gattsuru
1yr ago
The likely worst-case legal scenario is a lawsuit followed by settling out of court for a trivial amount.
Depends on what you consider trivial. TraceWoodgrains pointed to Midler v Ford in California, and it's foundational for Californian law, but the punchline is that Ford got off scot free, and the ad agency in question was hit for 400k USD. But that's because Midler was an issue of first impression at the time, limiting evidence of 'evil motive'; contrast the later Waits v Frito where Frito-Lay and its advertising company got tapped for a combined $2m USD over an ad that "broadcast in September and October 1988 on over 250 radio stations located in 61 markets nationwide" (though the advertising company had verbally offered to indeminfy Frito-Lay before running the ad). Contrast in turn White v. Samsung, where a literal robot acting as but clearly not Vanna White, which rhymes with today's problem, and ended up at 400k USD over a fiery dissent.
It's not business-ending, at least for a business OpenAI's size -- even adjusted for inflation and for how much Californian juries hate tech companies, I'd expect closer to 1m than 100m. But for all the philosophical problems with an expansive right of publicity, it's not toothless.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Paxton's condescension at the opposition probably isn't great for the longer-term stability of the nation, but in terms of direct impact, I'm more worried about everybody else. If the future were dominated by the most authoritarian political movements in the country stomping each other's faces, well, it'd be bad, but I can't say it would be bad because of the poor innocent jerks.
It's the people in the crossfire. There's always some fuzzy edges where maybe the immigration enforcement is rough-handed to discourage illegal immigrants, or maybe the LGBT restrictions are breaking privacy For The Children, or what have you, but there's also times where people are pretty obviously hammering a matter to drum up attention, or even just because they'd be expensive in human and financial and political capital to defend, and Paxton hasn't hesitated.
Paxton's far from unique in this, and I'm not sure he's even in the top ten. If politics were the proverbial game of chicken, we've long since gone from simply throwing the steering wheel out the window, to shooting a hired driver and cutting the brake lines. But Garland's been bad enough, and we don't need two in a row.
gattsuru
1yr ago
I'd caution that the NRA and its members are technically the 'victim' in the current New York lawsuit, but that didn't stop James from threatening the entire organization's mandate, digging through and almost-certainly leaking a ton of internal records, and pretty much crippling both the legal and political expenditures for one election already and probably a second. Tots coincidentally, no insurance provider in the state is willing to work with the organization, a ton of competent personnel have fled the ship or started planning competitors with all the inefficiencies and lost time that demands, so on. We won't know the full reckoning for a bit (June?), but the possibility that the org ends up under a hostile state's conservatorship is absolutely still in the cards.
Tides doesn't face that threat, but it's not because the state can't fuck over a badly operated donor funnel; it's because Republicans don't have the infrastructure to make that push.
gattsuru
1yr ago
In some ways, that difference can make it a better metaphor, especially for conversations in the 1990s and early-00s. Questions like whether you can treat sexual minorities with additional caution because of an infectious disease (or even protect them from themselves, as defenders of the Cuban concentration camps sanatorios argue even today), or ethnicities with suspicion because a co-religionist drove a plane into a building are still relevant, even if they're not the central case. Rogue killing someone with a casual touch, or Cyclops blowing up a city block with a blink, are exaggerations, but there are answers to these questions that also answer all the closer ones.
I'm a fan of bringing up trans stuff and gun stuff... well, partly because it makes both sides very uncomfortable, but also because the question of whether a dick gun makes a rapist murderer drives a lot of disagreement. Not all, especially outside of the TERF border, but a decent amount. And one reasonable response is that ability alone does not make for a deadly act: it takes either decision or negligence.
It's just that this ended up not being where the broader progressive movement actually went. There had always been a fraction insistent that prejudgement was fine for even things far smaller than leveling an skyscraper, it was just being pointed the wrong direction, and they won. Once you've decided that the possibility was enough, you're pretty quickly going to find yourself just haggling over the price. At the risk of pointing to metafictional example:
Huntington's disease was a hereditary degenerative disease with cognitive and psychiatric symptoms, one of which was psychosis. Huntington's was seen in perhaps one in eight thousand people, and psychosis was seen in perhaps one in ten of those. If a randomly selected human of Superman's apparent age were to obtain Superman's pwoers, there would be in a one in eight thousand chance that they would both have Huntington's disease and the symptoms of psychosis, the result of which would probably be casualties that would dwarf the Great War by a large margin...
