roughcoat

I doubt encryption does anything all by itself. And apparently, encryption-using terrorists--who would be violating the law if such laws were in place--do kill children. Manchester, you know, it just happened. Nice. Berlin. Stockholm. Pretty soon, it'll just be a "name the city" game where the only question is how bad the most recent terrorist attack they suffered was compared to the rest.

And just as gun control laws do precisely dick to stop criminals from committing their crimes--because laws aren't magic, and they don't bend reality to make guns disappear as soon as the law is signed--encryption laws will be just as efficacious at stopping terrorists from using encryption. Like some wannabe martyr gives a shit about a fine he'll never pay and time he'll probably never serve in some resort prison?

I've used a handgun to signal for help, to find lost people in the woods in Alaska, to hunt, to scare away bears, and for fun. And on a few occasions, I've been very glad to have a handgun with me stateside, because I came quite close to needing to use it to protect myself. Fortunately I was able to negotiate those situations without using force.

Are you a pacifist, incidentally? Can you really think of no valid reason why a citizen might need to wound or kill someone?

Uh huh. Have you studied the genocides of the 20th century? How does a disarmed and helpless populace look in those circumstances?

And since you think the government should be trusted to mete out all force, I'm certain you'll have no trouble handing the government all your passwords and keys, right? Maybe mail them a copy of your car keys and house keys too, since they're so trustworthy?

You trust them to protect your physical safety, to protect your life, if you're willing to hand over your right to self protection. Surely you then trust them with your data and property?

If your idea of reasoned discussion is responding to my comments with logical fallacies, there's no point in wasting any more time on you. Good day.

Further to this, the reality is politicians who want to undermine information security don't give a damn about protecting their citizens/subjects. That's just the excuse to make the poison pill more palatable. What this is about, and what gun control is about, is right there in the name: control. It's about having a monopoly on security and force, so the populace will be less independent and easier to manage. At the very least, if you make enough things illegal you can jail whomever you like, because at some point it will become impossible to avoid breaking the law. The US is already there.

We've already seen government agencies in the US targeting specific political groups. I don't follow politics in other countries much but it would hardly surprise me if that happens elsewhere. It certainly has throughout history. How far will that go this time? No matter what side of the aisle you're on, it should frighten you, because the tool you use on your enemies when you're in power--and any tool you create to beat them up more effectively--is then available for your enemy to use on you when you inevitably lose power.

I find it shocking how many people who clamor for electronic freedom and an uninterfered-with internet are perfectly happy to cede their rights and independence in other areas to the government without so much as a grumble. Learn from history, FFS.

What nonsense. It's obvious what the parent comment meant. Law abiding gun owners by definition do not kill innocent children, just like law abiding people do not use encryption nefariously. Encryption and guns are both tools, with nothing intrinsically good or evil about them.

Yet law abiding gun owners were punished and had their rights stripped throughout most of the world on the pretense that it would somehow help stop crime, despite the quite glaringly obvious fact that criminals by definition do not care about following laws. Thus, only law abiding people are hindered. Criminals will still use encryption and guns, while law abiding citizens will be rendered unable to defend themselves, either electronically or physically.

I find it amazing that I need to spell this out for you.

Wait, you're calling his argument bullshit? You didn't even make an argument, you just said something completely nonsensical.

I'm not speaking hypothetically. I have loaned many tools, and many other possessions, to people in the past. Other people rarely treat my possessions with care, and sometimes they can't be bothered to return them unless I badger them. If I loan you a tool, and you not only don't return it in good shape and in a timely manner but make me come get it from you, I'm certainly not loaning you anything else.

There are certain things I just won't loan. Books? Hell no, unless they're textbooks. If I think someone would enjoy/benefit from reading a book, I'll buy them a copy. Tools? Probably not, unless it's about my third spare and I don't care if I lose it--and I'd probably just give it to them then. Vehicle? Maybe, depending who they are, but I'm more likely to just give them a ride. And of course, that's the thing, isn't it... I'd rather help someone myself than just hand them my gear and wish them luck. And I have done so many times in the past, though I am becoming more selective about who gets my time.

Liability is not to be ignored either. Loan someone a ladder they're too clueless to use properly and you might find yourself getting sued. Besides the fact that I don't want someone else wandering off with my $300 Werner multiposition ladder--sorry, I don't have a crappy ladder I keep around just to loan out--the thing is not exactly foolproof to use. 16 feet off the ground is not the best time to realize you didn't lock the pivot correctly. I wouldn't let someone whose competence I was not sure of just borrow a chainsaw, motorcycle, or firearm either.

FWIW I don't like borrowing things myself either. I've broken friends' possessions before and even though I fixed/replaced them, it's still an awful feeling breaking someone else's stuff.

Here are some opinions and experiences related to loaning tools, if you're interested:

http://www.garagejournal.com/forum/showthread.php?t=37765

http://www.garagejournal.com/forum/showthread.php?t=355714

It's interesting that the 2009 thread had a lot more people who were happy to loan tools, and who had good experiences doing so, than the 2017 thread. That mirrors my experience with loaning things to and generally helping people over the last decade.

I don't see how having a long commute somehow diminishes the benefits of having a personal vehicle. For most people, having a personal vehicle means, partly, being able to live where they want instead of having to choose a home based on accessibility to public transportation, or alternately, to be able to take a job that may be lucrative but totally inaccessible by public transportation. A personal vehicle offers a good deal of flexibility and antifragility that I think you're ignoring here, given the way the real world is set up.

