gattsuru
22hr ago
To be fair, Anthony is fundraising on GiveSendGo, the same place Rittenhouse eventually got shoved to. To be less naive, I'll notice that GiveSendGo has not lost credit card processors for it (nor for the Luigi fandom), nor has a Harvard-backed organization hacked into GSG and doxxed contributors such that any have been fired.
gattsuru
2d ago
Depends on whether brightness or fine detail are more important. I'd probably go with the fine detail option, with what you're saying.
Regardless of what you buy, most are going to be somewhere around 2-5 lumen/LED. You don't have to beat the sun to be visible, but as a comparison most floodlights run around 1200 lumens, and automotive turn signals around 500-900 lumens.
None of them will be visibly bright under full sunlight (compare automotive high-beams at 3200 lumens), and I don't think it'd be practical for any clothing you'd want to wear. I'd expect a good quality thin diffuser will at least change color or perceived shade under a 144LED/m WS2815 setup (napkin math says ~500 lumen/meter post-diffuser) under normal outdoor conditions, but it will be subtle regardless of what LED strip you go with. And if you're wanting that sort of sophisticated animation, being able to control individual squares rather than long strips seems likely to be a bigger benefit compared to just adding additional parallel strips.
(imo, even 'normal' LED strips you won't want full brightness at night.)
There are premanufactured flexible 'sheets' of WS2815s that may be easier to work with for something like a vest, if they have enough density and brightness for your task.
gattsuru
2d ago
NeoPixels (WS28xx), DotStar (APA102/SK6812/SK9822), and most circuit-on-board designs do their own current control for each (zone of) LED -- the only real challenges for implementation are making sure you don't have too much voltage drop (because current control can't adjust for input voltage below the forward voltage drop), and if so just running additional power connections to the middle of the strip. They're not great for room lighting because of the color quality, though, even the RGBW variants, and diffusers only help so much. They're designed for constant voltage drivers; using a constant current power supply can cause problems ranging from comm issues to drastically reduced lifespan.
Cheap RGB lighting strips will almost universally do the series+resistor thing, as will even some decent single-color room lighting. Constant-current drivers and LED strips built for them exist, but you're usually stuck with very specific lengths of LED strip as a result; unless you really need the extra brightness uniformity, I dunno that I can really recommend any.
If you're trying to work with battery voltage to a non-current-controlled output, I really recommend a buck-boost-buck voltage stabilizer. You can get 12v ones for small or mid-sized applications that will handle the full voltage range you want to run a lead-acid battery down to, and are good on output within about 5%. Only downside is that they don't like starting in <-10F cold temperatures.
There's a lot of good information on the WLED discussion boards (and, unfortunately, Discord). If you want to skip the programming side, WLED as a program is also pretty strong, if not necessarily well-documented.
Most of the NeoPixel/DotStar (or simple one-channel RGB 'mood lighting') strips intended for direct Arduino use will cap out around 60 mA per LED, simply because that's the cheapest and easiest configuration for the chips. Adafruit has some ultrabrights, but they're a nightmare of a form factor and probably too bright for what you're doing, even in the day. If you're willing to print out your own circuit boards, getting big LEDs onto a WS2814 chip is an option, but soldering the big heatsinks those LEDs come with onto a flexpcb is not an easy task, even with specialized tools.
Unless you're willing to deal with individual heatsinks on the ribbon, the easy tradeoff is just going with more LEDs in a smaller form factor. You can get individually-addressable ones up to 120LED/m this will have almost four times the brightness of a 30LED/m cheapo strip, along with better resolution. The WS2814s or APA102s are usually going to be the brightest in a given form factor. Going to higher voltages won't get you that much extra brightness, but it will have an impact and drastically simplify the wiring for even moderately-sized runs due to voltage drop issues, so 24v is probably the easiest to do with a 'normal' setup. This does significantly complicate the driver board, though.
