D’oh! I think I stopped reading and responded early. I hate it when people do that, my bad.

There are cases where whatever business just has a residence in an otherwise private area. Or at least have been. OP didn’t specify either way about the surroundings, though.

OP specified actual, real currency.

Depends what your cost of living is, and how good you are at saving.

If it’s located in Lilongwe, congratulations, the cost of decent food is going to be like $2 a day, so if your utilities and security are covered, you’re going to have a considerable disposable income to play with.

Lots of people work for $15 an hour, in the West, and get nothing extra covered. That is a bit of a trap.

I mean, economically speaking, that boils down to if you could earn $15 + the cost of renting those things, with roommate, on your own.

Other variables could effect the answer pretty strongly, but they’re not specified in the question. And, I guess, if you just don’t care about amenities.

Well, by that logic, the private militaries in question should have just gone on strike, as well. It wouldn’t take many to foul up the operation, right? There’s just way, way more public support for life to go on like normal, than there is for whatever fringe party you’re pushing to seize power. (Or for a raging power vacuum, if you’re the kind of person who doesn’t have an alternative society ready in detail)

To be fair, at the polls, this basic logic works. Normal voters are kind of predictable and inert, and elections are routine and safe, so that 1% of activists do make it rain. If you really mean business, you should go and sign up to doorknock - for an established party, or a fringe party. If nothing else, you’d get to see what we’re talking about first hand.

If that’s too big an ask for you personally - and let’s be real, most people on Lemmy wouldn’t ever do that - you should stop talking about people’s livelihoods and personal safety. Hopefully, you’re not in that picture.

So yeah you can fire a bullet so many different ways, a rusty nail and hammer will do the trick.

Well, there’s also the not-small matter of aiming, or firing again if the first shot didn’t put a satisfactory hole where you wanted. Or just getting the bullet going fast enough to do damage, without a barrel to channel and contain the blast.

It’s not like the whole history of firearms after the cartridge was invented was a waste of time.

You can make guns easy peasy

Ehhh… You can make guns. Metalworking in general is beyond most people, though. And, if you want to rifle a barrel, it’s not clear if standard machine shop equipment will be enough (that’s a pretty small, tight space for a lathe tool). Easy peasy is a bit of a stretch.

but ammo is much harder to manufacture and easier to regulate

People can and do reload their own ammo. I don’t know if anybody DIYs their own smokeless powder, and that would probably be highly illegal, but I’ve heard of people making their own black powder.

Well, 1/3 of, say, America supports what’s going on, and another 1/3 doesn’t really care either way. Even in just that last third, caring enough to take on enormous personal cost is extremely rare.

Basically, how, given massive public support, you win, was never the question.

The thing is, nobody wants to sacrifice for some distant, abstract ideal. That’s why history’s revolutions didn’t happened like this, either.

Edit: What people do like to do is idly talk about it. Somehow shitposters rarely show up IRL.

I’ll admit I don’t know tons about Star Wars, but isn’t is a bit of a lawless universe? Not quite Mad Max, but, like, on it’s way. Dotted with wretched hives of scum and villainy and all that.

So, control is loose enough to allow things like breaking copyright law, and the tradeoff is there’s a lot of less sympathetic crime going on. Basically, you can have freedom, or you can have order, and both are double edged swords. People seem to spend a lot of time asking for more order, because even in very safe Western society they’re afraid. Maybe they shouldn’t do that.

PS: I think stories need to be larger than life to attract the audiences attention. It’s the same recipe since ancient Greece’s theatre works. Because people are people and they want what they always wanted.

Yep. even if you take danger out of the equation,

I guess, but I don’t really have a problem hearing “kraut” or “polack”, because it’s just an obsolete insult. At he end of the day words are just words. It’s the intent behind them that can be nasty.

Which is why this probably was too far. Although, I hope the transgressive humour never leaves the open source world.

Arguably, the fact that nobody knows it’s offensive means it probably shouldn’t be.

It really really is.

Absolutely blessed.

VE6n#!'Q_K

Which work was that in?

No, but you did talk about the internal logic of the Star Wars universe, and people like Star Wars. So, I launched into a small rant. My bad!

I meant 1984 the novel FWIW, where everything is really centrally controlled.

Obviously, a lot of people don’t roll that way, but it seems like they kind of want to even if they don’t.

Unironically. HTTP with micropayments is looking less dumb than it probably sounded at the time. At least that would help keep whatever hacker site up, instead of being a pure waste to everyone.

Hopefully they were both okay. They might be, TBH, dogs seem to love that stuff.