Liz

Oh, no, it's just that I don't weigh all violence as equal. I have a different value system then you do when it comes to interpersonal violence and that's okay that we disagree there.

To me, removing a potential victim's ability to protect themselves isn't worth removing a potential victim from being attacked at all. To me, they're not a 1:1 trade. You probably disagree, and that's okay, but I place a high value on an individual's agency, to the point where I'm willing to let them live in a slightly more dangerous society to get it.

This trade-off exists in all areas of life, and I don't necessarily side with personal freedom in all of them (I would ban cars if I could), but I do in this area.

I don't think you know what a zero sim game is....

It's a balance between individual rights and societal safety. You have a right to defend yourself from threats to your life and safety by using deadly force. To say otherwise removes the ability for a good chunk of the population to adequately defend themselves. I'm related to plenty of people who cannot defend their life against the average male aggressor without a gun, and you are too. At a certain point size and strength are insurmountable.

But yes, encouraging people to responsibility engage with firearms for self defense use means that there will be more guns floating around, which means more accidents, suicides, and murders. Just as with any other choice for the rules of society, it's a trade-off. How much do we value keeping the right to adequate self-defense as a universal right? How much do we value preventing accidental injury and death?

The classic comparison is cars, simply because the annual death numbers are similar, and pretty much no other reason. But even so, we can draw parallels. Cars have mandatory features that reduce the likelihood of injury without impacting the usefulness or general experience of using a car. So too do guns, with nearly all guns having to meet industry requirements for safety, like being able to handle an overpressure event, and being drop-safe.

Cars have a licensing procedure (though it's essentially a joke here in the US) and a licensing procedure would be fine for guns, so long as it can't be used to restrict access (racist approvals and denials would become a problem in a hurry). My ideal licensing program would be a free handling skills course where failure would require some sort gross negligence, and even then you'd still get racist denials.

And really, this is the fundamental problem with guns: I (and many others) view them as a necessary tool to accessing a highly valuable right. The chances you'll need a gun are very low, but the cost of not having it can be very high. You don't have full control over whether someone else will attempt to take your life, and I don't want to say to a large chunk of the population "we're going to take away your ability to defend yourself in order to save other people who would still have that option either way."

And I want to be clear, I completely agree with the other person. If you're going to bring guns into your life, you had better learn medical skills, social skills, and you had better train with your firearm in somewhat realistic conditions. You should carry pepper spray, you should practice learning how to actually effectively calm people down, you need to learn how to safely store your guns and ammo, etc. Etc.

I get the desire ban guns in order to save lives, but you'd also be endangering others. Compare that with the car analogy, and banning cars would have a similar trade-off. Some people would live thanks to not getting in a car accident, others would die thanks to not having the same level of mobility (which has about a billion knock-on effects for quality of life).

The truck still doesn't need to be that big. Trucks have gotten absolutely massive with no appreciable difference in bed size. Yes yes, of course, bigger truck = more towing and load capacity, but honestly there's got to be a reasonable limit where something becomes a commercial vehicle, and the limit needs to be much lower than the current standard.

Neither of the groups should be allowed to do it.

I did more digging. Turns out you're right. Primary voters represent general election voters very well. The hangup seems to be with the difference between people who said they voted in the primary and people who actually voted in the primary. The people who say they voted are more extreme than the general population, but the people who actually voted are representative.

The primary voters fit that description in a broad sense, the general election Republican voters less so. But, it's the primary voters who decide the candidates, so that's how you end up with that kind of person on the ticket and in office.

Yeap. That's why we have to switch to any number of alternative voting and representation systems that elect more reasonable candidates. No primary, five member legislative districts with Approval Voting would be a choice, but there are others (you'd actually use a proportional variant).

That's true for kinda sorta everything? Battery manufacturers don't want to have to deal with creating a bunch of custom battery runs, so they end up standardizing and higher level manufacturers buy from there. This is especially true in situations where space isn't at an absolute premium (like it is in a phone). Open up the battery pack for your cordless drill and you'll find very standard batteries inside there, probably hooked up in series to get to the desired voltage.

This is more like you complaining that some cars don't come with automatic transmission options. Sorry buddy, some of us like sports cars and having an automatic transmission option would devalue the very concept of what that particular car is.

I still haven't beaten Super Mario Brothers. I've gotten very close, but I choked on the final Bowser multiple times. I'm not mad at Nintendo for that. I'm not even mad at myself for that. I had loads of fun playing Super Mario Brothers and being able to save would lower the value of the game.

I don't understand why you're insistent that all games need to cater to your desired difficulty level. Some games are made for you, some games are made for other people. Chasing the widest audience possible is how you end up with bland art, be it games, movies, social media platforms, or any other thing people enjoy.

Look, you said it yourself. Different people want different things, and what some people want is fundamentally incompatible with what you want. So, you get a different set of games than they get.

1. The too-easy levels of notfun are very far away from the too-hard levels of notfun.

2. Different games are for different styles of fun and for different people. Heck, some games are more like walk-through stories than actual games. If the game is too hard for you to enjoy, then that game just isn't for you, that's all. Let other people have their difficult games and find a different one to enjoy. When I played Monopoly Go and found it boringly easy, I didn't complain that they should make it harder so I could enjoy it, I just recognized that I wasn't the kind of player they were targeting and found something else to play.

The problem being that a lot of people don't actually know what it is that will make them happy. Winning is good, right? Yeah, but not if it's too easy. Being to save the game state at any point makes a lot of games much too easy to be any fun. And while you might argue "well just don't save all the time," people are also bad at creating their own handicaps to increase fun.

Yes, there are exceptions to every generalization (see: OSRS Ultimate Ironman) but by and large there's a reason why the most popular kind of games are set up the way they are.

You ever play Monopoly Go? Straight-up not fun because it's basically impossible to lose.