Circuit-on-board options would be even brighter, but they're generally not going to have as high a resolution, and a lot of COB boards can only address 'zones' of multiple LEDs (sometimes over an inch per zone, which is how these COB strips advertise such high LED/m values). That said, do look closely at any purchase option; even 'standard' neopixel strips on are often zone-based (cfe here at 120LED/m and 20 zones/m, or here at 896 LED/m and only 16 zone/m). Low zone density will usually result in lower brightness when compared to a (admittedly often theoretical) strip of the same LED density.
Depending on the complexity of your intended LED patterns, this may or may not be an acceptable tradeoff.
WS2815s are always going to avoid zones and can be found in much higher density, but they're individually much less bright (at the benefit of being much more power-efficient) and only go up to 12v, along with having higher passive power draw. If you need a lot of detail and don't want to have to fuck with 24v power, the 300+LED/m strips might be worth looking at. I'd still recommend grabbing a sample unit and making sure it's bright enough.
gattsuru
3d ago
It's a technically fantastic film, and I was impressed the one time I watched it. But I don't want to watch it again.
It's a great film, and I can understand why it might rank among people's favorites. It's just (intentionally!) not an enjoyable film. If it's something someone should watch, it's better that they find it on their own.
gattsuru
4d ago
At least in my shop, the workflow has been to generate a spreadsheet with alphabetized dependencies, marked by version and environment, across all projects, and leads review them once a month. Yes, for internal development this is all stuff that's getting looked over anyway during normal PRs, but a second set of review's not always a bad thing. For external tools, or dependency-of-dependency issues, or where an old library is getting increasingly out-of-date, it can be a first impression matter, and that has highlighted some concerns or vulnerabilities that weren't visible without delving deep into log files.
((That said, b/c we have some python situations, it's also had 'semver, damn near killed him' sorta problems where a 'bugfix' update also broke everything subtly. And a larger number of cases where 'this second library looks like a typo of the first library' that was just QT being QT.))
I've been trying to figure out a way to automate date-of-update fields for at least some of those dependencies, but it's ... been kinda a pain in the ass. I dunno if commercial SBOM tools do that. Most of the ones I've looked at only advertise highlighting 'known risk' versions and 'known good' ones, which I'm less a fan of. It's not fun and it's not hugely effective even at small scales -- I can't really do much more than google a lot of dependencies for server tools, since we're a pretty small shop and that's far out of my field of experience -- but it's not just box-checking either.
gattsuru
5d ago
Federal law generally prohibits the purchase of firearms from (a resident of) a state other than the state of residence. While there are some states with 'neighbor' carveouts, but to quote the ATF's website:
New Jersey's state law closes off that exception as a category:
Yes, Nybbler could theoretically leave the entire state and establish residency elsewhere. I'm skeptical this is the sort of requirement we'd accept for any other right.
And while it is possible he misspoke, there is no magical way I can know this.
That's fair had he mispoke, but you could also try to do a Google.
gattsuru
6d ago
New Jersey's "shall issue" purchase permit requires anyone who wants to buy a gun to submit the names of two adults, who have known the applicant for three years, and will vouch for that person. While the statute itself only requires those adults to be unrelated for carry permits and does not require those adults to be NJ residents, many jurisdictions will reject purchase permit requests not matching these 'rules' (sometimes as explicit policy). This is not a trivial ask for a large portion of people working in New Jersey, given that the state has gone out of its way to smother gun culture and slaughter the hostages; if you don't work in police or military sectors, you may not have any gun-friendly people among your coworkers or neighbors.
If you've ever seen a mental health professional, you're required to provide their contact information. Don't know it, or a shrink you saw twenty years ago happen to be antigun? Gfl. This includes not just involuntary commitment -- the recent A4769 explicitly prohibits purchase permits for anyone who's ever had a "voluntary commitment", and the permit form itself now asks if applicants have ever "attended, treated or observed by any doctor or psychiatrist or at any hospital or mental institution".
