Look up neo-feudalism.

Firefox completely messed up the UI on phones and tablets. I could get over the breaking of extensions, but the UI is sacred. it's become horribly annoying to use for no good reason, and pushed me to Brave.

I bet those you call Bible-thumpers are not remotely Catholic. Christianity is not a monolith.

The USA is a large union of states. A single state is about the size of your country. Do you think it's the job of the EU supra-national government to provide safe housing, illiteracy or health care? The number one mistake people in other countries make about the US is assuming that their 300M+ collection of diverse states should be viewed identically to your little crowded and sometimes nearly-dictatorial statelet.

Putin won't get away this time!

Yeah, but this concept doesn't account for grifters and psychopaths, and devalues the degrees of the honest students.

First of all, I said "gun" not "handgun", it was the parent poster. For home defence, a long gun can also be used, depending on proficiency and preference of the owner. To store a handgun responsibly, or any gun for that matter, you should use a quick-access safe.

In terms of preparedness, a rifle is not the be-all-end-all. Listen to some experienced been-there-done-that people that went through economic collapses, civil wars, sieges etc. They all say that a handgun is the first layer of personal protection. There is a whole lot of time and space between the first rumblings of disaster, and outright combat. If you walk around with a long gun strapped to your back during that time, you will get targeted, hurt, arrested, or killed. To protect yourself and your family, you need to be able to move quietly and avoid confrontation, while being discreetly armed. Hence, handgun.

A handgun and rifle with an ammo stash is sufficient armament for disaster preparation. If you like guns, then having a semiauto and a bolt precision rifle, with a shotgun on top would cover all your potential requirements. But experience clearly shows that you are better off having a handgun that not.

That's because a gun in the house will be the choice for a suicidal person. Without it, rope or something else will be chosen. Everything else is FUD.

A gun not going to be a psychic magnet for criminals. Those will come (or not) regardless if there's a gun in the house.

As the economy tanks and crime goes up, wouldn't you rather have the most effective option to respond to a bad guy? Get some safety and proficiency training.

Indeed. Without the production of the Red counties, the Blue counties would be rubbing two sticks together for warmth and eating grubs.

That's true, and a lot of projects start as small easy problems. However, all projects grow over time, and as complexity grows, they stop being small and easy.

I have an approach to starting a project that can be summed up like this: use the next most powerful platform than you think will be sufficient.

For example, one frequently used command w/ lots of arguments? Write a shell script. If you think a shell script will do it, choose python. Python is good enough? Go with Java. Java is good enough? Go with Scala. If you have a JVM bias that is...

Python is the kind of language that makes easy problems trivial, but harder problems become impossible and unmaintainable.

Java and JVM have diverged. I don't think the JVM is going away in a long time, but I can see a good JVM language taking over Java.

No tattoos

I wonder if having been written in Python was OpenStack's biggest mistake.

Mailed ballots get lost, and more could get "lost" depending on the district's political leaning. There's already documented cases of absentee ballots ending up in the trash or by the side of the road.

Extra ballots already get sent to addresses where people don't live any more. Increases the chances of ballot stuffing and fraud. What's stopping someone from faking a driver's license to make those extra ballots valid? What's stopping someone from putting more than one marked ballot into a single secrecy envelope? Nothing.

What's stopping a harvest of blank ballots by paying people for unopened envelopes containing voting packages? Nothing.