The National Instant Criminal Background Check Systems (NICS) is a 90s-era system that (almost) all buyers of firearms have to undergo every time they buy (almost) any firearm. Despite its name, it checks not just criminal history, but also every other category under the 1968 GCA that disqualifies a person from owning (almost any) firearm, where the disqualifying incident has been reported to the FBI. While most people notice this only when buying a firearm, those who get a DQ result from NICS are on notice that they can not legally own (almost) any firearms, no matter what conditions they received them.
One lesser-known disqualification is that of those who are 'adjudicated as a mental defective or has been committed to any mental institution', which is the prong T.B. in this New Jersey case failed. However, the exact edges of those definitions are fuzzy. Most jurisdictions require some level of adversarial hearing or multiple doctors reviewing the commitment, but neither rule is part of the statute and neither have bright-line across-the-US caselaw.
While the Department of Veteran's Affairs had long held the ability to report 'mental defectives' since the 1993 establishment of NICS, and Clinton made some acts on this road, the Obama administration held that the Department of Veterans Affairs could use existing records to determine what veterans were 'mental defectives' and should do so automatically and categorically. To do so, they relied on determinations of what veterans had a fiduciary appointed to help manage their financial affairs, a process that had very low standards of evidence, a presumption of incompetence against the veteran, no due process rights to representation, did not require any qualifications or training for the administrative staff making the determination -- and, of course, did not give adequate preliminary notice that the act would strip away any Second Amendment rights. 95%+ of all "adjudicated as a mental defective" submissions to NICS from federal agencies were coming from the VA in 2013 and 2014. This ended up including hundreds of thousands of submissions.
((Continuing on a certain theme, the Obama administration based this policy's authorization on the bipartisan NICS Improvement Amendments Act of 2007.))
Most critically, veterans could and often did receive or even actively request fiduciaries solely to assist with financial affairs, not because they were dangerous or actually incompetent, such as if they wanted their spouse to have easier access to their records or VA fund. This could mean dementia or severe suicidal ideation, but because the VA was also getting eaten by paperwork in the same time period, this also could just be a matter of who in the family had the time or the patience to deal with the bullshit or, again, who could balance a checkbook.
Ostensibly, the policy was meant to reduce veteran suicide. To be charitable to the point of foolishness, I’m sure the proponents were absolutely sure that they were reducing firearms suicides (or lost guns) by making them less available to some vets. But given the near-complete disinterest in whether these disarmed vets were particularly likely to commit suicide, that’s about the best you can get, and then we’re back to the federal government treated arbitrary restrictions on a constitutional right as an unalloyed good, and these people targeted because they’d be less able to challenge it.
The Obama administration later proposed a federal regulation applying the same sort of system to Social Security and was expected to hit at least 75,000 people; this was blocked under the CRA in 2017. Some appropriations riders in 2024 and 2025 blocked the VA from using funds to submit records to NICS except where a finding of dangerousness or a court order was involved, though the last rider I'm aware of expired in March.
gattsuru
19d ago
The first trouble is that, even assuming these things are all true, this conditions the availability of a constitutional right on knowing exactly how to frame a matter for the tastes of whatever judge or judges he was unlucky enough to pick months or years before seeing the court room, having the funds to hire lawyers (and since the guy isn't pro se, instead being represented by this guy, having the funds and knowledge to hire 'competent' lawyers), having the capabilities to act well as an effective witness at trial, and come off nicely-enough presented while sitting in court for a New Jersey judge to like him, (and don't know about a community services organization offering low-cost outpatient services). Few of these matters could be verified without a time machine; none are in the public record to even make sure that the judges are properly summarizing it.
The second trouble is that, especially when coming from someone that says "that seem onerous but that's the point" when it comes to this class of regulation, there's a lot of 'oh, my personal experience makes this seem a whole lot more reasonable' depends on things that the rest of us can't know.
The third's that assuming enough round up to true requires a lot of faith in the New Jersey appellate courts, and there's reason to believe judicial bias here older than most people writing on this site in general, and for at least one of the two judges here.
