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If you own a house with nobody living in it, you gotta pay rent to the state each month for the privilege of keeping it empty.
They do this in India. You’re allowed 2 homes, 3rd onwards you have to pay Income tax for deemed rent received if it’s empty.
After a while, it’s just part of the cost.
Not much of an expense imo. Like giving a speeding ticket to a billionaire, it doesn’t actually mean much if you’re rich enough.
Id rather make the initial purchase cost extraordinarily expensive after buying more than two houses. Third house is 5x the cost. Fourth house is 50x the cost. Nobody needs four houses so it’s a fuck you tax.
And at scale it will eat into investor returns, making holding them empty a less profitable endeavor. They would suddenly go from having a neutral MRR asset turned into a negative MRR if they choose not to rent out. You can bet your sweet bippy that the bean counters are going to notice the difference and argue to sell or rent them to cut the expenses.
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It’s not just another cost of doing business though, it’s specifically a cost of not doing business.
So imagine someone has been buying up homes to rent them. Market rate for rent is $1000 and they own 1000 units (just to make the math easy). That means they would profit $1 million every month with every unit filled, and lose $1 million every month for leaving every unit empty.
Now imagine they have half the units filled, so they are getting $0 each month. They could try and raise the rent over market rate to cover the cost, but that would make it harder to fill the empty units and encourage their tenants to leave. If they lower the rent a bit though, they could fill the empty units and erase the cost entirely. Now imagine every landlord is in this dilemma; it puts the pressure onto them to appeal to prospective tenants. They could even increase profit by housing people for free, just filling units with the homeless to reduce costs.
If they don’t change behavior and just eat the cost, then that’s more money for the state to invest in housing programs.
You do, it’s called property taxes.
But they mean specifically a vacancy tax. So anyone who owned vacant property would have a large additional payment or get it rented
I don’t see this working. Not only the property owners would transfer this cost to your monthly payments, the government would need an enormous bureaucracy to actually control and enforce this law. I don’t believe this is technically possible to achieve.
They pass on a tax that doesn’t apply if you’re renting it?
Eventually somebody will rent it, and the monthly price will be higher to recoup the tax.
No, like market rate for the property. Everyone pays property tax, regardless of whether the property is vacant or occupied.
My dad inherited my grandma’s ancient house recently and is practically forced to find a way to remodel it to be rentable because there is a imputed rental value tax where I’m from.
What’s the alternative, just leave it empty?
I would think it could also be acceptable to transfer ownership to a relative who doesn’t already own a home. It just seems like a waste to have a house with nobody living in it while so many people are unhoused.
I guess he could sell it but then its pretty likely that it’s brought by a property developer, as we can’t afford to buy it off him. As it stands, the house isn’t really suitable to live in
The more properties you own, the more tax you pay on the price of the next one - excluding if you only own one, but escalating quickly after like 3 or 4.
Possible formula: Tax for n-th house = n-th Fibonacci number + 5 * max(0, n - 2). So low numbers like three get penalized by that linear part, and high numbers grow exponentially due to the Fibonacci number.
Ok now it’s starting to get confusing enough to fit into our tax system. Can we add more variables? Lol
This is so obviously what needs to happen. The fact that it hasn’t says everything you need to know about current governments.
Texas is that way to a point. Your primary residence gets enormous tax breaks. Any property after that, fuck you, pay up. The downside to that is that it contributes to the high cost of rent as the owner passes it along to the tenant.
Does it increase per property owned though? They can’t keep passing on the tax increase to the tenant if at a certain point they own 1000 houses and now their tax on the last one is 7 times higher than the rent on it.
That’s what we should be doing any house after your second gets increased a ton per house. Make it untenable for people to own rental properties. I don’t mind someone having a vacation house or two if they can afford it. But nobody needs 10 vacation houses, they’re rental or investment properties at that point so fuck them.
Are you talking about a homestead exemption? I think most places have something like that but it’s just a discount on the house you live in so not an increase on the other properties. They would just get normal tax rates for any additional properties. I think making it an exponential tax would make a huge difference.
Yes homestead. I’m not sure how other states do it.
