>Obviously there's the cognitive dissonance aspect to point out, but we are all doing that to some extent.
Not necessarily. I mean, the people who give out an uncomfortable laugh do exhibit signs of cognitive dissonance.
I don't have an issue with accepting both statements: factory farming is awful, and I still eat meat.
There is no cognitive dissonance.
The logic is straightforward: I do not believe that me, an individual, abstaining from meat is going to do much to factory farming, while it will make a huge, adverse impact on my life.
Government regulation is how this problem would be solved (the only way it can get solved), and I'm all for voting for bans on factory farming, heavy taxes on meat products, etc.
One's gotta pick their battles.
I pick ones where my participation won't amount to martyrdom.
Yeah but tons of things are awful. For me I couldn't keep doing things I knew caused immense suffering in other beings, be it humans or animals. (Sourcing things from ethical whatever and reducing consumption in general the last two decades, I'm sad my iPhone 6 isn't supported for banking so have to go android 10 etc).
Vegetarian options got cheap, and I still eat locally produced eggs and some milk products.
But like, awful can be coped with. Everyone thinks factory farming is awful. Few give a shit.
It's still not cheaper to have a very meat rich diet then to have one that is mostly plant based; or entirely vegetablebased plus milk and eggs from local production - which wouldn't get you in some of the difficulties vegsns have to desl with, where they need to take some nutrients in the form of supplements if they don't absolutely optimize their diet (which again becomes expensive - would be interesting to be corrected here)
All that is to say: some people act less ethical then others, and should have to accept that fact - instead of trying to produce an image of the self (to themselves mostly but also to others) that conceals it; be it through normalization ("guess we all do that"), rationslization ("if i wouldn't do it someone else would"), or blame shifting (if someone would do this and that i would behave like that, so it's up to them to provide me with xyz)
edit: I apply that to myself. I know that I don't act as ethical as I could regarding the consequences of my diet.
Basically this boils down to "I don't feel responsible for the meat I eat being factory farmed."
Not that I'm in any position to criticize; I'm in the cognitive dissonance camp.
Have you considered consuming "ethical" animal products (e.g. free range eggs or whatever?) That doesn't seem like martyrdom; compared to what you want (government mandated livestock welfare) it only costs you marginally more (due to missing economies of scale.)
> If they aren’t but still a lifeform, that makes it perfectly okay?
According to Jains: No. Violence against plants, insects, and possibly even certain microorganisms is considered unethical.
IMO as an irreligious person: Yes. Life is just a particular form of self-sustaining and self-propagating system. Those properties are of little to no moral value.
About as sure as one can be. It's neither logically nor physically impossible, but the claim that trees are conscious is practically unfalsifiable and is not supported by any substantive evidence. It has nothing to do with "fast" or "slow," no matter how you poke or prod or slice or dice a tree, there's nothing that suggests a capacity for consciousness. I would be less surprised if my friend's dog started speaking perfect Chinese with an American accent.
If anyone cares about plants suffering they should go vegan, as many more plants are consumed to raise animals than would be if there was a direct plant intake in humans for the same amount of calories and nutrients. Ditto for land use, water, CO2 emissions, etc. but let's assume our friend cares strictly about reducing suffering short of starving themselves to death.
Just FYI, the designation "free range" on eggs means essentially nothing. It means the hens have access to the outdoors, but that could still mean a tiny, packed space, just missing a roof.
"Cage free" and "no antibiotics" are probably the only USDA-regulated terms worth caring about, but they're fairly low bars. "Certified Humane" designation is a higher, well-audited bar, but many farms that might qualify forgo it due to the costs associated.
Factory farming is a consequence of a post-industrial economy where 95% of the population isn't directly involved in farming. Few people would want to reset the clock back to where most are attached to the land with limited options. The only reliable source of B12 before the modern era was to consume some animal derived products. Other basic nutrients are hard to attain through plants alone. It is necessary for us to engage in animal husbandry in the absence of technological interventions that we never evolved to depend on.
To the extent that I can, I do try to pick ethical products (like the aforementioned free-range eggs).
