gattsuru
4hr ago
It depends a lot on what you're looking for. DeCADA is one of the higher quality vendors and has a real store, but mostly sells full kits and only a little cheaper. Mould King is closer to Lego Mindstorms is capabilities and has a more serious price delta, but they've had some occasional missteps with early kits. If you just want bricks and parts, either to build your own set or as replacements, GoBricks is the biggest bulk manufacturer with a good reputation, although I have no idea how well they'd scale to FIRST's demand.
And if you just want bulk and don't care what, AliBaba has absolute tons... but the quality can be flaky.
There's a potential compromise I could see, where instead of mastectomies they'd be doing breast reduction, with preservation of function.
Yeah, that's fair, and has some practical arguments in its benefit anyways. Apologies, I'm just used to seeing them merged together. I think there's some moderate arguments for reducing total surgeries in cases desistance is extremely unlikely -- an FTM with the unfortunate genetics to have D-cup breasts at 16 and who's had a stable identity since 12 is in an awkward place where they're going to go under the knife twice for something that they're pretty confident about -- but complication rates for these procedures are low enough that it's a plausible compromise from an ethical perspective.
Whether it's an enforceable one is harder. Ideally, we'd just have enough trust... but we clearly don't, and that distrust is well-founded, hence this discussion. There would definitely be aggressive action by both patients and to straddle the line of what's 'just' an aggressive reduction, and there's even some process arguments to not be entirely dishonest when doing so (afaict, 'masculinizing mastectomy' is already much more likely to leave lymph nodes in place compared to conventional mastectomy; "inverted T" procedures are structurally more similar to a breast reduction to an A or AA and are actually used by some trans men as their final masculinizing top surgery already). There's a few clear markers -- removal of the nipples, lymph nodes, milk ducts, yada -- but we can't exactly those to end up on the medical file even if there were agreement on them being the 'right' dividing line.
Which is probably the broader problem.
Where do you get that from? From what I understand desistence is still pretty understudied.
That's a reasonable criticism, a lot of the data is either low-confidence or coming from suspect sources, and there are adult desisters.
But if the numbers were even comparable to the most optimistic trans activists claims of 'low' pre-puberty desistance, we'd be talking 1%, and that's still well over three thousand people in the United States alone. If adult desistance were the majority or a sizable fraction, as gender-critical people claim with some support for pre-puberty, we'd have FtMtFs by the tens of thousands at this point, especially in the aftermath of the Fox Virian lawsuit.
It's hard to make that match up with reality as we see it. That's a low confidence claim -- there have been enough changes in FtM demographics that something could have changed in 2023 on the intake side, or 2026 on the outtake side; it's possible the entire measurement system is so badly corrupted we can't see a 1-in-100 signal of a 700k+ population -- but for all it's just absence of evidence, it is still signal. And the most plausible explanations are either low rates of adult desistance or very early desistance that is being handled, despite a doctrine that I agree shows insufficient patient safeguards for this specific case.
I wouldn't have anything against asserting general minor insurance tomfoolery, but asserting tomfoolery that conveniently supports my point didn't feel fair, and I wanted to make it clear I find any potential skepticism completely valid.
Fair.
This would be lower than the STH number, but not by much (and that's expected as they include other forms of surgery, including the infamous laser hair removal).
Yeah. Not sure if that reflects coincidence, genuine number, taking from the same underlying source, or being bamboozled by the same misdirection.
EDIT:
They're irreversible, 17 is still in the "crazy teenager" years, and even for the purposes of gender dysphoria, they don't seem like something that can't wait a few years
I guess my problem's that we allow a lot of other crazy teenager years to do irreversible things without dire and traumatic medical need. Hell, we force or psuedo-force it in many circumstances. I don't buy the suicide prevention arguments and I understand that many social conservatives are opposed to other cosmetic surgeries in this age range, and I understand that this is deeper than a piercing or (most) tattoos, but it's hard for me to put it in the category of something they can't understand well enough to make decisions just because some 1:10000 or 1:1000 risk that they won't like it a few years later.
Some of that's just because this feels like salami-slicing -- if 17-year-olds are crazy, then so are 19-year-olds, and well we don't let 20-year-olds drink alcohol, and 24-year-olds can't be trusted with rental cards -- that someone will make even if you have a very principled end-state, but there are just also pragmatic arguments.
A complete ban on 'top surgery' for a trans guy is, in a large portion and probably majority of cases, going to be a serious constraint on their romantic opportunities at a time a lot of normal people start forming exactly those relationships: boobs tend to be pretty polarizing for straights and gays and lesbians alike. For the genetically (un)lucky, passing becomes impossible, and while that's not a massive value from your perspective, it's clearly something a lot of adult trans men do put a lot of effort into. These do, I recognize, become less serious if we accept significant breast reduction surgeries as a separate category.
