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LAPD raid goes from bad to farce after gun allegedly sucked onto MRI machine
  • This is the dumbest damned thing I've read about all month. What the absolute fuck???

  • Russia has lost at least 3,003 main battle tanks since the beginning of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
  • They could expand their industry,

    They've been doing that for over a year and I'm confident that they've hit their limit. Their current unemployment rate is estimated at 3.8%, salaries are skyrocketing as industries compete with each other for available workers, and inflation is out of control. Those are all strong indicators that their labor pool has turned into a puddle.

    The only way they could expand any further is to start using migrant labor and who the hell, aside from North Koreans and maybe some Chinese, are going to migrate into Russia right now? Especially in sufficient numbers to make any kind of a difference.

  • Well thats crazy explicit astroturfing
  • Are we supposed to act like this is new? The Hillary Clinton campaign was doing this via CTR (Correct The Record) back in 2016 and it was particularly noticeable after the DNC forced Bernie Sanders to exit the race. It continued after the election when CTR transitioned to "ActBlue".

    Then there's the 2016 Reddit MAGA craziness but I don't think there's any need to re-hash that. It's CTR that most people don't know / forget about.

  • Everett True promotes gun safety (September 23, 1918)
  • So it’s demonstrable that the wider gun-owning community is pro gun education and safety, and you’d think adding laws that support these beliefs would be no-brainers – but they aren’t.

    Gun Owners generally do support firearms education, both for kids and adults. The stuff for kids is increasingly being removed and blocked by the Democrats as shown in the links I provided.

    The problem with requiring education / training for adults is that the anti-firearms folks broke trust on the issue. In places that have, or had, such requirements the barrier to entry was being continually raised while more firearm types and accessories are being restricted.

    It's reached the point that some states who have the requirements are now being sued for failure to issue permits in accordance with their own law.

    If you're a Pro-2A person you'd have to be outright stupid to hop back in the pot for another round of "Boil the Frog".

    ...whereas mandatory training/education, testing, and licensing I think would improve things, and might be a reasonable middle-ground acceptable by both sides. Like they say in Lower Decks: “if both sides are equally unsatisfied with the negotiation… THAT’S A COMROMISE!”

    There's no trust between the groups which makes compromise nearly unobtainable. The Anti folks will not offer any compromises and the Pro folks wouldn't trust them, and rightly so, even if they did.

    Its an intractable problem.

  • Everett True promotes gun safety (September 23, 1918)
  • Firearms education is only necessary when there are guns all over the place.

    True but that condition is absolutely positively 100% not going away at any time in the next 50 years. The 2A could be repleaded and private firearm ownership made federally illegal tomorrow and there would still be firearms in closets, dresser drawers, and attics in 2074.

    it doesn’t really make sense for them to want NRA propaganda in schools.

    That's completely fair but nothing is being created to replace it. If they don't want the NRA involved that's cool and I completely get it...but that doesn't clear them to do nothing while blocking what already exists.

    It's frustrating as all get out.

  • Everett True promotes gun safety (September 23, 1918)
  • but if you have to go hunting you should at least know how to shoot straight.

    I'm almost certain that every single State requires passing a Hunter Safety program before you can get any kind of Hunting License. The laws have changed a lot since 1917.

  • Everett True promotes gun safety (September 23, 1918)
  • I really don’t know why it isn’t mandatory.

    In the United States firearms education should be mandatory. It's not because the anti-gun crowd loses their fucking minds whenever it comes up.

    The NRA has funded and run a program called "Eddie Eagle" for decades that teaches basic firearms safety and accident reduction to kids and it's been slowly driven out of schools.

    You can find a plethora of articles online but here's an example: https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/laurieroberts/2022/02/15/bill-require-gun-safety-nra-eddie-eagle-program-schools/6800808001/

    Here's another example from Kansas: https://www.kmbc.com/article/kansas-bill-would-require-school-gun-safety-program/39432200

    The legislature passed it, the Dem Governor VETOED it!

    Wrap your head around this for a minute. Here's Republicans and the NRA (fuck those guys) trying to do a "common sense" thing and getting lambasted for it. I can understand having an issue with the NRA (fuck those guys) but there's been absolutely no counter proposals or attempts at creating something similar without NRA involvement.

    We NEED firearms education in this country but we're losing what little we did have and attempts at adding more are continually thwarted by the very people screaming from the rooftops about "Common Sense Reform".

    It the same stupidity that Republicans have with Sex Ad. It's education vs ignorance. We need education.

  • European parliament.
  • Cool, what took them so long?