The deep problem is that these don't apply to the all or even a majority of the cases you're supposedly focused on, and could easily apply to the harmless. The "can't remember the name of their medication" test is a frustratingly close mirror to the Obama administration's 'fiduciary' test, which was quite broadly applied to people whose sole sin was having difficultly dealing with a checkbook. That's not only non-theoretical, it's a decade-old.
gattsuru
19d ago
[Note that by "childish and gay", that's "this is how attraction works when your age is only measured in single digits" and "not confident/socially capable enough to trust you can dominate a more feminine woman", respectively. It's also preferring more "universal" traits than specifically masculine ones, if you prefer that framing.]
I won't deny the 'gay' bit (though I like my men with a bit more meat on them), but as much fun as homersoc_ style 'tomboy breaking' can be, a sizable part of the interest for me at least is finding someone who's interested in domming me. I can dom and trust myself to do so; it's just not really my favorite. That's not universally connected to masculine traits -- lipstick doms do exist -- but I'll point to scottieman's Anthology of Rat Bullying as an example of what would otherwise be 'normally' traditionally feminine top (uh, barring the last image, cw: m/f and one m/m/f) framework that becomes tomboyish as much by having the character act as a dom as by any overlapping or shared interest with the subs.
gattsuru
19d ago
A lot of the axis that popularized AGP have been trying to paint furries as autozoophilies. It's objectionable to me in part because a lot of people would round off the 'auto' bit, so it is less palatable than 'tf kinkster'.
((Although there's a few places that -philia that does show up in kink-heavy spheres: vore fans call themselves voreaphiles or endosomaphiles pretty often depending on flavor, and people who buy 'i consent' sleep masks call it somnophilia even if it doesn't fit under the technical definition.))
But it's also objectionable because it seems pretty obviously wrong as a broad model. Yes, there are people who fit the central version of the case: Bailey brings up plushophiles that have a plush tf kink, which is pretty common, but I could link to a guy talking about how he wants to TF into a werewolf, get rawwed by a werewolf, or both at the same time. But there's an absolute ton of people that don't, ranging from human-on-anthro fans, to those who fantasize about being a different species than what they find attractive, to those who only find transformation or becoming an anthro interesting in a nonsexual sense even if they have sexual interests in other parts of the furry fandom, to those with intense sexual interests in a transformation concept so long as it's happening to someone else.
To be fair, Bailey et all don't claim that autoanthrozoophilia is absolutely universal among furries. But they do everything up to that point in the articles themselves, and in contexts outside of academic papers just imply it really heavily, and indeed go further and suggest that these correlations explain how people became interested or more interested in the fandom, rather than any other possible arrow of causation.
That's a pretty big central part of the disagreement for Blanchard/Bailey's AGP theory, and there it is much more explicitly aggressive: they claim that trans people either fall strictly into one of homosexual transsexual or AGPs, categorically. To the point where any testimony that crosses the margins -- a solely-androphilic transwoman without traditionally-male interests and who masturbates to dressing as a woman, or a solely-gynophillic or bisexual transwoman with traditionally feminine interests who doesn't -- is evidence that the trans person isn't willing to be truthful. This was maybe defensible in the 1980s and 1990s, where various motivating factors lead trans women to present study leads highly sanitized versions of themselves.
But these days we have wide arrays of sources that can't be built around people trying to lie to psychiatrists. There's tons of counterexamples, and even a handful would raise serious questions about whether this behavior was the motivating factor.
gattsuru
20d ago
Yeah, there's seems a pretty weird mix of 'awkward substitutions that probably should just wait for an Amazon delivery instead' (worchestershire sauce), 'not exactly traditional but workable' (fresh chili, green onions, arguably ginger), 'could work as a stir fry, but stretching the limit from americanizing to just bastardizing' (ketchup, that much sugar) and 'what the actual fuck' (breaking the noodles, olive oil, boiling them before pan cooking).
To be fair, he doesn't seem to promoting it as a traditional pad thai and a few other recipes include pretty bastardized versions, too (cacio e pepe e boullion?).
gattsuru
20d ago
He didn't really break out until mid-March of this year. He was getting some local coverage before that, and it's very interesting how much of that is puff pieces with little actual 'when what where why' behind them, but even the actually newsworthy stuff wasn't NYC-wide newsworthy.
gattsuru
20d ago
I would recommend using, or picking up, a pair of decent work gloves. I've done four or five car door repairs, and every single time I've either cut up my hands or gloves. Even if it's miserably hot, they'll be worth making sure it's not your fingers.
gattsuru
21d ago
Yeah, there's a basically no chance if they (or even a not-joke Republican candidate) split the not-Mamdani vote. The sane option to my eyes would be organizing behind Adams, sad as that sounds, but it's also a massive coordination problem. But I don't get why they tried Cuomo in the primary to start with, so maybe there's something that would overrun the 'already lost this fight once' problem. And my low opinion of Cuomo is part of why I don't think they can coordinate.
gattsuru
21d ago
Cuomo's also just about the single worst political candidate available. People talk about 'scandals' like it was 'just' him being a gropey bastard, but the COVID nursing home policies killed thousands, possibly ten+ thousand.
