gattsuru
1yr ago
It's a very funny literalization of "fuck you money", but I've been trying to narrow down focus when writing these posts.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Theoretically, the UK has pretty expansive options for trying someone in absentia, often on expedited means. It would be possible to issue 'notice' that was never possible to read, find Musk guilty in a day, and then set a whole mess of fees and penalties after his accounts, or even use it as a previous conviction in a more serious claim later against either Musk or Twitter's UK branch.
But that's only a little more likely than WhiningCoil's "Harris okays extradition of a US citizen for yucks" option.
It's a threat to be a threat to everyone else; if the Met police are willing to risk US retribution, they're absolutely going to fuck over some nobody in the EU.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Thierry Breton, Commissioner for Internal Market of the European Union, has written a 'friendly' letter to the leadership and ownership of X Twitter:
I am writing to you in the context of recent events in the United Kingdom and in relation to the planned broadcast on your platform X of a live conversation between a US presidential candidate and yourself, which will also be accessible to users in the EU...
This notably means ensuring, on one hand, that freedom of expression and of information, including media freedom and pluralism, are effectively protected and, on the other hand, that all proportionate and effective mitigation measures are put in place regarding the amplification of harmful content in connection with relevant events, including live streaming, which, if unaddressed, might increase the risk profile of X and generate detrimental effects on civic discourse and public security.
((The commission has called this letter "neither co-ordinated or agreed", for whatever that means.))
Bruce Daisely, the pre-Musk Twitter VP for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, writes in the UK's Guardian that:
Musk is having a live conversation with the former president, promising “entertainment guaranteed”...
The founding general counsel of Twitter, Alex Macgillivray, once described the business as being the “free speech wing of the Free Speech party”. In the US, there’s often a myopic sense that its freedoms don’t exist in the rest of the world, but in the UK 1998 Human Rights Act, article 10 enshrines freedom of speech. Critically, there is a recognition that free expression carries with it a duty of responsibility. The UK law requires that such free speech is not used to incite criminality or spread hatred...
In my experience, that threat of personal sanction is much more effective on executives than the risk of corporate fines. Were Musk to continue stirring up unrest, an arrest warrant for him might produce fireworks from his fingertips, but as an international jet-setter it would have the effect of focusing his mind. It’s also worth remembering that the rules of what is permitted on X are created by one of Musk’s lesser known advisers, a Yorkshire man called Nick Pickles, who leads X’s global affairs team.
Musk’s actions should be a wake-up call for Starmer’s government to quietly legislate to take back control of what we collectively agree is permissible on social media. Musk might force his angry tweets to the top of your timeline, but the will of a democratically elected government should mean more than the fury of a tech oligarch – even him.
The London Met Chief Commissioner had an interview last week, where he said:
We will throw the full force of the law at people. And whether you’re in this country committing crimes on the streets or committing crimes from further afield online, we will come after you.
I'd like to summarize the rest of the video -- allegedly he or the interviewer highlighted Musk specifically -- but for some reason the underlying video has disappeared. I'm sure Sky News pulled the video without any government action being involved, yepyepyep.
A Washington Post journalist asks the White House: [edited for readability]
Q: Elon Musk is slated to interview Donald Trump tonight on X. I don’t know if the president is going to tune in. Feel free to say if he is or not. But I think that misinformation on Twitter is not just a campaign issue. It’s an America issue. What role does the White House or the president have in sort of stopping that or stopping the spread of that or sort of intervening in that?
Some of that was about campaign misinformation, but, you know, it’s a wider thing, right?
A: Yeah, no, and you’ve heard us talk about this many times from here, about the responsibilities that social media platforms have when it comes to misinformation, disinformation. Don’t have anything to read out from here about specific ways that we’re working on it. But we believe that they have the responsibility. These are private companies, so we’re also mindful of that too.
But, look, I think it is incredibly important to call that out, as you’re doing. I just don’t have any specifics on what we have been doing internally.
