I very rarely have trouble sleeping, but when I do, this is what I've always done since childhood and it hasn't failed me yet.

I lay there, with my eyes closed, resist any temptation to look at my phone or do anything else, make myself as comfortable as possible wrapped up in blankets and pillows and whatever

And I just kind of direct my mind towards something pointless and let it wander down that rabbit hole

Maybe I'll imagine sort of a bunch of swirling lights and colors and just kind of watch them, look for patterns, etc.

Or I'll make up stories. I'm no author, but I'll imagine myself as maybe a super hero, or an astronaut, or a wizard, or any of those sort of stock characters, and I imagine myself saving the world, or fighting a dragon, or boldly going where no man has gone before. These stories I'm making up aren't deep, they're a crappy universe full of plot holes and the kinds of characters an elementary schooler playing make-believe would come up with, because of course the superhero I'm imagining myself as can fly and has heat vision and wolverine claws and can turn invisible and has super strength and...

Or I just kind of think about simple things I enjoy. Places I could go hiking with my dog, date nights with my wife, meals I'd like to cook for friends, etc.

Whatever it is, I just kind of let my mind wander down that road, it takes my mind off of whatever was keeping me awake, and after I while my focus begins to falter and I just sort of slip into sleep from there.

I'm pretty sure this kind of falls under the category of some kind of meditation. My work once did a mandatory "wellness retreat" as a "training" thing I had to go to. One of the things we did was a guided meditation session, and that felt like the same sort of thing (but for people who are boring and lack the imagination to think of a scenario to meditate on by themselves, imagining myself flying an x-wing through an asteroid field beats the pants off of imagining I'm walking through a meadow to the beach or whatever that lady was having us imagine)

Sometimes a little background noise is helpful. I'm not personally too picky about what it is, I like trip hop music for this purpose, or forest sounds, or just random YouTube videos (not even necessarily anything relaxing, I've fallen asleep to some machinist YouTubers plenty of times and the sound of a mill, lathe, band saw, grinder, etc. isn't exactly what I'd call soothing.

And when all else fails, I rub one out

I kind of think of the 50s as kind of a major turning point for the US. There were a lot of seeds of greatness then that weren't properly nurtured in the following decades so that they could grow.

While just about every other country in the world was trying to put themselves back together from WWII, we had emerged not only unscathed, but in almost every measure better than we were before. We had military might, we had a booming economy, manufacturing, science, technology, arts, entertainment, cars, appliances, TV, electricity all on a scale previous generations could only dream about.

Even if you were part of a marginalized group- black, LGBTQ, female, etc. there were some glimmers of hope that looked like things might get better soon- the civil rights movement was picking up steam, there were some early LGBTQ rights movements and demonstrations taking shape, women entered the workforce in a big way during the war, and after the war mostly returned to the home afterwards but those seeds were planted, I don't think it's a coincidence that little girls growing up in the 40s watching the women in their lives being the Rosie the Riveter would become the ones who embraced 2nd wave feminism 20 or so years later.

And of course we had high corporate taxes helping to fund it all.

It wasn't all sunshine and roses of course, and you will certainly find no shortage of people here on Lemmy who will happily spell out all of the many reasons the 1950s sucked, and I don't disagree with them, but that's not what you asked, so I'm not going to go into that.

The 50s were a major leap forward in the quality of life for many people in america, and while far from perfect, there is definitely an angle you can look at it from where things looked like they were more-or-less on the right track.

Doubt anyone's going to see it at this point but figured I'd write out some of my other thoughts now

When I talk about going back to square one and defining what a firearm even is, I mean that quite literally. Muzzleloaders aren't considered firearms, and no they're not likely to be used in a mass shooting, but they'll still kill someone just as dead as a modern firearm. There's stupid loopholes about antique guns that may function in much the same way as a modern firearm.

They're fucking guns.

And with an eye to the future, it may be worth building in a little future with other weapons technologies that may come into play that should be regulated similarly. There are high powered air rifles today that are comparable in stopping power to some firearms, shouldn't they be regulated in a similar manner? Or what if advances in battery technology and such make coil/rail guns viable as man-portable or even concealable weapons?

We also classify things in really stupid ways. Take a look at some of the weird shit around short barrel shotguns/rifles and "any other weapons" where you can have 2 basically identical weapons that are classified differently just due to a quirk of how they were manufactured. An AR-15 with a short barrel is a no-no unless you're willing to jump through some extra hoops, but you can build an AR-15 "pistol" and slap a -not-a-stock "wrist brace" on it.