  • House Passes Bill to Label Products From Illegal West Bank Settlements “Made in Israel”
  • WTH? The House can't pass a budget or deal with any of the other pressing issues but they have time for THIS?

  • Body-Cam Footage Raises Familiar Concerns About BPD’s Plainclothes Unit - In May, a Baltimore detective pointed his service revolver to the temple of a prone and restrained man.
  • Law Enforcement, remember this article is about a Cop, isn't "just anyone". There's two reasons for people being riled up about this, one of which is criminal and the other is user error / training.

    Ignoring the criminal aspect of what he's doing the Cop literally cannot fire that weapon without endangering himself and his fellow officers. He also can't fire that weapon a second time without manually manipulating it because he's using it in a manner that WILL cause it to mechanically malfunction.

    It's fucking stupid (and criminal) all the way around but it has nothing to do with the points you are making.

  • Body-Cam Footage Raises Familiar Concerns About BPD’s Plainclothes Unit - In May, a Baltimore detective pointed his service revolver to the temple of a prone and restrained man.
  • How the fuck is this legal?

    Glock, an Austrian company, uses a variety of common sense safeties that are automatic in nature.

    With a manual safety the user has to remember to engage / dis-engage it as appropriate. This means a weapon can be left in an unsecured state simply because the user forgot (or elected not too) engage the manual safety. Conversely if the user forgets to disengage the manual safety the weapon will not fire when they need it too, which makes an awful lot of sense when you know that Glock designed these weapons for Law Enforcement.

    To work around the weaknesses of a Manual Safety Glock designed what it calls its "Safe Action System" which you can read about here.. In a nutshell a Glock will not fire unless the trigger is intentionally pulled in the correct way.

    Other pistol manufacturers will have some, or all, of those feature and may have other things such as "Grip Safeties" where you have to be holding the pistol both correctly and tightly enough before it can discharge.

    There's quite a variety of automatic safeties in use in the pistol world. If you are interested you can read about them here.

    On balance these kinds of automatic safeties are at least as effective as a manual safety and there are valid arguments with empirical evidence showing that they can be safer.

    Any of the folks who place more value in their ability to end another person’s life on a split second than the safety of their own children want to chime in and explain this one to me?

    Could you explain why you are using such inflammatory language? NO safety can or is meant to make a loaded firearm safe from a child. It's arguably easier for a child to flip the selector lever on a manual safety than it is for one to grip a firearm a specific way or pull its trigger in a specific way (or both).

    Loaded weapons, regardless of their type(s) of safety mechanism, should not be left where they can be handled by children.

  • Fond memories
  • Of all the "Feature Phones" I ever had, and I had a bunch, the Alias and it's successor the Alias II were my easily my favorites.

  • Healthcare: How Long Do Patients Have To Wait?
  • The best way to do this would be to use data from 2023 (as the infographic claims) and NOT data from the years 2000 through 2022. It would also be helpful if the source wasn't a right-biased US based organization whose stated goal is de-regulation of the Medical Industry.

    They could also do their reports using established methodology instead of creating their own, base it on first sources instead of literature review, and maybe they could avoid biased sources while they were at it.

    Seriously, I tore into the data and sourcing and it's simply awful. The base report isn't really even about wait times, it's about increasing efficiency (and thus profitability) through using telehealth, blister packs, and OTC contraceptives.

  • Healthcare: How Long Do Patients Have To Wait?
  • I tore this apart in a comment in the original feddit post. For you Australians the tl;dr is that the data is outdated, with some of it being from 2014, while other data is from the pandemic. NONE of the data from any country is from 2023 as is being claimed.

  • Healthcare: How Long Do Patients Have To Wait?
  • I'm really disappointed in statista for publishing this. I've always considered them a solid source of data but this is flat out misinformation. It's based on study done by a biased source using questionable methodology using data from literature review that stretches at least as far back as the year 2000!

    The study was done by the Consumer Choice Center, a right biased organization seeking to deregulate the Medical Industry.

    The study is called "Healthcare Time Saved Index" and you can access it on their website.. You can read the full study (PDF) by clicking the link on that site and you can access their data / sourcing (Google Docs) at the link they posted.

    If you want to hop right to the data / sourcing you can use this link.

    First off despite what the infographic says this is absolutely 100% NOT 2023 data! If you look at column I (Average wait times for a primary physician appointment (days)) and check the sourcing this is what you will find:

    America - Sources give data from 2021 and 2022.

    Australia - Source is using data from 2000 - 2019 with the GP Data specifically ending in 2014.

    United Kingdom - Source is using poll data from April of 2022.

    Sweden - Source is using data from 2020.

