Most welcome!

A little background on the NYPD and firearms
Back when most departments were transitioning from revolvers to semi-auto, NYPD held on to revolvers for quite a while. Their revolvers used double action triggers, which means pulling the trigger both rotates the cylinder and also cocks the hammer. This means the trigger pull is long and heavy, you have to pull it a long distance back and with a good amount of force.
With pistols, the longer distance you have to pull the trigger and the harder you have to pull, the less accurate you are. Pulling the trigger moves your hand and puts force on the gun itself which can throw off your aim.
Many officers would ‘pre stage’ the trigger, pulling it halfway back to an indent where the pull gets slightly harder. This is a horrible practice that no one should ever do, because it means you might unintentionally discharge if you get jostled, but it made them more accurate when it came time to actually fire so they kept doing it. NYPD didn’t train it out of the officers even though it is against virtually every firearm guideline.

So then the department switched from revolvers to semi-auto pistols, mainly for the magazine- average semi-auto pistol holds 17 rounds, revolver holds 6. But they used striker fired pistols- these guns have a shorter, lighter trigger pull as the only thing the trigger does is move a catch to release already stored spring tension into the firing pin. That can make you much more accurate because the force of pulling the trigger moves your aim off, so less force needed to pull the trigger means more accuracy.

Problem was, a lot of officers had muscle memory from years or decades of carrying the double action revolver so they would try to pre-stage the trigger. And that would of course fire the gun when they didn’t want to.

NYPD’s solution to this was to simply make the trigger on their semi-autos really really really hard to pull. They had a custom spring designed that increased the trigger force- a semi-auto usually requires about 4-6 pounds of force to pull the trigger, they put a 12 lb spring. That allowed the officers to apply pre-stage force from their revolver days without discharging the weapon. Still absolutely horrible practice, but this stopped the unintentional discharges.

This had the side effect of course of making the guns relatively inaccurate. When you have to squeeze the trigger with that much force, it throws your aim off. And especially when you are in an emergency situation and adrenaline is pumping, it’s hard to shoot accurately when you need to pull that hard. But it stopped the unintentional discharges so they went with it, since the force had a lot of old-timers.

And, for a very long time, they kept issuing these 12lb trigger guns even to new recruits, many of whom had never fired a gun before and could be easily trained to use a standard trigger with proper trigger discipline. So now THOSE officers were accustomed to 12lb triggers.

For the record, no other police department in the nation did this. Every one of them transitioned from revolvers to semi-autos without much problem, because they did not tolerate bad trigger discipline to begin with. And while some recommend a slightly stiffer trigger than the stock trigger, NYPD is literally the only one with a 12 lb trigger.

It wasn’t until 2021 that NYPD started to back off, and started issuing new recruits weapons with ‘only’ 8lb trigger springs. That is still fairly high, but those 4 lb less makes it a lot easier to shoot accurately.

Point of all this– When I hear that NYPD is shooting multiple bystanders, I’m not surprised. Unless those officers first hit the streets in the last couple of years, they are still using the 12 lb trigger and it’s not surprising they have shit accuracy and are shooting bystanders.

It’s a problem of NYPD’s own making though.

The only way you can do this, is if the only service you use the provider for is storage. Encrypt the data before you send it to the provider and then they don’t know what they’re storing.

If they have to do any processing on it at all, then conceptually they need a plain text copy of it to feed into the CPU. And if they have that, there is nothing you can do to stop them from stealing it or using it.

There has been some research in this field, the concept is called homomorphic encryption. That is where you encrypt something in a way that allows a third party to manipulate the data without possessing a key. It is still very limited, and likely always will be due to the extreme difficulty of the question.

with an outside control interface that’s quite literally about as optimal as it can be.

Which is probably true, as long as you make one assumption- that the operator dedicates a significant amount of time to learning it. With that assumption being true- I’ll assume you’re correct and it becomes much more efficient than a Nano/Notepad style editor.

I’m happy to concede without any personal knowledge that if you’re hardcore editing code, it may well be worth the time to learn Vim, on the principle that it may well be the very most efficient terminal-based text editor.

