gattsuru
2yr ago
There's a big issue that needs better policing, self- or other-wise, but I'd caution some of these examples aren't particularly good ones. In particular, the actual proposal from Tatchell was :
One alternative option might be to introduce a tiered age of consent, where sex involving under-16s would cease to be prosecuted, providing both partners consent and there is no more than two or three years difference in their ages. This system operates in Germany, Israel and Switzerland...
Any review of the consent laws should be premised on five aims. First, ending the criminalisation of consenting relationships between teens of similar ages. Second, protecting young people against sex abuse. Third, empowering them to make responsible sexual and emotional choices. Fourth, removing the legal obstacles to earlier, more effective sex and relationship education. Fifth, ensuring better contraception and condom provision to prevent unwanted pregnancies and abortions and to cut the spread of sexual infections like HIV.
That is, essentially a Romeo and Juliet law. There are some good arguments against these laws: there's a lot of potential for abuse with a lot of the covered age ranges, even within same-age relationships in these age ranges, there are pragmatic arguments against people this age having even safe and consensual sex, and far more than the general sphere this subject is especially vulnerable to the Murder-Ghandi problem.
But they are extremely far from the central case for pedophilia.
gattsuru
2yr ago
I'm generally an AI/ML booster, but I could understand not wanting to give the major studios an inch, here. There's already a pretty bad tendency to fuck around with the numbers to make even major films have nearly no residuals, when not passing out glorified contracts of adhesion. It doesn't exactly take a lot of creative thought to consider what sort of foolishness a sufficiently motivated bunch of Dark Triad lawyers and beancounters could do, and it takes a lot of thought to bar off every exceptionally-bad option. In that sort of low-trust environment, it's more reasonable to target bans even if you don't think in the absence of a ban that the counterparty would be able to hit you too hard.
Of course, on the flip side, while I'm impressed by as a mostly-voluntary (they're still effectively semi-closed shop) union, I'm not exactly impressed by them as a guild. Them wanting to avoid being automated away (or, worse: being paid peanuts for something that gets laundered through AI for the actual sales item is a trivial tactic) doesn't really change whether someone else will be willing to work with the studios at risk of getting automated later, and having comparable quality, or whether I should care as a buyer.
gattsuru
2yr ago
Robbers Cave was the second run at the same experiment, run specifically because the first attempt had too much cooperation between the two 'teams', and this wasn't disclosed in Sherif's paper. Worse and perhaps more critically, the paper heavily concealed the extent Sherif (in the first experiment) and OJ Harvey (in Robbers Cave proper) actively manipulated the participants to make them more aggressive or be more affected by the aggression of other participants. It's not as severely a fake as, say, Stanford Prison, but Harvey was on-record as it being a script with an intended conclusion.
Milgram had a lot of information available suggesting that a significant number of his experiment subjects knew or claimed to know that the actor was acting, enough to overturn the conclusions, along with not actually holding to his claimed experimental protocol very consistently. Which is less severe and more borderline as 'faked', but (hopefully!) worse than all social science experiments.
gattsuru
2yr ago
There's been several cases where people did various things to rainbow road-crossing markers, and while some have found specifically that the state's or city's property could not be a valid target for hate crime purposes under existing law, this does seem to be a specific statutory thing.
gattsuru
2yr ago
Do you have a problem with Cheques, cash, wire transfers, and Credit Cards?
To be fair, wire transfers are so fraught that, in the United States, attempting to initiate any significant one will immediately have you filling out a form that lists some of the most common forms of fraud. Large transfers will usually have the bank (or other vendor) . As a result, most Americans will only use them in extremely rare circumstances.
((Though ACH, by comparison, have far too few protections. And similar sorts of fraud focused on gift cards are not well-enough known yet in normie world.))
gattsuru
2yr ago
But I think it is also responsible partly for degree of dissatisfaction. How many people in a social context where transition wasn’t an option, would have been happier not transitioning than people not transitioning in a social context where it is an option?