It's not an all-or-nothing thing indeed; there's a huge spectrum between veganism and not at all thinking (or caring) about where the animal products come from.
But yes, I, as a consumer, am not responsible for what is already heavily regulated in favor of factory farmers. Heard of the ag gag laws? You can't vegan them away.
It's not a free market, see.
It's as delusional to blame people for eating the availableunethically produced meat as it is to blame them for starving during the Holodomor (..or Great New Leap, or the Irish Potato Famine, or...).
Radium-based snake oil "medicine" didn't disappear because the consumers boycotted an unethical product. It was because we have FDA.
I really do not feel responsible for what would amount to trying to enforce regulation that doesn't exist.
I am responsible for voting, so when it comes to the ballot, ethical farming does get my vote.
I noted this in another comment, but the "free-range" designation means almost nothing. Hens have access to the outdoors, but that can mean a packed coop with no grass where part is missing a roof.
Look for "Certified Humane" or research the farm directly.
Well of course. Free market (even as a theoretical concept) is only possible with regulation that prevents monopolies and ensures some sort of fairness.
The agricultural market is perhaps the furthest thing from it, given the importance of, well, having food. Farmers get subsidies. Nation-states get involved in the circulation of food around the planet. Geopolitics comes into play.
In some markets, individual choices of consumers matter a lot in shaping them.
Agricultural products are as far from that as it's possible.
I am not convinced that not buying unethical meat does any more than not buying unethical weapons of mass destruction, or not using Palantir's products.
Few of us are hoarding stashes of chemical weapons or signing contracts with Palantir, and yet Palantir still thrives.
Perhaps simply not buying it isn't always the most effective way to end something.
>Government regulation is how this problem would be solved (the only way it can get solved)
My cynical inner pedant compels me to point out that societal collapse will also solve "factory farming is awful". And we're probably closer to that than effective government regulation of it.
Equating eating meat with martyrdom in the year 2026 is, in fact, the same cognitive dissonance you personally deny.
I eat meat. And I'm highly, highly morally conflicted. I'll leave it at that to avoid sounding hypothetical—except to mention that the only logical reason I don't go vegetarian/vegan is the work and personal development that'd be required of me. (I'll take being called lazy over disingenuous any day, if we're ostensibly virtue signaling here.)
> I eat meat. And I'm highly, highly morally conflicted. I'll leave it at that to avoid sounding hypothetical—except to mention that the only logical reason I don't go vegetarian/vegan is the work and personal development that'd be required of me. (I'll take being called lazy over disingenuous any day, if we're ostensibly virtue signaling here.)
But that is precisely acting as a martyr.
You're "highly morally conflicted", which means you suffer inside. You could stop that suffering by either 1) going vegan, so you don't have to worry about it, or 2) deciding to continue eating meat and no longer worry about it. Right now, you're picking the strictly worse combination of continuing to eat meat and remaining conflicted indefinitely.
I'm starting to realize that internal moral conflicts are a lot like physical pain - it's an important signal from the body, and you should pay attention to it, but in the end, if you know you're not going to do anything about the underlying cause, then there's no point in continuing to suffer - you just make it go away with painkillers, and carry on living. This does not mean denying the problem - quite the opposite. Constant pain makes it hard to think rationally, and suppressing it puts you in a much better position to address its underlying cause.
Do what you like and as you like, but my two cents: if you want to make something that seems hard, start with one step and continue step by step at your own peace. Big goals are accomplished by proudness of small gaps instead of shame and desires of the missing ones.
During 10 year I gently removed some ingredients of my diets/habits and added others in the meantime. It was longer but way easier than I imagined.
Hey, at my ripe, old age, I only started learning how to properly feed myself more recently than I'd like to admit. So I take your point about acknowledging one's baby steps once you successfully string a few together.
>Equating eating meat with martyrdom in the year 2026 is, in fact, the same cognitive dissonance you personally deny
You completely missed the point.
In the context of picking battles, martyrdom is (self) sacrifice for the sake of sacrifice, with no direct gain for the cause.
