This is a Coke commercial from Argentina from 2013, and it’s beautiful.

Its flooring to realize no advertising agency would ever put this on TV in America.

Why does advertising in America hate families so much?

Yesterday I completed that thread protector.

This was required to finish the alignment spigot, which is required to mount the backplate to the rotary table, which is required to mount the chuck to the rotary table which is required to hold the mandrel to hold gear blanks, which is required to make gears, which are required to make the Casinator.

See, this is firearms related.

This was the first time I used an internal grooving tool. It was the first time I’ve run the lathe in reverse to do any cutting.

While there were no precision requirements for the thread protector, I still treated it as if I were making a backplate for a chuck to be mounted on the lathe. This gave me practice in measuring bores correctly, and hitting my numbers.

I am going to decide if I coat it in LPS-3 or if I give it a bluing treatment.

Not The Bee. Appears I have been fooled by a parody account. But the sad part is that it is too believable 

Sweet Saint Policarpo. You are going to argue in front of SCOTUS that the Constitution is unconstitutional?

Like somebody said, what do you expect from a guy who could not make one pillow.

There is a company called Saw Stop which developed a safety system for table saws that detects when a finger touches the blade and applies a brake to the blade to stop the user from getting more than a minor injury.

It’s cool technology, but it’s expensive. A compact Saw Stop table saw us $900. The standard is $2,300.

Replacement brakes are $120.

If that is where this ended, I wouldn’t be posting.

Saw Stop, which is owned by the parent company for Festool, has lobbied to have the federal Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) Saw Stop like safety brake on all new table saws sold in the United States.

Currently Saw Stop is the only manufacturer of this product and therefore would have an instant monopoly.

There is also questions over how Saw Stop would enforce its patent. Saw Stop has said publicly that it would open the patent to the public if the new rule is passed, but it’s still enforcing it the meantime. So their promise is no guarantee of anything.

What this comes down to, is that their is the potential here for a rule change that would make it impossible to go to Lowes or Home Depot and buy a $99 table saw. You might have to buy a safety table saw for several times that.

I am the owner of a $99 after Holiday clearance sale Kobalt table saw. It’s great for $99.

If I had to pay $500 for it, I wouldn’t have bought it because I’d never recoup that value from my saw.

One Congresswoman seems to get this and wants to block the Saw Stop rule.

A new rule mandating finger-detection technology in table saws could raise costs by hundreds of dollars and result in a government-mandated monopoly.

I introduced a bipartisan bill to protect consumer choice and block this mandate until the patents for this tech are made public. pic.twitter.com/vQ26gCvWKG

— Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (@RepMGP) May 15, 2024

She’s right.

The internet attacked her.

we should respect the consumer's choice to have their fingers chopped off by a table saw https://t.co/gkf2QQaz3b

— Nathan J Robinson (@NathanJRobinson) May 17, 2024

Hi ma'am. Greatly respect your work on allowing fingers to be cut off. Thank you

— mr Biden sir youre cheugy (@LaborPal) May 16, 2024

Ah yes the “Let corporations cut off fingers” bill

— ? (@comemenism) May 15, 2024

"You should cut off your own fingers!" is quite a platform to run on.

— Jonathan Vankin (@jonvankin) May 15, 2024

you’re literally pro-fingers getting chopped off lmao

— Mike Figueredo (@HumanistReport) May 16, 2024

Fighting for the right of working-class Americans to lose their fingers! pic.twitter.com/IS7NY97sfS

— Craig Lawrence (@clawrence) May 17, 2024

This is just a sampling.

I’m absolutely convinced every single one of these people has never used a table saw.

I don’t think any if them has ever used a power tool.

These are all soft handed people who do nothing buy touch keyboards all day.

There are two important factors.

Saw Stop saws are very expensive. A portable jobsite Saw Stop Saw is $1,700. A jobsite Saw by Ryobi or Kobalt could be had for $300. Even a DeWalt is $600.

Ignoring the patent, there are embedded costs from adding circuit boards, sensors, and the electronics for the brake.

Low cost homeowner hobbyists table saws will disappear.

Businesses will have to pay out significantly more for saws.

Likely, small businesses and independent contractors will simply stop using table saws and switch to circular saws.

The reality is that most table saw injuries come from improper use. Failing to use guards or pushing tools.

Businesses, tradesmen, and hobbyists have been using table saws for years without being injured because they use them correctly .

But these doofuses know they can’t be trusted to use a saw without hurting themselves so they want safety mandated, at the expense of cost efficient saws.

They take a stance of moral superiority instead of incompetence.

People like this should be ignored, because they are the sorts of idiots who stab themselves trying to take the pit out of an avocado, they can’t run a table saw.