Given the urgency here, I'm sure that they have published urgent fact-checking on things like... *checks transcript* Trump's hilariously false claims about the harms caused by the Fukushima Nuclear Accident, right?... Right?
No, that's not what they mean by misinformation or disinformation, just like the people calling GOP investigations into the "Global Alliance for Responsible Media" 'conspiracy theories' didn't mean that like its clear and prominent existence or self-admitted tooling or target matters. The line between 'allegedly' and 'stated in public' is less a distinction and more just overlap.
There's a fun story here, where despite all this, free speech still works, and to some extent that's likely to keep being the case. Even if you end up having to exfiltrate employees from certain countries, there's VPNs for now and StarLink in the future, and one not-quite-stated explicitly side effect of StarLink is that Musk will probably end up with a mini-Cloudflare, too. (though, uh, there's another possible solution to that).
But there's a more morbid one where it's come to this point. There aren't any detailed reports behind Musk's claims that "The European Commission offered 𝕏 an illegal secret deal: if we quietly censored speech without telling anyone, they would not fine us". Musk has implied at length that GARM used 'Brand Safety' as a proxy for political positions, but there aren't specific claims in his lawsuit. There's no explanation how major industry metrics whoopsididdled the official number there for months on end. Barring a million Congressional subpeonas that aren't going to happen and wouldn't be answered fully even if they did, it's impossible to tell the difference between GARM's membership all acting independently in a specific way, and someone in power in some regulating state made a few phone calls?
Is this the one place all these forces were necessary? Or is it unusual only in its visibility, as a result of people not playing along?
gattsuru
1yr ago
I'm very hesitant to accuse Trump of having any principles.
The one nice thing I have to say about Walz is that he was supposedly pro-nuclear. I'm not hugely optimistic about it a) lasting the rest of the election season or b) actually doing anything -- Walz signed a pretty big energy bill, but never actually did get rid of that nuclear moratorium -- but triumph of hope over experience yada yada.
gattsuru
1yr ago
gattsuru
1yr ago
how would this work?
In a perfect world? Some third-party group (or, ideally, groups) with a lot of credibility provides review of spending by target and by effectiveness and by necessity of underlying goal, which Congress analyzes seriously, and implements in the next budget with enough detail to have a serious result, after which the President faithfully implements it.
In a merely-ridiculously implausible one, rather than pigs-flying-and-hell-freezing-over one? Someone points to Bad Departments, and the President just refuses to spend money wherever he feels like it and doesn't have an active contract already implemented, while prohibiting those in the agency from signing new contracts or issuing new RFPs. And probably gets Impeachment 3: Electric Boogaloo for it.
I'm... not optimistic, even on top of the issues re: Trump biting, political viability, and a thousand other problems. Anyone trying this would get absolutely wrecked politically. If you think the Washington Monument strategy is bad when the national parks service applies it, you're gonna have a Real Fun Time when the DoE starts talking about dumping low-level 'nuclear waste' somewhere. And things like federally guaranteed student loans are both a massive time bomb and also the sort of thing where trying to rip off the band aid completely screws over a third of a generation without a much better plan than anyone in federal office is able to conceive of.
Trump might still do it by accident -- he's been promoting fucking with foreign aid to incentivize foreign countries to take certain deportees -- but even if that happens it's gonna get slapped back, and the areas he cares about most are the smallest for spending.
Which areas are critical and should remain mostly untouched? (post office?)
The Post Office is actually in a weird place; it's theoretically independent and self-funded (since 1971), though there's some cash infusions for infrastructure and that make that a little fuzzy in the edges. ((Though its finances make so little sense that its advocates have spent the last decade trying to come up with justifications for tweaking its mandate into something that could justify a vast cash infusion; as it is, the entire business model depends on junk mail.))
gattsuru
1yr ago
Sorry, didn't mean to inundate you. Neither of these would directly be good competitors for a top-down Magicka-like (especially Psi; while it provides a great tutorial, it depends on programming at a table and only allows a small handful of spells to be carried at once, so it's worse about piloting your build as Noita), so much as they've got different flavours and some source code available to browse to see how rough different things can be to implement.
