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For the latter be sure to follow the "don't be black rule". I like the proposal to make the second amendment all about blunderbusses.

Citizen militias are an obsolete military formation. Like taking a knife to a gun fight... as if it has to be said.

Well, yes. Personally, I have long thought that the 2A will get repealed or heavily modified one of these days, and if things keep going as they are I might even vote in favor of the changes. That, for me is a shame, because I am one of the many, many Americans that own guns as a hobby. I own old guns and/or unique guns. Why? I like to work with my hands and restore/reuse old things. Old cars are too costly and hard to fit on a work-bench in the winter. Many old guns are, with all their drawbacks, marvels of engineering. Ammunition is equally interesting, particularly if you have to search out the brass casings or modify newer casings to fit, and make your own bullets and run the tests to determine which type of gunpowder works best, etc, etc, etc. And then, when you think you have everything just perfect, you can go out to the shooting range and kill pieces of paper, find out things are not perfect, and go back to the work bench for further improvements. And I don't carry a gun, and they go to the range unloaded and come home unloaded. And I don't belong to the NRA either. I would say, however, that the oft-repeated thing about the huge number of guns owned in the US is a red-herring. Many of us that own many guns are hobbyists such as myself, and most of those guns are old -- not the ones that are best for the killing.

"Arms" in the constitutional sense were never supposed to be handguns. Militias and armies don't rely on them, they rely on rifles (you get in big trouble calling your rifle a "gun" in the army, I'm told). We could follow the letter of the law and issue a government-manufactured carbine (something like the M1) to every citizen over a certain age. That's all you're allowed to own (unless you have a special permit for collecting, hunting, or other hobbying), and you're not allowed to modify it in any way (15 round clip only). It's to fulfill your duty as part of a well-regulated militia. Maybe, just maybe, we could start to defund some military/police/prison operations and put those funds to work helping people avoid a life of crime and guns. Imagine if our society openly showed it cares more about our freedoms than it cares about putting us in jail!

This whole gun thing is crazy, When I go to get gas the local gasoline seller, the gas "service station" died a long time ago, they have around 12 pumps and it's not unusual for there to be 6 or more cars fueling up. I filled up last week and out of 7 people fueling their vehicles 3 had pistols openly on their hips. One had a god damned 50 cal. Desert Eagle! I guess he wanted to make sure he could defend himself from any stray Bradley Fighting Vehicles that might attack while he was pumping gas. I live in a well known liberal university town! This shit is out of control! I think the path forward is clear, far from the general population needing the same guns as the military guns need to be confined... at the very least! Confined to your home and restricted to pump shotguns with #5 shot shells, 410 gauge at most! Personally I think we should be able to open carry knives not guns, but show up in public with a bowie knife on your belt and spend a few days in jail and be fined big bucks but carry a gun and you get special treatment. Yes I think crazy pretty much says it all about gun culture in the US.

Getting to that elevation is somewhat of a problem, unless you think sherpas can haul everything up. And “significantly thinner” is still significant; it’s about a third of an atmosphere.

There was a recent article documenting how the rate of bigfoot sightings correlates with black bear population. “The results suggest that there's a strong correlation between sightings and the local black bear population—for every 1,000 bears, the frequency of bigfoot sightings goes up by about 4 percent.” https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/01/study-finds-bigfoot-sightings-correlate-with-black-bear-populations/ “It's easy to see how black bears and bigfoot could be mistaken for each other. Despite their name, the bears come in a wide range of colors, from a golden brown through to a deep reddish one, as well as their namesake black. They're also large animals and will frequently stand on their hind legs to get a better view of their surroundings. They also frequent the forested areas that are supposedly bigfoot's favored terrain.”

It really depends on which level you are looking at it. Undergrad? Not so much. There can be differences in how the technical labs are equipped, though in the US (and elsewhere) labs are getting cut because of cost. This trend is less so in countries in which Universities are not funded by tuition. I will also add that having tuition as a significant part of the university budget often creates perverse incentives and often also leads to administrative bloat. Examples include having offices who are actively trying to recruit and attract students, which is largely absent in entirely publicly funded institutions. Likewise, there is more incentive for student retention, which is associated with higher grade inflation. From a student perspective the experience can be better as there is more support (incl. recruitment, accommodation, living space, guidance and career counseling, as well as easier to grieve grades). But it does not mean that the education is better (often the reverse, actually). On the graduate level, that depends more on individual researchers than the university per se. I.e. individual profs can run successful groups regardless on which university they are working in. However, there are disparities between countries. The US provides quite a bit of funding for research, but there are quite differences between European countries. Highly ranked universities are often also flush with money and often support profs more with resources to establish successful research programs. That being said, there are many moderately or low ranked universities with good researchers and successful (research) graduate programs. Things are a bit iffier when the University primarily sees itself as a teaching university. There, Profs struggle to maintain a program as they get virtually no support (e.g. no lab space). They therefore rarely have successful programs in natural sciences (though they might have social science programs).

A good dinosaur fossil can be a very valuable commercial property. Plus palaeostratigraphy (the dating of rock samples by eg their fossil assemblage) is big business in mineral extraction etc. Maybe it's graptolites and conodonts rather than dinosaurs in that case, but the economy still needs a good reserve of trained paleontologists to identify them.

