gattsuru
1d ago
It's an impact, but it's likely to end up a bigger impact in the sense that this is the first time a federal gun law has been actually rolled back instead of merely sunsetted or outdated.
A 200 USD tax isn't trivial for a gun accessory, especially an expendable one, and having zero tax might allow some manufacturers to start building out entry-level silencers so the cost-of-first-hit isn't 100+ USD on top of the tax. But while that's part of why the NFA was annoying, it's not the biggest or even a primary part. And I'm not even sure we'll see much drop in MSRPs. From the sellers side, they still count as 'firearms' for FFL purposes, you'll still need an SOT, there's still going to be a ton of legal risk, and there's still a hell of a lot of overhead. From the buyer's side you aren't any less afraid of 'oil traps' or accidental 'transfers' or the ATF giving you a free colonoscopy.
((Yes, theoretically zeroing out the tax should also make enforcement of the whole registration schema impossible, but we know how that goes.))
Meanwhile, the parliamentary stuff is pretty obnoxious. I expect a dem appointee to be biased, but Byrd Ruling modifications of a law that has been defended in courts as a tax literally dozens of times is appalling.
gattsuru
3d ago
It's possible, but I'm skeptical -- AI isn't as bad as people say, but I don't think it's quite there yet, and more critically there's a massive space for additional programmer output -- and a lot of this stuff is happening at the same time that Microsoft is demanding vast increases in cheaper workers.
I'm not convinced darwin2500 needed a permaban, but if you want a long-form discussion of why he was a bad poster, I wrote one here (and against some of his AAQCs here). And it's not like that was some all-encompassing list; many of his worst behaviors were well after that summary, and I didn't even include all the bad behaviors before that summary (open question: can Darwin2500 use CTRL+F?). _Viking's "Stop posting like your account is actually run by multiple people who don't talk to each other." kinda sums it up.
There's (unfortunately) a number of posters that you could pick out for each of darwin's individual ticks except from the right here (well, most of them), but there are very few, if any, that manage to combine all or even a sizable section of them all on their own.
gattsuru
2d ago
while something like this gets AAQC'd.
I would be very, very, very interested to see you explain exactly what in that post you believe is objectionable, "hostile", or "delusional".
gattsuru
1d ago
gattsuru
2d ago
To be fair, once you've built a colony industry around Human Skin Leather and Human Skin Leather accessories, there's an upper limit to how much of a surprise this could become.
gattsuru
2d ago
The Shadows of the Empire book does a lot of the heavy lifting, at least in the old Legends continuity, explaining not just Luke (Jedi training and seeing the cost of seeking revenge above all) and Vader's (finding the Dark Side increasingly unable to repair or alleviate his damaged flesh, and that Palpatine is grooming people to kill Vader's whole family... and thinks Vader's so weak that a crime lord that's not even force-sensitive might take him down) change in perspective, along with a lot of other goofy bits like Leia's Booush outfit or where Luke's new lightsaber crystal came from. Kinda with mixed results: it's definitely not a Zahn-level book, and a few parts were pretty cringy even by 90s-standards, but neither was it awful.
Of course, it did so twelve years after Return of the Jedi made it to theatres.
Eco's theory is certainly believable. For other examples, Harry Potter and Redwall fandom regularly points to the many bizarre early storytelling decisions as why they joined as heavily as they did. I will caveat that it's definitely not sufficient, though. Jupiter Ascending is a glorious trainwreck that leaves unanswered questions everywhere, but despite a small fandom of exactly the demographics you'd most expect to be into fanfic, it's largely abandoned.
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
2d ago
My typical rule-of-thumb is 1/4 lb per adult per meal if you have a lot of sides, 3/4 lb per adult if meat's most of the food. Lot of it's going to depend on how long the guests are staying (one meal or two) and how picky you'd expect them to be if you run out of one protein. Probably going to end up with a decent amount of leftovers unless they're staying for both lunch and dinner. That said, almost all of these will store well in a fridge for 4-6 days, and they'll mix in well with pasta (everything but the chicken) or rice (everything) dishes pretty easily, so as long as you've got fridge space I dunno that I'd be that worried about leftovers.
I don't grill often, but there's a lot of great kabob recipes that just can't be done in an oven or air frier. Might take one variation on that.
