raz-0

The metaverse is a pile of shit. Even assuming it is something people want long term, they don’t want what is being made. People don’t want to move to Facebook-burg and be stuck with no amenities but the company store. Also there were gold atms which heralded the return to hard currency from fiat right? i will also point out that there’s an atm down the street that has a $9 service fee. Just because some grifter sees a chance to make a buck doesn’t mean that’s the future knocking on your door. I’ll be more excited when making it convenient doesn’t just translate to being rid of the bitcoin you have for a more recognized cash equivalent. Like tell me when we have the first big company offering refunds in crypto when you paid in crypto.

It's got to survive the fact CA has state preemption AND then pass constitutional challenges. Even the 9th would have a very hard time upholding the fee, but they are 97% scumbag by volume, so.... Likely it'll just be killed by state preemption.

That list is incredibly misleading. Like paypal on the list is truly leaning into bitcoin because they are willing to provide actual money to merchants in exchange for you giving them bitcoin. They are actually swapping one form of money for another. Similar with newegg. At&t on the other hand accepts traditional money and has just integrated a payment method that says they will allow bitpay to give them cash on your behalf. They don't want your bitcoin. Microsoft is on the list, but removed bitcoin, readded, and appear to have removed it again, at least all their FAQs on how to do it no longer work for me to see the option. Starbucks doesn't want your bitcoin, which is why you can't use it in person. They will accept dollars form a third party on your behalf after the transaction completes. They will then give you credit for that at a later date. Overstock is hard to say what they are doing. Amazon doesn't want your bitcoin, but will accept dollars on your behalf from a third party. Apply this scrutiny to the rest of the list, and it gets much, much shorter.

I suspect part of it is that the dollar value of leveraged investments was extremely high. We are currently looking at regulations that might make some of those leveraged investments harder to pull off and some of them illegal. We are also looking at higher interest rates, which make it, even under the current rule set, more expensive to extend the duration on that lever. They have to pay up or pay the interest. So if you have to pay up, you have to get the cash somewhere. Crypto went first because it is a market they were manipulating that is looking to be the subject of massive regulatory change if not outright bans on it in some places that have been fueling the market.

https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/docs/final_report-smart_gun_report.pdf the report as a result of obama trying to push an executive mandate for the DOJ. It's basically a summary of the osti report but includes a summary of known smart gun attempts. Of note, the osti document notes a permitted failure rate of 5 stoppages in 1000 rounds. The federal guidelines for bidding handgun contracts permits one stoppage in 2000 rounds. That is the current standard.

https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/71695 That gives the basics of LEO requirements for smart guns. You will note they are largely incompatible with what the gun grabbers want, and 100% incompatible with making stolen guns useless as their requirements insist on it failing operable and power loss is a failure mode. So in that case the only tool needed to make a stolen gun operable is patience.