In all cases, failure to provide accurate information has been used to reject later applications with correct info, even where a genuine mistake occurred. There's a still-used "To any person where the issuance would not be in the interest of the public health, safety or welfare because the person is found to be lacking the essential character of temperament necessary to be entrusted with a firearm" prong that many jurisdictions have been throwing for pretty much whatever reason they want.
All of these things are readily discoverable through a quick google search. And The_Nybbler has mentioned most of them here, in ways that can be discovered by doing an author:the_nybbler "new jersey" search. Instead, you've thrown allegations of a felony or domestic violence condition, and pointed to a survey run by an explicitly antigun policy outfit, which gets numbers that are wildly out of line with every other analysis and the state's own estimates.
Similarly, New Jersey's response to Breun's explicit text that :
But expanding the category of “sensitive places” simply to all places of public congregation that are not isolated from law enforcement defines the category of “sensitive places” far too broadly. Respondents’ argument would in effect exempt cities from the Second Amendment and would eviscerate the general right to publicly carry arms for self-defense that we discuss in detail below. See Part III–B, infra. Put simply, there is no historical basis for New York to effectively declare the island of Manhattan a “sensitive place” simply because it is crowded and protected generally by the New York City Police Department.
hasn't been quite as bad a tantrum as Hawaii declaring multiple islands a sensitive place, but it's pretty close.
There are a few challenges to these laws pending, but they have threefold problems:
- It takes the better part of a decade and hundreds of thousands of dollars to bring a lawsuit with even a chance of success, in the ideal situations. There's places doing it, like ANJRPC, but there aren't many, they can't fund every case, and for a variety of reasons they have to very selective about what cases they do bring.
- SCOTUS has been overwhelmingly willing to let these cases percolate, even where defiance of the upper court ruling is pretty explicit.
- It's very easy to moot specific as-applied challenges, without making large-scale changes to the law or its application. That's especially true for carry permits, but courts have bucked normal proceedural rules to find cases with even live monetary damages moot.
And that's ignoring the 'special cases' bullshit, like Koons taking seventeen months (and counting) from oral args before a decision was released, or Bianchi having a judge sit on a dissent long enough to have a separate case she was also sitting on conflict with it to block the majority of judges from publishing an opinion.
gattsuru
6d ago
XPlane or Prepar3d are better as instrument trainers, but you can still get MSFS to the point where it can be blessed for BATD purposes (effectively, can clock a limited number of hours on it as a pilot). The biggest worry I'd have is that they are still buttons; even high-end yokes tend to be horribly unrealistic when it comes to physical feel, and many parts don't really have good physical equivalents even if you're willing to pay an arm, leg, and first-born child.
In normal conditions a pilot only really has to manage the aircraft in the sense of a checklist, where there's literally very exact steps involved for procedure at every point in the process, but high crosswinds, bad visibility, (very) low fuel levels, equipment failures/non-ops on aircraft or ground, or particularly annoying airports can make that less true. In those situations, being able to identify the feel of different types of whole-aircraft movement go, or knowing how to count off time properly in your head under stress, or how to handle procedures that aren't covered in flight simulator work could be more relevant.
Critical voices certainly did exist, but they didn't get much national spotlight.
It is kinda interesting that the two examples you brought up don't actually mention the conditions that brought serious controversy (eg Kelsey's family separation, 'kids in cages' conditions) during the Obama presidency. Instead, the objection is just that he wasn't maximally dgaf about illegal immigration, or to an extent wasn't able to be maximally dgaf because of legal restriction.
On this, I can confidently say there were, in fact, people on the left who noticed the lack of improvements under Biden- indeed, I was one of them.
A claim presented without evidence can be dismissed... well, I'm not going to say as readily, because I'd like higher standards of discourse, here, but I'll again point to all the people who didn't complain even as things got -- often dramatically! -- worse have names or at least nom de plumes present before this week.
Unfortunately, since the Biden administration spent most of its existence being attacked relentlessly from the right (and towards the end, even from the center and even from some leftists!) about the perceived border crisis, and calls for harsher crackdowns on immigrants polled pretty well, it was, unfortunately, a pretty foregone conclusion that the Biden administration wasn't going to try and improve those conditions...
