Rov_Scam
2d ago
You're giving these people too much credit. When you said "Progressive Art Scene" I thought at first you may be talking about gallery openings or legitimate theater or modern classical music. Instead you were talking about the horrible "scene kids". These are usually punk bands that have only perfunctory instrumental talent and virtually no songwriting talent who latch onto the "scene" because they know that they're too untalented to become professional musicians. They usually put a high value on vague concepts like "authenticity" and "selling out" and look for reasons to create internal drama and ostracize people. You know you're at a "scene show" if, say, you go to a show at a venue in the city one night and then a couple weeks later you go to a show in an exurb 30 miles way and the audience is composed of almost entirely the same people. They mostly play the same circuit, though, because these bars are owned by scene people themselves. If it were a self-contained community of people who just wanted to play locally it would be no problem; less popular styles like jazz and bluegrass are usually like this. The trouble is that these people all have aspirations of playing music full-time, which makes the stakes higher and introduces a lot of stress. It's almost like a combination of Orthodox Judaism and Old Order Amish, where there's a comprehensive Mosaic law you're expected to follow with shunning the consequence of violating it. It's a breeding ground for drama.
Everyone in that thread may have differing politics but they all seem to buy into the scene mentality; their problem is that it's placing emphasis where they don't want it placed. The fact that politics plays a more prominent role isn't surprising but it could honestly just as easily be right-wing politics as left-wing — it just so happens that most of the participants were already lefties so that's the natural direction it took. In the grand scheme of things, though, it's beside the point. These people are rank amateurs involved in a circle jerk, and their bullshit has about as much influence on the broader culture as what's going on in some random subreddit.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
I don't understand the focus on skilled immigration. A lot of what we need is unskilled work. Since the pandemic we've seen reduced hours and increased wages for service jobs that they still can't seem to staff. I suspect part of the reason for the price increases everywhere is that they have to pay 15 bucks an hour for someone to push a cash register, not because of change in the law but because they can't find anyone for less than that, and they're still having trouble staffing these places. US Steel is having trouble finding laborers for mills because even at 80k/year no one wants to work rotating shifts doing manual labor in a dusty environment.
Rov_Scam
5d ago
It's irrelevant because no one actually cares about their doctor's academic credentials. Maybe fail rates are higher at UCLA but UCLA is hard to get into to begin with, so I imagine the coursework is harder than at a place like NEOMED. And there are already schools of osteopathy that seem to attract people who couldn't get into MD programs. I'd be willing to bet that if I were to take a random poll few people would be able to tell me where their doctor even went to med school let alone how highly that school is regarded or what their grades were. Like almost everything else, once you get your first job your education is pretty much irrelevant.
Rov_Scam
7d ago
The evidence against Perry was prejudicial, but that's not the end of the analysis. All evidence is prejudicial to some degree. The question is whether the prejudicial nature is outweighed by the probative value, and it was because it was clearly related to motive. The argument wasn't that it was evidence that Perry was a bad dude but that he specifically contemplated the actions which he was accused of. The evidence of Foster's prior actions wasn't admitted because it would only be relevant if Perry was aware of it at the time of the incident, and there's no evidence that he had seen those posts. Even then I don't know if it would be admissible because simply blocking a street isn't a deadly threat, and intent to intimidate doesn't necessarily mean intent to injure, but since Perry didn't see the posts, we don't need to go that far with the analysis.
Rov_Scam
7d ago
The prior incidents of protesters shooting at cars is all well and good, but they're only relevant if the defendant knew about them and they influenced his decision, and the only way to admit that evidence is if he testifies to it himself. While that evidence may have helped his case, that help almost certainly would have been outweighed by the fact that he'd have to testify and open himself up to cross examination, which almost never ends well.
Rov_Scam
7d ago
I've got more written but this is taking quite a bit of research to do the way I want to do it and I've been unusually busy for the past month so my apologies for not getting the installments out sooner. In the meantime, I owe you answers to your questions.
Does CMU being the best CS university in the world affect the day to day of the average person in Pittsburgh? For example, the JHU's excellence at Medicine or Clemson at Automobile Engg. defintely seems to affect the economic makeup of their respective cities.
