I think an adversarial foreign power would push to expand rather than diminish state funded media like CPS, PBS and NPR. They’d probably also try to reduce the right to keep and bear arms and would increase regulation and taxes to damage domestic industrial capacity and reduce competitiveness. I don’t think our leadership at the executive level is doing this. I don’t think an adversarial power would invest $100B into TSMC Arizona or push Japanese car manufacturers and European pharmaceutical companies to build domestically. Thank you for sparking this thought experiment I actually did enjoy doing some research on this topic.

> think an adversarial foreign power would push to expand rather than diminish state funded media like CPS, PBS and NPR.

They don't need to do that. They are defunding and demonizing those and instead taking over TikTok, CBS, CNN... X and WaPo already taken over by colluders. Oh, and the cabinet is all Fox News people.

> push to expand rather than diminish state funded media like CPS, PBS and NPR

I don't see why. If they were not planning on taking over the place long term, then they'd want to decrease state capacity not increase it. ( Furthermore in the US, corporate media conglomerates make up most of what we'd traditionally consider state run media )

> reduce the right to keep and bear arms

Why exactly? In this context, small arms mainly just give the population more tools to harm each other as the place falls apart.

> increase regulation and taxes to damage domestic industrial capacity and reduce competitiveness

Regulation has been increasing for decades. But even overbearing regulations are a downright level playing field for innovation compared with having to bribe the administration (with money and political prostration) to avoid becoming the target of capricious attacks under the color of law.

> invest $100B into TSMC Arizona or push Japanese car manufacturers and European pharmaceutical companies to build domestically

These are beneficial, but it feels like we're back up against the limits of continuity and showmanship. Complete repudiation of constructive investment (eg CHIPS Act) would raise eyebrows. And a few big state-directed investments here and there aren't going to reverse the tariff assault on our distributed industry. Furthermore unless the economic bargaining power of workers drastically changes for the better, foreign-owned factories in the US are still going to result in most of their generated wealth leaving the US. And without that, the main benefit of domestic factories (nationalization in a time of need) is fundamentally abhorrent to the US political environment no matter who is in power.

This isn’t very big news. Issues occur during bring-up often. Linde’s processes are possibly so power intensive that failing over to generator power is not possible. TSMC is right to put Linde on notice since Linde should have a PFMEA and control plan to eliminate any root causes for downtime. I suspect in the long term TSMC has plans to insource this if the issue persists. Scrap happens sometimes during manufacturing, if the writer only has journalism experience and no manufacturing experience then they may not have a conceptual understanding of acceptable first pass yield. After all, the TSMC logo features failing parts!

In many ways I agree with you, but the problem statement (constrained/exhausted gas supply from vendor) makes it seems like this was not just line down, but the whole factory stopped for a few hours. Line down is a miserable migrane but still managable... while a whole factory stoppage makes a lobotomy seem like a good idea. It also sounds like there was not enough forewarning to park critical customer wafers in a "safe" stage of the process.

Even so, I also would still call this another monday at a semiconductor factory. Welcome! Here we play a nearly endless game of whack-a-mole. Here's your mallet and your towel. Now whack enough of the moles hard enough until they stop coming back (at least through the same holes). Beware the alpha moles.

By any road, I am surprised to see even this high-level perspective on a quality event disclosed to the mainstream public; I thought this was not standard practice. I enjoyed the read.

Just curious, would a full factory stoppage require recalibration or revalidation of certain equipment? Or is it more like an atmospheric issue that only affects the product.

I'm also curious. Its not like the power went out and machines unsafely shutdown though.

Sorry for the delay friend, I missed your message.

The number of issues that a semiconductor factory stoppage would cause stretches one imagination, worse if you cannot bring the material to a "safe" spot on the line. I will try to capture a few of them, off the top of my head.

As you alluded to, Contamination is the big one. You really need power to keep things clean. But also, the process that runs in the factory is just assumed by default to run all the time, and you optimize the process around that assumption. In a system with thousands of operations (and many suboperations within each operation), the process window is just too small to tolerate much deviance, and the process window is certainly not explored around a hard restart like this. We want to prevent it from running under these conditions at all!

Now for some more details:

- If your fab air handling/pumping system stops, particle counts will explode. This in turn causes killer defects on the process material.

