The first one is pretty simple, bans on gun ownership for people who have involuntary committed is a common law. Texas and Florida both do it as well. Requiring you submit your history of commitments seems a reasonable part of the ban there.
No. "the name and hospital affiliation of any mental health practitioner you have ever seen, since birth". Not anywhere you've been involuntarily committed. Any mental health practitioner, you have seen, over your entire lifespan. Talk to a licensed MHP as a high school guidance counselor, and it's technically required. And you have to sign a disclosure request so they can ask hospitals actively.
(Bonus: any errors in an application, even honest mistakes, can be and are used to on their own act as sufficient cause to reject a permit to purchase.)
So if anything NJ is lighter there and doesn't pry into your history until you try to get a gun, instead of having a database of everyone by default.
New Jersey does run its own Point of Contact system including a mental health database. They just also require active disclosure of everything else, too.
((New Jersey, by statute, also prohibits firearm permits from being issued to anyone with a voluntary mental health commitment, though that's not relevant here except to show it's also more aggressive than Florida in stupid ways.))
This is the thing most likely to be unconstitutional. Challenge it in court and let the process play out.
The specific New Jersey requirement's legal challenges have been bound up by some case consolidation and standing delatory tactics problems, but we do have other circuits who have looked at those policies and decided they were a-OK. My personal favorite is Antonyuk, where the character references survived because there was an imaginable circumstance where they could be constitutionally applied, and because buying and gun and possessing a gun are different. So the challenge has been live since 2022, the district court's stay of other parts of the law that were blatantly unconstitutional was reflexively stayed and never went into effect.
SCOTUS booted the case there back down, without any process protecting the plaintiff's rights in the meantime, and given Rahimi, very little chance of the Second Circuit changing their minds or New Jersey behaving any better. SCOTUS doesn't care. It's not a random illegal-immigrant with a human trafficking background on a holiday weekend.
He doesn't have two people in his life who trust him to own a firearm and going out of state is easier than finding and convincing other people
His primary stopping point is the disclosure requirement; he does not have those names of professionals. Beyond that, many jurisdictions will actively refuse character references from out of county, and the law permits them to reject references arbitrarily.
But how would the appeal "debunk the defense lawyer's claim"? He's claiming the judge said something in private, unless he has actual evidence the appeals court isn't going to care.
I don't see where you're getting "in private" from, but the trivial and poor debunking would be to say "that didn't happen" or "there is no evidence of this claim", in their own writing. A stronger one would be something along the lines of "here's the trial transcript, it ain't in it".
I'm not asking you whether they'll have a perfect debunk. I'm predicting -- and willing to bet at nontrivial odds -- that they're not going to try.
You're absolutely right in the sense that appeals court isn't going to care. They don't need to debate whether it happened. That's the process.
gattsuru
13hr ago
Ugh, I'm sorry for doing this without responding first to the earlier conversation thread, but:
You would simply not have a gun,
TheNybblr has made his situation clear, and there's an active court cases with arguments next month over that class of problem; it's not a hypothetical.
and you would not be able to make meaningful legal appeal otherwise.
Do you believe Dexter Taylor will have a meaningful appeal that either clearly debunks the defense lawyer's claim or sends the case back for a retrial? How about Malinowski? Will New York Citiers be allowed to own stun guns?
gattsuru
22hr ago
For all anyone knows, the undomesticated version of the horse was just as unruly as the zebra and in fact it seems pretty likely.
There's some weak evidence against it: we don't have pre-domestication true horses around, but the Przewalski's horse is a little closer related to the modern horse than to the zebra, and while they're even more assholish than zebras, they're supposedly more trainable. I'm not convinced that it's a big difference, but I'm not convinced that it's strong evidence against the Guns Germs Steel view.
I'm not an expert but I'm pretty sure people eat kangaroos. How can you be so sure that kangaroos are not domesticable?