    For GP visits every one of their sources is using data from the pandemic, none of them are using data from 2023 as claimed by the graphic.

    It doesn't get any better for "Non Emergency Surgery".

    First off the CRC Study doesn't say "Non Emergency Surgery", it says "Elective Surgery" and as Johns Hopkins explains they are not the same.

    Jumping back to the data it somehow gets worse.

    America - Their source (Fee) relies on another source (Frasier) who is using data from 2016! The Fee.org article is also bashing Canada's healthcare system. (bias)

    Australia - Data from 2022.

    United Kingdom - Data from 2018.

    Sweden - Data from 2018. (Same source as the UK)

    So for Non Emergency Surgery Elective Surgery visits the data is once again NOT from 2023, instead it's a mix of significantly older and pandemic era data that at least in one case relies on a biased source.

    So as I said in another comment "The study is fucking trash and someone took that trash, piled it into a dumpster, and then set it on fire in order to produce the infographic."

    The post should be taken down by the mods as misinformation and statista should delete the infographic with embarrassment.

  • Healthcare: How Long Do Patients Have To Wait?
  • Not sure where the 4 days comes from.

    It comes from here.

    That's a solid / highly regarded source but the data they used stretches as far back as 2000. Four days to see a GP may have been accurate in 2014 but could easily be out of date now.

    The 21 days from the US is just madness tho, if accurate.

    That 21 days number was a nationwide average from during the pandemic. I tracked down their source and while the infographic says "2023" the study source says 2021-2022...right during the pandemic. So not only is the year wrong the infographic is mislabled / misleading.

    The study is fucking trash and someone took that trash, piled it into a dumpster, and then set it on fire in order to produce the infographic.

  • Healthcare: How Long Do Patients Have To Wait?
  • According to the data source the US wait time is a Nationwide average...from 2022.

    Gee, I can't imagine why getting a GP appointment would have been hard in 2022. It's not like there was anything going on.

    Seriously, the study that this infographic is based on is pretty much junk no matter what country you live in.

  • Healthcare: How Long Do Patients Have To Wait?
  • The point of the "Study" they did was about efficiency and time, specifically how increased use of TeleMed, Blister Packs, and generally available contraceptives would save Patients time and Providers money. Does that make more sense?

    This "study" is low quality work, barely above junk status. It uses old and weird sources and very questionable methodology. It's possible they came to the right conclusion (which wasn't US bashing btw) but if they did its only because the target was so wide that they could hardly fail to miss.

    https://consumerchoicecenter.org/healthcare-time-saved-index/

  • Healthcare: How Long Do Patients Have To Wait?
  • The "Study" that this infographic is based on is full of shit. The deeper I dig into the data the more disgusted I get with it. It uses old / weird sources for a number of countries (for instance that US wait time is from the pandemic), they change up terms (Non-Emergency and Elective are not the same thing) and a whole host of other problems.

  • Healthcare: How Long Do Patients Have To Wait?
  • IDK what the wait time is about on the green bar.

    I do. That average wait time is from 2022 (pandemic anyone?). It also varied drastically depending on your exact location.

    The "Study" can be found here - https://consumerchoicecenter.org/healthcare-time-saved-index/

    If you click the link to the Access the Database you'll be taken to a Google Doc with sources. The first one up is the United States and if you go the "Average Wait Times" tab you can see that their source for the US was this article: https://www.forrester.com/blogs/hurry-up-and-wait-long-wait-times-cripple-access-to-care-health-outcomes-and-patient-experience/

    It gets even worse when you check the next tab over regardarding Wait Times for Elective Surgery, there you find the data is from 2016! https://fee.org/articles/america-outperforms-canada-in-surgery-wait-times-and-its-not-even-close/

    Oh, and "Non-Emergency" and "Elective" are NOT the same thing.

  • Democracy, Refreshed: The House was supposed to grow with population. It didn’t. Let’s fix that.

    As originally conceived, the House was supposed to grow with every decennial census. George Washington spoke just once at the Constitutional Convention — and on its final day — to endorse an amendment lowering the ratio of constituents to members to 30,000.

    Today, House members represent roughly 762,000 people each. That number is on track to reach 1 million by mid-century.

    0
    New York Proposes Crackdown On Major Gun Company (It's Glock)

    New York may become the first state to bar gun companies from selling pistols that can easily be converted into machine guns.

    9
    Is Proton a good choice for what I want to do?

    I read the sidebar and didn't see anything about asking questions so apologies in advance if this post breaks a rule.

    I'm in the U.S. and wanting to knowif Proton Family is a good choice for my use case.