When these probabilities were multiplied together, the final very rough estimate was that Superman had a one in ten chance of bringing about a global scale human catastrophe of some kind in the next thirty years. Even if the odds had been one in a hundred, Lex would have taken a similarly extreme course of action.
It mostly didn't work, but settling with Defense Distributed (and giving a not-trivial amount of cash in the settlement offer) is the sort of lawfare I'd expect from a coldblooded conservative, if small-scale by the standards of that sort of cy pres-like lawfare. And then there's the obvious guesswho stuff that didn't work entirely.
I agree that a Count of Monte Cristo-style planned revenge isn't really Trump's strong point, though.
EDIT: that said, I do think it's the sort of thing Paxton would a) have the temperament and skills for, and b) absolutely do it for both political ends and to make an impulsive boss happy.
gattsuru
1yr ago
gattsuru
1yr ago
A California Superior Court judge ruled Wednesday that there is enough evidence for Moorpark College professor/pro-Hamas agitator Loay Alnaji to go to trial on charges of manslaughter in the death of Paul Kessler, a Jewish man who was involved in a counterprotest on November 5, 2023. Alnaji was involved in a confrontation with Kessler on that Sunday afternoon when he allegedly hit Kessler in the face with a bullhorn, causing Kessler to fall and fracture his skull. Kessler died approximately seven hours after the altercation...
Dr. Othon Mena, Assistant Chief Medical Examiner for Ventura County, conducted Kessler's autopsy and testified as to his findings. Mena found four exterior injuries to the left side of Kessler's face, along with a tear inside Kessler's mouth and damage to Kessler's tongue where he'd clenched his teeth, likely after being hit with the bullhorn. After examining the bullhorn and the grooved pattern of the rubber lip on the bottom of it, Mena concluded that the scrapes/lacerations to Kessler's left chin, left upper lip, and the outer corner of his left eye were caused by the bullhorn striking Kessler, and that the black eye noticeable on autopsy was either caused by the bullhorn strike or Kessler's subsequent fall.
Mena also testified that a 2-inch curvilinear tear on the back of Kessler's head and a skull fracture were caused by the assault or fall.
A crime lab technician testified that Kessler's DNA was found on three portions of the bullhorn: near the bottom, where a red/brown bloodstain was found, and in two sections of the bottom lip of the bullhorn.
gattsuru
1yr ago
gattsuru
1yr ago
There's one classification that's people that the CBP (and related agencies) detected, but did not apprehend. There's still some uncertainty -- how much were the numbers fucked with? was that particular bunch of pixels in the distance of an overexposed camera a coyote or a coyote? the CBP used to exclude turn-backs from gotaway numbers, but they've stopped reporting turn-backs, does that indicate a methodology change or a reporting change -- but they're probably not entirely made up, either.
There's another classification that's everyone that the CBP didn't see at all as they crossed the border outside of a port of entry, period. The CBP's testified to Congress that this has stayed at "10 to 20%" of those detected but not apprehended, and that they have high confidence in it, but it also seems entirely pulled out of Mayorkas' backside. Unfortunately, that's true for most people: there's a lot of estimates for total apprehension rate that can be back-calculated into unknown-gotaways, or just plain estimates, but it's hard to argue why 25% or 33% or 42% is 'right'.
The estimates giving 6-7 million tend to be based around only CBP encounters, minus explusions/deportations, plus the CBP's own estimate for 'gotaways' or undetected illegal immigration. This isn't the absolute lowest-bound possible -- some number are repeat offenders -- but it's a very low estimate, especially when the CBP is also claiming that its apprehension rate has remained stable from the lowest part of the Trump/COVID lull til today, and as immigration courts have been increasingly swamped.
((And, obviously, this excludes visa overstays.))