Not unless you live near campus, but I doubt that's the kind of influence you're talking about. I have a friend who works at the robotics lab but his place of employment makes no difference in my life. The so-called city fathers hype up our tech prowess all the time, but I'm guessing that all cities with any kind of tech industry do that, and Pittsburgh is still like 18th in number of tech jobs, so I'm inclined to say that any influence is minimal. The one exception may be in East Liberty; it gets a lot of hype for being recently gentrified and having a Google office near there, but for all the housing they're building I've never heard of anyone actually living there, and normal people don't hype the area up like they do other trendy areas. That's more of a discussion for the installment on East Liberty (there's certainly a lot to unpack there), but off the top of my head I'd guess that all the apartments are rented by techbros without social lives, which is why I haven't heard of anyone wanting to move there.
Does Pittsburgh ever feel like a college town? Upitt + CMU makes for 50k students not that far from downtown.
And Duquesne just outside of Downtown, and Point Park in Downtown, and Carlow right next to Pitt, and you get the idea. So yeah; any remotely trendy part of the East End with decent bus service is going to have a relatively high number of student renters, particularly grad students. I've never heard of any of them wanting to live in East Liberty, though. The only part that feels like an actual college town, though is Oakland, where you're right on campus, but being in the city makes it qualitatively different than if you're in a town that revolves around a huge state school in the middle of nowhere. I'll go into greater detail in the section on Oakland.
I've seen Pittsburgh compared to Seattle wrt weather, hilliness, whiteness and having tech. How fair is the comparison ?
I've never been to Seattle so take my response with a grain of salt, but I think it's reasonably fair. The climates are probably comparably dreary, but here we actually have 4 seasons with hot summers and cold winters. Our climate is mild compared to places like the Rockies and interior New England, but we're quite cold and snowy for a major American city. Culturally, though, I don't think that Seattle has the working class industrial history that gives Pittsburgh its sense of grit. I'd also wager that they're a lot less "ethnic" than we are; everybody here is Catholic and has names like Bob Schlydeki and Larry Deldino and you can still smoke in bars here. People I've know who moved here from Seattle are surprised by the amount of industry that still exists and the fact that working class people actually have accents. Most had assumed that the mills had died completely and that accents were an affectation from television that nobody had anymore.
Rov_Scam
7d ago
You're assuming that Trump is actually behind the compilation of these lists. From what I've read, it's all conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation that have proven in the past they don't give a shit so much about loyalty to Trump as they do advancing their own agendas. Using these outside lists when he didn't have a clue himself is a big part of what got him in the position he was in during his first term. Asking them to come up with more names isn't going to change that. And competence does matter. At a certain point you're getting less into people whose job consists of making policy decisions and more into the realm of everyday managerial functioning. For instance, say that Trump thinks the ATF's FFL application review process is too strict and wants to make it more liberal, and he fires the guy responsible for this process with a gun nut who's dedicated to making sure practically anyone who applies gets an FFL with minimum hassle. That may be great in theory, but if the guy in question has no clue about how the review process works and ends up bumbling through his job to the point where delay times are so long that applications that would have been a breeze under the old guy are suffering inordinate delays, the exact constituency he's trying to appease isn't going to be very happy. I can just see the article in The Atlantic now: "He thought Trump would make it easier for him to run his gun store; instead it's become a nightmare."
Rov_Scam
7d ago
I hate to do this but you did the math wrong in the earlier post. You said:
Presumably the first 1,000 were selected basically at random and showed a 9.5% voting rate among people that had been deemed mentally incompetent and weren't allowed to vote. If that rate held, that would be over 2,000 votes from ineligible, mentally incompetent voters, just in Dane County.
The article says that there are about 22,000 voters on the incompetent list in Wisconsin. A random sample of 1,000 taken showed that 95 people had cast ballots at some point since 2008. Without numbers specific to 2020 there's no way to estimate how many improper votes were cast. That being said, if they want to implement a system to catch this I'm all for it. If they want to prosecute the people who voted illegally, I'm all for it, though going after incompetent people probably isn't a good look.
