I don’t know that my parents were ever the kind of person that bitched about paying taxes. They might have privately, but i don’t remember it ever being a big deal. Me, I understand that my taxes are too low for what I expect the gov’t to be doing.

And you’re exactly right about the social experience. One of the enormous struggles for atheists has been building a community. Churches fill that need, even though they cause real harms in other ways. If you go to a church, it’s easy to meet people and make friends when you move to a new community. If you don’t, well, good luck because you’re going to need it.

Honestly, this is why I don’t discuss Mormon history and the massive, gaping chasms in their claims of Truth with my parents. My parents are old–old enough that the family is talking about who is going to call the coroner, who’s going to deal with tying up finances, etc.–and knowing that they’ve wasted an entire lifetime and hundreds of thousands of dollars in tithing on a con isn’t going to do anything useful at this point. Fifty years ago? Sure, they would have had plenty of time to come to terms with it. Now? Meh.

Not where I am; DOT 5.1 costs 2-3 times as much as DOT 5 locally.

DOT 4, $.375/oz.

DOT 5.1, $1.42/oz.

It’s 3.8x more expensive to buy DOT 5.1 locally.

I’ve had a car with where the oil pressure sensor failed; combine that with an oil leak, and you quickly have a major problem. So, what happens when the sensor telling you the oil level fails? A dipstick is extremely unlikely to ever fail to work correctly, so…?

You can use DOT 5.1 to significantly increase that wet boiling point, but it’s expensive for normal car use. I usually use it in my motorcycle, since I’ve experienced brake fade on that before, and it’s… Not fun.

Depends on how much you drive, and what the recommended interval is. If the interval is 7k miles, and you drive 18k in a year, yeah, you need to change the oil 3x/year.

It seems to me that counting the number of cycles each makes, and basing your intervals off that would make more sense than mileage. If I’m constantly running at high RPM, that should require more frequent oil changes in terms of mileage.

It’s been a long time since I worked on that case, and I only did a very small part working on the discovery documents, so I’ve forgotten a lot, and had a lot of details a little confused. :)

It sounds like it was probably one of the seminal patent troll cases.

SCO crashed and burned in part because they tried to sue multiple Linux providers claiming that they owned all the rights to certain pieces of code that they’d contractually leased from IBM, and that IBM giving code to Linux distributors violated the terms of their agreement with IBM. It was a lawsuit that dragged on for over a decade and a half–I think that it’s still going–and it’s bled SCO of tens of millions of dollars ,esp. since they’ve lost nearly every single claim they’ve made.

It’s disposable in the sense that it costs basically nothing to make

Also no. If I, for instance, want to print a Glock, the only part that I’m printing is the polymer frame (which, legally, is the gun). I still need to buy a slide, slide stop, guide rod, recoil spring (IDK off the top of my head if Glock uses a captured spring or not), barrel, trigger & associated parts, magazine catch and release, etc. Oh, and I’ll need to buy magazines, or at least a magazine spring if I’m able to print the magazine, baseplate, and follower. While I don’t particularly want to price them all out right now, more often than not buying parts is more expensive than buying a completed firearm. Right now I can pick up a Glock G17 gen 5 MOS for about $475 (after shipping and transfer fee); if I save anything with printing, the savings are going to be small

The biggest advantage to a printed gun is that all of the other parts can be purchased with cash, and without a background check, so there’s no record that you ever purchased the firearm.

A bit of heat and it’s no longer a gun,

You’re still going to be left with the metal parts. OTOH, they have no serial numbers, so they’re functionally impossible to trace. Also, any polymer gun can either be melted or incinerated.

Keep in mind that you can also print silencers now. The big advantage to that is that, if you don’t mind violating the National Firearms Act of 1934, you don’t have to send your fingerprints to the BATF or pay $200 for a tax stamp. They don’t last as long as inconel or titanium silencers though.

Look, I’m 100% in favor of people printing guns. Or buying 80% receivers/frames, and fabricating their own. Or, hell, buying a Haas desktop minimill and learning CNC programming to make gun parts out of metal. But most of the time you’re going to end up spending more to make one than to buy one.

The motion also claims that the search couldn’t be a… safety search?

You’re thinking of a Terry stop.

Prosecution might argue is was a safety search […]

That would be the exigent circumstances exception, but you need more than just an assertion for that; you need a rational basis for claiming exigent circumstances.

not the level of education that Luigi received.

Just because someone has a college degree doesn’t mean that they can write for shit.

If I was the kind of person that would commit a high-profile assassination, that is not something I’d want to bet my life and freedom on.

Not a lawyer, but I know that when a cop arrests someone in a car and the car is impounded, they catalog items.

Under Illinois v. Lafayette, 462 U.S. 640 (1983), it would be fine to inventory a bag when you’re being booked. But they hadn’t gotten that far, and I’m not aware of any evidence that they would have actually booked him without the contents of the bag.

Search incident to arrest typically allows you to search the person of the suspect to ensure that the person doesn’t have a weapon, or has evidence of a crime that they can destroy. Once you’ve separated a person from a closed bag, you don’t have the immediate right to search the bag; US v. Chadwick, 433 U.S. 1 (1977). OTOH, once an arrestee is actually being booked, they can perform an inventory of the contents of a bag (Illinois v. LaFayette, 462 U.S. 640 (1983)), which would have turned up the gun, etc., and it would have turned them up under controlled circumstances. But that’s not what happened here; he appears to have been arrested on a pretextual basis, and then his bag seized and searched without a warrant. However, it’s going to be up to his attorneys to make this argument, and my guess is that the state will argue that he was definitely, 100% going to be booked–despite the lack of evidence at that point to support that–and thus it was inevitable that the gun would have been found. I think that’s bullshit, but we’ll see.

disposable weapon

Printed guns aren’t “disposable”; they’re untraceable. A printed firearm can function for tens of thousands of rounds, and is not necessarily any less accurate than any other polymer firearm.

If he never expected to even make it out of NYC, carrying that stuff kinda makes sense. But I def. would have dumped everything in the Hudson river.

Let’s say that Mangione committed the crime.

My understanding is that he gave cops a fake ID when they questioned him on reasonable suspicion (the basis of which was a tip from an employee). That is something that yes, he can be arrested for. And he can be personally searched after that arrest. But at that point, he can no longer get a gun out of his bag, and cops have control of it, so he can’t destroy evidence/get a weapon from it; so searching the bag should be out at that time. So, my understanding, based on case law, is that they would have needed a warrant to search it at that time, as the contents of the bag aren’t related to the reason he’s been arrested. You aren’t supposed to be able to use a pretextural arrest to search a person’s car or belongings (e.g., arrest you for suspicion of drunk driving, then search your car to find evidence of burglaries).

In theory, without the warrant, the search and everything from the search should be out. Even if he committed the crime, and kept all the evidence conveniently in his backpack, it should be completely excluded from the case. I’m sure that the DA is going to argue that there’s some exception that allows a warrantless search, but I can’t say what that argument will be. If the evidence is allowed in, his defense attorney is going to have to object every single time that prosecutors refer to it, for any reason, in order to preserve the option to claim that evidence was improperly admitted in an appeal. (Which they should absolutely do, if it goes that far!)

Federal rules of evidence is pretty complicated stuff. But goddamn, does it look like someone fucked up bad on a really high profile case.