The Second Amendment was intended to be a check on federal power. None of the amendments were incorporated into jurisprudence about what individual states could do until arguably 1890 and not certainly until the early 1920s. Many states had laws around firearm storage for decades. In the 1830s, Massachusetts was the first among several states to generally bar carriage of firearms in public. Texas would follow suit in 1871.

The Heller decision written by Scalia was a sea change in constitutional law, but it laid down important limits that were respected in the MacDonald decision that followed soon after and which incorporated the Second Amendment as applying to states as well as the federal government. Scalia wrote that firearm law limitations were presumptively lawful, and essentially laid down an opportunity for the federal government to prohibit future types of weapons sales by preventing them from becoming publicly available. Here's what he wrote (citations removed).

We also recognize another important limitation on the right to keep and carry arms. Miller said, as we have explained, that the sorts of weapons protected were those "in common use at the time." We think that limitation is fairly supported by the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of "dangerous and unusual weapons."

It may be objected that if weapons that are most useful in military service—M-16 rifles and the like—may be banned, then the Second Amendment right is completely detached from the prefatory clause. But as we have said, the conception of the militia at the time of the Second Amendment’s ratification was the body of all citizens capable of military service, who would bring the sorts of lawful weapons that they possessed at home to militia duty. It may well be true today that a militia, to be as effective as militias in the 18th century, would require sophisticated arms that are highly unusual in society at large. Indeed, it may be true that no amount of small arms could be useful against modern-day bombers and tanks. But the fact that modern developments have limited the degree of fit between the prefatory clause and the protected right cannot change our interpretation of the right.

Scalia had no problem with regulating or even banning public availability of broad classes of weapons as long as those available to the public continued to be available to the public. In his view, existing weapons like missiles and new weapons like portable lasers could be banned because they were not "in common use." However, Scalia died in 2016, and the Court has moved to a substantially broader view than he had.

What are you going to do when Nazi Trump really ramps up the persecution? Oh right, sit back and protest and hope the government doesn't murder you all, ie just like Iran did to it's protesters two months ago.

The people who have clamored most over the last 40 years about government overreach are largely those most supportive of Trump's tyrannical behavior. However, the fastest growing segment of gun owners in the last couple of years are those on the left, with even more disproportionate growth among minorities. There are a lot of former military who are very unhappy with the direction that he's taken, too. There are a lot of guns on both sides and not nearly enough police or military to handle them all.

So far, the Trump administration's own overreach has been embarrassing enough to force them to back off. The videos of the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti were bad enough, but the responses by almost everyone up to and including Trump in labeling them terrorists and declaring that the ICE and CBP agents did no wrong before we even had multiple views of what happened caused them to backpedal (even the NRA chimed in against the administration). Bovino was removed from Minnesota and demoted, resulting in him either deciding or being forced to retire. They sent Tom Homan in, and the first thing he did was withdraw half of the agents assigned there, and most of the rest have returned to their assigned jurisdictions. Noem's constant bluster and media presence have sidelined her in the administration, destroyed almost any chance of a political future and cast a permanent pall over the brutal enforcement actions under her watch. Her replacement, Markwayne Mullin, isn't much better in terms of policy goals, but he has said that he doesn't like and doesn't want the constant press from extreme actions. The GOP, including Trump, is being forced to negotiate on things in the DHS budget bill that Trump declared just a couple of weeks ago were nonnegotiable. Trump's actions in Iran have backfired, and so far, the only negotiations happening seem to be in his own imagination, leaving him looking even worse, even among his own supporters.

They're weak and they know it, and their support isn't as solid as it was a year ago. Whether this means they continue to back down or they suddenly lash out, I don't know. But if they do move to mass violence, it isn't going to be against a group of unarmed pansies entirely incapable of shooting back. I hope it doesn't come to that, because it will become impossible to predict the outcome.

Trump has issued 101 pardons in his first 13 months of office, many of whom were very obviously guilty of serious crimes and for which Trump was expecting a quid pro quo. The Cuellars are a prime example. The evidence against them was overwhelming, yet Trump pardoned them and then got angry that he registered to run as a Democrat for office in his district. And there's Changpeng Zhao, whom Trump didn't know anything about but pardoned on the idea that his prosecution was a "Biden witch hunt." We're supposed to ignore that Peng's company made the Trump family $2 billion richer a few months before.

Mikrotik has manufacturing in Europe and China, as well as Vietnam and Malaysia. Their higher-end stuff seems to be made in Europe, but that doesn't necessarily mean that parts of those aren't made in China.

I'm not fond of Musk, but this part about SpaceX is just blatantly untrue. Falcon 9 has an enviable record, with only two full failures and one partial failure out of 619 launches. Of the 602 attempted recoveries, they've made 589 of them using 53 boosters for an average of 11 launches per booster, with at least one (B1067) completing 33 landings.

NASA has most certainly not given up on reusable rockets. They continue to plan for the Falcon line to be used, and New Glenn has some contracts with more likely coming as it demonstrates reliability. Vulcan is supposed to eventually get reuse capability (we'll see), and NASA uses that, too. Even most of the smaller rockets have or are developing reuse capability.