I don't think 15m is correct (and it might just be taken from a Trump claim), and most of the ways to get anywhere plausibly close to it depend on some questionable assumptions (eg, declaring some of the weirder refugee categorizations "illegally imported" even if it's not strictly speaking illegal for the immigrants themselves), but the Biden admin numbers are pretty hard to believe.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Was literally pointing a gun at Rittenhouse, whose friend claimed he said "His only regret was not killing the kid and hesitating to pull the gun before emptying the entire mag into him" (later retracted, tots honest), and who was illegally carrying a concealed weapon after his carry permit had either expired or been revoked.
Yep.
gattsuru
1yr ago
No clue. Attempts to formalize and distribute governance haven't even been great at stopping progressive organizations from being skin-suited from the inside; in neutral ones, they've been largely been explicit targets.
In terms of success stories, you've basically got SQLite. Which probably has had some effect -- it operates in a nexus of spaces where both liberal and leftist interests often drive focus. But I'm not sure it would work for many other projects.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Paul Prediger, nee Gauge Grosskruetz, aka bye-ceps, has also filed a civil suit. But yes, I genuinely expected feds to go after him, and it hasn't happened, and that surprised me and does show some limits.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Teter
To add to The_Nybbler's point, oral arguments in Rahimi were November 2023, a case where an incredibly unsympathetic defendant (alleged multiple shooter, drug dealer, and girlfriend beater) was indicted for possessing a firearm while subject to a domestic restraining order. We won't know for certain how the court rules until the opinion drops, and that probably won't happen for a month (or up to three).
But it's extremely unlikely that this will result in a significantly broadened understanding of the Second Amendment. The most optimistic takes in the gunnie world hope that the Court will allow Rahimi's conviction and just require a finding of 'dangerousness'. Most expect that they'll overturn the lower court, or leave only the most narrow process grounds to protect Rahimi.
And there are reasons beyond oral argument tea-leaf reading for that. It's already happened before in Gary/Greer, where unsympathetic plaintiffs made it easy for the court to decide that for process reasons a prohibited person didn't need to be proven to know they were prohibited.
But even more broadly, there's just not that much of the court touching this right to protect all but the most aggressive infringements in the cleanest-cut cases across the wide scope of all people in a jurisdiction, and sometimes not even that, even as case after case was teed up.
If the Court wanted to protect the rights of people who hadn't been violent, they had a case where a man was banned from possessing guns because he was convicted of counterfeiting cassette tapes in 1987. And they punted. If the Court wanted to protect the rights of people who had suffered mental illness long ago and recovered, they had a case where a man was banned from possessing guns because he had a depressive episode in 1999. And they punted. States requiring guns to have technologies that don't exist? Taking private property without warrant or compensation or grandfathering? License denials for driving while black a police encounter that did not result in an arrest or any evidence of wrongdoing? Punt punt punt.
The best result the gunnie sphere other than Bruen was Caetano v. Massachusetts (2016! and see the massive resistance in O'Neil v Neronha, only finished in 2022). After that, there's maybe the GVR on Duncan v Bonta... except they GVR'd it to the Ninth Circuit, which even at the time had literally never allowed the Second Amendment to do anything, and since broke rules to slow Duncan down further. It's not like Bruen is even the only example: Caniglia v. Strom, was more a Fourth Amendment case, but see the later punts on the massive resistance it has faced by lower courts.
Maybe I get surprised here, or VanDerStok is where (... in 2026? assuming it doesn't get punted then?). But despite an environment with a massive variety of low-hanging fruit, these are the only things the Court cared about, and that's not random.
gattsuru
1yr ago
I'm not convinced that they were tools that are broken rather than blunted, but even if they are splintered beyond repair, how and when and what happened is worth knowing. Regardless of what matters in the long run, these tools are almost certainly not the only tools vulnerable to the same things.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Along with the the impeachment process -- in New York, technically just 'removal', requires recommendation from the governor followed by two-thirds of the State Senate, gfl -- trial-level criminal court judges are appointed by the Mayor of New York City for a lengthy period, mandatory retirement at age 70. Judge Abena Darkeh's current term is set to expire in 2030, so you could just hold the New York City mayoral office for six years time, along with taking over the recommendation system. Again, gfl.