And machine guns are a no-no, but bump stocks, binary triggers, forced-reset triggers, etc. that get you basically the same effect are a-ok. Not to mention that absurdity we had for a few years where shoelaces of a certain length were technically classified as a machine gun.

I basically want to create 4 categories

Hunting arms- single shot or manually operated rifles and shotguns with barrel length 16" and greater, rimfire rifles, muzzleloaders, and certain larger handguns. Low rate of fire, not easily concealable.

Concealed carry weapons- handguns.

Other firearms- short barrels rifles/shotguns, semi-auto shotguns and centerfire rifles

Machine guns, destructive devices, etc. we're moving bump stocks, binary triggers, forced reset triggers, etc. into this category.

For the first 3 categories, the main difference is going to be in the types of training required, as well as the required insurance rates. I think it's also fair to be allowed to purchase hunting arms at 18, and bump the other categories up to 21. *

For the 4th category, we're keeping things largely the same as the current NFA regulations, but we're fixing some of the wonky definitions, and increasing the cost of the tax stamp, because the $200 it was set at in the '30s really hasn't kept up with inflation.

We're also going to make most gun accessories subject to the same sorts of background checks and such. And we're moving silencers into this category.

We're unifying gun laws across the country. No more wonky patchwork of different states having their own laws. If it's legal, it's legal across the whole country, if it's illegal, it's illegal everywhere.

I hate the term, but we're closing the "gun show loophole" (which really has nothing to do with gun shows) all transfers must go through the process. We're also expanding the locations you can do them at, not just FFL dealers anymore, police stations, and some details would need to be figured out for security reasons, but maybe some places like DMVs, post offices, courthouses, etc. and we're getting rid of any fees. No excuses to not do things properly.

We're beefing up the background checks, getting all states on the same page with what does and does not disqualify someone from owning a gun, red flag laws, probably disqualifying people with DUIs (if I don't trust you with a car I certainly don't trust you with a gun)

And we're delisting marijuana so that if you like to smoke up once in a while you're able to keep your guns.

*Along with the changes in ages, we're also making some changes to police and military. If you can't legally purchase and carry a handgun or rifle as a civilian, you don't get to carry them in your line of work either. You're exempt from the draft until 21, you can enlist at 18 but only serve in non-combat roles until 21, and if you do enlist before age 21, you will receive education and training equivalent to that many years of college or vocational training. Police academy will become a 4 year program equivalent to a bachelors degree. Also off-duty officers do not get any special exemptions in their eligibility to carry firearms, and their duty weapon stays locked up at the station when off the clock. There's a whole lot more I have to say about police reform too, but that's an entirely different rant.

Firearms must be stored in a properly-rated safe that is either firmly attached to the structure of your home - studs, floor joist, concrete, brick, or other masonry walls, etc. or that is heavy enough that it can't be easily moved by 2 guys with a hand truck. No leaving them in your car, unsecured in your garage,in the night stand, etc. when you're not able to directly oversee them. We're not going to be doing in-home inspections on this, but if it's somehow found that you're storing them improperly, like if someone is able to steal them because they weren't properly secured, then you lose your right to own guns.

If you lose your firearm (I work in 911 dispatch, the amount of calls I've had for guns found in bathrooms, movie theaters, etc. that someone left behind is pretty worrying) or have a negligent discharge (that isn't the result of a manufacturing defect,) you lose your right to own guns.

We're making some major changes to stand your ground laws and castle doctrine, I don't have a problem with castle doctrine as a general concept, but a lot of states' implementations leave a lot to be desired. When your outside of your home, I think the focus should be more on duty-to-retreat (again, I work in 911 dispatch, I don't think a night goes by that I don't have a dozen calls that could have been solved without police intervention if my caller just fucking walked away but instead escalated into some sort of fight)

No, we are not arming teachers. Full stop.

I'm probably missing some things here, and there's a lot of details I'm glossing over a bit because this comment is already too long, but hopefully this kind of paints a general picture of where my head is at.

Malinois are Belgian shepherds

It's a weird situation, in Belgium, the Malinois, Laekenois, Tervuren, and Groenendael are all considered part of the same "Belgian Shepherd" breed, just with different coats, basically the same as how there are short, wire, and long-haired dachshunds, or black, yellow, and chocolate labs.

In the US (and probably some other countries) they're generally regarded as 4 separate breeds.

But yeah, malinois markings are kind of all over the place. As long as there's some black on their face and some brown/tan elsewhere, that's pretty much right.