New York City isn't the same Literal Worst in the way Cuomo is, but that's mostly because California and Newsom exist and can't rebuild a home after a fire. The punchline to all the Abundance Liberalism is either congestion pricing, or Eric Adams treating the invention of 'trash cans' like a major success.
And that's kinda the critical bit. There's a temptation among progressives to think of this as some failure of advertising or sufficiently innovative policy recommendation, but that's like trying to out-crude Trump. You're not going to beat socialists at making up policies with great advertising and 'novel' policy, and even trying to compete with them on those metrics will drive you to start making awful policies yourself.
The alpha centrists try to advertise themselves on is about actually improving the actual situation on the ground. But Cuomo and NYC (and Newsom and California) can't do that, either.
One take is that Mamdani's able to massage a lot of traditionally idpol issues as anti-Trumpist or under legalisms, and thus been able to avoid explicit proposals by having the whole thrust of his lunchbucket politics also imply them.
((eg, "affordable housing" doesn't mean housing people can afford; it means a ton of Section 8.))
Another, more cynical one, is Darwin's old "it was never about being gay". Idpol doesn't care, specifically, about gay rights, or African-Americans, or Hispanics, or even about winning their votes. It cares about the cause of the day, with no more honest motivation than it being the cause of the day. And Mamdani's tongue-bathing Hamas anti-Zionism is the cause of the day among the upper-class demographics he needed to win the primary.
Edit: I was tempted to use hating the Joos above, but couldn’t find a good summary to support it. Not a problem anymore! /EDIT
There's some silver lining on that cloud, in the sense that the Idpol cause of the day can swap out on a minute's notice. But it's not gonna.
gattsuru
21d ago
On another hand, this can also look like an excellent example of a union leader’s ability to organize and lead not only anti-Trump/anti-ICE disruption efforts, but force Trump to respond/take him seriously, even as Mr. Huerta’s organizational turnout capacity supported larger protests and greater effect. Sure, some of the protestors got out of hand, but there’s no evidence they were linked to Mr. Huerta… right?
I will also highlight the Teamster delivering face shields to rioters. Could just be coincidence, but the timeline I have been able to figure out for the LA riots is really tight, and the LA-area Teamsters and SEIU are both known to work together and for 'energetic' protest. Even if the DoJ does seriously investigate things I dunno if it could be proven, so no way to know whether the early parts of the LA protest were waiting for something to start rather than were outraged and surprised by Heurta's arrest and spontaneously acted.
And, from the other perspective, I'll point to characters like Judge Duggan, or the various Try To Arrest Me, ICE politician protests, or to the Dem nominee for New York City mayor having Luigi fanboys high in the communication and outreach ladder.
But such norms are not laws, particularly when the norms derive from the discretion of often sympathetic enforcers who are no longer in the position to make the call.
Maybe, but I'll point out again that Lujan Grisham wasn't impeached, censured, indicted by a grand jury, called a fascist on national television or a nationally-syndicated paper, yada yada. She did technically receive a preliminary injunction, but it was immediately stayed. Fauci isn't under arrest. No lawsuit Carter Page could file would ever get to trial. Mahmoud Khalil is out on bail.
Maybe that'll change. Duggan could end up being the first swing of a very hard-hitting hammer. But every single attempt to bring these forces forward has a built-in time crunch. And there's a lot of ways to delay and slow and drop every single effort.
gattsuru
22d ago
No.
The problem is that there are enforcement of laws that people disagree with, which have very overt parallels to matters where the other tribe received broad victories, which any reasonable reading of the text of the law would not permit, and where defendants either lose in court or never have a fair day to start with. It's a problem when the Constitution seems a scam, and where the BATNA looks like a direct improvement on the very measures that negotiated agreement is advertising itself on.