Well 1) This isn't functionally different than the magnetic ring on S&W revolvers way back when. It's not a "smart gun" because it doesn't identify a user. It identifies a ring. 2) LEO groups have analyzed offering over the years. Identical RFID schemes have failed their tests repeatedly, so I don't know why this one would be different. RFID has gotten cheaper, but not fundamentally different since then. Not even really significantly smaller, just the small stuff is WAY cheaper now. I believe fundamentally, the system fails because of having to wear multiple rings if you want to be able to shoot with your off hand. People keep on thinking they can make a buck pushing the same rope. RFID won't work because it isn't identifying a person unless you implant the RFID. Consumers don't want that and I suspect LE unions don't either. Fingerprints won't work because you would need a 100% consistent presentation of grip and for each gun to be set up for the sensors to be in the right place for the user because people aren't the same shape and size. Grip sensing technology won't work because it is unclear that you can actually identify someone by their grip, and it requires 100% consistent presentation of grip, which doesn't happen. (after many years they can't fit the technology in a gun nor can they get through a magazine without malfunction). Blood vessel pattern recognition might work.... if you can ever fit it in a gun and don't mind never wearing gloves. Facial recognition might work... if you can fit it in a gun, and don't mind it not owrking on all lighting conditions, during a struggle or while talking. So... yeah like it won't work. Voice recognition... you would have to couple it with a touch sensing device in the gun, but possible.. if you don't mind that bob can unlock his gun for charlie. Also voiceprints don't work well if they can compensate for yelling, stressed speech, etc. Heart rate recognition. This tech could probably fit in the gun grips right now. But it operates on the scale of multiple heartbeats and it needs electrical contact across the chest. So you would need two hands, need both to be in contact with only one set of sensors at a time, and need to never wear gloves. DNA sampling... BAHAHAHAHAHHAHAH yeah that's going to fit in a gun sometime in the next 50 years. And if the needles are small enough to not be noticed will they go through gloves. And I mean is your gun now an infection vector after that perp with HIV grabs for it. Contact DNA means no gloves and we have yet to get it to be broadly reliable and usable in a lab much less in the copious spare space in a pistol. Ear recognition... see face but harder. Iris recognition... see face but harder retina recognition... see iris recognition but harder and less functional in real environments hand geometry.... unlike grip sensing, some testing has been done on uniqueness, and it's pretty solid. But to be so it needs increadibly consistent presentation of one's hand. finger geometry... see hand but less reliable and harder. smell recognition... this is like voice recognition. It's not directly coupled to the gun. Identifying you are in the room isn't the same as identifying you are holding the gun. And it won't fit in a gun anytime soon. The other grip recognition... i.e. a hand equivalent of gait recognition. This would only really work on holstered guns if it is even unique enough. But kind of like keystroke recognition you could potentially measure how one goes about drawing and gripping a gun. When yo can make it fit in the gun. So lets pretend the above aren't doomed by state of the technology and use cases and packaging issues. Now we have the ADA.... oops like a whole bunch of them now can't be the only winning technology.

So first some background to aid in understanding. When you join the NRA, you have contributed basically nothing to the legal and political fight for RKBA. That entity isn't legally allowed to do much in that arena. That falls to NRA-ILA, and if you want to donate money to he NRA to affect political change, you should be donating there. The main good the membership part of the NRA does is helping shooting ranges operate. Either via expert input on how to get one built, grants, or access to insurance. Regardless of which of those things you might be donating to, don't reactively donate. Go find the donate button and make a donation. If someone asked you first, it is pretty much guaranteed less of your dollars make it to where you want it to go. Outside of having run the organization so poorly as to put it at peril while mismanaging everyone's contributions, the NRA basically operates on the model of mitigating damage. You don't launch a lawsuit that might set bad precedent. You don't say no to legislation, you ride it into the ground trying to make it less bad. This has worked like shit. So