People vastly underestimate the number of privately held firearms in Europe, and how “easy” it is to obtain one.
It’s not an insurmountable obstacle, and depending on the country can range from “California difficulty” to “basically an NFA stamp” but they’re out there.
Often they are not “the scary black rifle” type, but they’re still firearms.
This is very country-dependent; in some they're actually quite common, in some they're extremely heavily restricted. In Ireland, say, you will require a legitimate reason to have one (essentially the only legitimate reasons are sports shooting, hunting, and certain farming activities), training, secure storage inspected and signed off on by the police, and permission from the police. In practice, it's so onerous that most people doing sports shooting would use a gun owned by the club. Automatic rifles are completely illegal to own, as are nearly all pistols (except for use by the military and by specialist police; ordinary police don't have firearms). Tasers etc are also effectively illegal to own (there being no legitimate sports/hunting/farming applications).
Oddly, crossbows are also restricted, though may be licensed as above; as I understand it this is due to a legislative error which no-one has gotten around to fixing.
Exactly - gun laws are way more complicated than people assume - some countries on paper will be identical to Ireland but basically anyone can say "hunting" and the police don't do much more than just sign off on it.
And in other countries, they make no distinction between a black-powder blunderbuss and fully automatic military weapons - they're both equally hard to obtain, so the people who do get a gun end up with a select-fire rifle.
Pistols are often more heavily regulated than rifles, because they're concealable.
In the USA you can just buy a black-powder cannon if you want. Artillery not so much if it is autoloading. The "own a musket for home defense" copy pasta comes to mind.
I've known a few people into black powder guns and cannons. It is a fun hobby for them. One of them got into it by way of model rocketry, the rest were folks who were generally into "mountain man" era skills, technology and reenactment (for history and fun, not prepper illusions).
There was also a tradition at our high school to shoot off a cannon each time our football team scored a point at home games (just the powder no projectile).
I'm now curious if one could license one here. It doesn't _obviously_ fall into any of the categories that would make it prohibited (as opposed to merely restricted), and it's not like it'd be very useful for criminal purposes, but it might be hard to sell the gardai on the idea that it was essential for farming. (Surely at some point there's been a sport that involves cannon, tho...)
Maybe because to them the upsides are more important than the downsides, including because it would be illegal to go out without pants in their country. I don't think wearing clothes should be required by law.
Besides the obvious effort required and the monetary costs, as somebody who wears glasses and commutes by bike and train I can name a couple others.
After biking to the train station my breath is heavier than normal, and having to put a mask on when entering the train made my glasses fog up, so I would usually wear it under the nose (even those with a valve, because they still made it hard to breathe after biking, although a little easier).
Otherwise I would be unable to use my phone nor laptop and I would have nothing to do for most of the commute.
My glasses would also fog up when entering indoors locations during the winter, so I would have to clean my glasses and mess around with the mask to make the air come out from the bottom.
There's also no clear upside for me given that I rarely get sick, the last time I had a fever was in 2022 and the time before that was 2017.
I don't mind my 75 minutes x 2 commute, but 55 minutes are spent on a half empty train and the rest on bikes (mostly on bike lanes or empty roads), so I get to eat a snack, use my laptop and do some mild cardio. I've done the same commute a couple of times by car and it was much more stressful.
It might also be due to demographics in Western countries. If the ratio of workers to total population decreases while the demand for work remains the same, there will be less competition for jobs and workers will be able to demand higher pay. It also depends on how many can be replaced by machines.
> They used to claim they were not an advanced economy and still a developing nation so they should be allowed to do it. Just like the West burned coal to industrialize. Is that still the official story?
I guess so, their median income is still lower than that of the US and western European countries
It seems to me that the main purpose of having a college degree is signaling that you're not too stupid and too lazy, although it depends on what degree you got, in which college and which country.
Of course you're supposed to have learnt something while you were there, but for the vast majority of my peers, what they learned about physics, electronics and control theory while pursuing our computer engineering degree, was mostly useless. All my acquaintances ended up working as software developers, and I know only one who writes firmware and needed to have some electronics knowledge.
So I don't get why many companies still require a degree for software developers. Some of my best colleagues don't have college degrees.
Companies could use IQ tests to filter out stupid people and then proceed with a regular interview for those who passed the IQ test. Lazy people are very few in my experience and they would get filtered afterwards, but companies could just pay people less for the first few months to compensate.
Maybe they could apply the process I described just to applicants without degrees.
I think a lot of what you're speaking to is the result of people undervaluing liberal arts degrees.
I work in a technical role, but I have a liberal arts degree. Liberal arts helped me learn how to think, learn new things, synthesize different things into a coherent argument, and more. People ask how I RCA problems so quickly. It's because I'm used to taking a set of facts from pile A, another from pile B, etc. and bring it together to a cogent argument.
Meanwhile I'm interviewing people with CS degrees who can't even explain the difference between symmetric and asymmetric encryption.
I think some of this (not being able to tell crypto types apart) is the emphasis on specialization. I helped with some intro infosec courses years back, and these were smart students but they had not much exposure or understanding of basic CLI tools. They had interacted with Windows with a mouse for their entire life, so using a prompt was something new and strange. Most picked it up, but it took a bit of time.
In my experience (granted, I'm in a research lab, so there's likely a bias compared to regular industry), CS/CE are somewhat unique in that way. Most CS/CE people don't have to touch most of what they've studied, as a CE I took classes on lasers, radio, convex optimization, quantum computing, op amps etc but haven't had to use the detailed knowledge from the classes at all. Many professors even commented in the classes themselves that most of the content was not likely to matter in industry.
My most useful classes have been math as they gave me the fundamentals to pick up enough of other fields to work with them. To the point that I often joke that I got an applied math degree rather than computer engineering.
But, in comparison, the physics, EE, mechanical engineering etc people I work with frequently use the stuff they learned from school.
Society needs knowledgeable people that aren't software developers too.
Also, CS isn't about programming; it's a branch of applied mathematics. It's the difference between science and engineering. Though in truth, many programmers are to software engineers as electricians are to electrical engineers.
I mean speak for yourself I guess, I learned a ton of programming fundamentals in pursuit of my CS degree and that laid the foundation directly for my career in web engineering.
I entered the job market already experienced with the tools, languages, and then-popular libraries and frameworks - I learned exponentially more on the job, of course, but that learning was built my college education. It would have been a struggle to get right to work without it.
The same is true for me, but I could have learned those things without going to college and without wasting time studying subjects that have never been useful in my work.
Yeah I know I could have, but to be honest, outside of a classroom setting, and perhaps especially lacking enthusiastic peers to engage with and co-operate with - I am really not confident that I could have done a better job learning on my own terms in 4 years than I did at college.
I suppose, one nuance might be - I wasn't 'just going to college to get a degree' - I was there specifically to learn skills that would make me hireable. It helped that I liked the subject matter, undoubtedly.
Also that I had to borrow all the money to pay for it myself.
