I think you make very good points but wonder if you could have softened the delivery a bit.
Why? It's a great delivery. It may sound harsh only to our truth-allergic world of big corps.
Readit Newsfrongpik commented on Show HN: I made a Hacker News for the automotive industry autonews.io... · Posted by u/trizoza
Again though, defensive gun uses is not a proxy for lives saved. In general adding guns to a situation where murder is not the intent will increase the number of lives lost.
In a situation where a criminal breaks into someone's house and brandishes a knife, the intent doesn't matter and the criminal shouldn't have agency to decide the outcome. I think this is what rubs me the wrong way about your comment: who gets to decide the outcome - the robber or the one being robbed.
Why can't we get rid of Real-estate agents all together? Snipping off 3% of the house sale price is a ridiculous fee for shuffling some documents around and pretending to be acting in my interest. What's stopping Redfin/Zillow or SV tech scene to disrupt this arcane industry?
I haven't purchased a home before, but it seems like most things such as discovering homes, securing loans, touring the place, inspection, sending offers, closing and signing the deed - is very much automation-ready. There must be some reason.
Edit: I got a real estate agent to kick off house search from Redfin. We had a zoom call, he looked at what I've added as favorites and basically didn't do anything useful or provided anything more than what's already on Redfin wesbite. We browsed some homes together and had a bit of small talk. I didn't go as far as putting down the offer but why do I need to do this bullshit with a real estate agent? It's frivolous and unnecessary. May be he would be useful later down the process? If you've bought a home, would love to know what parts of that process are ripe for automation.
Everyone can't just collectively move away from the MLS database. I'm sure redfin is trying to figure it out.
I like to say that the reason you need two agents to sell a house is because you need one agent to convince the seller to sign that contract and another agent to push the buyer.
In an ideal world the seller would hire someone to show the house to potential buyers (e.g. redfin pays a fixed hourly rate to its agents who show the house) and then both seller and buyer hire real estate attorney to close the deal. 3K usd max. This nice plan falls apart when sellers and buyers can't agree where houses will be listed for sale (don't offer craiglist).
We need you know.. Tinder for houses.
As a counter point though, different suicide methods have different fatality probabilities. Handgun to the head has a really high fatality probability, rope to the neck less so. Removing a high fatality suicide method could cause people to turn to a less fatal method.
You sound like an efficient assets manager. People turn to a suicide because their life is miserable, often for objective reasons (e.g. cancer) and you may find it hard to believe, but it's their right to end it.
Unless you are just using your handgun for sport, this sort of defeats the purpose of having one for defense. And as long as you are just using it for sport, why not just have a 2-key lock, and you give the second key to your trusted buddy.
At any rate, I applaud any efforts to curb handgun deaths. I personally think handgun purchases should come with a free suicide prevention pamphlet or similar. I've long argued that if people really cared specifically about gun deaths, handguns should be the first and primary target, not "ghost guns" and bump stocks and other rarely-used (but scary sounding) accessories.
Handguns aren't particularly useful in war either compared to rifles, are easily concealable, and are just all around bad news. I think most of America's "gun epidemic" could be solved just by cracking down exclusively on handguns (for both civilians and police) and not bothering with rifles. It's counter-intuitive because a lot of mass shooters use rifles, but if you look at the numbers, the total number of people that die from mass shootings (and rifles in general) is very small, especially when compared to handgun deaths.
Before curbing the "gun epidemic" I'd look up how many lives are saved vs how many are unrightfully taken. A proxy for the first number is the number of burglaries - about 1.5 millions per year. A proxy for the second is about 10 thousands - all gun related deaths excluding suicides and internal gang disputes.
In a home invasion I would have thought the last thing you would want is a gun. If you're in the US, then the invader likely has a gun, so if you also have a gun then you're giving them a pretty good incentive to shoot you. If you don't then you might get robbed, but home insurance will cover that.
Well, if I was a woman, I wouldn't take your advice.
But what about when you need the gun quickly because of the burglar/home invader?
(This was sarcasm. I don’t take anyone seriously who with a straight face says it’s a good idea to have a gun at home for “protection”. No, there won’t be a home invader. And no you aren’t going to be better of with a gun if there is. But there isn’t.)
How many violent home invasions are reported per year?
Just get the damn guns out of their reach. This “problem” is unique to America because of the stupid romance with guns.
Stop selling the guns like candies and move on, like the rest of the world. Sure, there will be problems, but smaller.
It's their right, though. You can't take away someone's rights because you feel morally superior.
frongpik commented on DevSkiller IT skills report 2021: Demand and hiring trends devskiller.com/it-skills-... · Posted by u/gru232
I agree with you. But I also think that there is threat of potential violence that is unfamiliar to people from quiet little countries like Australia.
I never got shot and killed in the US, not even once. But the fear of gun violence is real, not just as a subjective experience but as a tool, Switzerland has more guns, but the US is unusual in that it is both a democracy and has so many guns on display. The standard response to this from my side of politics is to say that the US needs gun control. My feeling is that the US is different because the US is different, it’s bigger, more complex and there are greater and more numerous tensions and conflicts than the other Anglo/euro democracies. Americans relationship to their government and the culture around personal responsibility and political participation is very different to the disconnected disinterest in my own country. So I don’t want US gun culture exported, and I don’t want my kids living in it. But when you read things like:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_Coalfield_War
It seems there is an intimate connection between the generative political culture of the United States, that doesn’t shy away from conflict in pursuit of ideals, and gun culture, that cannot be easily separated. I believe there is something in American culture that calls people to intervene, that urges facing into conflict, even violence in pursuit of higher ideals that is both useful and destructive, even if we could never tally the full cost, in short order we can produce horrific numbers, but I believe this same imperative drives vital movements like feminism, gay rights, anti racism that inspire required changes in my country. So I both agree with you and think you’re missing the point. Cancer, heart disease, dementia are numerically vastly greater killers, but as an outsider from Australia coming to the US the underlying conflict in the society is hard to come terms with, it is much better hidden in Australia. I think my experience is common, I will always regret leaving the US. I adjusted to that sense of threat that personally, and I think I would have tolerated it if I had stayed and had children there, but I can’t bring myself to move my children there.
The fear of gun violence is imaginary. The media instills the fear because, quoting the Chomsky propaganda model, "when people fear, they accept authority". Most people in the US wouldn't know gun ownership is a thing, because most of them will never see a gun unless they go to a range.
My hypothesis as to why the new US administration is so fixated on gun control is that they really need to import big piles of migrants to do the low rung labor, but if that new underclass gets guns, things will go downhill. So their plan is to pack the supreme court with anti-gun judges (to bypass the bill of rights) and take the guns. They seem to be trying the Australian scenario where a possibly manufactured shooting was used as an excuse to ban guns.
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