((There's also a rule about residence, but I have no clue if/how it's enforced.))
gattsuru
1yr ago
To be fair, the Aloha Spirit stuff was downstream of using a state statute to evaluate the state constitution.
To be less fair, that's not how that works for anything else. And the state constitutional provision had the exact same text as the federal Second Amendment. Which the Hawaii Supreme Court decided just didn't apply, with or without any aloha spirit.
The Brooklyn District Attorney's website reports:
“Ghost guns are a threat to New Yorkers everywhere, and my Office is working tirelessly with our partners in law enforcement to stop their proliferation. Today’s sentence should send a message to anyone who, like this defendant, would try to evade critically important background checks and registration requirements to manufacture and stockpile these dangerous weapons. Every ghost gun we take off the street is a win for public safety.”
The District Attorney identified the defendant as Dexter Taylor, 53, of Bushwick, Brooklyn. He was sentenced today by Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Abena Darkeh to 10 years in prison. He was convicted of two counts of second-degree criminal possession of a weapon; three counts of third-degree criminal possession of a weapon; five counts of criminal possession of a firearm; unlawful possession of pistol ammunition; and prohibition on unfinished frames or receivers on April 16, 2024, following a jury trial.
Taylor, also known as CarbonMike, was both a CTRL-Pew 3d printing enthusiast and a New Yorker, a combination that Didn't Go Well.
The specific charges and sentencing are complex, but if I'm reading matters correctly, almost all sentences run concurrently, so the headline charge about ghost guns, like the charges about possession of pistol ammunition and so on, are kinda swamped by a ten-year sentence for 'assault weapons' and for 'owning five firearms'. There are a few border issues on the text of the statutes, but there's not a ton to argue on whether Taylor complied with these statutes.
((Not least of all because many are vague or broad enough that it's very much up to the local DA to make the decision anyway.))
There's a lot to be debated about whether the laws are constitutional, but not much chance that it matters. The New York Assault Weapons Ban has been the target of prolonged lawfare since before Bruen, with the FPC currently supporting Lane after the state was getting good enough reception in Vanchoff v James about lacking credible threats of prosecution, and that's the case with the stance furthest along. Other statutes, like possession of ammunition or "ammunition feeding devices" without a matching pistol permit, are difficult to write cases to challenge before enforcement at all. Even if the statutes for each of the longer sentences are overturned, bail pending appeal is extremely unlikely. Taylor will have served most if not all of his sentence first, especially given the glacial pace that courts have set for these matters (cfe Duncan).
Taylor also makes the argument that he did not have a fair day in court, and while almost every defendant does that to some extent, his argument is unusually compelling. No few gunnies finding a pull quote from the judge allegedly claiming that "Do not bring the Second Amendment into this courtroom. It doesn’t exist here. So you can’t argue Second Amendment. This is New York." but the gameplay about objections, if honestly stated, is as bad or worse. (I'm unable to find a direct trial transcript.).
Also doesn't matter. There is a right to an impartial judge, but this mostly covers matters like giant campaign donations or hating an entire nationality or literally copying text from a party's submissions, rather than just figuratively being on the prosecutor's side. Even assuming Taylor's (and his lawyer's) summary is accurate and complete, the appeals courts don't care that lower courts hate people accused of making guns.
In some ways, Taylor might be the ideal test case: nothing in the visible court records or DA chest-beating show nefarious intent like violent personal history or planned mass shooting or intent to resell (and New York law places a presumption on multiple possession as for sale), he (was) traditionally employed, he credibly claims that he's never fired a single one of the guns, and at 52, he's aged out of the various high-criminal-risk age brackets. To beat the HBDers to the punch, he's even visibly a minority.
((To beat the HBDers with a stick, if we're framing absolutely everything as part of the progressive stack, I think there's strong evidence that the real top of the stack is whatever matches the politics today in a far more direct manner than mere race.))
