commandar

@commandar@lemmy.world

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commandar ,

Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 72 may be his most important work in terms of political insight. It's almost stunning how on point his criticisms of the relationships between politicians and the media 50 years ago are and continue to ring true. I feel like it's a pretty important book for anyone with interest in American politics.

commandar , (edited )

However this supreme court said that the magic words 'bump stock' wasn't in the legalisation. Words that didn't even exist until 2003, or thereabouts. The court ignored the legislative text completely.

This is the text of the NFA that has defined what is a machine gun since 1934:

The term “machine gun” means any weapon which shoots, is designed to shoot, or can be readily restored to shoot, automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger. The term shall also include the frame or receiver of any such weapon, any part designed and intended solely and exclusively, or combination of parts designed and intended, for use in converting a weapon into a machinegun, and any combination of parts from which a machinegun can be assembled if such parts are in the possession or under the control of a person.

I'm not a fan of this SCOTUS, but the bump stock ruling was inline with decades of jurisprudence on the topic and the final opinion was fairly unsurprising as a result. It was honestly less of a gun law ruling and more of an executive regulatory procedure one.

A bump stock does not function by a single action of the trigger and does not meet the statutory definition as a result. The ATF rule banning them got struck down because Congress hadn't authorized the ATF to regulate machine guns beyond that specific statutory definition.

Bump stocks are no more a machine gun than a Gatling gun is under the definition that has existed for nearly a century, and the legal status of the latter has been extremely clear for a very, very long time.

If the goal is to treat them as a regulated item, then Congress needs to pass legislation with language that covers them because saying it was already there is simply incorrect. There is a specificity to the language of the NFA that doesn't cover any number of mechanisms. It's been a deficiency of the law since 1934.

If you want to fix that, that first requires understanding exactly what needs fixing.

commandar , (edited )

That excellent quote of the text you provided spells out that any modifications to a gun that allows any more than a single shot is to be prohibited.

Incorrect.

It prohibits any conversion to a machine gun. The previous sentence has just defined a machine gun. The "by a single function of the trigger" language is what's critical to this case and you're completely ignoring it. When reading laws, you use words however they're explicitly defined if a definition is provided, not how you think they should be defined or would be used in common speech.

Like I said, Gatling guns are pretty highly analogous. They produce what most people would consider automatic fire. They've also consistently been ruled to not meet the definition of a machine gun going back to at least the 1950s because they don't meet that single function of the trigger requirement.

The solution is to change the text of the law.

commandar ,

They had several cases along these lines involving several agencies, and I feel like people don’t understand the underlying legal idea - rule making power belongs to Congress. Federal agencies under the executive branch that have rule making powers receive those powers by Congress delegating it to them in a limited fashion through legislation.

Nitpick: rule making power does belong to executive agencies (at least until this SCOTUS decides to reverse Chevron deference). Law-making power resides solely with Congress.

What this means, as you suggest, is that Congress sets up statutory bounds within law, then the responsible executive agencies create rules interpreting them and defining how they'll be enforced. Where cases like this one go wrong is when the agency oversteps the bounds of the law as passed by Congress. At that point, the agency has engaged in creating new law rather than rules, which is why the courts swat them down.

I agree with your overall gist, just feel that's an important distinction to understand the situation.

commandar ,

According to the affidavit, Prieto said: “The reason I say Atlanta. Why, why is Georgia such a f------up state now? When I was a kid that was one of the most conservative states in the country. Why is it not now? Because as the crime got worse in L.A., St. Louis, and all these other cities, all the [N-words] moved out of those [places] and moved to Atlanta. That’s why it isn’t so great anymore. And they’ve been there for a couple, several years.”

Yes, black people have only been around in significant numbers in Atlanta for a couple years.

Certified stable genius.

commandar ,

He came to suck years later.

At the time he was considerably farther to the left than the rest of the field short of Dennis Kucinich. Opposition to the Iraq war was central to his campaign when half the party was still trying to justify it. He wanted to push universal healthcare before that was a common position within the party. He was on the cutting edge of promoting gay rights and was extremely popular in the gay community when that community didn't have the voice it does now. His stint as DNC chair built real party infrastructure and helped set the stage for Obama's 2008 run.

The country -- and the Democratic Party -- were considerably more conservative 20 years ago and he definitely helped push things toward where we are now.

That said, he's absolutely said and done some things in recent year that make it pretty clear he's not the progressive vanguard he was back then. He's stood still, and arguably regressed, while the country kept moving. It's unfortunate. But I think it's also a mistake to dismiss him outright; he was a pretty important figure in getting the party to where it is now.

commandar ,

"Smarter" is the wrong way to look at it. LLMs don't reason. They have limited ability to contextualize. They have no long term memory (in the sense of forming conclusions based on prior events).

They potentially have access to more data than any individual human and are able to respond to requests for that data quicker.

Which is a long way of saying that they can arguably be more knowledgeable about random topics, but that's a separate measure from "smart," which encompasses much, much more.