It's hard to long for the solely-imagined, but there were a lot of people longing for the solely-imagined into the mid-90s and early-00s, and I only start there because that's where I first ran into it. That's actually driven a lot of art and transhumanist trans stuff, because magical or magic-science explanations for gender swapping predate Ranma 1/2 or Heinlein by decades. And while having it only be the realm of magic makes it more unreachable, it also hides a lot of the costs and tradeoffs: Ranma 1/2 fans could envision transition where the only serious ramifications were some social impacts, your rival hitting on you, and maybe some lost muscle strength, without questions like what surgical or even hormonal intervention might involve.
gattsuru
2yr ago
This isn't exactly the most compelling parade of horribles. Even for the central case, that the FBI's employees can't take time away from stopping actually child-abusers to report not-child-abusing creeper accounts is... not obviously a horrible thing. Even for actual 'advocacy of violence', Reddit's pretty happily demonstrated that the things that can be reported and the things that should be spending any of the DoJ's time might as well be two disjoint circles. And there's a ton of non-central cases, here.
((That's separate from my general skepticism about government agencies obeying court orders like this. Contra your recent arguments, I don't think we'd see a bunch of DoJ employees go to jail if they ignore this court order while it's getting appealed and before it is stayed or overturned; I don't think we're even going to see serious efforts by DoJ attorneys to warn employees that they may be covered by the injunction.))
gattsuru
2yr ago
I'll caution that some of this is more alliances than behaviors: a lot of not-very-gay-places will put out the whole flags-and-posters-and-pronouns bit in the interests of outreach. It's not just signalling, but it's also not necessarily a dating club either. You don't want to know how much background drama stuff like this ends up with.
My first guess would be the same loosening of priors that allows for creativity also loosens the heterosexuality prior; but then why gay and not bi?
At least for the furries, a lot are bi, or something that you'd probably identify as bisexual even if the furry themselves doesn't. Furscience's stuff gives around 45% bi-or-pan, and I don't think that's too far from realistic. Now, the breakdown for high-recognition artists is probably a little different, but it's also a little harder to find that out quickly (eg, Meesh and ruiadri both identify as straight, which... might surprise readers).
gattsuru
2yr ago
IIRC, it was Neil Gaiman who first wrote "the problem of Susan." It's been repeated endlessly, of course.
He published a short story under that name in 2004 that seems to have been one of the main rallying flags for The Problem of Susan as a philosophical point. It's worth pointing out that Gaiman's The Problem Of Susan (cw: nsfw) is fictional, not just in being a short-story rather than an essay, but that even in-story much of it is metaphor and dreams and supposition. There are a number of interpretations and, and while the "C S Lewis Thinks Girls Have Cooties" analysis is the most shallow and most heavily repeated, it's not the only one and maybe not even the most plausible. There's a lot of the story that's about broader theodicy, and about what happens to children's stories that grow up, and about what the brave adventures actually require happen in the background. The character-who-might-be-Susan ends the story dead, but dead in a way that's reconciled with her life, if by setting herself or her goals outside of God.
((To be a bit less charitable, the story's also... very far from Gaiman's best work; the emphasis on dream-logic interplays of violence and sexuality are nearly Garth Ennis-level shock jock-isms, and if anything have only become more dated since. I don't think Gaiman himself really ever had a good idea of what he was trying to say with Greta's dream: he describes the story as "I suppose I wanted to write a story that would be equally problematic, and just as much of an irritant, if from a different direction, and to talk about the remarkable power of children’s literature."))
If Lewis had been writing for an older audience, maybe he'd have explored her psychological state in more detail and it would have emerged that yes, she knew Narnia was real but she turned her back on it for more complicated reasons, not just because she wanted to go to parties.
I think there's something that could be done here, in an interesting way, but on the other hand, there something awkward when the closest attempts I'm aware of are an XKCD four-panel, and maybe some mediocre web fiction. I don't know whether anything that could be done would be a good story.
