defend yourself criminally

Robust criminal defense

These court proceedings aren’t criminal cases. They’re more like hearings on restraining orders and things of that nature. Like I said, this is generally less than a single day’s work for a lawyer, 2-5 hours.

I’m comparing middle of the road prices for handguns ($500-$1200) to middle of the road prices for a lawyer who can handle one of these hearings ($500-$1500). I still think it’s financially irresponsible to own more than 3 guns and not have a $1000 emergency fund.

If you can’t see the difference between buying one gun every x months and paying a lawyer 4 to 5 figures all in one go that’s on you.

You’re off by an order of magnitude. I’m saying the lawyer would cost between 3 to low 4 figures, generally less than a single gun.

Time is linear and you can’t sell what was taken from you.

The ownership of the gun hasn’t changed. That owner can sell the gun even if they can’t physically possess it. Federal law requiring relinquishment of firearms (like upon conviction of a disqualifying felony or domestic violence misdemeanor) explicitly provides for selling the guns as a way to comply with the order. Each state is different in their rules on selling weapons already in the police’s possession, and states require that transfer to go through an FFL, but most do not.

Look, I’m a gun owner. And I think part of being a responsible gun owner means having the financial means to actually deal with the consequences of owning, and potentially using, that firearm. I think it’s a defect of American gun culture that there are so many people with concealed carry licenses who wouldn’t even know how to contact a lawyer if they were to actually fire a gun in a real situation, whether it’s a legitimate self defense situation or a negligent discharge. Gun ownership carries important responsibilities, and there is such a thing as someone who is too poor to responsibly own a gun (much less enough to where the phrase “all my guns” carries its own implicit meaning).

The issue with red flag laws is that they completely bypass this.

It’s my understanding that every state with a red flag law imposes a procedure similar to involuntary commitment: a court weighing evidence presented to it under penalty of perjury, with a heavy presumption that these orders are only for extremely rare situations.

Florida’s procedure, for example, requires a petition from the police to the court, and requires the police to show the court that the person is suffering from a serious mental illness, has committed acts of violence, or has credibly threatened acts of violence (to self or others). In ordinary cases the person whose guns are being taken away has an opportunity to be heard in court before the judge decides, but in emergency cases the court can order the guns be taken away for up to 14 days, and requires an opportunity for the person to be heard in court.

So in practice, in Florida, someone would have to convince the police they’re a danger, and then provide enough evidence that the police can persuade a judge. Private citizens aren’t allowed to petition the court directly, and the process requires proof of a serious enough set of facts to justify taking guns away.

Gun suicides are a huge problem, so there is a legitimate need for interventions in the appropriate circumstances. Suicidal ideation is also usually an impulsive or fleeting idea, so removing the means of suicide only temporarily can be a solution to that temporary problem.

The Swiss saw suicide rates drop with reduced access to firearms in shrinking their military, and the Israeli military has seen weekend suicide rates drop by simply having troops check in their weapons into armories over weekends, without a corresponding change in weekday suicides.

Anti-suicide nets on bridges work very well, too, because simply making a suicide more inconvenient, or require a bit more planning, is often enough to just make it so that the suicide attempt never happens.

So yeah. I’m generally against restrictions on firearm ownership or access for people who can be responsible with them, but I’m 100% on board with interventions for taking guns away for mental health crises, and restrictions on those found by a court to have engaged in domestic violence. And, like, convicted criminals, too.

Do you really believe that “all my guns, bullets and reloading material” is cheaper than a lawyer for a hearing like this? In my mind that phrase represents thousands of dollars worth of gun stuff, and a lawyer who can represent you in a TRO hearing might be about $500-1500 ($200/hour, maybe 2-8 hours of work for that first hearing).

Florida seems to be the state most likely to use the law.

I wonder if the stat is skewed by the fact that Florida has the largest population of Florida Men.

The average cost of a hospital stay in a U.S. hospital is about $3,000 per day, but it varies significantly by location. So long stays like yours might cost between $250,000 and $500,000.

If your insurance covers it (and about 92% of Americans have health insurance), you’d be looking at your annual out of pocket max, which the law caps at $18,000 for family plans or $9,000 for individual plans, but which most people on employer sponsored plans (around 60% of Americans) have out of pocket maxes around $4,000 to $5,000. Source

So for most Americans, your hospital stay would’ve probably cost the individual patient about $5,000. Insurance would’ve paid another $350,000.