Part of the answer is that some people wait-and-seed, and eventually the hate crime convictions were overturned for boring technical reasons, and their sentences reduced. There's a fair argument that the results still weren't fair -- the sentencing judge overtly said that he was still trying to give sentence enhancements for the religious focus of the crime, which is kinda sketchy even if specifically authorized by statute -- but it's enough that people who weren't that interested in philosophy of law could claim that everyone had a fair day in court and a neutral law was applied, whether or not it actually was.
Part of the answer is that the Amish are considered weird, and breakaway Amish weirder, and most people don't care about weirdos even where the court is unfair or the law illegitimate. As the list of awful things the government does to weirdos go, it's not going to take a top ten slot, and the people who do care about those top ten slots don't exactly get invited to a lot of parties.
Hell, even as sketchy trials before biased judges go, I can point to worse in pretty recent times.
Reality all adds up to normal. The fiction where one action by a government is so corrupt, awful, self-dealing, evil, and malicious as to result in major political upheaval or revolution is... not impossible, but it's the exception, rather than the rule, and usually downstream of a large mass of other motivating factors. If you look at the motivations for times these sorta things do go hot, there are patterns, and they're often not about anything so prosaic or useful.
It's an unpleasant revelation. Sorry.
gattsuru
22d ago
If you know any lesbians and are under the age of 30, you're likely to run into at least a few lesbians who flirt with transitioning or transition.
Even in older circles, there's been a small portion who've long experimented with small amounts of T to go superbutch; some of them have started liking 'sir' outside of the bedroom context, though the majority have largely stayed mum or paved over the matter.
I've also heard of, though never met, "FTM femboys," who as far as I can tell are women who transition to men who dress as women...
It's pretty rare, but yeah, you can run into that a bit. Pantheggon's probably the most comprehensible to straight(ish) non-furs (and contrast Accelo to see what a bi cis femboy looks like, with the caveat that there's some m/m and even the m/f stuff is about as gay as that can get), though I'm just making an educated guess about the artist's actual gender. Haven't run into it in real life, at least as the sorta thing that they've waved as a flag.
... which is again a bizarre way to arrive at basically heterosexuality. I realize that the femboy thing is distinct from femnininity proper -- try calling a trans woman a femboy and see how it goes -- but at some point the irony and the flip flopping just goes so far that I can't even entertain the logic.
There's a criticism that t4m (or even t4t) transmen can end up 'just' straight with more steps, but I dunno if that really matches up to how it goes in reality, and not just in the sense that some transmen like to top. But I'm really not a fan of the whole 'escalating scale where nonconventional is better' thing, either.
I think some of the weirdness is downstream of seeing-as-a-state-dropdown-box problems, but a lot of it's that coherent names get overloaded quick. A lot of these people are what I'd consider central examples of nonbinary (ie, wanting to present as mixtures of male and female) or genderfluid (ie, wanting to present as male some times but female in other times), but because the terms also include a bunch of random junk you end up a dozen different people trying to come up with new terms that aren't, which get jumped on in turn and often have pretty stupid-sounding names. I keeping hoping that the versions with actual surface grip will have enough time and brownian motion to have a sort of brazil nut effect going on, but even with actual physics that's really dependent on pretty specific requirements, and it's more likely than not they won't be present here.
gattsuru
23d ago
Yeah, that's pretty fair. I'd argue Ellison a few other bits going on (eg, themes of self-sacrifice, some of the hate including legitimate criticisms, a not-IFLS-style scienticism), but I've got of tolerance for well-aimed hate, and I can understand his public persona as a lot deeper a disappointment than Moore-style stuff.
gattsuru
23d ago
Set it myself. I've been trying to mark more adult-content-focused comments; even if the links aren't porn or even strictly speaking nudity, they're probably the sorta thing a lotta people here don't want to be surprised by.
It's under the ... menu for each comment, though only available for you (and, presumably, moderators?). Have to post it and then mark it after it's posted.
gattsuru
23d ago
Trying to work my way through NoStarchPress's Computer Graphics from Scratch (caveat: got it deeply discounted during a Humble Bundle, definitely wouldn't pay full price). It's a little obnoxious because I've dabble enough in newer technologies that a lot of the early tutorials are annoyingly useless, but I'm also finding all the places I've missed conventions or misunderstood processes before.