As mentioned, the data is lacking, but there were a few studies looking into related issues. There is some lack of granularity and I don't think there is a study focusing on a relatively rare event such as home invasion. One study looking at a cohort cohabitating with folks with and without gun ownership and they found that although the all-cause mortality was similar, the homicide rate among gun owners was double to those of non-gun owners. Specifically looking at homicides at home, gun owners were about 4x higher at risk. However, the risk of getting killed at home by strangers was only 1.45x higher among gun owners (but therefore still higher) and 7x higher for the risk of getting killed by a spouse or intimate partner. So from a high-level view, gun ownership as such does not reduce risk of getting killed, but seemingly in all scenarios (again, from a composite view) increases it.https://doi.org/10.7326/M21-3762 There are more studies looking into whether gun ownership can be deterrent for burglary and the overall consensus seems to be that it is not the case. However, there is a positive correlation between burglary and gun ownership and it could be that in rough areas folks are more likely to have both, guns and burglaries.

I see the weakest part of the pro-gun argument as the false equivalence that is made between gun rights and, say, free speech rights. It is true that dictators have successfully withdrawn free speech rights via baby steps - first, quelling talk of sedition, then incrementally widening the definition of speech that is "dangerous," until they've pretty much shut up everyone who isn't saying I love fearless leader! The right-wingers think they have a clever parallel there. What makes the equivalence false is that speech cannot be limited because we cannot in a democracy define limits on what grievances people may have with government. Speech is, by its nature, unpredictable and often ambiguous and even after a thing is said, opinions may vary greatly on what was really said. Shooting someone with a gun, however, is unambiguous. Offend someone with your speech, and you can discuss it, restate it, even apologize or retract it. And they can freely speak and critique your speech. Shoot them dead with a gun and they stay dead. Governments, and the people they serve, have a natural interest in preventing what is irreversible and lethal. Gun rights imply the right of civilian citizens to kill people in certain circumstances where self-defense or defense of another could be implemented by lethal force. Anyway, I have real contempt for the false equivalence argument. If I say I would like to dig up the corpse of Julie Andrews and have sex with it, you might be offended. If I shoot you for standing on my porch and looking menacing, you might be dead. The First Amendment and the Second Amendment are not of equal importance. We would not have even had the 2nd A. if the founders had created a standing army at the outset. There was talk of doing it, but the funds and organization weren't there, so they opted to create the 2nd A in the interests of forming militias.

Show the consequences as seen by the first responders. Watching drone videos in Ukraine soon takes out the 'fun' of war and playing soldiers.

This is an outdated package of ideas otherwise known as Copenhagen's school. Decoherence is the key, not the observation, whatever that means. I don't think that makes much sense. Decay is already understood as an interaction, but not between matter and time, but mediated by W and Z bosons. What would interaction between matter and time even mean? Interactions, as we understand the concept, require a position representation.

That's actually quite mindblowing. Thanks!

Some very rich people will pay alot to stop that happening; people have the right to kill anyone but me and my employees (unless I decide to fire them)... In the words of Dave Chappelle (almost), "get every black person, in America, to register... for a gun licence, if you want to change the law."...

Com puters are specific to their use. An old Pentium will suffice for Net surfing, as the speed is limited by your internet connection, not computing power. But you might want a Ryzen with 16 cores if you want to edit graphics or videos. Similarly guns have specific purposes. An assault rifle of low caliber has little stopping power and is almost useless for hunting game larger than a rabbit. Its purpose is to incapacitate, as a wounded enemy combatant will tie up two others to care/carry him, while a dead enemy can be left behind. You don't want to have wounded game run off and die somewhere you cannot find it, so assault rifles are bad for hunting. I read statistics that 360 million Americans own 400 million guns, but 3/4 of Americans do not own guns, only 1/4 of them do. At some point, it is simply saying " look, I have more, bigger, guns than you." Nothing more than showing everyone that you have ( are ? ) a bigger dick. And those insecure incels are the ones usually committing the mass killings

Since "Bigfoot" is a mammal and not a single microorganism, it requires a sufficient population to keep it genetically healthy and diverse. It would have to number in the hundreds to thousands. Otherwise, they would have to mate with their relatives, which would end in DNA degeneration. Incest and inbreeding are unhealthy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inbreeding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inbreeding_depression

You are playing a video game, you have received a "gift" box, it could contain one of many items... has the box contents been determined as it was presented or will the contents be determined as you open it? Is the box empty or does it already contain a gift?

The way I see it, any kind of gun that the police and military have access to citizens should also have access to. So if you want to ban certain guns from citizens, ban them from the police and military too.

Im not sure about the legality of dynamite but I believe anybody with the money can get a tunnel-borer. But regardless, the 2A does not cover such stuff, just like it doesn't cover drugs. Certain drugs you can have access to only if you're a licensed doctor but that otherwise are banned and that's fine because the 2A does not identify any right to access such stuff. The 2A identifies the right to keep and bear arms, not the right to keep and bear other stuff such as dynamite and tunnel-borers and certain dangerous drugs. Because they had access to them when the Constitution, including the 2A was ratified. When the 2A which identifies the right to keep and bear arms, and that's exactly what it does as it doesn't grant the right it identifies it, muskets were the military/police grade guns back then and citizens had full access to them. Today it's semi automatic guns and in some cases full automatic guns that the police and military use so that's what citizens should have access to as those are the arms of today. The arms that are mentioned in the 2A are in reference to whatever the arms of today are. Back when the Constitution was ratified it was muskets, today it's the more advanced guns that I mentioned. Our country's founders weren't dumb, they knew weapons would get more advanced in the future. So if you want to restrict citizens to muskets as some people say the right to keep and bear arms identified by the 2A only applies to muskets, then its only proper to restrict the police and military to muskets and the kinds of guns that were used back then as well. To allow the military access to more advanced guns and not citizens is a double standard. That's exactly what they're needed for, or to put it more precisely, to protect themselves from the government should the government become oppressive. In the USA it's the citizens that are supposed to control the government, not the other way around. The USA was created for the people by the people. We've got many checks and balances in place but the right to keep and bear arms, as identified by the 2A, is a final check and balance. If all else fails the people can revolt against the government should the government become oppressive.