From a practical standpoint, a surgical intervention at 17 makes it possible to 'turn a new leaf' at college, in ways that having the procedures done at college do not. That's most extreme in states that require surgical intervention to recognize legal transition, but even outside of those constraints, there's just a massive difference from 'Aiden-who-was-Alice' and 'Aiden-who's-short-and-really-shy-in-showers'. There's some downsides to this goal from a social conservative perspective -- I would argue it makes desistance a lot less likely, and soccons would argue that it's closer to love bombing -- but it's worth noticing as a motivation.
gattsuru
6hr ago
SCOTUS has offered a fascinating followup:
The State of Florida moved for leave to file a complaint against Washington and California for defying federal law by providing commercial driver’s licenses to illegal aliens who cannot read English. The result of this practice, Florida alleges, is the disturbing phenomenon of illegal-alien truck drivers causing fatal accidents on the road
This Court declines to even hear Florida’s claims, even though it has nowhere else to bring them. Because I would allow Florida to file its complaint, I respectfully dissent.
So there remains a very obvious way to split the baby in lieu of resolving a politically unpleasant extradition case: simply refuse to hear a complaint between a Red State and a Blue State.
gattsuru
6hr ago
Lord knows I can't criticize for dropping conversations, but can I at least get an answer about:
It's not so much that I'm taking it at face value because I feel like it, but because the prosecution has to run with this theory. Okay, they don't have to, but if they don't they run into evidentiary concerns... If they want to run with a different theory, they aren't going to be able to introduce the confession.
? Do you have a name for this rule? Because while the prosecutors would have to supplement the confession, but it's still very good evidence for many of the prongs of their theory (and various rules re: completeness/prejudicial effect yada yada not relevant here).
gattsuru
6hr ago
The possibility for incidents of testicular/ovarian cancer when on HRT should not be so easily discounted.
It's a serious concern and something that needs to be seriously reviewed by any medical professional and the patient, especially given the impact on both fertility and hormone stability in the case of desistance. But it's not some clear threshold behavior or more dangerous for the 16-18 year age range than for 19+: while I recognize that the data is limited, the risk seems primarily tied to duration of treatment rather than age of onset, the proposed link is attenuated, and the base incidence is low to start with. As with the "vain meaningless life" aspect, an argument that generalizes to adults only persuades to the extent it would meaningfully apply to adults.
(And the testicular cancer risk seems genuinely to have not panned out? Though they would say that...)
Also you can't simply undo puberty blockers, it's not a free lunch sort of deal.
I pretty explicitly spelled out that I've been persuaded that the data on puberty blockers is actively against their common-form use, and the extent that 'technical experts' promoted them despite or even because of severe and irrecoverable side effects have reduced my trust in both those experts and a lot of the information coming from the broader medical community on this topic.
gattsuru
20hr ago
[caveat : I'm not especially concerned about hormones for 16+, and I don't really get the object to 17+ mastectomies. These processes do have risks and side effects, but they're relatively well-bounded and understood, and combined with the drastically reduced incidence of desistance by those age ranges, the harm calculations just aren't looking that severe. I could be persuaded on these things -- I have been persuaded that use of puberty blockers were not just a minimally-harmful experiment but instead ranged from ill-advised to active malpractice, and the prominence and tolerance of bad actors from that sequence does leave me more cautious about the evidence and documentation for hormone therapy for the 16-18 range -- but I've had too many serious medical interventions before I was 18 for the 'mutilate' or 'consent' frameworks alone to really hit. Younger hormone therapy seems to have serious impact on bone health, and the long-term effects of orochidectomy and hysterectomy are much more serious and much harder for teenagers to understand.]
These 54 clinics have to pay their bills somehow, and that implies a throughput that is probably more consistent with the 14K number being accurate, rather than an overestimate. Of course that alone tells us nothing, a clinic can offer a wide range of non-invasive services, like psychological support, or hell perhaps they do keep the lights on with laser hair removal.
There are definitely clinics without surgical capabilities (or in jurisdictions that prohibit surgical intervention for minors), so psychological support and pharmaceutical interventions and such clearly can suffice for some businesses, and naively I'd expect that while the individual compensations are higher for surgical intervention, the bread-and-butter by definition is a lot more likely to come from recurring stuff. Dunno if there are any public figures, though.
That last bit might raise an eyebrow. Normally, I'd say it reminds me of a bit I once saw in an Adam Curtis documentary, about how the OG Neocons were screaming about the USSR building up a massive fleet of submarines, and when it was investigated and they found no such thing, they started screaming that this means the Soviets have a massive fleet of stealth submarines.
