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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 5th, 2023

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  • i changed my mind about gun ownership sometime in the last two years

    i used to think that like, sure i get that it would be nice if nobody in the world had a gun, but the cat was out of the bag. and remember when the covid lockdowns started? there were lines around the block at gun stores. it just seemed crazy to me to be the only person without a gun, like what if shit hits the fan?

    i think i changed my mind around uvalde, because like, that event made it pretty clear that guns dont really contribute to the rule of law. all guns did in that scenario was allow cops to kill a child an hour after he murdered 21 other children.

    i really had to kind of re-evaluate the pros and cons. sure guns would be great if, in the 0.05% likelihood event that society turns into mad max, i need to murder my neighbor for tomatoes so i can delay getting scurvy for another week. but in the meantime every single time someone has like a fucked up teenager phase or watches an insane amount of youtube incel shit or whatever, we’re making sure that they have immediate access to a means to kill like 100 people before anybody can do anything about it?

    it just doesnt make sense to me any more to live my life planning for the worst possible societal outcome in a way that has very obvious and real consequences. itd be like if nobody had invented the seatbelt and the way we prevented car crashes was having giant fucking spikes right at eye level surrounding the car to disincentivize other people from driving into you







  • i have a pretty specific example, but i do this in the comment section on pretty much every post about EVs, because very frequently there’s somebody repeating the lazy myth that oh actually EVs are just as bad as internal combustion engine vehicles because loose awareness of life cycle assessment. people state this all the time as if it’s some kind of philosophical point about the impossibility of technological solutions to climate change, when in actuality it is a quantitative falsehood that is easily disproven with very cursory research, like you can pull up the relevant data from the IEA in like five minutes. ive told this to probably like fifty people, including at my job at an EV company, and it has never once changed their mind, i guess because again people are actually not looking to engage with this point quantitatively. but it still takes me a little while to disengage from my natural inclination to be helpful about something that on its surface is a math question.


  • i had this disconcerting experience several years ago, i was talking with a friend of a friend who i’d had a couple of classes with but never really spoken to, and we were talking about technology in some context, and i made some off-handed reference to the unabomber’s manifesto. he didn’t know what i was talking about, so i briefly explained the themes, industrial alienation, etc. and then he asked who the unabomber was, so i explained that whole thing. and i had to explain that like, i was not really serious about wanting to live in a cabin in the woods, it was just sort of a dark humor joke, then he said ‘oh no it’s okay, i totally understand,’ and then he got serious and said, ‘personally, i really agree with charles manson. the race wars are coming’ i was like ‘uh,’ and diligently avoided ever being in the same room with him again. i’m not even white??