Blanchard draws from wayyyy too little experience. I can give you furry examples of autoandrophiles in the gay male, cis woman, and trans man spheres, and even point some pretty clear distinctions between the autoandrophilic (cw: ftm in shibari and y-fronts, artist is nonbinary and I have no clue birth gender) and not-auto-androphilic (cw: ftm in panties, artist is straight male) treatments.
And that's been around for a while. The first Drayk 'intersex' commission I can find was pre-2010, and trying to find a good word that covers what people want in the fantasy (since some people want themselves, but transitioned, and other people want a character that never had to transition) was both getting a lot of controversy and eventually got an awkward compromise on e621 in early 2016.
gattsuru
23d ago
Can you give an example of a potential EO rule to change this?
How well-grounded do you want?
I don't think we'd see a Democratic President put forward an EO holding all asylees, once granted asylum, to be treated as having "been lawfully admitted for permanent residence" at the time of their entry, rather than the time they were issued a green card, but that's for political reasons rather than fear of judicial review. A court case would inevitably point to such retroactive adjustments in other contexts (the Cuban Adjustment Act was a statute, and had a portion of "lawfully admitted" happening up to 30 months before registry), but the real power would just come from the courts, and especially SCOTUS, not being able or willing to retroactively strip citizenship from hundreds of thousands of people, no matter how improperly given. A unilateral executive modification of the immigration registry date falls under similar problems -- even if a 2029 Dem admin had unilaterally granted it a green card to someone under this law that couldn't possibly have legally been eligible (eg, having been born after 1986), it's not clear anyone would have standing to challenge it... and it's just as unclear what political results would fall from that.
These are still mechanically possible; both could lead to a large number of people being given American citizenship overnight.
For a more politically plausible path, take something more like a soon-as-possible policy of rubber stamping of asylum claims, followed by a late-in-administration full rule setting a rubber-stamping of asylee-to-green-card-to-naturalization process. The strict read of the relevant statutes has six years, but it's not clear that even a fair-handed judiciary would read it that way rather than five years. This wouldn't get people voting overnight, but it'd be able to naturalize them within a single President's administration. The APA tomfoolery we've seen with DACA applies here; it could well be done with one term if the following administration was forced by courts to keep the old policies running.
There's other options that are more politically possible, but I'm not comfortable discussing them publicly.
Also, hasn't SCOTUS been pretty open to claims of standing by states challenging Federal policy?
Not really. Massachusetts v. EPA's what everyone points to requiring courts give 'special solicitude' to state challenges of federal policy, but that's literally only been used for that one case at SCOTUS, with every following case leaving states high and dry.
I'm not sure how much of Ellison's writings are his own faults, rather than exaggerated versions of failures he's seen and done, but there's definitely a mix and I agree that it probably doesn't favor him -- the man did end up with a bipolar diagnosis late in his life, and it pretty clearly wasn't some badge-of-accomplishment diagnosis. And he definitely has some of that 'I talked to a taxi driver' rather than 'I did this enough to grok it' going on.
Tbf, my gutcheck has some of the exaggeration in The Essential Ellison feels like self-loathing, even before I knew about the BPD... but it wouldn't, wouldn't it, whether because he actually had those flaws that bad or because he felt his minor failures were the end of the world. On the other hand, it's hard to tell how much of his hating was anti-anti-semitism rather than just being a hater in general -- the man famously loathed Star Wars and Spielberg in general, and had a number of non-Jewish cause celebres like van Vogt.
On the gripping hand, it's hard to tell how many of those cause celebres he really cared about, rather than just hating their enemies: From Alabamy With Hate is the best-known example, and particularly damning because its denouement revolves around a letter from a bigot who was 'bad as mud' but 'better' than racial minorities, without much consideration of what made Ellison good rather than just better than bigots, but it's pretty consistent everywhere from race to sexual behavior to the military to his stories to convention behavior. His enemies being idiots, or nazis, or chuds, or the teeming fandom masses, or normies, or whatever... might be better than racial resentment, but it's still not good.
I don't have a lot of room to criticize a hater for hating. I do have a lot of room to criticize a man that wrote at length about how science fiction and speculative fiction aren't the same thing, who can't do anything more himself.