Tesla is a mess, Musk had to get SpaceX to buy Twitter and Grok, and Starship is clearly having more problems than expected, but SpaceX's core Falcon operations are working just fine.

For power, he will likely divert a bunch of solar panels and grid-scale batteries from Tesla.

The bigger issue is that he wants to put this close to sources of vibration, like the Tesla gigafactory that uses high impact tools to shape metal. Apparently reputable commenters elsewhere have said that these impacts, while invisible to human sensations, are likely enough to affect high-sensitivity chip manufacturing operations. Existing fabs all over the world have to take into account traffic from nearby highways, and the gigafactory will be even closer and involve sharper impacts.

He has also dismissed concerns about clean rooms in the past, saying that they're overblown, and that he'll be able to eat a cheeseburger and smoke a cigar in the same rooms that are running manufacturing operations.

He was good as an idea man for a while, but his ideas have lost contact with reality.

ASML uses the calendar year for its fiscal year, so it's the same thing.

There was a little of that, but I think they really wanted to be part of the industry and figured that their effectively unlimited bank account would make that relatively easy. Almost out of the gate, GFiber was complaining about the amounts of red tape that incumbents were imposing, ranging from high fees to use existing poles to to arguments over easements to lawsuits over trivial and even frivolous claims. They lobbied city, county, state, and federal governments to do everything they could to block Google, threatening to withdraw from markets even before Google started building out, potentially leaving people without any high-speed internet for years as a way to threaten government officials who wanted to keep their jobs with losing them due to angry constituents.

I've seen cameras installed in gyms to monitor the exercise floor. There's no reason they wouldn't be, and multiple reasons to have them, including showing customers misusing equipment, harassing other customers, or starting fights. They're not installed in the locker rooms, but the main floor is perfectly fine.

They're also perfectly within their rights to ban customer recording devices, including smart glasses.

Grumman and McDonnell Douglas were saved from bankruptcy by mergers. It is very likely that other companies like Martin Marietta would have gone bankrupt post-Cold War save for mergers. Five major defense contractors were left out of around 50 previous major contractors. OpenAI may not go bankrupt, but that doesn't mean its independent future is secure.

OpenAI is already facing serious headwinds. Its 2025 revenue was only $13 billion, but it expects 2030 revenue to be around $280 billion. Two years ago, it expected to invest $1.3 trillion in data centers, hardware, and model training, but a few weeks ago, that was cut to $600 million. It's losing money on most of its subscriptions, even the $200 Pro level. Its early technology edge is fading, with Anthropic and Google competing for the top spot. It had to push out ChatGPT 5.2 earlier than planned, and that wasn't much of an upgrade over 5.1. They're still by far the most popular AI brand, but that doesn't mean permanent success.

Permanent recordings raise questions about two-party consent. If a microphone can pick up the worker's voice, there's a good chance it can pick up the customer's voice, too. There are around a dozen states that do not allow recording without the consent of all those who might say something.

Solar panels worked, but many of the wind turbines were offline. However, this was known, planned, and communicated well in advance. The other plants were expected to make up for it, but they failed. As I just mentioned in another comment, there are lawsuits claiming that many plants were unavailable because they were taken offline for maintenance just before the blizzard arrived as part of a conspiracy to spike energy prices.

Lawsuits were filed in 2024 and 2025 alleging market manipulation by intentionally bringing down power plants for maintenance triggered the blackout, rather than a lack of regulation mandating winterized plants. While some plants did go offline for a lack of winterization (most notably to me the failure to insulate a sensor on a short section of pipe, taking half of the South Texas Project Nuclear Power Plant offline), the lawsuits claim that the blackouts were a conspiracy to raise prices, similar to what Enron did in California around the turn of the century. Back then, rolling blackouts became common, and it was blamed on the weather or infrastructure. Ultimately, it came out that Enron was deliberately taking plants offline to reduce supply and force prices up.

Social Security and Medicare monies already have their own trust funds that cannot be directly taken. The money is sent to the Treasury in return for special bonds available only to those programs, boosting the sizes of the trust funds over time. If it just sat there, they would be in even worse trouble than they already are. Also, there is no income cap on the Medicare tax.

I'm all for removing the cap on wages taxed for Social Security, though.

The ancient mainframe code is also holding back improvements. Banks in other countries that got a much later start on computerizing everything have much more advanced methods of moving money around for the average person. I still have to write 2-3 checks every year for places that make it extra difficult to use credit cards. I have to pay "convenience fees" to send money via ACH for property taxes and a few other things. Adding a PIN to debit and credit cards was a massive lift for US banks because old code had to be modified to support it.

I'm not saying that the old code should be replaced for sake of replacing old code. Sometimes it works just fine. But it was also written in another era, and finding the people who are willing to work on it and get a federal government salary is really difficult. And maybe rewriting it so that it can scale better and not require million-dollar machines from IBM to run them would be a good idea.

The IRS runs heavily on ancient technology. I wish it were better, but moving people who know how those ancient systems work is asking for trouble.

But with this group, that might be the point. Make the IRS dysfunctional so it can be scaled back, or at least so that they're spending so much time cleaning up messes that they're not doing audits of the most complex taxpayers.