and you cant change what car mfgs are doing.

You can, though. The steady inflation in vehicle size is a direct response to CAFE regulations and revisions, which incentivize heavier vehicles. Pickups, of any size, were far less common prior to CAFE’s enaction in 1975, despite the population being more rural, agricultural, and industrial then.

Sorry for the late response, I missed your comment.

I can tell you my specific motivation for learning to crawl.

Before I was born, my father had a hobby of brewing beer, which he attempted to keep with a baby in the house. With each batch, there was a glass carboy on the floor beneath the telephone nook in our kitchen. Full of a bubbling brown liquid, with a water airlock on top letting the CO2 escape, this was, by far, the most interesting object in the house to baby me. I would stare at it from my high chair, and I wanted to get closer to it. So I learned to crawl, sat next to it, and poked at the rubber stopper until I shoved it into the carboy and ruined that batch of beer. My father was very upset.

My father never brewed another batch of beer after that. A couple decades later, I took that carboy out of my parents’ garage, crushed up the dried rubber stopper and fished it out of the carboy, and used it to brew my own batches of beer.

There’s been a bunch of bad design around me, too.

For example, they decided to eliminate a lane of traffic, shift the street parking out into the road farther, and build a “protected” bike lane between the parked cars and the sidewalk. Except there’s a bunch of driveways for parking lots, and side streets, for cars to want to turn into, and now all the cyclists were invisible to the motorists because they were separated by the row of parked crossovers. If you rode at anything more than a walking pace, slowing or stopping at every curb cut to look for cars, you’d get hit by someone that had no hope of seeing you.

I guess enough people got hit by cars, because after about a year they moved the car parking back against the curb, and the cycle lane back to the traffic side. Though the road was still less one car lane in an area where there had been a perfectly good bike lane before all the improvements. I used to ride that road a lot. I don’t anymore.

Another thing that’s popular now is painting the entire bicycle lane with green paint. Because cycling is green! But that paint is a lot more slick than pavement when wet. It’s awful to ride on.

But to the layman, attempting to describe balls of ice falling from the sky, and not the process that formed them, is there any practical distinction to be made between ice pellets and hail?

Where I live, building bike infrastructure means removing a lane of traffic, or parking, to install a bunch of curbs, poles, and large rocks, to create a bike lane that largely goes unused, while traffic is substantially worsened.

Here’s an example of a work in progress. When this was taken they hadn’t yet filled the holes they’d dug in the road with the rocks.

a war involving nuclear weapons. Which nobody but the USA is capable of igniting.

Russia regularly threatens to start a nuclear war…

I’m from the US, and I use sleet in the manner Commonwealth countries do.

I recommend you write a literal plan down on paper

In late November 2025, CARROLL, a member of the Turtle Island Liberation Front (“TILF”), provided a Confidential Human Source (“CHS”)1 an eight-page, handwritten document titled “OPERATION MIDNIGHT SUN” that described a bombing plot.

Specifically, the plan contemplated planting backpacks with “ieds,” or Improvised Explosive Devices, to be simultaneously detonated at five locations targeting two U.S. companies at midnight on New Year’s Eve 2025 in the Central District of California. The handwritten plan stated the “ieds” would be “complex pipe bombs,” included instructions on how to manufacture the bombs, and included guidance to avoid leaving evidence behind that could be traced back to the co-conspirators.

Did that theory include a reason why the White House needs an on-site data center, which could not be fulfilled by locating it anywhere else?

Likewise, Renee Good and Alex Pretti weren’t murdered, they were killed in undocumented uses of force.

Steampunk is all about direct steam power. Before the harnessing of electricity confined steam to electric plants.

Electromechanical technology was well developed prior to the invention of the transistor, and remained widely employed through the 1970s, when microcontrollers started replacing it.

GOA was founded by a member of the John Birch Society. Their current President is a member of The Council for National Policy. They’re hard Christian right, with a narrow focus on gun rights that largely obfuscates that. The idea that the GOA itself, or the bulk of their membership, have a strong objection to what’s happening in this country is laughable.

In other news, Trump made a cryptic post on Truth Social, stating “Some of you guys are alright. Don’t go to major sporting events in the next two weeks if you’re in the southwest.”

It is unclear what the President meant by this. However, it should be noted that President Trump has not been presented with an NFL Peace Prize, and may not feel obligated to think purely of peace.

You can make one with home depot parts if you needed to.

Not really. You could shove some freeze plugs from the auto parts store into a capped length of iron pipe from the hardware store, but the tap to thread it onto a muzzle isn’t something you’ll find in either store. And good luck getting all the holes to line up if you’re trying to do it with a hand drill or a drill press. In the end, you’d have a real piece of shit, weighing down the front of your gun for little benefit.

You’d be better off not bothering until the local machine shop starts selling nice ones, along with full-auto conversions.

Even in areas of the US where AR-15s are restricted, it is usually possible to purchase one in a neutered configuration, which can be returned to standard configuration if you’re so inclined.

There are other box-magazine fed intermediate-cartridge semi-automatic rifles that are a better choice than a 12ga shotgun, and don’t run afoul of assault weapons bans, such as the Mini-14 and SKS.

A pump action shotgun is better than nothing, but it is most suitable for hunting ducks and deer.

Shotguns are not a good buy. A standard 12 gauge has significantly more recoil than typical rifles, a lower rate of fire, significantly less range, smaller magazine capacity, and lower reliability due to the construction of the ammunition. It is also completely ineffective against hard armor plates that are now ubiquitous.

Suppressors are cool, but they’re not all that useful. Most people would not have them, so hearing protection would still be required. Simple foam ear plugs are the most effective, and very cheap. Electronic muffs with a pass-thru microphone and speaker system can be had for as little as $50, allowing you to hear everything around you other than the gunshots.

The purchase order for someone trying to make themselves a player in a democracy, is a semi-auto rifle, preferably an AR-15, a dozen magazines, ammunition, electronic muffs. Following that, a sling, an optic, a way to carry magazines on your body, ceramic armor plates. You can consider a pistol, a baton, around the time you’re getting a first aid kit, a radio, a helmet.

You assume they’re all cowards, which is false.

All armed protesting will accomplish you now is ensuring your house is one of the first a government death squad visits.

They looking for the softest targets, right now. That will change. Armed protesting will do nothing more to change the government’s clearly stated course of action than unarmed protesting has.

The only effective response is forming citizen militias and executing Federal agents whenever they’re found.

The executions will continue no matter how much you protest.