Education is key in firearm safety.

Nobody scares me more at the range than adults who rent a gun who clearly have no experience. They’re often simultaneously confident and dangerous. Kids at the range are afraid of getting in trouble so listen to people telling them how to be safe, but adults are the fucking worst.

Our goal is compliance, not enforcement. The only people we throw the book at early are repeat offenders we’ve already suspended from pulling permits for repeat violations or anyone who tries to meet us with a lawyer.

We learned long ago that you can’t give a micrometer in this town to rich people who try to intimidate you with a lawyer. Other cities fold under that pressure, but with everyone in the city being in the top 0.1% there’s no way we can let lawyers intimidate us.

We go to court a few times a year, and our lawyers are way meaner than we are and haven’t lost a case since I’ve been with the city.

When you can’t take out the head, you sweep the legs.

We can’t get Trump or his minions in Washington right now. But if we go after ICE and DHS people with massive civil fines, he’ll run out of people willing to do his bidding.

The people we’re talking about have billions and we can only legally charge them a few thousand. We can’t cut off the money spigot, so we cut off the supply of workers willing to work for them.

And the workers that get fined are the ones still performing the work after we’ve issued a verbal and written stop-work order and cited the owners. And it’s not like we just put something in the mail - we discover the work by driving by, seeing the workers on site, and speaking with them directly and telling them to stop. Our code enforcement people don’t cite the individual workers until their third trip to the site in which they’re told to stop. Hell - if they stopped when we first asked we wouldn’t even know who to cite if we wanted.

Most of the time, they stop without being cited and work with us on permitting and remediation. We end up having to go after the contractors for violation of a SWO about 1% of the time (though we’ll also cite them for other things like wrenching through public utilities in the ROW more often). And in those cases it’s almost always the contractors who lie and either tell the owners a permit isn’t needed or that they already have one. The last time we did it they had actually printed out a forged permit placard.

And that 1% that repeatedly refuses to follow the rules gets to go to court and explain their side to the judge, where the reality is they’ll probably have the daily fine dismissed and only pay the initial $500 or whatever if they start to cooperate.

You can only issue arrest warrants for criminal contempt, meaning Trump can just issue a pardon.

Civil contempt isn’t subject to the pardon power.

I’ve had to one water rescue in a lake, and it sucked. The water was in the 50s and it was about 30 degrees outside. I can’t imagine doing one in Chicago.

And in my case the rescue wasn’t that difficult. I’m a scuba instructor at a university and we were doing a big dive weekend at the end of the Fall semester, and any time we have a bunch of people in the water, we like to leave one instructor on the surface to organize and be in charge of everything. A group came up yelling for help.

I ran into the water and swam out to meet them and tow in the victim while having my divemasters prep the aid station and assemble the O2 kits, and the guy was barely conscious and turning blue.

As I stripped his gear off, I noticed he was wearing a semi-dry wetsuit that was REALLY tight. I cut relief slits in the suit with my shears and by the time I’d dragged him out of the water he was fully awake and color had returned. Turns out he’d found the suit on Craigslist really cheap and insisted on using it even though it was too small, and between that and the colder water down deep his circulation had been restricted.

But even with that fairly easy rescue (the same suit that caused the problem also made him supper floaty), the cold air and water made it exhausting. I can’t imagine doing a much more difficult rescue in Chicago water.

Because if the last 25 years have taught us anything, it’s that the US going to war with Islamist nations creates regional peace and stability…

A bunch of social media accounts with their name and address may start attacking Scientology and right-wing crazies.

A current example is states invalidating all Trans people’s IDs during a primary election. That’s happening right now.

Also - getting an ID is expensive and time consuming in the US. The cliche of spending 4 hours in line at the DMV to get a license even though you made an appointment ahead of time isn’t an exaggeration, and applies to getting an ID as well. The reality is most people won’t spend the time and money to do it just so they can vote every 2 or 4 years - especially people who can’t afford to take a day off work and travel to do it.

But people will do it so they can drive their car every day - so people with IDs are more likely to have more money.

And for people who have driver’s licenses that fall on hard times it’s also a problem, because they stop paying for insurance (invalidates driver’s license), lose their car (keeps them from paying for insurance or renewing license), or even lose their home (address change invalidates license). These are not people who can take a day to go pay to vote. And that’s exactly what they’d be doing, because the new ID card they’d be buying would strictly be for voting. Aside from the cost of the ID, when I updated my DL in June I had to travel 80 miles round trip, and the process took about 7 hours - and I had a car to speed things up.

So it’s effectively pay-to-vote system that only applies to poor people. People with money can vote for free through “motor voter” registration by checking a box when getting or renewing their driver’s license.

The plan is only for very rich and poor people to exist.

Hundreds of things that cost tens of thousands of dollars versus thousands of things that costs hundreds of thousands a year.

You’re literally saying that Steam’s server costs are orders of magnitude less than Gamestop’s retail store location costs.

I’ve worked in retail and in tech. Tech infrastructure is expensive, but they save a metric fuckton by not requiring physical space. You could fit the entirety of all of valve’s Tech infrastructure in a single building. Of course, they don’t do that - they have it distributed in data centers all over the world. But they are renting space in server racks, whereas Gamestop is renting thousands of retail spaces for 100 grand a year, another 100 grand each on staffing them, and a metric fuckton on inventory. And their cut of the sales is tiny.

People saying they charge 30% are wrong. Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo charge 30%. Gamestop’s margin on a new game is like 10-15 percent. They make more on used games, but only if they sell. Their 100% markup on used games versus what they pay doesn’t mean as much when lots of those games go unsold. At least new games can be returned to the manufacturer.

Not 10 times the employees. 10 times the nunber of stores as Valve has employees.

Let’s look at the cost of just floor-level associates. If Gamestop employees made an average of $14 an hour and they have 2 employees working and were open 11 hours a day an average (standard is 10am to 9pm - they actually work shorter hours on Sunday, but there’s also time spent opening and closing the store and extra hours on holidays other than Christmas, so 11 is low). That comes out to over 100 grand per store just in nominal hourly wages for floor associates.

Valve would have to pay 7 figures on average per employee to have the same staffing cost as Gamestop’s lowest-paid employees.

You know what it costs to run a retail store? And even in 2025 GameStop had 10 times as many retail store locations as Valve had employees.

And it’s not like retail has no tech infrastructure expenses.

30% makes sense for a physical store with high overhead, inventory, staffing, and other expenses.

Valve could take a 5% cut and still make a ton more than a retail store for the same product.

I’m not sure where I stand there. Steam is a great platform, but for purely capitalistic reasons. The only reason they aren’t as bad as other platforms is because they’re privately-owned and take the long view because they don’t have to worry about the day-to-day fluctuations on stock value.

Gabe isn’t your friend. He’s a billionaire yacht-collector who makes the vast majority of his money by taking a massive cut from other company’s products because of their virtual monopoly that exists because they launched an online marketplace in 2004.

Just throw hard enough to trigger fusion reaction then.

Order of the Phoenix took the longest book and made the shortest film.

It’s as if extreme price increases causes by tarrifs, loss of migrant workers, and now memory/storage shortages combined with and devaluation of the dollar drive inflation and the stock market nominally goes up.

Was hoping to open the article and find out that it was an exaggerated clickbait headline and he was just doing laundry.

I should never hope when it comes to Republicans.