You haven't been paying attention. And that's ok. Obama was destroying families, and killing peoples, he just did it out of sight with a charming smile.

You think people deported by him didn't die as a result? You think his massive expansion of drone violence didn't kill people living lives as rich and complex as Pretti's? You don't remember Obama deciding not to prosecute people for Abu Ghraib?

I mean, the fact that it's Pretti who you're drawing the distinction on might indicate to you where your racial biases are here.

Aesthetic differences are differences: red is not blue, afterall.

However,

I was. We were doing things, yall just didn't pay attention/

Having produced, performed in, and engineered a number of shows and festivals, this is a terrible idea for a pricing strategy.

Consider portajohns for an outdoor festival- incentivizing folks to wait until the last possible minute makes it impossible to determine what the needs are there, so how do you plan for how many shitters you need to bring and maintain for, say, a 3-day festival?

Consider that "festivals discount early sales" might be a kind of Chesterton's Fence, and you might question why they do that...

Not everything sells out right away, though. I've bought concert tickets on the day of the show more than once. Somehow they still managed to have all the concessions staffed.

But regardless, the formula for decreasing the price could be adjusted. For example, it could be an exponential decay toward the reserve price, with the decay rate set so that most of the decline in price is early.

Or, for shows that are entirely general admission, like festivals, you could use the alternative form of dutch auction: when tickets go on sale, everyone bids what they're willing to pay for some number of tickets. Then the bidding closes (with ample time for planning), and the bids are cleared in descending order of price, and everyone pays the amount of the lowest clearing bid. This method would find a price closer to the true market price of a ticket and discourage speculators.

The issue is that most events don't even sell out. This is a terrible idea.

You might not remember any. That doesn't mean they did not happen.

I rememebr friends doing migrant support in San Antonio in 2012 and similar actions.

I bet it feels nice to pretend that it's other folks who are hypocrites.

But don't forget that you're just pretending.

Just because you seem genuinely curious I will say this:

Yeah, it scares the crap out of me too.

I'm queer and very far to the left politically, and my neighbors all have a lot of guns and if you listen to what they say they think that queer leftists deserve to be murdered just out of principle.

I am not under any illusion that firearms make any situation with the government better; I have been assaulted by DHS (pepper spray) and in that situation I am certain that going from being "non-compliant" to "violent" would result in being murdered by the government in short, short order.

However, I am very worried about situations where my neighbors (who are all very well armed and very far to the right and very excited about 'interruptions in regular government') become violent.

There are many, many historical and current precedents for that situation.

So although the best situation would be unilateral disarmament, that isn't going to happen in the rural west of the US.

All that said, what do you think my position is? Owning "sporting rifles" and training on self-defense with my cadre of trans folks and anarchists seems to be the more realistic strategy than just hoping the US doesn't get suddenly worse, especially given the path it has been taking at the federal level.

Personally, I'd much prefer to be running around playing with my ham radios but here we are.

Hey, my sympathies on your plight :(

I don't know what I'd do in a similar situation. Again, I don't see how carrying a gun could improve the situation, except possibly that if everyone on the left was also carrying then the folks on the right might get scared and begin to think more rationally about gun control.

Statistically, though, you're safer than they are. Guns are much more likely to kill their owners than anyone else [0], so while it's obviously scary, maybe the thought that your neighbours are less likely to kill you than themselves or each other brings some comfort?

[0] https://academic.oup.com/aje/article-abstract/160/10/929/140...

> Guns are much more likely to kill their owners than anyone else [0]

That article says no such thing, despite people often claiming it does.

What do you think it says then?

The easy observation is that it's far more likely that guns simply do nothing than they are to kill anyone.

I am about 50, and I can tell the difference between when my mental health was in a place where I might kill myself and where I am now.

That makes the math around gun ownership a lot more straight forward- hoping that the bigots will off themselves before they start lynching folks again (because it wouldn't be the first time) doesn't seem like the safer bet.

I am glad you live in a place that has never been touched by bigots excited by war- clearly there is no way that in Europe the bigots have or will ever (again?) require local resistance fighting (right?).

First, it's a bit of a silly cliché, but a true one, that guns don't kill people, people kill people. The way you've phrased it, even aside from the facts, makes it feel like FUD implying that someone's gun is going to creep up on them in the night.

Second, you can just take it from the horse's mouth, since papers give you an abstract stating their findings. An even briefer snippet of what they say themselves there is:

> Those persons with guns in the home were at greater risk than those without guns

> in the home of dying from a homicide in the home. They were also at greater risk

> of dying from a firearm homicide, but risk varied by age and whether the person

> was living with others at the time of death. The risk of dying from a suicide in

> the home was greater for males in homes with guns than for males without guns in

> the home. Persons with guns in the home were also more likely to have died from

> suicide committed with a firearm than from one committed by using a different

> method.

The first half of that regarding homicide says nothing about being killed by your own gun, only about being a homicide victim in your own home. It _could_ and likely does include some of that, but it's not captured or quantified, all we see is total homicide numbers. Nor does it have any statistics about anyone else killed, either outside the home, or someone else killed in your home, so there's no basis for comparison there.

The second half only claims to be true for males in the first place, not everyone. It also explicitly acknowledges that it doesn't deal with the likely confounder of people who don't have a means of suicide in the home committing suicide _outside_ the home, and thus not being included in their numbers.

Right, but the basic point - that people who have guns are more likely to die by guns is true, right?

The sophistry about whose gun killed them is kinda moot. They don't actually track whether the gun-owners died by their own gun or not, as you say.

But it's likely, isn't it? We're talking about people who either kill themselves, or kill their family members. It's likely using the gun that's already in the house, rather than a new, different gun being brought in from outside.

And if it is a stranger coming in from outside with a different gun, then doesn't that contradict the entire point of owning a gun? That you can protect yourself and your family from strangers with guns?

Not being able to get stuff on a pallet or in a 5 gallon bucket or whatever has its own cost. Hell, not being able to invoice on NET30 or have a supplier or even not having to pick and pack stuff has a cost.

All your analysis does is ignore what folks' actual concerns are.

Of course everybody eventually has to take a shit and has dumb jokes.

You're just ignoring some very real differences in how folks relate because of their circumstances and declaring that those of us who understand those differences are dumb.

You're not a temporarily embarrassed billionaire. Having hung out with them, their concerns really are very different than say, the line cooks and journyman HVAC electricians.

While it's tautologically correct that the billionaires also have to have lunch at some point in the day, the specifics of it are vastly different. But more importantly, the ways in which they make their basic livings are fundamentally different in ways that lead them act differently.

That's the difference that folks are point out, and ignoring it just makes you look ignorant of some basic facts about the world.

It's almost like our material relations to others defines our primary concerns and thus our class interests and thus how we exist among other folks.

But that's just, like, such a 19th century communistic view on things.

We may all be in the same storm but we're not all in the same boats.

I used to read the yearly accident review publication by the American Alpin Club.

Two very basic facts emerge:

- about a 25% of the accidents they list would not have been accidents if a helmet had been worn

- a significant number of incidents are caused by folks splitting up for some reason

The large point that I've take into later life: there's nothing special about me that exempts me from statistics.

So when I can I wear a helmet while climbing and never split the party in the mountains.

And the logical extension would be don't go hiking with anyone who might split the party or strand you, I suppose.

Well, as much as one might.

Many of the very good lessons of goofing around climbing with randos has been refined skills at evaluating partners, which I had not previously considered to be a skill that could be developed in its own right and which has served me quite well as I have worked at it in my larger life.