'It wouldn't have worked' is not a good argument, any more than it would have been a reasonable cause for me to duck out here.
I very much do not grant this! ... Especially since, frankly, conservative anti-lockdown hysterics at least as good as they got, if not more. Certainly, where I live, "lockdown measures" were a total joke due to Republican-lead efforts to fight the lockdowns.
I was (and to a lesser extent remain) a COVID hawk, if a bit more libertarian-minded a one ('changing hearts and minds' rather than arresting people has a lot to commend it!). Whether COVID measures were or were not 'right' is an entirely different question than what you're running into here.
If we're supposed to care about process, it matter if the Biden administration paid attention to the process. It matters if the Biden admin told the Supreme Court, while trying to maintain a stay of a lower court decision holding a policy unlawful, said that they wouldn't extend the policy, and then just remade the same one with the serial numbers filed off. Left-leaning people here actually believed it (or at least pretended). It matters if Newsom gets to cancel Easter one year, get slapped down by SCOTUS for putting much heavier restrictions on religious organizations than bike shops, does the exact same thing a second year, gets slapped down a second time, and instead comes back with the same policy with the serial numbers filed off. In many other cases, state or federal regulations were pushed at length and then gamed through mootness so that they could not be challenged at all, either by revising the policy trivially faster than courts could react, or requiring behaviors in time periods that made judicial redreasability impossible.
Yeah, it'd suck if sometimes process leads to less-than-perfectly-ideal results! But that's what principles are; if they never cost you anything, they're just convenient slogans. Not least of all because no small number of your political opponents have different ideas of what those ideal results are!
It's not like COVID is alone, here; if you really want to draw some one-off exception to just that, I can give similar lists for (and, indeed, the "just arrest everyone" example above is unrelated to COVID!). The Saga of Defense Distributed likewise turns on 'oh, this settlement the federal government signed? Doesn't count, now'.
gattsuru
7d ago
The sort of situation the underlies Oncale-style scenarios -- long on-site deployments in grungy conditions with little or restricted access to non-company facilities -- is rare, but does still exist. Some of those fields are historically male-dominated, like oil field work in Oncale's case, but whether that's -dominated in the sense of near-zero remainder or just a lean varies. Restroom access tends to be far more common and serious a problem (and there's reasons for Ally's Law, for a non-trans context), though.
Yes, it's possible to leave your job (and sometimes career), or to some limited extent just suffer through it (the trans woman coworker I've mentioned before did Have To Negotiate re: restrooms, but just ducked the hotel room and shower questions, sometimes at pretty significant costs), but that's 'voluntary organization' in only slightly more of a sense than public schools are 'voluntary' where home-schooling or moving is an option.
Moreover, the line between public-commanded and voluntary private organizations gets fuzzy, in the modern day. The government does, actually, put rules about the spacing of toilets and showers in your private member-only org. At best, this turns into a trans-equivalent of what the New York vampire rule was trying to do to gunnies; it might be theoretically possible to comply with the law and carry a firearm/use a gym shower as a post-op trans person matching your presentation, but in practice actually doing so, and even a business trying to work with you might not be capable of actually doing so in a way you could trust. More often, it invites restrictions on those private orgs that don't cooperate.
There's a fair criticism that the trans movement is a good part of why that's the case. I agree this would be a more compelling argument had activists spent the last ten years trying to win hearts and minds, rather than argue for Bostock maximalism-and-then-some or obfuscate even the most egregious abuses of their proposed alternative policies when the shave-my-balls guy starts trolling random beauty salons.
((Though in turn, there's a counterargument that this policies impact otherwise normal people, not just activists, and for every Andrea James there's a few dozen non-trans trans activists that are aggressive nutjobs.))