    Two decades ago I got tired of changing email addresses whenever my ISP changed so I registered my surname as a .net vanity domain and started running my own email server at home. When Google started offering Google for Organizations for free if you had less than 10 users I folded up my personal email server and shifted everything over. We use it for e-mail and basic family calendaring.

    Last month when going through bills my wife and I were once again frustrated by coordination required to sign into various accounts. "Hey what's the password for $CreditCard?" or "What's the MFA you just got for $BankAccount?" or "What's the password for Disney"?"

    That got me started looking for a family password manager so we could easily share and keep this stuff up to date.

    At the same time we realized that were paying for YouTube TV, YouTube Premium, two YouTube Music, and an Amazon Music subscription. Whoops.

    Well, no problem. We'll just "family share" the YTTV and YTP subscriptions so everyone has everything and we save some money.

    Nope. G-Suite doesn't allow family sharing. So we're all going to have to create seperate @gmail.com addresses to make this work. Oh, and I'll have to shift the YTTV subscription from my vanity domain to a regular @gmail as well. Which breaks the entire idea behind the vanity domain in the first place.

    While I researching a Family Password Manager of course I found Proton Pass. While I was looking at the pricing for it I realized that they also have a "Family" setup for email which looks interesting.

    So now I'm considering porting my vanity domain and all it's email out of G-Suite and over to Proton Family. At nearly $300 a year it's not exactly inexpensive, since I'd basically be paying it until I die, and it will be a fair bit of work to switch everything over so I don't want to do it unless it's going to work.

    So would Proton Family be a good choice? Are there any significant technical challenges to migrating a custom domain and email out of G-Suite and into Proton?

    Edit: This post was rambly and unclear. The TL;DR is that I’m increasingly annoyed with G-Suite and since I’m looking at Proton Pass anyway I'm wondering about Proton Suite (which includes Email, Calendar, and Pass).

    13
    Automation Question - What am I missing?

    Always surprises me when I go to do something in HA and realize that I can't figure out how.

    This time its lights, specifically making sure that they don't get left on.

    Until now I've simply been creating an automation for each light switch so that if it changes state from Off to On and when it's 30 minutes after sunrise it's starts a 15 minute wait and then changes the state of the switch to off.

    This approach mostly works but it's less than ideal.

    First I'm having to create an automation for each device. How do I do it by Area, or list / group of devices, instead?

    Second if a device is turned on too early there's no state change for the automation to catch and it never fires. I could fix this by creating another automation that checks for it but then I'll have even more of them to manage.

    Third this doesn't work very well if you want different things to happen on the weekends as opposed to during the weekday. For instance on a Saturday I may WANT that closet light to stay on longer because I'm putting away clothes.

    It'd be really nice if I could program HA like this 'On a weekday if you see any device on this list turn on 30 minutes after Sunrise I want you to turn whichever one(s) it was off again 15 minutes later.'.

    I'm must be missing something here because surely HA can do this, right?

    9
    Have a ratGDO v2.5i and no case for it?

    Shortly after the ratGDO v2.5 was released I ordered one and a couple of days later I ordered a case from Etsy to go with it.

    Two days later the Etsy seller messages me asking if have the v2.5 or v2.5i because the cases are different. WTF? There's already a new version?! I tell the seller to make it the v2.5i because that's probably what I'll get.

    So last week I received a very nice red case from the Etsy Seller HighTower3D out of the North Carolina. Seriously, this thing is nice. The build quality is high, it has magnets in the bottom for mounting, comes with allen screws (and the allen wrench you need) and a couple of little zip ties.

    So this week my ratGDO shows up and...it's v2.52i! A quick check of the website shows that there's now a v2.53 and that makes four revisions in the last month!

    You can't make this stuff up so all I can do is laugh...and give away the v2.5i case that I spent $26 on and doesn't fit the ratGDO version I ended up with.

    I have no use for this case so I'm giving it away to someone who can; make sure you have a v2.5i though because this call will NOT fit any other version.

    If you are in the United States and can use this case then leave a reply below. 😊

    7
    Correct way to control Sidewalk Heating Mats

    I ordered some sidewalk heating mats from HeatTrak and I want to automate them with HA so that they come on when it makes sense to do so based on the data from my Tempest Weather Station.

    According to HeatTrack my mats will have a combined resistive load of 5A which is well within the spec of the Zooz ZEN05 or ZEN14, both rated for 15A resistive loads, but when I asked them about it they did not recommend using either of them with heated mats. They couldn't, or wouldn't, explain why and it doesn't make sense to me why this wouldn't work.