who else is worth donating to? Nationally, the two biggies are the second amendment foundation, and the firerarms policy coalition with gun owners of america stumbling in at third place. The SAF is pretty much focused only on court cases, and seems to be very, very conservative about the cases they initiate, but seems to be seem to be more productive in usefully joining onto suits that didn't originate with them that have some legs. They seem to largely be beating their head against the 9th circuit for a while though. So unless that is a longer term strategy I don't understand, I'm not terribly pleased with the performance in the last few years. Then there is FPC. They seem to be a bit light on lobbying, but appear to still engage in it. They also are a lot more aggressive in pursuing litigation. They may not have won us anything huge yet, but they also haven't screwed us yet. They seem to exercise some decent judgement about the cases they take and they seem to be willing to back multiple horses on a given issue rather than waiting for an ideal case/defendant. As time goes on, they don't seem to be stupid, and they seem to grasp that you can't make the shots you don't take. Also if you read their mission statement, it seems pretty sound and non partisan. GOA is more about lobbying and making headlines. They are brash and kind of annoying at times, but they get attention. It's hard to tell if they carry any weight lobbying or if they are just running around me-tooing everything and sending out press releases when the winds blow their way. They do seem to be shaping up to being the most agile in terms mustering coordinated group yelling at congress, so that's something in their favor. The major downside for them is that they are effectively owned by an individual, which isn't the best plan for a durable and robust organization. There are no real membership benefits to the above, and I suspect they don't ever remove anyone from the rolls kind of like the gun grabbers don't. I've also never gotten a membership renewal request from any of them. the SAF does seem to waste the most money on sending me junk mail. So I haven't bothered to renew my membership to any of them. My general strategy is that I have a budget for donating money for RKBA activism, and at a minimum they all get a Christmas gift of $25. I then make smaller additional donations throughout the year as rewards. If I see a lawsuit I like the looks of and it was launched by FPC, they get another donation. Same for SAF. GOA tends to not get media based donations from me, but occasionally earns some extra cash by getting me useful information fast on federal actions. Locally, we have had a ton of groups stumble through. Many of them absolutely awful and they go away. ANJRPC is the state NRA affiliate. The kindest thing I can say about them is I think they finally got the message that the gun owners of NJ weren't impressed by how they were doing things. They seem to have departed a bit from the mother ship's playbook of focusing on legislation and mitigating harm, and have joined in poking the bear to generate legal challenges. But there's a lot of bad blood between ANJRPC and NJ gunowners as for a very long period, there wasn't much evidence they existed outside of their association with a single gun range and official legal filings. Then there is NJ2AS, which as far as I can tell spearheaded the shift to organized legal challenges in NJ to try and make something actionable happen to challenge the law. It appears to consist largely of Alex, and his traffic accident underscores my concern about any group that is basically owned and operated by an individual. There also always seems to be a perpetual churn of the designated fudd group that only cares about guns and hunting. That seems to currently be the NJOA, but they can't even keep a website up at the moment it seems. While some of the more prominent ones in the past got big enough to generate proof that stupid people in larger groups are dangerous, I'm not sure that these groups aren't just shills for whomever. Then there is the CNJFO. Which seems to have come on the scene to promote community outreach and to try and get the various other organizations to play nice with each other. Their appearance seems to coincide with NJ2AS and ANJRPC starting to appear to have some strategies in common. Here I don't have a good answer. CNJFO got my money this last year, but that is in part because they are the newest face in town and I know some of the people involved. The rest of my state activism budget went to crowdfunding specific lawsuits. I always make sure my amazon smile is always pointing at something pro 2a, and make a point to donate at least the market rate for a case of ammo each year to a variety of groups. The NRA made it clear that not having a plan B is a shit plan.