On one hand, there is a point where you have to kill the buddha. Most heroes have feet of clay, few philosophers can commit to the bit to Diogenes level. Especially in media there's always going to be a temptation to present someone who's better than you can be, and whatever extent the mask molds the face, it's never going to be perfect and it can't change what's already happened. It's never pleasant to recognize the extent a writer's real positions are weaker than what they present, but Litany of Tarski -- but in turn neither does a philosophy of life become wrong merely because its proponents can't live up to it. Pratchett's view had its flaws and its failings, but wanting something that isn't true, or maybe even can't be true, because it's worth the progress toward it, is an acceptable tradeoff in my eyes.
On the other, I'm trying to write up an effortpost about cyberiatrogenic conditions (and, uh, come up with a better name than that), and one of the subleads is "the things we needed to hear, from the people who should have been there to say them", and how that's incredibly dangerous. Few heroes are carved full from in-situ marble, few philosophies can survive being used every day... except in this distant or fiction view, where every consideration comes through the camera lens, at most from wholly-artifical canned challenges built to reinforce the themes of a story. It's easy to forget that, or what it means. This is a way you'll be burned, and the stovetop hurts, and you'll be burned again. That's part and parcel of how heat works. Tech has let us forget that, for short periods and for induction cooktops, but that's an artifact of memory, not of the world.
Real people, whether Ellison or a childhood friend, will not be clones of you or homonculi of what you want or want to become. Real relationships mean friction. Pratchett's view had its flaws and its failings. Carrot Ironfoundersson (mostly) doesn't and can't. Beware what extent the latter has hacked your brain.
gattsuru
24d ago
Yeah, a lot of the gameboy- or ds-form factor devices seem like they're extruded from a press somewhere. Miyoo and TrimUI seem like they're at least aimed at enthusiasts, but most of what actually get advertised seem like glorified ewaste aimed more to be good gifts than good things you'd want to buy for yourself.
That project sounds like it'd be a blast, albeit also a pretty sizable challenge. The MiSTer is pretty impressive tech, if probably more dedicated to fidelity than I could recognize. I've heard far more mixed things about the Retrons, although I do appreciate having something more legitimate than 'tots-ripped-yourself' rom-dedicated machines.
gattsuru
25d ago
I've fallen down the emulation rabbit hole. Or perhaps it's emulation hardware?
I was looking for a portable and moderately linux-friendly device to host this project that wasn't a stupid phone ... and I'm probably going to end up just using a busted-ass stupid phone, all the non-Apple dedicated 'tablets' are either huge or crap or both, and I had some familiarity with portable gaming handhelds like the Steamdeck and thought 'oh, how hard could it be to figure out one with decent battery life'?
Surely there must be some market between eWaste web browsers and ItCanPlayCyberPunkForFiveSeconds, even if it's a bit of a weird niche--
Who wants to drink from the firehose!
Okay, emulation has taken off. I'd messed around with SNES or PS1 emulators back when they were all the rage, or the GameCube a decade ago, but I'd kinda gotten the impression the late PS2 era had been a brick wall, with only weird specialty projects like Yuzu as successful exceptions that aimed for the low-hanging fruit and getting absolutely clobbered by lawfare. Hardware wise, I'd seen a million different Raspberry Pi compute stick shells, and just slapped the same code on a RaspPi I already had and considered RetroArch checked.
Nope. Gone are the dime-store-3d-print shells. Forget BCM2711s or RK3399 (... mostly). Even the Bricks built for gameboy-level emulation are running on more specialized and capable processors, and some of the higher-end machines can be comparable to desktop machines I would be pretty comfortable playing 2022 AAA-games on. Sure, Nintendo can cost the software developers or website hosts a pretty penny, but you don't even have to run to skeezy AliExpress offers to get giant deliveries of embarrassingly overt piracy... and maybe some software herpes. The PS3, despite its weirdo architecture, seems like it's actually working okay? And on things like the XBox, Microsoft cares so little about it that you can just rip software straight from an unmodded console, with nothing more specialized than a USB spinning rust drive. Who expected the day when M$ wasn't the bad guy when it came to archiving old games?just don't look at their OS. When you can't play something, it's usually a sign of serious software limits some nutjob is willing to work surprisingly hard to solve, or you're emulating a wii game with a prolonged jerkoff joke as a central game mechanic that doesn't translate well.