This is literally an associate professor of law at Yale asserting "my reconstruction of events based on interviews long after the fact is more plausible...
Yes, but the Yalie's claims still includes sections like :
As laid out in the reconstruction above, I believe it likely that Lawrence and Gamer were in Lawrence's bedroom together when the police arrived. I further believe it likely that the two men were involved in some kind of sexual activity (possibly, though not necessarily, including prohibited anal sex) when the police arrived. Thus, on the one hand, I do not believe a central contention of Quinn and Lilly's account. For reasons I gave earlier, I think it unlikely the deputies actually witnessed Lawrence and Garner having anal sex.
This isn't compatible with "But in short, Lawrence and Garner were not together, sexually or otherwise, before or after the case", nor "the case that affirmed the right of gay couples to have consensual sex in private spaces seems to have involved two men who were neither a couple nor having sex." At most, Carpenter's analysis tries to question whether the men were having oral sex, or whether the police had actually seen them fucking rather than just recognized that they had been.
But that is not actually the legal question relevant to the case. Even had Lawrence and/or Garner brought a not-guilty plea, rather than plead no contest, and faced a jury, the jury would not have asked which of the two had topped for a minute in front of police, but merely whether they had sex. Even excluding the contested police statements, it doesn't exactly take a giant leap of faith to think that the two men found naked in a room with some gay porn, after a false police call that was triggered by a lover's spat, were Down Bad. Separately, the men were long-term confirmed bachelors, but this isn't even a 'but they might someday violate the statute' question; the available evidence suggests this wasn't even the first time the two fucked. It's possible that the two were merely remarkable fans of frottage or manual masturbation, or that prosecutors wouldn't consider rimming to count, or what have you, but it's a bit of a reach.
These are reasonable discussions! It's quite likely that at least one if not all of the police testimonies were 'embellished' if not simply lying as a way to implement 'contempt of cop' as a charge, and that does say something for these laws in specific and for due process in general (although I think Carpenter is a little too quick to assume contradiction and, for that, which direction: drunken guys making bad decisions are not ). But the 1973 statute in question banned both oral and anal sex, and like all crimes allows arrest and charge on relatively low standards of evidence. And neither Lawrence nor Garner would have to have lied. After all, "no contest" does not require you to plea that the factual allegations in a claim are true, unlike a guilty plea (indeed, a lot of states have case law about people having to plea no contest because they could not remember facts of an incident well enough or even at all to plea guilty).
I expect Carpenter tolerates, if not intentionally courts, this confusion: there's a reason his paper subtitles a section as "Posing As Somdomites [sic]". But Carpenter only says this in the subtitles, which are apparently in the group of things no one expects to be honest, and tbf he throws in an annoying footnote. This sort of thing is neither unusual nor is Carpenter (or the New Yorker) particularly severe here. But it's still kinda relevant to recognize that they were sodomites, and almost all the available evidence suggests that they were at least working on the practical side of that with each other the day of the arrest.
The revelation that Lawrence and Garner were not married-in-everything-but-name is more honest and contradicts a lot of the implications the Lawrence cert request about not merely couples but 'long-term couples', and in Kennedy's writing (along with its other problems: the man's first draft was so florid gay clerks asked him to tone it down), and it's somewhat more fair.
((Indeed, here perhaps Carpenter is either unwilling or too unfamiliar with the matter to actually Darkly Hint: his analysis, at most, suggests that Lawrence and Garner had a one-night stand or perhaps a threesome-turned-twosome with an annoyed third wheel. That neither Eubanks nor Garner had regular employment and were staying late at night in a large apartment rented by a man of moderate income... sometimes that sorta thing is someone genuinely providing as much as they can to destitute soon-to-be-friends. Sometimes helping down-on-their-luck gay guys out means a bunch of gay guys will be in your apartment. And then sometimes it means they'd owe you a favor. I'd bet closer to category one or two, here, but I've seen the aftermath of people chasing three.))
