I thought you had to somehow resurrect the ghosts of the murdered to get furies. Am I remembering my Roman mythology wrong?

Yeah, Zillow and others basically act like paywalls to make it harder to find out information about available real estate and force you to do everything through agents who try to steer you to properties that give them a bigger commission.

The absolute worst is searching for land, because most of those sites don't want to give you the parcel numbers, which make the information almost completely useless. With a parcel number and five minutes of GIS searching, I can tell you if it is worth my time, all without ever having to visit the property. Instead, they'd like you to have an agent try to convince you that the sheer cliff is buildable as long as you use an advanced septic system. ROFL.

I've never understood why MLS wasn't more open. It has always been going against consumers' best interest to keep it as closed as it is, IMO.

... spread over probably 24" x 48", or 8 square feet, for a total of 625 pounds per square foot.

Ignoring that the numbers above are probably less than half the static load limit, the static load limit is as low as it is because A. the raised floor has weight, and B. the raised floor likely has a much lower weight limit than the concrete slab under it.

Solution: Remove the raised floor.

Which means you can now run overhead cable trays above the height of your tallest employees. No need for the raised floors. Also, by ripping out the raised floors, you can have that extra height, so no need to rebuild the building.

Because people can't tip the racks up to get them through the doors, or lie them flat corner-to-corner in a freight elevator? This seems like a problem with movers not being creative enough when moving things, rather than a building problem.

This whole article reads like people looking for an excuse to spend more money and build monuments to themselves, rather than an actual problem. What am I missing?

The increase in fire rates is completely irrelevant for training, too. You can learn to shoot a rifle with any rifle. You'll need a little bit of training on how the mags load in different rifles and stuff, but not much. In terms of learning how to aim and stuff, kids can train on a single-shot rifle.

It's not obvious to me. I learned how to shoot rifles and handguns as a kid, and I've never had any kind of gun in my house other than a BB gun.

Governments at the time had a powder house that provided extra munitions and guns. Some militiamen at the time did have personal weapons in their homes. The minutemen were more trained than other militiamen, and presumably also screened for not being nuts. So yes, hand-picked elite soldiers all had weapons, but that's not an indication that everyone needs to — doubly so when you consider that the National Guard is the only remaining lawfully recognized militia in the U.S., and all others are markedly different from the militias at the time, which were organized by local governments, not by random people who like to shoot guns.

The whole point is that we have that, and it's called the National Guard.

Let's not forget that modern mass shootings still could not have happened without cartridged firearms. Let's not forget that there's a clear, direct correlation between the increase in assault rifle sales after that ban was overturned and the number of mass shooting deaths in the U.S. Let's not forget that mass shootings have been around since at least 1949, and probably longer — it's not a new phenomenon at all — and that the only thing that is clearly correlated with the number of mass shootings is the number of guns sold.

I'm not saying that we should get rid of guns, but blanketly saying that all gun laws are unconstitutional just isn't grounded in what the second amendment says, and burying our heads in the sand and ignoring the damage caused to our society by nutjobs getting guns isn't going to keep it from happening over and over.

Some common sense laws could cut the mass shooting to really close to zero, all without meaningfully preventing normal, sane people from owning firearms if they want to do so. Examples:

• Re-enacting a federal waiting period (with an exception made for people who have an active restraining order against someone else and can legitimately show a reason to need one immediately for self defense) can dramatically reduce gun suicides and heat-of-the-moment homicides. And while this probably won't reduce mass shootings much, it will reduce gun deaths.
• Safe storage laws can dramatically reduce access to guns by gangs and known criminals who would not pass a background check. They can also reduce access to guns by children, who should never be allowed to have access to a firearm without an adult present, because very few have the mental maturity to handle that responsibility.
• Mandatory government-funded pre-purchase and annual psych evaluations for anyone owning a firearm could massively reduce the rate of mass shootings by identifying people who might be unstable and ensuring that they get the therapy they need to not go postal, particularly if you combine it with free mental health counseling for anyone who wants it and make it easy for mental health professionals to report to police if they feel that a person may be a danger to themselves or others, and if the police then have a policy of confiscating any weapons that the person owns and not giving them back until they have gone through an adequate period of counseling and the health professional has lifted the firearm hold.
• Requiring all firearm sales to be tracked by serial number in a federal registry, and providing civil liability for the last registered owner when a firearm is used in a crime unless they can show that the firearm was stolen out of a certified gun safe can then make all of the previous regulations have the teeth needed to actually do their jobs.
• Requiring significant additional screening to own high-power rifles, semi-automatic and automatic rifles, large magazines, etc. would also likely fix the recent surge in mass shooting deaths. (It's not just that mass shootings are becoming more common; they're also becoming more deadly.)