(Hexcasting, for example, is Turing complete, and it's kinda impressive how little it takes to do so; the actual evaluation ops are a few dozen pages of admittedly polymorphism-dense kotlin. It's /also/ why the mod makes delay/sleep, multithreading, or unlimited recursion so very expensive, though.)
gattsuru
1yr ago
How quickly and often do you want individual spell-interactions to happen?
HexCasting has a few built-in ways to store spells, and most of the time people will just load three or four spells down and never have to use a wand again. But I played for a short time in a group that disabled or made extremely inconvenient most of them, and while it never got to the "I need to charge compile my attack" level, having to trade off between spells that could absolutely wreck a room when prepped but couldn't be used in a hurry, against those you could draw in a few motions but were inefficient or destructive, was fun.
((Also one of the very few times where quining was useful.))
HexCasting's spell language is esoteric and unwieldy in a lot of ways (eg: simplest rainbow bridge), but a lot of that's intentional rather than a requirement of the design.
((Ars Nouveau is more 'slap pieces together, adjust only if you need something special', drop a familiar or a spell turret if you want to do something huge, though in turn it suffers a lot from complacency syndrome. You can do hilarious things with T3 glyphs, but basic particle->damage->amplify->delayed damage->amplify is what you'll actually use in 99% of vanilla.))
gattsuru
1yr ago
Raggedy_anthem went off the mod team and either set their account private or deleted it about three months back, “personal reasons”
gattsuru
1yr ago
That's a nice standard to draw in the sand, but we demonstrably don't hold it against CNN as a society, nor have the ability to hold it as individuals. CNN specifically is quite willing to pass around claims from one rando statement with vague details and none of the information necessary to corroborate it. Nor is unique to that high-profile example (eg, Roy Moore's mall ban) -- or to CNN (eg PigGate).
gattsuru
1yr ago
Prototype and Warframe are pretty fun on the speedier-combat side, though they do share similar issues with the gameplay loop struggling at times.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Not unless SCOTUS really wants them to: the Bruen/Miller/ series has repeatedly leapt back to the well of "in common use at the time for lawful purposes like self-defense", and it makes for a very easy line-drawing. Maybe if there were a large number of people taking glock switches out for a day on the range, or for lawful self-defense, or otherwise-legal competition shooting, but we're not really in or likely to be in that situation any time soon.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Anti-car activists have a mental model of an ideal world with a level of density they believe is incompatible with typical roads, and often think even moderately car-traversable areas are Literally Causes Of Death.
I'm... not a fan, and to be blunt their underlying claims range from merely misleading to outright malicious lies, but they're a pretty common viewpoint.
gattsuru
1yr ago
The southern border would be an obvious "specific crisis", and Venezuela is likely to just keep getting worse well and long before it gets better. And it doesn't hurt that the 'obvious' solution, at its most charitable, involves funneling billions of dollars to immigrant and refuge assistance groups that overwhelmingly support Dems, and more credibly involves large-scale amnesty and eventual citizenship to large groups of people that Dems believe will vote reliably Democratic.
(cfe 2020's estimate of 2.1 million.)
On culture war stuff, "does the ADA cover gender identity" is very likely to come to a head at SCOTUS in the next four years no matter how hard Roberts tries to punt on it, and regardless of what SCOTUS decides is going to be a massive political deal. If it ends up a Gorsuch opinion, it's hard to overstate how much of both law and everyday life that it touches. Either answer is likely to have a Harris admin run as far as SCOTUS will let them in the rulemaking postgame.
College debt is a ticking time bomb.
I would be very surprised if we go two and a half years without some high-profile shooting of some kind that makes gun control the matter of the day.
