mctoasterson

joined 1 year ago
[–] mctoasterson@reddthat.com 5 points 7 hours ago (2 children)

Yes I'm not saying there was zero violence in society. There were things like Al Capone's St. Valentines Day Massacre, Bonnie and Clyde, the Kansas City Union Station shootout, etc. but these were extreme outliers in society at large and were international news because of it.

What is relatively new is the concept of an average student or worker becoming disgruntled and deciding to mass murder peers in a singular incident, usually with some grandiose manifesto attached to it.

[–] mctoasterson@reddthat.com 4 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago) (4 children)

Last report I saw was the suspect left an "AK47 type rifle" with a scope, at a vantage point 300-500 yards from Trump's location at the time.

Now granted journalists don't tend to know a damn thing about firearms, or ask good follow up questions so who knows, it could be a DMR type of rifle like an SVD that the uninformed would mistake for an AK.

But if it's just a standard 7.62 x 39 AK pattern rifle, scoped or not, that's ... very optimistic at that range.

[–] mctoasterson@reddthat.com 38 points 17 hours ago (20 children)

Something definitely broke in society around that time though, and "access to guns" only describes an outlet or mechanism, and not the underlying problem.

Pre-1968, civilians could buy full auto machineguns. At one point in the 1930s the Sears catalog would send a full auto Tommy Gun straight to your house via mail order with no background check. And yet in those eras the idea of a grand spectacle suicide/homicide event would have been absolutely unthinkable, even among the most disposessed in society.

The root problem is something more like cultural narcissm, for lack of a better word.

The concept of a deep cynical anti-hero move like publicly murdering pseudo-random aquaintances is a relatively modern problem. Maybe we need to do a better job suppressing "main character vibes" and narcissism, the acting out and sociopathy that is prevalent now.

[–] mctoasterson@reddthat.com 0 points 21 hours ago

Imagine thinking that platform only "went bad" recently.

[–] mctoasterson@reddthat.com 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Pretend you like, and are interested in the meaning of, her unnecessary wrist tattoo. That's good for at least 5 minutes of conversation.

[–] mctoasterson@reddthat.com 23 points 1 day ago

Wife: "I bet he's thinking about other women."

Husband: "Marvel 'nerds' are now just normies."

[–] mctoasterson@reddthat.com 8 points 1 day ago

I have often said (to mostly deaf ears) that Fantastic Mr. Fox is probably his best film, and one of my favorite films period. Glad to see it so high on one of these lists.

[–] mctoasterson@reddthat.com 4 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Purely strategically, the best bet is for NATO to fund and lend/lease materiel to Ukraine sufficient to make the Russian effort protracted and expensive. Maybe Ukraine can solidify some territorial gains in Russian oblasts enough to have bargaining chips. From there it is just a game of finding acceptable off-ramps. Maybe a treaty gets signed that trades territory back to something like the "original" borders circa the beginning to the current conflict.

Russia clearly doesn't care about personnel losses (and historically never has). But maybe if it drags on, the conflict will become economically and politically costly enough that Putin is looking for offramps.

[–] mctoasterson@reddthat.com 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

This sounds awesome. It uses the native YouTube app? Or YouTube in the TV web browser?

[–] mctoasterson@reddthat.com 10 points 2 days ago (4 children)

The temp is low but it is a vacuum. Vacuums are bad at dissipating heat. Think of the vacuum walled drinking vessels. They are so efficient at keeping beverages hot/cool because the vacuum insulates the majority of the surface area that heat can move across.

Likewise a cooling tank of water (typical nuclear reactor design) itself surrounded by vacuum, will not cool efficiently at all. Presumably they'd have to use piping to circulate the water over a large surface area of some other medium like the moon rock itself.

[–] mctoasterson@reddthat.com 2 points 2 days ago

This lady looks like a GoT style witch. I guess Trump is Stannis in that scenario, only with less charisma.

[–] mctoasterson@reddthat.com 76 points 3 days ago (6 children)

This is where "piracy" is actually the industry's saving grace. Decades or centuries later, will record labels exist and be well-managed (and flush with cash) enough to preserve archival copies of their artists catalogs? Probably not.

Will obscure weirdos exist all around the world on Usenet, IRC, or seeding torrents? Possibly.

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