- You also can't keep your tools evacuated at high vacuum / ultra-high vacuum levels (effectively, atomically pure). Pumping down to this level is not trivial and can take weeks of work to restore if the vacuum chamber is badly contaminated. Fab air is much better than the labs I used pumps in, but it is still a big job to keep these chambers pristine.

- Many tools are implicitly dependent on continuous operation and consumption of feedstock and workpieces (often called tool conditioning). For example, Letting a dry etch chamber idle means it will inevitably develop some kind of contamination layer over the previous chamber-wall conditioning layer. This can happen very fast (think ~30 min) even when the tool is idling under ideal conditions, and it often forces process module friends to run "dummy" conditioning wafers to manage the issue. Now imagine what might happen on non-ideal conditions.

- Feedstock / consumables can go bad very fast. There's wet and gaseous feedstocks trapped in the lines of every single tool, and most modules don't characterize what happens to the feedstock quality when the tool is shut down, at all. Related, I remember a story where a lab was having a terrible time replicating what was happening in a foundry due to particle contamination from wet cleans/etch. It turns out that the particulate was coming from the plastic jugs holding the wet chemistry. The root cause turned out to be the fab used that chemistry so much and so fast that the particulate contamination was never a problem, while the lab might have held the half-full jugs for months, causing plastic bits to build up in the chemistry.

- The engineers must prove that their tools/segments works as spec'd post restart. This is exhausting and painstaking work. Bringing tools back up to production in the course of normal operation is already tiresome enough. But you cannot just run critical material and hope for the best! SO now you must spend days validating the entire process line again.

- You can try to shelve / store key material to avert true disaster, but there are critical segments where this is impossible due to reactivity or sensitivity or whatever. You have a finite amount of time to get your material out of those high risk segments, and if the gas supplier only gives you an hour of forewarning, all that material might be totally screwed and there is virtually nothing you can do except cross your fingers. The material would likely be scrapped anyways since the risk is known to be too high to bother processing it further.

- There is also a finite amount of time where the wafers can spend in stores, even if they are pulled off the line in "safe" segments of the process. They will still collect particles, they will oxidize, surface quality will degrade as long as they are not in optimal conditions. Cleans are an option, but you must be sure those cleans do address the specific types of contaimination the wafers collected while in the stocks.

OK, that's what I could immediately think of off the top of my head in the time I have available. Hope that satiates your curiosity for the moment.

> After all, the TSMC logo features failing parts!

I'm not sure about that, I think the blank spaces are just parts that have been picked. The dies have been cut and the good ones are being removed.

Normally a wafer would have die-sized spaces for test structures used for optical, electrical, chemical and other tests. Think the TV test card https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test_card

    > This isn’t very big news.

The opening paragraph feels a bit pearl clutching to me.

    > the company had to scrap thousands of wafers that were in production for clients at the site which include Apple, Nvidia, and AMD.

Eh. So what? I am sure scrap thousands of wafers for all kinds of other reasons. I would be better to know the cost per hour of a total plant shutdown. (Of course, I'm sure the author doesn't have this information.)

    > After all, the TSMC logo features failing parts!

Final hat tip here. I never knew that.

I attended an objectively good public school system in California. There was very little political slant pushed by teachers except a far left slant in my journalism class. Thankfully we had many AP and honors classes which allowed motivated and competent students to thrive. I personally found myself disliking most normal classes because some students seemed unmotivated or incompetent and I didn’t like to be around those types of people. In scouting I met many homeschooled boys who didn’t seem very well socialized but their parents were always affluent, intelligent, mature and stable people who supported their boys. On one occasion a homeschooled kid didn’t want to be so he ran away for a few days and all the parents grilled us for clues as to where he may have gone. He ended up going to public high school with me the last two years and I think he made friends there. Another boy was homeschooled because he never managed to make friends and was quite annoying and quick to anger. He left out scout troop because he failed to adapt to the group and threw a knife at me! In college I met kids who went to ineffective public schools and they were very obviously much less competent than the people in my high school and heavily at a disadvantage. Based on my observations all children raised under homeschool were socially awkward but far more intelligent than the average public school kid. After moving out of state I observed that public schools make a really big difference in outcomes, I found that the people that came out of Portland Public Schools (PPS) were palpably less intelligent and also learned that group exams were sometimes taken! Also there were always needles, homeless camps, public drug use and fires around Portland schools. In these cases I think homeschooling (or groupschooling) would provide better outcomes.