Kangaroos are farmed like deer, and take a similar environmental niche, but the males are also genetically primed to find the nearest biped and punch it in the face during mating season. That last bit's usually the argument why no one has domesticated them despite matching Diamond's six rules: yes, kangaroos have a dominance hierarchy, but it involves the lead male getting the shit clawed and kicked out of him, and humans aren't really built for that. They're also a little prone to panic, though that's kinda a hard metric to measure.
Conversely, the efforts to domesticate foxes, minks, and river otters are probably stronger arguments against Diamond: of his six proposed rules, these animals are bity, panicky, don't have as widespread a social structure, and are carnivorous. They still seem to get much more friendly pretty quickly; they just needed the right incentives and human leadership to domesticate or partially-domesticate.
The stories themselves are pretty easy. There's a lot of people who already had 'stories' in their heads that they wanted to bring to the screen, to the point where script-fic is a little derogatory in fanfic spaces. And we're at the point where you can give an LLM a pretty rough idea and get a coherent story out from them (cw: 30k words AI-generated story, painfully full of obvious spaces for improvement and still about on par with recent Disney output).
The tech's just hard. There's people messing with it, and for short periods you can get human-like emotion and acting, especially if you're open to pretty non-standard definitions of human (cw: sound, hellhound with human teeth). And then the background fades into a dream, or the character suddenly looks subtly different, or things start clipping, or the lipflaps don't match up with the actions.
Some of that's because people are just dabbling hobbyists: if there are people building their own unique voice clones, converting renders or live video into to pose2video work, or doing a lot of layering, there's definitely no one publicly doing all of those things combined. There's probably a way to make it work, by exploiting first-frame-last-frame and controlnet. But that requires a pretty sizable set of storyboards, and a stronger vision, and the ability to maintain focus when you're presented with something close but not quite good enough..
It's also just hard to do at home. Wan2 or LTX kinda work on an nVidia 3090 or better, but it's minutes-per-generation in the simplest cases. Add on that overhead and it can take the better part of an hour to make a single ten-second clip. With the right workflow or tooling you might be able to make that work out - that's still about a week per hour of video - but right now those workflows are things you'd have to build yourself.
I'd expect we'll eventually get some sketch-focused artist or rough animation-focused modeler working directly with them, and it'll have some major benefits, but I couldn't tell if you if that'll be a weeks, months, or years.
gattsuru
1d ago
Supposedly bugger's supposed to be just 'annoying person', and you'll hear 'silly bugger' in some circumstances, but I think that was a corruption from Gordon Ramsay and Terry Pratchett (and Father Ted, maybe?). It's still pretty low-stakes as an insult even among people that know the original context, though.
Under similar metrics, my impression's that 'arse' is a lot lighter-stakes than the UK take, though it's still not very harsh even in the UK. Same for 'bloody' as a prefix, which I still don't get.
From the other direction, in America, "cunt" is considered rude enough that I'll avoid it in explicit pornographic contexts (though not all Americans will), and could be a firing offense on the first use. Made a work trip to Australia very awkward.
I really wish there were some good isekai works out there, but as a genre it's near-uniquely prone to promising really good central ideas, and then immediately dropping them for glorified wish fulfillment antics. It's not that the stories are predictable, but that where they're going is just not very interesting, and the conflict with the potential makes it really obvious. And that seems to have only gotten worse as the genre has matured.
So you have a fascinating world with deep questions... that's not going to get answered or explored. You have a character that's badly out of depth in a world where that's a punishing problem... and is going to be overpowered godmode in ten chapters. You have a relationships that have to cross massive cultural boundaries and make serious compromises... and it's not going to matter, because the main character's going to have between three and ten waifus dangling from his arm regardless of where they can even speak his language. You have an opportunity to seriously think about the portability of knowledge or critical thinking skills when entering a world where even the laws of physics are different... and it's almost always going to go full It's Magic I Don't Gotta Explain Shit.
They can be fun reads - trash can be fun, and I'm not above reading or writing power fantasy or fixit fics or harem comedy - but they're seldom deep books, and almost never good and deep. So they're trash.
