There was a separate law passed in 1792 that defined what weapons should be available for people in a militia, but I can't find any evidence that the second amendment ever did that. It was based around similar laws in other states and in England, none of which specified such things, so it would be very surprising if they had considered doing so.

Even if we assume that the intent was to protect the right to bear all future military-grade weapons, it was still intended for forming militias for the defense of the country, not for storing high-power weapons at every individual's house for their personal use where kids can pick them up and shoot each other.

Weapons of that time would not have been easy for a kid to discharge multiple times. They would not have been easy for someone to discharge a hundred times in anger and mass-murder people. And so on. And that's the point I was trying to make. These weapons are materially different from anything they could have conceived of at the time.

although map editing sucks and it often gets lost and can't properly reset its position. It needs to be rescued pretty often which is a major fail.

That's very distinctly not my experience. What version do you have?

A real vacuum cleaner just about maxes out a standard residential 120v 15a circuit, as anyone who remembers the incandescent bulb era can attest to. A circuit with a few lamps shared with a vacuum cleaner could easily end with you flipping a breaker or replacing a blown fuse.

When you look at the absolutely tiny lithium ion pack these robo-vacs come with, ...

Sitting on my kitchen table right now is a drone pack. It's 57,5Wh, smaller the batteries of most modern Roombas. It's 50C - thus it can output up to 2,9kW. And there's even higher packs available than that. Lithium ion cells can handle some truly high power outputs. It's *energy*, not *power*, that is their limitation. Run a pack at 50C and it'll be empty in a bit over a minute. That said, on hard floor surfaces there is absolutely no reason why you should be drawing more than 300-400W or so, and you can get by with well less than that. High powers are for like shag carpeting and the like. Also, the head matters more than the power (though of course contribute) - for a hard floor, for example, a fluffy roller head is ideal.

Pet hair has never been an issue for me with robots. My long hair always is. It's way longer than any pet's.

Yeah, my Roborock has rotating mops, and I can say with 100% certainty, I haven't lived in a cleaner house since I moved out of my OCD mother's place as a teen. You could eat off that floor.

Facts. I used to have a Roomba for years, but as I live in Europe, it was getting increasingly hard to deal with modern features (like the self-emptying base which needs 120V power). I reluctantly switched to a Roborock when my power converter died, and just, wow, they're light years ahead of iRobot. I think iRobot has been coasting on its name for a while now.

When it comes to gun rights, I'm personally in favor of a strict originalist interpretation of the second amendment based on how someone in that time would interpret it, just like the right end of the Supreme Court claims to believe in.

You have the right to own and bear as many muskets and flintlock pistols as you want, so long as they are for use as part of a militia to defend the country.

Wait, what? You think the right to bear arms grants you the right to a fully automatic assault rifle of the sort that wasn't even invented until almost two hundred years after the signing of the Constitution? Sorry, but no. You want to buy a firearm so you can threaten your ex? Also no. You want to open carry your pistol so everyone knows not to mess with you? Still no.

The second amendment doesn't say what you think it does. It never did. It says that because a well-trained militia is essential to the safety and security of the country, the right of the people (as a whole) to bear arms (of some kind) shall not be infringed. A logical reading of those words does not prohibit taking away guns from specific people (e.g. those with a history of violent crime). Nor does it preclude restricting specific types of weapons to people who have been more thoroughly vetted (e.g. high-power semi-automatic or automatic rifles).

Strictly speaking, you could allow people who have never been convicted of a crime the use of only non-lethal weapons, and so long as learning on those weapons would qualify you to be able to use more powerful weapons if we ever get attacked, such a highly restrictive legal environment would still at least arguably meet the rather low bar for what must be allowed by the second amendment.

So no, gun laws do not inherently violate the second amendment. To violate the second amendment, they would have to make it substantially more difficult for an average person to obtain or use a typical firearm. Until a law crosses that threshold, it likely isn't a violation of 2a.