But regardless, it's worth keeping clear eyes on what the ramifications of a policy actually involve.
gattsuru
8d ago
What's the terrain and the path look like? If it's paved or nearly-flat hard clay, you can get away with pretty cheap caster wheel like those used for tool carts, which have the advantages of being trivial to install and swiveling. If it's muddy or sufficiently uneven, then you're going to want hefty pneumatic wheels -- either wheelbarrow, or hand cart -- though I'll caution that they're a lot more sensitive to alignment. If it's gravelly or sandy or if this isn't going to get used often, they do make 6+ inch hard rubber tires that aren't fun to work with, but are a lot more resistant to sliding due to underinflation, or to being punctured.
gattsuru
8d ago
The trouble with this claim...
((well, the broader trouble. Specifically for Abrego Garcia, the man had a 2019 hearing at which he had an opportunity to demonstrate that he was a US citizen or lawful resident; this specific case clearly can't happen to citizens.))
... is that there's a surfeit of lurkers with absolutely no history on the topic always pouring out of the walls, and a deficit of actual principled people. The punchline to this post is that Kelsey Piper suddenly became quite outspoken on immigration policy literally the day of the inauguration, after literally years of ducking it as someone else's field.
I can make the argument that playing stupid games with legal technicalities is bad because I've done so for years, and I've called balls and strikes whether on 'my' team or against it. It's important enough that even as I don't have much time to do online stuff in general right now, I'm writing this, here.
Do you? Fine, you're a brand new poster, you're probably not going to write a ton of top-level posts given this. Do you have any examples of Democratic-friendly figureheads writers who actually were horrified, during the actual Obama presidency, about those terrible conditions? Anyone who looked into the conditions encouraged by Biden-era rules and noticed what the results were, on your side?
Okay, immigration is not a field everyone spends all way writing about. Do you have any examples of any Principled Worried Person who panicked that COVID gamesmanship about religious services or with visas would Possibly Hurt People Who Count? That a state governor said "just arrest everyone"? Anything?
There's a fun philosophical distinction between whether someone 'really' does something because of their internal state, or because of what they do. I don't particularly care. If I can't tell the difference from outside between Kelsey and The People Who Really Care, it's not something that can change how I have to model your behavior, if Really Caring doesn't modify your behavior.
gattsuru
13d ago
Before reading:
Having read:
gattsuru
15d ago
[cw: probably implied tmi]
I don't understand why rimming/being rimmed would be appealing at all outside of dom/sub dynamics but it also appears too often to just be coincidence.
In straight porn, it's much more likely to be dom/sub or degradation stuff, especially straight not-pegging stuff, but that sells it a bit short. For the gays, a lot of it's psychological for non-dom/sub reasons, either a way to formalize preparing to top/ready to be topped, or as part of other play to help loosen someone up.
That said, there are some physical bennies, including many that aren't readily achievable in other ways. It's great for getting someone more in the mood before starting to stretch them out, for example. For the rimmer, there are some sensory benefits (if the rimmee is scrupulously clean; there's reason I joke about it being the only good arg for dental dams), but like eating someone out in other forms, it's very much about what you bring to it: if you're really focused on how your partner's reacting it can be a fun time from watching that. For dealing with women, you want to be a lot gentler and a lot more certain that everyone's on the same page, but it's a great option for people who like the sensation of hotdogging but don't like insertion there proper.
There's a lot of prep work involved, and it's definitely not for everyone, but it can be worth it.
There's a reason prostate exams are a meme, and it's an orgasm modifier for when you get bored/want variety (intensity can come from novelty).
It can, but there's some pretty serious practical differences long after any novelty's gotten the chance to wear off. Not all those differences are for the better -- they're a lot less forceful, so to speak, sometimes to the point of being minimally 'productive' -- but the difference in refractory period is measurable.
I don't know what the equivalent is for women, if there is one, due to the inherent lack of that part, though there are probably a few things you could do in that case if you fill both holes
There are also sex toys that focus on backdoor and clitoral play, as well as some that are intended for the clit, front, and back. All are generally a not-favoured realm for more reputable companies, though, given the risks of cross-contamination.