> Wikipedia would do really well for itself if it instead created a set of public high level rules for an open model to follow

This is literally every LLM that quotes Wikipedia.

The value in Wikipedia is it’s curated. A model is the opposite of that.

As for the topic at hand, it seems nobody agrees on what genocide means anymore, few are willing to accept there is legitimate disagreement, everyone has a unique definition they’re loudly committed to, all of which makes the entire debate self obsessed.

I don’t think curation is the answer, if Wikipedia was based off rules and if fundamental articles were dependencies to more complex downstream articles I think people would have more respect the site. Curation invites unintentional omission of information which people may suspect is intentional. If a Wikipedia model first defined rules for a genocide article and then screened events that were suspected to be genocides against the genocide article then a more uniform interpretation of genocide across the entire site would be possible. I think the goal for Wikipedia is to avoid inconsistency, to cover every viewpoint in a topic with rationale and to do so truthfully with associated references.

An issue not brought up is that LLMs are not deterministic enough to follow rules -- it would be nice if we had a perfect robot that could do all these things and then determine rules for it to follow. But it only took prompt tampering with Grok for it to start talking about mechahitler, and I'm pretty sure at least that wasn't entirely planned. Inconsistency is almost to be expected from LLMs.

> if Wikipedia was based off rules and if fundamental articles were dependencies to more complex downstream articles I think people would have more respect the site

These structured sources of truth have been tried. They don’t work. Natural language allows for ambiguity where necessary in a way code does not.

> If a Wikipedia model first defined rules for a genocide article

It would be worthless. Also, futile. You think when the world’s governments can’t agree on what genocide is, a random editorial decision at Wikipedia will control?

> the goal for Wikipedia is to avoid inconsistency

It’s a goal, but certainly not the goal. Truth isn’t a mathematical schema, particularly when it comes to social constructs like genocide.

I don’t think you’re entertaining the idea sufficiently considering you’ve stated that it’s a worthless and futile idea. I think it’s a worthwhile and valuable idea. Rules-derived articles with logical dependencies could hold a mirror to our own biases. I think truth should be logically derived and I don’t want people to be hostile to the outcomes since we’re approaching a future where technology will be able to do this.

> don’t think you’re entertaining the idea sufficiently considering you’ve stated that it’s a worthless and futile idea

It’s useless and futile to this problem.

It could be useful. But as a compliment to Wikipedia. And not in adjudicating something like the definition of genocide.

> should be logically derived

Not really an option for social constructs, which rely on consensus more than logical consistency. You could create LLMs that logically derive an answer from a definition. But that is a semantic punt with extra steps (unless the LLM controls martial forces).

Sure, and one of my co-workers in Palo Alto had his primary residence in Washington State. But at least he rented a studio in the Bay Area for when he was down during the week.

Here, the two bedrooms were added to the police station so the police chief can live there at taxpayer expense, in seeming violation of Millbrae's Code of Ethics for city employees, and without permission or a permit, and in violation of fire code. "The inspector also took a picture of a shelf in the bedroom with what appears to be a half gallon of liquor. That would be a violation of both city and county policy."

Do you really want a police chief to have such disregard for the law, regulations, and policy? I sure don't.

It looks like you skipped these rather important details so you could have an excuse to complain about the Bay Area and promote open carry. In actuality, you are justifying an abuse of power and trust.

I think the bigger story here is that there are many talented people who are drawn to California because of the opportunity but would rather live elsewhere. Some people in tech have the benefit of working from home and can be digital nomads but there are many of us who have to live where we work and often that’s not where we really want to be. If he had the same rights and cost of living as Idahoans do I’m sure he’d he’d live in the Bay Area. I would rather live in Seattle and so would my coworker, I know a very talented engineer who sits across from me who commutes every weekend from Los Angeles to Bellevue because he doesn’t want to live here. My boss is looking for land in Spokane to settle down and another coworker lives in Nevada but commutes to work here and stays in hotels. When I lived in Portland the police and firefighters did nothing about the tents and RVs that caught fire next to where I lived. Having lived in Los Angeles the firefighters here do nothing about tents which become molten plastic fissures in the ground so I think they need to get their priorities straight since they have finite time and resources.

So you think it's appropriate for the chief of police to abuse his power to secretly break the law and regulations because he wants to live in another state during the weekends and have the government pay for his lodging?