The smart gun law was repealed and replaced with a different version that simply requires every gun store to have and display one model of smart gun with some marketing crap explaining how it provides features other guns don't. But that is after the Attorney General declares a smart gun available for purchase. And it doesn't affect you keeping your old guns. I don't think the new law will even prevent the sale of new guns that are unencumbered by this BS. We've already had this game played with an RFID encumbered handgun. Those didn't trigger the old law and likely won't trigger the new one. Mainly because they identify an item rather than an individual. The basic technology in play here has been rejected by law enforcement repeatedly since the 80s. The electromechanical interrupts are usually unreliable, and RFID can fail due to interference. If any get sold, someone pro 2a and and of a security oriented mindset will buy one and defeat the "security" mechanism. The last go round just required a strong magnet.

I mean if you are someplace you can't possess them, you can't really use them there legally speaking. It's jsut that the charge will be possession of them.

I wasted my time so you don't have to. It was stupid. Basically it is Phase 1 - collapse.. PM worthless. Phase 2 - endurance... PM worthless. Phase 3- mumble mumble ... PM worthless Phase 4- recovery. PM can be sold again! Your corpse can now use PMs to resume your previous lifestyle! Which is kind of stupid IMO. I mean he's right in the mechanism, which is that PMs decouple your money from fiat currency, and that is their value. But he never gets very far into when and why that is of value. Here's some of mine, non exhaustive: -flight. There are cleaner shirts in the closet, and you want to put one of them on. If the smugglers aren't taking your local fiat currency, you need something to sell to get out. If they will, you may not be able to spend the local currency on the other end (embargo, no trust in it, etc). In that case PMs are man portable, fairly dense stores of wealth. -black markets. Historically things seldom break down totally and forever. The emphasis is on the KI in TEOTWAYKI in the real world. But historically, the consumer never loses. They get what they want, it just may have a cost. If people want something that the official sanctioned order of things can't get them, you get black markets. When dealing with black markets, you may need to conduct business in something other than the local currency. You can use PMs to buy things or more likely secure whatever the black market's trusted currency is. -banking without banks. Look at less developed nations, or nations with much more dynamic range with regards to wealth and poverty. PMs in the form of jewelry and luxury items are often a very common store of wealth when you don't want to trust the banks, or simply don't have banks. Anything we do today that uses loans may need something like PMs to be done in a less organized and automated society. -insurance. Mostly of the variety of I didn't see that coming. PMs can be a hedge against having prepared for the wrong systemic failure because it is a universal fiscal translator. That does come at a premium. -flexibility and freedom during the make pretend period. We are in the US. Lets face it, we are at the top of the pyramid, and if/when that ceases to be the case, we will pretend like nobody's business that everything is fine and normal. PMs, since they have use outside of being money, will likely have loopholes that will allow you to conduct some forms of business in an advantageous manner even within the system that is still hobbling around. What all the preppers and goldbugs seem to never want to say is that it's pretty much guaranteed you will lose money on precious metals. You are paying now to have them on hand later. But someone without TEOTWAYKI pressure there will be someone taking 10-20% up front to get you metal, and 10-20% at the back end to get rid of your metal. You will likely lose 25% on average doing anything but barter unless you are a fine gold/silver smith and can add value to it via your craft. That premium may buy you access to something in the future if things go badly. But realistically, if I have enough money to buy me a barrel of oil, if I turn it into PMs, I probably have enough to buy 80-90% of a barrel of oil. If I turn it back into cash at market rates, I probably have enough to buy 60-75% of a barrel of oil. From a financial standpoint, it is a significant upfront investment that can't easily be abandoned. Myself, I like to compare PMs to copper, oil, and chicken, and do my financial game planning on that historically to determine if I have "enough". (and I don't own a lot. maybe enough for a good bribe from some low level bureaucrat) But when I bought mine, a pound of boneless skinless chicken breast at costco was $1.99. Now it is $2.99. Based on metals prices, $1.99 of metals then should buy $2.98 of chicken now. A barrel of oil should be around $125, and a pound of copper should be about $5.40. It's at $4.40 (also to illustrate how you get screwed over by transitioning metals to cash, buying a pound of copper ingot runs $25-35 despite the market value. You can get industrial quantities at about $3 a pound).

I don't disagree. Like I said, I have not put a lot into PMs. (oops hadn't hit post, so I say that below).

My prediction is more will be done to prop up ammo prices than component prices. I suspect primer prices will drop off when demand for ammo falls. Mainly because unlike the rest of it, primers involve significantly more skilled manual labor. They will be happy to be making a profit having reloaders pay to keep their primer manufacturing capacity on hand for the next crunch when they can ratchet up the margin on them. Primarily by selling them as part of loaded ammo. It may need to see some of the new ammo manufacturers (assemblers?) fail first though.

We are definitely in a sell everything to somebody mode rather than a sell something to everybody mode. Even after expansion of capacity. Primers are still in short supply, and i don’t think there will be much easing of that until the ammo they are selling sits on shelves longer than it does now. I’m fine with profit. But with this kind of consolidation, we are a couple of decisions from the 2d being screwed over or priced for only the wealthy. It’s a sector where an adversarial relationship between the manufacturers and the customer base isn’t a good situation.

If you want 9mm or 223 yes, they can usually sell you something. Outside of that there’s more issues.

