CarbonIceDragon

I mean, hypothetically couldn't they mix some proprietary chemical formula into the ink and incorporates some device that analyses the ink chemistry and doesn't print if that proprietary mixture is not present?

I could have used this when I was a kid playing games and would go "sorry, my cpu is bad" whenever I had lag issues even though the cpu was actually okay and it was really because of playing on a laptop with integrated graphics and a spotty internet connection, because at the time I thought CPU was just a short way of saying ComPUter...

Much, possibly most, of the lemmy userbase is just people that used to use reddit until recently or still do, so this is unsurprising

I mean the supply and demand for the trucking companies. Shipping is a vital service, if it had high taxes, it would have to dramatically increase prices for their shipping service, but they shouldn't go out of business because everyone else would still pay those dramatically high prices, because they'd have to

That depends on if the tax is sufficient to cover the societal costs of driving that mile or not. Not every use of electricity degrades public infrastructure to the same extent, so if the maintenance burden an EV adds is more than what the electricity tax brings in, then additional taxes to make up the difference would make sense.

That should mean they don't go bankrupt though. If their service is vital, people will pay for it even if the prices rise. It would mean an increase in prices for goods admittedly as the stores try to recoup the increased logistics costs, but intuitively I'd imagine the financial impact on the end customer wouldn't be as much because they're paying for the road upkeep either way, just via higher taxes in the current state and via increased prices in the new one.

I don't think the primary concern with things like this is the porn companies having access to that information (though it is of course a concern, especially given that no organization is immune to hacking), but rather that the government would have access to people's porn consumption habits, which presents both the same hacking risks but also the risk that some future government that decided to go after, say, LGBT people would have information that could potentially be used to identify those people at scale. Plus the risk that some unscrupulous member of government could use the information to blackmail critics or political rivals.

I'd focus less on the actual guns, and more on the ammunition. Guns don't fire without them, so if a potential shooter can't get ammo, the effect is the same as if they can't get a gun, but there are a few crucial differences:

Guns are increasingly easy to manufacture at home if one so desires, with things like 3-d printed guns becoming a thing, and as such, I feel that trying to regulate the actual gun is a losing battle in the not too distant future. A gun is basically just a lump of metal, or any sufficiently strong material, arranged into a certain shape. Bullets however require explosives, and explosives with the right properties at that, and the ability to manufacture that at home is much less common, and would be subject to regulation anyway given the inherit danger of explosive chemicals.

I would not totally ban bullets, mind. Even if that could somehow be made to work constitutionally, there is still the issue that there are some legitimate and generally harmless uses for a gun (things like hunting or sport target-shooting at a safely cordoned off place like a range), and that while uses like home defense might not be particularly likely to help much statistically, they are still culturally important in the US, so if you manage to entirely ban them, people will probably vote in people later who will reverse the bans, and then you have the problem back. In a democracy, one has to try to align with what the people want, and any gun control law in the US is going to have to be made to acknowledge that, like it or not, a significant fraction of the country like guns and want to be able to have them in some capacity. This doesn't mean that we should give up on gun control, but that the legislation needs to be more nuanced than just "no more guns allowed, problem solved".

What I would do, is give an allowance for how many bullets one is allowed to purchase in a given period of time, and a quite small one. One would be allowed to purchase more than than this if it can be proven that the previously purchased rounds have been fired, for example, by bringing back the spent casings (I figure this would have an added benefit in incentivising people to find and clean up these when doing things like hunting or practice shooting at home). I figure that, given that hunting rifles tend to be single-shot devices that aren't fired a whole lot in a single trip (since a loud noise like a gunshot will probably scare off a deer if one misses), and that home defense weapons like a revolver don't get fired often at all and don't need to have more than a couple rounds to be a deterrent, having only a handful of rounds available at once shouldn't impact these uses too much. One would also be allowed to buy ammunition in unrestricted quantities at a licensed and inspected (for compliance with laws like this one) gun range, with the caveat that unused ammo must be returned, presumably for a refund, upon leaving, and that the range could face legal penalties if people are allowed to take ammo in exess of their normal allotment off the range. The goal of all this is to create a situation where it is very difficult to possess more than a small number of rounds at once, and thus make a mass-shooting more difficult to carry out.

I'm not sure to what degree that this restriction is practically possible with the way the internet works though. You can probably make it work on big websites dedicated to that content, sure (there's admittedly still the issue of using VPNs to appear to be from a location without such rules, but given that these kinds of laws seem to be slowly becoming more common, maybe that won't be an issue forever), but children are curious about things kept off limits, and includes teenagers who may seek that content actively. As such, if there's a reasonably easy way to find that content, they'll find it, so simply gating big websites isn't enough. In theory, laws about the matter probably apply to more than just those sites, but consider: small websites based in other countries might just not care about foreign laws, any web service that allows user generated content (which is a lot of them) can potentially be used to share pornographic content, and some such web services are set up in a way that moderation sufficient to actually stop this is not realistic (say, discord servers secretly set up for sharing it, or fediverse instances too small to be notified by regulators, or based in another country, or with inactive moderation that doesn't notice what is being shared). As such, I don't think it's really realistic, short of a type of authoritarian control on any site that allows any kind of user uploaded content that would cause way more harm than what it tries to solve, to actually be able to stop minors from being able to access porn if they really want to. As such, I'd think that a better way of addressing concerns like them getting the wrong ideas about how sex works, or having unrealistic standards of appearance or such, is better sex-ed. When they grow up they'll be able to access this stuff anyway, so if one is worried about it giving incorrect ideas, it makes more sense to tell them that they're incorrect, and why, and what the reality of the matter is, rather than try a futile attempt to childproof the internet.

I mean, surely the solution to that would be to use curated/vetted training data? Or at the very least, data from before LLMs became commonplace?

I'm assuming that the building is asymmetrical and appears more conventional from the other side, as it would seem to need to to have proper support, so probably on that side

Ive learned a fair bit of geography from playing paradox interactive's various games. It wont really give the best sense of modern countries borders or anything since of course theyve changed from what they were and the games diverge wildly from actual history, but the general name of certain regions, the general part of the world certain cultures are from, that kind of thing. Sometimes I'll find interesting some small country Ive never heard of in Europa Universalis or something and go on a bit of a research tangent out of curiosity over what it actually was and what happened to it.