Buelldozer

They are the “Jack Booted Government Thugs” that the NRA was yelling about 30 years ago. Literally, it was May of 1995. They were reacting to the spate of violent government actions against people of their community. Since then the NRA has been corrupted, gutted, and finally crushed by the very Government it used to rail against.

Democrats cheered it on while they worked overtime to leave half the country powerless to actually resist the Tyranny they claim to fear. I say claim because they’re still at it right now, today, which is something that no one who was truly fearful would do.

The situation we are in is a reminder of why American’s traditionally didn’t trust Government and most especially overly power Federal Government.

It may read like it but this is not directed at you personally. It’s directed at the wider universe of anti-gun liberals who’ve started crawling out of the woodwork to ask the same question you did and my reply is a snapshot of the overwhelming aggravation that many 2A people feel when hearing it.

Where the gun people?

It’s California, there aren’t that many “Gun People” around. California has doubled, tripled, and quadrupled down to make sure that their populace is absolutely as disarmed as possible. In fact nearly every god damned city that is having these kinds of ICE Raids is located in a State that’s done the same thing. New York City, Chicago, Portland, and Denver are just a few examples.

Add onto that these kinds of immigrants can’t legally purchase firearms so they’re unable to do it themselves or even create Community / Mutual Aid situations and to make it worse they are living in ethnic enclaves so there’s no regular citizens around to help.

The next question is likely to be “Okay, so where’s all the 2A freaks from everywhere else?” and the answer to that is…how the fuck are they supposed to know when ICE is going to raid a place? Especially if that place is in another Town, County, or even State?

After that its usually something like “Well these Gun Nuts should just start countering ICE wherever they find them and not wait for a specific situation.”.

The Anti-Government 2A people you are asking about tried 5 years ago and the same people who are today asking “Where the gun people?” wanted absolutely fucking nothing to do with them.

It happened back in 2020 and no one wanted to help. (Those guys received massive prison sentences by the way.) The Boogaloo Boys in general, and those two specifically, were then widely criticized for their actions even in minority and immigrant communities.

Hell the NRA is still being mocked for its Anti-Government / Pro 2A stance from thirty years ago!

Short sighted idiots cheer while Government disarms its citizens and they strongly back any law or movement intended to disarm them more and faster. Then when some people who are still armed go after Government Thugs they make it a point to shit on them while wishing them a quick journey to hell.

Then these same idiots have the absolute audacity to ask “Where are they?”. It’s the wrong people asking the wrong question.

The correct questions are “Where the fuck has everyone else been for the last 30 years?” followed by “Why the fuck should we help you now?” and the correct questioners the Anti-Government Gun Owners.

For example, I’ve noticed that some websites start throwing captchas at me or even just straight-up refuse to load with 403: unauthorized errors because I have my router set up to load-balance across two Internet connections. (At least, that’s my guess as to why it’s happening.)

I maintain several multi-wan commercial setups and they don’t have this problem. I obviously don’t know what your setup is but I’d guess something is wrong with how its handling flows / connections. Once a connection is established between your edge and an internet resource that flow should remain “stuck” to whatever wan port it started with and it sounds like that isn’t happening.

On the other hand the 1970s car was a giant hunk of shit that went to the crusher decades ago and the 2020s appliance is using 1/4th the electricity and 1/2 the water of something built in the 2000s.

I’m old enough to remember the 1970s cars and with some exceptions they sucked.; they were slow, heavy, smelly, and dangerous. I also have a 2 year old combo laundry machine (Washer + Dryer) with a built in heat pump that is freaking amazing.

Both nostalgia and survivorship biases are real.

With the rise of game streaming services like Xbox Cloud Gaming and Amazon Luna I predict that the console market is basically over. I honestly don’t expect Microsoft to release another console and if Sony does it’s almost certain to be the last. Nintendo may stick with it longer since they just released the Switch2 but they seem to be prepping for it with the digital key thing.

It sucks for the players but it makes fiscal sense for the Publishers and Console Makers (Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo) if there is an industry wide pivot to game streaming where players are required to pay every month. I know that some games don’t lend themselves well to this, yet, but it’s blatantly obvious (at least to me) that this is where the industry is headed.

We’ve already reached the end of “Console Exclusive” games and I think what comes next is “Streaming Platform Exclusive” games. I think what comes after that is the Publishers establishing their own Streaming Platforms for their own games.

This is precisely what has happened with the rest of the entertainment industry and there’s no reason I can see for gaming, which is a subset of that same industry, to do anything else now that the streaming technology exists.

Steam and GOG will end up pushed out of the market or they will also become Streaming Platforms, just ones that cater to a different set of players.

Australia got the criminals while America got the prudes.

Eh, you’re assigning an awful lot of malice with no real reason. A smartphone manufacturer already has access to the kind of data exposed in this attack, regardless of whether the headphones were hooked up with wires or bluetooth.

Samsung, Apple, Xaomi, Huwaei or whoever else doesn’t need some stupid BT vulnerability to know what attached devices like headphone are up too. They already have root level access to the phones hardware.

My ISP certainly doesn’t have my Social Security number. Why on earth would I give it to them? Why would they even ask for it?