That they were not a traditional couple (or threepul or whatever) is a more realistic criticism of Kennedy's writing. But that still does not get us to "Plaintiff shopping", "All it takes is a bit of theater", or a place where we can't find "parties who aren't being puppeted". Indeed, Carpenter and Lewis both agree that all three of Eubanks, Garner, and Lawrence were very far from the sort of parties that anyone would want for a court case. One of the police that night (Quinn, the man who alleged to have been exposed to over a minute of two men fucking at gunpoint) thought it was an intentionally-farmed case. But Carpenter dismisses that entirely; Quinn's report is the one Carpenter believes was most heavily 'exaggerated'.
There are aggressively shopped cases and plaintiffs; even assuming the report for 303 Creative isn't lying it still wouldn't be the most severe. US v. Miller is my long-standing favorite, simply because the 'controversy' involved a man who was dead before the case was decided. There are even some traits for this case after the charges were filed: the defense lawyers requesting that their own clients face higher fines (so they could appeal) are one of the more obvious.
Rather than being picked as people to find a case, or perhaps had a case with facts selected to best present before the court, the gay men here seemed to have been 'picked' once they were already facing prosecution, and picked mostly in the sense that they and Lawrence in particular (previously pulled to a police car in his underpants while shouting at police!) were obstinate enough to pick a fight.
There's a fair critique that these men did not have the information to understand what that fight would entail for them over the long term, or that given costs of what they paid that the broader movement owed them more; the New Yorker piece ends with a bit on that. And it's quite true: I've made my case for smaller-scale problems, but the extent the legal community depends on an army of sacrificial lambs is pretty appalling. But it is less an argument in favor of 'natural' cases as against them.
gattsuru
2yr ago
I think the New Yorker piece overstates Carpenter’s analysis of Lawrence, and in turn Carpenter’s paper is more than a little conclusory. It is very hard to read this and come away with the assumption the two men certainly or even likely never had sex, even if it raises some weak questions about whether they were caught immediately in the act (or drunkly continue before police) rather than just having been undressed in a room with a lot of gay porn when caught.
gattsuru
2yr ago
However I'm most interested in how this innovation could shift the balance of power back to the strong and physically capable, away from the nerds.
There's been some amount of this in VR already: BeatSaber is one of the more famous VR games as a whole and can be surprisingly calisthenic (cw: flashing colors), and games like Rumble take that further to a point that can interact with your proprioception.
But there are ultimately games. There are definite advantages to Apple's handsetless approach -- dumbest side, you actually do lose track of where your real hands are when using a lot of VR handsets! ((Though I'm not sure handsetless is the right answer. Lucas's LucidVR tech has that bulky jank only DIY can provide, but cheap haptic feedback allows a lot of things that handsetless can't.)) But it's not immediately obvious that these would have any implications on a 'balance of power' any deeper than the next generation of MMORPGs, or perhaps some corny Pokemon Go-style things.
It's imaginable to see something with broader implications. You don't need to be physically strong to build a house in Minecraft, and you're not doing much more to build a house in VR-Minecraft (though your noodly arms will get a workout!), but there's at least a plausible scenario where XR/AR-HouseBuilding Assistant ends up being a thing. Given the current state of recruiting for the trades (and the people who are recruited often doing awful at it) that's potentially a pretty lucrative design space.
But the reason Software Ate The World isn't that it was something you did with computers; it's that it's something you did once and it applied ten thousand or ten million times without having to redo each one. There are a few places where that matters with just physical strength or dexterity, but most of those spaces are very well-explored.
But if you suppose that a lot of the reason past-gen tech focused on us noodly-armed people was because the active and energetic don't enjoy sitting down at a computer when thinking hard, then maybe that's a different matter.
The theory for "merit" is that schools are intended to teach people useful things, and that "merit" is supposed to track the ability of individual students to learn from and engage with those useful things, such that they are more productive in later life and contribute additional impact to society. The extent this is realistic depends pretty heavily on the topic and school, since med or engineering students having certain skills is a lot more important than law fields, but it has supposed to be part of the spirit constantly.
