Trust me when I say that you must understand the principles of machining before you try to do CNC. And unless you are good with CAD/CAM, you’re going to have to program in G-code too. If the only thing you’re doing with CNC is loading a part, and changing tools, no, you don’t need to know much. But if you want to mill an existing 3D model, you’re absolutely going to need to be a good machinist in order to program CNC.
eBay does not allow the selling of ammunition components, but you can buy some gun parts. I can’t say for certain, but I strongly suspect that powder, brass, primers, and projectiles are all tightly regulated in countries that have strict firearm regulations.
Reloading isn’t particularly tedious unless you’re using a single-stage press. A progressive press moves things along pretty well; once I have my brass prepped (cleaned, sized, trimmed, crimps removed, etc.), I can usually load 100 rounds in 15 minutes or so. Pistol ammo is faster, since I don’t have to spend as much time worrying about trimming or removing primer crimps; it’s just clean and go (decapping/sizing is the first station in the progressive press). Does it save money? Absolutely. I’ll save about $.01-.02/bullet on 9mm, and about $.1/bullet on 5.56x45mm. BUT I’ve spent well over $1000 on reloading equipment (!!!), which means that I’d need to reload 10k 5.56x45mm bullets to break even.
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Under $100? You won’t find one that doesn’t need a ton of work. If you go up to the $1000 range, you’ll probably start finding small, old ones that are in useable condition, without tooling.
Quick notes - you can’t print everything you need to make a firearm, or, more correctly, you can’t print everything you need to make a firearm that works more than once. In the case of the ubiquitous Glock, you’re printing the frame, which is the serialized part, and therefore the entire ‘gun’ under US law. Once you have that, you can buy all the other parts with cash and no ID check (in most states). Without very, very expensive metal-printing technology, you can’t print, e.g., a barrel, or a slide.
Second, resin printing is extremely precise. Some resin printers are +/- .0001"; that’s more than accurate enough for firearms. That said, resin prints aren’t durable enough to be used for guns; you would want something glass-reinforced for a Glock frame, or an AR-15 lower receiver.
Prices for printing are far, far lower than CNC costs. The smallest metal-cutting CNC mill that I’m aware of starts at about $60,000, and that’s for the bare machine. Tooling is going to cost several times that. If you’re a professional gunsmith, it might make sense to buy one, if you do a lot of slide milling (for optics, or cuts to reduce the weight), or if you’re making a lot of custom muzzle brakes, but gunsmithing doesn’t tend to be a very lucrative career.
Disagree on VR, depending. I use a VR dry fire training system, and it’s def. improved my real-world shooting.
That’s not necessarily valuable, exactly. Yes, companies charge a lot for consumer ink jet printer ink, but prices go down dramatically when you’re talking about commercial printing. A two liter bottle of high-end dye sublimation ink runs about $200 (might be up since I last bought in 2021), and the dye sublimation ink for the HP printer I operate costs about $700/10L.
If your printer has replaceable print heads that aren’t part of the ink cartridge, and if you can retrofit a bulk ink system, then you quickly find out that ink is pretty inexpensive.
Oxygen now stably bonds with three hydrogen atoms, not two. The new formula for water is H3O.
Good luck with any kind of life form that we would recognize as being alive evolving.
Nope. Still good for a few years.
But that’s because I always buy toilet paper and paper towels at Costco, and buy more when I’m down to two cases.
Two is one, one is none.
I’ve heard that packing gauze into a gunshot wound to stop the bleeding is pretty unpleasant. I’ve also heard that a tourniquet that’s on properly is unbearably painful as well.
Clearly y’all have never tried sounding.
(My urologist strongly warned against this; said that it could cause microscopic tears in the urethra that could lead to strictures.)
Three herniated discs in my back causing sciatic pain. It wasn’t that the pain was bad on a moment-to-moment basis, but that it just want on and on and on. It was agony to sit down, so I had to stand in my cubicle to work. It was painful to lie down, so I ended up getting about 4 hours of sleep each night. I was taking several grams of ibuprofen, acetaminophen (yes, I’m lucky I didn’t destroy my liver), and naproxen sodium daily, just to be functional. This went on for over a year.
The fun part is that when I first starting having sciatic pain, I was pretty sure that it was my back, because I hadn’t done anything that would have injured my leg. I had really good insurance at the time, but my doctor refused to order an MRI or even an x-ray; he thought I was trying to get a prescription for drugs. It took about 15 months of pain, and multiple visits to my doctor, an ER, and even attempting to see a chiropractor (who was at least self-aware enough to realize that he shouldn’t touch me without an MRI first), before a scheduling error got another doctor in the practice to look at me, order an x-ray, and then order an MRI on the basis of the x-ray. Within about two days of the MRI being read I had received a referral to a neurosurgeon, in less than a week he was asking me whether I wanted a laminectomy or a spinal fusion. (These days I’d be opting for disc replacement), and I was recovering from surgery about a month after that MRI.