Can't say anything on the alcohol side; I can barely drink beer or wine, and while I can drink hard liquor I've never developed enough of a taste to distinguish more than rough categories.
gattsuru
10d 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.
gattsuru
2d ago
I'm... hesitant to go with any of the easy answers. The Bulwarkist side of no-longer-Republicans-if-they-ever-were exists, but it's tiny. The Republican minority outreach should expect to see incoming demographics who don't like The Gays, but the difference just isn't that big. Measurement problems are endemic to modern polls, but there's a lot of reasons to suspect that they'd result in these polls going more toward the demographics most gay-friendly (younger, more urban, more online). And while it's possible for some number of people to be rounding 'gay marriage' and 'trans stuff' together, either out of confusion or treating the movement as a whole, there's too big of a difference in poll numbers on gay marriage and trans stuff for that to shake out right either.
I think there's some genuine disagreements on policy that have become a lot more apparent in the last three or four years. MacIntyre likes to Darkly Hint in ways that wouldn't be accepted (or even necessarily understood) by a lot of Red Tribers, but matters like surrogacy, limits of workplace conduct, interactions with media, the bake-the-cake movement, these are things I see from not-especially-online people in the real world.
I'd like to think that there are workable compromise positions, but they depend on actually understanding and respecting the other side, and I thought the same about trans stuff.
gattsuru
8d ago
To Rightists with daughters reading this: are you concerned that they might encounter "natural family planning" on the internet and really f*** up their life?
Funny story: typical use of condoms is about as effective as typical use of natural family planning (which in turn is about as effective as the pull-out method). In general, there's a lot of good arguments against overlapping multiple different methods if you aren't using an IUD, but a lot of the 'herp derp they hate birth control' stuff is a lot more workable than most people expect.
((I don't have a daughter (or son), but especially given the chances my preferences are genetic I'd be more concerned about the other consequences of sex, like bad relationship fallout.))
gattsuru
2d ago
And FFXIV : Endwalker (cw: level 90 spoilers).
gattsuru
9d 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.
I'm not disagreeing with the factual findings. Literally in the post you're replying to, I said:
T.B. here might well (maybe even likely would) fail an honest analysis of dangerousness, but we didn't get that. T.B. might well (maybe even likely would) fail an honest analysis of improvement in mental health condition.
Indeed, the question raised by the petitioner during appeal was specifically "the trial court improperly relied on his current physical condition, age, and stated reasons for seeking expungement". While I don't think that's meritless -- I raised some statutory interpretation questions, again literally in the post that you're replying to -- I do fully recognize that there's absolutely zero chance of them being successful. Likewise, I recognize that because of the commitment's age bringing any serious challenges to would be difficult even were New Jersey and its federal circuit any less biased against gun rights, and because of the petitioner's age and the speed of New Jersey courts, any Second Amendment-related or due process legal challenges would be doomed.
My argument is that these are bad; that they defy broad rights and due process and justice, and yet can't be meaningfully challenged and won't be meaningfully recognized. We've had this distinction before.
T.B. in this case might have failed a test for expungement in a fair system, but he didn't get a fair system. Instead he got one where his rights could be taken away in an ex parte hearing with no due process or representation and standard, and to retrieve those rights he could present only limited information against an explicitly adversarial judge who could moor any denial in anything the judge wanted under any standard of evidence and using any information or no information at all. Indeed, he didn't even get a system interested in pretending to be fair, where the judge can make some handwave toward what T.B. would have to do in order to comply with the law.
There's a trivial sense where they're bad in ways that undermine all of the defenses that you entered this discussion with. But there's a more general one where it's no defense at all to say that the bad procedures are established by statute, and that the biased judges are just part of a biased system, and that there's just going to be people who fall between the awkward interactions of laws that don't mesh together, and that people simultaneously should know that any constitutional or due process arguments would actively doom whatever trivial chance their 'conventional' petition might have and that outside observers can't point to the blatant disregard for constitutional rights or due process.
There are imaginable universes where we are, as a society, so attached to legal formalism that all of these things weigh against constitutional rights, and the constitutional rights lose. There are imaginable universes where all those frictions and safety risks weigh against constitutional rights, and the same happens.
The courts can, have, and did in the last week jump over themselves to protect the rights of a murderer to 'prove' that he might have only planned and assisted with the murder of an innocent woman. The courts can, have, and did jump over themselves to defend an illegal immigrant who beat his wife and allegedly participated in human trafficking from getting deported, with everyone on the Left and their dogs and you specifically talking up the importance of due process.