The same is true for the indefinitely confined. If you want to go after these people that's fine, but you'd better be prepared to investigate all 250,000+ instances and prosecute each one that doesn't meet whatever strict reading you want to give the law. You can't just go into Milwaukee and find a few black people or bleeding heart liberal activists who violated the law and use them as an example of "Democrat voter fraud"; you have to be willing to go into rural areas and ask MAGA hat guys detailed questions about whether Grandma is really indefinitely confined when she still has an active driver's license and was seen at the grocery store walking around the day before submitting her application. That isn't going to sit well with anybody, which is why nobody is ever going to suggest such a thing.
Rov_Scam
8d ago
Project 2025 has approximately zero chance of succeeding:
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The president is already allowed to appoint approximately 4,000 people to high-level agency positions. At any given time in the Trump Administration, approximately 1200, or about a third, were unfilled. If he can't manage to fill these it's unlikely he's going to fill anywhere from 5 to 50 thousand additional posts.
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He's already notoriously bad at picking aides who are loyal to him. He fought with his own cabinet more than any president in recent memory. There's no reason to believe that four years of not having to appoint anyone is somehow going to make him better at this role. This problem is magnified by the fact that most of these positions aren't going to be under his direct supervision, and he'll only know that they don't have the requisite loyalty when a scandal erupts. Not a good look.
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If you remove a career bureaucrat and replace him with a political hack, the new guy isn't likely to have an in-depth understanding on how things actually work. Bureaucrat A doesn't do what you want so you replace him with Bureaucrat B. Bureaucrat B is dedicated to doing what you ask, except he isn't well-versed in the Administrative Procedure Act or the various other laws governing the office, and he's essentially starting from scratch. Except there's no time to get up to speed because the president wants this done now, so he ends up doing something that violates the law and the action ends up getting tied up in court for the next six months while the new guy in charge bungles various other duties of the office that were an afterthought under the first guy. Now the president's in the position where he has to fire Bureaucrat B and replace him with another guy who didn't make the cut the last time and is now even more likely to screw things up. Meanwhile guys appointed to non-contentious positions are making their own little messes that just become fodder for your opponents without any political gain. This obviously isn't going to happen every time, but when you're talking about thousands of positions the Venn diagram isn't always going to match up and there's a good chance you find you've appointed a moron.
Rov_Scam
8d ago
Prosecuting the Tides foundation isn't going to do much. As a "dark money" organization most people haven't heard of them the way they've heard of the NRA, so the chance that anyone will actually care is low. Furthermore, as a foundation, they don't actually do anything themselves but simply distribute money to other groups. It takes a long time for an advocacy organization like the NRA to build up the donor network and social capital to have the kind of influence they've had. If you're just distributing money, there's plenty of other advocacy organizations that can easily take up that slack.
The biggest problem, though, is that most of the alleged malfeasance on the part of Tides is directed towards liberal advocacy groups who claim they mismanaged money intended for their benefit. For example, they're currently being sued in California by BLM, who claims the group misdirected 33 million in funds that were raised as part of a joint campaign and were supposed to be earmarked. Any other prosecutions are going to be in a similar vein. It's hardly an own of the libs if most libs haven't heard of the group you're prosecuting and the ones who have are likely to be your star witnesses. If BLM ends up siding with the administration it's hardly a good look.
Rov_Scam
8d ago
The problem there is that going after voter fraud in a non-grandstanding way means he actually needs to name names and have evidence. You can't just say there was MASSIVE FRAUD in Detroit or wherever; you have to actually say here is a corrupt election official and here's exactly what he did and here's the evidence to prove it. Most of the voter fraud stuff in 2020 was more along the lines of "I don't like the looks of this", which doesn't exactly help you out too much when it comes to a prosecution.
Rov_Scam
11d ago
Studying and interacting is much different than expending considerable resources on something, which in turn is much different than waging war or making large economic investments in something. Sure, we spend money on researching things out of curiosity already, but it's not a lot. Numbers are hard to come by, but one figure I saw says we spent about $7.2 billion on botanical research in 2013. However, the context of this figure was talking about money spent on crop science research, and I'd be willing to bet that the money spent on projects like some professor studying rare ferns of Appalachia is much less than what we're spending on more practical applications. If an alien civilization were to visit earth from the distances described, it would be an incredibly costly mission with no guarantee of success. My guess is that if they wanted to study us they'd send unmanned vehicles first, then maybe a small research party like at the beginning of E.T. I highly doubt they'd come here with cargo ships ready to exchange resources for technology, let alone bring an army to mount a full-scale invasion. After all, we've been sending stuff into space for 60 years and we still haven't got past the curiosity stage yet, with the exception of satellites that are within driving distance. We certainly haven't gotten to the point where it makes sense to start mining the moon or something similar, and that's practically right on top of us in astronomical terms.