Texas increased from ten thousand to twenty five thousand to forty thousand to a hundred thousand in a short period.
So semantics. I say increase for other houses, you say discount for primary house. Either way you choose to phrase it, you pay less for your primary residence and more for other properties.
My city somewhat does this. You get a significant tax break on your primary residence, so if you rent out your house you pay more.
But if you rent out 1000 houses you pay the same tax rate and if you were to rent 3. Op was saying that it should go up per house. So by the time you have like 3 or 4 you can’t afford more.
Linear housing, quadratic taxes
Serious question, couldn’t you bypass this by just setting up different LLCs that only have one or two properties under them?
They already do this. In my old job, the boss had 0 properties, he just used company money, company cars etc and had multiple of them
Motherboard front panel connectors should be officially standardized. These fucking things have been basically the same since the 90s, but we still have to line up all the individual wires instead of having one plug.
Oh, and fix RGB headers while we’re at it. They’re the flimseist fucking thing, and you shouldn’t be able to use a 4 pin plug on a three pin header.
They said dumb ideas.
Also modular power supplies while we’re at it thanks. 20 years and the cables still can’t be reused/you have to remanage the whole damn case when doing a swap
That’s already a thing? I have several power supplies that have completely detachable cables allowing the psu to be swapped directly. Not sure how standardised the psu side of the cable is between manufacturers, but this does exist in some form.
They’re talking about standardisation. Unfortunately, many manufacturers use different pinouts on the psu side. Sometimes they’re identically shaped but have the polarity reversed, or 12v on a 5v rail. Pure evil…
Make the manufacturers comply with standard rgb headers. I’ve got several accessories that came with rgb headers that I have no idea what the hell they were supposed to connect to other than maybe some proprietary controller. Absurd when most any decent common mobo all use the same connector type.
All adult sex work should be legal across the board. Anyone, of legal age, should be allowed to not only sell their services but they should be able to pay taxes and be allowed to unionize and collect benefits from any organization they work for (brothels).
A lot of the people in this world who are messed up in the head just need to get laid, and those doing to dirty work should be celebrated and rewarded for their efforts. I genuinely think this would make the world a better place.
They said dumb ideas, not smart ones.
That is pretty much how it is in Germany. Illegal (outside of the regulation avoiding taxes) and forced prostitution is still a huge problem. There is just way too much money to be made in that business…
I personally prefer the Nordic models therfore.
The problem in the countries that generally allow prostitution is that, though it has been legalized, it is still horribly stigmatized. Which creates that gap where forced prostitution can flourish. If a “business” is using illegal immigrants as forced labor, who can they turn to for help? That’s a double dose of stigma right there. But even a native person who’s being coerced would likely get little in the way of help since “upstanding” society looks down on their chosen profession.
Our collective worldly society needs to stop looking down their nose at sex workers as some kind of deviancy.
But then, seeing how religious extremists seem to be gaining power all over, I doubt we’ll see any positive change on any of these things.
The pimps that are trafficking over don’t care about stigmas and the women aren’t afraid about getting stigmatized, but about getting send back to their home-countries.
You’re reading comprehension is lacking. The people I am referring to having a stigma against prostitution are not the pimps or the girls who are performing. It’s the law and the society of people who think prostitution is a lowly profession for degenerates.
people…just need to get laid
A Hollywood induced fantasy.
People need therapy, and substituting that with sex is enabling the messed up folks to stay messeed up.Nope. In germany you can actually get a prostitute paid by your healthcare provider if you are disabled because it has so many benefits for your mental health. If you never even experience that important part of human life you can easily get depressed.
Ex-JW here. 100% agree. I’m still fucked up from that shit.
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(By the way, here’s a more effective way to delete your comments: highlight all the text in your comment then click delete. Then leave a punctuation mark or a hashtag in the comment field. Then save the comment like that. This will overwrite the comment you no longer want people to see. Because nothing is ever deleted.)
Ill remember that, thanks! Also, it was this one:
Dangit I came to Lemmy last night to ask a question about SIM cards and you got me all distracted and made me forget
Ooh-la-LA that’s a fun sex mark
Sexual surrogacy is a thing for a reason. Licensed therapists work with patients and sexual surrogates.
https://www.webmd.com/sex/what-is-sexual-surrogacy
So sex can be part of therapy.