My understanding was that ‘pure’ pedophiles–ones that have no interest at all in post-pubescent children or any adults whatsoever–tend to be less concerned with sex/gender, particularly because children don’t have defined secondary sex characteristics. I don’t know if this is actually correct though. I’m not even sure how you could ethically research that kind of thing and end up with valid results.
And honestly, not being able to do solid research that has valid results makes it really fuckin’ hard to find solutions that work to prevent as many children from being harmed as possible. In the US at least research about sex and sexuality in general-much less deviant sexualities–seems to be taboo, and very difficult to get funding for.
I guess where I come down is that, as long as no real people are being harmed–either directly, or because their likeness is being used–then I’d rather see it out in the open than hidden. At least if it’s open you can have a better chance of knowing who is immediately unsafe around children, and easily using that to exclude people from positions where they’d have ready access to children (teachers, priests, etc.).
Unfortunately, there’s also a risk of pedophilia being ‘normalized’ to the point where people let their guard down around them.
It’s obvs. very hard to get accounts of what pedophiles are doing; the only ones that you can survey are ones that have been caught, which isn’t necessarily a representative sample. I don’t think that there are any good estimates on the rate of pedophilic tendencies.
the reason loli/whatever is also illegal to distribute
From a cursory reading, it looks like possession and distribution are both felonies. Lolicon hentai is pretty widely available online, and prosecutions appear to be very uncommon when compared to the availability. (Low priority for enforcement, probably?)
I’m not sure that increasing the supply of CSAM would necessarily increase demand for CSAM in people that aren’t already pedophiles though. To put it another way, I’m sure that increasing the supply of gay porn would increase consumption of gay porn, but I am pretty sure that it’s not going to make more people gay. And people that aren’t gay (or at least bi-) aren’t going to be interested in gay porn, regardless of how hard up (heh) they might be for porn, as long as they have any choices at all. There’s a distinction between fetishes/paraphilia, and orientations, and my impression has been that pedophilia is much more similar to an orientation than a paraphilia.
The PROTECT Act has been, so far, found to be constitutional, since it relies on the obscenity standard in regards to lolicon hentai. Which is quite worrisome. It seems like it’s a circular argument/tautology; it’s obscene for drawn art to depict child sexual abuse because drawings of child sexual abuse are obscene.
the thing many abusers like most about CSAM is that it’s a real person and that the artificial stuff won’t do it for them at all.
Perhaps. But what about when they can’t tell the difference between real and virtual? It seems like the allure of all pornography is the fantasy, rather than the reality. That is, you may enjoy extreme BDSM pornography, and enjoy seeing a person flogged until they’re bleeding, or see needles slowly forced through their penis, but do you really care that it’s a real person that’s going to end the scene, take a shower, and go watch a few episodes of “The Good Place” with their dog before bed? Or is it about the power fantasy that you’re constructing in your head about that scene? How important is the reality of the scene, versus being able to suspend your disbelief long enough to get sexual gratification from it? If the whole scene was done with really good practical effects and CG, would your experience, as a user–even if you were aware–be different?
CSAM possession is illegal because possession directly supports creation
To expound on this: prior to this point, the creation of CSAM requires that children be sexually exploited. You could not have CSAM without children being harmed. But what about when no direct harms have occurred? Is lolicon hentai ‘obscene’? Well, according to the law and case law, yes, but it’s not usually enforced. If we agree that drawings of children engaged in sexual acts aren’t causing direct harm–that is, children are not being sexually abused in order to create the drawings–then how much different is a computer-generated image that isn’t based off any specific person or event? It seem to me that, whether or not a pedophile might decide that they eventually want more than LLM-generated images is not relevant. Treating a future possibility as a foregone conclusion is exactly the rationale behind Reefer Madness and the idea of ‘gateway’ drugs.
Allow me to float a second possibility that will certainly be less popular.
Start with two premises: first, pedophilia is a characteristic that appears to be an orientation. That is, a true pedophile–a person exclusively sexually attracted to pre-pubescent children–does not choose to be a pedophile, any more than a person chooses to be gay. (My understanding is that very few pedophiles are exclusively pedophilic though, and that many child molesters are opportunistic sexual predators rather than being pedophiles.) Secondly, the rates of sexual assault appear to have decreased as pornography availability has increased. So the question I would have is, would wide availability of LLM-generated CSAM–CSAM that didn’t cause any real, direct harm to children–actually decrease rates of child sexual assault?
Because any simulated CSAM laws have been, to my knowledge, all struck down when challenged.
To the best of my knowledge, calling drawn works obscene has been upheld in courts, most often because the artist(s) lack the financial ability to fight the charges effectively. The artist for the underground comic “Boiled Angel” had his conviction for obscenity upheld–most CSAM work falls under obscenity laws–and ended up giving up the fight to clear his name.
The book is brilliant, even if it’s difficult to read and follow. The satire of art criticism is just so on point.
…And it’s hard to know if the Navidson record and house never really existed or not (in the context of the book) because of the way Johnny is slowly unraveling. It’s got strong elements of cosmic horror to it, along with razor-sharp satire, and the delineation in writings styles between Johnny’s personal narrative, Zampano, and the various journal articles are written really sells the entire piece.