SirEDCaLot

Cryptography. As in, using encryption and encryption keys to authenticate me, rather than just a password.

Last week or two I've been learning more about passkeys, and it makes threads like this seem ridiculously out of date. Given the choice between emojis and passwords and hard crypto, I'll take the crypto.

Then get yourself a basic black & white laser printer. Brother is usually pretty good for that. The cartridges don't expire and it'll be ready instantly when you need it, whether that's tomorrow or next year.

Here's one for $120

IT person here. Avoiding HP is a good idea. But a better idea is don't buy shitty cheap consumer level inkjet printers from any brand. Most of them have this sort of bullshit, although not usually as bad as HP does. Instead I suggest buy it for life. Get a nice color laser machine, spend a few hundred bucks, and you will have a printer that lasts until you die. I like the Canon MF743CDw, it's a little on the pricier side but it scans both sides of the paper in one pass. Also does color duplex printing.

If you don't want the extra size or weight of a color laser, get a black and white laser. How often do you really need color? And if you must get something cheaper, get one of the newer inkjet printers that use refillable ink bottles rather than cartridges, like there is an actual ink tank on the printer and you refill it with a squeeze bottle rather than replacing the cartridge.

Much has been said about the idea of 'signal leaving UK or EU'. Little has been said about how exactly that would happen.

AFAIK, Signal has no business presence in the UK or EU. IE, no offices, no registered corporate entities. Thus, they (arguably) have no more requirement to comply with UK's or EU's regulations than, say, Iran's or China's or any other jurisdiction where they do not do business and have no presence.

Signal's leadership has a record of giving any regional restrictions the middle finger, so I doubt Signal would voluntarily block EU countries. So that means the EU would either pressure Google and Apple to delist Signal (easily worked around, at least on Android, and soon on Apple too as EU is trying to force sideloading) or they'd pressure ISPs to block connections to Signal (more or less impossible).

If EU tried to do that, it'd just create a giant game of whack-a-mole. And people doing real CSAM shit would just move to even more private distributed systems.

This is the answer.

Matrix needs to make it easier to expire or delete messages from the server, but other than that it's doing a lot of the stuff Signal should've been doing years ago. Easy to use multiple devices, easy to get messages on multiple devices, keep chat history in sync, no reliance on phone numbers for identity or single identity servers, good working federation / ability to set up private hosted groups, etc.

Perhaps nobody overtly wants to ban all guns in the sense of making all guns illegal. There's always a 'reasonable' proposal. But it overall feels like a roll back strategy, like the US tried to roll back communism in the cold war- pick at the edges until there's none left.

A buyback program IS a ban by the way- it's just confiscation with compensation. 'You can't own XYZ anymore so we will confiscate it from you, but we'll give you some money.

The real issue though is that guns aren't hard to make and therefore the black market effect will be minimal. Look at illicit marijuana (pre-legalization) as an example. Lots of it was grown in Mexico then smuggled in. Then hydroponic/airponic tech got better and cheaper and instead it was grown in attics and basements closer to where it would be sold. So now the drugs smuggled in are drugs that require lab processing like cocaine or heroin. But if (hypothetically saying there was no legalization) you made home-grow setups illegal, that wouldn't stop anyone from doing it anyway.

Same is true with guns. For under $500 you can buy a device that turns a half-machined block of metal into the main part of an AR15 rifle. For $5k-$10k you can buy a CNC machine that will turn a solid billet of metal into most parts of a gun. And unlike a drug lab, unlike even a basement marijuana grow op, all these devices can be presented as 'legitimate use' with very little prep- just clear the gun CNC file out of the machine and that's it. Way easier than marijuana (which takes weeks to mature and then must be harvested and packaged). So you could do this in a legitimate front business with a 'night shift' crew.

So I argue even if you greatly restrict civilian firearm ownership, the real criminals who commit the majority of gun homicides and gun crimes will have unimpeded access to guns. The same gangs that right now trade in stolen or straw purchased guns, will instead trade in imported or home-machined guns.

Yeah I think indoor farming / vertical farming is going to be the ultimate answer. Much more efficient in every way, including resource use, water, pesticide, etc.

I think you do me an injustice, and needlessly so.

The US is not 'just one country' with the same ideals and attitudes everywhere. We are 50 states, and while there is an overall American culture, each state or even city area has its own local culture, ideals, politics, etc.
I live in a 'blue state' (IE Democrat-majority, Democrats are generally an anti-gun party). There's not a big gun culture here. There are not people with 10 gallon hats and a 6-shooter on their hip riding around in a giant pickup truck with a gun rack. My state has more gun control laws than most in the union.
When I grew up we had no guns or interest in guns. During my whole childhood the only exposure to guns I had was once at summer camp there was an activity shooting .22LR rifles (small caliber), lying down, at targets. And once on vacation we went to a shooting range that was part of a resort.

If we'd had this conversation 10 or 12 years ago, I'd have been mostly on your side. I recognized the 2nd Amendment was a thing that existed, but I saw no reason anybody needed an 'assault rifle', I thought gun free zones were a pretty good way to improve safety, and overall a lot of 'gun culture' seemed like needless penis extension.

It was actually one conversation that kicked off a change in my position. An old friend of mine and I were getting lunch together. This guy has always been very Republican (pro-gun/conservative party), owns several guns, goes hunting, etc- but we have a lot of mutual respect despite differing worldviews on many subjects. Anyway, as we finished lunch he mentions that he's going to buy an AR-15 rifle and would I like to come along? I made a dumb joke like 'damn man, I didn't realize it was that small, I'm sorry dude'. He just laughed and said 'You know my deer hunting rifle, the one you said you have no problem with civilians owning? Well it's actually a lot MORE powerful than an AR-15.' I started to argue but he said 'look, nothing I say is going to convince you. So just Google it when you get home, okay?'.
I KNEW he was wrong- a 'military weapon of war' would definitely be more powerful than a stupid wood stock hunting rifle like Elmer Fudd would carry. Surely the military wouldn't be carrying weapons inferior to those of random civilian hunters, right?