My car makes it slightly difficult to change lanes if I don’t signal, some resistance on the steering wheel and a warning beep beep beep that I’m “drifting.” There are some terrible roads around here that confuse the sensors so I do a bit of steering wheel arm wrestling now and then just to keep going straight.
That is why I turned lane assist off after a dozen false positives that felt like the car was going to steer me into danger with no benefits.
Parking assist got turned off when parking in a garage set off a cacophony.
It was when I was holding leftmost lane position passing a semi and it beeped and tried to steer me into said semi that I decided it can fuck off for ever lol
It does that on highways with cyclist too
Well of course, nobody elses life matters really! /s
In my experience, lane assist is pretty good on the highways, and actively terrible everywhere else.
The only “feature” I hated more than lane assist was hill start assist. Chirped my tires, or stalled completely, on every fucking hill.
Do you have trouble staying in your lane on the highway?
That’s the easiest place to stay in a lane.
Lane assist seems to agree with you. It is only able to do its job on the highway. Elsewhere, it actively seeks head-on collisions.
Its job is apparently making up for lazy people who can’t pay attention to the multi ton vehicle they are driving.
How strong is the lane assist in your car? If I was weak enough to even be bothered by the lane assist in my car, I’d figure it was time to stop driving. It certainly has never come close to overriding my steering.
Ever drive on a construction zone where they’ve started to rip up pavement and half the lane is an inch higher than the other half? Ever change lanes into that lane, and feel the steering fight you or lurch as you cross that lip?
The problem isn’t the strength needed to overcome the lane assist. It’s easy to fight it. The problem comes when you know you are well centered in the lane. But, all the sudden, you’re being pushed left or right, and you have to quickly determine whether you’re feeling uneven pavement. Or maybe a tie rod end or a ball joint has some slop in it. Maybe the power steering pump is leaking and running dry. Or, maybe the fucking lane assist thinks a strip of tar in the middle of the lane is a lane marker, and it wants me to cross the centerline.
The problem isn’t whether or not I can take it in a fair fight. The problem is that it throws a punch.
Well, that’s kind of what I’m saying. That’s insane. In my truck I wouldn’t even describe the lane assist as a nudge. It’s just barely enough to be perceivable. Certainly nothing that’s going to make me question anything other than if I’m over the line.
You’ve become conditioned to consider a “nudge” to be lane assist helpfully pushing on the steering wheel, to move you toward the center of the lane. Your muscle memory reacts to such a nudge by accepting it, allowing it.
30 years of driving has conditioned me to consider a “nudge” to be an indication that something is pushing on the car, moving me away from where I intend to be. My muscle memory reacts to such a nudge by immediately arresting that push and reversing it.
No, I haven’t been conditioned into anything. 38 years of driving taught me to be able to tell what is happening because I’m aware of the road. I know I didn’t just drive off the edge of the road, because I know where the road is and I know where my tires are.
I’ve had lane assist in my truck for 2 years and I learned what it feels like. However, it’s clear that different manufacturers implemented it differently. All I can say is, it appears Honda got it right.
Different cars have different levels of pushing back. My in laws’ Subaru twisted hard like bumping a curb while my Honda was a slight bit of resistance.
The wheel jerking makes me think that I’m losing control and is extremely distracting.
It isn’t about losing tug of war, it is about losing focus.
I hate all that. Bro I hate of my mouse sensor has angle snapping, prediction, acceleration, or smoothing.
I loathe the concept of electronic throttle bodies and anything after 2005 has them. I don’t want my car to get to think about it after I press the throttle. Air now! Goddamn asthmatic cars. I don’t even want a manual transmission.
This is probably the best thing about lane assist on modern cars.
When changing lanes without a turn signal, the wheel resists a bit.
I have actually seen people I drove with be annoyed by it. I absolutely love it, because it is only annoying if you don’t use your turn signals.
I disagree, it’s annoying in general.