Lemmy.ml tankie censorship problem

I feel like we need to talk about Lemmy's massive tankie censorship problem. A lot of popular lemmy communities are hosted on lemmy.ml. It's been well known for a while that the admins/mods of that instance have, let's say, rather extremist and onesided political views. In short, they're what's colloquially referred to as...

commandar ,

This comment is kind of fascinating because it's essentially reinventing Slashdot's metamoderation system 25 years later.

It was good then. No reason it wouldn't work again today.

commandar ,

Plus Russia had 8.7 million military deaths in WW2, so this is really just a small military operation for them.

The current casualty numbers are something like 5x the total Soviet losses over a decade in Afghanistan. That conflict was ultimately deeply unpopular and destabilizing for the Soviet Union, so I'm not sure I'd agree with characterizing it as small change for them.

commandar , (edited )

Spoliation can be grounds for the judge to give the jury adverse inference instructions. i.e., the jury is allowed to assume that whatever was info was destroyed would have been damaging to the defendant's case.

commandar ,

Kagi has a built in Fediverse lens (filter). Works well IME.

commandar ,

Ancestry is owned by Blackstone.

Personally, that data being in the hands of private equity doesn't really sit any better with me.

commandar ,

I was familiar with Overthrust from Botswana just to the north because Vice did an amazing article on them years ago (that fortunately has been captured by the Wayback Machine since the photos are gone on the live site):

https://web.archive.org/web/20201024232145/https://www.vice.com/en/article/3b5pp3/atlas-hoods-botswanas-cowboy-metalheads

African. Cowboy. Death metal.

I used to follow them on Facebook back before I ditched social media. Their aesthetic and commitment to the bit is fucking fantastic.

commandar ,

it would require a constitutional amendment

Senate, yes. House, no.

The House used to regularly increase in size and has only been at 435 seats since 1911 and capped at that size since 1929. This is changeable through normal law making.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-the-house-got-stuck-at-435-seats/

commandar ,

I request a credit increase every time I get a raise or every 6 months, whichever happens first. Why get credit I dont need? In case I ever do need it, but more important is that debt ratio. That is what gets you good loan rates. Do it before you need it, and you will be set.

There's also a feedback loop here -- once the credit limit increase hits your report, other creditors see it and are more likely to extend increased limits to you. I went through a few years where AmEx and Discover both seemed intent on being my highest limit card and would preemptively offer CLIs after the other one had.

And to expound on your point re: credit utilization ratios - this is another area where having higher limits than you need helps. Your percentage utilized of available credit has a huge impact on your overall score. Having a higher limit means that if you need to carry a balance due to an emergency spend, it'll have less impact on your score.

e.g., you have an emergency expense of $700 with a line of credit of $1000. Your utilization is now at 70%. This will have a negative impact on your score pretty quickly.

Take the same $700 spend and apply it to a $5000 line of credit and you're only at 14% utilization. That'll still have an impact but much less than anything over ~30% utilization.

Even beyond emergencies, if you use a credit card to pay fixed bills each month and then immediately pay them off, you'll occasionally have months where the payment credits after your statement date and hits your credit report -- same deal there. It looks much better on your report if that balance is a fraction of your available credit than if it takes up a large chunk of it.

commandar ,

I had a few years of young and dumb followed by struggling through the great recession that pretty well wrecked my credit early on.

I then went through a few years while rebuilding where I really dug into learning how the credit system works and gaming it to my advantage. It was literally a case of getting entertainment out of "number goes up." I got bored with it once my available lines of credit hit a couple multiples of my annual income, but the end result was having a basically perfect credit score.

It ultimately paid off when it came time to buy a car and get a mortgage. Basically had immediate access to the absolute best rates available and approvals have always gone super smooth.

The flip side of that is my SO who never went through the young and dumb stage and hadn't needed to rebuild credit, but had a similar "fuck credit" attitude as the OP so they'd never had credit in the first place. The fortunate thing there is we were able to jump start their credit history by adding them as an authorized user on one of my older accounts with a high line of credit -- this gave a massive boost to both average account age and available credit and pretty much instantly brought their score up from the 5-600s to low 700s. Add in a few more deliberate things like financing a car instead of paying cash and now they've got enough of a credit profile built up that it'll be okay if anything ever happens to me.

Obviously, that requires a lot of trust, but it's good info for relationships where one partner has established credit and the other doesn't.

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    commandar ,

    But he determined the direction and scope of Democratic policy almost in its entirety

    I wouldn't agree with this.

    In terms of the progressive wing pushing the agenda under Biden, Liz Warren has had far more direct impact.

    Warren was rather famously successful in landing allies into key positions in banking, education, and labor regulatory agencies. These are the sort of moves that are less flashy, but have played a large part in why we've seen things like debt cancellation pushes and a resurgence in antitrust action since Biden took office.

    commandar , (edited )

    Their business model is buying overstock items from other retailers and then reselling it highly discounted. It's the reason you'll find things that are Walmart, Target, etc store brands there.

    Basically, it's anything that aged out in inventory elsewhere that the original retailer no longer wanted taking up shelf space for whatever reason.

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