Because the argument is that guns cause violent crime (specifically mass shootings) and the example of Finland shows that not to be the case. Then if guns don’t cause violent crime what is it?

The most likely explanation to me is that there is a confounder: an unknown which causes both the acquisition of (one or more) guns and the commission of crimes. A hidden criminality element which Finland seems to lack.

The alternative explanation is that the U.S. is a broken society (in one or more ways) and that this leads people to feel the desire to lash out in extremely violent ways. The availability of guns in the US offers them an easy option for inflicting mass casualties but the recent example of Michigan shows that even without a gun there is still the opportunity for mayhem.

Well yeah that’s sort of the point. The presence of guns alone does not predict gun violence. You need violent people for it to happen.

I got it from Wikipedia. Households and people are different statistics. People includes children who are unlikely to own a gun.

I also prefer households as a statistic over guns per capita because it avoids the issue of gun collectors who may have hundreds of guns in one household…

Finland has almost as many households (as a %) with guns as the U.S. (38% for Finland vs 42% for the U.S.) yet the U.S. has about 19x the per capita gun homicide rate of Finland.

They’re just trying to cash out at this point. Much of the early investment, such as from Microsoft, was not in the form of cash but credits to use Microsoft’s computing resources. Can’t retire on Azure credits!

Using technology as a surrogate for community.

It’s just nostalgia applied to the internet. Some people call it Eternal September. Everyone prefers what the internet was when they first discovered it and hate what it’s become since then. I remember the internet from 1996 most fondly. Many prefer it from the 80s or earlier 90s. This is no different from other media: music, TV, movies.

Of course this is separate from the real issue which is the consolidation and silo-ification of the modern web.

I don’t have a doorbell of any kind (the button isn’t even hooked up to anything). My neighbours are jerks but they won’t steal packages or anything like that.

We’re living in a low trust society that used to be a high trust society a few decades ago. I believe all of the problems you see in politics ultimately stem from this. Factionalism is tearing western society apart.

Don’t you know the Dewey decimal system?

Also the real life story of anthropologists visiting an uncontacted tribe via helicopter!

Community gardens still divide the space into individual plots. If I grow a bunch of jalapeño peppers on my plot then it’s not cool if you just come along and harvest them all.

Save up your money and then move to a low CoL country that’s friendly to foreigners.

Yes, it is a choice. However one of the biggest problems is that so many of the good choices are gone. I’m talking about the positive social institutions and community organizations people used to belong to. The third spaces.

Communities have fragmented. Neighbours hate each other. Both of my neighbours hate our family. One is a childless, alcoholic husband and wife who also hate each other (they used to be nice years ago) who also hate us and give us creepy looks all the time. The other is green lawn-obsessed neighbour who hates us for the pine trees we have growing on our property and refuse to cut down (at our own expense) to suit their tastes.

We’re a society of severely mentally ill, isolated, confused, and angry people. Our villages and communities are all gone. We’re all a bunch of islands unto ourselves.

The manosphere is one symptom of a much larger problem. Look at it in isolation and you’ll miss the big picture. Authoritarianism is on the rise globally. Loneliness is reaching epidemic proportions. Society’s traditional institutions are a distant memory. All we have remaining are loose groups of people shouting at each other as the spectre of war lurks in the background.

That’s a strange list. OpenAI doesn’t only offer SaaS for end users, it also offers API access which puts it into the infrastructure game with the likes of Amazon AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure (which actually offers OpenAI services and pushes them out to Windows users en masse).

6 million units at $700 a pop is $4.2 billion in revenue. Much closer to 1/2 of $10 billion than 1/10.

Apple has never made more money from the App Store than from iPhone hardware sales. When the iPhone launched the App Store didn’t exist yet. Over time, Apple’s revenue from services (including the App Store) has grown dramatically to around $26 billion per quarter today, though that is still less than what they earn in iPhone sales (a bit over $50 billion per quarter in 2024).

Prefer the juice that turns you into a bottle of juice that turns people into juice that turns people into juice that turns people into juice that turns people into juice…

This is the same mistake everyone makes. They think Donald Trump is just a person. That he actually matters and we just have to get rid of him and everything will be okay.

It doesn’t work that way.

As fascism didn’t die with Hitler, it’s not going to die with Trump. All of the problems — all of the rifts in our society — will still be there when he’s gone.

So you want Donald Trump in charge of the telecom industry and any other industries that have received some sort of public subsidy?

“To my friends, everything. To my enemies, the law.”

This is the only logic to it.