• 2 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: November 22nd, 2023

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  • They have metal internal components just like almost every 3d printed gun does. There are some things that you just need metal for, like springs. The vast majority of 3d printed guns are actually guns purchased from a gun store and then modified with the equivalent of handmade after-market parts.

    In order to be undetectable by metal detectors, you would have to keep the amount of metal in them to about that of a pair of glasses. So basically a firing pin and that’s about it. I think a break action firing chamber would probably set it off like a big belt buckle would, and no recoil or magazine springs mean that it would have to be a single shot weapon with a manual reload - some kind of break action. And no barrel liner or a metal barrel at all, nor metal bullet casings. A shotgun shell might be able to make it through because of their mostly plastic shell with a copper back about the size of a quarter, but that’s gonna be about it.

    It’s really not the issue that politicians and the media make it out to be. It’s just fear mongering.



  • They probably misconstrued “pick-up artists aside” as being very specifically about literal “pick-up artists” rather than as a generalized hitting on someone in public thing.

    I do agree with them, though, in that it’s very culturally dependent on how okay it is. I remember from a long time ago now one of those “kids today are always glued to their phones” memes where somebody just responded with a photo of a commuter rail car from the 50s where every single person in the photo was reading the newspaper, and I have a similar story from my dad about my grandfather: My grandfather worked in NYC for over 20 years and he commuted by train. During those commutes, he sat next to the same man, twice a day - on the way there and on the way back - for years, and only once in at least a decade did they ever speak to each other. “Are you finished reading that?” Those were the 5 words that man spoke to my grandfather, who handed him the paper he had finished reading, and they never exchanged another word again. I don’t think they ever even looked at each other.

    I would also add that it’s a very extroverted thing to do, and not in the sense of social anxiety or something, but in the sense that introverted people burn mental and emotional energy in social interaction, and by trying to engage with a stranger in a random conversation, you might be using up the spoons they have that day. I’ll talk to random people in public as well, but I keep it to one-off statements that people can either leave be or reciprocate with if they want. A joke about the traffic in trying to navigate the grocery store, that sort of thing. I’m very good at talking with people, I learned it from working a service industry job as a teen, to the point where I was basically the public face of a company, but I find it EXHAUSTING to do. I’m an introvert, pure and simple, and social interaction simply takes energy to do. At the end of the day, all I want to do is isolate myself so I can recharge and unwind.

    Plus, there’s the whole “women having to handle a man” aspect. Women have to treat men differently and behave differently to protect themselves when interacting with men (ones they don’t know in particular), and so a random stranger trying to start up a conversation is A Situation that they have to analyze. It goes back to the “women would prefer to be in the woods with a bear” thing. Women would rather a random bear try to start a conversation with them in public, or something.



  • My reason for the bullet train and subway in particular is the nature of being on tracks as well as avoiding traffic (Windows bloat in my use of the concept).

    Great for the average user because they don’t have to really understand any of the systems involved or anything, just pick a stop and off it goes, but if you try to go off the beaten path at all, you’ll probably find yourself having to work around the immutable nature pretty quickly. You can’t just go anywhere with it like you would a car.

    There’s a program that I had installed that for some stupid reason doesn’t let you log out on the Linux version and it auto logins as well, so if you log into the wrong account like I did when I installed it, you have to delete the user data from it. In Bazzite, it turns out that you can’t just go into the folder and do it manually, you have to use a specific application that comes with Bazzite to delete user data from an application. A minor annoyance, but I did have to go off the rails a little to solve the issue compared to how I would’ve handled it on Windows.


  • Because the most common people complaining about Bluesky fall into 1 of 2 groups:

    People upset that Bluesky isn’t tolerating their behavior (mostly Nazis and transphobes angry about the community not letting it become Truth Social 2 or allowing transphobes to harass users, but also certain leftist groups, much like the tankies here on Lemmy)

    People upset that the infrastructure isn’t FOSS or some similar complaint about it not being enough (purity test behavior like in every comment section on Lemmy)

    And people saying that Bluesky is an echo chamber tend to fall very heavily into group 1.






  • Print the parts for a new printer on a cheap one, buy the hardware at a local hardware store or electronics store (or even strip the cheap one for most of the parts), and start printing in your favorite flavor of open source software. Or buy the printed pieces from someone or online and then buy and assemble the rest. That’s what they do with guns to circumvent some of the gun laws, because the not quite finished pieces are not legally considered a gun.

    All this would do is make people buy printers the way that they buy guns, ironically. And it still won’t do anything about the so-called “ghost guns” anyway, because those are either legally bought guns with the serial number shaved off, or they’re garage guns like the one used to assassinate Shinzo Abe.


  • Except for the fact that this doesn’t put any pressure on anyone who wants a gun (those are still really easy to get in California, just not as easy as most other states). But those who benefit the most from this law are gun manufacturers, and not long after when this bill is extended to printing replacement parts for anything, all companies that charge inflated prices for repair parts or design their products to be unrepairable entirely.

    What people who print “guns” are actually printing is gun furniture. Custom grips and the like, either for comfort/aesthetics or so they can take cheaper gun parts and use them to build a clone of a similar gun from a company that charges more. They still use legally purchased gun internals.

    The gun that Luigi Mangione supposedly used was a Glock, legally purchased and one of the most ubiquitous pistols in the world, with a 3d printed grip on it. Every other part of that gun came from the manufacturer.

    The gun used to kill Shinzo Abe, however, was made entirely out of simple materials readily available at any hardware store and is completely legal in all 50 states. Because a gun like that is considered a “garage gun” and those are legal under federal law because it’s essentially impossible to stop somebody from gluing together a pipe and a nail to strike the bullet with and fire it down the pipe barrel. But 3d printed gun parts don’t fall under the same regulations and those who stand to lose the most from people 3d printing are those who charge unreasonable prices.

    You know who else would benefit from this law? Games Workshop, who sells many miniature figures for $40+ each, and a few for over one thousand dollars.


  • You’re laboring under the impression that consumer protection laws mean anything in the US. They don’t. Unless it’s something absolutely egregious, then maybe they might get a slap on the wrist. Maybe.

    Another perfect example is my buddy who was looking at digital watches yesterday. The same watch was $100 more expensive on Amazon than at Walmart, and Prime prices are often higher than if you don’t have Prime. I’ve also had Amazon completely lie to me about an item being on sale, claiming that it was 50% off on a Prime day sale, and then when I went and checked it the day after it turned out that it had been more like $5 off than the several hundred they claimed the sale would’ve saved. They marked it up wildly just to pretend that it was on sale. And they’re not the only ones to have been caught doing that. Plenty of other places have been caught doing the same thing, but since they’re big companies, unless you can get a settlement from a class action suit, nobody cares.


  • These kinds of things are often A B testing to see what they can get away with - especially in countries like the US where consumer protection laws basically don’t matter. It’s kinda like when they raise subscription prices in one country but not another, but with showing some people in that country a certain amount of ads per watch time vs another group with a different amount of ads. They see how much they can get away with before people start complaining, and then what they can get away with before people start cancelling.

    I watched a video just this morning talking about how YouTube has built-in systems for similar A B testing with video thumbnails to tell creators which gets more watch time. You give it 2 thumbnails and it randomizes which one people see, and then tracks click-through rates and watch time percentages before giving you a result of which one performs better.