If I need to go around, say, a mail truck parked on the side of the road, the steering assist in our work van starts to rumble or shake or whatever it does. If there’s construction, you guessed it, it doesn’t understand that I have to cross over the line to continue driving, and if I have a turn signal on, the cop/worker directing traffic is going to expect me to go that way.
If a car is driving in the opposite direction and starts to ride/cross the double yellow lines, me moving over causes the vehicle to resist and fight me, potentially putting me into an accident because I didn’t think to put my turn signal on in a split-second situation.
My car should not be able to, idk what word I’m looking for, override me? People need to take driving more seriously and stop handing off their responsibilities to a computer system/sensor that can not only fail, but also doesn’t understand real world applications.
Lane assist fucking hates narrow and or curved roads, too. I turn that shit off when I’m driving my parents’ car. I really hate the steering wheel trying to decide what’s best for me.
I love the lane assist on my car. It does resist me a little bit in the situations you describe, but it’s not a strong resistance. Just enough to get my attention if i do it by accident, but not enough to hinder me going where i need to go.
Now i’m curious what the lane assist parameters look like for different makes and models…
On a Hyundai, there’s a very annoying beeping pretty much coinciding with the wheels hitting the lane markings - which IMHO is too little too late, and besides around here most lane markings are made to rumble so it’s not like an additional audio signal is needed.
On my ex’es brand new car, that feature got turned off after very few kilometres, and has stayed off ever since.
Mine works like yours, it’ll jottle me a bit but if I want the car to go there it goes there, I don’t need special efforts to make it happen. It also has the auto-brake thing in case you’re about to rear end someone and I’ve set it to high to see it working but even that I only managed to make it beep and flash but not actually brake yet, looks like it would only do it pretty late. I think most people complaining about this are having an “back in my days” moment tbh, but maybe there are indeed cars out there where the implementation is more invasive.
I drove a Honda Pilot with lane assist, and I hated how it jottled the steering wheel. It felt dangerous to me how much it resisted, even if it’s not really that much.
I currently drive a Honda Fit with lane assist, and I love it. Literally use the lane assist every time. It beeps and has a warning on the dash about leaving the lane, and maybe it even has the same amount of resistance, but it feels a lot safer/natural
I think I just don’t like the steering wheel “rumbling/jottling” or whatever, because it’s like a false tactile feedback. I’m sure I could adjust to it, but it’s not the best implementation imo
Also, the auto-brake thing (is amazing and should be standard) doesn’t come on until you are wildly close (and the distance that it engages, seems to be speed dependent). So you’ll really only see it engage if you’re about to be in a wreck, or you’re really ballsy trying to “test it”
Anecdotally, I’ve heard people say they almost got into a crash because of lane assist, especially with the white/yellow temporary lines. But that does depend a ton on the car.
I have to agree that if you have to turn, you should be able to turn, lane assist be damned - we’re not yet at the level where a car can accurately judge 100% of the road situations. But it’s probably a good thing we’re moving into a future where crossing lanes without turn signals feels like a virtual bump on the road.
This is probably the best thing about lane assist on modern cars.
Absolutely not. It’s fucking dangerous. The one time I drove a rental like that, I went through a construction area downtown, and it tried to steer me right into a construction fence when I was following the yellow temporary construction lane markers that were going around the fenced off area.
Surely you can disengage it when the markings are bad, right?
If you know it’s there & how to disengage it, yes. As I said, this was a rental with a dangerous system enabled & no warning. I disengaged it right after this incident.
Fair enough.
You’re just a shit driver. It does not prevent you from steering the vehicle.
A car nudging you towards an accident is dangerous, even if it’s not forcing you into an accident.
An unnecessary distraction that needs active attention in a chaotic situation is a bad thing, bad driver or not. And yeah, there are many bad drivers out there. Cars should be designed to be driven by bad drivers, not armchair experts.
Why not just have expert bus drivers and as few cars as possible by having proper driving tests. (looking at the US)
Yeah, but that’s a whole 'nother topic.
I live in a country with proper driving tests, but most drivers (myself included) are still shit at driving. Even professional bus drivers are limited humans.