We aren't in those universes. You know we're not in those universes. That this disagreement is only imaginable for matters that happen to line up with your political goals leaves any argument presented under them as below contempt.
gattsuru
8d ago
Trump v. CASA is very specifically about universal injunctions; none of the majority really delves into the likelihood of success in the merits, and I'm extremely skeptical that it could get more than two votes max on the merits of the underlying lawsuit.
I'm skeptical the EO will even avoid pretrial mass relief: the majority openly invites state-wide injunctions or class action lawsuits, and this would be one of the cleanest Rule 23 class actions possible. I'd be willing to bet 100 USD to a charity of your choice that there are at least three circuits where almost all children of illegal immigrants are covered by an injunction before the end of the year, and I'm only going that low because of friction effects.
... depends a lot on your definition of 'national injunction' and 'gain value'.
This at Table A-2 provides the most expansive definition of both, in that they were injunctions applying beyond the bounds of a courts jurisdiction and applied for at least some time, though because it measures them by what President was in place when the injunction was applied, not what President's administration started the policy that was enjoined (eg, several 'Biden-era' cases revolve around preliminary injunctions about military prohibitions on HIV-positive membership or joining, Harrison and Wilkins). (Contrast Harvard's 14 injunctions under Biden). Smashing those two lists together and focusing on the Biden admin, I'd count :
- Texas v. United States, 515 F. Supp. 3d 627, Tipton's temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction against Biden's 100-day pause on immigration deportations. I don't think this ever got reviewed before it self-mooted, but I also don't think it actually stopped the admin from just doing it and saying it was enforcement discretion.
- Faust v. Vilsack, 519 F. Supp. 3d 470, Holman v. Vilsack, No. 21-1085-STA-JAY, and Wynn v. Vilsack, 545 F. Supp. 3d 1271, loan forgiveness for racial minority farmers. I think this one held for at least the original program until it was repealed. Biden did work around it by using other programs or having supposedly race-neutral programs that only racial minorities were informed about, though.
- Louisiana v. Biden, 543 F. Supp. 3d 388, ban on new oil drilling leases in public lands, preliminary injunction. Reversed on appeal to give more tailored restrictions, trial court drew it back to thirteen plaintiff states. Also an APA case. It's not clear if it actually worked; the EO in question didn't stop scheduled oil leases, but the plan for future auctions dropped dramatically.
- Texas v. United States, 549 F. Supp. 3d 572, DACA, preliminary injunction on new admissions to the program. APA case, overturned on appeal.
- Texas v. Biden, 554 F. Supp. 3d 818. Termination of Migration Protection Protocols (aka Remain in Mexico). Kinda an APA case? Overturned by SCOTUS and the Biden admin had just made a new memo terminating it anyway beforehand.
- Texas v. United States, 555 F. Supp. 3d 351. Whether "shall" requires the administration to do anything to criminal illegal aliens, preliminary injunction. This is the one I keep yelling at Ben_Garrison about, you know how it ended.
- Arizona v Biden, 40 F.4th 375, second verse, same as above except it was overturned at the circuit level.
- Georgia v. Biden, 574 F. Supp. 3d 1337, federal workers vaccine mandate on the contracting side, preliminary injunct. 11th Circuit scaled it back to just the plaintiff organizations, their members, and the seven plaintiff states.
- Feds for Med. Freedom v. Biden, 581 F. Supp. 3d 826, federal workers vaccine mandate on the employee side, preliminary injunction. Long procedural history, think the injunction was in place when the policy was repealed, mooting the arg.
- Nebraska v. Biden, 52 F.4th 1044. HEROES Act loan forgivness, preliminary injunction by the appeals court. Upheld by SCOTUS.
- Braidwood Mgmt. Inc. v. Becerra, 666 F. Supp. 3d 613. Contraception, abortion, and PReP mandate for ACA insurance coverage, weird procedural history since it's mostly a process question with RFRA stapled on the side, hence why it came up literally yesterday. The RFRA side got an injunction that looks like still applies but isn't universal? And the universal injunction on Appointments/APA was squashed early on appeal down to just the plaintiffs, overturned by SCOTUS.
- Monticello Banking Co. v. Consumer Fin. Prot. Bureau, No. 6:23-CV-00148-KKC and Tex. Bankers Ass'n v. Consumer Fin. Prot. Bureau, No. 7:23-CV-00144. Something about the CFPB being unconstitutional and injunctions against data collection rules. I'm not even sure if these count as real national injunctions rather than just applying to a large organization with a lot of members.
