Here you go - https://archive.is/tjywS

I agree with all of this. At the same time, I think that, in most cases, people should allow their body to adapt to heat, if they are healthy enough to do so. Most people can learn to be comfortable in higher heat than they believe, although some people have medical conditions that will make them more susceptible to heat exhaustion and heat stroke. If you can get by without it, you should. If you’re at risk by not using it, don’t feel guilty.

(FWIW, my office only has a/c because I have a very, very large printer in here, and it tends to have head strikes and scrap prints out if there’s no climate control. But since I’m not printing at the moment, the current temp in here is 82F.)

[…]with intent to obtain money, property, or other tangible benefit[…] [emphasis added]

There’s your problem. You’d have to demonstrate that he claimed the badge in order to receive some benefit. He’s a congressional member of Texas, and Republican; by winning the primary–which likely did not hinge on the medal–he was almost certain to win the general election.

This would be a very, very hard case to make as a prosecutor.

On top of that, as we experience higher temperatures, many people also crank up their air conditioners—which emit more heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

This is not correct. Air conditioning units do not ‘emit more […] greenhouse gases’. Air conditioners use a refrigerant–usually R134a–which does have a high global warming potential (GWP) compared to methane or CO2, but that refrigerant is in a closed loop; it’s not going anywhere unless the system is damaged. Most a/c failures aren’t from refrigerant leaking out of the system, and the system no longer being able to effectively transfer heat, but from the compressor motor failing. When the compressor fails, in most cases you can evacuate the refrigerant, replace the broken part, and then recharge the system. (The fact that they can be repaired doesn’t mean that they usually are repaired. Which is shitty.)

What is true is that a/c units emit heat themselves. An air conditioner moves heat from inside a space to outside of that space; in the process of doing so, the a/c unit itself is creating an additional small amount of heat from the function of the compressor motor, electronics, etc.

Beyond that, most electricity that’s used to run a/c systems–and every other electrical device–is produced from burning fossil fuels. So if there’s more demand for electricity–such as from a heat dome that has everyone running their a/c full-time–then yes, more CO2 is going to get pumped out into the atmosphere. But if your electricity is coming from sources that are largely emissions-free, like solar, wind, or hydro, then air conditioning is a negligible source of heat.

tl;dr - don’t feel bad about using your a/c when heat rises to dangerous levels; agitate at a local, state, and national level for renewable, carbon-neutral ways of generating electricity, and for more efficient use of electricity.

I dunno, when you’re talking about really specialized niches, there are still plenty of forums. Like, 600rr.net; it’s dedicated to nothing but Honda CBR600RR motorcycles. If you have a problem with a 600RR, the answer is probably there, and the forum is still ticking along because it’s just too hard to find those super-niche answers on Reddit. Want gun content with a healthy dose of homo/transphobia and christian nationalism? AR15.com has you covered. Want to talk about the minutiae of reloading and be autistically-focused on long-range accuracy? SnipersHide.com is your place. (They’re a bit fuddy though.)

Sure. If you’ve abused it in some way so that it doesn’t take or hold charge, then you might have to pay for a replacement battery. But I think there would be an implied warranty when you’re given a replacement, that the replacement was fit for service. And the company might just have to roll the cost or replacing batteries every so often into their electricity pricing models.

That’s like asking who owns a propane tanks for your grill. You own it while you have it.

When you get a new batter, you own the new one, and relinquish ownership of the previous one, paying for the electricity that’s on the new battery. AS LONG AS the battery that you’re relinquishing is substantially identical to the new battery.

Penile plethysmography is not actually a very accurate way of measuring sexual attraction. It’s just the best thing that we have right now.

I wouldn’t take that article too seriously. It’s not citing any sources directly, and the sources regarding penile plesthysmography were not terribly solid studies, IIRC. Medium is a glorified blog site, much like Elephant Journal.

Where he is right now, he can’t have remorse. At the time that this article was written, he was probably still a believing Mormon, and for him to admit that he was wrong would be the same as admitting that his religion–which was likely one of his personal foundations–was also wrong. Mormonism is a cult, and it’s very, very hard to leave because of how deeply it sinks tentacles into your brain.

I love my dad. My dad was, and is, great. Yeah, he was absent a lot, because work and church shit kept him busy, but I’ve never met anyone IRL that was as genuinely kind and willing to help.

If I live my life being only a tenth of the man that my dad is, I’ll be doing well.

…My mom on the other hand…

Ding ding ding, this is the answer.

ALL of politics is about building consensus and compromise. Every single bit. There will never be a candidate that you agree with on every single issue; that means that you’re always going to have to vote strategically, and decide which issues are the most important to you.

As anyone that combs through my post history will not, I’m very, very pro-2A; I oppose almost all restrictions on gun rights, I think that the past-'86 ban of FOPA should be thrown out, and I’d be fine with the Nat’l Firearms Act of 1934 being ruled unconstitutional. On the other hand, I also support religious plurality and freedom–including especially the freedom from religion–reproductive rights, voting rights for everyone, non-discrimination, LGBTQ+ rights, and support the right of cops to eat a sack of dicks. So even though gun rights are very important to me, I’m extremely unlikely to ever vote Republican. Especially since I live in a state where it’s very unlikely I’ll ever have to worry about losing my 2A rights, but my partner has to worry about losing their access to reproductive healthcare.