I agree, but still fewer drivers should be an improvement for safety and climate and one day maybe most roads could be replaced by train tracks with bike lanes on either side.
I agree, I just really want to insert my non-relevant ideas into the discussion
What if their arms are just really weak, you do have to turn the wheel slightly more than normal.
If their arms are so weak as to be unable to overpower the lane-assist nudge, I really hope for everyone’s sake, that they are not behind the wheel of a moving vehicle. The ‘nudge’ isn’t strong in any sense of the word. You can overpower it with two fingers if squeezed tight. My semi truck had lane and steer assist, which nudged a little harder to steer the truck back into the lane, but that, too, could be overcome with a tight two-fingers grip.
Suicide assist is horrible. Around here there is no middle of the road separator, to narrow road. So it tries to hit head first the traffic in the opposite way.
Country roads here are like that.
I just turn it off.
Like a light switch
Just go click
It’s a cool little Mormon trick
Any and all type of marketing completely banned.
I think you should be allowed one sign on the building itself and a listing in some sort of directory and that’s it.
Yea as much as we hate marketing it’s necessary to some degree for us to even know that things exist. How do you think new medications for yet untreated diseases get spread? Those companies pay a ton in marketing to get the meds out into the world and in the hands of doctors. Lots more people would be dying of stuff we have the cure for if they couldn’t advertise meds.
Directories for specific products would be good though. If I need a kitchen gadget I can go to a directory of kitchen or food goods and look around. Between that and word of mouth we would be covered.
you get one research paper too but the sample size of the study should be in the title.
Is reading the abstract at the very beginning really that much of a burden?
Making it easier to sort them is something we need to consider. Also, it would make disinformation harder.
Yes please
Imagine a kid runs out on the road suddenly… What a dumb fucking idea!
Correct. A dumb idea is exactly what she was asked to produce.
They also asked for ideas that would make the world a better place, which this wouldn’t. So it’s just a dumb idea with mainly negative side effects.
I think they weren’t asking for an idea that would actually make the world a better place but rather one that somebody on some level believes would make the world a better place. Hence it still being a stupid idea.
If it were somehow magically possible to force people to use turn signals but only when they turn at intersections or change lanes, I think it would, in fact, make the world a better place. Because it would mean less car crashes.
But it’s not possible, which is why it’s a dumb idea.
The blood of children must be sacrificed if we want to live in a world with good driving etiquette
Or a road with a bend in it… 😅
The smarter version of this idea is the turn signal comes on automatically in the direction you turn.
It’s not. The point of a turning signal is to give a warning to fellow drivers in advance. Turning it on right when you’re turning is way too late. Just learn to drive properly for fucks sake!
The smarter version of a dumb idea is still a dumb idea. No one is advocating seriously for any of this because of the obvious flaws.
haha imagine… cars having brakes! LOL wtf amirite?
Instantaneous, lifelong driving bans for any driver who is found to be texting or intoxicated behind the wheel.
Realistically, they still drive. They just don’t have insurance so the second person they hit is fucked.
I respectfully disagree. People, who depend on cars for their job would lose the license and their job, making them drink more.
I respectfully disagree. People that cannot bring up the discipline to drive sober and keep their attention on the road, even if their jobs would depend on it, shouldn’t have the privilege of being allowed to operate a machine that can easily kill when making a mistake or misjudgment.
Respectfully, so what? If you drive for your livelihood then it’s your own damn fault if you get banned from it for doing something illegal.
You spectacularly missed the point of DUI law. Society couldn’t give two shits if someone is drinking themselves to an early grave. It’s when they endanger other people that it becomes an issue. That’s why it’s driving under the influence, not existing.
Many countries will judge a DUI induced kill a murder, because the person who chooses to drink and drive knows that killing someone is a probable outcome and chose to do it anyway.
Agreed, and I respectfully disagree with everyone else replying to you.
Relying on your car for your job is a much wider criterion than driving as your job. In car-centric places like the US (outside of the big cities) that’s probably 99% of the population. Couple that with the piss poor social safety net and losing your license literally means starvation.