Eh, I get this is playful overstatement, but the extent minor insurance tomfoolery is tolerated is pretty important to recognize. Unless you're Haim, the feds really don't get involved in Medi* stuff unless it's hilariously overt or big amounts of cash are floating around, and sometimes not even then. Just fucking up ICD codes is wrist-slap stuff at best. Which is why it's a big concern... but it also means that it's a lot less of a big overt scandal if it's proven.
For their trouble, they were rewarded by Biden siccing the FBI on them. The case of Dr. Haim is one of the biggest affronts to justice I saw in recent years, but I'd need an entirely separate effort post to go over that.
Some discussion here
As a side note, the hospital, that the authors of the second paper are affiliated with, recently received a subpoena from the DOJ, demanding records related to pediatric gender-procedures, which they decided to completely ignore, almost like they have something to hide. The DOJ's petition to enforce compliance has now been granted, so I suppose we will, at some point, find out if they were on the up and up.
I'm not quite so optimistic; there was a mess of legal interplay here that would have gotten less favored political actors disbarred, and while requests for emergency relief have been denied so far, the jurisdiction charlie foxtrot is enough a mess it's possible the summary statistics will only be released if O'Connor defies procedure.
In other words, the numbers found by the court, for a single clinic, for a single year, were 2-3x greater than the numbers from Stop The Harm for the entire state for the entire period from 2019 to 2023. gattsuru called their numbers eyepopping, it might their own they were being conservative.
To be clear, eyepopping was more a reference to the 5k surgery interventions, but yes, the discrepancy between TRUE's claimed patient count and that available to other observers is concerning. Similarly, SEGM estimates a maximum of 1k masectomies on under-18s per year, and I'd consider them gender-critical in a way that would give higher-end estimates whenever possible. If they're vastly underestimating things, that's a concern regardless of the merits or demerits of the procedures simply because we can't possibly measure the outcomes on things that we don't know are happening.
gattsuru
23hr ago
That's reasonable. There's some robotics industry stuff that FIRST helps toward -- most heavily machine shops, where you want someone who can actually work through g-code or particular CNC interfaces, and to a lesser extent you do see some LabView in 'the real world' for aviation research -- but it's definitely not going to get you more prepared to work in a median industrial factory. I'd like to raise the sanity waterline there, too, but I don't think I can speak the language.
gattsuru
1d ago
I don't quite understand. Who is even doing this besides the strivers?
Anecdote, but there's a decent number who use it to see if their kid actually likes programming or STEM-adjacent stuff since the school programs are garbage and self-driven learning is very hit-or-miss, a smaller number who just insist their kid do something as an after school program to get them out of the house and FIRST is something that's still air-conditioned, and a lot of kids who get into it because it's an in-school program and less dumb than most of the other electives.
The dedicated strivers exist, and they're really obnoxious when you run into one that's made themselves a drive coach, but it's not the only entry point.
Is FIRST not basically the only game in town?
No, surprisingly. VEX V5 is the most comparable league to FTC, and it's technically a little larger in terms of just student count. The teams I mentor actually have pretty serious recruitment conflict because it's so much easier to run an 'award-winning' V5 team. FRC is pretty unique in scale, at least until you get into battle-bot style destructive stuff, but that doesn't really show up on the resumes. And there's a bunch of smaller programs like REFC Drone or the National Robotics Competition.
gattsuru
1d ago
That's fair, and it (along with the grant/scholarship ecosystem) are a serious frustration with these programs.
But there is a separation between the telos and the day-to-day work: even for students that are only getting involved to fill out their college resume, they at least have the opportunity to learn more. I've had students go into the program unfamiliar with the "plus" and "minus" screwdrivers, and come out knowing how to safely use a lathe; start without the ability to read basic Java assignment, and leave building a command scheduler library; to begin with a wire management scheme of 'rat's nest', and grow to something that's not horrifying; to start a stuttering mess and grow to actually give a confident presentation.
My bigger criticism of the programs are how poorly they play into some portions of that: the program designs make it very hard to justify teaching soldering, or electrical engineering, or good CAD principles, or serious ground-up manufacturing, even off-season. ((to be fair, because it's hard to find the mentor expertise. I can't CAD worth shit. Finding anyone who can run a hot air rework station and volunteer six hours a week is a pretty hefty lift.))
The Lego stuff has always been at the less productive end of that. You can teach basic programming with it even if the EV3 did a little better, and there is a public speaking and product development bit even if it's never been very realistic, but the design and problem-solving sides have always felt a little too much like encouraging students to solve by exhaustion rather than learning.
