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.

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.

Patreon should have just immediately pulled their app from Apple's store. They're a website. There's no obvious benefit to doing things in an app versus a website.

That said, nothing inherently prevents Apple from maliciously making it harder for Patreon's website to work on iOS. Apple controls the only web browser engine that is allowed to run on the platform.

Actually, it is. Cars don't generally allow third-party apps at all. They're an embedded system. Therefore, those are entirely moot.

Gaming systems are largely limited to games, and to a limited extent, media consumption (e.g. Netflix), which makes them a much more specialized system than an iPhone.

And gaming systems don't need to be a single tool that serves all of a user's needs in the way that a cell phone does. Cell phones are something you carry with you all day, and generally require a monthly cell service contract. So there are significant ongoing costs and hassles associated with having more than one. But most people play games primarily at home, which means it is relatively painless (apart from the initial purchase cost) to have multiple consoles; if a game isn't available on one, they can play it on another. Thus, game console app sales compete across platforms in a way that cellular phone app sales largely do not.

So while not entirely moot, gaming platforms are still a very different animal from a consumer perspective.

Apple is the only high-volume general-purpose computing platform I can think of that does not freely allow side-loading and third-party app stores. So in many critical ways, Apple stands alone on this one. And that's doubly true if you limit it to mobile platforms.

That said, I do agree that game platforms should not be allowed to be locked down, either. It is just far less important from an antitrust perspective because of fundamental differences in how the devices are used.

U.S. courts could not give two s**ts about worldwide market share. Apple has more than 58% of U.S. market share for cellular phones.

Apple's servers aren't involved at all for in-app purchase payments through third party payment processors. And no sane person would consider such sandboxing to be reasonable for a server that just provides downloads of app binaries, because the server is not doing anything more than loading bytes from disk and sending them out over HTTPS. So that would get smacked down by the courts in a quarter of a second.

Competent lawyers do not play games like that, because they know that doing so is the surest way to incur treble damages for willful violation of court orders.

They, in fact, have 58% of the U.S. cellular phone market, which is more than enough control over the market to regulate them under antitrust law.