In all seriousness, the reason you'd use that is because pushing things in there is actually rather painful, so being able to break that up rather than continually insert an approximation of a cylinder is important mostly while going in.
That's, uh... not the only use case or argument for the design. Pressure on both the prostate and the rim is a significant part of the point (both in and out), and being able to have regular increases and decreases in that pressure can be beneficial. Beads are also built so that they can physical fit in lengths that would otherwise not be practical, even compared to similarly slim semi-rigid toys.
That's also why the plugs are shaped the way they are it's generally uncomfortable to continually have that part stretched that far, which is why they taper off at the base then flare out again (so you can grab it for extraction).
Partly, but also so that they can fit in and stay at a consistent depth, rather than getting pushed out. The flare, conversely, is more important to prevent anything from getting sucked up there.
There are toys designed for large and continuous insertions. Some of that's size queens, but with the right textures and reasonable sizes they can work out for normal butt people -- they're not as good for prostate play, but a lot easier to work with if you're focused more on the actual motion going in and out.
gattsuru
17d ago
If you're the sort to write reviews for places you buy from, I would recommend mentioning this as part of the review. The vendor may not realize it as a potential problem that could have been solved with a single-page printout or a sticker, and it's not just bad for the frustration. While modern WiFi is less likely to damage itself from running without a load than older devices, it's still not great for the hardware.
gattsuru
18d ago
To be fair, the popular science version of came from an obnoxious 'science popularizer' and deGrasse Tyson of his day that fudged a lot of the analysis as hard as possible -- made more obvious when he reused similar scenarios for climate change and the aftermath of the Kuwait war, the latter of which pointedly didn't happen.
But the actual scenario of hundreds of megadeaths is bad enough.
gattsuru
20d ago
Show examples of him holding to his principles, whatever you propose them to be, in a way that undermines Dean's view of his 'brand'.
I'd like to be wrong, but without having searched, did Hanania comment against the Biden proposal to tax unrealized gains? Because if not, even accepting the Trump actions as worse, it's going to be very hard to see this as not carefully calibrated for whatever situation Hanania wanted to comment on.
gattsuru
20d ago
I’d highlight the old Homeworld manual as another great strong point. The game’s mechanics were okay, if a little easily solved, but the universe it drew and the bounds of what it left to the imagination were fantastic.
gattsuru
20d ago
Why is that the case?
Having a spinning secondary disk that's constantly plugged into your computer helps prevent some concerns that overlap with RAID benefits (eg, single disk hardware failure) and some that RAID can't help with ("oops I overwrote this file I need"). It only partially mitigates catastrophic physical risks (such as theft), and does not mitigate at all mitigate catastrophic malware or user error concerns. I have dealt with multiple users who've had ransomware not only hit their main drive, but every drive plugged into every computer on their home network; I've seen a couple people accidentally overwrite their storage drives when reinstalling Windows or Linux.
This is a low risk, especially if you're computer-savvy, but it's also very low-cost.
Since I ended up opting for a TV ...
Ah, sorry, misread that.
Is that humidity sensor easy to install?
No, unfortunately. There used to be some decent commercial ones, but the brands I know about look to have stopped manufacture. That probably means that, with the growth of good AIOs, leaks are a lot less common, but I do know of a few major AIO manufacturers that have had recalls over leaks.
I've usually stuck with condensate cutoff switches and put them inline for the power cable, but this requires some familiarity with wiring and crimping 110v or 220v AC power. Home water leak detectors can be useful and they're literally set-and-forget (modulo The Apps), but make sure to get one that has a humidity function, not just direct drip detection. Be aware that they won't shut off the system, they'll just beep at you to do so.
It's reasonable to skip one, and most people do. If you do not use a leak detector, do regularly inspect (1/month) your PC internals, especially at fittings near the CPU waterblock, for any signs of corrosion, 'grit', or dampness. I'd also recommend being extremely aware of the PC's intended physical orientation: AIOs are very dependent on gravity feeding the pump, .
gattsuru
21d ago
Get a cheap set of cable ties -- I'm a big fan of velcro, but there are moderately good magnetic or flex-plastic ones. Good wire management starts on day one, and if you let it get bad you'll never fix it.