But it's noteworthy that Lego seems to be pulling toward the UMC strivers, that FIRST decided to nope out. It's even more noteworthy that result seems destructive toward FIRST, rather than anyone else, and will only become more so if FIRST doesn't shape up fast, and that they don't seem to have any route to do so in no small part because of the skills development segments that they've missed.
FIRST To The Drop
FIRST (painful backronym "For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology") is a large robotics education program, operating both in the United States and worldwide, established by Dean Kamen (... yes, the segway guy) and Woody Flowers in 1992.
It's best-known for its FIRST Robotics Competition, where teams of students make large robots that compete in 3v3 matches on a basketball-court sized arena, which has an estimated 90k students, followed by the FIRST Tech Challenge, which focuses on smaller robots competing in 2v2 matches in a 12-foot-square arena, which serves around 90k students.
The youngest segment, FIRST LEGO League, is a bit of an oddball: rather than direct head-to-head competition with a mix of fully autonomous and remote-controlled modes, students complete sets of scored challenges with one robot on a table-sized field at a time. While the kits support Python, almost everyone's stuck in a mediocre Blockly-styled language. FIRST's headline number says 600k+ FLL students, but that blends in some of their other not-quite-robotics applications; the real FLL Challenge number isn't available but probably 500k+. So despite being the youngest program and the least well-known, it reaches far more students than the rest of the program combined, and in an awkward way.
FIRST, correspondingly, has more than its fair share of normal culture war problems. The programs have had a pretty painful see-saw between rewarding actual robotics, programming, and manufacturing on one hand, and giving out blue ribbons for 'community outreach' on the other. There's been several snafus around The Rainbow STEM alliance hitting state politics. Especially at the higher end of the competitions, the different equipment and expertise available to the most well-established teams and the median team are extreme, and then administratively that problem gets described as 'helping underprivileged students'. FIRST renamed the high-profile Chairman's Award into the rather obnoxiously-named Impact Award, which is just after PICO/POCI in terms of missed opportunities, and while a team doesn't have to be optimized for the mainstream press to get anywhere on the Impact Award, it's no coincidence that it happens. There's a very awkward question about FRC events playing the People's Republic of China's anthem before the United States one.
But today I'll bring a more boring one. What happens when you build a major program serving a half-million people, and the hardware doesn't show up?
This didn't come as a bolt from the blue. FIRST Lego League's reliance on a much-bigger company for its entry-level program had been both a source of friction and a massive lost financial opportunity, and the Lego's Group's move from the powerful-if-antique EV3 to the drastically-less-capable Spike Prime was already the writing on the wall that the Mindstorms-style robotic environments weren't going to be long for this world. However, Lego sunsetting the Spike Prime kit only a few years after its initial release, and replacing it with an even-less-apt and even-more-expensive successor named the CS/AI kit, incompatible with the existing tournament style events FLL runs, isn't just a vague problem off in the distance.
Few, if any, extant FLL teams want the new equipment, they want it even less if it's only going to be around a year or two, and they couldn't run any practical game with it if they did. The new kits just can't support multiple robotics payloads in any useful way, and as a result have to run in a completely separate league from the Spike Prime-based kits. Many regions may not run the new equipment's tournaments at all.
And now those teams have 40 days before end of sales. Spare parts will be available til June 2028, and teams can keep using their existing kits, but in two months new teams will be stuck on the secondary and resale markets -- and for many school-based teams, that means not buying at all. Because of the age range and parent buy-in, community teams often come and go as students age in and graduate, and now new teams are facing a hell of a problem when on-boarding.
I've seen speculation that the LEGO-FIRST partnership only collapsed because, between Woody Flower's death on the academic side and Dean Kamen's 'absence' on the business relationship one, FIRST as an organization no longer has the social capability to manage these sort of partnerships. There'd be a very morbid irony if the biggest impact the Epstein Files had was on an educational non-profit, but I'm skeptical. And not just in the sense that Kamen was probably 'just' incredibly unperceptive or showing poor judgement. The financials and business decisions just don't explain enough.
Lego almost certainly was making money hand over fist for those Spike Prime kits: I'd estimate that their material cost is under 50 USD for a kit they sold direct at 400 USD. And, for that matter, making money hand over FIRST, since little if any of the kit money went to the organization running the events. Even including overhead and development costs, the financial incentive of a captive market is serious. But they aren't going to make a new hardware environment just to handle a League Game, because if that was even slightly in the cards, Lego wouldn't be trying to use their new AI/CS kits for the league they're proposing either.
Something has Lego unwilling to support conventional more capable robotics. That's a serious question of its own, and the answers could say a good deal about the broader world: Lego could conceivably be worried about product liability, thinking about optimizing for classroom environments where a lot of the money is, swerving over some bizarre financial or business concern, or building toward a future where computer programming or robotics means less and AI means more. (Though the "AI" part of Lego's new "CS/AI Kit" is just pose detection you could do with OpenCV in 2015.)
