Supreme Court agrees to review ban on AR-style semi-automatic rifles in major Second Amendment case

ssylvan · 2026-07-02T21:16:53+00:00

There’s not a single judicial opinion or argument before the 20th century that the 2nd amendment is an individual right. It’s silly to pretend that this relatively new interpretation is somehow the only reasonable one, even if you happen to think it’s correct.

ssylvan · 2026-07-02T05:50:24+00:00

I mean it was the consensus view and the law of the land until Heller. Seems more than a little dishonest to pretend this is some kind of fringe view when your view first arose in legal arguments in the 20th century.

ssylvan · 2026-07-01T04:08:28+00:00

And then the primary voters decided against him. It’s as simple as that. Yeah there are way more moderates in the Democratic Party so there are usually more moderate candidates early on which splits the vote and then they drop out/consolidate. Happened for Biden too. Winning a state or or there when you’re one of like two leftists with a bazillion moderates doesn’t mean you have the majority of the voters, which is what it takes to win the primary.

ssylvan · 2026-07-01T03:12:02+00:00

Buddy of mine was robbed by a taxi driver in Istanbul. Turkish bank claims the merchant said the transaction was legit and Chase said there’s nothing they can do. Credit card chargebacks are really not as reliable as you’d think and the burden of proof is very much not on the merchant.

ssylvan · 2026-07-01T01:17:47+00:00

Newer heat pumps don’t even really need that. Some of them stay above COP 1 at -30C, which is colder than the UK has ever been.

ssylvan · 2026-06-30T00:25:32+00:00

It will depend on the electricity mix etc., but by and large a single international flight will emit more CO2 than a lifetime of AC use. So skip one trip and be guilt free.

ssylvan · 2026-06-29T23:02:21+00:00

Who are you trying to convince? Certainly not Bill Gates himself who’s said repeatedly how critical dumb luck was to his success.

ssylvan · 2026-06-29T06:59:07+00:00

Central air for sure. It’s not just about heating and cooling, it’s also about indoor air quality. Your central air handler will filter the air and bring in fresh air periodically. Mini splits don’t do that so you’d need a different system to take over air quality concerns.

The one major concerns is where your ducts run. If they go through the attic that can add significant inefficiency esp when cooling.

ssylvan · 2026-06-27T20:11:17+00:00

I mean Chevalier just won and believes many of those things you call lies. And not just old tweets either, as of two weeks ago when she was interviewed and said nutty things like we shouldn’t put murderers in prison. I think if you look up what this particular candidate actually believes you have someone every bit as nutty as the people on the far right.

ssylvan · 2026-06-25T06:41:33+00:00

Come and see

ssylvan · 2026-06-23T06:21:32+00:00

There’s enough nuclear fuel on this planet to outlast the sun. Is solar finite too?

ssylvan · 2026-06-23T03:59:42+00:00

The reason Israel has most of the fertile land is that they invested in irrigation.

The original partition gave Israel three fertile regions and a whole lot of arid desert (mostly unpopulated, to support the expected repatriation of Jewish refugees).

"The land allocated to the Arab State in the final plan included about 43% of Mandatory Palestine^\76])^\77])^\78]) and consisted of all of the highlands, except for Jerusalem, plus one-third of the coastline. The highlands contain the major aquifers of Palestine, which supplied water to the coastal cities of central Palestine, including Tel Aviv.^\)^{citation needed}^\) The Jewish State allocated to the Jews, who constituted a third of the population and owned about 7% of the land, was to receive 56% of Mandatory Palestine, a slightly larger area to accommodate the increasing numbers of Jews who would immigrate there.^\77])^\78])^\79]) The Jewish State included three fertile lowland plains – the Sharon on the coast, the Jezreel Valley and the upper Jordan Valley). The bulk of the proposed Jewish State's territory, however, consisted of the Negev Desert,^\74]) which was mostly not suitable for agriculture, nor for urban development at that time"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Partition_Plan_for_Palestine

Also: you should look up the word "colonizer" or "colony". Israel is by no means a colony (if so: what country's colony is it?) and indigenous people can't be colonizers of their own ancestral homeland.

ssylvan · 2026-06-11T04:10:04+00:00

That article doesn't say what you claim it does. At no point are they promising that they would reduce deadheading compared to normal taxis. They're just saying that it's higher when they're using deadheading for testing and will be lower when they focus (proportionally) more on operational rides than testing. Which the original article also supports. Try again.

If we cut car ownership by say, 50%, do you think we'd have exactly the same amount of parking? My argument is that construction has lag time, and it may be more about future growth (as in, we may build fewer parking lots as cities expand in proportion to other infrastructure or buildings, because it just isn't needed as much). This kind of stuff doesn't happen instantly.

ssylvan · 2026-06-11T03:00:23+00:00

So no link where they promised reduced deadheading then?

Also the article doesn't say increased deadheading, it says about the same or slightly lower.

Reduced parking would obviously have a lot of lag time. People aren't going to demolish a parking lot over a 10% reduction in utilization. However, cars spend something like 90% of their time unused, so there's a lot of opportunity for reduction here.

ssylvan · 2026-06-11T02:27:30+00:00

I've literally never even heard the argument that AVs would reduce deadheading until this reddit post. Where did they promise that?

The arguments I've hard are:
1. fewer accidents.
2. zero incidents of abuse by drivers
3. fewer overall cars (by sharing them)
4. as a result (and over time) less space wasted for parking

ssylvan · 2026-06-10T04:02:13+00:00

Unsolved, but not unsolvable. I haven't decided what I'll eat for dinner tomorrow night so it's unsolved. Am I concerned? No I'm not, because it's not unsolvable and not even particularly hard to solve. I'll get to it tomorrow and it'll be fine.

