That’s the thing, they aren’t buying up “troubled” things, they’re looking for high return investments to future proof them against the decline of oil or anything that buys them western influence or street cred. A disgraced, homicidal, drug using pilot isn’t any of those things.

He might be able to get away with a flying gig somewhere in the world but not in any first or second world and most third world countries. Saudi is way too on top of their shit to allow his dumb ass in a cockpit again; his only options are truly the bottom of the barrel worldwide.

The FAA will never issue him even a private pilot certificate again in his entire life, let alone a commercial to be allowed to fly as a bush pilot.

Saudi isn’t the type of country that would overlook this, especially with the taboo on drug use in the Middle East.

The countries that would overlook this are few and far between with other serious issues making it not worth trying.

Not quite, someone posted that he could end it and he responded that if the WFP provided a plan showing the specifics of how world hunger could be ended for that amount he would fund it. WFP then provided a plan for how that amount could be used to help reduce world hunger for a short time and Elon said “the claim was end world hunger, not reduce it temporarily” which meant they didn’t meet challenge.

This is nothing new or unique. As much as it sucks when it’s blatantly obvious like this, there isn’t a true and objective way to draw perfect districts. If you cut the state into perfect squares then you group completely unrelated communities on either side of a large river that have nothing in common and one overwhelms the other. Sometimes one niche population is one county over from another one that’s twice the size. A lot of times a certain state does have a serious political bias. Independent districting committees with members from both sides still come up with wildly gerrymandered maps. A lot of times they aim for “highly competitive” elections where both sides have a real chance at winning any given election, but if the state is genuinely deep blue or red, that’s gerrymandered as well even if it “feels” democratic. 538 had an awesome map where you could visualize unfair advantages for each, highly competitive districts, compact districts (no absurd shapes like this one) and compact but follows existing county lines, but when ABC bought them they gutted everything good about 538 and just used the name for their existing garbage election reporting hoping to lure in a few more viewers so it’s now wiped off the face of the internet.

It’s only a small portion of Austin. If you take a sliver of a city where 20k people live and add it to a large rural district with 30k people across thousands of square miles you then spread the population of the dense city across the rural districts without overwhelming the ratio.

That’s absolutely it, before the NRA gave up on promoting gun rights and imploded its political power never came from “buying politicians with industry money.” It came from a large pool of highly active voters with a shared primary issue. Their report card was more effective than any donation or individual campaign. Mobilizing large groups of voters is far more powerful than deep pockets. That’s also why nothing has changed since their collapse, pro-gun voters had been jumping ship to more effective groups for more than two election cycles now. “Defeating the NRA” didn’t result in a gun control win because by the end the NRA’s corruption did more to hurt gun rights than anything Bloomberg could buy; ripping that bandaid off entirely allowed the community to rebound even harder.

It’s never been about the money, that’s just an easy scapegoat for someone not wanting to admit that they lost on any given issue. It’s really easy to say “evil corporations bought the law/result they wanted” than admit that a highly engaged voting base was behind it.

The gun and anti gun lobbies are chump change in politics. Combined they amount to less than $10m. I literally can’t even find their relative ranking on mobile because they aren’t even a drop in the bucket compared to others.

https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/industries

I feel like it would be pretty quickly determined that you are the “victim” in that scenario. I have actually carried explosives through a TSA checkpoint before though; it was the BEST LAYOVER EVER. They came to the lounge I was in asking for volunteers to train the dogs and then handed me a backpack with semtex in it and put me in line. The dog found me, I told him he was a GOOD BOY and got to throw his kong for him and rub his belly. 45/10, would layover again.

Depending on what airports they tried to go through they likely would have been caught. Even garbage security theater like the TSA catches concealed explosives fairly well.

OK, I genuinely have no clue what got that post removed. If you’re gonna have your own magic dictionary of what’s allowed then you’re gonna need to let people know what are and are not the special “no-no” words. It wasn’t even an edgy comment, it was just calling out the Russian bullshit, or was that the issue? Gotta protect the Russian shills or something?

Removed by mod

Most of the truly ridiculous knife laws are in states with equally ridiculous gun laws. A few have been challenged under 2A grounds with some degree of success but it just isn’t being pursued that much.

What does the article say? I’m on mobile and even with DNS Adblock all I get is a super loud Ford commercial that links me away from the article if I try to stop it.

You can bring them back with no issue. It has never been an issue, just a regulatory prohibition on selling them.

Have you met Lemmy? There’s a reason it will never truly take off no matter how shitty Reddit gets; it’s the people.

Yeah, but to say a Mach 3 cruise missile isn’t high speed because it isn’t hypersonic is missing the point.

Just because hypersonic are reported on frequently as a catchy headline doesn’t mean they are functional weapons that any given country could go out and buy on the open market. They are very much in the test/development stage and only in reach for the top global super powers. No, it’s not as fast as the vaporwave buzzwords and if we’re doing our procurement from the ACE Combat DLC marketplace then sure, but for context, the US still relies primarily on the Tomahawk which flies at M.74, the same as a C-17. This absolutely is a high speed cruise missile.