They are not Draconian, they are in the ballpark of a blue state in the US.
If the progressives were willing to accept the Swiss laws in the US under the stipulation that they would never again be made more strict, the US gun owners should be thrilled.
Part of the problem is that US gun laws are often motivated by misunderstanding or spite rather than reason or compromise.
They would be called draconian by Republicans and the NRA, look how they react to any increase in gun laws today. Of course blue states get closer to the Swiss laws but IIRC no state has any kind of background check on ammunition [0] or universal gun registries both of which are part of the Swiss system.
[0] It would be practically impossible to enforce because states can't put up barriers from things coming into their state from other states.
They would be called draconian by Republicans and the NRA, look how they react to any increase in gun laws today.
That's because those increases are never compromises or exchanges. They are simply demands. Republicans and the NRA look at what the gun laws in DC and Chicago were before the Supreme Court cases and think: "That's their end game. Zero guns. Because look: when they had the political power to take them away, they did." They have no rational reason to support increases in gun control that come in exchange for nothing.
If the Democrats offered a compromise, in the form of a constitutional amendment, not repealing the 2nd amendment but detailing it out, we could probably see real talk and progress. If it's not an amendment then it's simply "pray I don't alter it any further".
Why would you demand "exchange" to introduce a law that is sensible and has positive impact? You don't have drivers' association demanding privileges in exchange for penalizing drunk driving or restricting maximum speed.
The whole NRA situation in USA seems so absurd from outside.
Because, unlike with guns, nobody is trying to ban cars.
And to the most common objection: yes they are. Gun control proponents often bring up and praise the UK (near total ban) and Australia (significant limitations compared to the U.S.) as examples to emulate.
And in Chicago and DC, before the Supreme Court cases, there were effectively total bans. And when the plaintiffs sued, they didn't say, "well I guess we went a little too far, let's establish a regulated framework under which responsible, qualified and trained citizens can own guns". Instead, they went all the way to the Supreme Court to try to defend their bans.
So, even if a gun owner agrees with a particular piece of proposed regulation (and I'm sure plenty do), they would be acting against their own long term interests giving the block trying to ban guns political momentum and capital.
> Because, unlike with guns, nobody is trying to ban cars.
That's actually wrong. Gun control isn't banning guns, and if you consider background checks a "ban" - then driving licence requirement is a "ban on cars" :)
If someone had the bright idea to put the right to drive a car in constitution - Americans would be now arguing whether countrywide requirement to have a driving licence to drive a car is ok or not :)
I said that there is a large political block trying to ban guns. Not that they are banned, or that they are more regulated than cars. Is that what you're referring to?
> Instead, they went all the way to the Supreme Court to try to defend their bans.
Their current tactic is to revoke a law that makes it too far into the judicial system to avoid having it receive constitutional review by the Supreme Court and thereby invalidate it nationally.
It speaks volumes to the underhandedness of the gun control proponents.
The whole NRA situation is absurd from the inside too. The organization is the propaganda mouthpiece of the gun lobby and GOP very poorly disguised as some sportsmen's club of yore.
What if you already have a .org domain that you actually use?
How would you like it if your phone company started charging you extra to keep your phone number, and told you, there's plenty of other phone numbers you can have, we won't charge extra for those
You mean "How did I like it when my email provider increased their rates?" I switched email providers and updated my email address with my relevant contacts.
It was annoying, but nobody claims seriously that email providers are a monopoly.
So, yes, HBO does have a monopoly on Game of Thrones, and my email provider does have a monopoly on my email address.
This is, for example, why they explicitly passed a phone number portability law, because phone companies were abusing their monopoly power over individual phone numbers, to keep people from switching to different providers.
No? I'm not sure what the relevance of that is though?
I mean, it would certainly be right for the government to limit the increase in the cost of .org registrations to inflation, or better to cap the profit margin, since costs are likely to decrease, but just because it's right, doesn't mean it'll happen. .org domains are an artificial scarcity that wasn't even created by a corporation. At least the telephone was invented privately, so you could argue phone numbers are fair game, but with domain names even that argument doesn't hold. There's no reason a private company should be extracting economic-rent from it.
Only if one thinks .org has value over .anything-else. If one isn't hung up on having a .org at the end of their URL, there is a world of alternatives.
.org does have value over .anything-else because .org domains already exist.
The value is, for starters: branding, people remember sites.
The value is also vendor-lock in. What you called "annoying" above. The value is not having to do that annoying thing, that is value, and it's what the registrar can now use to extract money from existing .org domains.
The value is also, that if you let your .org domain lapse, since you don't want to pay for it, now someone else can take it and pretend to be you.
Their standard socket bulb prices aren't bad (about $15 if you get a 6-pack), and they do produce bulbs for the slightly different European sockets, but shipping to Europe is about $40 (plus I'd then have to deal with picking them up at the customs office, which is always a multi-hour ordeal). But assuming I haven't found something decent before I'm next in the US in March, I'll pick some up then.