And you think the chief of police never unexpectedly needs to be on-site during the weekend, nor needs to inform the Board of Supervisors of his regular weekly absences? (For that matter, does his compensation already include a cost of living adjustment with the expectation he would live in the county?)

I suppose you also think it's appropriate for a bomb squad member to live out-of-state for a job which requires they be able to respond to a bomb threat within one hour?

It really comes across like you have an axe to grind about the Bay Area and being forced to live there, causing you to be an apologist for police officers who break the law and their job obligations.

I think I’ll just being empathetic here, maybe his heart is just in Idaho? If he is the chief if may be within his authority to built out infrastructure within the station. Presumably he can react much faster during weekdays since he’s already in the station and delegate authority during weekends when he’s away and cannot respond quickly. It would be in family for a police department to have redundancy and response plans for his brief absences. Flights from Boise to SF are relatively cheap and short so his commute could even be shorter than if he went snowboarding in Mammoth or backpacking in the nearby Sierra Nevadas over the weekend. Is he required to never vacation so he’s always available on short notice? Maybe we should look at the rules he allegedly broke and see if they need changing?

> If he is the chief if may be within his authority to built out infrastructure within the station.

The article was clear that there was no building permit, it wasn't up to fire code, it violated ethics rules, and more. (Eg, "Millbrae officials tell me Eamonn Allen didn't get permission before installing those mattresses, he didn't get a permit, and that he changed the locks on the building." ... "Chief Allen has to get permits, modify construction, and pass inspection if he wants sleeping quarters there.")

> and response plans for his brief absences

It appears the city manager was not aware of his frequent absences, which is why he filed a complaint to the city attorney. Who is supposed to know these response plans and sign off on them?

> Is he required to never vacation so he’s always available on short notice?

Of course not. Holidays are something to work out with, among other things, your employer. It does not appear that city management knew he was doing this.

> Maybe we should look at the rules he allegedly broke and see if they need changing?

Like having building permits, the requirement for sleeping areas to have fire-resistant walls and a secondary egress, and the ethical prohibitions on using "city owned property for personal need, convenience or profit"?

You are joking if you think all of them should be changed so the police chief - who is supposed to follow and help enforce these rules - doesn't break them in secret because his heart simply isn't into living in Millbrea during the weekends and he doesn't want to pay for a studio apartment or motel room on his 6-digit salary, on top of his mortgage and travel cost for his house in Idaho.

"We need to see was someone living in there permanently?" Canepa said. "These are taxpayer dollars and so we need to make sure that what's taking place in those facilities really is for the good of the taxpayer. That means people aren't living there." - this quote doesn’t follow logically since the chief living in the office may actually be better for response time. This article makes me feel like all critics involved are like crabs in a bucket that are frustrated that someone managed to supercommute. I worry that someone in city government directed the fire inspector to the station as a political move more than in the actual interest of safety! If this guy faces any response to his living situation I would hope he gets the same treatment that those living on the street (whose habitation poses a fire risk to the public and burden to taxpayers) do - support from the community and no repercussions at all.

> since the chief living in the office may actually be better for response time

If only the police chief made that argument first, in public, instead of sneaking around the rules.

> This article makes me feel

That's because you seems like someone who really, really doesn't want to live in the place you work but don't have an option to work remotely.

> as a political move more than in the actual interest of safety

Then the police chief is extremely poor at understanding the rules and how to work within them to effect change.

> I would hope he gets the same treatment that those living on the street ... support from the community and no repercussions at all.

You really are ill-informed. "Millbrae is now the first city in San Mateo County to implement a no-camping ordinance intended to prevent unsheltered homelessness and remove encampments." https://www.smdailyjournal.com/news/local/millbrae-passes-sa...

Ha! "It allows Millbrae to remove personal property and campsite-related items in public spaces with 24-hour notice for individuals. If personal items are removed, they will be stored at the Millbrae Police Bureau for up to 90 days." so technically the police chief could keep his personal items at the station for 90 days, just like homeless people could. But that's not what you meant since homeless people aren't being given free shelter at the police station.

I get it. You don't like California cities. You want to live some place cheap and with guns, while making a good income. Sounds great. But you are letting your emotions make you blind to anything outside of your tunnel vision and gut feelings.

It's strange how people are missing that the Chief of Police broke the law, and bringing up irrelevance like how Boise is nice or he deserves vacations (!?).