But that's unknowable, and moreover, not just a FIRST problem. FIRST's problem is that they've got a year, maybe two, to build an ecosystem from the ground up.
The first obvious answer is finding someone that's already doing this stuff.
Unfortunately, the edutech space is an abomination right now, between high cost of entry (the minimum regulatory price, just in paperwork, to bring a programmable wireless robot to market just in the US is about 20k USD) and the extreme uncertainty in demand and post-sales cost centers. The other big robotics program in the United States is Vex, and Vex's elementary- and AIM program is pretty much remote-control trash. and while their middle-school programs are more serious, they're neither built for nor readily retrofitted toward the sort of competition matches -- either designed for head-to-head bouts in the late middle school range, or with extremely constrained build capabilities even compared to random Legos. Worse, there are some business reasons that Vex and FIRST wouldn't want to partner even if the hardware did work, as Vex competes directly with several FIRST FTC vendors and might want to better position GO or IQ as replacements for FIRST entirely.
FIRST could build something in-house, or with their partners.
It's not looking great, Bob. To be fair, the XRP was almost certainly a grad student school project (I'm hoping not an electrical engineer), and it does have some moderately clever software decisions, and if your BoM is aiming for ~30 bucks at small unit size, you have to compromise somewhere. To be less fair, it's a grad student making worse electrical engineering decisions for a product than I've seen made for one-off youtube shorts. (to be actively uncharitable, if I find whoever keeps selling ultrasonic distance sensors when time-of-flight sensors are right there, I'm putting him in a Saw-style trap). Rev Robotics, that third-party partner that directly competes with Vex, isn't able to keep up with FIRST's demands for their FTC and FRC equipment, has little if any experience in the younger education sector, and their existing control hubs and display hubs are infamous for not surviving heavy use by late middle-schoolers, or even poor travel conditions.
FIRST could hope some new business is going to pull a rabbit out of a hat for them.
Hope's not a plan. There's no RFP for a replacement kit (and FIRST's past RFPs have been pretty badly designed). There's little evidence that they could talk Lego around into keeping older-style kits active longer, and a lot of reason that Lego might not want to be sweet-talked. It's only been a couple months since the news dropped so maybe they're just trying to get started -- but if they only have a year or two, they don't have a lot of months to get moving. It can take two or three months just to get a single manufacturing run with a new ABS-injection mold, and that's assuming you already have the business relationships set up to do it. Anyone considering entering the field, without having some attestation from FIRST, has to know their investment could be cut out from them at any moment, whether because FIRST makes up with Lego, abandons this age range, or just doesn't like the new developer's specific kit. The window for a third party to pop out of the woodwork and target FIRST's specific program needs is tight, and closing, and it doesn't even look that attractive.
I dunno.
If I were in their shoes, building in-house seems the clear least-bad decision: education hardware is a major space to get income with high margins, there's a lot of potential market and inroads for other educational use, and it'd massively derisk the organization from this exact problem. FIRST has tens of thousands of volunteers, hundreds with dedicated hardware design experience, millions of alumni, organizational connections with multiple higher education groups that already do serious software and design work for grad student projects gratis, and enough cash on hand and grants to easily self-fund the development cycle. This could be done well at 2-3 million USD, and done at all around 1 million USD, and the organization did have that money and the people it could ask for grants specifically to do it, and at least from the outside, it wasn't trying. FIRST doesn't have a ton of full-time staff, but this isn't an unusual type of tech to contract out. Regardless of specific industrial capacity, actually owning and directing the product lifecycle is both a possibility and a necessity, as this whole incident spells out.
But if I were in their shoes, I've have done that five years ago. Anyone with eyes could tell you that depending on hardware owned by single third parties was a major problem for the organization. Maybe there were arguments for not doing building in-house for FLL before this year, since the Lego Brand Name was a major selling point. But that's still leaving tens of millions of dollars in kit profit on the table to sweeten the deal for a partner where it wasn't enough. It's also only one of the FIRST programs. The FTC and especially FRC environment in particular has long depended on controllers that never really 'fit' the ecosystem. FRC's RoboRio is a National Instruments product that NI clearly hates to sell and support, and have actively made less robust by reducing the conformal coating and introducing a microSD card slot.
That's been a problem FIRST knew needed to be solved, and it's only in the last two years that they've even started to consider even partial ownership of the actual robotics controller that they're selling their entire programs around. And they started in the hardest environment to do it, trying to replace the gigahertz-speed and (differential-signaling) peripheral-heavy RoboRio rather than the megahertz-speed Spike Prime.