And that's suggesting Nothing Ever Happens re: Taiwan, Russia, Iran, so on.
gattsuru
1yr ago
People are treating this like a serious political strategy, as if you find the best burn, the sickest memes, you will move the needle in the mind of the average normie voter.
Oh, I'm being far more dire than that. That the normies don't care is a selling point to the extremist argument, here. The pro-bashing perspective -- whether pro- or anti-gay, smear-the-queer or beat-the-nazi, so on -- never was to persuade the average normie voter: it was to motivate and activate your side, and demobilize and delegitimize the opposition.
I'd like to argue that they are wrong, but on some topics it's at least coincided with pretty significant success.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Yeah, if you're willing to deny the premise, it's not really a dilemma at all. Compared to McGirt or Bostock or Carpenter, overturning the complete ban on machine guns just wouldn't be anywhere near the same level of pragmatic impact. Machine guns just aren't that useful, even in criminal contexts, and that's in the infinitesimal chance that someone could bring a challenge against Title 2 background-checks-and-blue-glove as a category rather than just the post-86 ban on new registrations.
The problem's far more one for the political realms -- the press doesn't care about the distinction between deaths caused by a type of firearm versus those that could only be caused by a type of firearm, Whitehouse/Schumer will absolutely throw the red paint even if it wasn't a firearm specific to a SCOTUS ruling, and as you say, enough of the court doesn't care about even far more aggressive gun bans.
It's pretty frustrating to see a SCOTUS that considers the primacy of political realms, and even more so when it only happens certain political directions! But even assuming all those things, there are ways that SCOTUS could act within those constraints. That they don't says something far worse.
gattsuru
1yr ago
I'm not sure. Confirmation of justices is solely a Senatorial power, so it could just be motioning around that part of things, both to say that the bill's appointment scheduling stuff is not dependent on House votes, and imply that the Senate can change it again at any time they want.
The rest of it needs to get passed as a full law, including House and Presidential approval. There's some serious questions about how well jurisdiction-stripping could work out as a pragmatic question -- AEDPA is pretty illustrative -- but to the extent it does anything it has to be part of a federal law. Limiting when the President can submit a SCOTUS nominee might or might not be constitutional in any case, but it definitely wouldn't mean anything as solely a senatorial rule except to say that the Senate would auto-refuse (or auto-not-vote).
gattsuru
1yr ago
LOTT wouldn't have been harmed if they did some basic fact checking to check if the story was real
As I said contemporaneously, I don't think this is realistic. At best, Trace's strength was that LoTT could not find third-party evidence supporting it (uh, modolo Trace's cohoaxer doing so), but neither would evidence disproving it be found, and no small amount of circumstantial support likely existed for p-hacking reasons.
There's an argument that people should only publish if multiple unrelated sources for a claim can be identified (again, ignoring Corvus in Trace's hoax), but that's not a convention we hold anyone else toward.
gattsuru
1yr ago
That said, I think some of you are dramatically overestimating how much impact "Sexually humiliating the other side" or "Jokes about couch-fucking" actually swing voters.
The problem here is that, at best, you're going to fall to an argument that all these awful and disruptive and slanderous behaviors... didn't help with swing voters.
Not hurt. That's not an argument to skip this.
Sorry if that's a rant, but the pro-bullying side of the LGBT politics can quite credibly argue that everything (from bashing homophobia to Santorum's Google Problem to the literal leader of an anti-bullying movement targeting teenagers for public mockery) was a large or the determining factor in a massive swing in political alignment, the anti-bullying side can at best argue that it wasn't necessary, and the moderates can't do anything but flinch from the question. And once you see the pattern there, you start seeing it a lot of places.
gattsuru
1yr ago
... from the dissent in the linked decision:
That is why Heller could say that laws banning weapons like short-barreled shotguns and machine guns are constitutional. These weapons have long been linked to criminal activity, as the majority notes. And they also are “not typically possessed by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes,” and thus “highly unusual in society at large.” Heller confirmed what history and tradition already established: A weapon must be both dangerous and unusual in order to be banned.