Fascists can create

We really need to get over this idea that it’s only “fascists” using AI to push their ideology. In 2025 you’d be hard pressed to find any National Government, Political Party, or Ideologically based group who is not using a metric fuckton of AI bots to distribute AIGen content in an attempt to sway elections and opinions. The IPIE report on this makes it quite plain that at least 80% of elections worldwide had problems with this in 2024.

At this point blaming this solely on “Fascists” is wilful blindness and a clear indicator that someone is either living in a bubble of single-sided information or is an ideologue themselves.

Unfortunately it’s not a country with very safe windows.

Even the TCP sliding windows aren’t safe!

Your analogy makes no sense. This woman came here in 1978 and the Shah was booted in 1979. It is entirely believable that she would have faced reprisals in Iran during the massacres of 1981.

I don’t know why this woman was denied asylum but her request was well justified by events.

As an American I fully agree. I’ve completely had it with our politics infesting everything, everywhere, all the time. For everyone’s sanity it needs to stop. More communities need to have and enforce a “No US Politics” rule. No Trump, no Elon, no AOC, no Bernie, no State Senator from bumblefuck Alabama or Los Angeles, California. None of it. Just.Fucking.Stop.Already.

This is a couple days delayed response, apologies for that I’ve been pretty busy.

With the rise of game streaming services like Xbox Cloud Gaming and Amazon Luna I predict that the console market is basically over. I honestly don’t expect Microsoft to release another console and if Sony does it’s almost certain to be the last. Nintendo may stick with it longer since they just released the Switch2 but they seem to be prepping for it with the digital key thing.

It sucks for the players but it makes fiscal sense for the Publishers and Console Makers (Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo) if there is an industry wide pivot to game streaming where players are required to pay every month. I know that some games don’t lend themselves well to this, yet, but it’s blatantly obvious (at least to me) that this is where the industry is headed.

We’ve already reached the end of “Console Exclusive” games and I think what comes next is “Streaming Platform Exclusive” games. I think what comes after that is the Publishers establishing their own Streaming Platforms for their own games.

This is precisely what has happened with the rest of the entertainment industry and there’s no reason I can see for gaming, which is a subset of that same industry, to do anything else now that the streaming technology exists.

Steam and GOG will end up pushed out of the market or they will also become Streaming Platforms, just ones that cater to a different set of players.

There’s also the fact that the majority of Iran’s nuclear facilities were built before UHPC, the concrete discussed in the article, was available!

Why? The kinds of UHPC being discussed in the article weren’t available even in the United States until the year 2000 but most of Iran’s nuclear facilities were built between 1974 and 2005. Even their primary enrichment facility in Fordow, which was struck with MOPs, was started no earlier than the mid-2000s as it was still unfinished in 2009.

Basically the majority of Iran’s facilities, even their major ones, are too old to have the kind of concrete being discussed in the article.

Likely no one. I wouldn’t be surprised if the next generation of consoles is the last one.

A lot of masks only work in the visible light spectrum. It’s entirely possible to “radar” images and remove them.

The EV1 was a wildly impractical vehicle with < 100 miles of range that cost $100,000 in 1996 money (over $200,000 today). It was never ever going to be any kind of mass produced consumer vehicle. Without GM subsidizing the ever loving shit out of them the only people who could have afforded them were the ultra wealthy.

Regardless, the only thing political was California’s insanely premature ZEV mandate set to take effect in 1998. That was political but not the EV1 itself.

BTW GM never really gave up on ZEV / PZEV even though most people think they did. I had a most excellent Hybrid Tahoe in the late 2000s but at 55k-ish new in 2009 ($82,000 today) it was simply too damn expensive to be a mass market vehicle. Just like the EV1.

I don’t remember anything about all their designs being open source but they DID open source(*) the Roadster.

They also open sourced(*) their charging connector which has now become an increasingly used standard called NACS.

I’m putting that asterisks by open source because that’s only sorta-kinda what they did. More precisely they made the Roadster and TCC royalty free to use and released all of the engineering documents necessary to use & recreate them.

What you’re probably remembering is their Patent Pledge from 2014. At this point Tesla holds nearly 1,200 patents worldwide so that Patent Pledge isn’t a small thing. They’re surely not going to make all of their vehicle designs open source but they do seem to be holding to their Patent Pledge and its underlying “Open Innovation Framework”.

This doesn’t mean Musk or his companies are good, it’s just a review of the facts.

I’ll never understand how the EV thing became a political issue.

I think at first it was viewed as a threat by both the Domestic Auto Industry including the UAW. Tesla was selling an increasing number of vehicles, which is what the Big 3 cared about, and they weren’t a Union Shop, which is what the UAW cared about. So they fought the rise of EVs out of self-protection.

It’s really the oil industry fighting it now because it’s an existential threat. The United States generates almost zero electricity from oil, to them it’s all about fuel. Coal has been in steep decline for two decades and as an industry its nearly done. They were replaced by the Natural Gas folks for electricity generation and you won’t find many NG folks who are actually against EVs. When you do it’s because their parent company is an Oil Company.

Toss in the rise of China as the current best source for EV batteries and the threat that Chinese companies like BYD present to the Big 3 and its easy to see why things are still all knotted up.