What the hell do you mean the ammo price increases weren't about over demand? We basically doubled ammo purchases. Is there a single domestic manufacturer of ammo or components that didn't expand production? We still aren't meeting demand fully. One of the quotes form the article is this "If Blinder were correct, then one would expect lots of new productive capacity and new entrants into this market." We saw both. The price of components has dropped back down from the peak. The price of powder has dropped back down form the peak. In general at least. The things really choking further expansion are primers and manufacturing capacity. If you shoot common calibers, you have probably noticed there is more available at off peak prices. However, if you shoot less common stuff, you are still hurting because the production lines are making what they will sell the most of. As for new entrants, we are seeing new imports. We have Palmetto looking to bring russian ammo production to the US by purchasing the machinery and importing it. I've seen people sporting significant purchases of primer brands I have never heard of in my life. So we somebody somewhere is participating in new markets even for primers, the hardest nut to crack in the supply chain for ammo manufacturers. I'm not a fan of the massive consolidation that has occurred, mainly because we are basically two bad management decisions away from being seriously screwed. But I'd argue that a lot of what we are seeing is the fact that regulatory pressures and government activism are driving some of the behavior. Every public firearms related stock has to ask themselves how to cope with activist funds trying to screw them either independently or at the behest of state legislation on investment funds belonging to the state. Stock buybacks and building war chests would seem a natural response to that threat.

I mean have you looked at rent lately? It’s gotten insane. One of my friends was paying $1700 a month for a one bedroom. And they just published prices for the new year which puts the same units at $2100 a month. At $15/hr you either have to accommodate a kid’s schedule, or get lucky in finding someone in a situation where they don’t have to cover typical housing and food costs.

QPQ nitrided carriers are awesome. They clean up easy and the finish can't flake off and the finish wears better than phosphate. For bolts I keep various spares about just in case, but I just buy JP bolts at this point. They are super consistent dimensionally, they last as well as anything, and they stand behind them.

Yeah except that also applies to the non mim parts. SA had a spate of slide crack at stress risers because they had metallurgical problems. The issue isn't mim the issue is QA. I mean ruger knows their shit inside and out with casting. Ruger's issues tend to be with engineering and process on new stuff, but they largely work once a new product is sorted out. And I can't recall their casting ever being an issue.

konica-minolta toner if you need such things (their factory blew up, and that was always going to suck, but the supply chain is slowing down the rebuild)). printers serviced in general. cisco switches are way screwed as mentioned previously. Many other brands as well. Wireless access points are getting scarce. video conferencing appliances and larger room scale hardware for same. usb-c docking stations. oil filters as mentioned above... stupidly marked up if available at all. furniture - i got a new bedroom set in October. That took a month to get here.... except for the dresser.... that got pushed to November, then January, now they are saying April. For something ordered in September. primers (slightly improved, but still bad) powder (more improved, but still bad) CPUs (this has gotten a lot better) graphics cards (this has gotten nothing but worse) There's always some paper product it is a PITA to get. The price of bacon sucks... I wish it had gone up just 20%. I think you can only manage that if you swap the good stuff for the cheapest of crap bacon. Winter coats for kids were a cluster fuck this year. Shopping mid September there was almost no stock, and very limited variety. It looked like last years leftovers plus one brand that got a bunch of inventory through on total crap jackets. More started showing up later, but damn. It took nearly a month to find my kid a coat that wasn't total trash. Most places had everything on the shelves to make it not look empty. Swimsuits still being on the rack in October? wtf.

Every life is valuable. Heck.. since they are oppressed theirs are more valuable than yours.. just lay down and die already. I mean that's pretty much what california sherifs said to do... lay back and think of england.

I've got one. It's got issues. I personally never had an issue with it cycling light loads. It is, however, REALLY easy to get it to jam in a manner that needs tools to clear while reloading it. The way the foregrip is mounted makes it a pain to set up for quad loads. I just had it take a dump mid stage too many times in 3 gun. I've got about $1000 total into the gun trying to make it run. I've been much happier with my stoeger m3k.

I mean it's not an opinion. Here s a pic of the new gun next to a BR9 next to a WW2 FN hi-power. That's just what a hi-power looks like. I mean it was designed by JMB after he made the 1911. It's a kind of cousin, but it's not a mash up of a hi-power and 1911.

How does it look like a 1911 and hi power had a kid? It looks a lot like a regent BR9 with a nicer finish and safety. maybe slightly cleaner machining. It looks like a hi-power.

Have things been getting better for gun owners in NJ? The answer is no. Do we have any more risk than before? Maybe, but Sweeny wasn't our friend. He would sell every one of us down the river for something he wanted.