Guns are a lot like a drug addiction. They feel good at first for fighting off the British, but eventually everyone gets one and starts shooting each other. Trying to take them away is like trying to get a needle from a heroin addict.
Politically it’s impossible because of the control money has in our elections. And even if they made all guns illegal overnight, you just sent 400 million firearms directly to the black market… bad things would happen.
Police are important too, no one really wants to live in a society where no laws are enforced, but I would agree that the source of violence really ultimately gets back to inequality and lack of democratic representation in representing the interests of those who have no power in the existing system.
Obviously that would start with getting money out of politics. People with opportunities and possibilities typically don’t join gangs or kill thousands of people when they have stability in it’s place. Most people want that, but can’t due to a lack of representation in our government.
I actually agree with some of your point.
Banning guns doesn’t seem to be a winning policy politically anyway. It would be the most direct resolution but those sort of ideas almost never work in theory because of peoples fear.
I think we should go even deeper into why gangs exist to begin with and it’s simply economically advantageous to do crime versus the alternative exploitive minimum wage job. And that we need to address income inequality completely before any major gun policy changes can happen.
Although gangs aren’t the only shooters (probably actually a minority for many mass shootings). What would you propose for people who are just crazy? Mental health funding, but really that comes back around to it being nearly impossible to prevent all mental health issues with 8 billion people. It seems a lot easier just to get rid of the guns.
I know I circled back there… I guess there really is no good solution, lol
I’d like that as well, but do you think there wouldn’t be any public policy to improve peoples lives?
It seems like Biden has done really nothing but people in the US forget what it was like 4 years ago.
As well as a few other things.
this is probably a really bad idea, but I feel like quality discussion only happens when minority opinions change those of the majority for the better of all.
Like within realistic expectations. My first thought is renewal (hopefully permanently, at least until single payer) of the expanded healthcare marketplace subsidies that are set to expire next year if republicans gain a majority.
Would a public option be on the table if they gained a super majority?
I realize I’m in /c/antiwork so it goes without saying it’d be nice if we have universal healthcare without all this baloney money being siphoned to these criminal insurance companies. Just trying to help anyone out in a similar situation. ;)
If you make less than $103,000 / year (family of 3) and pay more than 9.5% of your household gross income on healthcare premiums, you will likely save thousands by using your state’s healthcare marketplace. You are likely eligible because they fixed the family glitch, now the 9.5% applies to the cost for family rather than individual coverage as before.
Although the subsidies will likely end after 2025 if dems don’t retain a majority in house/senate.
It could easily save you thousands of dollars a year… Like I’m 100% of it… Ask me how I know, lol. Please look into it. I think you have to wait til open enrollment in December? or when your healthcare renews annually. You might be able to do it immediately due to “hardship”. I don’t know the specifics of your situation but I’m pretty sure you and a lot of other people here would save a lot of money. I would talk with a healthcare_gov or your state agency agent, they get paid by the gov’t to help you through it at no cost to you. You can also get a low HDHP and get your own HSA to essentially pay no taxes for medical expenditures. I hear fidelity is good, due to no fees.
Speaking of which, is there an active financial advice community on Lemmy (like that old site that should not be named) like /c/financialplanning or something like that?
That’s what high beams are for… Cars don’t need to light the dark side of the moon, drivers only need to see the roadway in front of them. Both provide ample illumination, it’s just one allows you to see the color of a zit on a mouse 3 miles away, which is entirely not necessary for safe night driving.
And I was saying that some higher end incandescent lamps are equivalent to some LEDs. I know there are LEDs that far exceed the lumens of traditional lamps.
reads title … 😮
reads article
Of course, this expected time-to-decay has only shifted from 10794 years to 10790 years
ಠ_ಠ
I agree that she should be more clear on demanding a ceasefire (although she did actually partly demand just that in March, at least for 6 weeks - and again during the debate), and that this war could probably be stopped if she made such demands. The current US administration is working to end the fighting, so not voting for the party that is actually working to end the war is at the detriment to the people of Gaza.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said two weeks ago that 90 percent of a ceasefire deal had been agreed upon.