Rov_Scam
17d ago
I'd preface this by saying that since these "powers" were so poorly defined by the OP, speculating about who they'd find acceptable seems kind of pointless, since any discussion can elicit a response of "no, the powers aren't like that". Anyway, I'm going to proceed on the assumption that these mysterious overlords are left-leaning but not too far left, avatars for the man they're actually trying to keep in the White House. Which I guess makes me one of them, though I'm opposed to assassination and, in any event wouldn't know where to start, but I'll nonetheless use this as license to consider myself somewhat of an expert, especially since most of the people in my social circle are of roughly the same opinion.
Desantis was a credible Bogeyman two years ago but his absolute inability to outmaneuver Trump has rendered him impotent in the eyes of the Powers. And in the eyes of Trump supporters he's totally disloyal and probably a cuck, too for taking abuse from Trump and not bothering to fight back. Desantis's main advantages over Trump were that he was supposedly more competent and that he was actually willing to fight rather than get involved in messy political disputes. His campaign showed that he was totally uncharismatic and couldn't run a national campaign to save his own life, allowing also-rans like Nikki Haley to run circles around him. And he his profound unwillingness to attack Trump, even in the face of his abuse, didn't exactly project the image of a fighter. He's a guy most lefty Democrats would reflexively dislike and bitch about for his policy positions, but he isn't the kind of guy whom anyone would be concerned about the country over. If Trump, as charismatic as he is, was unable to cow the governmental apparatus into bending to his will, then Desantis sure as hell isn't a threat. He's also too much of a traditional Republican at heart to make any serious changes. He'll talk about ending woke but when he realizes that there isn't much he can do about it he'll just shift to enacting more tax cuts. PLus, the guy does have actual executive experience running a large state.
As for Youngkin, I've never met a Democrat who has strong feelings about the guy. I don't live in Virginia, but outside of there the man comes across to most Democrats as as somewhat moderate, the kind of Republican who can actually win a statewide election in Virginia. While he wouldn't be as acceptable as a guy like Phil Scott, he's not exactly the MAGA menace Republicans would need to nominate to really scare the lefties. For Trump to be assassination-proof his putative successor would have to be someone like MTG or Boebert, and there's no way in hell that's happening. And if it somehow did happen, there's no way someone like that is defeating an incumbent. And even if someone like that did beat Biden in the general, it would pose no real threat to any powers that be because these people are totally incompetent and more interested in soundbites than government.
This is totally anecdotal but it proves my point. A friend of mine has a winter house in Boebert's district in Colorado. Being in the West, there's some local water authority, basically a citizens group, that relies on the local rep to get Federal funding for their operating budget. This isn't exactly controversial politically, but they have to meet with the rep every year to go over the budget and whatnot so the rep knows how much to ask for and can justify the number if pressed. First, instead of attending the board meeting, Boebert wanted to do it over the phone for no plausible reason other than that she was too lazy to attend. Okay, whatever, but when she's on the phone it's clear to everyone involved that she wasn't actually listening. When she asks for clarification of something that she should have understood had she been paying attention, it's clear to them that she's either a complete moron or has such a short attention span that she can't even listen to the answers to questions she asked (Which weren't pointed clarifications of someone involved but simply asking them to repeat what they just said). Then she terminated the meeting early by actually telling them it was boring. These aren't the kind of people who are going to make any significant change if in the White House.
Rov_Scam
18d ago
If these mysterious powers that be really don't want Trump to be president to the point that they're willing to assassinate him, and we presume they have the ability to pull it off, why wait until he gets elected? Anyone even more odious than Trump is probably someone who has even less chance of getting elected — and none of the personality cult — than he does, so why not do it now? Especially since the security of a sitting president is almost certainly much tighter than whatever he's getting now. We've never had a major party candidate drop dead during an election season before, so it's uncharted territory how much of a shit show it could turn into trying to find another nominee on short notice. The veep is the obvious choice, but I'd be willing to bet that the actual primary candidates will feel like they deserve a shot since they actually got votes at the convention and Trump's pick was only for vice. Or hell, do it now while there are still primaries to go and Haley is still on the ballot. She may have a better shot of beating Biden in the general but four years of her are certainly better than four years of Trump. Why even give the guy a chance if you don't have to?