Yep, I make many pictures but don’t feel like I need to share them with others. Sometimes I show my girlfriend and sometimes I frame them or put them on my fridge. I actually don’t really want to show strangers my work because I make photographs for myself and I’m not looking for critique because I’m developing my own style and exploring what interests me. I don’t need to prove my photographs are authentic because I know I took them!

Heavy disagree with the point of this article. Their concern is that departures result in institutional memory loss. I think that rapid iteration >> institutional knowledge. Unfortunately NASA is at a point where private companies have to develop hardware independent of NASA and then sell it to NASA because their requirements are too dumb. I wanted to work at NASA/JPL for years but all the people I’ve met there have become paper subject matter experts by making 10 satellites and rovers while people at Nvidia, Apple and SpaceX ship millions of products and get to see hardware fail at scale. From what I have heard, NASA and legacy milaero contractors are where you go to get your new ideas crushed by incumbents. I think science is ripe for disruption where we privatize the process of doing science and publish the process and results publicly. NASA keeps much of their institutional knowledge to themselves from what I have experienced, I work in aerospace, and none of their data is readily available to me. Also, years ago JPL was criticized for significant delays in programs due to their policies. https://spacenews.com/psyche-review-finds-institutional-prob...

Do you really think these cuts are done with the intent of positive effects on the space and earth science enterprise?

The model was that NASA did stuff that was pathfinding, typically in response to science objectives, and that commercial applications would follow. By design, it’s not mass production.

This works for Earth science stuff like land surface monitoring, methane monitoring, land subsidence, groundwater monitoring, sea level rise, etc. NASA developed these remote sensing technologies that have made it into commercial applications.

So there is a synergy between NASA science and commercial space. It does not have to be either/or.

I genuinely believe NASA funding should be reduced to 0% then ramped back up to eliminate the old blood and introduce people with new ideas and ways of thinking. NASA is also incredibly inefficient with their quantity of centers and conflicting specifications. People forget that NASA has been so mismanaged since Apollo that they designed the deadliest spacecraft ever - the Space Shuttle. If there’s a synergy between NASA and industry I don’t know about it and I don’t benefit from it! All the models and theories I use in my daily life were pioneered by IBM, DoW/AF and universities. I can’t actually think of a single model I use that came from NASA. Near-future I see Lunar Gateway as a debacle, distraction and money pit, likewise with SLS. In recent memory incumbent milaero companies flubbed Orion heat shield tiles (NASA could have prevented this if they actually had institutional know of this old technology), Starliner thrusters and SLS solid rocket boosters. They also binned nuclear thermal propulsion.

You could post what you said exactly that got you fired here in this thread.

Got the exact quote and the context?

Some years back, I had a discussion with an older woman who struck a conversation with me innocently enough about weather or something. She turned the topic to politics and volunteered an opinion, her tone and expression indicated to me that she expected me to agree with her statement. I told her that I respectfully disagreed with her and I also told her why. Her expression soured and she told me that because she was a schoolteacher she thought guns should be banned because too many children had been killed by people using guns on them. I agreed with her that it was tragic and that I hoped we could live in a world where kids wouldn’t die from people using guns on them. In my life I want to be rational and honest and I want to listen to people. I listen to people and I hope they listen to me because that’s how ideas are exchanged. I asked her how I myself could avoid becoming the victim of a genocide without guns. I wonder this myself. I’ve read about genocides, the millions of people dead in China, Russia, Germany, Poland, Africa and Gaza too, I’ve also seen rioting and violence firsthand in Los Angeles and Portland and I wonder how I can ensure that my girlfriend and I will be safe now and into the future. I have no solution except for responsible gun ownership. A few years ago our car was stolen in Portland, the police did not help and the 911 phone service was down at the time. The only way I could get the car was to physically go and pick the car up, a car surrounded by criminals, of course I needed a gun to make sure I was safe. I think about natural disasters or occasions where government is unable or unwilling to protect its citizens - how will good people defend themselves against evil people? I’ve seen violence firsthand so many times that I have a visceral reaction to the thought that someone would take my guns away - I simply wouldn’t let it happen because I know if I did then I wouldn’t be able to prevent myself from being killed and dumped in an unmarked mass grave by a 19 year old kid who thinks he’s doing the right thing because of a mandate from a politician, and I wouldn’t be able to stop evil people.