This still doesn’t mean I endorse or agree with people driving distracted in any way. If revoking someone’s license meant removing them from the road but not destroying their life, I would do that in a heartbeat.
Now that would make about 95% of all BMW drivers wonder why their steering is broken…
It’s not just BMWs anymore. Probably only about half the people on the road with me use turn signals and it doesn’t matter what they drive.
Sadly yes
I still like to think the thing from Fight Club where they blow up all the central banks would be cool.
The idea of “destroy the banks and free everyone” is in so many movies and shows. Sneakers, Mr. Robot, Fight Club. Hell, even Tuvok had a gang of teenage hackers “ethically distribute” money in SeaQuest.
I’m destroying war, corruption. I’m ripping the heart out of greed! [as they both battle to hack into and out of the world bank]
It does have some historical precedent. In the ancient Near East it was common for all debts to be destroyed every decade or so.
Mr Robot definitely had my favorite execution of the idea. Destroying the tape backups with their own environmental control system was just the best. I still feel bad about the nice security guard guy though :(
That movie is wilder than I remember….
We don’t talk about it…
If you brake check, the car will eject you through the sunroof. If you don’t have a sunroof, you do now.
Always puzzled me, let’s say the dude behind failed the check and hit your car, what the hell did you gain from this?
At least in the US, a lot of fault hinges on rear impact. Not worth a damn, however, with how many dashcams people have now. These idiots still try though.
Fun fact, in a lot of states even if they slam the brakes if you hit them you are still at fault. You should have been at a safe following distance, and no one knows what that actually means. People will argue that a distance of less than 2 seconds is totally fine and safe because they do it all the time. But a safe following distance means that at your current speed of travel if the car in front of you came to an impossibly instantaneous stop you should have time to notice and stop without hitting them.
At freeway speeds this is a minimum of 4 seconds following distance in dry condition. As in when the back of their car passes a sign that you should be able to start counting Mississippi’s and not reach that sign with the front of your car for at least 4 Mississippi’s
Now, if they come up from behind you swerve over and then instantly slam on the brakes obviously you’re fine(if you have a dash cam) there was nothing you could have done, but if you have just been riding their ass and then they slam on the brakes? You’re totally a fault as far as the law in many states is concerned
That’s exactly the mechanism being exploited, yes.
Oooh, I didn’t understand what you were talking about until the last paragraph. I always thought “brake checking” was a specific move when you change lanes in front of the car and slam on the brakes, just a type of road rage. So, when you said that you’d be at fault if you hit them in the rear, I was really confused.
On the other hand, if you “ride their ass” and they check you, that’s completely fine in my book. Personally, I always keep the safe distance and it makes me really nervous when someone follows up close as I like to be in control of the road situation around me. An animal could run onto the road, something could fall out of a nearby truck etc. I mean, what is the person behind going to do? Anyways, I don’t usually check them, but rather slow down gradually so they also have to, and then speed up. They usually get mad, but if you’re going to drive like a dick, expect someone to react.
This isn’t true, if they can stop at an impossibly fast speed, why can’t you? Let’s say they stop in 3 seconds, that means their brakes can get them from 65 to 0 in 3 seconds. If you’re 2 seconds behind them, you have 5 seconds to stop. If you react within 2 seconds, you should be able to stop in 3 seconds. The only reason you would not be able to, is if you didn’t do maintenance on your brakes,
There’s almost no person in the world who can’t react in 2 seconds.
What if they slam into a truck at highway speeds? Instantly they’ve gone ftom 100km/h to 0, and you have to stop your car before you slam into them. How much space do you need between you in this scenario?
With 2 seconds worth of space, you have about 55 meters between you, and a normal reaction time would be about 250ms, which leaves you 1.75 seconds and 48 meters to come to a complete stop. And hopefully the person behind you reacts accordingly and doesn’t slam into you as well.
This is the answer, and is exactly what happens when you see those accidents involving like 6 Plus cars. Too many people riding way too close together at high speeds and none of them were able to stop in time when the first car suddenly stopped
- The front of the car has a lot more expensive stuff to damage.