Maybe the teething problems explain the hesitance? FIRST did start working moving the FTC and FRC environments toward gear they had at least a partial ownership in with the SystemCore controller. That settled on a Raspberry PI CM5-based device, mostly Rev Robotic's brainchild, and both much later than the intended timeline and inevitably going to have supply chain issues. That seems like more argument to start fast, with well-circumscribed and specific feature sets, dependent on proven hardware, than not start at all.
FIRST has risked tens of millions of dollars in program revenue, and the program as a whole, on hardware that they didn't control and couldn't guarantee would remain available. The end result is a worldwide program, with hundreds of thousands of interested students and tens of thousands of volunteers, that's just driving unpiloted toward an oncoming cliff. Which makes for an especially awkward metaphor in a robotics context.
gattsuru
3d ago
Yes it is generally true like 99% of the time or whatever. People who are innocent (and also not extremely unlucky where the circumstances make them look guilty) and last that long are rare. It is a perfectly fair heuristic.
It's a heuristic you're using to refuse to consider evidence that might disprove your claim.
Sure, but the US system looks to be pretty accurate overall. If you do spot checking instead of cherry picking, you'll easily see that basically every single case you look at would not just deserve it but clearly so.
Is the claim that I'm cherry-picking, or that the cherries are extreme outliers that would never survive under SCOTUS scrutiny, or that the cherries don't exist?
gattsuru
4d ago
Yes obviously, but do you actually understand at all how long pouring over a bunch of court documents and the like would take?Maybe if you're happy with "here's what the defense's lawyer said after judgement" or "here's what a politically motivated person says" as your basis for why it's unfair, but tons of defense lawyers and politically motivated people say that after (it's their job!) and they're almost always wrong about it.
There's a fantastic missing middle option between 'deep research of an entire case down to its bones' and 'hey, let's pattern-match to this sex offender case'. I mean, I'd be fascinated if you actually could find some defense the ATF in Adamiak's case that didn't devolve to 'we should have a Chevron but worse and retroactive and for felony crimes'...
But I'm not very optimistic. And it's still more engagement than 'oh, I don't know what that is'.
If he's truly clearly innocent (or the law he was charged under is unconstitutional) he can keep appealing upwards. At the very top of it we have a 6-3 conservative majority SC, if they think it's biased against the 2nd amendment they can always take it if they want.
They didn't.
They also didn't take the Gardner case, where Gardner definitely did the behavior (brought a gun into Maryland, shot someone trying to kill her), but the law itself was unconstitutional (not even just on a Second Amendment matter! She couldn't even apply for the required permit at the time, because she wasn't a Maryland resident, so fuck you privileges and immunities clause).
It's very rare a supreme court does that (because again, basically every one of these claims are bullshit and the ones that aren't bullshit get resolved before even reaching "let's appeal to SC" level) but he has tons of options left.
No, he doesn't. At this point he can hope for a pardon, or attempt some procedural habeas or other post-conviction efforts that are just or more differential to the original jury finding and expert testimony as his first appeal, and unlike an illegal immigrant, SCOTUS won't give a damn about.
Again, "If your counterargument is that this specific claim must not be a person falsely convicted because he hasn't specifically been found innocent later, congratulations on your new rule as the king of tautology club."
Complete perfection is not a goal that is expected or achievable, unless we dismantle the justice system completely there's always that risk. Blackstones ratio as a concept is entirely about acknowledging some innocents will inevitably end up punished unfairly, and arguing for us being sided towards finding people not guilty.
Blackstone's Ratio may well prescribe exactly the level of policy we're facing, but it doesn't actually make the innocent guilty, nor tell us that the policy as implemented is morally correct.
(also, ten-guilty-free prioritized over one-innocent-jailed has some hilarious ramifications when put against your heuristic, but that's a separate problem.)
google exists, as does the search engine on this site.
If your counterargument is just that typically people claiming to be falsely convicted of crimes are liars, that's... probably true, and also probably useless. If your counterargument is that this specific claim must not be a person falsely convicted because most claims of false conviction are false, congratulations for making an even worse riddle of induction. If your counterargument is that this specific claim must not be a person falsely convicted because he hasn't specifically been found innocent later, congratulations on your new rule as the king of tautology club.
gattsuru
5d ago
Adamiak was convicted of a crime he clearly did not commit, partly under an interpretation of the law not even yet finalized at the time of the 'offense', by a jury. The Conservative Supreme Court didn't care.
gattsuru
5d ago
Trying to brainstorm out an RP2350-based educational robot brain. I don't really want to like the chip, both because it's stupidly overkill except for the multi-UART environment I'm increasingly thinking is unavoidable, because the RaspPi foundation's got my hackles up, and because the 'recovery mode as USB drive' is the sort of thing that sounds great to engineers and makes any IT person wonder what the fuck they were smoking, but the PIO blocks are just so damned convenient... if they work.