Rov_Scam
19d ago
I agree with most of what you said, but aren't you an American expat living in London? There seems something a bit off about someone in your position saying that immigration restrictions are the only thing that matters.
Rov_Scam
19d ago
Calling Cliff Asness a "lifelong Democrat" is disingenuous at the very least. I used to keep CNBC on as background noise when I was in law school and his name rings a bell as the guy who was complaining that one or another of Obama's bailouts was too friendly to workers and not friendly enough to hedge fund billionaires such as himself. Some further internet research shows he was a Rubio supporter in 2016 and a Haley supporter more recently. I don't know what the details of his voter registration are, but he definitely comes across more as one of those never Trump conservatives who Republicans spent the last 8 years assuring us were electorally irrelevant.
Rov_Scam
20d ago
I just spent all day defending large companies in products liability actions, and I'll do the same thing tomorrow, etc. I don't have the time or the inclination right now to give a crash course on how personal injury litigation actually works, but suffice it to say that the jury is irrelevant. We often bring it up but it's more of a theoretical construct than a real thing, because there's no way in hell a case actually goes to trial unless things go significantly off the rails. Damages in a case aren't related in any way to coverage limits or how deep the defendant's pockets are. The damages usually aren't even alleged and when we're evaluating cases are projected awards are just estimates. But no one wants to go to trial; these things settle. Plaintiffs' lawyers, as I said earlier, have to work for free until the case is resolved. The plaintiffs themselves don't want to wait, either, and their engagement agreements require them to accept any reasonable offer. Most of the work involved in a case is less legal razzle-dazzle and more going through the evidence systematically to determine an appropriate amount for settlement negotiations. The idea of a rainmaker gunning for a huge verdict is something more out of a John Grisham novel than the reality of day to day lawyering. There are some Plaintiffs' attorneys who are like that, but they tend to get shitty cases that it quickly becomes apparent aren't even worth trying for a big score; they usually end up just taking whatever we offer them. Some are more aggressive than others, but they're all pragmatic. They have businesses to operate, and they can't afford to throw 200 grand into a holein the hope that it turns into a big score. Any Plaintiff's lawyer working on contingency needs a war chest, and it's much easier and better for their clients to make sure they get a fair settlement then to burn through all their operating capital in search of a huge payday. There's also the added wrinkle that most jurisdictions now have mandatory settlement conferences with the judge; judges in general aren't necessarily averse to trials, but they don't like it when the parties can't settle straightforward cases with no major issues. If one party is intransigent, they aren't getting any help there. As for the insurance companies, they're durable. They survived asbestos, where they're still paying millions of dollars a year on decades-old general liability policies that had low premiums to begin with. They survived countless natural disasters where everyone in a large metro suddenly needs a new car or house at once. They'll survive self-driving cars just fine.
One caveat I'd add is that this is, of course, dependent on self0driving cars being as good as if not better than human drivers are overall. If they're not that good then they'll never be able to market them in such a way that will absolve the driver from any responsibility. Despite recent gains, I'm skeptical that they'll ever get that good in our lifetimes, in which case this exchange is pure navel gazing. But if they do, I don't think liability is going to be a huge issue.
Rov_Scam
20d ago
The part you're forgetting is that if Ford has to insure against all those accidents then the driver doesn't. The up front cost to the consumer may be more, but it's effectively prepaying an insurance policy that lasts the life of the vehicle. Whether or not you're actually coming out ahead depends on specific numbers, but as long as they're somewhere in the ballpark of what you'd spend on insurance then it's a question of how much you value self-driving capability, which is already enough of an advantage that people would be willing to pay a steep premium.