Dog genetics get really weird, malinois shouldn't really carry the genes for an all black coat, and I think with the Groenendael the black coat is tied to the long hair gene (do not quote me on that) so you can't really have one without the other.

But mix in a splash of any other breeds and just about everything you think would make sense with color genetics goes straight out the window.

My friends have a dog that is, IIRC, a mix of Malinois, Dutch shepherd, German shepherd, and Lab. She would basically be the platonic ideal of a malinois except that she's all black with just a splash of white on her chest.

I have, as far as we know (she's a rescue, no paperwork,) a purebred Malinois who is basically spot-on perfect coloration and body shape, but she's got about 20lbs on what you'd normally expect a female Mal to weigh, so we kind of suspect she may be mixed.

(It's purely accidental that we both ended up with a Malinois, we're both the kind of people who just kind of accept whatever dog falls into our laps when we're ready for one, and we both lucked the fuck out that we got the only 2 lazy ones in existence)

It's not, and that would be addressed in the stuff I didn't feel like writing last night (and still don't)

And I don't feel like writing it because there's a lot to it, to just barely scratch the surface, my ideal gun control reform would be part of major overhauls to basically all aspects of government and we'd have things like universal healthcare (which would cover the psych eval,) government funded childcare (so that you can do something with your kids while you jump through the hoops,) free and expanded public transportation (so that you can get to the courthouse or wherever you need to,) expanded workers rights (so that you would have PTO to use to go do all of that,) expanded hours for government offices (so that people hopefully don't even need to use that PTO, I know it my county to get a concealed carry permit you have to be able to get to those courthouse during certain hours on certain days, the courthouse isn't conveniently located and the hours suck, most people probably have to take a day off of work and get up early to do it, that's bullshit) and we'd be getting rid of most fees for government services or at least making them scale to income.

And of course, were funding this by massive taxes on the wealthy.

Basically we're putting a hell of a lot of hoops in the way, but we're paving the way to those hoops so that anyone who wants to has a fair shot at being allowed to attempt to jump through them.

US

Our gun laws are a patchwork of really dumb state and federal laws and regulations that often don't make much sense and there is little consistency. I think we pretty much need to go back to square one with basic shit like defining what constitutes a "firearm" and go from there.

I have a lot of thoughts on this and I'm not going to write them all out here right now, because it would get really lengthy and I just don't feel like it right now (if there's interest in hearing what this random internet stranger has to say I may write it up later)

But in general I think that people should be able to own guns, but I also think that there should be a lot of hoops to jump through to get them, background checks, proficiency tests, education , training, insurance, psychological evaluations, storage requirements, etc.

Lag bolts are more like a big wood screw, what you call coach bolts seem to be what we call carriage bolts

I'm not sure if the wire gauge thing is right, unless you're talking about a different system than I'm familiar with, because with wire gauge smaller number=bigger wire, and with screw sizes smaller number=smaller screw

Also just my 2¢ on "machine screw" vs "bolt" as a casual tinkerer with various things held together by different types of threaded fasteners.

Generally speaking if it's got a hex head or nut that I'm using a wrench to tighten, it's a bolt

If it's got some sort of hole (or God forbid a slot) that I'm going to use some sort of a driver (for the purposes of this, an Allen "wrench" is a driver) to tighten, it's a screw.

And of course everything gets really murky when we start talking about things like sheet metal screws, lag bolts/screws, masonry screws, etc.

Just an FYI if you're not familiar with American screw sizes, calling this a 10-32 equivalent is probably going to confuse come people.

The naming convention used for screws in America includes the shank diameter and the pitch of the thread in threads per inch (TPI)

So a 10-32 in a #10 diameter screw with 32 threads per inch

Below about ¼ inch diameter, the American system usually uses that numbered system, a #10 screw is .190 inches or roughly 3/16

For larger diameter screws they usually just use the nearest fractional equivalent instead of the screw number, so a ¼-20 is roughly ¼ inch (actually .242in/ or #14) diameter and has 20 TPI

Most sizes have a standard coarse and fine thread, for #10 32TPI is the fine thread, and 20TPI is the coarse thread

Little back-of-the-envelope math that I'm not super confident in, this would be something like a 10-16 screw. You might want to rename it or add a note to that effect, or maybe call it something like a #10 extra coarse thread.