I'd love to go with an STM32 part instead, if only for the much stronger recovery environment, but even if they make a cheap, small, 6+ UART hardware, good fucking luck finding it from their website. And it's pretty well outside of their wheelhouse, or the wheelhouses of anybody selling to peons in the <1k purchase range.
gattsuru
5d ago
Semiconductors are the standard example. You can build a transistor in a cave with a box of scraps, but it's going to be pretty limited, and it's going to depend on material you can't just scrounge up in a random field somewhere. The actual production we do today involves collecting materials from 30+ sites around the globe, refining them with a few dozen different chemical processes each with their own feedstocks, and then brought through several layers of actual manufacturing of tools until eventually you get the final output.
Each individual step could theoretically scale down (though you'd have trouble trying to send One Dude or even Ten Dudes to run the extremely complex mine in the middle of nowhere, if only for 'and then they went stir crazy' problems. But there's still a ton of steps, they require drastically different areas of expertise, and in some cases they're just geographically separate. You don't just need a rare earths industry and quartz mining and a power plant and a metalworking field. You don't even just need the chemical feedstocks and mining tool production system and oil refining and tool development. You need all of them and hundreds more besides, and it's recursive.
Worse, the costs and initial creation are extreme, only made up because the unit price is low. If it takes 600 people to design, test, and implement a new generation of x86 processors, that's a low-end estimate of 120m investment in just personnel development costs -- great if you can amortorize it over 500m chips; terrible if there's only 1m users. Some stuff that might be possible might not be viable. Others get friction just because the level of demand changes: in our world, there's several people who have full-time jobs making nothing but M3x10 standard screws, phillips-head. Boring, but good work if you can get it. In a world of a 100 people, there's one guy who has to make every single necessary screw, and he's making up 1% of your workforce rather than 0.000000001% of your population even assuming he still has all the automation because he has to keep up with it and swap things out.
There are technical solutions or psuedo-solutions to some of these matters, but many of them have their own minimum threshold: if you want AI-powered robots, you need the semiconductor industry and TSMC and a whole industry of brushless motors and servos and yada; if you want to use genetic engineering to bypass some of the pharmaceutical industry's issues, you need a lot of infrastructure built toward that. ABS injection molding can be modeled as a tool for letting a small number of workers make a truly astronomical number of output parts, but requires its own (admittedly relatively small) industrial base... and it's also one that only make sense for unit sizes over 10k, because if you just need five of a thing, it takes more time to produce with ABS injection than it would to vacuum form, urethane cast, or cut with a CNC.
Some of these technical solutions are, in turn, their own problems in a 'minimum viable society' question. We take it a given the only 2-3% of society needs to work on farms in order to produce adequate food, but that's downstream of mechanization and automation, geographically distributed crop production, bulk-scale automated storage, so on. You don't need GPS to run tractors, but you probably do need GPS or RTK-likes ground-only solutions to run semi-automated tractors. You don't need exact rubbers or metal formulations, but you do need pretty exacting ones to make the modern super-sized tractors. You probably do need chemical fertilizers and widely-available forced-water hydration, which isn't a big ask but still takes somebody building it.
I'm not committed to the 500m number, or to any number. There's a real bad habit of people looking at the past to just assume that the western workforce of a time was necessary to produce that time, and that's clearly not true.
But I'm very skeptical that it's so not true that 'set up an isolated society on a convenient island' is possible without a continent, without massive compromises or drastic changes to quality of life.
gattsuru
6d ago
I'll make the non-standard argument that a lot of non-reproducing genes are good for other values, but that's probably just my own preferences.
The intermediate problem is that many of the environmental constraints here are less 'meme' or 'environment' and more result of TFR-buzzsaw policies. Whether they're intentional or not, they're probably not going to be as stable as human genetic code, and there's a non-zero chance they're going to just focus on the next least-desirable group.
The more serious problem is that modern industrial society doesn't scale down to one person, or ten thousand people, or a million, and I wouldn't want to bet too hard on a half-billion. Even assuming that the TFR-buzzaw ends somewhere, it might not stop at a point where we can still do things like 'build integrated circuits' or 'get to space' -- and if we fall below 'produce and refine fertilizer', you get some bad problems that might shove you down the path further. That's not a likely problem, but it's the sort of problem that comes up all at once.
gattsuru
6d ago
I think that -- generally speaking -- settlements of legal claims do not need to be reviewed by a judge to be binding.