Wow, what Gordian Knot, such unsolvable. I won't pretend this closes every edge case -- there's a handful of super-rare and dumb guns that could be banned and probably shouldn't be, and even for Title II 'firearms' there are some things like silencers that are starting to creep up in popularity despite their onerous restrictions -- but it absolutely clears the question of machine guns versus assault weapons ban under any sane reading.
((The majority tries to glue the knot together by claiming there are 740,000 machine guns are registered with the ATF... which is a fascinating claim, and also absolutely useless trivia; less than 180k are pre-1986 guns that can possibly be owned by rando civilians, and of those not all are civie-owned or even functional.))
There are fair arguments whether this distinction is good as a matter of policy, whether it acts as an (undeserved) free pass for 1920-1990 bad laws, or where the exact line distinguishes between common and uncommon use, but it has historical support in both Founding- and 14th-Amendment-eras, and prohibits some of the most directly abusive and useless regulations.
The only time the court usually wades into these dilemmas is when a circuit split forces its hand, but that's unlikely here since any circuit that would strike down the restrictions doesn't contain any state that would enact them.
This would be a more credible argument were the court not ready and quick to jump into quite a lot of other circumstances that fit all these criteria.
Maybe? The Firearms Policy Coalition is pushing the case, and believe it to be their last best hope at an assault weapons ban case. There's more egregious statutes, but at most they're just more arbitrary.
But it's been at SCOTUS conference before, with pretty nakedly the same reasoning (albeit just pointing to Kolbe), and they just GVR'd it. And there's also the GVR in Range to point at, too. The court can just keep punting.
Bianchi v. Frosh's en banc opinion has dropped.
It's a bit of a doorstopper, coming in at 183 pages, but it's probably not worth a read: the decision itself is about what someone like The_Nybbler or Justice Thomas would expect, and to the extent you couldn't predict the result from a wikipedia page, you'd have gotten within two votes.
As tl;dr: Bianchi was a challenge to Maryland's Assault Weapons Ban, a 2013 law prohibiting the ownership of a wide variety of rifles and handguns based on a mix of names and features, along with 'copycats' of those names, as well as a broader set of firearms, with an exception for those guns registered before the law went into effect. A wide majority of the Fourth Circuit's court of appeals (10-5) held that it, and almost any specific firearm or feature ban, would be lawful under Bruen and Heller. There's some complexity splintering the majority about the precise logic, but just into a majority that says Bruen means nothing, a concurrence (six names!) is little more than a call to overturn Bruen's test explicitly and the Second Amendment implicitly overlapping fully with the majority opinion, and the best you can get is the one judge who concurred-in-judgement only under the recognition that the other opinions were openly defying Bruen but would still allow any ban under Bruen. Some morbid comedy -- the most common firearm in America, more common in ownership than a Ford F-150, is "dangerous and unusual" -- but it's a tired old joke at this point. MorosKostas has a highlights reel for the masochistic.
The dissent tries to recognize some form of Second Amendment right, but even with cutouts and allowances that nearly swallow the rule, it only got a tiny minority, with five names out of a total of fifteen.
The decision does, however, answer one fascinating question about the process. During one of the (denied) requests for cert at SCOTUS, petitioners raised an interesting question:
Petitioners recognize that this case comes to the Court in an unusual posture. Two terms ago, this Court granted, vacated, and remanded this case, and now Petitioners find themselves in the unfortunate position of still not having been able to secure a judgment from the Fourth Circuit and asking this Court, yet again, to take this case and resolve it.