Sounds like you did pretty much the same bit of googling I did, because I also ended up there and ctrl-f'd "Taliban" and only found the one result

For anyone who doesn't go down the rabbit hole themselves, that result is "Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP)" or the "Pakistani Taliban"

Which is a group that mostly seems to be active in Pakistan (duh) and in Afghanistan near the border. TTP pledges allegiance to the Afghan Taliban, but the Afghan Taliban, at least publicly rejects that allegiance (though you can certainly make some arguments that they're probably in cahoots, just keeping things off-the-books)

Yeah, security updates are a big sticking point for me too.

That's another reason I'm not rushing out to buy one. If they actually stick to their 5 year plan, that's pretty solid, but that's a big unknown right now.

And with almost anything there's some 1st generation bugs that will probably need to be worked out. If they stick around for a couple years and keep up with their updates I'll give them a little more consideration.

Also we're now starting to see some brands come out with color e-ink devices, I wouldn't mind one of these with a color e-ink screen.

So maybe I'll be getting a minimal phone 2 or 3.

I haven't personally played around with rooting and custom ROMs and such in honestly probably a decade, but an unlockable bootloader would be nice, even if I don't necessarily see myself using that feature at this point in my life.

And not for nothing, since a flagship smartphone can pretty easily cost $1000+ these days, $500-ish for this phone sounds oddly reasonable. Not that it's got flagship specs, but for something that's filling a specific niche with some (for many) desirable features, that's not a bad price IMO.

My thoughts on kangaroo are, kind of unsurprisingly, that it tastes exactly like it evolved on a different continent than any other meat you've ever eaten.

It's still definitely in the red meat family, but it's different and it's hard to explain how. I'd say it's maybe more like venison or maybe lamb than beef, but it's definitely its own thing.

There's a lot of cases where depending on how you prepared and seasoned it, I don't know if I could necessarily tell you with 100% confidence if I was eating venison or beef, and maybe even a couple things you could probably pull that with lamb or goat vs beef. I'm pretty sure I could reliably pick out a kangaroo dish from a lineup 100% of the time.

It was good though, I would absolutely eat kangaroo again if it was more readily available around me. It's kind of a stronger flavor that some people might have an issue with.

Tasted like fishy dirt meat

I'm not a fish-eater in general, but I am an avid fisherman (I just catch them, the wife eats them,) so I've heard a lot of stories from my fellow anglers (which should, of course, be taken with a grain of salt, there's a reason they're called "fish stories")

There is a persistent rumor I've heard that some people will take catfish and other bottom-feeders like carp home alive to let them swim around in a bathtub of clean water for a day or two to sort of flush all of the mud and everything out of their system before cleaning and cooking them

Allegedly it's more of a southern thing.

I have yet to find seafood that I like.

Irony of ironies is that I love fishing. Luckily anything I catch worth keeping my wife is more than happy to eat.

People always tell me that good fish shouldn't taste/smell fishy. I retort that I suppose good beef shouldn't be beefy either.

I'm willing to hear people out, try different fish prepared in different ways, still haven't found one that I liked, at best they're mostly tolerable.

I've figured out that I generally tend to enjoy freshwater fish over saltwater. If I catch a couple nice trout I'll eat that for dinner with my wife instead of having to make a separate dish for myself, I won't hate it, but I won't like it either and I'd probably rather have a hot dog.

And I like raw fish better than cooked.

I might actually kind of like raw oysters, but they are in no way worth the cost.

Lox isn't bad, but I'd prefer just about anything else over it.

There are a couple fish-based products out there that are so far removed from fish that they're hardly worth mentioning for the purposes of this comment that I do enjoy, like Worcestershire sauce and Asian fish sauces, katsuobushi, Caesar dressing, Crab Rangoon (let's be real, you could probably leave the crab or "krab" out of most takeout rangoons and it wouldn't change much) some Japanese fish cakes, etc.

The absolute worst is shrimp though. Nothing about shrimp is appealing to me, the taste, smell and especially the texture are all pretty repulsive.

I'm not otherwise a guy with a lot of food hangups and consider myself a pretty adventurous eater. Weird tastes, textures, bizarre fermented stuff, strange meats, etc. are all generally OK in my book, there's not many other foods out there that I don't enjoy. In my house right now I have some double salt salmiak licorice, a bottle of Malört, a wide selection of hot sauces going up to around 1 million scoville, I'm pretty sure I have both Vegemite and marmite somewhere in my fridge, some very peaty scotches, and plenty of other very divisive foodstuffs that I enjoy.

I have tentative plans to visit Iceland next year, so I'll probably end up torturing myself with some hákarl at some point. And I don't intend to seek it out, but if it happens to be offered to me for free somewhere I may consider trying whale, which I suppose is technically seafood.

