691–700 of 861 posts
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> Of course prisoners should not be allowed to vote, for the same reason as children. Prisoners in jail can be there for a multitude of reasons. But the main difference is that they were likely of voting age. Some states even do allow prisoners to vote. Who more than anyone here is subject to its laws than people imprisoned? It also naturally penalizes poor people, since they demonstrably get less 'legal equality', a…
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(posting this in both comments about this) i am the author of the article. the adafruit blog is not trying to block you my dude(s). we are under constant automated scraping and ddos, largely from ai crawlers, and we use cloudflare to keep the site online at all. the nature of of these things will cause false positives depending on browser, extensions, network, or referrer. the site publishs full-text rss feeds with n…
Cloudflare is ridiculous. I can't even open it using Cromite (privacy enhanced, but not over the top, android browser). I get: blog.adafruit.com Verifying you are human. This may take a few seconds. blog.adafruit.com needs to review the security of your connection before proceeding. And this hangs forever. What difference does it make if I access this site using a browser (blocked anyway) or I asked my LLM to fetch t…
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Prusa may still be king if you're using printers commercially, running them hard 24/7 in a print farm, wanting to be sure your investment has a decent lifespan with readily-available spare parts and upgrade options. But it's a premium brand now. For lighter use by hobbyists, Bambu is the clear winner on price/performance. The 'less open' downside is not a factor to most people, and the printers generally work so well…
If your goal is to buy the cheapest machine you can find in the world, chances are good everything you buy is going to come from China. That Prusa Mk3 you bought ages ago can be upgraded to the latest model, which means you have the option of turning that device into a lifetime machine, something ONLY Prusa offers. Yes, the initial purchase price is higher, the lifetime price might not be.
The upgrade kits are definitely a good thing, going from MK3 to MK3S to MK3.5S was a worthwhile upgrade path and has prolonged the useful life of the printer. But they have their limits.
(And with 3D printing going more mainstream, there's a large segment of the market that has no interest in building printers from kits or stripping down printer to install upgrades - even though some of us find that quite enjoyable)
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People print guns and gun parts. More than you think. Now even more since metal printing is starting to become affordable. I print grip and grip attachments for my 9mms and my AR15, trigger guards, barrel clamps, etc. I also find it stupid since, as the article suggests, what kind of algorithm can you implement to do smart detection of something that could be potentially dangerous? Will it also detect negative space?…
> Sadly, instead of having better laws we get fallacy rhetoric by people who probably have never touched, much less fired a gun in their lives. Why is this the litmus test for being qualified to write gun legislation? Do we also expect our lawmakers to have tried heroin or downloaded child porn so that they can regulate those activities?
To use your heroin example, this is akin to banning spoons or needles because they heard those are tools of the heroin addict. It shows a lack of understanding on the part of the regulator and has a far reaching effect on people legally using the items.
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"less than 50%" being 49.8%. Kind of winning on a technicality there.
A big problem of the American two-party system is that you can't distinguish a vote against one party from a vote for the other party: Did all of that 49.8% vote for Trump, or was he the "lesser of two evil" for a lot of people who genuinely hated Harris?
> blog.adafruit.com Your browser is out of date. Update your browser to view this site properly. Click here for more information if you care about right to repair and the ability of regular people to make a living and choose their own destiny(i.e. live independently of a mega-corp), this type of error message should bother you. HTML is a mature tech. There is no reason for this type of error
(posting this in both comments about this) i am the author of the article. the adafruit blog is not trying to block you my dude(s). we are under constant automated scraping and ddos, largely from ai crawlers, and we use cloudflare to keep the site online at all. the nature of of these things will cause false positives depending on browser, extensions, network, or referrer. the site publishs full-text rss feeds with n…
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"This is how its always been" is one of the banes of my existence. It explains why we're here, but not how to do better. There are ways to do better. A national holiday for elections has been mentioned countless times. We could do like Australia and mandate required voting. Prisoners should be able to vote. But this country is too hell-bent on punishment. Registration can be made on the same day of voting, rather tha…
There are a few things that could be done to improve the electoral process in USA. An easy one would be to have people vote on weekends instead of Tuesday. The second would be to have more polling station so that people don't have to wait hours to be able to vote (alas this seems to be by design). Since we are there, but unrelated to the amount of people voting, fix the vote counting process so that you can get the r…
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I can't find the detailed breakdown for 2025, but in 2024, they took in $308bn in premiums and paid out $264bn in medical costs. So even ignoring all of the downstream and systemic problems caused by insurance existing as a for-profit entity, they're taking 14% off the top just to exist as a middle-man. https://www.unitedhealthgroup.com/content/dam/UHG/PDF/invest...
> they took in $308bn in premiums and paid out $264bn in medical costs ... they're taking 14% off the top just to exist as a middle-man. In 2023, they had a 0.8% profit margin[0]. 9 billion dollars in a trillion dollar industry. Ignoring the disingenuous framing ("taking off the top" including how much they pay their employees), how does that compare to other industries? [0] https://content.naic.org/sites/default/fil…
Highlighting that was actually part of my point. What utility does insurance add to justify its existence as a middle man? How are we better off with a middle man taking a cut vs nationalizing the industry? And that 14% is at best, given the other externalities of the existence of insurance and its perverse incentives.
You're saying "how is that worse than other industries", but I'm saying, why is there an industry there at all?
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There are a few things that could be done to improve the electoral process in USA. An easy one would be to have people vote on weekends instead of Tuesday. The second would be to have more polling station so that people don't have to wait hours to be able to vote (alas this seems to be by design). Since we are there, but unrelated to the amount of people voting, fix the vote counting process so that you can get the r…
Also on the list: Tackling the electoral college thing such that every voter contributed equally, regardless of their home state. I don’t live in the US, but US elections have quite an influence and it’s frustrating to see a system I perceive as very flawed having such an effect here, at the other end of the world in New Zealand.
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Just imagine what happens when lawmakers discover the possibilities of every one with access to a lathe or CNC machine. Absolutely ridiculous.
Every time I see one of these stories I wonder how many tools I would have to remove from my garage to make it impossible to build a primitive gun in there. With enough ingenuity I'm really not sure there would be anything left.