Thanks, that's interesting -- I'll have to buy one of their bulbs to compare to my other LED bulbs.
Looks like the lowest cost might be the 100W COB LED ... It would need a bunch of supporting equipment but it might be possible to do it for around $2 per watt.
Edit: I guess the normal bulbs and the led tubes could also come in around $2/watt and they can take mains power so that might be an easier but physically larger route.
Yes it does! A giant spike in the blue region is literally what makes the sky blue in the first place. If there weren't such a spike the sky would be white. When you look up at the sky on a typical clear day, you're getting more blue light than almost any one of these indoor setups.
If you look at 460-470 nm where the spike is in the LED spectrum, it's much lower in the blue sky spectrum.
I think the concern is something about the relative amounts of blue light. Not sure what exactly but something like, the human perception of brightness and therefore the self protection of the eye is calibrated for natural light, so the pupil contraction, looking away, etc, is not done correctly in with that unnatural distribution. Anyway I don't know if that's a real effect, but that's what people (should) mean when they're talking about "too much blue".
Google is like a feudal lord. In exchange for owning you, they'll protect you from everyone weaker than they are. Google doesn't want to break into your office computer as long as they can shovel ads down your throat. And their reputation for security is much higher than a small startup regardless of the startup's competence and intentions. See e.g. Project Zero or Chrome vulnerabilities vs Firefox.
> And their reputation for security is much higher than a small startup regardless of the startup's competence and intentions.
Not all security mind you, Android runs on ancient kernel and it won't be changing for a long time even though Google announced plans for moving to mainline linux.
Paying for retirees is solvable by simply aggressively taxing the billionaires.
You can't eat money. The problem is not financial, it is economic. Ignoring the few durable things that can be stockpiled, the money retirees spend, whether it comes from savings or taxes can only be spent on goods and services produced at the time the money is spent, by the labor force available then. The smaller this labor force, the higher the wages, the less purchasing power money has. Retirement saving becomes a positional good, it's not enough to save enough, you have to save more than the other retirees, because you're all competing for the same scarce resource: labor.
If that doesn't make sense, try thinking about it from a purely physical point of view. Retirees need physical goods and personal services (e.g. nursing). Both of these require humans to produce. The fewer producing people there are (young and middle age adults), compared to consuming people (retirees) the less there is per person, regardless of who you tax or how.
We kind of can eat money. Agriculture is already highly automated, and will become even more so as labor costs increase. For example strawberries are currently picked by hand because the fruit is so fragile, but picking robots are in advanced stages of development and will probably be widely deployed within a few decades.
A reduced supply of younger workers will also tend to increase retirement ages and reduce age discrimination. For example, a healthy 75 year old can still do a lot of nursing tasks. He might no longer be physically capable of lifting a bedridden patient but he can administer medications, record vital signs, change dressings, etc.
I mean, sure, kind of. But indirectly. We can eat improved technology which we might be able to buy some of with money.
increase retirement ages
Yeah, that's one of the negative consequences of the demographic collapse. Not that old people who can still work are owed a vacation funded by the young, but the world isn't exactly fair in handing out pain, and not everyone who can't retire will be deserving of not being able to retire.
reduce age discrimination
Maybe. Old people too broke to retire don't have tremendous leverage in the labor market, and historically market forces don't tend to fix discrimination, see, e.g. Blacks in the US.
The problem is picking a company you can be confident in for both:
1. Competent security
2. Good support
Google meets 1. but fails at 2. Every time this topic comes up there are many suggestions meeting 2, but without any arguments or evidence that the suggestions also meet 1.
According to HN security guru tptacek the top three most secure companies are Google, Apple, and Microsoft. (Paraphrasing from memory, any errors are my own.)
Apple and Microsoft both have retail locations unlike Google, which could in principle be used as a last resort for recovery, but I don't know if they actually are. Without good process and training that could open a weakness from social engineering, similar to SIM jacking at cell phone shops.
Does anyone here know if Apple, Microsoft, or any other company meets both 1 & 2?
Does anyone here know if Apple or Microsoft account can be recovered at retail locations with an ID? And if that process is social engineering resistant?
Edit: the thing to consider with self hosting is that there is no such thing really. You have to register your domain somewhere. What is that provider using to authenticate you? Not saying you shouldn't have your own domain, just that it's also a thing that can be lost or attacked. You also have to run your VPS or server somewhere. Do you own a datacenter? Do you have a backup generator and redundant internet at your house? Not saying you must but there's always trade-offs.
If the progressives were willing to accept the Swiss laws in the US under the stipulation that they would never again be made more strict, the US gun owners should be thrilled.
Part of the problem is that US gun laws are often motivated by misunderstanding or spite rather than reason or compromise.