The obvious warning - be very careful if you intend to fire it, do your reading first, yadda yadda. It's legal in America, though some states restrict production of certain things. Yes, you can absolutely make a non-replica, but if you want to actually design your own weapon, I recommend reading Chinn's The Machine Gun which has most of the requisite mathematical details.
And you want us to believe it will be okay if the government just "does something"? When will people quit turning to the federal government to solve their problems and take responsibility for themselves? Everyone ought to make his own decision whether to stay home or go to work and deal with the consequences accordingly.
I'll note that you edited your comment after I posted my reply, and are now making it sound like you didn't. It originally included something to the effect of, "This shouldn't be allowed to happen."
I hope this convinces people to become more self-sufficient overall and grow a little of their own food. Living farther out from dense urban cores on more land will help, and conveniently, it will also make one less likely to fall ill. Telecommuting will hopefully enable people to live much less densely and avoid something like this recurring at its present scale.
Dark sky is not a public good, it's a for-profit business that puts a shiny interface on the same information available to everyone. It also added user reporting and analytics, so added material value. The app cost money. Why don't you lobby your congressman to have NOAA develop a better app instead? You can't make a privately-developed program a "public good"; citizens can't just "demand" that dark sky remains independent and expands because they didn't pay for it. Either lobby the government for a better app, wait for the private sector to develop a better app, or lobby the government to attach a license to the data prohibiting commercial use (though this would kill the other apps, too).
So sorry to hear that; praying he gets well, along with all others sickened. Thanks to him and to everyone else who worked on the internet; they're the reason why we can still function and communicate at all.
Not all, no, but a good few do (I'm sure this varies by industry, region, etc.) Ambitious people tend to do so more than others; there are only so many promotions/pay raises/etc. to go around and I'd rather I get it than one of my co-workers, so it becomes a bit of a positional arms race.
There's also a third group with an equally-valid point: the people who don't want to pay for any of it. I think they've gotten drowned out by the others.
This is exactly right. The economy has grown to unsustainable levels based on the economic habits of the average American who can't be bothered to save, hence the crash we're seeing now. At sixty hours a week, that guy should be making six figures, pre-tax. There is zero excuse for not saving. Everyone should save at least six months of salary for emergencies; though a few people legitimately can't, most Americans simply don't bother because they'd rather spend that money on the new i phone.
Edit: Williamdclt, I'll answer your question here due to rate-limiting.
Yes, lots of us do; I've been working that way since internships in high school. Same with many others I know. Usually, though, it's close to 12 hours a day and none on Saturday, or maybe 11 a day and a little on the weekend. Not an issue so long as you plan about an hour a day for something fun and mindless, and leave weekends free to do chores/relax.
Edit: Consz, responding here due to rate-limiting.
Not all of us live in the same world. I'm glad to hear you and your friends are doing well, but that's not representative of everyone. I do because I'm currently hourly, and that's true of many of the people I mentioned. When every additional hour worked has more money associated with it, most people will work more; that's not silly. The downside is, of course, there's a distinct opportunity cost to taking time off, so I don't do so much of that.
How is shrinking the government to blame? It's expanded colossal ever since the new deal. Grover Norquist, the guy you're quoting, is not an elected official. He was just saying what he believes. That's pretty weak evidence for "the problem". The only nation that ended up containing it was China, because being able to tightly control what your population does is one of the perks of authoritarianism. That said, it doesn't make it a good trade-off.
If the media hadn't spent weeks fearmongering and spinning this as some killer exotic plague (rather than something that hits at-risk populations much harder but is survivable for most others). Only a few percent of younger people have needed intensive care. It won't make too much of a difference anyway; we'll still hit a peak and have a colossal shortage of everything. The doctors will have to make a choice: do we save the young person with more years and more productivity ahead of him, or do we save the eighty-year-old? Guess which will be chosen?