She disagreed, I disagreed with her, she made points I feel were unfair oversimplifications “guns have more rights than women,” but we had a respectful discussion but she didn’t want to talk with me anymore after that. I would’ve talked with her after because I value what people have to say and I want to have discussions. I think we can have discussions but we should never take away the rights of citizens.

This comes across a lot like you're saying that your personal feeling of safety for you and your family is worth more than the actual safety of innocent schoolchildren who are being mass murdered.

I am personally concerned that I may be the victim of genocide, and far more people have died from genocide perpetrated by governments than by school shootings. I’m not trying to be dense, I’m simply saying that history of demonstrated this. I’m also concerned that I will be the victim of violent crime and I’ve also had to defend myself from violent criminals in the past. Have you had any of these experiences? I’m curious to hear your thoughts if you’ve ever feared for your life in this way? Call me selfish, but I personally don’t want to be hurt. Thank you for your response.

You've talked about your feelings a lot, which is the point.

Guns make people feel safe.

They don't actually make you safer.

You're more likely to be killed by your own gun than someone else's.

Realistically, you have no hope of protecting yourself with a gun if you're surrounded by gangbangers with a bunch of guns all pointed at you.

Etc, etc...

The gun debate isn't a debate about facts, it never was. It's a debate about feelings, and scared people won't change their minds unless they stop being scared.

Nobody in America right now is trying to make people feel safe, not in an era where the President of the United States feels it is appropriate to personally attack... anyone for any perceived slight, in public, with verbal violence and in the case of anyone looking even vaguely hispanic, physical violence.

I get where you’re coming from, but I lived in Portland for years where the police were essentially suppressed by the district attorney Eric Schmidt (and other factors that were occurring during this time in Portland and in America). This led to violent criminals essentially controlling the city at night and which lead to unfortunate outcomes for my family. Simultaneously this came at a time where the previous president was threatening my job and livelihood with mandates and I was receiving emails from our national HR that we may lose our jobs if we did not comply. These two events did not make me feel safe for years, I do feel safer with the current president.

Mike Schmidt? I think Eric Schmidt was the CEO of Google.

I have had a gun pointed at me, and I've been where guns have been fired in anger around me.

I'm kind of surprised to hear somebody in America think it's a likely enough thing to happen to be worth the obvious societal cost of the wide spread weapons.

Realistically, if they did come for you, how much use would your weapon be? Do you believe that it would mean the difference between your life and death, or just that you'd feel better going having been able to put up some defence? Several genocides have happened in neighbouring countries from where I live in living memory, and it isn't at all clear that having access to a weapon allowed anybody who was targeted to survive.

The cost in mass shootings (now nearly two per day in the US) is a real cost borne by society at large. Your cost is still only hypothetical, and of unclear value if the worst did happen.

It seems you have been around violence but have concluded differently than I have.

I think that all rights are hypothetical until they are used. People in America have the right to free speech and assembly but depending on your perspective these rights are hypothetical for most people because they don’t use their speech or right to assembly very often or to the fullest extent. In some states, women have the right to have an abortion but many don’t use that right so hypothetically for them it doesn’t have any value. I think with the right to keep and bear arms it’s the same, for a good person defending themselves with a gun this hypothetical right becomes applied and has an immeasurable value to them. I don’t think we should discard any of our rights even if they are rarely used. I don’t think the risk of a genocide or civil war is infinitesimal, I think these sort of events happen often and are guaranteed over a long enough timeline. I think that people who are well armed would be better off in these situations and may even be the people who put something like a genocide to a stop.

You're misinterpreting what I said. I said that your ability to defend yourself and your family with a gun was hypothetical.

I can see that you like to think of yourself as a rational thinker about this, but you're refusing to answer the actual criticism: actual people are being killed every day due to the availability of weapons in your society. There are nearly two mass shootings per day. So far this year that has led to 250 deaths and more than a thousand injuries[1]. These are not hypothetical abstractions, which is all you seem interested in engaging with. These are real people, many of them children, who find themselves victims of gun violence. You are arguing that your feeling of safety is more important than their actual safety. All of your arguments amount to a continuation of your position that you put your own feelings ahead of the actual deaths of people in society around you. This is a very selfish way to engage in your society.

