It’s mens rea, lit. “guilty mind”, e.g. intent. If you take an action with the intent to cause a death, that’s murder (in my state, that would specifically be malice murder). If you take an action that is likely to cause a death with reckless indifference, but not intent, that’s usually something like murder in the second degree. If you cause a death through negligence or by accident, that’s usually some form of manslaughter.

Most traffic accidents are negligent; people don’t (…usually…) get into a car with the intent to kill someone, nor are they usually driving in a way that the know is likely to cause harm to other people. There are obvs. factors that will affect this–such as driving drunk–but causing a death is usually unintentional, and not through reckless indifference.

See also: troubled teen camps.

Indeed. It runs smack into the problem of falsifiability.

I had to get up and walk down the hallway within an hour of waking up from a major spine surgery. I swear I could feel the muscles that they’d stitched back together trying to tear themselves apart through the stitches

That was 20-odd years ago; I look forward to never repeating that.

Uh. Shit.

And I’m going to have to get a tractor to power a snowblower pretty soon here…

It was definitely unpleasant, but not the worst I’ve had. The worst was sternum implants; even though they used a shit ton of xylocaine, it was def. wearing off by the time they were pushing the implants in, and suturing me back up was… Ow. Definitely not fun.

By open mind, you mean an empty head? Devoid of critical thought and rationality?

As far as I can tell, there is nothing in chiropractic practice that is not quackery.

Think about it this way: the basic practice is the idea that you have misalignments causing problems, and that you can manually manipulate the body back into alignment. But then what keeps you from getting unaligned again as soon as you stand up? (Nothing, of course! That’s why you have to keep going back!) Take, for example, the common inguinal hernia. You can manually manipulate it so that you’re forcing the intestines back through the abdominal wall. And it absolutely relieves the immediate discomfort. But you’re not actually fixing anything; you need surgery to stitch the tear up. If you have weak support structures causing a problem, then physical therapy is going to create a permanent solution. If you have a herniated disc that’s not healing and causing referred pain, then you need to surgically fix the herniation.

I had a ‘pastor’ try and witness to me yesterday, insisting that his spiritual experiences made him right, while the spiritual experiences of people that converted to Judaism or Islam meant they had been deceived by the devil.

Assuming that your backup isn’t also infected.

Doesn’t have to be in the bank either; if you’re traveling with your life savings in cash, then if you get pulled over cops are likely to seize that money. Just because fuck you, that’s why.

I opt for bitcoin because it has more utility value for me.

My bank makes it an enormous pain in my ass to buy things from overseas vendors; they won’t process any payments that are going outside of the US border. The rationale is ‘fraud’, even when you’re dealing with well-known and trusted vendors. Even when I try calling my banks and telling them to pre-authorize the charges, they won’t go through. The only way I can get around that within the established financial system is by using a 3rd party payment service; those 3rd party services make their money by lopping off a percentage of that purchase. E.g., if I’m buying something for $1000 from China (and we’re going to ignore tariffs, duties, taxes, and shipping costs for the moment), then I may have to pay $1040 for it, because of the fees that are taken out. On the other hand, if I’m buying from a trusted vendor, and I use bitcoin, I can just send it to them. Bitcoin doesn’t care where it’s going, and–assuming you don’t care about speed of confirmations–transaction fees can be quite a bit lower than using any other payment system. (And, BTW, transaction fees are built into all payment processing systems; it’s just not apparent to individuals on the purchasing end. That means that if something costs .001btc, then I have to send, say, .0010001btc to the vendor, but then the)

Speculation doesn’t play a role in it for me.

I have no direct use for gold; I can’t plate connectors.

Or get a Dillon XL 750, a few pounds of Accurate 2230, and load your own while listening to The Tiger Bloc Podcast.

Not significantly, as long as you aren’t buying ammo that’s remanufactured, or is some Russian brand (Wolf, Silver Bear, etc.)/Turkish, etc. A bigger issue is going to be the twist rate of your barrel and the weight of the bullet, but even that’s not going to be a big issue unless you’re trying to get your rifle down to 1 MOA accuracy.

I’ve read the background on that case, and it’s all kinds of fucked. Like, the person that had been convicted under the law–and was thus arguing against it–didn’t even have representation show up in court, because he’d had to go into hiding. And the person that had convicted him knew that would be the case. Without anyone to even argue his side, it was practically a foregone conclusion that the court was going to reach a decision that the gov’t supported.

The tax was intended to be so high that no normal person could afford it. You could apply the same logic to free speech rights, and say that you have to pay a tax of $10,000 is you want to criticize Israel’s genocide in Gaza. It’s obviously intended to prevent the free exercise of the right.

Yes.

But many people–and I’m not saying you do this–but many people get gold, silver, and diamonds confused, and think that their intrinsic value is linked to their perceived value. does that make sense?

Point to @protist@mander.xyz . :)

Right, but they don’t have DID, they believe they have DID. Obviously that’s not the same thing. (Yeah, I know, it’s pedantic.) I absolutely agree with you about dumping toxic ‘therapists’.

If that’s the case, then surely there’s nothing wrong with police have military weapons and using military tactics, right?

…And they were absolutely wrong to do so then. Thankfully the Revolt at Cincinnati got them on the correct track of championing the individual right to keep and bear arms, as the constitution clearly intended, and as was understood for over a century. Then Wayne LaPierre called fibbies jack-booted thugs (which is true) shortly after the Oklahoma City bombing, and Bush very publicly resigned his lifetime membership. LaPierre caved, apologized, and now the NRA is a bunch of bootlickers.

There really aren’t any groups with the power of the NRA that are truly, deeply committed to the idea that the right to keep and bear arms is a right for everyone. And that’s unfortunate. Especially now.