What rifle and in what caliber do you most recommend for home defense and cheap, relatively plentiful ammo that is shortage-resistant?
I am considering a cheap Palmetto State Armory AR kit chambered for 5.56 NATO rounds so I could also fire .223s. Is brand particularly important, or are most ARs on the market good enough for practice and emergency use?
I don’t think it’s possible to abolish prisons for all crimes. But why does a thief or a drug dealer (or worse, just a drug user) need to be in prison? What about the nature of their crimes necessitates imprisonment as a reasonable method of corrections?
If the point is stopping people from reoffending, prisons don’t do that. Like objectively. Recidivism in the US is super high, and going to prison predicts increases in the severity of crimes people commit.
So, what reduces recidivism? Eliminating the factors that drove them to crime in the first place. So, you monitor them closely - house arrest, assigned social/case workers, etc. Like a more robust parole system for nonviolent offenders. With enough surveillance, you can reduce the likelihood of reoffence by making the chances of getting caught much higher. This enhanced monitoring would be temporary.
For violent offenders and more serious criminals, maybe prisons are still necessary. But they don’t have to be dehumanizing and can provide necessary health/psychiatric, educational, social, and job skills training.
You could make the corrections system more effective by making society easier for criminals to reintegrate into. If you’re a felon and you can’t find work because you’re a felon - how are you going to afford to live within the confines of the law? Step 1) jobs programs for felons with a path to eliminating non-violent offenses from your record as it relates to work with exceptions as necessary. Step 2) improve the education system to prevent people from turning to crime and to help give former criminals relevant job skills to earn an honest living. Step 3) provide healthcare to people - having access to healthcare for mental and addiction-related conditions is super important to reduce crime.
Basically - prison abolition isn’t about just letting rapists and murderers go free with no consequences. Instead, people in favor of prison abolition are typically in favor of reducing the societal pressures to commit crimes and preventing reoffense.
Having potentially thousands of years of embarassing moments of social awkwardness to think about. And, over the aeons, being relieved when the people you know and love die because they won’t remember the things you’re so ashamed of.
Many people have auras before and during migraines. These can be visual (seeing colors or black spots or colors/lights look brighter or dimmer), sensory (sensitivity to light/sound), speech-related (difficulty speaking or understanding speech), motor (impairment to movement), and brainstem (vertigo, tinnitus, ataxia, decreased consciousness, etc).
I get sensory, speech related, motor, and possibly some brainstem aura symptoms. You kind of just learn to recognize when a migraine is coming on and not a regular headache.
Ah yes, IPAs, the least manly of beers.
That’s the neat thing: our pancreases do! Until they don’t…
I didn’t realize how cheap the big hdds had gotten. Definitely looking into 2 bays.
You might be right. The Synology products look really good. I didn’t see that they actually have a sub-$400 4-bay NAS… DS423. Not sure if it’ll meet my performance needs. But the $600 4 bay doesn’t look too bad either really.
There aren’t comics afaik and, thankfully, the Jodorowsky monstrosity didn’t get made.
I mean, sure, but it’s half of a story. So much of the criticism I saw totally left out that it was part 1 of 2. I ask because it’d be like watching The Fellowship of the Ring and being upset that it was just a story about some midgets going on a hike - it’s a take you could only have if you weren’t at all familiar with the source material or even generally what it’s about. It’s not an invalid take, necessarily, but it is one that ignores that it’s only one part of a larger story. Dune Pt 1 was also a slower burn, and it’s totally valid to dislike that sort of movie.
I hope you watch the second one and can appreciate the first one as part of that context. Dune (the book, not just the movies) is very good for a lot of reasons and was incredibly influential on sci-fi as a whole. It’s obviously fine not to like it, of course, but as a lifelong fan, I just want everyone to give it a chance.
Edit: there are comics actually. Huh.
They were working on it long before the pandemic, so that’s invalid. But you read the book and believe that? Or did you not know what it was about beforehand?
Thank you so much for the reply! That is extremely helpful.