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.

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.

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.

Per capita? Assuming equal levels of corruption per capita, you would expect California to have three times as many charges per year as Illinois, twice as many as New York, and four times as many as New Jersey.

Never mind. I already know the answer. Per capita, California is one of the least corrupt states in the country, ranking at number 34 out of 50 (source).

Using corruption conviction rate per capita, Arizona is #9 in corruption, behind only Louisiana, Montana, South Dakota, Kentucky, West Virginia, Virginia, Maryland, and Alabama.

Fun fact: Of the ten most corrupt states, six are red states, two purple, two blue. Of the ten least corrupt, three are red states, three purple, four blue. Statistically, you would expect 3.4 blue, 1.8 purple, 4.8 red. Interpret that as you will.

I mean, you can massively increase your water supply and reduce global warming all at the same time by covering the entire length of the aqueducts with solar panels.

And water isn't scarce and dwindling. It's just not local to that area. We have almost infinite amounts of water ready for desalination. Nothing prevents us from having as much fresh water as we could ever need other than us not being willing to spend the money to build desalination plants. Heck, we might even be able to do it passively with solar stills.

Not inherently. Some unions do put in specific rules about specific job levels having specific pay, but not all. It just depends on what the union demands in their negotiations. A more reasonable approach would be to demand a certain minimum amount of wage increase each year. Even in that situation, if management isn't willing to give merit-based increases because the total dollar amount including the mandatory minimum for everyone else adds up to too much money, then it could still have that effect, of course. Either way, rigid pay rates aren't a hard-and-fast requirement of union workplaces.

Some union shops also have rules mandating that nobody do anything that is someone else's job. While theoretically intended to prevent consolidating and firing people, those sorts of rules often end up making life miserable by limiting opportunities for advancement and career growth. But again, not every union does things like that.

The real problem with unions is that they are basically doing what the government should be doing, were governments not hopelessly pledging fealty to industry. But because unions are too close to the problem, they see only the employees' side of things, and over the long term, their demands usually end up outpacing practical limits, and companies close the plants and move workers to another country. This is not to say that they would not have eventually done that anyway, but unions often exacerbate the problem and accelerate the job loss.

If unions focused only on improving working conditions, limiting working hours, requiring reasonable minimum standards for termination, requiring voluntary exit programs before any layoffs, and other largely cost-neutral demands, they could make life better for workers by being a check on penny-wise, pound-foolish decisions without causing long-term job loss or other downsides. But the temptation to always ask for more money is too great, so this almost never happens.

I'm part of the app ecosystem and I *still* don't understand why people develop half the apps that they develop, rather than making their websites work like the app does and having a button to save a bookmark on the home screen.

Credit card autofill has worked in Safari since iOS 7 (before Wallet). Wallet added the ability to scan cards. I can only assume that the functionality was tied together from the very beginning, since Safari's feature predated Wallet by a year. For sure, the integration has worked in Safari for as long as I've used it, which would have probably been a few months after the Apple Card came out in 2019.

You actually expect me to give actual guidance on how Apple could get away with violating antitrust law without getting caught? I use their devices. I have zero incentive to do that.

Patreon should have just immediately pulled their app from Apple's store. They're a website. There's no obvious benefit to doing things in an app versus a website.

That said, nothing inherently prevents Apple from maliciously making it harder for Patreon's website to work on iOS. Apple controls the only web browser engine that is allowed to run on the platform.