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What’s the deal with single action vs double action handguns? Well, it’s all about the trigger and exactly what happens when it’s pressed. The only thing the trigger of a single action (SA) handgun does is release a cocked hammer to fire the gun. With a double action (DA) handgun, pressing the trigger cocks and releases the hammer. We could leave the explanation there, but as they say in calculus class, it gets complicated. It gets complicated because both revolvers and pistols come as either single or double action, and because within these two distinctions there are variations that require some explaining. So, here is a full breakdown of single action vs double action handguns.

Single Action Revolver

How it Works

The single action revolver is the classic cowboy six-gun, epitomized by the Colt Single Action Army or the Ruger Blackhawk or Single Six. With a single action revolver, the hammer must be manually cocked before the gun can be fired. So, the trigger of a SA revolver has a single function; when pressed, it releases the hammer, allowing the gun to fire. Once you have fired a SA revolver, you must manually re-cock the hammer to shoot it again. If you’ve cocked a SA revolver and decide not to shoot, you can press the trigger while holding the hammer back and manually lower the hammer to a safe, half-cocked position. But you’ll have to cock the hammer again when you decide to shoot.

Single Action Pistol

How it Works

The trigger of a single action pistol works the same as the trigger of a SA revolver. But because the slide of a SA pistol must be manually retracted to load the handgun, and because the slide cycles to the rear after every shot, in both instances it cocks the hammer. So technically, you never really have to cock a SA pistol. But, if at some point you decide to manually lower the hammer, then, just like with a SA revolver, you must re-cock it to shoot it. Because most SA pistols are carried cocked, a manual thumb safety that “locks” the pistol and prevents it from firing, like on the Colt 1911, is generally part of the package. Because some shooters are nervous about carrying a “cocked and locked” pistol, they either avoid SA pistols or carry them with the hammer down, which means they must thumb-cock the pistol before they can shoot it.

Double Action Revolver

How it Works

For many years, double action revolvers like the Smith & Wesson Model 686 were the most popular sidearms for law enforcement. With a DA revolver, you have options, because the trigger has two functions. If the hammer is manually cocked, the DA revolver trigger works just like a SA revolver trigger; when pressed, it releases the hammer. But if a DA revolver is not cocked, you can pull the trigger and it will cock and release the hammer. This makes the double action revolver faster to shoot and better suited to law enforcement or for self-defense. Also, just like with a SA revolver, you can manually lower the hammer on a DA revolver after it has been cocked.

Double Action Pistol

How It Works

If a DA pistol is not cocked, a single trigger press will cock and release the hammer. You can manually cock a DA pistol for the first shot, but after a DA pistol has been fired, the pistol’s slide cycles and cocks the hammer for you. Many DA pistols have a de-cocker, a lever that un-cocks the hammer allowing it to safely fall and return the pistol to double action mode. The difficulty with managing DA pistols is that the first trigger press is long and hard because it has to cock and release the hammer, subsequent trigger presses are lighter and crisper because after the first shot the hammer remains cocked. Also, with some DA pistols, if the cartridge fails to fire, you can pull the trigger and try to fire that same cartridge again.

Double Action Only Revolver

How It Works

Complicating the single action vs double action conversation are double action only handguns. They are a little different—but only a little. Let’s start with DAO revolvers. The only difference in a double action only (DOA) revolver and a DA revolver is that the hammer cannot be manually cocked because it has no “cocked” notch, because it’s been bobbed, or because it’s shrouded or concealed. A bobbed, shrouded, or concealed hammer is less likely to catch on clothing during the draw stroke, and that’s really the only advantage a DAO revolver offers. The inability to cock the hammer on a DAO revolver circumvents the lighter trigger action associated with firing a revolver in the SA mode, and some believe this makes DAO revolvers safer. The truth is, it’s well-trained humans that make guns safe.

Double Action Only Pistol (DAO)

How It Works

The trigger of a DAO pistol it cocks and releases the hammer—every time—and since there’s no “cocked” notch on the hammer you cannot manually cock it. After you fire a DAO pistol, the slide recoils and pushes the hammer back, but as the slide goes forward, the hammer follows it to a “safe” un-cocked position. Like some DA pistols, most DAO pistols have re-strike capability. If the cartridge in the chamber does not fire you can pull the trigger for another attempt. It’s debatable if this is an advantage or a drawback. In most cases if a cartridge fails to fire, it will not fire in subsequent attempts and that can waste time. A better approach is to get the dud out of the gun as quickly as possible. As with DA pistols, DAO pistols have been largely replaced by striker-fired pistols.

