TeknOShEeP
1mo ago
Agreed only on practical grounds, and only for the moment.
It is impossible with current technology to not use a nuclear bomb and adversely affect basically everyone on Earth. Millions of people use guns every day without affecting anyone who doesnt choose to be affected (usually on the gun range wearing ear pro). When humanity spreads among the stars, if you want to make pretty flashes on airless chunks of rock utterly devoid of life, you should be able to.
TeknOShEeP
1mo ago
Disagree entirely. While i do not agree with them politically, many of my leftoid friends have suddenly discovered the purpose behind the second ammendment, and are wondering why our state has so many idiotic gun laws.
Guns may be fun, and they may provide a constructive outlet, but their purpose is potential violence. Thats the point. Pretending otherwise is dishonest and pointless.
TeknOShEeP
1mo ago
The telos of a great many very useful inventions that are today essential to a civilized world was first to kill people.
Satellite navigation was invented for the explicit purpose of missile guidance during nuclear sneak attacks.
The internet was invented as a command and control loop to enable retaliation in the event of a nuclear sneak attack.
Precision measurement and machining was invented by the gun industry, to make guns, which kill people.
Pesticides that enable the feeding of 8 billion people and freedom from devastating famines are just repurposed chemical weapons.
Modern central planning and crisis response centers are organizational descendents of the Prussian General Staff, which was invented to enable the Prussian army to be a great deal more efficient at killing people.
Essentially any breed of horse not explicitly a draft animal is the result of breeding for war.
That the common European value system ignores these basic truths is not a recommendation in its favor. Rather it serves to illustrate how divorced from reality it is (just in case its current suicidal impulses weren’t obvious enough). Homo Sapiens did not evolve to sit atop this world by being pacifists. We exist because our ancestors (and some currently alive) embraced the necessity of potential violence.
TeknOShEeP
1mo ago
I guess it depends on what your standard for pulls is, I dont own a P320 but i would called them on the lighter side of average for the ones I've shot.
But again, engaging the sear to any point before release should not fire the gun. Tolerance stackup is a thing, but it needs to be managed for safety critical applications.
The issue here is that this gun has like 3 million copies in the U.S. and has undergone numerous rigorous testing and trials.
Sort of? The XM17 selection has been controversial for a while- the P320 did poorly on the drop safety tests resulting in a redesign, and then after down select to just Sig and Glock, Sig was awarded the contract before endurance testing was actuslly accomplished (allegedly because Sig cut their price massively at that point). Police departments appear to have based their selection on the military's selection, but I havent heard much about any of their testing, there doesnt appear to be a whole lot of it done.
Now I agree if this was just bitching about one Glock-clone vs another then there might not be anything to it, but the P320 is not a Glock clone, and has some rather unique elements to its design such as a fully cocked striker on recoil that no one else has done (including Sig on their other guns like the P365), and there appears to be a good reason for that.
TeknOShEeP
1mo ago
Quick glance at their stock price shows a roughly 15% jump since the ad campaign started in stark contrast to what has otherwise been a crappy year for them, so I'm fairly certain their boardroom is drooling over every hit piece.
TeknOShEeP
1mo ago
Mmm, going to have to disagree. The P320 has a fairly light trigger pull compared to most DA striker fired guns, 1mm of travel is maybe 2 lbs at most? Probably less.
And no, partially engaging the sear then jostling the gun absolutely should not result in a discharge, thats the whole point behind drop and firing pin safeties. Except as newer videos reveal, the P320s firing pin safety does not actually block the firing pin, and the drop safety is easily defeated by any slide canting, which occurs even under normal trigger pulls.
It appears to be a uniquely terrible design, even compared to other Sig pistols with teething issues, and a possible exception to the "guns dont kill people, people kill people" rule.
TeknOShEeP
1mo ago
The screw is to demonstrate the effect that quite a lot of holsters might have of putting slight pressure on the trigger shoe. The fact that you can get the gun to fire without pulling the trigger past the sear release simply by jostling the slide is, in firearms terms, completely and totally unacceptable.
TeknOShEeP
2mo ago
Technically, the National Reconnaissance Office operates the satellites and allegedly does not recieve direct tasking from the CIA, due to asinine interagency spats. And if you believe that, there's a certain bridge for sale.
TeknOShEeP
2mo ago
The middle ground is modern medicine is good enough to save people who 10 years ago would have been pronounced dead almost immediately upon arriving at the hospital, but even fully replacing a humans blood capacity several times over can't save them from brain death.