- The back car is usually called at fault so has a lower chance of changing this
- I knew an asshole who kept his trailer hitch in, just so he could potentially do more damage when brake checking someone
It’s their fault, so life insurance pays up.
Even so, it’s still a huge waste of time to get it covered and lose your car for days or weeks
??? Life insurance is the thing that pays money if you die young (and don’t do it intentionally). Assuming that’s what you’re getting out of it you don’t have to worry anymore.
How would the car know the difference between that and breaking for an emergency?
I don’t know, that’s someone else’s job. I’m just the idea guy.
“All bullets should cost $5,000”
– Chris Rock
(updated with accurate quote)
It’s such a lib solution. “Let’s make sure guns are inaccessible except to rich people”.
That’s part of the original joke, and also why the idea falls under “dumb”.
Well the conservative solutions have been working out fucking great, haven’t they?
Have you considered a leftist solution?
I see you’ve worked in military procurement.
First time I’m hearing of this, but it makes perfect sense! Another angle would be to reduce the tax in exchange for harm reducing behavior like taking a voluntary safety class.
We could fix so many problems with mandatory training.
Yes you have the right to keep and bear arms. On your own property. You want to take them somewhere else? Mandatory training and licensing. Just like we do with cars. At a bare minimum.
And I say this as a veteran and gun owner. The absolute lack of even having to know the basics of gun safety is appalling to me.
Most states do have mandatory classes, shooting tests, and exams to get a license to carry.
And license-holders commit almost no crime, statistically-speaking. People who go out of their way and spend extra money to comply with the law tend to be law-abiding.
My hot take that I’m sure I’ll get buried for is that in the US, proper firearm safety and training should be a mandatory middle school class. There’s just too many guns. Even if you don’t keep them in your house, your kid’s friend might. Even if some kid joins a gang and has a shootout with another gang, at least they won’t just spray and pray and kill an innocent bystander. I see no downsides except that progressives get apopleptic whenever anyone mentions guns.
Agreed. We learn CPR when though we don’t plan on heart attacks. People should be taught basic firearm safety.
Stop, drop, and roll caused me to seriously overestimate the number of times I would be on fire in my life.
I hate making something like that mandatory, but another benefit would be to reduce the stigma of guns in general.
It always surprises me how frequently I hear from otherwise pretty open minded people some version of, “I don’t own guns and I’ve never needed a gun. Therefore nobody anywhere needs one or should have one for any reason and I’d fully support completely banning them, and if that violates the constitution, so what, it’s what I want.”
Further, gun education would reduce the ideas and legislation to restrict guns based on nonsense. There’s a lot of fear of “scary guns” based on little more than superficial appearance, and I even see a lot of ideas from people claiming to want compromise, but it usually comes down to one of a few things: some arbitrary delineation between guns they’re okay with because they don’t look scary, something that would do little more than make criminals out of otherwise law abiding people, or depriving law abiding citizens of constitutionally guaranteed rights without due process.
As a license holder I’m well aware of all that. You typically only need a license to carry concealed. At least in my state, open carry is legal almost everywhere and requires nothing. It’s those people that need the training.
The real way to do it is require a license, along with recurring training requirements, to BUY and own gun, not just carry one. But the NRA and the politicians they own have a shit fit over any reasonable barrier to gun ownership. They are perfectly ok with sacrificing school children over the issue.
I’m from Texas, where they removed most licensing requirements and it’s idiotic. You still need one to carry on a college campus and certain other state-owned facilities, but it’s mostly a free-for-all.
I still keep my License to Carry up to date because I think I should have to maintain a license. It also let’s me skip the security line in some state facilities (including the Capitol) where license holders can carry.
I used to also shoot weekly during lunch break at nearby range too to keep my skills up. Now I only go a few times a year because a buying a case of 9mm just about requires taking out a second mortgage. I also rarely carry, since in business casual it’s hard to conceal anything but a pocket 380, and I’m so bad with my LCP I’d have trouble shooting my car while sitting inside it.
We already have the legal mechanism necessary to enact mandatory training.
The militia is “the whole of the people”. Congress is empowered under Article I Section 8 parts 15 and 16 to “prescribe discipline” (read: “training standards”) for the militia. They don’t have the power to mandate training only to those people who choose to keep and bear arms, but they do have the power to mandate training for everyone.