Abstaining from meat, to me, will take away one of the not-so-many joys I have in my life, without possibly making a meaningful impact on unethical farming.
I'm well off. You might be. Most people in the US are not.
And in the end of the day, poor people are going to buy the cheapest products in the grocery store.
So, there's always be a demand as long as there's supply.
More than that. We don't really have a choice for where meat comes from anyway. There's no requirement to put that on the label, along with nutritional data.
That, by the way, is another example where legislation can make a lot of difference.
My point is that abstaining from meat is about as useful as that young man setting himself of fire in the US to help children in Gaza.
Same goes about feeling bad about eating meat (while eating it).
The impact on the cause is zero.
Your energy would be better spent fighting the ag-gag laws, requiring disclosures on the labels, making ethically farmed products cheaper (and factory farmed produce more expensive), and so on.
You having morally conflicted feelings doesn't help anyone.
And it's simple, really: you are complicit in doing a bad thing. But the complicity is not in doing the thing, it's in supporting the system where in doing it is the rational choice for the majority of people.
Your choice in doing or not doing the thing has very little impact on whether the thing happens.
The comparaison of chicken and tomatoes is a strawman.
First off: people don’t swap them in their diet, a better exemple would be wheat or soy - which are what the 0.99/p chicken eat [edit: and it's closer in term of nutrients].
Second: the shelf price you mention includes gouvernement subsidies and economy of scale.
The grains price should be the one paid by the fermer, adjusted for smaller packaging.
Your comparaison may stands where you live because of political choices and societal evolution. It doesn’t in a more liberal and non regulated juridictions, does it?
>The comparaison of chicken and tomatoes is a strawman.
It's a direct answer to the question asked by the parent.
The answer is: no, vegetables are not cheaper than meat in the US.
It is perverse. Which is my point: what enables the low, low price of chicken isn't merely the laws of supply and demand.
>First off: people don’t swap them in their diet, a better exemple would be wheat or soy
Those are not vegetables. Those are grains and legumes, respectively.
>Second: the shelf price you mention includes gouvernement subsidies and economy of scale.
No shit.
Which is my point exactly: the problem is addressed by government regulation, and exists because of government regulation, including, but not limited to, subsidies to particular forms of farming, and ag gag laws.
>Your comparaison may stands where you live
Well of course I can speak about where I live.
And yeah, we're talking in English on a US-based website (specifically, a Silicon Valley one). I am talking about the US, a country of about 350M people.
It's not like I'm talking about a small state few people have heard of with no impact on anything. The situation in the US matters because it influences a lot.
Canada isn't that different from the US food-wise, for that matter.
Ah I might be confused by my low english skills but it seems grains and legumes are vegetable. I was curious and a quick search returned several sources confirming that however I'd be pleased to learn other usages.
> a plant or part of a plant that is eaten as food. Potatoes, beans and onions are all vegetables.
I'm don't want to argue on definitions though but the chicken/tomatoes comparaison hardly make sense in an answer to satvikpendem: he mentioned vegatable in comparaison to meat in a poor people diet. In that situation one would certainly aim mainly for cheap and nutritious staples AKA grains and legumes instead of tomatoes.
At least we agree on the regulation impact! I wish you a pleasant Californian day :-)
If you are going to be that literal then I'm not sure what to say. By vegetables yes I meant a plant based diet (including legumes and grains which are vegetables technically speaking) vs one with meat, not literally tomatoes versus chicken. You might have given a direct answer but it's not what was implied in the context of the thread. I do agree that there is a big problem with the current regulations and subsidies artificially pushing down the price of meat, yet even still it is cheaper to not eat meat. And I say this as someone who does eat meat.
Aside, I'm not sure why you're being so aggressive in your comments, it doesn't make for good discourse when one says things like "you've completely missed the point" or "no shit" or the oft seen pattern of quoting and rebutting each line. If I were to speak to my friends that way I'd quickly lose friends.
> In the context of picking battles, martyrdom is (self) sacrifice, with no direct gain for the cause.
On the first clause, exactly. (The second clause appears to be a bit of ad lib.)