There is no pretty solution to this problem. A lot of people will get hurt. I wish everyone would stop staring like a hungry child at the government, begging it to "do something". The government cannot solve this problem. Stealing more money from those who remain in work won't solve anything. This is precisely the time to reduce taxes massively, completely gut every entitlement program, and strangle the bureaucracy that caused this mess until the nation has a chance to prosper.
EDIT: Replying to Slartie comment here, as HN is rate-limiting.
What is "navigating through"? The government can't arrest those who violate its un-constitutional orders, lest it risk spreading disease further. Why can the precious bureaucracy solve this? How? It'll do something, that's for sure, but that's because everyone keeps screaming to "do something".
You're looking at this absolutely the wrong way. This is the time to massively cut taxes, promote supply-side growth, and remove almost all entitlements. It is the job of each American to be responsible for his own welfare, not for Big Daddy Government to swoop in and save him. The Nanny State strikes again. Twelve-hundred-dollar hand-outs to everyone? Disgraceful. We're turning into a nation of lazy mooching welfare queens.
> Now tell me again that the "government cannot solve this problem".
> Even the anti-government Republicans currently seem to look to the government as the only instance potentially capable of solving this problem.
Who said I was a Republican, or agreed with the party, or approved of its actions? I don't. It's a disgrace.
EDIT: Replying to ss2003 here, as HN is rate-limiting.
Yes, but entitlements too. They make up most of our expenses, not military.
EDIT: Replying to jahaja here, as HN is rate-limiting.
Why do you say that? You'd really saddle the next generation with debt to pay for a shutdown that saves mostly older people? That's no more fair than a million people being killed by a virus. If you could choose that everyone looses his job or one person dies, what would you choose? Why? What about a hundred people dying? Thousand? Where's you're bright line?
3.28 million people are already out of work, likely a good deal more than that. One million are most at risk. There won't be zero impact, but that's less than a third, right out of the gate. Long-term we'll see significant increases in unemployment on the "shut-it-down" path.
To clarify based on your reply to this comment, my point was that we've already seen more people out of work than the estimated worst-case 1.2 million death toll. This is the first data point, and we'll see more huge increases as we gather more. You mentioned that sick people won't work, but we're already seeing what is possibly more unemployment than we'd have with people sick. 1.2 million < 3.28 million.
While some people may not work in the short term, this "flattening the curve" business prolongs that time greatly. We'd all be back much sooner if we just ripped off the band-aid and got it over with.
EDIT: Replying to circumvent123 here, as HN is rate-limiting.
Yes, death is worse than unemployment, but for how many? Death for one vs unemployment for everyone, which would you pick? If so, is this simply a question of the ratio of the two? Regardless, that's not the choice of bureaucrats to make. At-risk populations are responsible for staying home and keeping themselves safe.
For this not to bankrupt the nation and retard our growth for the next twenty-five years, we need to all go back to work, today. Even if coronavirus kills a million people, the rest will probably be fine in the long term. If we shut down the economy, three hundred million will be affected. This "flattening the curve" business is clearly not worth it.
You cannot shut the economy. There is only so much we can borrow. The fed is buying debt right and left, and the government surely doesn't want to borrow money and remove that liquidity. So, the fed will buy t-bills instead and probably have to inflate the currency to pay for it all. We could end up spending orders of magnitude than 2 trillion on more hand-outs, so we could end up with another period of stagflation. Unless we want to retard our growth and prosperity for the next 25 years, we all have to go back, consequences aside. Vulnerable people need to stay home for months until this blows over; it's not the responsibility of the rest of us to lose our jobs for the sake of a few others. Doctors say we have to stay home, but as doctors, they naturally want to prioritize health. As the saying goes, if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Like many other problems, there are diminishing returns as we approach either extreme of opening the economy or shutting it down. This extreme clearly isn't working. The at-risk million stay home; everyone else goes to work.
I just re-discovered MTG a week or two ago. I was wondering with a few friends what we could do to socialize, and as none of us are big video game guys, we decided to try playing via Cockatrice. I was able to quickly set up a server and get everyone playing; lots of fun. In case any Cockatrice developer sees this, thank you!