By contrast, executive orders that exceed authority specifically granted by Congress and exceed the constitutional authority of the executive branch to interpret and execute existing laws are per se unconstitutional. And those are highly scrutinized regardless of which party is in the oval office. The Republican presidents just have a tendency to wipe their a**es with the constitution a lot more often than the Democrat presidents, so their orders get overturned more often.

Either way, the point remains that you would typically expect that if 3% of people are the sorts of people tempted to commit crimes and you have 100 people, then 3 of them are tempted to commit crimes, and if you have 200 people, then 6 of them are tempted to commit crimes. Larger governments, assuming all else is equal, should have proportionally more criminals. Therefore, having more people convicted of corruption does not prove that the government is more corrupt, but rather, proves that the government is bigger, which is just stating the obvious.

And aging U.S. equipment is a lot better maintained and newer than what's left of Russia's aging equipment.

Per capita? Assuming equal levels of corruption per capita, you would expect California to have three times as many charges per year as Illinois, twice as many as New York, and four times as many as New Jersey.

Never mind. I already know the answer. Per capita, California is one of the least corrupt states in the country, ranking at number 34 out of 50 (source).

Using corruption conviction rate per capita, Arizona is #9 in corruption, behind only Louisiana, Montana, South Dakota, Kentucky, West Virginia, Virginia, Maryland, and Alabama.

Fun fact: Of the ten most corrupt states, six are red states, two purple, two blue. Of the ten least corrupt, three are red states, three purple, four blue. Statistically, you would expect 3.4 blue, 1.8 purple, 4.8 red. Interpret that as you will.

I mean, you can massively increase your water supply and reduce global warming all at the same time by covering the entire length of the aqueducts with solar panels.

And water isn't scarce and dwindling. It's just not local to that area. We have almost infinite amounts of water ready for desalination. Nothing prevents us from having as much fresh water as we could ever need other than us not being willing to spend the money to build desalination plants. Heck, we might even be able to do it passively with solar stills.

Not inherently. Some unions do put in specific rules about specific job levels having specific pay, but not all. It just depends on what the union demands in their negotiations. A more reasonable approach would be to demand a certain minimum amount of wage increase each year. Even in that situation, if management isn't willing to give merit-based increases because the total dollar amount including the mandatory minimum for everyone else adds up to too much money, then it could still have that effect, of course. Either way, rigid pay rates aren't a hard-and-fast requirement of union workplaces.

Some union shops also have rules mandating that nobody do anything that is someone else's job. While theoretically intended to prevent consolidating and firing people, those sorts of rules often end up making life miserable by limiting opportunities for advancement and career growth. But again, not every union does things like that.

The real problem with unions is that they are basically doing what the government should be doing, were governments not hopelessly pledging fealty to industry. But because unions are too close to the problem, they see only the employees' side of things, and over the long term, their demands usually end up outpacing practical limits, and companies close the plants and move workers to another country. This is not to say that they would not have eventually done that anyway, but unions often exacerbate the problem and accelerate the job loss.

If unions focused only on improving working conditions, limiting working hours, requiring reasonable minimum standards for termination, requiring voluntary exit programs before any layoffs, and other largely cost-neutral demands, they could make life better for workers by being a check on penny-wise, pound-foolish decisions without causing long-term job loss or other downsides. But the temptation to always ask for more money is too great, so this almost never happens.

I'm part of the app ecosystem and I *still* don't understand why people develop half the apps that they develop, rather than making their websites work like the app does and having a button to save a bookmark on the home screen.

Credit card autofill has worked in Safari since iOS 7 (before Wallet). Wallet added the ability to scan cards. I can only assume that the functionality was tied together from the very beginning, since Safari's feature predated Wallet by a year. For sure, the integration has worked in Safari for as long as I've used it, which would have probably been a few months after the Apple Card came out in 2019.

You actually expect me to give actual guidance on how Apple could get away with violating antitrust law without getting caught? I use their devices. I have zero incentive to do that.