Quick summary: Call to 911 of a domestic dispute ending with a male shot by the wife. Cops arrive at scene, find the male outside the house, secure him for transport to local hospital and try to deal with the female who announces she has a gun.

Female comes out of the house acting like she has a gun hidden under a sweater.  Makes enough menacing movements that cops open fire ….and miss.

There was at least one rifle involved in the mix. No idea if it was used, but if it was and also missed… holy crap.

I am seeing more and more videos where cops go slide lock and miss the target altogether.

If Spray and Pray done by gang members is bad, how come it is not an issue for police?

Isn’t that theft? Customer already paid for the goods. The driver, although miffed, has no right to retain items that do not belong to her and was contracted to deliver.

Delivery driver refuses to give customer their order because they didn’t tip her pic.twitter.com/b6pwFFdmqP

— non aesthetic things (@PicturesFoIder) May 17, 2024

When we are dealing with political “stuff”, there are three different things at play.

Rights. A right pre-exists us. Everybody has the right to be armed. Everybody has the right to speak freely. Everybody has the right to seek happiness. These rights are endowed by their Creator

Authority. Authority is permission to exercise some power.

Power. Power is the ability to do something.

As an example, the state has the power to imprison you. They do not have the right to do so. They may have been granted the authority, by The People, to do so.

Our Constitution does not grant us any rights. It does not give any power to the state. It authorizes the state to do some things. As part of that authorization, the state has gathered power to itself.

People are greedy. Anybody who claims we are not is likely lying to you or themselves, or both. Greed is not bad.

I want toys for the safe. I want toys for the shop. I want toys for the house. I want good food. I want good water.

There are 1000s of things I want. There are things that I need.

My greed makes me want to get the things I want.

I need to decide on what is the best way to get the things I want. I could decide to steal these things. This does not have a long term positive outcome.

Because I want, and because I need, I have to find a way to get money. I have decided that the best way for me to get money is to marry well, sell my skills to others, and sell things that I make.

When I am selling things that I make, I need to sell them at a price that will earn me a profit. The size of that profit is set by greed. If the price is too high, I will not be able to sell very many. If the price is too low, I will not be able to make enough profit. I want to find the price that generates enough profit and enough sales to make an overall profit that I’m happy with.

That is greed at work.

Unfortunately, greed also causes people to look for advantages. One of the easiest methods of getting an advantage is to change the rules such that you have some sort of advantage over others.

You are making a widget. You have been making widgets for years. You have a strong customer base and many return customers.

A new player comes into town and starts to manufacture widgets in competition with you. They are not making much headway, as your long-term efforts and excellent product keep people coming to you to purchase.

The new player decides that they need an advantage. They know there are potential safety issues with the widgets that they are making. It is easily mitigated by using a known procedure.

They go to the government and lobby to “Make Widgets Safer.” “Protect The Children From Bad Widgets!”. They get a new regulation passed which requires a compliance report on using the particular procedure in making widgets.

The government is now using a power they may not have the authority to use. Regardless, they do have the power. They have more power than you do.

You now have to hire a person to perform compliance reporting along with compliance testing. Your costs have now gone up to the point where your competitor’s price/quality is closer to yours, and they start to take customers from you.

The question then becomes, by what authority did the state impose that compliance regulation on you?

The state always has the power. When some purple haired whale yells that your penis replacement AR-15 isn’t going to stop the state, they are explicitly saying that the state has more power than you.

Their opinion is that the state should exercise that power to force you to do whatever it is they want you to do.

Save for your retirement? Yep, the state has the power to force that on you.

Pay for illegal aliens to have an education? Yep, the state has the power to force you to do that.

Buy car insurance? Yes, some individual states have forced you to purchase car insurance.

Buy health insurance? In a bill, we had to pass to know what was in it, the state did exactly that, they forced you to buy health insurance.

That is the exercise of power.

Does the state have the authority to do so? That is an entirely different question. You need to look at what the Constitution authorizes the state to do. What you find is that the lawyers have twisted small things to make it look like an authorization.

If you look at the original NFA, it was based on a tax. The state is authorized by Article I, Section 8, Clause 1:

This is the first of the enumerated authorizations. The state can tax just about anything they want.

But, their authorization to tax “just about anything” was modified in 1791 to exclude taxes on arms. …, the right of The People to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed. The word “infringed” means to “hinder”, thus a tax on keeping or bearing arms is an infringement and unconstitutional.

To conclude, we, The People, have rights and powers. The state has power but no rights.

Our rights are protected by different parts of the Constitution, including the Bill of Rights. The state is authorized by the Constitution to exercise some of its powers.

If the federal government is not authorized to exercise a power, that authorization goes back to the individual states and The People.

Do NOT let anybody claim that the state has “rights”, it does not. It has power. It is either exercising the power under the authority of the Constitution or it is abusing its powers.