Of course, the Brooklyn DA brought the case, knowing that. The judge acted like this, in this case, knowing that. And no matter how dim you might think they are, they're winning, and this know what it takes to win. Whether that's because the courts punt on serious cases because defendants fail to present long evidence of futile requests, because they credibly believe that Taylor's not Perfect Enough for the courts to actually handle or for various gun rights orgs to fund, or because even if they're wrong they'll never suffer for it, doesn't really matter. It's possible that Brooklyn DA took the case because Taylor's social media made it easier to prove, it might be that we're only gonna hear about this case out of many because of said social media, and it doesn't really matter.
There's a lot of ways to snark, in "What's the penalty for being late?" fashion, about how Taylor's non-violent noncompliance with a law has gotten a much longer sentence than nutjobs who were separately violent, or a comparable sentence to a man who literally burned another man to death on the pyre of an Approved Cause. And that's not entirely fair, because the federal system doesn't have parole and New York does, and anyway there's a million different squiggly little variables about the crimes and sentences, and there's nowhere near enough cases to make a deep statistical analysis even if I wanted to try. Gun control advocates will certainly quibble, at the edges, about whether this is really 'non-violent non-violent', since there's always the possibility of later bad acts or theft or loss or mental break.
And Taylor ain't dead yet, despite an (alleged) no-knock raid. The actuarials put decent odds on him even seeing the light of day as a free man again, parole or no. Unlike Mr. Lee, had Taylor expressed his dislike of current law enforcement with a bit what the ATF calls a destructive device through a bit of what I call a broken window, the odds would not be looking so good. But there's no magic court case, here, and no golden BB. This isn't even the strawman of a scifi writer drawing up villains who just want their laws as threats to hang over innocent men. If you are ruled by people who hate you, giving puppy-dog eyes and saying this is just a paperwork crime and no one was hurt won't buy you a cup of coffee before you get absolutely reamed in all the least fun ways, and contra a once-prolific-now-banned poster here, everyone who cares about this stuff is ruled by men who hate them.
This is what table stakes looks like.
gattsuru
1yr ago
[caveat: there are some parts of this discussion area I'm not going to describe, either publicly or in private messages.]
Any? Throw YOLO onto a Jetson, some batteries, and a decent lens, have fun. Start with one of a dozen preconfigured models, maybe use the VisDrone dataset if you want to put a bit of effort into tweaking something. Probably about 2k-10k if you're buying all pre-built (maybe a bit more if you want non-DJI).
Actually doing it well gets harder. There's been a little bit of effort into image-based localization, to avoid GPS jamming, but for technical reasons (off-nadir sunlight suuuuuucks) it's annoying as hell to work with, and you probably want it or something like it, in addition to your main sensor payload. Some human identification is easier than others. And actual decision-making for more complex stuff is a Coding Project.
gattsuru
1yr ago
The spreadsheet did not appear to have all data, even in hidden form: Nordean argues that several messages were missing, in addition to those hidden, and the government's later claimed that Miller had deleted them. While some were never disclosed (either claimed as classified, 'FBI sensitive', or irrelevant), several of the deleted messages were made available later and had no plausible justification for nondisclosure. Beyond that, several pieces of Miller's live testimony contradicted the messages in the hidden part of the spreadsheet, most notably related to access to attorney-client privileged materials.
gattsuru
1yr ago
I legitimately do not understand why judge's eyes gloss over or even they get angry when it's suggested these people shouldn't be assumed to be the most credible people to ever exist. It's almost comical how much defense counsel has to tip-toe around it until they find essentially a smoking gun.
What's particularly funny is how even defense lawyers get into it. Cfe when themotte's own notice that an FBI agent perjured herself at length during a criminal trial; he was genuinely curious how the FBI agent would weasel out of it (spoiler: easily!), and even entertained the possibility "whether the prosecutors will bother" to bring perjury charges (spoiler: no).
Civil suits can be very Zif's Law-prone, where a small number of actors can put an outsized number of lawsuits forward, unless the statute is very limited (and the various enforcement arms actually stick to that rather than redefining it). Laufer from Acheson Hotels v. Laufer, for example, filed "557 suits in sixteen different states, plus the District of Columbia", and while she's at the higher end of ADA testers, individual people with thousands of tester lawsuits exist.