> Abstaining from meat, to me, will take away one of the not-so-many joys I have in my life
I don't think the concept of 'martyrdom' encompasses self-interest. It does however consider the cause/s of other beings. So I maintain, not a very cognitively consonant use of the term.
>On the first clause, exactly. (The second clause appears to be a bit of ad lib.)
The original definition of martyr is: "a person who voluntarily suffers death as the penalty for declaring belief in and refusing to renounce a religion"[1].
It's suffering for the sake of being true to one's faith; impact of that decision on anyone else not being a factor in whether one is a martyr.
Abstaining from meat consumption when it's something you really enjoy is martyrdom in that sense: you are sticking to your moral principles while having no impact on the proliferation of unethical farming.
>I don't think the concept of 'martyrdom' encompasses self-interest
You think incorrectly. The concept of martyrdom means forgoing the self-interest of self-preservation and not being in pain. There's no martyrdom without sacrifice.
>It does however consider the cause/s of other beings.
It may, in the modern sense of the word, but it doesn't have to. See the linked definition. The causes for which one martyrs themselves may vary. The unifying factor is suffering in the name of the cause.
Not suffering with the effect of making something happen. It's choosing to suffer in the name of something that makes one a martyr.
Martyrdom is not an efficient way to bring the cause closer to reality.
> So I maintain, not a very cognitively consonant use of the term.
You can maintain it's not the correct usage of the term, dictionaries be damned, but cognitive consonance has nothing to do with that.
Many individuals independently making the choice has made a difference, both in harm reduction on the demand side and choice on the supply side. It's never been easier or more accessible to be vegetarian/vegan.
We used to have more humane farming. We used to have laws against child labor. We now eat pigs, animals smarter than dogs, that lived tortured lives while wearing clothing made by children.
You can easily chose 'not factory farmed' and still eat meat. You just don't. I'm guessing unless you grew up rich or very recently, you consume more meat now than you were accustomed too growing up. In that case you choose to actively benefit from the factory farming.
>We used to have more humane farming. We used to have laws against child labor.
So, you get the point of having legislation like laws prohibiting child labor instead of moral grandstanding calling on people to abstain from purchasing unethically produced goods, right?
>We now eat pigs, animals smarter than dogs, that lived tortured lives while wearing clothing made by children.
Which goes to show my point: the problem of child labor has only ever been resolved by having legislation against it.
Not by passing the (un)ethical choice onto the consumer.
>I'm guessing unless you grew up rich or very recently, you consume more meat now than you were accustomed too growing up.
I grew up in a communal flat in post-USSR-collapse Ukraine with five families to 1 toilet, in case you are wondering, and no, I don't consume any more meat now than I was accustomed to growing up.
I don't see how that is related to anything I'm saying, other than trying to go for another holier-than-thou ad hominem.
>You can easily chose 'not factory farmed' and still eat meat.
Pray tell how.
Let's be specific. I live in California, and while I consider myself well off, I'm not what you'd call rich.
I shop in stores like Lucky, Ralph's, and 99 ranch.
When I go to those stores, how do I tell which meat was "factory farmed", and which wasn't? Honest question, because that information isn't on the label.
Which is, again, a point I am making: it should be illegal to not put this information along with nutrition data.
> On that note, mandating an SD card slot as a requirement would be a very much welcome next step.
Fuck that. Who are you to subjugate us with your preferences. Limiting what a phone can possibly be by mandating features such as SD cards is so unimaginative. There's always a segment of HN that truly wants to be tyrants and impose their preferences on the entire marketplace and consumers.
Nothing is stopping something like Framework laptops from existing in the marketplace right now besides demand. Y'all can all celebrate it on HN in your bubble but to mandate that the entire market goes in this direction reveals your frustrations more than anything.
You hate that people don't share your preferences and would go so far as to use the legal system to distort the marketplace just to satisfy your own preferences. It doesn't matter if it puts constraints on what a product can be, so long as it fulfills your needs.
So basically, it's a simpler path to impose your preferences on others than it is to actually do any work to build something or find something that matches your preferences.