Connecticut Yankee at least tries to be bitter (albeit as much to keep with the time travel stable loop thing than out of real conviction), but it's still very central an example of the genre's problems: Hank's dropped into a complicated society he deeply disagrees with, and the answer is Invent Gun and Get Lucky (both figuratively, and separately with a literal eclipse). The only real depth is using the as a metaphor for then-current problems (the aftermath of slavery, papists, the gullibility of the populace, so on), but Twain's heavy-handed enough that they're equivalent to a modern-day writer putting Ronald Grump as a isekai villain.
To be fair, Twain was also writing in the 1880s, so he was literally inventing a lot of the tools of modern literature, so it's hard to blame him too much for not reinforcing his themes with his events. But modern-day writers don't have that excuse.
Spellsinger is my personal nemesis: it opens up with an everyman protagonist who genuinely gets squicked out by the realistic conventions of a fantasy (furry-adjacent, my kryptonite!) world, along with a 'magic' that borrows from science and that the protagonist doesn't have any unique strengths with... and then there's a two-page transition that turns into the protagonist solving every problem with the power of badly-mangled rock song. It's one of the few books I've literally thrown across the room. I've read some stinkers, but this is a book that could have been a lot more.
If you want recs, RE:Zero is good if you don't mind the gore, Magic Kingdom for Sale Sold is a pretty central example of the genre and its flaws done reasonably, Vision of Escaflowne is better-known for its visuals but does a good job for its time. Dual! Parallel Trouble Adventure is decent if very much worse than Tenchi Muyo for 'stupid harem hijinks'. Dark Lord of Derkholm is kinda a deconstruction, enough that I don't really count it as isekai, but it does a good job of pointing out the problems.
Ar'Kendrytheist is one of very few works to actually take its setting assumptions seriously (and finish), but it's very long and extremely progressive-coded (if only rarely so woke as to be actively detrimental rather than merely smarmy), so I'm a little cautious to put it into the clear recommend list. Arguably Beware of Chicken as a 'shorter' (aka several novella) comedy, though it's not as good about avoiding the pitfalls. I have high hopes for the Contention series, but it's just at the crux of both 'what's the answer to our grabbing mystery' and 'does the main character naturally learn from his mistakes, or does he just get overpowered' at the end of Book 2 and that's kinda the turning point between good-for-isekai and awful.
gattsuru
2d ago
I'll caution that, without further detail, Network Engineer Intern is probably a lot of Cat5E pulling and crimping, and a lot less fighting with Cisco IOS, than it would sound like from the job description. That's better and more experience than it sounds - the difference between implementing spanning-tree on a lab environment and troubleshooting it on some wild unmanaged switches is night-and-day - but it can feel a little hazing-like from the inside view, and you'll want to keep up your more specialized skills.
gattsuru
2d ago
Will second this. It's not a great game mechanically, but the aesthetics and soul was fantastic from the first zone to the endgame.
our wisdom flows so sweet. taste and see.
gattsuru
2d ago
The easy answer's that they're a weirdtopia - akin to Caelum Est Conterrens or The Metamorphisis of Prime Intellect - but that's not very helpful.
It's hard to call them a pure dystopia. It's not 1984 or Brave New World or (the inside or outside!) of The Matrix; hell, it beats Reedspacer's Lower Bound. The average person's life is the sort of thing a large portion of the world would still call paradise, and the Minds are as gods. Many of its problems are downstream of showing the people are still (somewhat) people with rough edges and friction, or are artifacts of needing to be in a story where there is conflict, or to where something else can meaningfully be outside of The Culture.
