In re: TERFs, transgender people make up a very small part of the general population, roughly .5%. The odds that any given TERF would get picked up by an UBER driver that is a transwoman are very low.

I suspect–and I’d need to be checked on this–that you would need to have gotten your gender marker changed on your driver’s license in order for Uber to correctly identify your gender. And that makes it an even smaller subset of trangender people that could trigger TERFs. OTOH, I could absolutely see a TERF going ballistic over a cisgender woman that wasn’t fully gender-conforming…

The fact that the cancelled in the face of public pressure means nothing; they can always resume the partnership once the pressure subsides.

10% is pretty close to a controlling interest, since many shares never vote at meetings.

That’s like saying that it’s inevitable that murder and rape will happen.

Just because someone is going to do it eventually doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t have the death penalty for doing it.

The proprietary cartridge design kills it, IMO. It’s like making a super-gucci AR-15, but then it only uses your mags, and your mags cost $150/ea., v. $20 for a Magpul.

Don’t fucking buy Mira products; they’re overpriced Czech surplus. The OM-90 is the Czech designation for Mira’s CM-7M, and you can get them for $90 on eBay, vs. the $450 or so that Mira charges.

Honestly, get yourself an M-40 that’s in good shape, buy a 40mm-to-3M-bayonet adapter, use some 3M P-100 cartridges (you can get them for about $2/ea. when you buy in bulk). P-100 will filter out all particulates–even finer particulates than a HEPA filter or N-95–and will also filter out water- and oil-based aerosols. That covers all riot-control agents, because CN, CS, and OC are all aerosols, and not true gasses. Almost any surplus gas mask that’s been made in the last ~30 years, seals, and uses a 40mm NATO cartridge is going to be just fine for riot-control agents.

If you are really worried about a P-100 filter being insufficient, get a few new old-stock NBC filters. NBC (nuclear, biological, chemical) filters were phased out about 15-20 years ago in favor of CBRN (chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear) filters, but if they haven’t been used, they’ll be absolutely okay for riot agents.

If you wear glasses–and many people do–get a spectacle insert for whatever mask you have. Glasses break the seal, and while you will probably be fine with contacts in, that’s not necessarily a good risk to take. Supposedly the Kris Optical Mag-1 glasses can be worn under a mask without compromising the seal, but I can’t personally attest to that. I think that they’re one of the older styles of BCGs that were issued, but I’m not sure.

Oh, and get GOOD hearing protection. Consider high-end electronic ear muffs, and wearing ear plugs under them. Some places are using LRADs to disperse crowds, and those can wreck your hearing.

N95 is insufficient. You want a P100 filter cartridge; P100 will filter out oil-based and water-based aerosols, as well as all particulates. They will not filter out true gasses, but, good news!, CN, CS, and OC are all aerosols, not gasses.

No. Avon still exists, they have the current contract to make the M-50 gas mask. (Which, BTW, is not compatible with standard NATO CBRN 40mm cartidges.)

Gonzalez, the person that did run against Maduro, almost certainly won.

Maduro refuses to show the proof, and all attempts by non-partisan groups to monitor the election were rebuffed. Meanwhile, Gonzalez released the official tally sheets from poll watchers, and parallel vote tabulation confirms those results, and some statistical analysis of the claimed vote totals is very, very strongly suggestive that Maduro cooked the vote totals. And yet, somehow you’re sure that he won.

Is there any amount of evidence that would convince you that Maduro falsified the election results? Because he’s not providing any evidence.

Also, there’s no doubt that Hugo Chavez was popularly elected. And Maduro was elected by a very slim majority (about 50.6%, IIRC) the first time, in '15 (?). Since then? Eh. Popularly supported? I’m not seeing any independent evidence of that; the people claiming he is are official propaganda arms of communist parties. Was Machado a right-wing candidate? Yep. But if she had so little support, then why was she barred from running? And the fact that she’s done shitty things, is a shitty person, and asked another shitty person to illegally invade does not mean that Maduro is popular with the people of Venezuela.

Maduro is a monstrous dictator. He’s just not the kind of monstrous dictator that Trump likes. Like, y’know, Putin.

The person that won the Nobel Prize recently–Machado–ain’t exactly a great person to be leading Venezuela either, but the odds appear to be pretty damn high that she would have won the 2024 election in a blowout landslide, had she not been barred from running, and the vote count being entirely fraudulent by Maduro.

It’s all good. :)

Technically accurate, but not accurate in any meaningful way in this context.

The planet would be unlivable LONG before CO2 levels got high enough to directly risk the health and safety of humans through inhalation.

CO2 levels don’t actually poison us though. The problem isn’t CO2 levels per se, but the effect they have on global climate change, by trapping more heat. If less light gets through, then the planet cools, even if CO2 levels remain high. If temperatures stabilize or drop by 1.5C, then plants should eventually be able to remove the excess CO2, as long as we stop increasing our output. OTOH, the decreased amount of light getting through might make solar panels less efficient, and may reduce plant growth since they kinda need sunlight too. Sooooo…

Win 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC is what you want. It comes with a grand total of zero drivers, so you’ll need to download them to a USB drive before installing, otherwise you won’t even be able to get online because there’s no driver for the ethernet or WiFi. You can even uninstall Edge! (Which you should definitely do.) I think that massgrave.dev is considered reputable for downloading and activating, which is done by shell scripts. You should be able to turn off pretty much all telemetry on it.

…And so it’s not enough that she voted against the appropriations bill that would have entirely funded the Israel war machine, she also needed to vote for the amendment to the bill that would have cut ‘offensive weapons’ in a bill that she was going to vote against…? source for the bill, source for vote record

…And you expect me to believe that M-L wouldn’t still be saying that she voted for an amendment to continue funding the Israeli military? That’s simply not believable when she already voted against the whole bill.

Can you tell me which sentence in that statement clearly says, “I support sending weapons to Israel”? Or are you making a lot of inferences based on you a priori beliefs?

You’re not proving your point.

Hope that helps.

You aren’t making your case here.

It wouldn’t have mattered how she voted on this bill to anyone that thinks she isn’t far enough left, or left in the correct way, because that amendment wouldn’t have eliminated all Israel weapons from the bill. As you know. Voted to stop sending some weapons to Israel? That’s not enough, therefore she supports genocide. Didn’t vote to stop sending some weapons to Israel? She supports genocide. It’s ‘heads I win, tails you lose’.

She knew that, in the end, the bill would get passed despite her nay vote.

Okay, she also knew that the amendment wouldn’t get passed, so there’s no harm in voting against it, right? You’re applying two different standards of logic here. If you look at it through the lens of, “AOC wants to eliminate all military funding to Israel”, then the votes are ideologically consistent; the first fails to meet the goal, so gets voted down, the second vote–the overall military appropriation–funds Israel, and so also gets voted down.

You’re setting up an unfalsifiable argument, where there’s no condition that would lead you to believe that she’s opposed to the genocide in Palestine.

Removed by mod

Assuming that your backup isn’t also infected.