So, let’s have a high school, senior-year class on safe handling. More importantly, let’s have a class on the laws regulating the use of force, so everyone is aware of when we can use force against another, and when force may be used against us.
Careful there buddy, you’re getting dangerously close to preventing uneducated morons from buying semi-auto rifles to keep in their pickup trucks.
Semi-automatic just means you don’t need to reload between every shot, it doesn’t mean burst fire (that’s still considered automatic)
But what about fully semi automatic, huh?
Thank you for explaining to this former infantryman how military rifles work. 😂
What’s wrong with semi-automatic then?
I’m all for this. I mean, gunpowder is not particularly difficult to manufacture. If the legal sources of ammunition charge $5000 per bullet, I could make a fortune with blackmarket black powder.
(Ok, I’m not actually “all for this”…)
Star Trek should be required viewing for all world leaders.
That sounds like it would be a good idea, but there is a strange but significant cadre of right-wing Star Trek fans. I think they just pay attention to the pew pew space battles and ignore everything else or something.
I honestly see why. While I love star trek, it has a very strong power structure “with the right people in power”, as if power itself wouldn’t corrupt people. The admirals may not always be right in the beginning but they accept their wrongs and have no bad intentions and the heroes are always celebrated by the establishment.
This can be understood as “this is the perfect world where even authorities are good” or as “I told you, authorities are the good guys”. I, as a left libertarian, prefer Farscape (and still watch every star trek show)
Exactly! The TOS/TNG era are “benevolent authoritarianism” and conservatives, of course, see themselves as the good guys. “If things only went our way, our society would be perfect, just like Star Trek!”
I think Edington said it best. Paraphrasing, “[The Federation] are even worse than the Borg. At least they tell you about their plans for assimilation. You’re more insidious you assimilate people I think they don’t even know.”
I, as a left libertarian, would probably end up in the Maquis
What’'s left liberterian even means?
Anarchist or anarchist adjacent
They’re the OG libertarians. The right explicitly stole the term and celebrated doing so.
In short, they’re a branch of anarchism.
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So neo liberal economic is just a right wing spinoff of libertarianism?
I wouldn’t call it a spinoff but rather a ripoff. There might be few parallels but basically left Libertarians are against all hierarchies, including the state. Right Libertarian are against the state and want to build state like structures but privatized.
I never thought of it that way, but you do have a point. I still think it’s more pew pew than anything else though.
Steve Shives (I hope I got the spelling correct) made a video why conservatives like star trek and a part of it is they see it as stories of other worlds and by doing so ignore all the allegorical implications. “A planet where people have the false gender assigned to them at birth? How truly alien!”
And to be fair: escapism is a legitimate goal of scifi and media in general. You watch scifi to enter a different world, for at least an hour a week be free of all your problems in the here and now.
Sure, but I still genuinely believe the Gospel of Picard would have a net positive effect. Far moreso than the bible, which a good portion already have read.
I can’t help bit notice all these “debate me” chuds talk exactly like Gene Roddenberry’s writting style. Why does every conversation or discussion devlove into “the logic of your argument” “you misunderstood the logic of what i am saying”.
IMO conservatives are either Klingons, Ferengi, or deluded enough to think they’d be chosen to join the Q Continuum. And Libertarians think they’re Romulans or Cardassians but aren’t actually that organized or clever.
Khan-accerationists?
Even worse, I’ve run into fans who think the Terrans had the right idea.
Considering the Terran Empire ended up being conquered, this tracks with them idolizing other losers, like Nazis and the Confederacy.
That type of person will arrive at the conclusion “see, it’s okay to do eugenics and have nuclear wars, since humanity will turn out okay anyways”.
You get slapped across the face if you litter.
I always wished there was a karma system where every time you litter, when you get home what you littered is in your bed waiting for you. I would love the result for CEOs whose companies dump oil or toxic waste.
Yeah but they just order the dumping, the toxic waste appears are the lowly worker who physically dumps it in my mind
Nah, the karma system would know who is ultimately responsible