TeknOShEeP
2mo ago
did he actually do this
There's a FB video of it somewhere, amongst all of the other Satanist content (not derrogatory, he is apparently a practicing Satanist). Lacking a FB account, i cant actually log in to find the specific one. But he posted it himself.
Now i personally dont give a fuck what he does, but for branding purposes he's sort of pigeonholed himself into a very specific niche that a) most gun owners and gun curious people probably dont align with, and b) would definitely affect the squeaky clean image Gun Jesus cultivates.
TeknOShEeP
2mo ago
ThisIsSin covered it pretty well, the only thing I would add is GunJesus tries very hard (and succeeds!) at not taking sides in the culture war and keeps his videos and other endevours open to all. In this day and age, thats a very admirable thing and one of the main reasons he is universally respected.
Karl, on the other hand, at least by going off social media posts, rather vocally and militantly left wing, and not in a family friendly way either. (Drinking cum out of skulls is, uh, certainly a choice).
TeknOShEeP
2mo ago
Jimmy John's has superior cold sandos to Jersey Mikes, but no one can top the Big Kahuna cheesesteak from Mikey.
TeknOShEeP
2mo ago
I do, but boomer-fuddville is convenient to me, so if i need to zero a scope or try a new build I can be in an out in under an hour instead of making it a half-day excursion. I make a point of loudly calling out all of these violations to the RSO, and they are pretty good about clamping down on it, but they shouldnt have to intervene in the first place.
TeknOShEeP
2mo ago
I think that was definitely true for the first Trump admin, one of the many personnel problems it had. But my reading of the tea leaves is that Vance is absolutely being groomed as Trump's successor- he is being sent out to do the sort of foundational policy making that you wouldn't fob off on the average do-nothing VP. Vance's speech at the Munich Security Conference is one of biggest moments in international relations of the decade, fundamentally changing the relationship between the US and EU, and full of lines that I would imagine Trump himself would have loved to drop, and yet JD is the one doing it.
Also, Vance is low key probably the smartest (in terms of IQ) major figure in American politics today, which is always a plus for his future prospects.
TeknOShEeP
2mo ago
children were born without marraige
Er, you mean "within marraige"?
TeknOShEeP
2mo ago
Yeah, I know exactly what type of gun owner the plaintiff would be, and its not good. One of those times when you wish this would be kept quite and the family could step in with a quiet word.
TeknOShEeP
2mo ago
On the one hand, this is a horshit denial of 2nd ammendment rights based on bullshit case law that actively makes everyone involved less safe (its the same debate being had right now in the pilot community- when you punish people for seeking mental health care, no one is going to seek mental health care). The courts should be fucking ashamed, and the justices involved run out of town on a rail.
On the other hand, the amount of times I have been muzzle swept by old boomer fudds at the range who cant remeber the 4 rules of gun safety much less their blood pressure medication is way too damn high, and I am all for not letting them have guns.
A way around this is to institute more competency tests, and make them rigorous. This will naturally raise the spectre of jim crow era literacy tests, but fuck it, if you cant recall basic facts like rules of the road, rules of gun safety, or what congress/the president actually do, you shoudlnt be able to shoot, drive, or vote.
TeknOShEeP
3mo ago
Some cursory searching indicates that the proper term for such strategies is "bonus hunting", not "arbitrage"
I would agree- arbitrage has a very specific technical definition that is not remotely equivalent to "free money". It gets abused often and is frequently used in get rich quick training course scams and the like.
You can execute an arbitrage strategy in gambling, but its much more likely to pop up in things like sports betting where you could buy the opposite sides of a result at different books under the right odds, ensuring a profit regardless of outcomes. Bookies are generally competent enough to avoid this situation though.
TeknOShEeP
3mo ago
Okay, but let me turn the argument around- prove that the launches are not making a profit. You say they are just setting money on fire. I say that is a ridiculously high number of launches to just burn piles of money on, it's an order of magnitude more than their nearest commercial competitor, and if they were not making money there is no way that even Musk could bankroll it. A handful of launches to prove concepts? Sure, its an investment. But you need paying customers within about your first 5 or 10 rockets, and you need to be making money not too long after that.
We have examples of what vanity space companies funded by billionaires look like- Virgin Galactic is one, Blue Origin another. SpaceX does not look very much like these companies. It does look a lot more like actually profitable commercial space launch entities like ULA and ATK, except with what appears to be far superior design and operations.
I professionally walk in aerospace circles, and while I dont work for SpaceX, I've worked with them on some stuff, and they by and large come off as an incredibly serious, cost-focused entity. Far more so than even "legacy space" they are beating the pants off of at the moment.
