Hoping to see news that the US government has finally decided to stop the economy from melting down.

I keep being disappointed…

Aren’t you supposed to be sword fighting on an office chair?

First, despite there being multiple school shootings this year, school shootings are a tiny fraction of the overall homicides in the US

Which are also often committed with guns…

which are, in turn, dwarfed by the number of suicides committed with firearms.

I’m not talking about suicide.

Second, looking at your link you provided, you see a lot of things like, “A gun was fired during a fight near a basketball game at Appoquinimink High School. No injuries were reported”, and “Bullets struck two windows of classrooms at PS 78 in the Stapleton neighborhood of Staten Island. One classroom was occupied by ten adults, but no bullets entered the classrooms” being counted as "school shootings:, which you then compare to Columbine. You are intentionally, and in bad faith, conflating entirely different things, and placing them all under the heading of, “firearms near schools”.

I did nothing of the sort. There are multiple bona fide school shootings in that list, such as the Michigan State shooting and the Covenant shooting.

It is relevant, because it has different causes, and is thus addressed differently.

That’s not a meaningful answer. Let’s have some details.

Are you willing to engage in good faith, or have you already decided that the only solution is banning firearms?

Are you willing to engage in good faith? So far, you’ve argued based on false premises (namely that school shootings are rare, and that there are no bona fide school shootings in the previously linked Wikipedia list) and evasive non-answers (namely that targeted violence at school is to be “addressed differently”, with no explanation of how). Doesn’t seem like good faith to me.

Which is not a desktop.

What’s the issue with Liberapay? I’ve never used it.

Even if it’s utterly pointless I prefer the anonymity

Cryptocurrency proponents are quick to remind me that cryptocurrency transactions are not anonymous, and are in fact highly traceable by virtue of being stored in a public ledger.

and some sites default to reoccurring donations and emails when using a card

Meaning, they try to mislead you into donating more than you intend to? Doesn’t that make them crooks, unworthy of your donations?

Is there a reason you didn’t use your credit or debit card?

There’s also that desktop web browsers generally request that their title bar not be shown.

Those have the excuse that they’re basically several windows in one, and the tabs are the title bar-equivalents. Very few apps have that excuse, though.

Side note: KDE’s tabbed windows feature was pretty neat. Too bad it’s gone.

As far as I can see, the only application of cryptocurrency is to facilitate crime: money laundering, ransom, paying for contraband, etc.

[meme where the hero pulls the mask off the tied-up Firefox’s head, revealing Safari]

I’d start by admitting that school shootings are, despite being extremely sensationalized, also extremely rare.

There have been multiple school shootings this year alone. Your statement would have been reasonable had you made it in the wake of the Columbine shooting, but to say it today is frankly absurd.

In scare quotes, because the people that commit random acts of violence in schools—versus targeted violence–are so uncommon that it’s hard to draw definite conclusions about risk factors.

That is not relevant. Targeted violence in school isn’t tolerable either.

Almost all of them ‘leak’ information in the days or weeks prior to murders; I do think that there needs to be a way to seriously investigate things like that, but I don’t know how you could do that in a way that doesn’t infringe on other, equally fundamental rights.

Indeed, so we’re going to have to solve this problem in whichever way minimizes harmful side effects. Unfortunately, that may involve inconveniencing gun owners, but it’s better than depriving everyone of privacy and going full Minority Report.

When you get right down to it, a lot of it is an issue of culture, where people feel like violence is a reasonable way to express feelings.

Mass shootings in particular are usually committed by someone who has no intention of still being alive afterward, and they do indeed almost always end in the shooter’s death. That’s not merely a “way to express feelings”.

the UK and Australia both have combined rates of violent crime–battery, forcible rape, robbery, murder–comparable to the US, and, in the case of rape in Australia, likely rather higher.

You’re contradicting yourself. How can American culture be uniquely violent if those other countries have similar rates of violence?

The US does have a sharply higher murder rate though; our violence is more lethal.

Because we have guns.

The unfortunate truth is that you can’t have rights without someone misusing those rights to hurt other people.

Yes, and we preserve those rights despite that because the alternative is worse.

The alternative we’re discussing right now is gun control. Is that worse than the status quo? If so, why?

If people can drive, sooner or later someone is going to drive a rental van into a crowd, just because they want to kill people and that’s the way they can do it.

This equivalence is questionable for two reasons:

1. Unless I’m mistaken, that doesn’t happen anywhere near as often as shootings do.
2. Cars have a purpose other than killing. Guns don’t.

Note that for vector graphics editing, Inkscape is really good. That doesn’t help you if you need to edit photos, though.

KDE has neat stuff, but Compiz was the king of bling.

Linux. I signed up with my first proper ISP as a kid in the '90s. The service included a shell account on their Linux server accessible by telnet. I thought it was really cool and decided to see if I could run it on my own computer, and to my delight, I could.

I haven’t had any of that, but I do notice that F-Droid can’t seem to automatically update itself without erroring. Something about failing to parse the package; I forget the exact error message. I wonder what the problem is…

Play’s reputation for being full of malware stands directly at odds with your assessment.

Hobbyists are rarely incompetent. They actually take pride in their work, and aren’t just trying to quickly slap something together for a quick buck.

Not sure what gave you the impression that most phone apps have gone through professional QA, but I very seriously doubt that they have.

As for mishandling user data, it’s a lot easier to avoid doing that when user data never leaves the user’s device in the first place. Proprietary apps collect user data for profit; free and open source apps often don’t.

Would you happen to have some idea what to do about all the school shootings?

de-escalation with China

You’re probably not going to get your wish on that one. The Chinese government is…well, not nice, as the Uyghurs can attest. Maybe let’s let them dial back the oppression first, then make friends with them?

This guy for president 2024!

Because the “simpler life” involves allowing spooks and marketers to read your conversations and use the data to brainwash and/or Minority Report you.

You are under attack. Defend yourself.