Rov_Scam
20d ago
As a products liability lawyer, I can tell you that insurance coverage is a lot more complicated than that. Any hypothetical policy would base the premiums on the number of vehicles sold. If there's a defect that results in injury, only a small percentage of the affected vehicles are going to result in claims, and only a small percentage of the total claims are going to involve huge losses. Huge verdicts only result when the insurance companies are adamant that there is no liability and are looking to get out from under it. Once it's clear there's liability (and often not even then), they'll settle claims at standard rates. You may get a couple of eye popping verdicts but these won't become a normal thing. No Plaintiff's lawyer is going to spend 100k+ taking a contingency case to trial chasing a verdict that's likely to bankrupt the company and leave him and his client waiting 5 years in the unsecured creditor line in a Chapter 11 hoping they can recover a percentage of the original verdict. Better to take the cash now.
Rov_Scam
21d ago
You're assuming the car companies are the ones footing the bill. They buy insurance for things like this, and the premiums reflect the risk and the average settlement value. This is how every company manages risk, including the car companies, who already get sued in product liability actions. Unless the risks are so high that they effectively become uninsurable, the cost of the insurance will just be reflected in the price of the vehicle. And if they are uninsurable, then self-driving cars are probably too dangerous to be marketed as such anyway. I would mention that I say this as someone who is skeptical that full self driving will be available in his lifetime.
Rov_Scam
21d ago
I don't know that any of these are great examples. Let's approach them individually:
Pregnant Worker's Fairness Act
It's a bit academic, but it should be noted that the EEOC doesn't actually have Title VII rulemaking authority. The "rules" they promulgate are merely interpretive documents that inform businesses on how to comply and inform courts on the agency's interpretation. The courts themselves are only bound to follow EEOC guidance if it's "reasonable". Now, there are decisions out there that say that courts can't just wave these away and should give the agency deference, so there's a pretty big hurdle to overcome if you want to go against this guidance, and it gets pretty complicated here, but suffice it to say that courts aren't bound by these rules the same as they would if they were promulgated by an agency that actually had rulemaking authority. It should also be noted that the EEOC still has to follow the APA when it comes to procedural matters in promulgation (like notice and comment), so this lack of authority doesn't exactly make it easy for them to run wild.
As far as the actual rule is concerned, it's hard to say from a Republican perspective what the EEOC should have actually done. Saying outright that the law didn't apply to abortion would have created a situation where the EEOC guidance was directly at-odds with any reasonable canon of legislative interpretation; I don't think any textualist could argue with a straight face that abortions aren't pregnancy-related. Saying nothing about the matter isn't an option either. Since they're still bound by the APA, they have to address the comments they received, and they received plenty of comments about abortion. And even if they could have just omitted the abortion section, all that really does is kick the can down the road for when a court actually has to decide the matter, and it's unlikely that any but the staunchest anti-abortion judge would rule that abortions aren't related to pregnancy.
But that's all irrelevant because it's unlikely that this rule (or lack thereof) would ever result in litigation. The rules pretty clearly state that the effect of this guidance is that an employer is required to give a woman leave (paid or unpaid) to receive an abortion. While this seems like raw culture war bait, the reality is that, excepting for circumstances where someone is trying to rub it in an employer's face, no one is specifically asking for time off to get an abortion. I've personally never had an employer ask about the nature of any medical procedure I've taken time off to get, or had them ask me which doctor I was going to, and if a doctor's excuse is required, I doubt many employers are going to do internet research to determine if this is a doctor who exclusively performs abortions. Employers generally aren't allowed to ask employees about medical conditions that aren't work-related, except to verify leave, although as long as a doctor confirms that the absence is for a medical reason they can't really inquire further. And I doubt they would, since hunting for people who are getting abortions means, practically speaking, that they'd have to investigate every employee's medical leave, which I doubt any really want to do. There may be some unlikely confluence of factors where this could become a real issue, but I doubt it. Most women seeking abortions aren't going to tell their employers that they need time off specifically to get one.
If Republicans felt that strongly of this, they would have sought to get specific language into the bill. They didn't, and complaining about this is just them getting hoisted by their own petard given the electoral consequences involved.