And so on. None of those policies violate my understanding of what the second amendment says, because they don't prevent a typical person from owning the sorts of firearms that are commonly used by individuals who are not active military. They don't prevent people who are active military, reserve, or guard (militia) from owning the firearms needed to protect the country, and they don't meaningfully impede our national defense, nor our police.

I saw Google and Plus together and got momentarily excited. :-D

I think you're wrong. I think the U.S. government has too much incentive to bail them out again no matter how badly they tank.

But you're not wrong about Ford being the least likely to survive the next ten years without massive government bailouts. IMO, Ford has never made good cars by any reasonable standard, giving rise to jokes all the way back in the late 1980s of Ford standing for "Found On the Road Dead" or "Fell Off the Road Dead", and I've seen no evidence that they have gotten much better since.

By someone legitimate, or by someone looking to get page hits?

Oh, Consumer Reports... the same company that has pretty much been dumping on Tesla for many years, and whose criticisms have been widely ridiculed by actual Tesla owners.

There was a separate law passed in 1792 that defined what weapons should be available for people in a militia, but I can't find any evidence that the second amendment ever did that. It was based around similar laws in other states and in England, none of which specified such things, so it would be very surprising if they had considered doing so.

Even if we assume that the intent was to protect the right to bear all future military-grade weapons, it was still intended for forming militias for the defense of the country, not for storing high-power weapons at every individual's house for their personal use where kids can pick them up and shoot each other.

Weapons of that time would not have been easy for a kid to discharge multiple times. They would not have been easy for someone to discharge a hundred times in anger and mass-murder people. And so on. And that's the point I was trying to make. These weapons are materially different from anything they could have conceived of at the time.

Let's mandate EVs with V2G to provide dispatchable electricity that is needed to stabilize nuclear- and renewables-heavy grids.

Silvergun, I think were drunk when you wrote that. But my mother also had a colloidal silver phase. It's always something. The biggest fad she bought into was a Rife machine which is basically just a frequency generator that's supposed to cure anything if you dial in the right frequency.

When it comes to gun rights, I'm personally in favor of a strict originalist interpretation of the second amendment based on how someone in that time would interpret it, just like the right end of the Supreme Court claims to believe in.

You have the right to own and bear as many muskets and flintlock pistols as you want, so long as they are for use as part of a militia to defend the country.

Wait, what? You think the right to bear arms grants you the right to a fully automatic assault rifle of the sort that wasn't even invented until almost two hundred years after the signing of the Constitution? Sorry, but no. You want to buy a firearm so you can threaten your ex? Also no. You want to open carry your pistol so everyone knows not to mess with you? Still no.

The second amendment doesn't say what you think it does. It never did. It says that because a well-trained militia is essential to the safety and security of the country, the right of the people (as a whole) to bear arms (of some kind) shall not be infringed. A logical reading of those words does not prohibit taking away guns from specific people (e.g. those with a history of violent crime). Nor does it preclude restricting specific types of weapons to people who have been more thoroughly vetted (e.g. high-power semi-automatic or automatic rifles).

Strictly speaking, you could allow people who have never been convicted of a crime the use of only non-lethal weapons, and so long as learning on those weapons would qualify you to be able to use more powerful weapons if we ever get attacked, such a highly restrictive legal environment would still at least arguably meet the rather low bar for what must be allowed by the second amendment.

So no, gun laws do not inherently violate the second amendment. To violate the second amendment, they would have to make it substantially more difficult for an average person to obtain or use a typical firearm. Until a law crosses that threshold, it likely isn't a violation of 2a.

By contrast, executive orders that exceed authority specifically granted by Congress and exceed the constitutional authority of the executive branch to interpret and execute existing laws are per se unconstitutional. And those are highly scrutinized regardless of which party is in the oval office. The Republican presidents just have a tendency to wipe their a**es with the constitution a lot more often than the Democrat presidents, so their orders get overturned more often.

Without the ability to protect platforms you will see an immediate chilling effect as hyper aggressive moderation kicks off on the large platforms who can't weather lawsuits.

So just like the classified ads that we had back in the day where you paid by the word and then your message went through a moderation process before it was published.

Repealing Section 230 would take us back to quieter times, for better or for worse.

Some good has come from promoting more user speech online, but also a lot of bullying, harassment, echo chambers, doxxing, stochastic terrorism, and so on.

Does the good outweigh the bad? Maybe, maybe not.

Either way, the point remains that you would typically expect that if 3% of people are the sorts of people tempted to commit crimes and you have 100 people, then 3 of them are tempted to commit crimes, and if you have 200 people, then 6 of them are tempted to commit crimes. Larger governments, assuming all else is equal, should have proportionally more criminals. Therefore, having more people convicted of corruption does not prove that the government is more corrupt, but rather, proves that the government is bigger, which is just stating the obvious.

And aging U.S. equipment is a lot better maintained and newer than what's left of Russia's aging equipment.