As a society the people we should be sending to Harvard are those who will get the largest Harvard marginal treatment effect.
I'm not sure I buy that -- for my criticisms of 'merit' as applied to Harvard, if it turns into a university pinata we might as well just seize the endowment and apply EA to that instead -- but even presuming it's true we actually still have both constitutional and federal law specifically prohibiting the government from making "largest treatment effect" analysis based on race without far more serious cause than present here.
((And I don't trust Harvard, or even the local YMCA, to apply a race-aware largest-treatment effect analysis in such a way that would recognize minorities they disfavour.))
Even after reading about the incident, it’s hard to tell what anyone involved wanted to accomplish.
Right before the confrontation and shooting, it's pretty clear the anti-Juan De Oñate protestors wanted to topple the statue and very likely destroy it; they literally had a chain wrapped around the thing and people trying to pull it over, a complete idiot who didn't know how to use a pickaxe, a guy waving around a "We don't ask permission" sign, so on. There's a lot to be written on the exact tactics, here, and watching the video closely shows a lot of roles spread across this group -- actors, observers, blockers -- but ultimately the point is to achieve a public and, if symbolic, concrete goal, usually as part of an approach to freezing and making the villain a target.
But ultimately the point is that there's a procedure and politics involved in doing this sort of thing above-board, and not everyone wants to wait for that when they've got a bunch of strongarms sitting around. Either because the government doesn't actually own the piece in question, or because it's politically complex to actually hold a vote, sometimes because there isn't as much public support to take down a statue as to just not put one back up, and probably at some points to make clear that they can. Sometimes this connection to local politicians is pretty overt, and you have State Senators telling protestors to vandalize statues and telling police they can't arrest the vandals mere hours before someone gets squished by falling rocks (the police chief to file charges was placed on administrative leave immediately after, and the charges dismissed by the state). But unless someone gets hit in the head with a rock fist, most of the time they're just an undistinguished mass of manpower; not only do these groups not face serious investigation, in some cases the state or city won't even bother listing it as a crime on open data sources.
The Civil Guard morons thought this was their time to shine! The police were demonstrably not actually upholding the law or protecting people or property, and they stopped Baca and provided first aid to the man Baca shot. They probably thought they'd be thanked -- not, you know, by the protestors, but the whole general 'silent majority' who don't like deaths at protests -- right up until the guys in full-body camo slapped them straight onto the ground.
Baca thought he'd stop people from doing something he didn't want them to do, and didn't think hard enough about what each specific escalation meant, objectively, til long after he'd either grabbed someone's shoulder out of nowhere or shoved someone who shoved him. Not much fancy going on there.
The state... I don't know. The Civil Guard wants to draw the anti-Onate protestors as the state gov's brownshirts and the police's shitty response to obviously criminal behavior at protests as an attempt to produce a scenario to legally destroy the NMCG directly, but while the public records request settlement raises some eyebrows, it's still a pretty complex conspiracy theory. Hanlon's Razor has the state leaving the protestors a free leash to avoid expensive lawsuits and bad publicity from lot of concentrated political alliances, and then trying to hammer everybody not in the group after things go tango uniform, but that doesn't exactly look great either.
Do you think Baca had any chance of winning if he went to trial?
Dunno. It's not the best set of facts for a self-defense case and far from the most sympathetic defendant -- the point of blockers as a role is to have people counter-protestors or even police can't touch without touching the (often photogenic and sympathetic-sounding) blameless -- but New Mexico's self-defense law doesn't actually rely on "first aggressor" like the prosecutor wished, and there's a lot of reporting suggesting that the prosecution was having a hell of a time getting witness statements. But I can definitely see why he wouldn't want to roll the dice.
gattsuru
2yr ago
This argument seems like begging the question. We allow some classes of minors to do tons of things without reflecting on attitudes re sex: a fifteen year old can consent to a colonoscopy (sometimes requiring guardian sign off), without the law or morality throwing away any concerns about sexual abuse with physical parallels.