[1] https://edition.cnn.com/us/mass-shootings-fast-facts

I understand your position, it is terrible that adults and children die by the hands of others. Genocides have happened all over the world and have led to tens of millions of people dying. These events aren’t hypothetical they’re historical but happen in big chunks rather than uniformly distributed and frequent but comparatively small events. I would suggest the statistics indicate that a person is likelier to die from a genocide than from a mass shooting by a factor of >100 and that small arms ownership and competence is more helpful rather than harmful since these tools can enable individuals to defend themselves against state actors or violent groups, or by their existence prevent groups with malicious intent from acting out on their genocidal or authoritarian desires. Something I agree with is the FBI’s assessment that people don’t commit crimes if they thinks it’s likely that they’ll be caught. I think that the collective individuals in our government (these United States of America) wouldn’t want to mandate concentration camps or a genocide because of the concentration of citizens with diverse mindsets who would provide feedback through resistance. There are of course other factors like recency bias that come into play.

Rhetorical: What does it say about America that a large portion of its citizens (assuming OPs feelings are not unique) fear being a victim of genocide? Can't say I've met anyone from any other "developed" nation who share the same dread by simply existing as part of their country.

In other words, the sum total of America's values have resulted in a citizenry that lives with existential dread. Maybe those values need a second look?

My thoughts on this is that genocide has been common outside of America in the last ~100 years and that Americans need to act differently than the rest of the world in an effort to keep it from happening here.

IF you are going to be the victim of genocide they will take away your ability to defend yourself first.

This of course plays into the fear US gun advocates have of any attempt to remove their gun rights. If it were to happen though, then maybe as a prepper type with a house and lands in the woods you'd stand a chance against an armed mob that came for you, but certainly not the government. If you're defending your sub-urban house (or even worse flat), I suspect that the gun you have for self defense would make very little difference to the final outcome, but might make you feel a bit better about it.

Did the gun actually make you safer when retrieving your car or did it just make you feel safer? Did having the gun actually solve any problem, or just increase the chances of someone dying over a parked car?

Aren't there other potential ways to fix society from your example of your stolen car other than "we should just arm everyone"? Shouldn't the answer be we should have police actually help these situations and we should do more to reduce the rates of people living lives where they're more likely to steal a car in the first place?

In my case, the criminals physically left because I had a firearm. That week the police response time was anywhere from three hours to three days. This was in Portland, Oregon and our car had been stolen three times before, my girlfriend‘s bike was also stolen and my car was broken into three times, my other car was totaled by a drunk driver without any repercussions. We left Portland shortly after meeting a British person who had been kidnapped and forced to withdraw money from ATMs.

I would love to live in a world where everybody has what they want but we don’t live in that world. That being said there is no excuse for somebody taking something that does not belong to them. I was deeply hurt by these experiences and forever changed in the way that I think and act. I learned that sometimes when I told people about the things that had happened to us, I felt that that person had sympathy for the criminals and no sympathy for me. I learned that it is a fact that police cannot be everywhere, they cannot react instantly, and even if they can react sometimes they won’t for political reasons. I still think of the time where I was sucker punched by some man on the street for no reason which is what initially lead me to purchase a firearm for self-defense. I can’t fix society, but I can protect myself and my loved ones.

There aren't any other solutions that empower the individual. The problem is when the police are underfunded and don't show up, or the judiciary continually lets dangerous individuals out on bail. We should be able to rely on the system, but it's not hard to see why people want firearms when the system fails.

> how will good people defend themselves against evil people

The problem is in people assuming that they are “good”. That’s hubris. The reality is that everyone is equally capable of evil—we’re just looking at taking guns out of the equation so that gun violence becomes highly unlikely.

>I’ve read about genocides, the millions of people dead in China, Russia, Germany, Poland, Africa and Gaza too, I’ve also seen rioting and violence firsthand in Los Angeles and Portland and I wonder how I can ensure that my girlfriend and I will be safe now and into the future. I have no solution except for responsible gun ownership.

No gun will save you during genocide if you are a target. Best case scenario you kill few attackers and die anyway.

An armed person won't stop a genocide, but an armed populace might.

Genocides are not committed solely by governments. An armed and divided populace is just as likely to commit a genocide as they are to stop one. Look at the Rwandan genocide. Look at the mass shootings we have here by white supremacists.

All it takes is an armed populace that stands by while “those people” (their neighbors) are killed by extremists (their other neighbors).