A purely contractual settlement has the defendant and claimant sign an agreement to end the lawsuit; it is remedied by bringing a court case again (though the second time, it's for breach of contract). These don't have to be reviewed by a judge unless there is a breach, and the standard is very generous toward the non-breaching party.
A judicially enforced settlement is one that's been presented to and accepted by a judge, and formally become part of the settlement of the case. These have to be reviewed first, but they become res judicata and a breach of the settlement terms can be punished with contempt.
When the Trump administration cut off funding for a lot of USAID recipients, did the US also file lawsuits to recoup monies already paid? If not, that's another area for possible future escalation.
As far as I can tell, no. The closest I can find was the big EPA fund held at CitiBank, but there it was still an attempt to go for funds awarded to Citibank rather than delivered to the grantees.
Most previous cases revolve around active fraud, noncompliance or unintentional mispayments, although I'll note that the latter have pretty wide avenues for relief and you get deep into equittable relief estoppel whatever really quick. Even there, a lot of the clawbacks come under other specific statutory authorization.
I can't find anything that's about intentional disbursements that a different DOJ later concluded were unauthorized. Even Iran-Contra didn't get unwound like Rov_Scam's hypothesizing: the feds tried and had some legal success to pull back money the executive spent and definitely didn't 'legitimately' have, but never got the money back, there was a much more constrained appropriations interface, and it was a mess in general.
EDIT: on the other hand, this isn't a settlement-settlement; because it's not reviewed by a judge, voiding it has a lot more options available.
gattsuru
7d ago
This is nonsensical. Was Obama responsible for the Washington Navy Yard shooting because 'the buck stops with the boss'?
There are some limited tools to have a moderately adversarial hearing on this sort of topic (eg, some of the cy pres abuses at least involved companies pretending to not want to plea guilty even if the terms were incredibly favorable for the claimed conduct), and some that have pretenses of adversarial hearings (eg, the ‘totally independent’ racial and environmental NGOs the Obama and Biden admin didn’t protest too much). I doubt these would quite the typical Dem or NeverTrumper, but they’d be less overtly partisan to centrists or the politically ignorant.
Of course, the obvious follow-up question is whether those options actually work, here. The absence of any non-partisan adjudicators, or of any even-handed partisans, does not make the odds look good, never mind certain, even where the facts are clear. If neither Vullo nor Palin can fly, appeals to fair courts are a loser.
But this still stinks.
gattsuru
7d ago
... I'm not a fan of the collusive settlements here, but you do realize what you're proposing, right?
There's something deeply ironic about chasing unsophisticated people who used a program claiming to compensate them for the government's past unreasonable enforcement, without cognizance of guilt, culpability, wrong-doing, or even ability to pay, but there's a pretty obvious ramification and 'next step' for it...
... and it's one the Trump admin could start yesterday, if you keep spelling it out.
I'd be a little interested to know what the current situation is, for your friend. From what I've seen, the overall velocity and pay structure is still looking pretty healthy, with maybe some minor impact that could be holistic economic trends. Admittedly, most of the public data is about the Big Name Popufurs, and imprecise at that, so info from the selling side of the market would say more.
Some of that missing update is because almost all of the 'legitimate' sites ban the stuff and furry is a social environment as much as just a plain kink, but there are Discords and boorus where it's allowed, and it's not too hard to spin up alternative hosts... and those haven't been that badly flooded, either. E621 average around 900 posts per day, to E6AI's 120ish, for example, and that's with a lot of mainstay kinks getting very little focus.
I think part of it's the difficulty of the tools, and another are limits of AI-generator user creativity. You can prompt a ten thousand images overnight of <your favorite artist> doing <your favorite kink> with <your favorite species>, even if the artist doesn't even draw your preferred kink or even sexual orientation. AIgen's definitely beaten prima's test for simple sex in almost any gender combination and hole, and it only takes a little bit of work to get into threesomes or foursomes. But like my experiment three years ago with buff werewolf dudes, the fifth gigabyte doesn't have anything the first four didn't.
There are ways to get novelty or at least 'surprise' out of these tools, but it takes enough effort that most people would probably rather see their own ideas instead. To do that, though, you need to seriously think about what makes those ideas good, or work, and artists have a significant advantage actually breaking things into their components and drives. Even if it's just how poles go into holes.
I think they definitely need to be a part of whatever FIRST goes with. Even if not!FLL wanted to keep the Lego relationship going, the possibility Lego might just stop selling to them (or worse, sell and then delay a shipment at the last moment) because they're direct competitors is a Sword of Damocles for the entire ecosystem. And the clone vendors are just way too attractive to ignore, since in many cases it's cheaper to buy from them than to get raw plastic feedstock.
The trouble's the practical side of that:
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