Update to the Juan De Oñate Statue shooting (as requested by @FCfromSSC):
A man charged in connection with a shooting that took place during a volatile protest in Old Town in the summer of 2020 pleaded guilty to several charges and is facing up to two years in prison. Steven Ray Baca, 34, on Friday pleaded no contest to aggravated battery and guilty to battery and unlawful carrying of a deadly weapon. He was originally charged with aggravated battery great bodily harm, two counts of battery and unlawful carrying of a deadly weapon. He is facing up to two years in prison or could be sentenced to probation, according to the plea agreement. His sentencing hearing is scheduled for September in front of District Judge Brett Loveless...
On Friday, Baca pleaded guilty to battery charges against Julie Harris and Vivian Norman. Both women said that Baca flung them hard to the ground during the protest. Baca's attorney, Deigo Esquibel, could not be reached for comment on Monday. Special Prosecutor David Foster also couldn't be reached for comment.
I've not been able to find any copies of the plea deal document itself, but the case lookup site points to 30-3-5, 30-3-4, and 30-7-2 & 31-19-1. The max estimated jail sentence looks like it's produced by throwing together all of the normal max sentences together, which isn't likely since the man's previous offenses seem limited to some minor traffic stuff, but that’s media coverage. Some of the plea may not be factually possible -- in particular, where New Mexico draws the line from concealed to open carry leaves 30-7-2 as less a slam dunk that it might seem at first glance -- but it's unlikely anyone's going to try to argue the matter.
Separately, the "New Mexico Civil Guard" group has had interesting legal battle charging them as impersonating peace officers](https://law.justia.com/codes/new-mexico/2018/chapter-30/article-27/section-30-27-2.1/), filled with increasingly harebrained legal tactics and having been targeted by an early injunction prohibiting the group from being a civil guard. Some of this has been reported as ‘disbanding’ the group, though the final consent decrees and judgements are hard to access to find out how literal that was. On the other hand, in case the behavior seemed particularly doomed or quixotic, six members (somehow!) were awarded a collective 300k payout from the state to settle likely public records request delays, which doesn't necessarily indicate specifically bad behavior or hilariously explosive text messages being covered up (or even if the money actually got to them; the org was severely sanctioned over the deposition misconduct), but must have been a very interesting meeting when deciding if dealing with these guys were worth 300k of other people's money. Baca is largely described as 'not apparently a member'.
I've not been able to find any assault or battery charges placed against any of the protestors opposed to the De Oñate statue, though the records are a bit of a pain to search.
The Albuquerque Oñate statue was removed in June 2020; the last mainstream reporting I've been able to find was limbo in 2021, shortly followed by an op-ed proposed splitting the baby by putting the statute in a museum and establishing a Truth and Reconciliation committee, which afaict has gone nowhere.
gattsuru
2yr ago
Never mind the graveyard of non-Zahn Star Wars projects. Media tie-ins are a crapshoot. If we weren’t lucky enough to get Zahn, we’d have been stuck with Splinter of the Mind’s Eye. I’m sure the author was aware of melodramatic runs like Dark Empire or Legacy of the Force. Not to mention multimedia projects like Shadows of the Empire. More successful than High Republic, surely.
While I agree that the author is overlooking a lot of Legends stinkers (why do people keep hiring Kevin J Anderson?!), I think the old EU had a lot more than just Zahn and Splinter. I love Zahn's work, warts and all, including a lot of the lesser-known stuff (eg, Quadrail, Dragonback, Icarus Hunt), but Allston, Stackpole, Stove, Denning all had some good works with significant success. Even a lot of the marginal stuff wasn't as bad as Splinter; Truce at Bakura or the Junior Jedi Knight septology didn't age well and were a little formulaic, but they were pretty reasonable works of fiction with decent sales numbers.
PoiThePoi often makes the steelman version of this argument (though given where some of his paychecks have come from, he would), but I'll also point to LycheeSlicer.