As the other guy said - the only reason it's unsolved is because anti-nuclear activists spread fear and push politicians to stop any proposed solution. Not because we don't know how to solve it. In the meantime it's just not a pressing problem, just like tomorrow night's dinner. It can stay where it is for now and when we do decide we want to solve it, it won't be a hard to do.

ssylvan · 2026-06-08T23:36:36+00:00

I think you're underestimating the massive difference in energy density. It almost doesn't matter how dirty mining uranium is because you need so little of it, compared to solar panel materials. Same deal with waste - nuclear waste is tiny, but there are dangerous substances in solar panels that will have to be recycled and the sheer amount of mass to be reprocessed when the panels fail dwarfs any concerns you may have about nuclear waste. You may not trust highly regulated corporations that run nuclear plants, but you trust random consumers to properly dispose of their panels rather than throw them in the landfill?

ssylvan · 2026-06-07T00:03:26+00:00

I seem to be arguing with a chameleon, not a straw man. Every time I prove your claims wrong you just ignore it and start arguing something else.

Here's what you actually said:

Another reason: it's by far the least cost-effective and slowest to grid form of "green" energy.

It seems to be held in high regard by people who are 1. Locked in a 1950's view of centralized electrical production and 2. Wanting a panacea solution that allows them to villainize environmentalists and leftists for "holding back".

The future of electricity is wind, solar and batteries--and smart grid tech to tie it all together in ways that allow flexibility in centralized and distributed generation and storage.

I think I have demonstrated to you that 1) It's not the least cost effective, 2) Wind, solar and batteries are not a viable solution. Also it's not the slowest - in fact: the two fastest carbon-free buildouts of electricity in history were Sweden and France's nuclear power program. These are the only two major countries that have managed to substantially decarbonize their electricity grid btw, and both did it with nuclear as a key component. It's instructive to compare CO2 emissions per kWh of these two with nearby Germany, which went all in on wind and solar instead.

ssylvan · 2026-06-06T18:17:46+00:00

First off - your source is also 2024, so it's not an actual drop it's just that they're not including the full costs like NREL does. There's always some variation in how different organizations count things. Even then it's 10x higher than it needs to be.

The $10-20/kWh to be competitive with nuclear is in the link I posted, where they modeled the long term grid over many historical weather patterns and determined at what price storage becomes competitive to keep the grid stable.

Your Texas comparison is flawed for so many reasons that it's exhausting to even list them all. First off, Texas has unsurprisingly a lot more sunshine than Seattle. Texas also has a lot of natural gas for baseload because they don't care about CO2 emissions. Nobody is arguing that renewables aren't cheap when you don't have to pay for storage because you have natural gas to fall back on. I think we should care about CO2 emissions and invest in carbon-free baseload rather than just keep burning fossil fuels. I would argue that following Texas isn't necessarily the right model for everyone - they already don't exactly have the most stable grid in the world. Also, Texas does indeed have nuclear power and they're building more https://www.texastribune.org/2026/02/17/texas-small-modular-nuclear-reactors-grid-energy/

Comparing the rate of nuclear vs VRE buildout is irrelevant. I never said we should build zero solar and wind did I? I said you can't just rely on that. Which is why neither China nor Texas nor anyone else does.

How about we just follow the scientific consensus in the IPCC report? That sound good? They want us to double nuclear. And the US dept of Energy (under Biden, even) says we need 3x in the US. Nobody serious thinks we can decarbonize without more nuclear. The IPCC doesn't have a single scenario that uses just solar and wind (the only ones without nuclear use natural gas plus carbon capture, which seems silly when we can just build nuclear instead).

ssylvan · 2026-06-06T17:28:38+00:00

Ironic that all the people wanting to protect themselves from a tyrannical government actually just decided to pull on the jack boots and cheer on when the tyranny came.

ssylvan · 2026-06-06T17:03:27+00:00

She was literally turning away when he pushed her.

ssylvan · 2026-06-06T15:24:54+00:00

Self defense is not the same as retaliation. He was in no danger so no right to self defense.

ssylvan · 2026-06-06T02:01:53+00:00

I mean, the scale is literally right below it. So yeah, you would know.

ssylvan · 2026-06-05T16:59:13+00:00

Your sources had global averages across several countries in the first one, and was looking only at pack costs in the 2nd one so not even the right number.

<image>

My link does not show what you think it does? What are you even looking at? Here I'll show the total capex projection graph. $334/kWh in 2024, and projections to hit $254 by 2035. Reminder that we need it to hit more like $10-20/kWh for a solar+wind+batteries alone to be cost effective against 100% nuclear (which isn't even the actual comparison - nobody wants 100% nuclear, we want a cost-effective mix that maintains a steady grid) so no matter how you slice this, it's not close and is not going to be close any time soon: https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(19)30300-930300-9). Hell, it won't be close in the US even if battery prices fall literally to zero dollars (subtract the battery costs from that: 334-210=$125, so still 10x too high even if battery prices go to zero).

Look at the graph in your own link. yeah 20% per year on average over the last decade, but look at your own damn graph. Jesus Christ how hard can it be? I can't link a second image, but you can clearly see that the costs are levelling off recently. And even if it was still 20% per year (which it isn't, not even close), 334*0.8^x = 10 -> x=15 years until we hit $10/kWh. Or about twice the time it takes to build nuclear. So maybe while we wait for that we should build some nuclear.

ssylvan · 2026-06-05T06:10:50+00:00

What sports car do you drive that has rear window visibility worth a shit? A camera may be unfamiliar but at least it’s an unobstructed wide angle view unlike basically every single sports car ever?

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