But what if you’re NOT hardcore editing code? What if you just need to edit a config file here and there? You don’t need the ‘absolute most efficient’ system because it’s NOT efficient for you to take the time to learn it. You just want to comment out a line and type a replacement below it. And you’ve been using Notepad-style text editors for years.

Thus my point-- there is ABSOLUTELY a place for Vim. But wanting to just edit a file without having to learn a whole new editor doesn’t make one lazy. It means you’re being efficient, focusing your time on getting what you need done, done.

A text editor that doesn’t need a tutor because the interface is intuitive enough that someone who has been using text editors (as a concept) for years can more or less instantly pick it up and start working without needing a tutorial to simply edit a config file.

To expand on this- In general you must comply with the laws of any jurisdiction where you have a business presence. This for example Meta is a USA company, but they have offices in the EU and they sell advertising in the EU from EU offices so they have to comply with EU laws for EU users. They can’t just wave off and say ‘we are a USA company, EU regs don’t apply to us’.

Lemmy is not a corporation. There is no business presence in Texas, unless an instance admin lives there or hosts the server there. So Lemmy, both as a whole and as individual instances, can simply give Texas the middle finger and say ‘we aren’t subject to your laws as we have no presence or business in your state. We are in the state of California (or whatever) and are subject to the laws of our home state. It is not our job to enforce Texas laws in California on servers hosted in Virginia.’

Thus Texas trying to enforce their laws on a Cali company is like Hollywood studios sending DMCA notices to Finland.

Taxes are not displayed anywhere else, so if Airbnb starts including taxes in their listing they will be at a competitive disadvantage as their pricing would become apples to oranges versus hotels in the wrong direction.

Almost nowhere in the US includes taxes in the advertised price.

Yes exactly. Hosts got greedy, Airbnb let them, and this is the result.

They could fix it pretty easily but the host would hate it.

• Make the price that is displayed by default inclusive of all fees and charges, except taxes. So that stupid cleaning fee makes your property go down in the list.

-Make the listing page clearly indicate whether or not the guest is required to perform chores. Make the filter aware of certain chores and allow a guest to screen out listings that require those. IE, ‘strip bed’, ‘do laundry’, ‘take out garbage’, ‘cleaning tasks’, ‘other’, etc. and have a really easy button at the top ‘filter out listings with chores’.

If I’m paying half the price of a hotel then I don’t mind having to throw the sheets in the laundry. If I’m paying more than a hotel plus a cleaning fee, I want to be on vacation and act like it.

They won’t. I think that’s why this is happening on a Saturday- stock markets are closed so it won’t instantly tank Boeing’s stock price.

Look back at the last few space disasters that killed people- Challenger and Columbia. In both cases it was the same- someone in NASA tried to sound the alarm but they didn’t listen because of organizational culture or whatever. Thus the people at the top of NASA could say with a straight face ‘we didn’t know, we will change culture to listen to the little guy who thinks there’s a problem’. And so, we all forgave them for making us watch heroes die on live TV.

This is different. The alarm has been sounded and it’s been sounding for months. Everyone at all levels of NASA, Boeing, and for that matter the general public know that Starliner has a very serious thruster problem. There’s no excuses here, no ‘promise to fix culture’ or new procedure that could forgive an accident. If Butch and Suni blow up on live TV there’ll be no excuses anyone for anyone to make because the decision is being made with everyone fully informed. The public at large will know it happened because NASA trusted ‘don’t bolt the doors on Boeing’ with the lives of American heroes. The American people will demand that heads roll at both NASA and Boeing and it may well happen too. We don’t like watching real heroes die on live TV.

So look at Starliner right now. The thrusters have problems that make them overheat and shut off when commanded to fire and, as of when I last checked, Boeing isn’t even sure what’s wrong.

Point is- if Starliner crashes with Americans on board, NASA won’t just be burning credibility. They’ll be burning themselves, Boeing, and the entire manned space program.

So I predict the flight readiness review before the press conference is just a formality, that the decision has already been made to bring our people back on Crew Dragon. And I’m sure someone from Boeing will be all thumbs up over an ‘overabundance of caution’.