Completely selfish. Just admit you have disdain for everybody else and you think you know better than the marketplace about what people want, and therefore should have the authority to dictate how everything should be designed and built while doing none of the work.
A healthy reaction to this frustration is to go build the thing you want, show people that it's better, and compete against the status quo - giving everybody more options and choices. You're not there though, and neither are the societies in the EU.
It's sad to see this kind of mindset take over Europe and it's clear it holds back Europe of reaching the heights of innovation and creativity that the world is hoping to see come from a continent that once pushed humanity to higher levels of existence and consciousness.
Now go ahead an explain how having a microSD¹ slot may hurt someone who has a device that reads/writes data².
Not hurt shareholder value. I'm talking about people³ here.
I'll wait. Very curious to hear your perspective here.
_____
¹ Technology that has existed for 2+ decades at this point, is the defacto standard for removable storage in phones, laptops, cameras, audio recorders, etc, supported by devices that sell for $5 new and relied on by the highest end pro gear, current spec making it forwards and backwards compatible for the foreseeable future.
Something that takes virtually no physical space and costs virtually nothing to add to a device that already needs to operate on gigabytes of data (we're not talking about forcing that, say, on a thermostat).
² Particularly, one which can run into a "Storage full" error.
³ Physical human beings (including, but not limited to, the end users), and specifically not your (or some CEO's) feelings about it.
> you think you know better than the marketplace about what people want
For reason, otherwise grown up people still believes there's a fantasyland “market” that automatically adapts to what consumers want.
I'm afraid to inform you that Santa ain't real, it's your parents who bring you gifts for Christmas no matter what you dreamed about, and it's the companies product department who brings you the features that end up in your phone, no matter what the consumers really want.
Nobody ever asked for uninstallable bloatware, yet they are in every phone. Nobody asked for a new redesign that makes you wonder where the damn button you want is now located. And so on.
I was working on an SDF-based CAD tool but gave up when I couldn't find a good way to do fillets.
It's very deceptive because the easy way works so well (Use smoothmin instead of min and you get smooth blends for free! You can even use a circular approximation of smoothmin and get proper fillets!). But when you want the user to be able to pick a couple of surfaces and fillet between them, it gets really hard.
It worked by rewriting the expression tree so that the blend arguments become sibling nodes and then applying the blend to the union/intersection that is their parent.
That works every time if you only want 1 single targeted blend, but if you want several of them then you can run into unsatisfiable cases where the same object needs to blended with several others and can't be siblings of all of them.
So I gave up :(. For me, CAD without fillets and chamfers is no CAD at all.
(Also, apropos for this thread: the discontinuity in the chamfer was a floating point precision problem...)
Well, user picking a couple of surfaces is literally an operation on a boundary representation, so of course it's a PITA with fields :)
I think the future is CAD is combined fields and breps. They're literally dual, one is covariant, the other contravariant (breps facilitate pushforwards, fields facilitate pullbacks).
One without the other is necessarily going to be limited in some way.
The distance field tells you the distance to the nearest surface at any point. You can have a "surface id field" tell you the id of the nearest surface to any point, and then when you raymarch to find the intersection of a line with a surface, you can read out the ID from the ID field after finding the intersection point. (Of course the ID field is also implemented as a function mapping points to surfaces).
So when the mouse is hovered or clicked in the 3d view you can easily find the ID of the surface under the pointer, and you can draw that surface in a different colour to show it is selected. No boundary representation needed.
The hard part is, given 2 surface ids, how do you add a fillet between them in the general case?
Another idea I had was to set the fillet radius on every min/max node based on the derived surface id's from the child nodes, but I couldn't find a good way to do this without making the field discontinuous.
That depends on what we mean by surfaces, and in the case of filleting, the user really wants to be picking adjacent faces (as in: an edge between two adjacent faces). That, or even a region to roll a ball along to generate a fillet.
The semantics of fillets even in the simplest case is that it's doing something to the edges, i.e. elements of the boundary representation, so that's a more natural structure for filleting.
