WoodScientist

Meanwhile in Alabama, things are so backwards there they haven't even figured out shoes yet! It's not like they prefer sandals or they're too poor to afford shoes. They all go around barefoot, because the idea of shoes just has never occured to any of them. Most buildings instead have special brush ledges so you can scrape the dirt and blood off your feet before you walk in. Again, they're just a hopelessly backwards people. So backwards, they haven't even figured out shoes yet. Their cousins over in Mississippi are a bit further along. MSU currently has a study going where they're experimenting with wrapping feet in ziplock bags, secured with rubber bands.

All real men spring forth, fully formed, from Zeus's brow.

I plan to live forever of course, but even 500 years would be pretty nice.

What if the person breaking into Kamala's house is Clarence Thomas?

The bigger problem is that people who buy guns for home defense are acting emotionally, not logically. The cold hard statistical truth is that if you own a firearm, it is most likely to be used by yourself or one of your family members to commit suicide, or to be the cause of a fatal accident, than it is to be used in self defense.

People have this deeply flawed belief about suicide that if someone wants to do it, they'll find a way. But that isn't how suicide actually works. Most actual suicides are spur-of-the moment things. And giving someone access, in their, home, to a quick and usually painless method of ending their own life serves to massively increase the risk of suicide. Everyone has bad days. Everyone who lives long enough and isn't a psychopath will experience deep sorrow. In a drunken sorrow on the night after a bad breakup or the death of a close relative? It doesn't take much for people to be vulnerable to the call of the void.

Yes, break-ins are scary. But the truth is, most thieves try NOT to break in when someone is home. And home invasions for rape, murder, or kidnapping are even rarer. There are a lot of scary things in this world, but you shouldn't let that fear control your behavior. Rabies is a damn terrible thing, but it would be incredibly irrational to avoid going on a hike just due the risk of encountering a rabid wild animal.

In the US at least, if you own a gun, it is far, far likelier that that weapon will be used to end your life or life of one of your family members than it will end be used in self defense.

This is why I do not own a firearm. Yes, home invasions are terrifying. But if you own a weapon for the sake of home defense, you are letting your emotions and fear control your life. The simple statistical fact is that, on the net, buying a gun lowers your average expected lifespan.

As long as you only drive it on your own ranch, fine. But when you take your vehicle off your property, it becomes everyone else's business.

It's scientific data, and considering the context, the rightful property of all mankind. Give it universally to any an all.

The seemingly straightforward solution is that SpaceX needs to be legally required to get into the radio astronomy business. As part of being allowed to launch such noisy satellites. If they are going to wreck radio astronomy on Earth's surface, they should have to launch orbital radio telescopes of such quality and quantity that SpaceX is actually a vast net boon on radio astronomy. This should simply be a legally required cost of doing business if they want to launch so many noisy satellites. Yes, these orbital telescopes would have a finite lifespan and need to be regularly replaced to be updated, but thankfully the greatest rocket company on Earth will be legally required to launch them regularly.

I mean, what exactly do you want? OP specifically asked how people actually go about hiring a hitman. I assume OP is not a mobster. Unless you have those kind of connections, there is zero chance you're going to find some person you don't already know who will be willing to kill for you in exchange for money. OP specifically asked about hiring a hitman. And that fundamentally implies that there are people out there that offer this kind of service that you can just purchase if you have the cash. And the truth is that no, that business fundamentally just does not exist. Just because some people in certain very specific contexts have killed another person for money does not mean that there is a way for the average person to find a killer-for-hire. That simply isn't a service that you can go out and buy.

Worse still, their MO is incredibly transparent. They want to establish a "buffer zone" in southern Lebanon, but Israel's "buffer zones" are just a way of slowly expanding their borders. The problem is that a buffer zone like the DMZ only works as a buffer zone if you keep your own civilian population from moving in to that buffer zone! Israel lets it's 'settlers' move into what are supposed to be buffer zones like the DMZ. After awhile, the settlements are retroactively recognized and made legal. Now you have civilians in ordinary communities living in what was supposed to be a buffer zone. And since they're right on the border again, they're now in range of attack from the angry people whose former land they are now living on.

"Buffer zones" only work if you arrest and/or shoot any of your own people who try and move into them. Otherwise, they're just a slow-motion conquest via bureaucracy. The same thing has happened in the West Bank. Israel takes Palestinian land around Israeli settlements, declaring them to be security buffer zones. Then they let their settlers move in there. Suddenly they have vulnerable civilians within easy reach of angry Palestinians, so they need to establish a new buffer zone. Rinse and repeat.