Here’s what this means:

If you favor access to reproductive healthcare, you NEED TO VOTE IN NOVEMBER.

The GOP will absolutely vote to restrict access to all reproductive healthcare now that SCOTUS has refused to do so.

Austria, not so much; Austria is in central Europe, and doesn’t have a shared border.

I don’t think mandatory conscription is a good idea in the US per se, but I don’t necessarily think that it’s necessarily a bad idea either.

all while also getting to fuck over the poors?

Not just the poors though. You’d have to cut infrastructure spending, Social Security, Medicaid/Medicare, criminal justice, food and drug administration (you know, the people that make sure food is safe?), everything that makes our country more or less functional. This isn’t something that the 1% would be fine with; it’s more like the .1%, or .01%, because even most of the very wealthy people would end up getting badly fucked by the kind of cuts you would need to have in order to add that many people to the military without instituting oppressive taxes.

I think that saying that the current military budget would triple if there was mandatory conscription is actually being incredibly conservative. If you look at military spending as a percentage of GDP when the US last had something even in the same county as mandatory conscription–World War II–the US was spending over 40% of the GDP on the military.

I can’t imagine most people in the US being okay with that kind of loss of necessary gov’t function combined with insanely high taxes unless the US was also involved in an existential war.

Okay, let’s thinks some of this through.

measures to remedy what they see as a “crisis” facing the all-volunteer military.

This is accurate. All branches of the military are having problems meeting their recruiting requirements, because kids in general in the US are no longer fit enough to make it into basic training in the first place. So while there are enough raw people that have the mental aptitude that are trying to get in–but just barely–so many of them are unable to meet the physical requirements that the military lacks the personnel that it needs.

He described the concept as a common “rite of passage,” one that would create a sense of “shared sacrifice” among America’s youth.

Okay, yes. This is potentially correct. However, you’re also going to see a lot of resentment. So perhaps you won’t see the esprit de corps that you might want.

he says leads to “unnecessary delays” and “unwarranted rejections” for some people with disabilities or other conditions who otherwise want to serve.

I was one of those people that might have been an “unwarranted rejection”; I scored quite high on the ASVAB at the time (I think 96th percentile in the mid 90s), but was disqualified because I was on Prozac. Now I would be disqualified because I’m on the autism spectrum. (I was then too, but hadn’t been diagnosed.) I might have done well in the military. I might have hated it. But I never got the chance to find out.

Only 1 percent of the U.S. population serves in the armed forces, Army data shows.

Okay, see, here’s a huge problem. Mandatory military service would mean expanding the military by 100x. Even if you only served 18 months or 2 years as a conscript, that’s an ENORMOUS amount of money that has to be spent by the gov’t feeding, housing, clothing, training, providing healthcare, and paying (since you kinda gotta pay the troops) for so goddamn many people, and that assumes that they entirely cut all post-separation benefits for anyone that is conscripted (e.g., no VA for people that become disabled, no GI Bill, etc.) The infrastructure spending alone for that, and the number of new bases that would need to be built, is staggering. Right now we spend 3.5% of our GDP on the military. Even if we went low-tech for all the soldiers that were conscripted, you could expect to see that number triple, easily. That means that you’re either doing massive deficit spending, cutting everything else that taxes are spent on, or raising taxes by a lot.

Finland, Norway, and Sweden all have mandatory military service, and are notably democratic and socialist compared to the US. Switzerland and Austria as well.

The serious argument about felons being allowed to vote is that voting is a civic duty, and you want felons to re-integrate into society. If they have tons of restrictions following them around for the rest of their lives, they’re always going to be a little bit outside. Feeling like they’re stuck outside of society makes recidivism rates higher, so restoring the right to vote is an important step in rehabilitation.

It would take a lot of people having felony convictions to be able to seriously sway an election, but given the racially polarized way that the criminal justice system is often applied, I think that’s probably happened.

I’m pretty sure you’re correct, although I believe that the part that’s capturing photons also needs to be heavily protected from the environment, and you also need something to prevent to many photons from getting to it and burning it out (e.g., almost all gen 3 NODs are autogated so that someone shining a flashlight at you won’t wreck your image intensifier tubes.)

It’s one of those things that can get pretty overwhelming to try and research as a consumer, because it gets really technical really fast.

Okay, so you’re talking about the IR that most people would refer to as thermal, rather than the IR that’s technically NIR, and is used in most image intensification. My mistake; as you say, these things get slippery because most of the time people aren’t talking about specific wavelengths and frequencies.

Yes, IR-as-in-thermal is going to be stopped by most glass. IR-as-in-NIR-for-NODs is not. The IR lasers and weapon lights that show up very well with NODs are definitely not visible to the naked human eye, so they’re outside of the visible light spectrum, and get generally labeled as IR, even if they’re outside of the spectrum of IR that’s used by most thermal optics. (It would be interesting to see if a Steiner DBAL could illuminate an area that had low IR for a FLIR camera.) And yes, for that, a red dot sight will work, because it will be set to very, very dim; too dim to be seen by the naked eye.