>The distance field tells you the distance to the nearest surface at any point.
What you're describing isn't the same. You really are picking solids, not faces.
This wouldn't work even in the simplest case of a cube.
You can define a cube by a distance field:
f(x, y, z) = max(|x|, |y|, |z|) - 1
If the user wants to fillet just one the edges, then what? You only have one surface (the boundary of a cube), and one ID.
The field doesn't know anything about the edges.
OK, OK, we can ignore this edge case (badum-tss), but even if you only allow filleting "two surfaces", those two "surfaces" (really: boundaries of solids) aren't necessarily going to intersect along one edge (which is what the user wants to fillet).
The intersection may have multiple components. Or may not be manifold.
As a concrete example:
f(x, y, z) = z - cos(x)
g(x, y, z) = z - cos(y)
Look ma, no absolute values! Let me smooth-talk a little though:
f(x, y, z) = z - cos(x)cos(y)
g(x, y, z) = z - 0.25
.....and that's before we get to the reality where the user's understanding of "edge" isn't topological (as in, component of intersection between surfaces), but geometric (sharp corners).
B-reps can get away with making no distinction between them... Until you have messy geometry from elsewhere.
Say, an STL file from a scan. Or a mesh that came from an F-rep by marching cubes. Or whatever unholy mess OpenSCAD can cook with CGAL.
It doesn't matter if you use F-rep or convert to one: chisel out a cube as an intersection of half-spaces, then cut with half-spaces that narrowly touch the edges.
It'll look like a cube, and it'll be a cube functionally if you manufacture it.
Good luck with that one.
>If you have good ideas for this I'd love to hear them and resume working on Isoform
Well. The good news is that putting fillets on every edge is kind of easy with fields because you can do it with offsets.
If F(x, y, z) is a distance field that defines a solid, G(x, y, z) = F(x, y, z) + c offsets F inwards by c.
G is not a distance field anymore though, it's giving values that arent distances on the outside of convex corners.
Renormalize G to be a distance field, call it G'.
Now offset G' outwards by c: H = G' - c.
Ta-da! Concave corners aren't touched, convex corners are rounded.
Flip the + and -, and you're filleting concave corners (G = F - c is a field that defines an outwards offset that fails to be a distance field inside the body near concave corners; compute G' — the distance field for G; offset G inwards: H = G' + c).
Now, the "just normalize a field into a distance field" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.
It works in the case of a cube if you define the cube to be the intersection of 6 half-spaces. There is a video demonstration of it working (partly) on a cube defined this way in the YouTube link in my comment above.
I define a surface to be the region of space where a particular SDF evaluates to 0. You define a solid to be the region of space where that SDF evaluates to <0, but they're broadly the same concept.
It is no problem to ensure that all primitives & all extruded sketches are defined so that each face gets a different surface id, and you would of course want to do this if you want to be able to fillet them.
You're right that there is a difference between an edge and between a pair of surfaces, but finding edges in SDFs is much harder than finding pairs of surfaces. If they intersect along more than one edge then you'll get the fillet along more than one edge. SDFs don't even have concrete "edges" in the general case. I'm not worried about this. Being able to fillet the intersection of 2 surfaces (solids) would satisfy me, but I haven't even got that far.
I'm not trying to find a solution that involves treating edges as "special". That's B-rep thinking. I don't mind if a "fillet" between 2 surfaces that do not touch but are closer together than the fillet radius creates a bridge between them, as long as it is smooth, continuous, and predictable.
It doesn't have to approximate the B-rep way, it just needs to be practically useful for turning sharp edges into rounded ones in a way that lets the user decide where.
>You must never have lived through governmental collapse.
I have (1990s Ukraine emerging from the ruins of the USSR).
>The children and the women will be selling ass for basic necessities, raped by both neighbors and invaders, and killed for no reason at all. Not Or. And.
Yeah, on that... Nope.
Dunno where you fantasized that from.
Prostitution for basic necessities existed, as it does in the US today (and everywhere else: poverty is the #1 reason for it).