It's slow-motion ethnic cleansing via zoning code and bureaucracy.

My understand is, yes. They just broadcast the message on all towers in an area. The pager may be a simple one-way passive device. Or, it might have just enough broadcast ability to periodically ping a cell tower.

Pagers still have some specialized use cases. One of these is hospitals. A lot of hospitals still use them. Hospitals, as structures, are designed to the most strictest structural codes of any kind of building. If an earthquake or hurricane happens, you want your hospital to be the LAST building that ever falls over. So hospitals tend to be big, heavy structures that are massively over reinforced, way beyond what commercial or residential buildings would be. If you look at hospitals, they just look different as buildings. They're hulking leviathans of structures.

While this makes them damn-near indestructible, it also can make it really difficult to get cell signals inside of them. Cell companies don't like wasting power broadcasting signals strong enough to penetrate bunkers. They size their towers so their signals can penetrate most common buildings.

But "penetrate" is a complex term. If you only need to transmit a simple message, a lower-quality signal is often fine. Think of the difference between talking and shouting. In a noisy environment with lots of interference, we automatically switch to a form of verbal communication, shouting, that can overcome a lot of noise, but has a low information density. You can shout to be heard over a din, but you're not going to be able to communicate subtle emotional context by minute tones in your voice.

Alternately, you can think of it that a simple message can easily be repeated many times. Want to make sure a simple text message gets through? Broadcast that thing 10,000 times in a row. That 10,000 times will still represent a fraction of a second of the data volume needed for a video call. But the pager can piece together the message from the few hundred fragments of messages that manage to get through.

I'm sure the actual network protocols are complicated, but I'm just talking about general communication here. The key is that for many reasons, you can often trade communications reliability for communications complexity. A video call will only work in perfect conditions. A simple page will penetrate thick concrete walls and work in the worst of weather events.

Oh, and often hospitals will actually install their own pager repeaters or independent pager systems right on site. In that case, the network doesn't need to worry at all about figuring out what tower to send the signal to.

Thankfully, the true morons are a very small portion of the electorate. I don't mean that anyone that is politically disengaged is a moron. If you just don't care about who leads you, figure each side is as good as the other, and just want to focus on your own life and troubles, fine. The struggle is real, and I don't blame someone who is working three jobs trying to keep a roof over their heads from simply deciding to avoid politics entirely. They don't have the mental cycles to spare, and they just can't. If you want to avoid all political news, put zero thought into the candidates, and just avoid avoid the electoral process entirely, fine. The right to vote is a right, not an obligation. I don't ascribe to that worldview, but I get it.

In contrast, the true electoral moron is someone who is completely politically disengaged, puts zero effort or critical thought into the state of contemporary politics, but still stubbornly insists on showing up to vote anyway. They don't have a damn idea who they should vote for, but damnit, they sure are as hell are going to vote anyway. It's the Dunning-Kruger voter.

But again, thankfully this is a very small portion of the people that show up on election day. There's maybe 30-40% of the whole population that's just decided to write off politics entirely. I don't personally understand that worldview. I can't imagine not caring about what leaders we elect and how it affects our lives. But, oh well, if someone chooses to opt out of the political system and accept whatever the rest of us decide, so be it. But while I don't understand it, I am at least thankful that most of these people have enough self-awareness to realize that if they don't give a damn about the outcome of elections, that they really shouldn't bother voting in the first place. The vast majority of people who are completely disengaged with candidates and the issues are simply not going to vote at all. It takes a rather rare breed of moron to completely divorce yourself from political thought and reality, while also deciding to still bother to register, drive to the polls, and fill out a ballot.

And also, I take solace in the fact that if their vote really is a random number generator, then they will have little actual effect on the election. Both candidates should get about an equal share of the true moron vote, so their overall effect is a wash.

I'm overall not that concerned about the true undecided morons. I'm far more concerned about those who have taken a look at both candidates and actually fully embrace and love the policies proposed by Trump and Vance. The type who are not just unaware, but fully onboard with their most abominable policies. I'm far more concerned that there's a sizable portion of the population that is entirely in favor of the idea of creating a Christofascist white ethnostate. Trump and Vance have the support they do because there is a sizable portion of the electorate that is fully aware of everything they have done and want to do, and to them? It sounds like a fantastic idea. THAT is what really keeps me up at night. The true morons are mostly harmless idiots. The truly evil ones are those I'm really concerned about.