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Last week or two I’ve been learning more about passkeys, and it makes threads like this seem ridiculously out of date.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?

I wish they did also. The stat would still be incomplete as many go unreported, but I’d still at least like a number of people who call and report a DGU.

Excuse me what? The Grandma is shot dead before she could even pull the trigger.

And she could be stabbed from behind, or hit in the back of the head with a bat before she even saw her attacker. Yeah there’s no guarantees in any sort of fight.

You are right on one thing- she’d probably never be quite as happy. I think you assume gun owners are spoiling for a fight, eagerly awaiting ‘their moment to shine’. It’s really not true though. Not for myself or anyone I know at least.

As a gun owner, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about such things. Being shot isn’t like in the movies where someone falls down and music plays and the hero rescues the girl, it’s ugly and painful, it’s like stabbing someone with a giant screwdriver by remote control. I hope I can live the rest of my life without ever shooting anybody or taking a life by any other means, because I’m pretty sure I’d never be quite whole ever again. I’ve always declined invitations to go hunting because I don’t want to be the one to take the life of an animal, I don’t even squish insects most of the time I capture and release them outside. So taking the life of another human is not something I ever want to do.

But what I want even less than that, is to do nothing while people I love are harmed. And so, if I have to trade my conscience and mental health for the physical wellbeing of my family or myself, then I will consider that a more than fair trade.
And I think the granny in our analogy would rather be alive and feeling guilty than dead. I know I would be.

Yes, mental illness might also be an issue but you also dont do shit to solve that issue.

This is one thing I HATE about my country- we have forgotten how important it is to take care of our own citizens. And I blame conservatives (the usually pro-gun ones) for this a lot more than liberals, but liberals deserve plenty of blame as well. Both parties find it effective and expedient to whip up voters with ‘those other guys hate America!’.
It’s not just mental health, it’s everything. Look at student loans- kids take on crushing debt because they’re told it’s the only way to get a good job, only wages are stagnant and they can’t make ends meet. Do we help them, the millions of our fellow countrymen who are in a really bad situation? Nah, fuck them, they did it to themselves.
And look at healthcare as a whole. People get cancer and go bankrupt with health insurance and it’s just like oh well, like that’s the way things are supposed to be.
Meanwhile the wealth of our nation is being extracted by a bunch of business interests that basically have the government in a state of regulatory capture (that video is from 2011 and it’s even worse today) and the people of the nation are too busy blaming each other to work together and FIX some of our VERY REAL problems.

So yes, I support gun rights. But please don’t lump me in with the loud and obnoxious lemming-conservatives who only use mental health as a way to defend against gun control then do nothing at all to actually improve mental health.

If it were up to me, we’d be spending BILLIONS on mental health, if not tens or hundreds of billions. If it were up to me, our defense budget would get a haircut (we really don’t need to spend more on military than the next 10 nations, including all of our major enemies, combined) and that money would be re-invested in America’s PEOPLE. Education, mental health, health care, etc. Schools should be palaces and teaching kids should be a well-paid, sought-after, competitive position that carries respect and prestige, not the current situation where teachers are basically underpaid babysitters that are expected to teach the test and then we act confused when entire generations of kids grow up with no critical thinking skills.

I believe the markets, and the corporations, and the government, do and should exist for the benefit of the populace overall, not the other way around. I think many in the US have forgotten that ideal.

My pleasure.

Various types of crimes are tracked by the FBI which then publishes an awful lot of statistical data. In question for us is expanded homicide table 8- same data is available on a different page that doesn’t deep-link well up to 2021, but the result for all is the same- about 10k-12k firearm homicides per year.
Side note- rifles (including ‘assault’ rifles and other rifles like hunting rifles) are used in about 300-400 homicides/year, never more than the number of people who are punched and kicked to death. Suggests that maybe trying for ‘assault weapon bans’ is a waste of time that won’t have much effect.

But back on track. 10k-12k firearm homicides per year, the vast majority committed with handguns or ‘unknown type’ guns. A gun might be ‘unknown type’ if it’s not recovered- for example if there’s a drive-by shooting and the perpetrators are not caught, you can’t say for sure what kind of gun it was because even pistol rounds can be fired from certain rifles.

Measuring defensive gun uses (DGU) is much harder. In the vast majority of incidents (90-95%) the criminal sees the gun and runs away so there’s not much to report. That means a great many go unreported, and of those that do get reported, there’s no central tracking system the way there is for homicides. That means the only way to get any sort of number is with surveys and statistical analysis, which are of course open to the interpretation and opinions of the statistician crunching the numbers.

Wikipedia has a good page on that subject which I would encourage you to read. But to briefly summarize- anti-gun researcher Hemenway puts it at 55,000-80,000/year, pro-gun researchers Kleck and Gertz put it at 2.1 million/year, pro-gun researchers Cook and Ludwig put it at 4.7 million/year. More direct analysis of the government NCVS survey data put it between 100,000 and 370,000 DGU/year which is the area I think is probably most accurate. However the one thing just about every researcher involved seems to agree on is that the question hasn’t been answered reliably and considerable uncertainty exists.

Thus, for the sake of argument, I take the lowest number from that- 55,000 DGU, and compare it with the highest number of say 12k firearm homicides, and I say there are AT LEAST 4.58x more DGUs as there are firearm homicides.

With that in mind, the argument that ‘a successful DGU where your own gun isn’t used against you is one in a million’ becomes statistically impossible.

A lot of the whole ‘owning a gun makes you more likely to get shot’ bit comes from bad stat analysis and selection bias. Put simply, if you live in an unsafe area, you’re more likely to get shot, but you’re also more likely to want a gun for self-defense. That makes the connection between gun ownership and getting shot a correlation, not a causation; but many people confuse the two.