- Nuziard v. Minority Bus. Dev. Agency, 721 F. Supp. 3d 431. Another racially discriminatory aid program, preliminary injunction. I think they just made the discrimination a little more subtle, but technically the injunction applied to the end of the case and the plaintiffs got a result.
- Career Colls. & Sch. of Texas v. U.S. Dep't of Educ., 98 F.4th 220. Higher Education Act loan forgiveness program. Preliminary injunction on appeal, under the APA. Currently at SCOTUS.
- Alaska v. U.S. Dep't of Educ., No. 24-1057-DDC-ADM, SAVE higher education loan forgiveness program. Preliminary injunction, under the APA. Stayed on appeal, though Nebraska effectively covered the same ground eventually.
- Missouri v. Biden, 738 F. Supp. 3d 1113, FEEL higher education loan income-based repayment program. Preliminary injunction, under the APA. I think upheld in 8th Circuit
- Associated Gen. Contractors of America v. U.S. Dep't of Labor, No. 5:23-CV-0272-C. Something really technical about treating truckers like mechanics for 'locally prevailing wages and benefits' rules? Preliminary injunction under the APA, appeals are currently stayed.
- Tennessee v. Becerra, No. 1:24cv161-LG-BWR. Including gender identity to Title IX (and indirectly, the ACA). Preliminary injunction under the APA. Probably mooted by the election.
- Tex. Top Cop Shop, Inc. v. Garland, No. 4:24-CV-478. Corporate Transparency Act beneficial owner rule. Commerce clause challenge, the poor bastards. Stayed by SCOTUS, with Kavanaugh specifically writing this as an example of universal injunctions bad.
- EDIT: All. for Hippocratic Med., 668 F. Supp. 3d at 560. Abortion pill FDA approval under APA, technically a nation-wide stay, but had the effect of an injunction. Got smacked down by SCOTUS./EDIT
Honorable mentions:
- Price v. Barr, 514 F. Supp. 3d 171, permanent injunction against rule requiring permit to film in national parks, reversed on appeal. Not really a red-tribe-blue-tribe thing, at least directly; one of the few places I'd put myself and Merrick Garland on the same side.
- Arizona by and through Brnovich v. Ctrs. for Disease Control & Prevention, 2022 WL 1276141. If you want to find anything on this, look for "Title 42 Immigration Case", or this clusterfuck. The preliminary injunction itself was against a Trump-era rule about immigration under COVID, but Biden hadn't officially stopped it, but Biden was defending or 'defending' it.
So there's a lot of cases, here. How you analyze them's going to depend on what you're looking for. Literally any case with an injunction broader than the plaintiffs that wasn't immediately stayed? I think you get somewhere around 15-17 cases, on about five major topics. Cases where this actually worked, if only until final review, cuts out at least five. In one sense it's damning that some of these injunctions got overturned by higher courts... but does that mean that the lower court got it wrong, the higher court got it wrong, or just that SCOTUS was trying to push the CASA button then?
Cases that would have changed if CASA was decided first? A lot of these are APA challenges that CASA specifically sets aside for future discussion, another handful were already being drilled down to their plaintiff states.
Cases that mattered? I dunno.
gattsuru
7d ago
The specific law here holds that a "commercial entity" (some carveouts for Google) that serves material on the internet "more than one-third of which is sexual material harmful to minors" must use either commercial or government identification of age, or be subject to fines up to 10k USD per day plus 250k if a minor sees it. There's pretty widespread potential to interfere or discourage adult-to-adult speech that is only obscene to minors, or even some speech that isn't obscene at all so long as it comes from one of these companies.
There's also a compelled speech problem in the original bill, 14-point font inclusion of a substance addiction help line level. This is currently blocked, though it had a weird period where that block was under an administrative stay for nearly six months.
gattsuru
11d 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.
Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton - Pornography 6-3 conservative opinion, Thomas. First Amendment does not prohibit Texas from requiring age-verification for pornographic websites. Kagan writes the dissent.
This one's weird.
The law is probably reasonable enough or close to reasonable enough (if not necessarily my idea of well-designed), but the lower court just set it against rational basis review. Previous SCOTUS decisions either put restrictions on adult content either fully in strict scrutiny (Ashcroft I and II, where restrictions were on the basis of the content's adult nature) or rational basis (obscenity to minors, movie theatres). And strict scrutiny, at least in a free speech context, is ruinously hard to achieve, in ways that even Thomas probably doesn't want to water down. The closest obvious parallel in previous law was adult theatres, which was admittedly a pretty jank decision of its own by pretending it was separating the effects of the content from the content to justify rational basis review. But that'd be the same as no review at all.