For those unfamiliar with resin 3D printers, like conventional hot plastic (aka fused deposition modeling, or FDM), they require an intermediate program to convert 3d models (usually but not always STLs) into instructions specific to your printer and environment. Unlike FDM, resin printers have a few very popular specific use cases, the majority of which are around small plastic figurines. It's not everybody using the things, but if you made me guess I'd probably estimate 95%+.
I expect this is eventually the open-source-like thing that eats Games Workshop alive, though resin printer firmware and software is a lot more closed-source than the FDM Marlin-variant world, excluding PrussaSlicer. And since most thing are closed source, they're paying people. Some vendors make this work through premium capabilities, other through weird partnerships with resin and printer part suppliers, and others with advertising. (most with a mix.)
For LycheeSlicer, the ad support comes in as thirty seconds of advertising before you can save the file for a (often hour-long) print, many of which are things you're also going to want to print. Which is a hilarious feedback loop, but it's also in theory a good solution to the discoverability problem.
There are a lot of sites with input STLs and tools for creating those STLs out there, and there's also really hard to find what you're looking for. Patio11 points to myminifactory, but there's a few dozen different sites focused on this sphere, as well as generalist sites that also have 3d models for sale to some degree. And search is hard: even if you know what you're looking for, text-based search is a mess when the best project might not even be in your language, there's a ton of overloaded language, and you also care about issues like dimensioning and complexity that not all search engines even support. A lot of times if you're just looking for inspiration, gfl.
But emphasis on the "in theory". I'm not much into the minifig world -- another use case for resin printers is producing fiddly gearing and other small parts FDM printers don't really do well -- but I just started a slice operation and the entire 30-second block was set for an advertisement for this group (not endorsed). There's probably someone who cares about these guys. But they're very much the most generic common denominator, and most importantly they're subscription model so you're paying for nearly-random material. So I'd expect that they're optimized more for ability to pay for advertising, rather than ability to get new purchases. To be fair, this isn't constant: the next try gave these folks, which seem a little pricey for their skill level but at least could plausibly be good arguments for someone who played with (or was curious about) whatever that system is.
Part of this is because a lot of decent advertising in the resin printing world has moved to other formats: patio11 points to kickstarter and youtube, but word of mouth and other approaches still apply. But a lot of it's just that advertising well is hard, and advertising poorly is economically viable for an obnoxious amount of content. It doesn't take that many people signing up for a patreon-like to pay for a small ad buy, even if they literally never use your product.
And in the resin printing world, the buyers at least get something that they paid for out of it, even if it's not necessary the deal they expected (uh, modulo kickstarters). That isn't the case for everyone. The various furry fandom ad systems tend to be a scattering of actual promotion mixed with grifts or scams and a delivery system that tries to make the ads block as much of your display as possible; Amazon will try to advertise repeat purchases of things you'd almost never buy twice in a lifetime and its 'promotions' system is a mess at best; Google's search ads are increasingly toeing the line into extortion schemes for big-name competitors.
Which leaves the question of, if advertisements could be good, why they degrade this way so readily.
gattsuru
2yr ago
You can avoid another set of world spanning genocides by not putting genocidal madmen in charge of three major continental powers all at once, and that’s probably not going to happen anytime soon.
I hope that's the case, but I'm not convinced that Tooze's Wages of Destruction is wrong.
It describes a lot of the worst atrocities by Nazi Germany in economic and logistic terms, and while that doesn't make the people who did it any less genocidally mad or evil -- the actions are just as vile whether done because of bad moral philosophy or to simplify food logistics -- it does give an alternative reason why three (or, uh, many more than that) genocidal madmen popped up and received widespread support all at once, despite their often wildly conflicting positions and backgrounds. And one can at least imagine the same frameworks applying to those other genocidal madmen, and to other less-successful ones who still nonetheless punched far above their grade.