And perhaps all you do is drive around the countryside on the weekend, but that is hardly the only use for a personal vehicle. At least half the really interesting things I've done in my life would not have been possible without my own vehicle.

Why do you assume people embrace "personal car culture" just because there's a lack of public transportation? People like having their own vehicles. It's freedom and independence.

Even if I lived right on a bus line, and my workplace was on that same line, I would still drive or ride a motorcycle to work (or bike, if it was close enough I suppose). I got well over being on the bus's schedule by my senior year of high school and I have no interest in going back to that.

I do absolutely agree we need more remote work options but that's up to employers, and they don't seem to like the idea much in general, so... not holding my breath.

There's a difference between belonging to a sort of tool club, and paying with both time and money to keep things going well, and loaning out my personal possessions. I've been thinking about joining a local makerspace specifically to get access to large tools I don't have space for right now, and I have no problem with that idea. That's no different from joining a gym, in principle. (That doesn't mean I prefer using communal tools. I means right now, that's what's best for my situation. Once I have space, I absolutely will be buying a lathe, mill, etc.)

However, there's a clear difference between that and loaning out my personal equipment. I would never belong to a car share because my car is an intensely personal possession. It doesn't sit bare and empty when I'm not driving it--I keep things in my car--and I never want it to be unavailable to me. And the same goes for my tools. Even something as simple as a ladder or a socket set is personal, when it's something you selected and bought yourself.

I wonder how many mechanics you know? Machinists? Other skilled tool-using professionals? Ask some of them how they feel about loaning tools sometime.

Make a facebook group for your neighborhood if you want, I suppose.

There's no way I'm loaning out my tools, equipment, or anything else I own except to people I trust very highly. I like my possessions to A) be readily available and B) in good working condition when I need them.

'But there are attitudes in mental software that must be modified. "I'm in a hurry and I have to get there RIGHT NOW." "Everyone is in MY way."

Individualism can be an inefficiency of the collective, and that will be a tough lesson to teach.'

Indeed, all you need to do is rewrite human nature.

I don't think anyone really knows. The vehicles haven't been around long enough to understand what long term maintenance looks like regarding any aspect of the vehicle.

People throw numbers around regarding cost for things like replacement motors and battery packs but as far as I can tell nobody knows how much that stuff actually costs either except the manufacturers, because the replacements so far have been done under warranty. That may not be true for all current-gen EVs though; I've mostly been paying attention to the Tesla stuff.

You are aware, I hope, that extinction wasn't invented by humanity?

Being poor is expensive, indeed. Most people don't realize that until they experience it. If they ever do.

If you never have much surplus money, you can rarely if ever do the things that save money in the long term. You can't invest in good clothes or household goods that might cost twice as much, but last more than five times as long as what you can afford, for example. You can't buy a freezer and stock up on food when it's on sale, or cook large cheap meals and freeze them to free up time later. Often, things like good benefits from banks and credit card companies are simply not available to you. Et cetera.

Obviously things like being unable to afford preventative health care and sort of health maintenance stuff like checkups and new glasses and so on can lead to much more expensive problems down the road. "Noncritical" health services like dental and vision are big things there. It's not like you can get a root canal or new glasses at the ER.

And it's very difficult to fight back against mistakes other people make that screw you over when you have few resources on hand. Problems with your bank? In my experience, if you have money a bank is a lot more likely to help you than if you're poor. I was treated a lot better when I had thousands of dollars in the bank than I am now, when I'm scraping by. And that's if you can even open a bank account at a reputable establishment at all. That is not a given.

Then there's renting vs owning property. Owning property isn't for everyone perhaps, but if you're handy and don't need to pay a professional to do everything the house needs, it's a lot cheaper to own than rent. Plus there's the general freedom you have on your own property vs rented property which opens all kinds of doors for saving money or just better quality of life in general.

Having money means you have the freedom to live very frugally by making smart choices and thinking long term. Not having money in the bank, free to spend on the right investments and opportunities, makes that enormously more difficult. And it's only getting worse with time.

We should do nothing, because while interesting, this is a nonevent. Parts of that article are wildly exaggerated or outright incorrect, trying to make this sound like some big deal. It's really not.

Sometimes in nature, things happen quickly. Look up glacial surge, for example. Just because a river dried up basically overnight because it got beheaded, it doesn't mean there's some global catastrophe playing out. It just means the glacier receded to a point where the terrain favored the other branch.

Not all of that core is replaceable, because the locations the cores came from have since melted.

Depends on what I'm doing. If I'm grinding through stuff I know exactly how to do, but can't automate away, I find having something like people talking or an audiobook I know well running in the background actually helps me focus. It occupies just enough of my mind that I don't feel tempted to get distracted by the internet.

I have a whole range of preferred noise depending on the task, from dead silence for hard, tricky problems up to what I just described for easy but important detail work. I even know exactly what kind of music I want to listen to for different tasks, and whether or not I want vocals in it.

There is no one-size-fits-all solution to what works for people.

Some kind of screen sharing app with Krita = virtual whiteboard. You have a lot more room than a real whiteboard offers, since Krita has a "pseudo-infinite" canvas, so you don't need to erase things. And you can save the file for reference, or to send it other people.