I guess this case didn't fall close enough to the commercial speech restriction cases for the adult theatre side to be even remotely palatable? But it's Thomas, and his willingness to go to the bat for bizarrely aggressive paternalism (eg, en loco parentis) is one of the bits that's long been a go to, for better or worse. Instead, he reaches (through BSA v. Dale for some reason) to the draft-card burning regulations from US v. O'Brien, saying restrictions on speech here are incidental to restrictions on behavior, so intermediate scrutiny. From that view, it's not unreasonable.
Then Thomas differentiates it from the strict scrutiny CDA cases by saying those "effectively suppresse[d] a large amount of speech that adults have a constitutional right to receive”. But the analysis is just limited to privacy concerns and stigma (aka, more privacy concerns). Yet these restrictions have potentially massive costs to speakers, not just receivers, on adult-content sites or even mixed-content that don't go up to that mark. Likewise, he tries to distinguish the CDA as regulating noncommercial sites that would not readily take up credit card processing, but HB1181 applies to all commercial entities, not just commercial sites. Burden can't drive level of scrutiny up, but this sort of perfunctory analysis gives little idea of what the actual analysis is, especially since intermediate review is a little ad hoc to start with.
Some of that burden review is probably because the Free Speech Coalition advocate comes across as kinda a nutcase during oral args. He mentions costs to site managers once in oral arguments and it's a stunning 40k USD per 100k users, and then spends much more of his time ranting about the motivations of anti-porn people. But then intermediate scrutiny's biggest bite is specifically in the prong of the O'Brien test that asks if the government interest is tied to the suppression of information, which is where the whole anti-porn thing rises anyway.
It rounds out to normal -- Thomas does everything short of wink-and-nod to say that pretextual restrictions on obscenity-to-minors that try to cover restrictions on adults are invalid -- but it's just such a bizarre way of getting there, and it's going to invite a lot of mess from lower courts.
Gutierrez v. Saenz - ... My read: SCOTUS lets a death-row inmate file a doomed, pointless post-conviction motion that doesn't have any hope of success but will probably delay his execution for a few more years
Yeah, probably. I'm really skeptical that a DNA test with no return of Gutierrez's DNA from the few samples available would factually demonstrate that he was outside of the trailer (or for a positive result to have his advocates want him in the chair), and while I could kinda see the arguments for allowing it anyway, it's hard to care. There's a chance Texas will just punt on killing him, but it's Texas, so that's a real far outlier. The process and procedural stuff might matter for other cases, perhaps? The court just didn't like the lower courts ignoring past dicta?
gattsuru
7d ago
Basically credit card transactions or services using those transactions. It might allow MindGeek-like auth, but the US doesn’t really have that. Presumably with a good faith effort to validate that the credit card holder’s name is above 18, though it didn’t come up in any args I could see.
gattsuru
8d ago
Yeah, they're not even subtle about it.
gattsuru
10d 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.
For the purpose of federal law, unless theres' been intervening changes to the law or caselaw, 302s don't count, because they're not adversarial or judicial hearings and often run ex parte. They do count for state law, though.
The mental defective side of the bar has been used very widely, if not consistently. And some places will ingest someone who comes to them voluntarily as if they weren't willing (or even treat a voluntary admission as involuntary without undergoing the normal procedures), though thankfully that's one of the few places that courts have been willing to push back on.
But otherwise, yes; federal regulations require that it be involuntary.
I will caveat that many states have separate rules that trigger on voluntary commitment, or don't even require commitment at all (hey, Hawaii!). New Jersey is one such state; applications for a purchase permit require applicants to complete a consent to mental health record search form. While the statute only specifically prohibits giving permits to people with a voluntary or involuntary current committment (no, I don't know why), both state courts and police generally treat it as a blanket prohibition, along with many inpatient procedures. T.B. here isn't even getting to that point, so he can't challenge it, either.
There's some technical parts to how LLMs specifically work that make it a lot harder to police hallucination than to improve produce a compelling argument, for the same reason that they're bad at multiplication and great at symbolic reference work. A lot of LLMs can already use WestLaw and do a pretty good job of summarizing it... at the cost of it trying to cite a state law I specifically didn't ask about.
It's possible that hallucination will be absolutely impossible to completely solve, but either way I expect these machines to become better at presenting compelling arguments faster than I expect them to be good researchers, with all the good and ill that implies. Do lawyers value honesty more than persuasion?
One would think! And yet.
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