Now, there's a lot of sketch here. At the high end, you have fun questions like iffy USB-C-PD implementations and driver hell. More often, expect a ton of hardware that cycles in and out in months if not days, from a manufacturer that's apparently colorblind and depending on Kickstarter churn. Even when everything works out fine, commitment to the LGPL is more in theory than practice, and there's a lot of reason to suspect that the Snapdragon8gen2 chips were 'surplus' from conventional projects -- I dislike Qualcomm's resale policies enough to think that's a plus, but from a support and longevity perspective it's a red flag.
And, yeah, a lot of these come with just piles upon piles of piracy. Ostensibly, you could play native games (many newer devices are fairly fully-featured linux/android, albeit with all the !!fun!! involved since most of the cheaper ones are ARM). Ostensibly, you could just rip games you own or collect, and I'm enough of a hoarder collector that I've actually been able to do some of that, but in all honesty? They're built for piracy. You know it, I know it, most vendors are pretty unabashed about letting you pick how much piracy you want and know it, the less graymarket vendors having to explicitly warn you that they aren't doing the piracy for you know it.
There's an optimistic view that's kinda nice. Yeah, it's a little twisted to be so ruled by nostalgia that you're putting as much processing power into a 2002 handheld game as could run a 2022 AAA one. And if everybody could have just bought a 5 USD rip of great games like Grand Theft Auto 3 or Shadow of the Colossus or Okami and run them on their cell phone, we probably wouldn't have gotten remasters of them. But in turn, there's a ton of other games that will never show up again, or where they are remastered get butchered in the process, or get remastered for a console or environment that itself has a shelf life measured in months. The Baptists-and-Bootleggers of Obsessive Weirdos and Literal Thieves haven't just kept a lot of otherwise abandoned games archived and usually playable (oh boy Games for gofuckyourself Windows Live), but they've made a lot of equipment and play options that would otherwise not exist, even if that requires pretty dedicated design and engineering work. If it also means you can get an unlocked Android device that'll accept alternate bootloaders for less than the cost of last generations Nintendo handheld, I'm not gonna complain.
So I dunno. I'm still more of a keyboard-and-mouse gamer, but some of the options are looking pretty good when I'm away from my desk or my documentation or my reading list. And even for normal gaming time, I think it might be worth firing up Megaman Legends or Robot Alchemic Drive again.
gattsuru
25d ago
I agree he's more sincere than John "Article III is <Not> Worth a Dollar" Roberts, fair. But I don't see any way to make VanDerStok workable in the same frame as Bostock.
Trivially, VanDerStok isn't clearly saying that the GCA definition of "firearm" is massively broad; that's why it has to keep wavering back and forth from ordinary meaning to what Congress 'meant' to say whenever discussing "artifact nouns". That's very far from Bostock's explicit division from what Congress intended to say from what the statute actually spells out.
But more critically, VanDerStok is a dodge. Gorsuch does not write to say that the GCA definition of "firearm" is so broad as to even cover all of the plaintiffs. He discovers that APA challenges must act as a facial challenge such that no enforcement of the regulation could ever be a valid interpretation of the statute, after the plaintiffs never argued it and the government defending the law disavowed. Even were he absolutely sure that the ghost guns rule were perfectly in line with the statute, he's not actually committing to it, either.
[disclaimer: IANAL]
The rule is that all administrative remedies must be exhausted before a lawsuit can be filed (successfully).
This has actually historically had some awkward results. For the VA example below, there was a VA-internal administrative appeals system required by the NIAA, but it would routinely sit on appeals for years. NICS itself has an ATF Relief From Disability program authorized by statute that has been defunded since 1993 and wasn't fast before that. Sometimes this precluded judicial review entirely, other times required demonstrating constructive denial.
That said, this court case here is the lawsuit after exhaustion of administrative appeals. You aren't required to (and are actively discouraged from) bring each matter individually. There's actually a bunch of really complex res judicata rules about bringing a lawsuit over the same legal matter without having a different underlying act, though I don't know them well enough to be absolutely confident that they'd preclude a second lawsuit here.
That said, there's basically zero chance of a successful Second Amendment lawsuit on this matter. SCOTUS has already had fairly sympathetic plaintiffs available, such as Mai v. United States; they've punted. Most successful lawsuits have depended entirely on process or statutory definitions regarding who counts as disqualified to start with. The one exception is the Sixth Circuit, notably distant from New Jersey, and that case depended on the government completely disavowing any current finding of dangerousness or similarity to currently-mentally-ill people.
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