A moderately good USB dock can make your life a lot more pleasant, both to just have extra options to put a plug in, and since USB-C ports fit pleasantly-and-destructively inside USB-A ports. They're not very expensive, but the lowest-end ones can be worse than nothing; expect 15-25 USD for something notTemu grade. Some, but far from all, B560s support Thunderbolt, either stock or as a generally pretty cheap add-in card, and while desktop users will seldom if ever want to use it as an expansion for graphics cards, it can be useful for data transfer or other high-throughput peripherals.
Contra ToaKraka, I'm not a huge booster for RAID at home, since there's a lot of subtle failure modes and it doesn't protect you from the most common failures (RAID is not a backup). That said, a cheap USB platter drive can set you back around 50-80 USD, be trivial to automate, and save a lot of potential frustrations even if everything Is On The Cloud. Does require regularly unplugging it to get the most out of it.
If you have available PCIE slots, NVME expansion cards will set you back 10-30 USD, depending on quality, and are a nice way to bulk up on storage if your motherboard is limited. That said, unless you get a B560 in mini-ITX, I'd expect three slots in a prebuilt, and that's more than enough for most users.
Your monitor and GPU will very likely support HDMI, knowing nothing other than the stats you provide, but double-check both support and compatibility -- a lot of highest-framerate options work best over DisplayPort. Adapters are cheap (though I'd recommend splurging around ~15 USD), but they suck to have to wait a weak for, and with tiny number of exceptions these adapters are unidirection.
There's some specialty things (eg, if you get water cooling, a cheap pump shutoff humidity sensor can save you a lot of frustration; if you do a lot of console- or simulator-like gaming there are some recs I can give for gamepads or throttles; VR headsets can change a lot of interests), but I'll assume that if you had those constraints you'd have mentioned them (and water cooling is pretty marginal today).
...the upshot of this case isn't that tens of thousands of people will become felons...
18 USC 992(a)(3): "It shall be unlawful (3) for any person, other than a licensed importer, licensed manufacturer, licensed dealer, or licensed collector to transport into or receive in the State where he resides [...] any firearm purchased or otherwise obtained by such person outside that State, [exceptions not relevant here excised]".
It's probably the sort of thing that gets six months for the first offense, if I've read the Sentencing Guidelines and presuming no previous criminal history, but it's still a felony by its plain text.
The federal definition of firearm is separately extremely widely-reaching, and the Biden administration also fucked with the definition of 'engaged in the business' to such a point that people who aren't even selling guns can get hit with it, but you don't even have to do any gymnastics, here. We don't have exact numbers on how many people bought a covered kit, not least of all because the BATFE is absolutely playing 'we'll never tell' as to what is a covered kit, but just the strict examples of Polymer80 and BlackHawk kits that the opinion focuses on get somewhere in the literally hundreds of thousands of kits sold; tens of thousands is a low-end estimate (the BATFE estimated 2.1m PMFs, and 500k owners).
The only thing that's protecting anyone with one of these firearms is the difficulty tracking them down, the government's pinky promise that it won't bring enforcement from manufacture before the date of the rule's enactment, and Kavanaugh's committment to enforcing that 'willfully' mens rea. And there's reasons (that I've discussed with you!) that people have reason to be skeptical of every one of these things.
((And even that's overstating it, since the BATFE just disavowed retroactively enforcing a serialization requirement and has left definitions of the law so poorly described and so prone to change that people are probably today buying things that they think are legal, and that the ATF does not. And, you know, this case given tacit permission for the most expansive possible reads. The very argument that the Biden admin brought to court was that the terms 'always' included this prohibition, and that they're just clarifying what was always illegal 500k people ago.))