    My next thought was to simply swap the outlet to something smart but this is an outdoor outlet so it needs to be GFCI and there's essentially no Z-Wave GFCI outlets made.

    Do I really need to use something like an Enbrighten Z-Wave Plus 40-Amp contactor for this or am I missing something here?

    6
    How do I add a cool down to an automation?

    I have an automation that turns my driveway lights on when motion is detected. It normally works fairly well but it was windy last night and that caused the automation to trip endlessly as my trees and bushes were whipping around. Lights would come on, shut off 10 minutes later, then turn right back on again. It basically did this all night until I disabled the automation.

    I'll do some fine tuning of the motion sensors which will help and I'm considering adding a condition to the automation where it won't trip if the wind speed is above a certain level but how can I add some kind of cool down timer to the automation to prevent it from endlessly engaging?

    11
    I need some help choosing how to setup lights and camera for my driveway.

    First the layout. My garage is setup similar to this one, although mine is attached, has three light fixtures, and my driveway is 4 cars wide.

    The wife wants me to replace the three basic on / off fixtures that we have (they're getting rusty) and keep them all matching. If I'm going to do this I want to add a camera to the setup.

    Functionally I'd like the lights to have or work like they have dual bright capability where they come on full bright at sunset then after a couple of hours they dim down unless they detect motion. If they detect motion then they come back to full bright for a period of time then dim back down again. They do this for a set period of hours, say 4, then they turn off completely unless they detect motion.

    My current lights are already automated for on / off (but not dimming or motion) through the use of HA and a z-wave switch.

    Where I'm getting stuck is that I can see at least three ways to do this but none of them are perfect.

    1. Replace my dumb carriage fixtures with new dumb fixtures then change the switch to a dimming version plus add a motion sensor and camera out front. Then setup HA for the functionality I want. The upside of doing it this way is that it's very easy to get matching fixtures. The downside is that the motion sensor and camera will not be well integrated visually.

    2. Replace my dumb fixtures with ones that have dual bright built in. It's easy to do, and I could even keep the HA Automation I have setup now, but again the camera setup is not going to integrate well visually. I'm also concerned that three motion sensors controlling three lights will cause trouble for the camera (or each other) because they will react to different things and turn themselves on and off independently.

    3. Replace my dumb fixtures with smarter ones. In the center position I'd use one that has an integrated motion sensor and camera. This Reolink seems like it would work pretty well. However RL doesn't make any fixtures that match it, which means my center fixture would look different than the other two.

    I may just have to deal with mismatched fixtures but does anyone have any suggestions? Am I missing an option?

    9
    U.S. population keeps growing, but House of Representatives is same size as in Taft era
    www.pewresearch.org U.S. population keeps growing, but House of Representatives is same size as in Taft era

    The U.S. House of Representatives has one member for every 747,000 or so Americans – by far the highest population-to-representatives ratio of any developed democracy.

    U.S. population keeps growing, but House of Representatives is same size as in Taft era

    The U.S. House of Representatives has one voting member for every 747,000 or so Americans. That’s by far the highest population-to-representative ratio among a peer group of industrialized democracies, and the highest it’s been in U.S. history.

    0
    To Fix Congress, Make It Bigger. Much Bigger. | Washington Monthly
    washingtonmonthly.com To Fix Congress, Make It Bigger. Much Bigger. | Washington Monthly

    Radically expanding the House of Representatives would help solve some of the biggest problems facing Congress and, by extension, the country.

    To Fix Congress, Make It Bigger. Much Bigger. | Washington Monthly

    Radically expanding the House of Representatives would help solve some of the biggest problems facing Congress and, by extension, the country.

    0
    Why shouldn't I use Reolink Cameras?

    The next step in my HA journey is adding cameras; indoor, outdoor, and doorbell so I've been exploring my options. I had originally intended to do a Frigate setup, I even have a Coral module and PC to do it with, but then I discovered Reolink.

    Without having any experience with them they look nearly ideal. They seem to have tight integration with HA 2023.3 or later and their pricing and functionality look good.

    They seem like a no brainer but I've noticed that they're often NOT the first recommendation in the HA Community. Why is that and why shouldn't I use them?

    18
    Where in the file system does the UDMP-SE store it's ipsec tunnel configuration?

    UDMP is running UniFi OS 3.1.16 and I need a specific VPN configuration that StrongSwan supports but isn't possible to do in the GUI. Three years ago the files I need were located in /run/strongswan/ipsec.d/tunnels/ but they are no longer there. Does anyone know where they live now -or- how to edit a VPN config outside of the GUI?

    0
    Buelldozer Buelldozer @lemmy.today
    Posts 12
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