But it's hard to call it a pure utopia, either. There are monsters, either from outside of the universe or just plain Klingon-equivalents. It is a world where people die, sometimes not even out of their own free will. The Culture might not be able to lose a war, but they can lose hundreds of billions of lives in one. The people just get bored. In a world with free energy and free automation, that's aiming pretty low. I'd argue that we only see people who excel because of their own fixations, where a healthier utopia would have more options and interests in arete for its own sake, but that could arguably be a literary thing. Same for the weird relationship with the Sublime, or the lack of people turned or turning into Minds or something on their scale.
gattsuru
2d ago
Even assuming it 'worked out' electorally, there's also a pretty broad 'there's two types of people that want to get into dead men's shoes' problem. To get any statutory changes, you don't just need one person with the will to force effective change: it's 1 President + 50 Senators + 218 Representatives + 5 Justices. Even a tiny or trivial number gets cold feet because they're more interest in living to see retirement than in getting those concrete wins, you go nowhere. There's even some juice in being in the handful to disagree!
gattsuru
3d ago
Sometimes it's worth following where the characters go. That's easiest when it's a detour - often a big scene just needs a different setup, or to happen in a different order, or have just one character out of the room - but sometimes it means changing the crux of the story. It doesn't always make it better, and I have seen it make the work much less coherent, but it's worth at least considering.
That said, if this is for the one-handed novelette or some major climactic scene, though, that may not be what you're looking for. You don't want to switch out a big action, drama, or sex scene just because your characters are getting cold feet or wouldn't be that adventurous.
... but I'd point out that very few people are perfectly attached to their principles and character. Throw temptation: would they do it for money, or pussy (or dick), or status? Throw time pressure: would they do it because someone threw a grenade into the room and they reacted instinctively, or because they only had a half-second to say no? Throw their judgement into question: would they do it if drunk as a skunk, or enraged to the breaking point, or half-asleep, or bleeding? Throw their certainty in question: have their peers judge them for their principles, or the villain tell them persuasively why their principles don't work, or have a valued ally suffer from their unflinching behavior earlier.
Alternatively, it can be a good reason to explore why this one out-of-character moment exists. Why is your brave warrior is fleeing like a coward can make a whole movie. That's one of the more dangerous ones, because it can take over or change the themes of a work heavily if the reason is heavy, even if it has no impact on the plot, but it can be all the more valuable for it.
gattsuru
4d ago
I stand corrected, I misread that data source.
I still think you’re badly underestimating the selection effects of the rest of the grand jury selection process, of radicalization among the average progressive and lefty, and of statistical artifacts in a random selection, and of the effect of heavily-leaning districts where the political lean is more severe and where most of the political attack happen.
(My “let me google that” also shows some jurisdictions in California requiring a 12/19 or 15/23 majority to issue an indictment, which makes your best-case average numbers much less favorable, but maybe I’m misreading that too.)
gattsuru
5d ago
Only about 60% of eligible voters turned out in California so even from the very start we have 40% of the population who is not particularly political.
California, specifically, favors volunteer applications for grand juries. This selects directly for civic engagement, but if you think it's a random selection of political engagement, drop that estimate from 3B param to something that runs on a Raspberry Pi.
For Napa County, as the first example to come up on Google, the first random draw I could find was from 2016-2017, and that was still a tiny fraction. If we brought 2024's 65% Harris-voting Napa population and multiply it by the 17/19 that volunteered -- assuming without evidence that the 2 volunteers were just too apolitical to find an excuse -- you still get 58%. I'll leave the math for some place like San Francisco County as an exercise for the reader.
Or perhaps you misunderstand the specifics of the law, the actual quality of evidence allowed in court (good evidence can get tossed because it was collected illegally or other procedural reasons) wasn't as strong, or plenty of other potential factors like that.
Which you will magnanimously avoid beating like a pinata, because you'd rather use the worst possible arguments instead. Just like you'll ignore the district matter.
generally around 60/40 like California
needs a simple majority,
Do you not know, or not care, how fractions work?
Because I don't think you know, or care, about how jury trials work:
In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district [emphasis added] wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.
And I also notice that you haven't actually engaged with the point (or examples!) of clear video evidence of criminal behavior being no-billed by Dem-leaning grand juries, juries, and magistrates.