Which still leaves revisionism as pretty unexciting, but does leave past genocides and especially the bigger and more deadly past genocides as worth studying.
gattsuru
2yr ago
Just these three matters alone get him to Zone B, where the sentencing guidelines hold that "the court may impose probation only if it imposes a condition or combination of conditions requiring a period of community confinement, home detention, or intermittent confinement sufficient to satisfy the minimum term of imprisonment specified in the guideline range."
And then there's the other gun we have photographic evidence that he possessed illegally, that possessing the firearm and lying on the form are different violations of law, the piles of cocaine, the potential FARA violations, so on.
gattsuru
2yr ago
If lying on the Form 4473 were the only crime he committed, sure. But it's not even the only gun he unlawfully possessed: it was a .38 revolver, while some of the photos from the Laptop That Wasn't show (in addition to way too much of Hunter for me to want to link directly or see again) Hunter holding a semi-automatic. And then there's the crack possession, the tax fraud, the likely FARA violations, the regular hiring of prostitutes/escorts (state-law only).
Hence my comments about being on the moron tax list himself.
This one is weird because it says he was part of a joint state federal operation called "Crime Drivers" which targeted people with warrants out for violent crime, but it doesn't say anything about his criminal history.
Jodeci Young from the same charging burst was in a similar boat; it's not clear if they were never convicted or if it was just never reported. Lot of possible explanations, unfortunately, both for why they were bundled in and for why they may have had different outcomes.
gattsuru
2yr ago
He's getting probation for other, unrelated crimes that he unquestionably committed. The guidelines for multiple counts in the same sentencing are a mess, but I think it'd end up adding two or four offense levels, depending on how you do the math.
Can anyone provide examples of someone who did a similar crime and compare what penalties they faced?
Most publicized cases tend to involve a lot more firearms and a lot more drugs, but cases do happen and can result in lengthy sentences. Some of those have further moron taxes than present for even Hunter Biden, but Hunter's not exactly off the moron tax list himself.
If anyone wants the statistics, this report says (on pg 24) that of the 7373 §2K2.1 convictions in the 2021 year, 5.3% (or 347) were for prohibited persons where the prohibition was due to unlawful drug use. Unfortunately, looking the other direction -- how many people who are prohibited persons related to drug usage get caught and sentenced -- is an unknown and probably unknowable thing.
gattsuru
2yr ago
I'm not sure 18 USC 922 (g) is the right charge: the false statement is 18 USC 922 (a) (6) and really the thing feds go after if they have the paperwork in hand. 992 (g) is more for someone who's prohibited and is found with a gun, and didn't get it through an FFL. 992 (a) (6) starts at an offense level of 14, and while it's still potentially subject to the offense-level-6 drop if solely used for lawful sporting purposes.
This isn't entirely correct: settlement agreements are contracts, but they're contracts that must be recognized and permitted by a judge (in most circumstances after certain early procedural stages in a court case). That's what separates them from just paying off potential plaintiffs or plaintiffs just voluntarily dismissing a case before answer, that they (or rather, mechanically, the judge issuing a dismissal with prejudice in response to a settlement agreement) are final actions on a court case that prevent further adjudication of the same claims. This is especially relevant for class-action lawsuits, where even the class certification itself must be accepted by a judge before settlement negotiations even make sense.
Because class-action lawsuits are final decisions binding on people who don't have any control of the legal strategy and may not even be aware of the lawsuit, there's massive potential for 'friendly' lawsuits, for plaintiffs that enrich themselves at the cost of the class, or for lawyers who enrich themselves at the cost of plaintiffs and the class. See the US v. NYCHA settlement rejection on appeal for an example of a lawsuit, or the more recent Purdue Pharma stuff.
Now, class-action certifications and settlement agreements don't have to be racially nondiscriminatory in this sort of context. Although I'd argue Shelly v. Kraemer is at least relevant, there's a pretty long history of class-action lawsuits seeking to resolve a specially-designed class's hurts without covering non-minority or non-covered-minority harms despite massive overlap.
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