Although this case was briefed and argued shortly [ed: December 6th, 2022] after it was remanded to the Fourth Circuit [ed: June 30th, 2022], the court of appeals did not act on the case for over a year after argument was held until, suddenly in January of this year [ed: January 12, 2024], it sua sponte issued an order directing that the case would be reheard en banc, with arguments scheduled for March 20, 2024. [emphasis added]
The plaintiff raised theories about how sua sponte en banc request might have been drawn to block a 2nd-Amendment-recognizing opinion, but did not publicly speculate about how that delay might have happened, or why. This case has been in process since 2020, twice made it to a court of appeals, and never received a true opinion on merits. We now have an answer:
After hearing the case in December 2022, the initial panel majority reached a decision and promptly circulated a draft opinion. Yet for more than a year, no dissent was circulated. The panel thus held the proposed opinion in accordance with our custom that majority and dissenting opinions be published together. A year later—as the proposed opinion sat idle—a different panel heard arguments in United States v. Price (No. 22-4609), which also involved interpreting and applying Bruen. The Price panel quickly circulated a unanimous opinion that reached a conclusion at odds with the Bianchi majority’s year-old proposed opinion. Facing two competing proposed published opinions, the Court declined to let the earlier circulated opinion control. Rather, in January 2024, we “invoked the once-extraordinary mechanism of initial-en-banc review.”
Price had its appeal oral arguments in December 6th, 2023, with the first scheduling of those dates starting in mid-September 2023. Only a month and six days passed between its oral arguments and both Price and Bianchi being sua sponted _en banc_ed. Meaning that Price had a unanimous opinion with less than a twelfth of the time that it took the dissent for Bianchi, despite much of that coinciding with the holiday season.
The specific judge who dissented from the never-published Bianchi appeal opinion, though not explicitly named in the dissent, is almost certainly Judge Thacker, an Obama appointee who sat on both appeal panels. The other two judges on the appeals panel, Richardson and Niemeyer, at in the dissent here, and back in the long-ago of December 2022 were expected to rule against the law.
I've written before about covert gamesmanship of internal rules for the judiciary. This is another brick in that wall: it is not sufficient to bring a good argument, with a good case, and a good plaintiff, jump through a thousand hoops on standing and specificity and caselaw, and get lucky enough on the draw to get an district-court and appeals-court panel willing to given the slightest honest engagement with the question. A single judge out of a panel can prevent it from ever releasing, and will, and has.
It's worth spelling out that, in both cases, how little this mattered on the instant question at hand: neither the Ninth Circuit nor Fourth Circuit were ever going to have the slightest chance of allowing a pro-gun decision from an appeals court to survive or go un-en banc'd, nor would they hesitate to grant an emergency stay. This about not about defanging the plaintiffs of these particular cases.
This means that there is one fewer case anyone -- whether future plaintiffs, cert requests, or SCOTUS opinion -- can reference. It's easy to demonstrate the unworkability of a standard, when no one need bother allow the honest implementation of it to survive, especially in the hostile circuits that are likely to see any law to appeal to SCOTUS. And there's an even !!funner!! question of what else along these lines happen, without anyone getting to hear about it.
gattsuru
1yr ago
I believe that having them in nurse's offices is common, though I can't say for sure if it's universal.
The theory for restrooms is that periods are an incredibly embarrassing thing that might come up with little notice or have to be handled multiple times in a day, so they shouldn't be only available through the nurse's office. I don't know that it needs to be a law, but it's not fundamentally unreasonable as a policy, and there's at least plausible funding authorization reasons.
It's just the men's room bit that's hilariously dumb.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Yeah, there's situations where a bug gets past your development or test environment, and there's times where you're legitimately in too much of a hurry to test, but this is...
Like, the best spin I can give on this is that whatever safeties they did have were apparently enough to keep this from already happening earlier, when it didn't cause hundreds of millions of dollars in damage and probably a couple lives on the margins? But as much as the ratsphere jokes about the ideal rates of errors never being zero, the ideal rate of this error is so much lower than this that it's hard to compare.
I don't think it's likely at all, but more for internal legal reasons : we've had dumber. Sometimes messy is the point.
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