Not to be a stereotypically insufferable Stallman style neckbeard about it, but the only two objectively correct answers to this question are FreeCAD for mechanical parametric things, and Blender for organic shapes or decorative models. (You can also bully Blender into doing parametric CAD work with plugins. And I guess OpenSCAD also counts, if you would rather program your models rather than model your models.)

All of the other available commercial options are some combination of:

• Proprietary vendor lock-in bullshit
• Subscription model “software as a service” perpetual money sinks
• Always online cloud services that either steal your models/make them available to anyone/probably also report you to the Feds
• Loaded with quasi-legal licensing restrictions that prevent you from distributing or selling your own creations made with it

Or for extra bonus points, all of the above!

FreeCAD isn’t exactly slick and it has a rather precipitous learning curve, but it’s also basically the only viable truly free option that won’t spy on you, steal your stuff, or turn you upside down and shake you for money on a monthly basis.

Bear Grylls also licensed his name to a series of exceedingly shitty knives manufactured by Gerber. He’s off my Christmas card list forever.

Sure, but I’m fascinated by these being assembled in Prague and… Delaware? Really, of all places.

Delaware’s only other possible claim to fame is evidently having the same surface area as Reason’s radiator in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash.

You separate out the isotopes. You don’t create U-235, but rather you extract the fissile isotope from your sample. There’s only a limited amount of the stuff in the world and the majority of uranium still buried (and in fact, the majority of it at all) is non-fissile U-238. Only something like 0.7% of the uranium in the world is U-235.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enriched_uranium

I suspect this is highly dependent on the level of enrichment of said uranium.

Even buying it piecemeal in dinkum quantities from scientific suppliers as a private customer, I’m seeing depleted uranium — i.e., 99.9% U238 and not realistically fissile material — priced at $32.50 per gram online. 2 kilos of that would thus be $65,000. Although I’ll be damned if I know just what the hell you’d do with the stuff.

I reckon weapons grade would run you just a smidgen more than that.

Correct on that count. The whole thing is now just a boy-who-cried-wolf situation.

That’s not why. It’s because it’s cheaper for a manufacturer of your widget to just slap a Prop 65 label on anything and everything out of an overabundance of caution rather than go through all the testing and certification required to verify if there is or isn’t any such material in the product. There’s no penalty for false positives, so to remain “complaint” suddenly every manufactured good on Earth suddenly sprouted the warning.

It’s already a truck.

Sandbags are remarkably effective at stopping small arms fire, at least as long as you can keep the sand in them. If you only stacked up the back wall of the truck right in front of the door and optionally if you only did it to waist height (you’d have to lie down behind them) it would absolutely work.

A typical hardware store sandbag is 60 or 80 pounds, and to stack up to a height of, say, four feet you’d probably need around 3200 pounds worth of them or so (40 bags) based on some rough back of the envelope math and hazy recollection of the approximate size of an 80 lb bag of sand. That may exceed the recommended load weight of your small box truck per the rental agreement paperwork or whatever the hell, but I don’t think in reality that would cause even a small U-Haul truck to struggle much.

Doing all four walls of the rear of the truck would probably take an inordinate amount of sand and wouldn’t be too viable.

Really, just pile up a layer of sandbags or whatever against the back door and you would be quite good to go.

Qualified immunity does not and never has protected anyone in law enforcement from arrest or prosecution for committing a crime. It protects law enforcement personnel from being sued over damages they cause during the course of their duties, provided that the execution of said duties did not violate anyone’s constitutional rights.

Don’t forget we have to do the Eugenics Wars first as well…

Did somebody say Bell riots? I thought I heard Bell riots.

Well, I see Trump doesn’t understand where the apostrophe goes. I can’t say as I’m too surprised, really.

Our cities are fine, they’re just governed by shitheads. It’s the spaces in between that are the hurdle.

Many folks don’t realize because the common usage doesn’t work that way, and to muddy the waters further the laws are written in many jurisdictions such that “assault” is used as a legal term of art which requires some manner of physical contact between the perpetrator and victim. DC specifically treats assault and threats of bodily harm separately, (source) but the penalties are the same and in fact refer to the same paragraph anyhow, so the net difference in this case is kind of moot.

In some jurisdictions there is no such thing as “battery,” and assault is the attack while threatening is the threat. This may or may not have something to do with dumbing down the wording at some point for the layman. I’m not a lawyer despite the occasional insinuation to the contrary, so I’m not qualified to speak on that possibility.

The Qidi Q2 has built-in spaghetti detection (and print failure detection in general), auto leveling, bed mesh compensation, etc. It’s not a print farm machine, though, so how you’ll get your parts off the bed and into your finished bucket will require some outboard tools and elbow grease. If its mechanicals are anything like my prior X-Max 3 from them I don’t predict it will require any adjustment, maintenance, or parts replacement for many hundreds/thousands of hours of runtime. I guess eventually you’ll need a nozzle at minimum, and you might want to lubricate the linear guides on the gantries every now and again.

It’s also compatible with their “Qidi box” filament changer doohickey if that sort of thing is important to you.

These days this is true of many other brands as well. The early days of your printer showing up as a kit full of bits and requiring you to spend as much time wrenching on it as using it are gone, unless you deliberately go and seek something like that out.

Qidi, Anycubic, Prusa, Creatality, and probably tons of others I can’t think of off the top of my head also make machines that are unbox-and-use.

That sounds like something a king would try to do. Just saying.

Doubt it. Some talking heads on Fox would simply be instructed to parrot some bullshit about “the protestors started it” and their base would lap it up. These are the same idiots who just take it at face value when El Presidente claims that Portland is “burning to the ground” even though it’s trivially easy for anyone with an internet connection to determine that this is bullshit.

A lie like that would just confirm the beliefs that these bozos already have, the fact that it’s totally divorced from reality notwithstanding. Pure confirmation bias.

Remember that a huge swath of not-coincidentally Republican rednecks wholeheartedly believe that the North fired the first shot of the Civil War even though this is manifestly false.

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