So I went home and Googled it. And I found he was right- his .30-06 hunting rifle has SIGNIFICANTLY more muzzle energy than the .223 AR-15 he was planning to buy. The hunting rifle was larger and heavier and in almost every way, more powerful.
I'm usually not wrong about technical things. So I was curious what else I was wrong about on the subject, turned out it was a lot. Not about policy or position, but about provable technical things of how guns work and how deadly they are and whatnot.
So I decided the best course of action was to basically forget everything I thought I knew, and start fresh. That kicked off a good 3-4 week deep dive on the subject, reading articles, watching YouTubes, doing research on both sides of the issue.

This brought about a few basic conclusions. The biggest is that most of the politicians who talk about guns appear to know little or nothing about guns, as many of their gun control arguments are easily disproved on basis of fact. And many of the laws they promote do nothing to regulate the actual lethality of guns, but rather try to describe 'scary looking guns' and ban those. For example, my own state's laws regulate rifles that have ergonomic features like a pistol grip or collapsible stock that have NO bearing on the rifle's lethality.

I then started doing research into use of force, defensive situations, etc. And that brought a very sobering realization- I lived in a bubble. Violence is not a part of my life (and I prefer it that way). My area is quite safe. But that doesn't mean I am immune to violent people- and there ARE people out there who ARE violent. Not many near me, but they exist.
And I'd say I've done more research than most into what happens in a fight. I've seen a lot of videos of defensive situations- robberies, fistfights, assaults, kidnapping, and straight up attempted murder. I've seen what happens when people get shot (you won't find it on YouTube). And I've seen how easy it is to seriously harm a human. We live safe lives in civilized society, but on the scale of the world, our bodies are pretty fragile and it doesn't take much to seriously damage them.

And that's why I say thought experiment for how to kill someone from 100' away. It's why I say that if someone wants to kill people, they will, gun or not. It's why I reject the logic that removing guns will save lives, because I recognize that gun regulations affect the law-abiding more than the criminals who are doing the most harm.

Point is-- I have done the thought experiment, a few different ways.

Do I want guns in vending machines? No. Is the absolute ideal to have everybody armed? No, the ideal is where nobody needs to be armed. But absent that perfect future, I think civilian armament as a deterrence to criminals works.

And you're missing the most important part of the point here. WOULD you?
Whether you can kill me from a distance or from up close, WOULD you do so? I wouldn't. Most people wouldn't.

There's a few who would. And a few of them think it's fun.

You say you can't kill me from a distance. I think you can, even without a gun. Consider this a thought experiment. You need to kill me from say 100' away. You don't get a gun. How do you do it?

Most illegal guns today are stolen or straw purchased, because that's the easiest and cheapest way of getting them and it requires very little transport.
Let's assume you made civilian gun ownership totally illegal. The math changes- they get a bit more expensive, they get shipped in from overseas along with the drugs. Or they get made locally- a gun isn't that hard to make in any decent machine shop. Certainly easier than making drugs. And unlike the drug lab, the machine shop has a legitimate 'day shift' use so it doesn't have to hide in a basement.

But you yourself said there's 1.5 guns for every person. That doesn't go away overnight you know. Even if you could get support for broad spectrum civilian disarmament, the criminals won't give up their guns and they'll just start importing or making more.

If you want to stop crime, of any kind, you have to stop the root causes. Stopping drunk driving by banning alcohol didn't work in the 1920s. Stopping gun violence by banning guns won't work today. You need to go deeper- look at where most gun violence comes from (gangs and drugs), and address that. It means education, jobs, a war on poverty, and it costs a hell of a lot more than just signing a law. But it would actually improve our society.

I think you're filling in the blanks a bit and putting words in my mouth.

I say practical obstacles work to screen out the 'low hanging fruit'. It's like metal detectors at the airport- screens out the random idiots, but not the dedicated terrorists. Trying to screen out the terrorists just gives you the TSA which costs billions and offers little of value above the standard metal detectors and xray machines of 1990.
There's two things that would stop another 9/11-- locked cockpit doors, and the fact that passengers know to rush a hijacker rather than cooperating. Security is a distributed decentralized problem, and centralized solutions rarely work for that.

As for prison- my analogy was pointing out the futility of trying to stop people from getting items they want. It doesn't work for drugs, it doesn't work for guns. You'll disarm the good people and the bad guys will stay strapped. And smuggling drugs into prison is a LOT easier than smuggling people out.

I'm all for reducing the number of guns criminals have. I just think it's a bad idea to reduce the number of guns good people have even more. And since a law only affects the law-abiding...
If you read this comment of mine there's minimum of 55k defensive gun uses in the US, probably more like 300-350k. The law will directly affect those. Not every one would become a murder, but that's a lot more victims of various types of crimes. And of the 10-12k firearm homicides per year, how many are committed by people who aren't legal to own a gun in the first place? An awful lot.

I CAN imagine a place where everyone I meet is unarmed- I live more or less in such a place. Connecticut, USA- I only know a few people who own guns but almost none of them ever carry, and I almost never carry myself.
I was making a specific point that you've sidestepped- that if a criminal had significant fear that their victim would be armed, there'd be less crime. That if in GTA random NPCs shot you for stealing cars, you'd probably steal fewer cars. Do you disagree with that?