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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • It doesn’t help that wage growth has largely been in the “unskilled” sectors (I hate that term, every job is skilled), but inflation reduction has largely been in non-essential goods. Which means that upper-middle to upper income people have been noticing their wages not increasing with inflation despite inflation overall being lower, and lower to low-middle income people have been noticing inflation impacting their budgets despite their wage increases.

    But in aggregate, “everyone” is being paid more and “inflation” is down. So at a macro level everyone “should” be happy with how things are going. But human beings don’t live at the macro level.






  • If I’m not mistaken, a “militia” was understood to be an ad hoc, non-standing armed group, supplied by the resources of its members. The amendment was added so that if a militia were ever needed (again), it could be formed, because the pool of potential militia members had their own firearms. Laws limiting citizen access to firearms would hobble any new militia.

    Given that armies at the time were only recently becoming “standing” (permanent) armies, and the U.S. didn’t really have one, their best option for making war was militias. They were acutely aware that the revolution began that way, and only later developed an actual (organized, separately supplied, long-term) army.

    But very quickly, the U.S. developed permanent armed forces and never had to rely on militias again. At that point the 2nd amendment really should have been obsolete.



  • It doesn’t help that the sentence makes no sense. The second clause requires that the first be the subject of the sentence, but then the third clause starts with a new subject, and lastly there’s that weird “German” comma after “Arms.”

    There’s more than one way to interpret the meaning, but strictly speaking the only syntactically accurate rendering comes out roughly as:

    [The right to] a well regulated Militia shall not be infringed, as it’s necessary to the security of a free State (security meaning the right of the people to keep and bear arms).

    …which is also meaningless.

    It’s a stupid amendment for lots of reasons, but the big one is that it’s just shitty English.






  • At what point does the world look at this and say that enough is enough.

    Do we ever, really? Over the sum of all war-related humanitarian disasters, the West responds to very few of them, and only when it’s economically or geopolitically useful. The Palestinian crisis is no different; it’s not exceptional in any way. There’s an ongoing nightmare in DRC that’s orders of magnitude worse than what’s happening in Gaza and… no one cares. Europe and the U.S. are on the verge of disengaging from Ukraine.

    The thing is, it doesn’t even matter if we “condemn this behavior.” We could do that all we want and it wouldn’t make much difference. And no one wants to be interventionist - there’s too much awful history around it, and it smacks of colonialism, and it means taking resources away from “domestic issues” that always seem to matter more.

    We’ve got to move away from the notion that the situation in Gaza is somehow unique. It allows us to conveniently ignore the root causes of the problem, which is much more universal, and stems from the ongoing sense of cultural superiority on the part of Europe and the U.S.


  • Duct. Duck is a brand name

    Yes. But also mostly no.

    Wikipedia:

    “Duck tape” is recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary as having been in use since 1899 and “duct tape” (described as “perhaps an alteration of earlier duck tape”) since 1965

    and:

    In 1971, Jack Kahl bought the Anderson firm and renamed it Manco. In 1975, Kahl rebranded the duct tape made by his company. Because the previously used generic term “duck tape” had fallen out of use, he was able to trademark the brand “Duck Tape” and market his product complete with a yellow cartoon duck logo. Manco chose the term “Duck”, the tape’s original name, as “a play on the fact that people often refer to duct tape as ‘duck tape’”, and as a marketing differentiation to stand out against other sellers of duct tape.

    People should really do the bare minimum double-check before showing their whole ass.

    As others have noted, “duct tape” is the last thing you want to use on ducts. Better to actually call it “duck tape,” as it was for the first 65 years of its existence.