So what's really going is that it would take political capital and legal scrutiny that a Trump administration probably wouldn't want to bring, and a future Harris or AOC maybe wouldn't want to bring. Great, if you're not paranoid! Still a felony if you're praying they don't change their mind without having to change the law.
The reason the court didn't get too into the weeds over the raw block of aluminum argument was because, as it was a facial challenge, specific examples weren't at issue.
It was a pre-enforcement challenge under the APA; the court decided to make that a facial challenge, as far as I can tell without even questioning the plaintiffs or providing clear examples of past opinions making APA pre-enforcement challenges. The court did go into several specific examples to highlight what they believed was clearly covered -- they refused to set bounds not because they wanted to leave the factual questions alone completely, but because they didn't want to deal with setting limits. People called this right after oral arguments.
If and when the ATF starts demanding compliance from distributors selling aluminum ingots, complete with CNC machine or no, then they can raise an as-applied challenge and maybe get a favorable result.
Yes, because of Gorsuch's opinion here, it will be impossible to seriously challenge this or almost any other new regulation, unless a manufacturer is willing to put both their freedom and their business on the line, and the BATFE decides to bring enforcement, and the manufacturer is able to put up the literally hundreds of thousands of dollars that a legal defense will involve while also having their business be considered proceeds of a crime, and the DoJ doubles down on enforcement for a case rather than punching out if and when it thinks there's a moderate chance of an unfavorable result, and and and.
Because the DoJ will be able to forum shop 'select the best jurisdiction for a relevant charge', these will be happening in the sort of circuits where judges will explicitly defy any interest in second amendment rights. In most cases, a distributor will have to commit hundreds or thousands of the same 'felony' just to keep their business or pay for material and capital until the DoJ notices them and decides to bring enforcement. Perhaps they'll be able to get money orders through, given the extent that the feds are willing to pressure financial institutions on this matter (that's a recent one, not the old Choke Point!).
If they are very lucky, the BATFE will not shoot their dogs.
That's my point. It's been my point since that Grisham rant; it's been my point since I first posted on this rule. The willingness of the courts to play along with procedural games around mootness, serious threat of prosecution, et cetera, have long stopped fulfilling any interest in judicial efficiency. The regulatory administration no longer cares about allowing people fair notice regarding what is and isn't illegal. Instead, we've made it impossible for people to know their rights, or to know what they need to do to comply with the law.
So, yes. Then, after all of the above, you might get a favorable result, even in light of the clearest violation of the statute's text possible.
gattsuru
22d ago
My point is that he did have an opportunity to prove his citizenship. Any parade of horribles predicated on not getting one kinda has to run by that point. If you're centered on the removal to El Salvador rather than any other country, which is all his protection from removal covers, that's certainly fair, and no small oopsie woopsies fucky wucky from the Trump admin, to absolutely no one's surprise. But it's a different class of problem.
((While I'd argue that mistake should count as a due process violation, I'm not sure it actually does under existing law; Baker and progeny have left the bounds of the due process clause very narrow even for actual citizens after actual hearings.))
Oilfield specifically, no, Oncale's just the best-documented example of what people are worried about. There's some practical and procedural reasons trans women (or men, for that matter) are unlikely to work on oilfield or remote drilling platforms, and from a quick google search I haven't seen any examples.
Aviation, fire rescue, emergency medical services or elder care services? The exact dividing lines for examples gets complicated, especially since people have often wildly varying bars for passing (and for firefighters specially you're a lot more likely to see ftm, where 'post-op' is a lot more varied and... probably not something most straight guys are going to find more awkward), but people either transitioning while in the field or right before joining it aren't that unheard of.
Fortunately for society, but unfortunately for discussion on this matter, a lot contention gets solved through relatively low profile compromise, partly because people can be reasonable and partly because of the big exception in the ADA. So lawsuits tend to involve people either are very litigious who run into assholes (and note there the actual lawsuit targeted Cabela's, not the battery company where the shower situation actually would have mattered had Blatt stayed).
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