Last year a law was passed in Minnesota that would eliminate the state mandated shotgun-only deer hunting zones throughout the southern half of the state (there were no shotgun-only zones in the northern half of the state). While the shotgun-only zones remained in effect for the 2025 hunting season, they're no longer in place for 2026. The one caveat is that counties can opt-in to being a…
This post is brought to you by the recent craze around red light therapy. Red light therapy has been used in the healthcare industry to successfully treat a number of ailments. Now it's being researched for use in treating various other ailments. Unfortunately, this has caused it to become the latest healthcare fad promising to cure everything from depression to low testosterone. The reason I…
This post shouldn't need to be written. What I write here should be filed under common sense. The normal response upon reading it should be, "No shit, Sherlock." But my experiences have convinced me it needs to be written. While I'm going to focus on firearms for my example, this post can be applied to most things. That's because I'm going to discuss trends and, more…
Policing, especially in the United States, has developed a reputation for cruelty in the last decade or two. This is largely due to acts of brutality and outright murder combined with a justice system that often shields cops from liability. Despite promises by politicians to fix this issue, the problem has only gotten worse. Now that cruelty is being enhanced by reliance on online services.…
I'm now convinced that Ted Kaczynski was a visionary when he wrote Industrial Society and Its Future . When I first read it, I believed that the future he described could be avoided. I believed what Timothy May wrote in The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto about how technology could be used as a force against the State. Most foolishly though, I believe that the masses would act in their own…
Technology journalists, the mainstream media, and even the Pope are warning about the threat of AI taking over or destroying humanity. This fear is largely fueled by the AI industry itself. In the scramble to inflate their valuations before their impending IPOs , they're trying to trick everyone into believing that the statistical language models they're developing are far more capable…
In my previous post I discussed how the ability to attend concerts is increasingly locked behind using either an iOS device or a device running a Google approved version of Android. The issue I described isn't an isolated incident. More and more of our lives are being locked behind our smartphones. The two major smartphone operating system providers, Google and Apple, know this and are using…
I'm going to date myself. When I first started attending concerts, you bought physical tickets. These paper tickets could be purchased in several ways. You could visit the venue ticket box during business hours and purchase them. Ticket would normally be available weeks or even months ahead of a concert or you could buy them when you arrived for the concert if it wasn't sold out. If you…
I've lived through a few epochs, moments in time where things changed so dramatically that we commonly talk about our world as it existed before and after. 9/11 was the first epoch that I was aware of living through (the fall of the Soviet Union happened when I was too young to know or care about it). COVID-19 is another. The differences between the pre-COVID-19 years and post-COVID-19…
Since I released Dinosaur OS last September, I've had to make very few changes to my image. This is a testament to the overall stability of Bluefin, the image upon which Dinosaur OS is based. But I started receiving error notifications a couple of weeks ago whenever the automatic update service ran. The initial error was actually due to a Flatpak problem. The developer of a package I…