But for some Americans, they’d be looking at a $360,000 bill and then would just file bankruptcy, start over with close to a net worth of zero, at least for non-exempt assets (people generally get to keep their homes, cars, and retirement accounts in bankruptcy so it won’t actually be starting from zero if you’re well into a middle age in the middle class).

Or worse, the hospital would realize they’re not getting paid, and then would find a reason to kick you out as soon as you’re stabilized. They have to keep you alive even when you can’t pay, but don’t have to treat you beyond that for free.

Let’s take home appliances. Imagine you are a person who knows how to diagnose and repair microwaves. You keep all the most common parts for the most common brands in your warehouse. You bring them with you based on the customer’s description of what is wrong, and you’re prepared to efficiently apply to correct repair as soon as you’re confident in your diagnosis.

Your typical job looks like this:

• Get a call, get all the billing information (15 minutes).
• Drive out to the person’s home (30 minutes).
• Talk to the customer (15 minutes).
• Unscrew and disassemble the access panels to the appliance itself (15 minutes).
• Diagnose and test things to make sure your initial hunch is correct (15 minutes).
• Remove and replace the faulty part (15 minutes).
• Put everything back where it belongs (15 minutes).
• Drive back to your office (30 minutes).

There, that’s 2.5 hours of your time to do a 15-minute task of installing a part. At the factory, a much less skilled person (who doesn’t need to know how to diagnose different models, or manage a business) could have installed 10 of those in the same amount of time. Maybe more, because they wouldn’t have had to remove an old one.

Most manufacturing is like this. Assembly is easy. Repair is hard. So repair of heavy/bulky/stationary things is always going to be very expensive. It may be more economical to tow the thing to a central place to be repaired, so that the worker doesn’t have to waste too much time driving from place to place.

Throw in the need to keep an inventory of dozens of parts for hundreds of models, and you’re also paying for the warehouse space and parts supply chain, and the interest on the money spent up front to stock up, maybe to be recovered later when a job actually needs that part.

The economics strongly favor assembling new stuff rather than repairing old stuff for anything even remotely simple. It isn’t until you’re up to the $5,000 range that it becomes pretty normal to prefer an all-day repair job over paying for a replacement.

For $500 devices, it’s gonna be pretty hard to economically repair things.

I’m only generally familiar with the big crime podcast/documentaries that spilled into the mainstream about 10 years ago: first season of Serial, Making a Murderer. And both of those were highly critical of the police work and called convictions into question (and actually got the public attention on the wrongful convictions).

More recently, I’ve seen the HBO series on Karen Read, and it painted a picture of severe police misconduct that at worst tried to frame an innocent person, and at best botched the investigation to make a conviction of a guilty person difficult to impossible.

So yeah, crime documentaries often do show police misconduct and incompetence. At least the ones that hit my radar.

The boring answer: criminal investigative files generally aren’t released, so they’re compiled in a way that mingles information about victims with information about suspects and witnesses and others potentially involved in criminal activity, intentionally or unwittingly, directly or tangentially.

If you want to export a list of all names in the files, you’ll want to filter out victims for sure, and probably mere witnesses. You definitely don’t want to out informants and make them vulnerable to retaliation.

So most law enforcement agencies simply will keep everything secret. The idea of releasing names from the file was unusual, and it’s not surprising that Trump’s own people refused to follow through, especially when it’s highly likely that Trump was in that list of names.

I don’t think it’s an insurmountable challenge. Just that the ratio is what matters, which means abrupt changes to birth rates might be more problematic than the magnitude of the change over time.

But I also don’t think that a stable population size solves the climate crisis or resource depletion. It might be the case that 8 billion people in 2075 end up consuming way more energy and natural resources in an even less sustainable way than the 8 billion people of 2025.

No, LCOE is an aggregated sum of all the cash flows, with the proper discount rates applied based on when that cash flow happens, complete with the cost of borrowing (that is, interest) and the changes in prices (that is, inflation). The rates charged to the ratepayers (approved by state PUCs) are going to go up over time, with inflation, but the effect of that on the overall economics will also be blunted by the time value of money and the interest paid on the up-front costs in the meantime.