Another big misused stat is suicide. You’ve probably heard a stat like ‘35,000 people die of gun violence every year’. How does 12k become 35k? Simple answer is that the rest are suicides. But I think it’s disingenuous to count suicides as ‘gun violence’ because the term ‘gun violence’ sounds like something that will happen to you, not something you do to yourself. There is a small correlation between gun ownership and suicide rate- I believe that’s partially due to socioeconomic factors (the guy who lives in a bad neighborhood more likely has no money and thus is more likely to suicide) but it’s also causative (happens because of the gun)- a gun will kill you instantly; whereas many other methods take time during which you may change your mind or fail in your suicide attempt. I still don’t believe that self-harm is a valid reason to restrict gun ownership though, but I respect that many disagree with that.

Hope that helps! Does it give you what you were looking for?

Being forced to defend yourself from a person with a gun is a thought no child should ever have.

I agree 100%. I think it’s a failure of our society that ANY child has to think about defending themself from ANY sort of violence- be it a psycho with a gun, or crime on the street, or a bully who will beat them up. We should aim to do better as a society.

But the society I’d consider ideal is not the society we have. We have violent people in our society. A few go psycho and commit mass murder, most don’t. And thus, we do our children a disservice by pretending otherwise.

We do a bigger disservice by doing little or nothing to identify violent people and help them become less violent.

Blaming the gun is a placebo pill we can take to make ourselves feel better about Doing Something. But it’s like blaming the car for the actions of a drunk driver.

“Having a gun means you can defend yourself” is a dangerous thing to let live.

It may be dangerous, but it’s also not wrong.

If 65yo grandma is approached by a 25yo male thug, she cannot defend herself whether thug is armed or not. The thug is bigger, stronger, and faster than she is.
If 65yo grandma is approached by a 25yo male thug, and she has a gun, she CAN defend herself. The worst case scenario for her is he also has a gun, in which case they are physically equal.

To be clear- I agree with you that we should not HAVE to defend ourselves. I’d love a society where nobody ever needs a gun. But pretending that society exists when it really doesn’t does nobody any favors.

Um, please think this through. You’re basically saying that weapons cause violence.

But that’s not how human nature works. Some PEOPLE are violent, and they commit acts of violence whether they have weapons or not.

I could approach you on the street and beat you up- that’s a violent crime. No guns involved.

I could approach you on the street and stab you or hit you with a baseball bat- that’s a violent crime. No guns involved.

Guns don’t cause violence. Weapons don’t cause violence. Weapons in the wrong hands can make violence worse, or in the right hands can prevent violence or stop it.

Okay so full answer from a real keyboard. Please consider this one to supercede the last one which was written on my phone on my way to sleep.

First- addressing your argument:

I argue there ARE NOT would-be bombers out there saying ‘I really wanna blow some people up but I can’t get explosives, my reign of terror ended before it began :(, curse you explosives licensing schemes! Guess I have no choice but to get a job and therapy.’. Evil men will always find the tools they need to dispense their evil.

But there’s a sliding scale. The more determined someone is, the more stringent restrictions it will take to stop them from getting whatever they want. There’s a limit to what’s practical, and a higher limit to what’s possible. Look at prisons- the most secure, controlled, patrolled environment in the world, and yet prisoners still get drugs and weapons and cell phones. Evil men will always find the tools they need to dispense their evil, but assholes are more likely to settle for whatever’s convenient.

So by ‘if 7-11 started selling dynamite’, that means drop the difficulty of acquisition to zero. And in that sense, of course there’d be more bombings- both because ‘Dynamite sale! 12 sticks for $12’ posters in the window would bring bombs closer to peoples consciousness, and because you now cover the entire scale of determination.

Second, my argument:

Bombs are a bad analogue because you can’t use a bomb defensively. If someone threatens to bomb my car, having my own bomb won’t help me much. And a bomb isn’t directed, it’s broad destruction that harms everything in its vicinity (buildings, people, vehicles, etc). So I can’t use a bomb to defend my home from an intruder as I’ll just blow up my own house & family; I can’t use a bomb to defend against street crime because I’d blow myself up too.

A gun however CAN be used defensively. It doesn’t harm everything in the vicinity, just whatever you shoot at. The gun doesn’t also harm the shooter, doesn’t also harm everybody nearby. I can shoot the intruder or street criminal without also harming myself or my family.

So consider Night City, or any similar society where you can assume everyone you meet is armed. In that society, much like in ours, you have two classes of people. There’s the criminal class- which includes the main character V. They go about their illegal actions, using violence against anyone who stands in their way. And there’s the average people. In a game like CP2077 or GTA, the average people are the NPCs that populate the city but with whom you have little or no interaction other than stealing their cars or wishing they’d get out of your way.
Obviously we’d like to disarm the criminals. But as people who don’t follow the law, that’s easier said than done.

When in the beginning of the game you hear the news report that there were 87 murders last week, notice that it’s talking about gangs and cartels, not innocent bystanders? Art imitates life.

But now consider the NPCs. Imagine if every time you had to steal a car, the owner would try and shoot you, and if you shoot back then random bystanders would shoot you. Would that impact your willingness to steal cars? I think it would, you’d go looking for parked cars to avoid firefights.

And that’s why I say having a mostly armed society is not an awful thing.

Try HomeSeer. I ran it for years before switching to HA.

You see a lot of criminals walking around with dynamite? I don’t.

Do you think that’s because explosives are hard to make or buy? They’re not. Starting with nothing but a bit of money, it’s far easier to get something that will explode than a gun.

Blowing shit up isn’t hard. It’s also not useful, and a bomb won’t usefully stop someone out to harm you. Thus criminals have little use for them.