Cool

Right?! I know. It’s so needlessly complicated. When I first learned about this my jaw legit dropped.

I’m not even necessarily proposing a registry but this is just fucking ridiculous.

A lot of Americans do actually support some gun control measures. A lot of Americans also don’t actually know how insanely hard and effectively the NRA has organized and opposed any remotely reasonable gun control measure. They basically ensure that any hearing on the subject is flooded by their members to oppose it. They just go and many sane Americans don’t.

• The ATF has no ability to have searchable records of firearm sales. To run a “trace” they need to use fucking microfilm or manually go through literal shipping containers full of receipts that are scarcely legible due to water damage. Article.

• Also, measure to apply for funding for the CDC to study the effect of gun control on gun violence: no, because fuck them.

• Measure to impose some reasonable restrictions on the ability to purchase firearms for, say, known domestic abusers: no, because we just don’t fucking care.

I’m not American, but I actually support sane firearm ownership. I look at the lunacy over there and I am almost shocked. I really do think, from hearing about this as much as I do, that many Americans support sane measures. But the NRA is a huge problem. It prevents people from even being educated on this issue.

Just a heads up: you put the closing parenthesis and period inside the hyperlink you posted.

Nbd, and good comment, just letting you know.

I legit can’t imagine hurting a bee. Wasps I’m less sympathetic to. But I love bees.

Technically ticks are arachnids, not insects.

And also yeah. Fuck ticks altogether.

It is an unfortunate thing, because tankies are actually a problem. And I do mean the real term, as in the folks who identify with dictatorships that are so-called communist.

The reason it’s a problem is that the folks who are left-leaning but uneducated sometimes get swept up in pro-authoritarian rhetoric that happens to oppose the west. I’m anticapitalist, leftist, etc. I see tankies and fascists having a lot in common. That seems dangerous in the sense that fascism is a real threat. Also, then, our ranks are being thinned out and co-opted by specific bad-faith actors. At the same time, when people buy into tankie (pro-Russia, pro-China, pro-North Korea) propaganda, this more or less consolidates some of the power that opposes actual leftists (as in, people who support human rights, equitable societies, environmental protection, etc).

Not really any argument against what you’re saying. Just kind of adding that the term tankie is actually useful to describe a specific viewpoint, but obviously not in the way that the previous commenter used it.

No

Yes. This on repeat.

I don’t know if they’re aware of this, but they’re also urging users to ditch Microsoft as a matter of course.

Tragically, no. I thought so too until quite recently. They did improve things but it’s pretty rough

Since a viral load can be reduced to zero through medication, HIV-positive folks can be non contagious. The use of condoms, even if the viral load is not suppressed through medication, seriously reduces the risk of HIV transmission. They don’t ask questions about condom usage. To be clear I’m not suggesting that HIV-positive folks should be donating blood, just that the actual factors for transmission are way more specific than “butt stuff = AIDS” the way that they imply. The result of this is still excluding queer folks end up getting excluded with language that’s less overtly hostile and more implicitly hostile.

The screening doesn’t exclude people based how many partners a person has slept with, or whether they have used protection (both of which are massive risk factors for transmission) and instead basically forbids anyone who engages in anal sex from donating blood.

That is true. And Canadian Blood Services is still super homophobic.

So this letter board is clearly advertising Canadian blood services. Canada’s healthcare system could use a lot of work, but it is far from the dumpster fire that American healthcare is.

If you want to shitpost about this and assume as Americans do that America is the only place, maybe try to find an image that isn’t so obviously from a country with universal healthcare.

I rented a place that had one of these. It’s just another thing to forget about maintaining.

A huge percentage of my life I’ve spent working outdoors in remote settings, drinking water from plastic jugs or bags. Maybe that means I’m just wired differently but I don’t really understand the desire to have chilled water in the first place.

It’s super unpleasant both in the delivery (eating a sufficient amount of nutmeg for the effects is hard to do without vomiting), and also in experience. Buuut my experience was basically like a fever dream – really bad but not torture-level bad.

This just sounds like straight up torture with extra steps.

No rehabilitation, no isolation of dangerous individuals from the general population. I’m decidedly anti-incarceration but at least there are arguments for it in place of something functional and just.

This just doesn’t solve any problems and adds some new ones. It sounds unbelievably cruel.

I think it’s primarily targeting the handheld gaming market

I was thinking he looked like Ricky from trailer park boys.

You can also sideload epubs, borrow books from libraries on Overdrive and read articles online, etc. It’s way easier on the eyes than screens that rely on refresh rates (which also make them better to use before sleep), they have long battery life. And it’s a lot lighter than carrying books around.

They have a lot of advantages over other platforms for reading.

Communism is an economic system, democracy is a political system. There are examples of democratic socialism and of capitalist dictatorships. Also, the word here is in fact socialism and not communism.