Or, you know, the device we're discussing

E readers don't generally make calls, texts, do navigation, or fit comfortably in the zippered hip pockets of my hiking pack

I'm kind of considering getting one, probably as a second phone to swap my sim card into for occasional use

The e ink is a big draw for me, as is the physical keyboard, not to mention the headphone jack and expandable storage.

With the e-ink comes good battery life, they're claiming potentially 4 days from what I can see. I like the idea of that for travel, where I might be spending long hours on a bus, train, plane, car, walking around town all day, maybe even camping somewhere where it may not always be convenient to charge my phone.

E-ink is also easier to read in direct sunlight without a glare, as someone with a lot of outdoor hobbies that appeals to me. (Although for the same reason I do also wish it had a higher IP rating, and maybe an impact resistance rating as well)

I dont tend to play a lot of games or watch movies on my phone to begin with, so I'm not so much interested in that aspect of it encouraging mindfulness, but for people who do struggle with that temptation to spend too much time on tiktok forget hooked on stupid games, I can see this helping them to kick that habit since e ink isn't really great for those kinds of uses, while not needing to totally unplug from the more utilitarian uses for a smartphone like navigation, different messaging apps, email, 2 factor authenticator apps, etc.

I'm not rushing out to buy one, but I might consider grabbing one if I get a good deal somewhere, or if it has some staying power I might consider picking up the next gen version of it.

Interestingly enough, the US doesn't seem to regard the Taliban (at least not the main branch that's currently running Afghanistan) as a terrorist organization.

When you said that I thought they might, I was actually pretty sure it was the case, but on looking into it that doesn't seem like they do, at least not officially.

Some other countries do, and there are a couple other Taliban splinter groups and such that do make the cut.

And of course, the entire history of Afghanistan since the Cold war can probably be of best summed up as "an absolute fucking mess" full of different factions, shifting allegiances, and all of that geopolitical nonsense, but you can make a pretty compelling argument that the US sort of put the Taliban in charge there in the first place. The us backed the Mujahideen against Russia back in the day, and while they're not exactly the same organization, there was a whole lot of overlap between former members of the Mujahideen and the people who formed the Taliban. So from one angle slapping the terrorist label on them would be kind of like admitting "we backed the terrorists"

You know, I've read your comment a couple times, and I can't quite wrap my head around what you're trying to say, I can kind of parse it in a few different ways, and none of them quite seem like they're really a direct response to what I said either agreeing with me or disagreeing.

It's certainly possible that I've got a case of the dumb tonight, but would you mind rephrasing and expanding on your thoughts a little bit?

I'm admittedly a little better read on the subject than most Americans

Off the top of my head, I'd probably be able to rattle off Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau, Krakow, and Treblinka off the top of my head.

Small side rant, my mom's side of the family is Polish. Most of my mom's grandparents (my great grandparents) were off-the-boat from Poland, I know at least one of them never became a US citizen. We have some family still in Poland, we're not exactly in regular contact but we know more or less how to track each other down when we want to.

Years ago, well-before I was born, my mom's family went to visit those relatives. There is honestly probably enough material from that trip (and from when a relative from Poland was able to visit the US back then) to write a pretty decent short book, or at least a couple solid blog posts. Lots of interesting comparisons between the state of things in the US and Poland during the Cold War to be made.

One of the things they did was visit Auschwitz. Seeing that was something that definitely shaped my mom's worldview from there on out. To her credit, my mom already had her head screwed on pretty straight before that when it came to racial tolerance and such.

She would occasionally tell us little bits about it when we were growing up, not like she purposely sat us down and gave us a Holocaust talk or anything, it was just something that came up occasionally when appropriate

I don't know if this was ever an intentional choice by her, but she never really said who built and ran the camps, who was sent there, why, etc. she pretty much just left it at they were places that existed, and that people did various kinds of horrible things to other people there.

As far as I knew, it was all Polish people (not unlike myself) doing horrible things to other Poles, for reasons I couldn't really wrap my head around. It wasn't until we started learning about WWII and the Holocaust in school that the details of who and my started falling into place.

But by that point, I think the key message about people being capable of immense cruelty towards other people had really been firmly planted in my mind. The fact that one side or the other are Jews, Poles, Germans, LGBT people, Romani, black, white, Hispanic, Christian, Muslim, Palestinian, Hutu, Tutsi, Armenian , Uyghur, etc. isn't really important compared to the idea that this is something that people like me could do to other people who are also just like me, and I need to be vigilant to make sure that doesn't happen.