Washington has been working for months with mediators Qatar and Egypt to try and bring Israel and Hamas to a final agreement.
Biden laid out a three-phase ceasefire proposal on May 31 saying that Israel had agreed to it.
Now compare that to Trump:
“From the start, Harris has worked to tie Israel’s hand behind its back, demanding an immediate ceasefire, always demanding ceasefire,” Trump said, adding it “would only give Hamas time to regroup and launch a new October 7 style attack.” Trump added: “I will give Israel the support that it needs to win but I do want them to win fast.”
So he would basically allow a full scale genocide, no holds barred.
That being said though, this is likely not going to end anytime soon due to the massive pager/radio attack on Hezbollah that’s likely going to make this whole quagmire even worse. And I 100% agree with you that the US/Kamala/Biden should put Israel in it’s place before this whole powder keg turns into WWIII, which is not outside the realm of possibilities to anyone who has studied history and the role multiple global conflicts played in the past to lead to world war.
It seems to me like we didn’t have this problem twenty years ago. If blinding LEDs are the problem, why not just not allow them anymore for headlights? It takes 5 seconds to pop in a new incandescent headlight on cars that have them, and well made ones can last 20+ years depending on the construction. Visibility is good and equivalent to some LEDs with higher end lamps, and it doesn’t create a superbly unnatural light that impairs the other drivers, pedestrians, or nature. It would also reduce light pollution.
On very rare occasion, the progressive step forward, actually looks a lot like the road backwards. It would take a long time to implement, but anything worth doing is worth taking the time to do it right.
Auto sensing technology is going to be more of a glaring headache in 20 years, when you have half of the cars with failing sensors and everyone getting blinded even worse. Adaptive Driving Beams (ADB) are not a solution, it does not properly address the issues of glare, and it will likely only make the problem worse by further removing human interaction from headlight controls.
Oh you can’t change apathy really. I was just suggesting if privacy friendly tech (ie: Linux) is to go mainstream, that it would have to be “easier” than what is currently out there to gain mainstream popularity.
Desktop linux is almost there, but the general population mostly uses mobile devices now, and phone Linux seems to be a dying prospect.
everytime I tell someone there are alternatives to using Google/Apple/etc their response is, “but it’s just so easy”. I guess you can call my view of that jaded, but people really don’t care? I mean I’m not trying to be defeatest at all, it’s just trying to accurately appraise people’s apathy to apply a proper resolution to the problem.
The solution has to make it “easy” for people because that is what they expect of technology now.
No one cares about this stuff but techies/Lemmy. Regular people don’t care, like at all. They know tech companies do this stuff but if convenience>privacy, most people take the former every time to make life easier. Data privacy is not a tangeable thing in most people’s minds.
There would have to be some sort of cataslismic event to wake people up enough for people to do anything meaningful. I don’t know what that would be, but I hope someone figures that out sooner rather than later.
Please remove if this sort of thing is not allowed. Trying to foster a discussion of various policy issues from week to week.
I’ve been seeing this more lately actually as a trend. I think policy makers (well at least some local and state) are getting smart to the idea that rezoning, while NIMBY’s hate it, is really smart city wide policy. Reduces need for spending public funds on additional housing and reduces road maintenance and public services that are required to upkeep a car dependent city.
I haven’t bought anything from Amazon in 10 years. It’s full of crap now, and the legit stuff is just thrown in to a bin in their warehouse for scanning by UPC, so it’s 50/50 if it’s an untraceable counterfeit. And the counterfeiters are good, so you probably won’t notice it’s fake until a couple years later.
US is a flawed-democracy, EU, Canada and Australia are currently the leading democrocies. That all could change but US is not the best in that area.
https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index
I’d argue it doesn’t have to be that way.
Lemmy is currently one of the few places online that can break free of media narratives because no corporation owns or runs it. It’s all volunteers. It could be made into a great place for open policy discussion, that serves the public interest.
People are so used to the vitriol promoted by 24/7 corporate media that it will take a long time to change that, but you have to start somewhere. You have to chip away at their influence, otherwise things will only be worse in 20 years.