When you have to pay up front for the construction of a power plant, you have to pay interest on those borrowed funds for the entire life cycle, so that steadily increasing prices over time is part of the overall cost modeling.

Even if you take money out of the equation, people need the productive output of other people to survive.

A man alone on a desert island cannot retire. As soon as he is unable to provide for himself, he dies. Yes, he can accumulate certain “savings,” but much of what is needed to survive cannot be banked and used later. Food storage is limited, and any method of long term food storage tends to require additional processing to be edible, so there will always need to be some kind of just-in-time cooking process to keep people fed. Same with shelter, where maintenance needs will always be there, or health care, where real time treatment will always need to be done.

In a society with a shrinking population, there will be an unrelenting pressure to simply stop supporting those who are not productive. And those who are productive will selfishly shape that society to cover their own needs first.

That’s not just capitalism, it’s every economic system. Taking care of our elderly and our disabled is a luxury of a prosperous society. If the ratio goes out of wack, the willingness to continue supporting that luxury may not always be there.

we’ve been fed this narrative that overpopulation is eventually going to destroy the world

It’s always been wrong, and some of us have been arguing against that kind of neo-Mathusian worldview this entire time.

Note that the same view also leads to the incorrect conclusion that population shrinkage will be good for resource management, pollution, etc. If one believes that a large and growing population will deplete the world’s resources and destroy the environment, one might conclude that a shrinking population will help conserve the world’s resources and preserve the environment.

But look at how things actually play out. The countries with the shrinking populations are still increasing their resource consumption, and the slowdown in population growth hasn’t slowed down resource depletion in large part because humans don’t all use the same amount of resources. If the population of India shrinks to the size of the population of the United States, but then increases its greenhouse emissions to match that of the United States, that would be bad for the environment despite the population reduction.

A shrinking population isn’t really a problem in itself, but an aging population is. That’s the concern about birth rates, is the worry that unproductive old people will have their lives cut short rather than enjoying a reasonable retirement.

My problem with nuclear is both the high cost and, somewhat counterintuitively, the very long life cycles to spread that high cost. The economics only make sense if the plant runs for 75 years, which represents an opportunity cost of displacing whatever might be available in 25 or 50 years.

A solar plant planned in 2025 might be online in 2027, and decommissioned in 2047, replaced with whatever technology/economics are available then. But a new nuclear reactor bakes in the costs for 80+ years, to be paid by ratepayers who haven’t been born yet.

So if in 2050 a 2030-constructed nuclear plant is still imposing costs of $66/MWh on ratepayers, to finance the interest and construction costs from 25 years earlier, will that be competitive with the state of solar/wind/batteries/hydrothermal at that time? Given the past trend lines, it seems economically foolish to lock in today’s prices for the next 80 years.

This paper lays out the cost projections that one could expect with the lessons learned from Vogtle Units 3 & 4, with the tax credits and government guarantees available as of 2024:

https://web.mit.edu/kshirvan/www/research/ANP201 TR CANES.pdf

Ok, current projections are still for the next two AP1000s at Vogtle to be something like $10 billion. That’s just not cost competitive with solar/wind. And it’s also not very realistic to assume that there won’t be cost overruns on the next one, either. Complex engineering projects tend to run over.

Also where did you see they did amortization of solar?

I’m just familiar with Lazard’s LCOE methodology. The linked paper talks about LCOE, so that’s just how that particular cost analysis works.

Vogtle added 2 AP1000 reactors for $35 billion. Future deployments might be cheaper, but there’s a long way to go before it can compete with pretty much any other type of power generation.

But the other misleading part is they looked at 20 years which is close to the life cycle for solar/batteries and not even half the life of nuclear

I think Lazard’s LCOE methodology looks at the entire life cycle of the power plant, specific to that power plant. So they amortize solar startup/decommissioning costs across the 20 year life cycle of solar, but when calculating LCOE for nuclear, they spread the costs across the 80 year life cycle of a nuclear plant.

Nuclear is just really, really expensive. Even if plants required no operating costs, the up front costs are so high that it represents a significant portion of the overall operating costs for any given year.

The Vogtle debacle in Georgia cost $35 billion to add 2 MW 2GW (edit to fix error) of capacity. They’re now projecting that over the entire 75 year lifespan the cost of the electricity will come out to be about $0.17 to $0.18 per kilowatt hour.