It's a little funny watching people accuse you of letting LLMs do your thinking, because if I wanted a Darwin clone, I could do better with 3B param and a couple hours with an nVidia 3060. But mostly because it's just sad.
gattsuru
5d ago
The lawfare against the NRA did massive damage to the already-wobbly organization, and to the extent it moved its political arms to third groups (eg SAF), the soup-and-nuts fundamentals work - training programs, lead abatement, range insurance - still remains badly crippled and under the control of Blue Tribe administrators. I’m not sure there’s going to be any way for a non-NRA org to take over them, given the pressure applied against banks and insurers that only the NRA’s self-insurance warchest has allowed them to survive under.
That’s… kinda the problem. “It doesn’t work” is a testable hypothesis, and only survives so long as it almost never works. “It’s a bad escalation” only works if you can persuade people that refusing to push the button means it remains unpushed; that’s clearly not true and can’t become true without a Time Machine.
gattsuru
6d ago
This does seems more like the defense that the SPLC will offer, than an accurate representation of the 'material misrepresentation' prong of the federal wire fraud law.
gattsuru
6d ago
More motioning around the Paxton/Cornyn mess, given my low opinion of both politicians -- the former for long standing tendency to wave a red shirt around the most marginal culture war stands and then not actually commit to a charge where it could matter, the latter for playing moderate in a way that's less compromise and more surrender.
gattsuru
6d ago
An Individual Californian Republican can be effective : I point to Moros Kostas pretty often as an example of a process-focused functionalist being radicalized for gun control matters. But the Californian Republicans as a party or as a coordinated group have been having trouble actually doing anything for nearly two decades, at this point. Part of that's downstream of the jungle primaries cutting them out of state power, but they've also just had troubles where they've collected people that are neither sane nor politically consistent: cfe Chad Bianco as a rising star who's both a BLM fan and chasing down ballots.
gattsuru
6d ago
In addition to the other examples already presented, I'd point to the difficulties in DC enforcement in clear-cut cases, and, for a non-grand-jury indictment, Don Lemon through a magistrate judge.
gattsuru
6d ago
Given that nothing about the system has changed (they're still just made up of ordinary citizens through the jury selection process)
Several of the failures to indict have been -- and been clearly downstream -- of jury pools where a heavy and radicalized Blue Tribe lean is present.
gattsuru
6d ago
That too, but Californian Republicans are like Californian Raisins in so many ways that they're not really a useful example of a broader trend.
gattsuru
6d ago
Your argument proves too much: the Trump administration also had difficulty securing a grand jury in cases where they had video evidence of the crime.
gattsuru
6d ago
You can do these things. There was a funny little bit about telling one of the coding LLMs to write like a caveman, and it's mostly noteworthy because it actually did save money through token brevity. It's pretty easy to produce style transfer from one writing genre to another, although the results can get pretty comedic pretty fast (caveat: I have no idea if this is good advice).
For local LLMs, LoRA aren't popular and they tend to have weird side effects, but they do let you get style transfer without the context overhead.
Does this seem like a good description of Caetano turning to Calce?
I know the process arguments: Caetano was a per curiam, not a ruling; the eventual decision in a different case after the state mooted Caetano only bound Massachusetts (and arguably not even them); yada yada standing self-mooting yada. But those are only arguments about how the process got here. They say nothing about whether the process is reasonable or correct.
Because it seems wildly insufficient to affirmatively prove that the government's acting illegally. Caetano did that in 2016.
And people clearly believe that, for rights they care about, and sometimes even for stupid shit like people appreciating the view of a building. Courts are quite happy to throw out preliminary injunctions and temporary restraining orders, even post-CASA and even where the government is quite likely to win the eventual case. We have processes that could be used to evaluate whether new, poorly-defined, and likely unconstitutional laws should go into effect or be delayed. They just aren't: see Illinois v. Due Process for a trivial example that SCOTUS didn't care about either.
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