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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • unless you see the uber car circling around you on the map, then canceling the ride and cashing in the “cancelation fee”

    That’s a relatively new phenomenon as people have learned how to game the system. The reliability of Uber when they first launched was complete night and day.

    yes, uber was faster to adapt it than traditional taxi industry, but they are not doing it for your blue eyes, they are doing it for profit and they do lot of shady stuff to achieve it.

    I never said otherwise. I was merely providing an example of why Uber gained adoption early on. The service was materially better than what taxi companies were delivering at the time in many places. I experienced that first hand.


  • Tracking, arrival timer and an easy app.

    The fact that they would actually show up.

    Where I live, before Uber you needed to call the cab company at least an hour before you wanted to get anywhere (in a city that you can get pretty much anywhere in 15 minutes). The dispatcher would tell you someone will be there in 20 minutes and, if you were lucky, somebody might show up in 45. Before Uber, there was more than one occasion where I ended up stranded downtown until 4 or 5am after the bars had closed at 3:00.

    Being able to request a ride, having someone reliably show up, and show up reasonably close to when they said they would was an absolute game changer at the time.



  • That excellent quote of the text you provided spells out that any modifications to a gun that allows any more than a single shot is to be prohibited.

    Incorrect.

    It prohibits any conversion to a machine gun. The previous sentence has just defined a machine gun. The “by a single function of the trigger” language is what’s critical to this case and you’re completely ignoring it. When reading laws, you use words however they’re explicitly defined if a definition provided, not how you think they should be defined or would be used in common speech.

    Like I said, Gatling guns are pretty highly analogous. They produce what most people would consider automatic fire. They’ve also consistently been ruled to not meet the definition of a machine gun going back to at least the 1950s because they don’t meet that single function of the trigger definition.

    The solution is to change the text of the law.


  • However this supreme court said that the magic words ‘bump stock’ wasn’t in the legalisation. Words that didn’t even exist until 2003, or thereabouts. The court ignored the legislative text completely.

    This is the text of the NFA that has defined what is a machine gun since 1934:

    The term “machine gun” means any weapon which shoots, is designed to shoot, or can be readily restored to shoot, automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger. The term shall also include the frame or receiver of any such weapon, any part designed and intended solely and exclusively, or combination of parts designed and intended, for use in converting a weapon into a machinegun, and any combination of parts from which a machinegun can be assembled if such parts are in the possession or under the control of a person.

    I’m not a fan of this SCOTUS, but the bump stock ruling was inline with decades of jurisprudence on the topic and the final opinion was fairly unsurprising as a result. It was honestly less of a gun law ruling and more of an executive regulatory procedure one.

    A bump stock does not function by a single action of the trigger and does not meet the statutory definition as a result. The ATF rule banning themgot struck down because Congress hadn’t authorized the ATF to regulate machine guns beyond that specific statutory definition.

    Bump stocks are no more a machine gun than a Gatling gun is under the definition that has existed for nearly a century, and the legal status of the former has been extremely clear for a very, very long time.

    If the goal is to treat them as a regulated item, then Congress needs to pass legislation with language that covers them because saying it was already there is simply incorrect. There is a specificity to the language of the NFA that doesn’t cover any number of mechanisms. It’s been a deficiency of the law since 1934.

    If you want to fix that, that first requires understanding exactly what needs fixing.


  • Tree nested communication is much more superior than traditional thread based communication

    Heavily depends, IMO.

    Nested threads are great temporary discussion of a specific story or idea. They’re absolutely miserable for long-running discussions. New posts get lost in the tree and information ends up scattered across multiple threads as a result.

    It’s also been my personal experience that the nested threads format just doesn’t seem to build communities in the same way forums did. I have real-life friendships that were made on forums decades ago and I never had that experience with reddit despite being a very early user.

    I don’t think that’s entirely due to the ephemeral format, but I do think it plays a part in it. A deep thread between two people on Reddit might last a few hours and a dozen replies before it falls off the page. On forums threads running months or years were pretty common, and that kind of engagement with the same people certainly changes how your relationships develop with them.



  • Subaru’s AWD system is legitimately better at putting down power to the wheels and getting traction than the vast majority of other AWD systems on the market. There are plenty of third party tests showing as much.

    That said, it’s a question of whether you actually need that. The truth is the vast majority of people don’t need AWD at all for the kind of driving they’ll actually do.

    I have an STi which has an active center differential beyond even the typical Subaru system and I absolutely love it. It’s magic feeling it at work. But my “likes to take the car on dirt and go sideways at 50MPH” use case isn’t needed for a commuter either.



  • 80%+ of severe injury and death on a bicycle is caused by motor vehicles, or complications of motor vehicle involvement.

    Which would mean ~1 in 5 have absolutely nothing to do with a motor vehicle. That’s significant.

    There is considerable evidence that everyone wearing a helmet in a car would save vastly more lives and prevent severe head injury

    Then that should be an easy [citation needed] for you because my searches are coming up blank for actual studies. Lots of assertions of it, but I’m not finding anything in terms of actual data.

    It’s very easy, on the other hand, to find comprehensive meta analyses on the efficacy of helmet use.

    It’s also worth noting that the introduction makes a point of calling out another common online assertion that you repeated – that helmets make people engage in more risk-taking behavior – as false:

    There has already been an extensive peer-reviewed literature review conducted by Esmaeilikia et al.5, which found little to no support for increased risk-taking when cyclists use helmets and if anything, they cycled with more caution.

    I don’t feel those people should be called stupid for their choice.

    I don’t think they’re stupid. I think they’re bad at risk analysis. That’s a pretty inherent feature of humans. It’s the reason I want to see actual data.


  • A helmet is only needed if you intend to spend significant time in traffic.

    The worst wreck I’ve ever had on a bike was without a single car in sight. Pinch flat while carrying speed through a steep downhill curve. I split an expensive MIPS helmet in two and still hit hard enough that I had a minor concussion, road rash up one side of my body, and cracked the face of a week old watch just to pour salt in the (metaphorical) wound. I mostly landed on my head and that helmet is the reason I didn’t have drastically more severe head injuries.

    Helmets aren’t just for traffic.



  • He came to suck years later.

    At the time he was considerably farther to the left than the rest of the field short of Dennis Kucinich. Opposition to the Iraq war was central to his campaign when half the party was still trying to justify it. He wanted to push universal healthcare before that was a common position within the party. He was on the cutting edge of promoting gay rights and was extremely popular in the gay community when that community didn’t have the voice it does now. His stint as DNC chair built real party infrastructure and helped set the stage for Obama’s 2008 run.

    The country – and the Democratic Party – were considerably more conservative 20 years ago and he definitely helped push things toward where we are now.

    That said, he’s absolutely said and done some things in recent year that make it pretty clear he’s not the progressive vanguard he was back then. He’s stood still, and arguably regressed, while the country kept moving. It’s unfortunate. But I think it’s also a mistake to dismiss him outright; he was a pretty important figure in getting the party to where it is now.