FFLs When the entire point of specific statutory language is to expand a definition, you can't complain too loudly when that definition gets expanded. If you had sole rulemaking authority with regards to this, how would you expand the definition to conform with the new law without simply restating the old definition? I'm sure you can think of a dozen ways that this could be done, but that's beside the point. The point is that someone has to come up with these definitions and they have to conform with the statutory language without being overbroad. But that's tricky. The problem here is that there are two basic categories that are uncontroversial. One is the people who are actually running gun stores who need FFLs for legitimate business purposes. The other is people who simply have a gun they don't want anymore and want to sell it. But there's a third category of people we've talked about before who the government really doesn't like — people who want to sell guns part-time or as a hobby. You mentioned in a previous post how the ATF no longer will issue FFLs for hobbyists. You can disagree with that stance all you want, but it seems to me that Congress agrees with that and that was the specific intent behind the change in language. Now it's up to the ATF to flesh out that definition to cover the myriad circumstances in which someone might be selling guns "for profit". And that's hard! The problem as I see it doesn't stem so much from the law itself or ATF's interpretation of it but that there is a group of people for whom any further restrictions on gun sales is bad and needs to be stopped. They simply aren't arguing that the law was a good idea but ATF bungled the implementation; they're arguing that the law was a bad idea to begin with and using the ATF's interpretation as proof. But those are two separate arguments.
FACE Act It's telling that this law has only become controversial in recent years, after the Biden Administration used it aggressively in the wake of Dobbs. For the first 30 or so years of its existence, the fact that it was never used in cases of church vandalism was never an issue. At least not enough of an issue for 2 Republican presidents to invoke it in 12 years, one of whom was devoutly religious and the other of whom was devoutly into culture warring. It's also telling that the act also allows for private enforcement via a civil cause of action that few parties seem bothered to sue under. That being said, anti-abortion protestors necessarily do most of their work when the place is open and in full view of the public. Most of the church vandalism was done at night by people who actually disguised themselves. One type of crime is much easier to investigate than the other.
Of course, that doesn't really apply to the Nota case, because the perpetrator was caught in the act. But it doesn't compare to the Houck case, at least if you actually look at the procedural posture. The information in the Nota case was filed the day before the plea was entered. This itself was several months after the incident. What this suggests was that this was already a done deal by the time it was even on the court's docket; for all we know, the prosecutor could have threatened to throw the book at Nota before offering a misdemeanor charge and a sentencing recommendation as a lifeline. Houck, on the other hand, was found not guilty by a jury. For all we know he could have been offered the same deal as Nota but turned it down; I'd be surprised to say the least, if there was no deal offered at all.
Rov_Scam
27d ago
Any activity level can cause unexpected injury; all it takes is to move something the wrong way. There was a period of time when I was riding my bike about 25 miles a day after work, and 50 to 80 miles on the weekends, and I ended up throwing my neck out while reaching for a drink on the top shelf of a convenience store cooler. If you're repeatedly injuring yourself in the same way after doing the same thing, then I'd stop to reassess my plans or seek professional instruction, but one-off injuries are par for the course for reasonably active people. It's probably more of an "I moved something the wrong way" injury than an overuse injury.
Rov_Scam
29d ago
He's not going to send in troops in any year, because there are already other enforcement mechanisms built into the law. The most obvious consequence would be that Texas loses Federal education funding, which is a hug deal because education funding accounts for about 20% of all Federal money Texas receives, and the state school system — which is already among the lowest-spending in the country — is already facing cuts now that the COVID stimulus is gone and the state legislature can't agree on how to pay for the shortfall. This won't happen immediately, though; my guess is that someone will file a lawsuit and enforcement will be dependent on a favorable court ruling, which won't come until well after the election. The real question is whether Abbott will be willing to enforce his own edict. State schools will be caught between a rock and a hard place if compliance with one law comes down to breaking another. Biden has the luxury of time, but if a school decides to do what they want to do then Abbott has some tough decisions to make.
If only the United States had the foresight to institute such a system a century and a half ago, before the immigrant problem got out of hand. Then they could have just used my great-grandfather's labor in the mines until he decided to retire (coincidentally right around the time Pittsburgh Seam coal started running low), and then deported him back to Galicia just in time for the German invasion. Another great-grandfather would have been shipped back to Calabria some time in the late 40s or early 50s. I don't want to think what the consequences for your family would have been. I'm not sure what the downside was of their being allowed to stay.
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