I mod a worryingly growing list of communities. Ask away if you have any questions or issues with any of the communities.

I also run the hobby and nerd interest website scratch-that.org.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • #8: Police

    State police enforce state level laws, and Federal agencies enforce federal laws.

    The whole semi-autonomous thing. If a state and the Feds both have their own laws against something they could each try to arrest somebody, but there could also be a situation where one might not have a law while the other one does. For example , weed is still illegal under Federal law. The Federal government has mostly chosen not to enforce these laws, but it could. Many states have legalized weed to varying degrees.

    So there could be a situation where somebody is smoking weed in a state that has legalized it. The state police have no power to arrest that person, but the Feds do.

    I’m sure this has all made it more confusing.



  • Alcohol sales vary hugely between states. In some states, you can get hard liquor at Wal-Mart while in others you can only get it at state run stores.

    The rules about licensing mean some areas gas stations usually don’t even sell beer, while in other places they have giant walk in beer freezers.

    Some states or counties have dry laws where they don’t sell alcohol on Sundays, or maybe no hard alcohol, or maybe you have to wait until noon to be able to buy it.

    It’s all over the place.

    As for the Wal-Mart machineguns, I think you’ve gotten enough replies on that detail, but again gun sales are something with huge variety. Some states have put restrictions in place where a Wal-Mart theoretically could still sell guns but doesn’t because of the hassle, and gun stores end up being few and far between, while other places basically just have the Federal minimum in place.






















  • Either of the first two Industrial Revolutions were not named because of the burning of coal in and of itself. Coal burning was part of the widespread and rapid transformation of society. Coal played a part in facilitating previously unthinkable changes in a short time.

    The adoption of cars has been more iterative and gradual. In the U.S. there are certain periods important for them such as, depending on how much you think it had an effect, the General Motors streetcar conspiracy. There was also the post WW2 push by Eisenhower to building National highways. But those didn’t radically and quickly change life in the way industrial revolutions did. There was the post-war boom, which if you want to view it through a certain lens, was a kind of revolution for the U.S., in that people found themselves with much more buying power thanks to the U.S. having assumed superpower status.

    Similarly nuclear power production has not caused widespread fundamental change in a short period. Nuclear weapons did become a major part of geopolitics, but nuclear power is as far as society is concerned just another way to make electricity.