Libertarians are mostly just neoliberals who are upset they’re not allowed to be more psycopathic.

Their new utopia will tear itself apart with greed, drugs and sex abuse just like all the old ones.

It doesn’t need to be profitable, let alone have every fraction of a cent squeezed from it.

The mothers may not even have been alive and medical staff simply can’t evacuate premature babies and all the ICU equipment needed to keep them alive.

This story is absolutely going to be used as “look how inhuman and barbarous these Palestinians are, good thing we’re genociding them” and your comment is exactly what they’re looking for.

But the reality is that if you shoot and bomb civilians, then threaten to bomb the hospital they’re being treated at, this could happen anywhere in the world.

They weren’t leaving babies to die and rot 6 months ago because they weren’t being shelled and shot at and if they weren’t being shelled and shot at now, they wouldn’t have left those babies either.

Exploding head syndrome only a beep? Brains do weird shit.

I don’t know, nor am I speculating. The person I was replying to said they didn’t see a browser check in the code, which isn’t enough to dismiss it.

They don’t need to put incriminating “if Firefox” statements in their code – the initial page request would have included the user agent and it would be trivial to serve different JavaScript based on what it said.

To block AI from hoovering up all our data, without paying them.

That’s not how greed works, nor how reddit works.

The only time they’ll do something that reduces profits is when they’re confident it will mean more profits in the near future (and they can’t figure out a way to have both).

That’s why they were happy to platform mask off neo-nazis, the dangerously stupid and communities dedicated to getting as close to child pornography as possible without technically breaking any laws and why they waited until the last possible moment to pull the plug on them.

They’re not uninformed, they’re lying.

They are fully aware that if a politician tried to introduce gun laws that were an exact copy of Switzerland’s, they would be staunchly opposed by the pro-gun community, Republicans and the gun lobby that owns them.

They just want to muddy the waters and drag out the conversation forever. The Switzerland excuse is just as bad-faith as when they blamed video games, music or too many doors.

Edit: also, might make the government think twice about fucking with democracy or stepping over the common man.

That’s just a marketing campaign from gun manufacturers. If it actually worked, it would have worked in America.

Instead, they get to choose between a neoliberal and a fascist every few years (if they haven’t been disenfranchised or gerrymandered into irrelevance), which decides whose rich friends and donors get to pocket the most public funds.

I honestly can’t imagine being so self-absorbed that I felt entitled to choose death for other people.

Of course, it’s apologist bullshit anyway, which means you’ve had a single thought about it and decided “job done”.

Most people being murdered in America aren’t being killed with that level of premeditation. Someone (usually a man) has a gun on their person or laying around their house, they lose control of their emotions, then they shoot someone.

People don’t tend to have a cup of acid in their bedside drawer but in the extremely likely event acid attacks became even a fraction of gun deaths, you have my full support to change the laws to address it.

Because I’m not on a death cult.

Yet with all these amazing weapons of mass destruction in their pantry, every single domestic terrorist just goes and buys a gun instead.

I’m sure the executives over at Chlorox are thrilled to hear that if radicalised psychopaths started killing and maiming thousands of people a year with their products, you’d fight to protect their profits.

But I’m not interested in solving every vague act of violence you’re able to inflict on the people in your imagination, I’m interesting in solving the violence that is happening right now, to real people, using a specific tool.

That’s incompatible with corporate greed. They will look at a billion transactions for $0.05 and start thinking “What if each of those was $0.50? Or $5.00? Or $50.00?”.

Without a regulating force (such as laws or consumer power that isn’t just neoliberal lies) , it will always grow to absorb every available dollar it can.

And realistically, charging people 0.045€ for the service they actually use won’t make them nearly as rich as charging people $50 each month for the $3 dollars they use.

They’ve already done the maths to prove it. It’s why it’s never happened.

There’s demonstrably millions of people who are absolutely fine with being assholes, especially if it’s profitable. It doesn’t matter to them in the slightest.

With any change on the site formerly known as Twitter, there are 3 lenses to examine it through:

1. Reducing the massive financial loss that Musk will almost certainly take
2. Amplifying the voice of the far-right
3. Stroking the ego of the man child who owns it

This is probably mostly 1. He’s looked at the number of users and said “what if they were dollars?”.

But like you say, there’s probably a bit of 2. Reactionaries are more likely to hand over a dollar for a Truth Social with outside their choir to abuse.

It probably won’t dissuade bots and astro-turfing, but it will make it pay-to-play, with the richest welding the most influence. That’s definitely 3 since by any other metric besides money, Elon is average.

I can only approve of people paying for services they use. It isn’t free to run. But there are several things to consider:

I don’t mind paying for services, but I now have 20 different services. Each one is trying to extract the maximum amount of money out of me while giving me a minimum in return.

I also accept that those services are not free to run, but realistically, these companies aren’t just trying to cover their operating costs, they’re trying to further line the pockets of executives and shareholders.

And its never enough for them. I could give Twitter $100 a month and they’d still sell my data for a few extra pennies. I could give YouTube an unlimited supply of servers and bandwidth and they’d still show just as many ads.

We will never get the cost living under control until this corporate greed is addressed because no matter how much money we pay people, there’s an army of psychopaths ready to milk them of every cent.

So fuck em. They can have an extra dollar when they can prove it will actually end up in the pocket of an employee. Otherwise, the richest man in the world can fund his own little reactionary pet project.

They dismiss it because it’s bullshit. Every stop on the slope is not inevitable.

In this particular case, why is the pro-gun community able to prevent changes to gun laws – despite those laws being deeply flawed and with only a minority of Americans supporting them – but somehow unable to prevent the floodgates after that?

The response the gun lobby wants to hear is “they gubbermint won’t do it because they’re scared we’ll shoot them!” but it’s pure bravado. Grossly negligent gun laws haven’t prevented the American government from doing things to its citizens that would make China blush and the pro-gun crowd didn’t even change their vote, let alone sacrifice their lives to prevent it.

Because everything is a bullshit slippery slope to them. “Oh you want to get rid of the second amendment? What’s next? The first amendment? The fourth?”

Nope. Just the second. It’s repealing an amendment, not dabbling with heroin. They’re not going to say “oh why not, maybe one more”.

Making the “responsible” part of “responsible gun owner” mandatory is not going to cause the collapse of civilisation.

The browsers solved this long ago.

Any request to open a new page, from either the pages themselves or from the OS, prefers a new tab. If there are multiple windows in which it could open a new tab, it prefers the latest. If you want to split a tab off into a new window, you can.

With Explorer, any OS request for a folder that isn’t already open creates a new window and there doesn’t appear to be any way to prevent that.

But in a weirdly shit way. I will never want more than 1 window but still end up with 5.

If any of those (conspicuously unnamed) household items were used to kill even half as many people as guns, there would absolutely be legislation to reduce the public safety risk.

If that legislation failed as routinely as America’s gun laws do, it would be improved or replaced until it worked.