting violence against others which should not be protected speech. As for the jury trials, have you ever been in a jury? I'd rather not thanks myself. My peers are mostly fucking idiots. And they're changing that as well.


But why is Meta lobbying for this? The bills they push move compliance onto the app stores. And Meta doesn't run an app store. I think the execs think its some sort of 4D chess move to put liabilities onto their competitors. I'm not sure it will work out that way. Seems like FB has a lot more to lose than they think.


> I'm not sure it will work out that way.

why? If age restriction get legislated into the OS, it puts a damper on further attempts on adding restrictions to sites, because they can point to the existing legislation and claim it's enough.


This is like saying, well they passed a new 5% tax, and if they try further attempts at adding more taxes, they can point to the existing legislation and claim it's enough.

COPPA already exists and they're insisting that it's not enough.


They're pushing for an API at the system level, where they can query the age

Such an API can then be extended to provide location data to "help the police find bad guys", track purchase histories to "prevent fraud"; all the stuff that Apple and Google blocked fb from sniffing from user devices

It's circumvention of these privacy protections with added vengeance since now Google and Apple will be sitting with the cost of implementation and the liability


>Such an API can then be extended to provide location data to "help the police find bad guys", track purchase histories to "prevent fraud"; all the stuff that Apple and Google blocked fb from sniffing from user devices

/s?

In case this is serious, why do they need an age API to ask for a location backdoor API?


The age API is not a prerequisite for adding a location API.

You start with the age verification because "think of the children" is an easy sell, then a year from now, there'll suddenly be a massive worry about criminals using their phones for "crime-stuff", so we need to track where these people are - there's then already a system in-place for easily adding such a functionality

A year after that it'll be online fraud that is apparently rampant

My reason for this conclusion is that there's no good reason that age verification should live at the OS layer. It is technically cleaner and simpler to have it as an external service - just look at the amount of issues it's causing for Linux distributions

FB are not dumb - they know this hurts Linux distributions, but they're an ad business and they need PII to sell those ads


> I think the execs think its some sort of 4D chess move to put liabilities onto their competitors.

No, they're pulling up the ladder. Meta is fine losing the app store battle because it can easily afford regulation requiring first-party compliance, and no startup could.


They would be no longer responsible for doing it.

My kid had classmates as young as 8 using it. Facebook knows this.


Think of how many quadrillions of hours under-18 spend online. Ads for verified 18+ are more profitable.


Their 40 yo boss will have never used anything other than a web browser (or a game) in their entire lives at that point. He will never have heard of AD. Windows is legacy at this point. Only the most old and obtuse businesses still use it and then only for Excel and maybe PowerPoint. Most of the staff today only uses a web browser. In 20 years, nobody will even know that AD existed except in some museum in SJ.


In the medium sized public sector organisation I do some work in (not tech), most of the business type systems we use are reached via Chrome and are subscription based. I can log into them all using Linux with Chrome installed from home and there is no difference compared to using an organisation PC in their premises. Yes, I am logging in via Microsoft 365 but very few of the applications apart from email and calendar/Teams are used. The business type systems could well be running on Azure but I suspect not, at least for some of them.

Contrast that with a decade ago. All systems accessed via networked PCs using Windows native clients. I had to use RDP to a desktop to access anything from outside the network.

One day someone is going to realise that the organisation does not have to spend £££ replacing every PC just to keep running a Web browser.


I always turn off swap and that solves this problem. I really don't understand why it is on by default anymore. If you need swap, you are doing something very wrong somewhere else.


So, it depends on how much RAM do you have. Also with a swap enabled system can swap out some very rarely used memory pages, and cache some frequently used files instead - so by disabling swap you rob yourself of this opportunity :)

I have 64 GB RAM on my workstation, yet i still have swap enabled (but with lowered swappiness value).


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