There’s always a possibilty for the mechanism to trigger if you accidentally bump the gun

Ah, a Sig owner, I see.

Finally, a fellow Glock hater!

Two things that should be completely unacceptable in a modern firearm:

• Having no safety mechanism whatsoever. (Trigger dingus doesn’t count.)

• Requiring a trigger pull (or even putting your finger inside the trigger guard) for any other reason than intending to fire a shot.

And there are so many excellent modern pistols out there that don’t break these two rules. Pistols that do everything a Glock can do, but without these glaring safety issues. So why is the Glock still the ‘default’ choice? It’s especially egregious to see it as a recommendation to novice shooters. Dealing with these safety issues should require an expert. Putting a gun with these issues into the hands of a new shooter is just asking for trouble.

It could also be a case of a prosecutor who agrees with the shooter. (A right-wing extremist prosecutor, who has ever heard of such a thing?)

In that case, the prosecutor might feel pressured to bring the case before a grand jury, just to make it look like he’s doing his job. But he could deliberately throw the case, neglect to mention important evidence, etc, etc, and fail to get an indictment. That way, he gets to shut down the prosecution without making it look like it was his choice. Since grand jury proceedings are sealed, nobody would be able to know he deliberately sandbagged and failed on purpose. Then he gets to make a public statement about how he tried, but the grand jury said no, so his hands are tied.

So it could be a way for a malicious prosecutor to kill/bury the case without looking like he’s deliberately letting a murderer go free.

They don’t do anything involving school shootings.

Not true. They’ll stand around and blockade the entrance to prevent parents from going in to rescue their children.

Luigi should try this defense.

“I just wanted to show him my cool gun, but then it went off, all on its own. Complete accident!”

If I wanted it to taste bad and bitter, sure.

Plus, no chargebacks.

If a customer gets cash from the ATM and then gives you the cash, they can’t later try to claw that cash back by denying the charge.

They could already easily track your face because your aunt uploaded a picture of you to Facebook and tagged you in it.

What they’re trying to do here is connect your face/identity with your Discord account, so that they can more easily track down dissidents who say naughty things online through Discord.

For me, the permanent cure for hiccups was being in the hospital with broken ribs. Getting a case of the hiccups when you have broken ribs is not fun.

With pain as my teacher, I quickly learned how to stop hiccups with willpower alone. And I’ve been able to do it ever since. I get one hiccup, tell myself “that’s the last one”, and it is.

or if I should try to find a good quality version instead, since what I usually find is in the supermarket where it’s almost universally cheap junk

Or take the opportunity to check the second-hand market for it! Craigslist/FB marketplace, thrift shops, ebay (used, private seller), garage sales, etc. Tends to be a lot cheaper, great for the environment (because less resources needed for new production and less stuff in landfills), and keeps your money away from evil corporations.

Why would you ever have a backlog in the first place? Why would you buy a game and then not play it?

Put the games you want to play in the future on your wishlist. When you’re ready to play a new game, pick one from your wishlist, buy it, play it.

The games aren’t going away, they’re not going to run out of digital copies. Why would you ever buy it before you’re ready to play it? It doesn’t matter whether it’s sitting in your wishlist or your hard drive, so let them sit in your wishlist, where it’s a lot cheaper for them to sit.

(Okay, sure, games go on sale on steam occasionally, and you might want to pick one up while it’s on sale. Even then, though … games tend to get cheaper over time as they get older. Just waiting and buying it later might ultimately be cheaper than the ‘on sale’ price.)

Man, I still eat like shit, but when I switched to drinking only water (instead of mainly soda/juice), I was easily able to lose the excess weight that had been building up.

No other changes. Just drink water. Only water. Water is good.

I keep a pitcher of cold, filtered water in the mini-fridge by my desk. That shit is delicious. And I don’t even miss anything. If you’re struggling with the switch to water, get yourself some good water.

Yep. Just like the fuckers walking around with $2500 sunglasses.

Those sunglasses don’t do anything that a $20 pair can’t do. And they don’t even look all that different.

The important part is that they enable absolutely disgusting consumerist snobbery, allowing some very vapid people to think that they’re better than other people because they have the expensive sunglasses.

In just about any kind of product you can think of, there are brands catering to this kind of conspicuous consumption.

A lot of it comes down to a mix of snobbishness, sunk cost fallacy, and tribalism.

You can’t admit that your $5,000 pair of headphones sound exactly the same as a $300 pair, because:

• You’d no longer be able to pretend that you’re better than the people who have $300 headphones.

• You’d have to admit to yourself that you completely wasted $4,700.

• You’d have to realize that the tight-knit community you’ve formed with other $10k headphone people isn’t really bettor or even really distinct from communities of people with $300 headphones.

Same here. I block all kinds of communities, often just because they’re not relevant to my interests.

I wish I knew a way to block a community without having to visit that community first, directly from my front page where a post from that community is showing up.

the question of whether evolutionary pressure on the timescale of human generations can keep up with our technological advancement

As long as people exist who could/would refuse it, and as long as there are enough of them to form a viable breeding population, evolution will bring the species through it.

Waiting for random beneficial mutations usually takes a long, long time. But if the beneficial mutations are already in a population, the population can adapt extremely quickly. If all the individuals without that mutation died off quickly (or at least didn’t produce offspring) then that mutation would be in basically 100% of the population within one generation. A rather smaller generation than the previous ones, sure, but they would have less competition and more room to grow. (Though, thanks to recessive genetics, you’re likely to still see individuals popping up without that beneficial mutation occasionally for a long time to come. But those throwbacks will become more and more rare as time goes on.)

That’s a vast oversimplification, though. Because it’s very unlikely that the ability to resist the temptation of ‘wireheading’ comes down to the presence or absence of a single particular gene.

Since mouse studies have already been done, it would be interesting to do it with a large, long-running experiment on an entire breeding population of mice, to see if there are any mice that are capable of surviving and reproducing under those conditions (and if so, do they show any evidence of evolving to become more resistant?)