But that depends on a number of very specific attributes: ADA tester targets have a lot of capital, they're often represented by insurance companies that are willing to give cash, the (court and administrative interpretation of) relevant statutory language in many circuits allows both standing and damages to be found without normal concrete harm, a very compliant regulatory system that writes increasingly broad material to base a lawsuit on, so on. Hence why SB8 lawsuits are very thin on the ground, and with HB1557 only allowing declaratory and injunctive relief it'll be the domain of morons tilting at windmills. The gun private right of action laws tend to be much more mixed -- lots of cash out there both to support lawsuits going in and reward them coming out, but standard of harm is a mess, and the PLCAA is only dying rather than dead.
In theory, it should be possible to write statutory language that limits testing trolls while still allowing even small lawsuits over actual harm, but a) a there's a pretty sizable portion of the support for the ADA that thinks the lawsuit heavy enforcement is a benefit, and b) it's not clear that actually would work, anyway.
gattsuru
1yr ago
It was all boiled down to that 5000 number that you’ll see repeated over and over again in Republican criticisms of the bill. What’s worse is that this number is presented as a capitulation to Democrats rather than a ceiling on the use of a draconian new power granted in a heavily conservative bill. It’s presented as if the bill mandates open borders for the first 5000 illegal immigrants every day, and only then begins to enforce some border policies. This is so laughably, bafflingly wrong that it defies belief.
In addition to the obvious no-trust problems -- there was already wide suspicion that official numbers on undocumented crossings (aka gotaways) were underestimates before the feds had additional cause to massage them down, and there's no judicial authority to require the Border Patrol to actually do something even should they report the real numbers, there's some fun questions about how mandatory 'shall' language gets -- the proposed bill had a number of other wide ceilings to its use that your summary glosses over:
- The count only includes "encounters" "between the southwest land border ports", "between the ports of entry along the southern coastal borders", and "between the southwest land border ports of entry of the United States", where "encounter" means physical apprehension and/or seeking admission at a port of entry. Gotaways don't count.
- "Aliens described in subsection (a)(2)(C) [unaccompanied minors] from noncontiguous countries shall not be included in calculating the sum of aliens encountered."
- "If the President finds that it is in the national interest to temporarily suspend the border emergency authority, the President may direct the Secretary to suspend use of the border emergency authority on an emergency basis." [for 45 days out of a year]
- The Secretary of Homeland Security only shall activate the border emergency without review on crossing the numeric thresholds for 90 days for the first year, 75 days for the second year, and 60 days for the third year; the SHS has unreviewable authority to not activate the 'mandatory' emergency for 180/150/120 days, and may not activate it at all the remainder of those years.
- The Border Emergency's exception lists includes "An alien who an immigration officer determines, with the approval of a supervisory immigration officer, should be excepted from the border emergency authority based on the totality of the circumstances, including consideration of significant law enforcement, officer and public safety, humanitarian, and public health interests, or an alien who an immigration officer determines, in consultation with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, should be excepted from the border emergency authority due to operational considerations." [eg, just because there's a border emergency active and mandatory doesn't mean any alien must actually be handled.
- ‘‘(A) SUMMARY REMOVAL .—Notwithstanding any other provision of this Act, subject to subparagraph (B), the Secretary shall issue a summary removal order and summarily remove an alien to the country of which the alien is a subject, national, or citizen (or, in the case of an alien having no nationality, the country of the alien’s last habitual residence), or in accordance with the processes established under section 241, unless the summary removal of the alien to such country would be prejudicial to the interests of the United States. [emphasis added.]
Eh... I dunno.
Historically, yes, but a lot of the recent tools are amazingly good. This guy (cw: FFXIV spoilers up to 6.0, NSFW audio) is audibly AI-gen, but it's based on a character that has maybe an hour or two of voice lines, total, and while it's ElevenLabs rather than running on a home desktop, I'm pretty sure you could get similar results through RVC. Handling more varied content over longer periods would probably want more input media, but it's the work of days rather than months.
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