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What does the US Supreme Court’s ruling against affirmative action in college admissions have in common with proposals for eliminating the “racial wealth gap”? Neither will have any impact whatsoever on the lives and material circumstances of the vast majority of Black Americans. It’s little wonder, then, that the group that cares most passionately about both is the upper middle class. Why do they care so much? Because neither is even supposed to have any impact on the lives and material circumstances of the vast majority of Black Americans. Wealth and income differentiation have increased greatly among Black Americans since 1967, when the percentage earning the equivalent of $150,000 a year or more was negligible. By 2018, 7 percent of Black Americans earned more than $150,000. Similarly, more than three-quarters of so-called Black wealth is held by the richest 10 percent of Black people. Over the course of a half-century of widening national inequality, the goal of affirmative action has not been to combat that inequality but to diversify its beneficiaries.

For that reason, I was reluctant to write about the Supreme Court decisions in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. University of North Carolina and have not followed the cases closely. I’ve long supported affirmative action, even as I’ve long understood that its interventions might produce only narrow forms of egalitarianism. At its core, affirmative action is a technique in the implementation of antidiscrimination law, based on an understanding that overt prejudice is too limited a standard for identifying redressable discrimination.

It was a recognition of that limitation that underlay early notions of institutional racism. Affirmative action was not, historically, a product of Black activists operating in their own interests. The term first appeared in a provision of the 1935 National Labor Relations Act that directed employers to redress discrimination against union organizers. President John F. Kennedy echoed the terminology in Executive Order 10925, issued in 1961, which required government contractors to “take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin.” President Lyndon B. Johnson used the same language in Executive Order 11246, on Equal Employment Opportunity enforcement, issued in 1965, and had articulated the notion more extensively three months earlier in his Howard University commencement address. The sociologist Frank Dobbin has examined affirmative action’s roots in the private sector, as well, tracing its growth as a pragmatic policy in corporate human resources departments, rather than as the spread of radical egalitarian social theories.

It is the right that is responsible for much of the attempt to elevate affirmative action to the level of high moral principle, like so many of its bogus misdirection campaigns. Ideologues have denounced affirmative action with a lofty rhetoric of “colorblind ideals” or “merit,” shifting attention away from the prosaic fact that it is a technique of antidiscrimination enforcement. Anti-egalitarians have a long history of concocting formalist “principles,” whether by advocacy or denunciation, to perfume their ugly and ultimately anti-popular political agendas.

This was at play during the good cop/bad cop choreography that Southern elected officials crafted in their campaign of “Massive Resistance” to the Brown v. Board of Education decision that outlawed school segregation. The good cops contended that they were not so much opposed to desegregation as they were concerned with defending the hallowed principle of “states’ rights.” I still recall North Carolina Senator Sam Ervin passionately playing the good-cop role, styling himself as a constitutional “strict constructionist,” which later became the basis for his rise to folk-hero status as a “country lawyer” protector of the Constitution during the Watergate hearings—not to mention his 1977 American Express commercial.

In the years since its implementation, affirmative action has been a useful instrument in the enforcement of antidiscrimination law. In the 1970s, it significantly informed efforts to open access for nonwhites and women in occupations and job categories—notably in police departments, fire departments, and air traffic control, in part because all are in the public sector—from which those groups had previously been largely excluded. Perhaps its most important victory came in the Supreme Court’s 1971 Griggs v. Duke Power ruling, which mandated that only tests related to genuine job performance can be used to screen job applicants. (Those who have plowed through Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s odious racist tract The Bell Curve will recall that Griggs was its main practical target.) As Dobbin shows in his book Inventing Equal Opportunity, the greatest evidence of affirmative action’s success is its routine incorporation into human resources management practices. That success also underscores its key limitation.

As an instrument of antidiscrimination enforcement, affirmative action is not equipped to address broader economic inequality, which has steadily intensified throughout American society since the 1970s across race, gender, and sexual orientation. The court’s 1978 ruling in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke shifted affirmative action’s justification from combating inequality to the pursuit of “diversity.” This provided a workaround to address the complaint that affirmative action constituted “reverse discrimination,” but an unintended effect was to obscure its inadequacy as a remedy to rising poverty and the increasing concentration of wealth.

Equal opportunity in a diverse society is an unobjectionable ideal. However, within a regime of ever greater economic polarization, in the absence of a vigorous commitment to egalitarian economic redistribution, the pursuit of equal opportunity has come to center on facilitating access to the upper reaches of wealth, status, and power for individuals held to embody previously underrepresented groups. Technically, this is as defensible a standard of equality as any other. In practice, however, it depends on a mystified, essentialist understanding of the relation between individual and nominal group: That Kamala Harris is vice president does little for any Black woman not named Kamala Harris. Diversifying the upper class can be an ideal only for a “left” that is totally embedded within neoliberalism. It’s the sleight of hand that Barbara and Karen Fields call “racecraft,” which permits the presumption that benefits conferred on upper-­status people of color will trickle down to all the rest. And that presumption, by the way, is the quintessence of racism.