TeknOShEeP
3mo ago
The US space program started out as a massive government push, and during the heyday of the Apollo program NASA's budget went as high as 4.4% of the entire federal budget. It definitely got results, and its the reason any space program exists at all. Lots of bad behavior has definitely snuck in since those days, but without the whole Space Race thing there is zero chance we have anything like the industry we have today.
Looking at the rest of the globe there is a strong correlation between "has an actual space industry" and current or prior national level "Space Race"-tier efforts. I.e. Russia and China have actual launch capabilities, their direct geopolitical adversaries in Japan and India have developed fledgling capabilities in response (as has Israel due to similar threats), and then you get giant blocks of highly educated, wealthy, sophisticated nations that have somehow managed to produce what is recognized in official policy documents as more of a jobs handout than actual space program, mostly due to a complete lack of any initial kick in the butt.
TeknOShEeP
3mo ago
Just please, won't someone show the actual profit the company is making.
You are asking for non-public numbers that being a non-public company SpaceX is under no obligation to provide. The current best guess is that Starlink (and its defense version Starshield) account for roughly 2/3rds of the company's revenue, and since most of that is for actual services rather than hardware it probably has a decent profit margin, but everyone has their own assumptions.
I know Musk is one of the richest people on Earth, but even he doesn't have unlimited cash to throw at a failing endevour. Jeff Bezos is also one of the richest people on Earth, and his rocket company Blue Origin is actually older, but has done far, far less in that same timeframe. If I get to invest my own cash, I'd put it 100% with SpaceX.
TeknOShEeP
3mo ago
The competition is catching up, and Starship has so far been nothing but a money furnace. Unless you show me how much money he's making from it, clean, I stand by my words.
Lol, lmao even. The competition is quite literally being left on the ground while SpaceX is by far the most advanced launch company on (and leaving) Earth. This (pdf warning) is a handy little summary of 2024 launch activities. There were 263 total orbital launch attempts last year, of which 134 were SpaceX Falcon 9s (132 standards, 2 heavies). 133 of those attempts were successful, for a demonstrated reliability rate over 99%. So more than half of all launches last year were SpaceX, and they are more reliable than anyone else. But even this number vastly understates the actual capabilities gap. While numerically having 50% of the launches, the Falcon family put more than 90% of the total mass into orbit because they can carry substantially larger payloads than any of their competitors (the Falcon heavy in particular can roughly double anything else's mass to LEO). Putting the very large cherry on top is the fact that no one else is remotely close to cost-competitive with Falcon 9 below $3k per kg and Heavy below $2k per kg, while everyone else including the Chinese who use ICBM boosters and drop their rockets into populated villages all north of $5k per kg.
So the current state of play is that the SpaceX workhorse, the Falcon 9, is at a minimum twice as capable in cost and capacity metrics compared to all of the competition, while being substantially more technically advanced. Its the only rocket currently active that incorporates re-use in any meaningful fashion, its the only rocket currently flying with engine-out capability, and its the only rocket currently flying that can do school-bus style launches where customers can buy a small chunk of the total launch mass and get their payloads inserted into independent orbits.
Everyone else is just playing catch-up with the Falcon 9 at this point, and having a hard time with it. Its fair to say SpaceX is at least a generstion ahead on the general launch vehicle front. But the hell of it is the Falcon 9 is going to be made obsolete by Starship, which will be even cheaper and have vastly more payload capacity. Are there problems currently? Yes, absolutely, the block 2 second stage seems to have some very big problems. But the whole "catching the booster" thing seems to be fairly well solved, which is mind boggling. No one else has any true first-gen re-use capability for even their boosters, and SpaceX has a fairly well developed second gen platform. The second stage needs some work clearly, but you get optimized platforms by experimenting, and thats what they're doing.
I guess this all seems like fanboying, but it is wild to me that one of the most technically complex and expensive markets ever developed by humanity is so wildly skewed towards one participant based purely on execution and not things like massive government intervention/control (Long March, Arienne).
TeknOShEeP
3mo ago
Wow, this is a fantastic summary I've been trying to write, but somehow way more concise. Reported as AAQC, thanks.
TeknOShEeP
3mo ago
the problem for actual conservatives is what is there actually to do here?
Really, the problem for "actual conservatives" is more along the lines of "how can we claw anything of any relevance back?" The "real conservative" party is dead, Trump killed it, and publically so. Being a William F. Buckley fanboy is the surest path to a dead political career, and frankly good riddance.
Lol, options are so much fun. They will fuck you 99.99% of the time. But the one time they dont... your broker calls you on January 27 about that Gamestop $10 call you bought 6 months ago on the advice of some idiot degen who's math actually penciled out. "Dude... you gonna exercise or what?"
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