They have a name for it: Dead Sea Effect.

Your first paragraph reminded me of a short story: There Will Come Soft Rains.

It is a matter of scale and tactics.

For scale, the US Army has ~4700 tanks according to the internets. Assuming they have a matching number of crews and can put them all into service, that’s 94 tanks per state. That sounds like quite a bit until you consider the coverage of a state. If we take NY as an example, that’s 0.0017 tanks / square mile. The military will be pinning down only small areas at a time with armor.

For tactics, no reasonable person expects to take on a tank with a pistol. The deterrence of an armed populace is in the scale and ubiquity of resistance. There are ~3M personnel in the US military from cooks and secretaries to special forces. They are outnumbered by firearms-owning civilians 76 to 1. The odds are bad. The military has force multipliers (tanks, bombers, drones), but deploying them effectively against the civilian population is not easy. Who are the combatants? If no one is standing outside waving a rifle, where do you drop the bomb, or fire the cannon? You could level an entire neighborhood and hope to destroy some of them. Will the non-rebellious populace remain on your side if you do this? An effective resistance will wait until the tank or plane is stopped to refuel and resupply, and then destroys the operators.

There is also the question of logistics. When operating abroad, part of the formula for success of the US military is their unbreakable supply lines. They bring everything from fuel to food to tools and don’t need to rely on local supplies. But all those things are sourced and shipped from the US… When the fight is on home soil, these supplies cannot be guaranteed. Sabotage of roads, bridges, pipelines, and railroads could significantly hinder the operating capacity of the military.

When speaking as any one person remaining armed as opposition to government tyranny, it is not as “Rambo,” but as a thorn on the vine. Collectively there are many thorns and any attempt by the government to crush the vine will result in a lot of pain. You make the option as unattractive as possible.

They did call her the “Queen of Mean.” She was an unrepentant asshole in her own time.

I daily a 1996 Jeep Cherokee. Manual transmission, manual windows, manual door locks. The basic radio was broken before I got it. It does have computer engine control with OBD2, but even that is simple in comparison.

When something breaks or maintenance is needed, it’s a straightforward fix with typical tools. I’ve come to appreciate the simplicity.

I wrote a program to figure out what day of the week this landed on (assuming it is in fact October 2nd, 151441).

It’s a Saturday.

Real downer on the start of the weekend.

Vote for who you want!

I have several Tampermonkey scripts to keep Youtube useable:

Additionally uBlock, and a plugin to alter the number of results per row (so I don’t wind up with gigantic tiles/icons on a large monitor).

It’s a complete disaster without these. :/

I recently finished my degree, and exam-heavy courses were the bane of my existence. I could sit down with the homework, work out every problem completely with everything documented, and then sit to an exam and suddenly it’s “what’s a fluid? What’s energy? Is this a pencil?”

The worst example was a course with three exams worth 30% of the grade, attendance 5% and homework 5%. I had to take the course twice; 100% on HW each time, but barely scraped by with a 70.4% after exams on the second attempt. Courses like that took years off my life in stress. :(

I had one recently that (when changing / creating the password) would allow you paste into the “new password” field but not the “confirm password” field. Super annoying.

I just opened dev tools, pasted it into the “value” property for the control, and kept on truckin’. Just nuts that had to be done though.

Oh man, you’d love this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEfNeUdq_C0

This is why I gave up trying to run my own email server. It became clear it was turning into a racket quite a while ago. I would hear from someone that they didn’t receive an email, so I’d check with their provider and sure enough I’d been blackholed.

I’d go through all the steps to clear everything, re-send the message and it would go. Send a second message and my server was instantly blackholed again for “spamming” or “suspected open relay” or some other reason. All the “Big Guys” as you call them of course carved out exceptions for each other, but no matter how many security signatures or other measures I implemented it was basically an instant lockout.

It got to the point where I was forced to sign on with a “Big” provider for routing.