• Cisco CEO surprised analysts by mentioning it had already sold half a billion dollars of AI gear.
• Cisco is trying to woo cloud companies away from offerings by Nvidia.
• One analyst says it's a promising start on a potentially huge new market.

Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins dropped a bit of a bombshell during its earnings conference call Wednesday. That's when he told analysts the company had already sold over $500 million worth of equipment to the largest cloud computing companies for their AI needs.

The cloud companies (or hyperscalers as the tech world calls them) are buying from Cisco because they are experimenting with using Ethernet — the networking technology that Cisco is known for — for their AI needs instead of Infiniband. Infiniband is the high-speed networking technology more typically used by data centers, a market cornered by Nvidia when it bought leader Mellanox Technologies in a $6.9 billion in 2019.

So Cisco, along with AMD, Arista, Broadcom, HPE, Intel, Meta and Microsoft, formed a technology coalition last month called the Ultra Ethernet Consortium to work on making Ethernet twice as fast as the fastest 400 gigabits speeds available today, and tweaking the tech to better handle AI.

"To date, we have taken orders for over half a billion dollars for AI Ethernet fabrics. We are also piloting 800 gig capabilities for AI training fabrics," Robbins said.

True, half a billion is an insignificant amount of revenue for Cisco, which reported a record $57 billion in sales for its fiscal year 2023 on Wednesday and $3.07 earnings per share.

But Robbins says this new AI cloud market will be triple or more the size of the original and, this time, he plans to make sure Cisco gets its share.

"This would probably be three to four times the opportunity size of the original cloud build out. And, you know, unfortunately for us, as it's been well documented, we missed the original cloud build out," Robbins said.

He's referring to how cloud companies that run huge data centers like Google and Facebook built their own data center networking tech or chose data center certified like Arista Networks.

"But I can say with every bit of confidence right now that as we go through this AI transition to Ethernet we are super well positioned," he said adding that "we now are installed in 21 use cases across the top six of these providers. And we expect that that momentum will just continue over the next few years."

Morgan Stanley analyst Meta Marshall is intrigued but cautiously skeptical. In a post-earnings research note, she pointed out that there's "an intense investor focus" on companies positioned for the AI infrastructure build-out and Cisco's investors want to hear its AI story. After all, at about a $225 billion market cap, Cisco's valuation is one-quarter's of Nvidia's $1 trillion.

While the $500 million sold so far is currently "small in terms of revenue, growing relevancy within this customer base is important, particularly given scale of opportunity," she wrote. "While we still think Cisco has smaller share within these hyperscalers, increasing penetration is a positive."

Are you Cisco employee with insight to share? Reach Julie Bort through email, jbort@insider.com, encrypted chat app Signal at 970-430-6112 or DM on Twitter @julie188 using a non-work device.

Cisco Systems' (CSCO) fiscal fourth quarter results beat analyst estimates. The company reported adjusted earnings of $1.14 per share versus a $1.06 estimate, while revenue of $15.20 billion was better than the expected $15.05 billion. The tech giant's first quarter earnings forecast was also better than Wall Street anticipated. Yahoo Finance Live breaks down the report.

Video Transcript

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- All right, Akiko. Let's take a look at Cisco. The stock under a bit of pressure here following its most recent earnings release. And taking a look at the numbers, they actually beat on both the top and bottom line for their fiscal fourth quarter here. When you take a look at revenue coming in at $15.2 billion, the estimate was for $15.05 billion adjusted EPS of $1.14. The estimate was for $1.06.

Going back to that sales number, they're breaking down a little bit further into their businesses services revenue, coming in line with expectations at $3.55 billion product revenue. Beating here to the top side, $ 11.65 billion. The estimate was for 11.47 billion.

Taking a look at some of their guidance numbers here, Cisco sees full-year adjusted EPS of $4.01 to $4.08, which was pretty much in line with what the street was looking for consensus there. Was for $4.04, this is for full year 2024. When you take a look at the Q1 expectations, revenues is expected to come in $14.50 billion to $14.7 billion.

That was slightly higher than what the Street was looking for at $14.57 billion a year. Yet we're looking at the stock under a bit of pressure and the focal point here is obviously Cisco, a good gauge, as just how much companies are still spending on IT.

There was some speculation going into this report that maybe we could see a weak report because of how companies-- they're either not spending as much or reallocating some of that spend towards AI. But at least when you look at the top and bottom line numbers for this most recent report and also their Q1 guidance, it looks pretty decent. Yet the stock under a bit of pressure

- Yeah, down about 1.3% right now.