Gangs did form. They didn't quite "seize everything they can". Protection racket was common, and preferred for the same reason that taxing a market economy is usually more profitable than a planned one.
"Invaders" weren't a thing.
Mass rapes weren't a thing.
People who "bulked up" and joined gangs, in their masses, weren't the winners.
Berezovsky, one of the most infamous Russian oligarchs, came from an academic background, with multiple publications in applied mathematics.
(Berezovsky number is a fun alternative to the Erdos number; mine is four [1])
Khodorkovsky was a chemical engineer by education who bootstrapped his business career by importing and selling computing equipment for a science education center he opened during perestroika. He used the funds to open a bank.
Gusinsky, Russia's media magnate, dropped out of engineering studies to major in theater. His diploma work was on Moliere's "Tartuffe".
Another theater major, Vladislav Surkov, went on to become Putin's chief propagandist and is primarily responsible for shaping the post-truth world we live in today.
Turning to Ukraine:
Kolomoyskiy, one of the most infamous Ukrainian oligarchs, was a metallurgical engineer.
Pinchuk, another oligarch, got a doctorate from the same university.
Poroshenko, an oligarch and a former president, got a degree in international relations and started a legal advisory firm for international trade before the USSR collapsed. His school buddy Saakashvili became the president of Georgia.
I can go on and on. A few thugs did make it big (e.g. Akhmetov); they were exception rather than the norm.
As the USSR collapsed, the people with enough smarts to be able to "seize everything" were either politicians or nerds.
>Anyone with any engineering knowledge can see why the 3D printing analogy doesn’t work because there isn’t a fixed set of models being banned.
Also because you can manufacture the exact thing with a lump that you just saw off later (or with a hole you fill with epoxy), or slightly larger / smaller / bent / etc., and it'll be functionally the same.
A functional piece of counterfeit currency needs to be identical to legal currency by the definition of currency; being indistinguishable from the real thing is the only function (otherwise, what you have is a piece of paper).
That doesn't apply to anything whose function isn't "looking exactly like this specific thing".
If the legislation aimed to by museum-grade visual replicas of certain shapes (e.g. an exact scaled down copy of Michelangelo's David), it'd be a technically challenging, but feasible problem.
But the problem they're trying to solve amounts to detecting the manufacturing of pieces with a certain function algorithmically, and forcing that spyware into every machine.
To boot, any form of algorithmic inference of the sort will require much more computing power than a 3D printer ever had.
That's ignoring the feasibility of solving the problem of "can this be a part of a gun", or even the much simpler one "is this part functionally the same as this other part" without giving a false positive on everything (as the saying goes, anything thing is a dildo if you are brave enough; guns aren't much different).
What I'm saying is that zero engineering knowledge is required to understand that requiring machines to refuse to make exact visual replicas of objects isn't the same as trying to restrict function.
I.e. that checking if two flat designs look the same is not hard, but checking if two designs will function somewhat similarly if manufactured is a God-tier problem.
_____
TL;DR: the only thing you can check by looking is looks.
And while that's all that matters for currency, it's irrelevant for guns.
Hope someone explains it to them legal folls. Ain't no engineering knowledge required for it.
>You can easily go through a couple hundred rounds in one visit to the range.
Range shooting is not what they're trying to legislate though.
Whoever killed that healthcare CEO didn't need a hundred rounds.
This legislation is insanely, horrendously bad and harmful, but "3D printed gun components are useless" isn't a solid argument against it. They're useful enough.
The real arguments, as others said, are:
1. You can achieve much more already without 3D printers
2. The legislation won't achieve its stated objective as any "blueprint detector" DRM will be trivial to circumvent on many levels (hardware, firmware, software)
3. Any semblance of that DRM being required will kill 3D printing as we know it (the text of the law is so broad that merely having a computer without the antigun spyware would be illegal if it means it can drive a 3D printer)
> Range shooting is not what they're trying to legislate though.
It's the thing gun manufacturers are selling to their customer base though. The theory was they were lobbying for this to prevent competition, but it's not good enough to actually compete with them.
> Whoever killed that healthcare CEO didn't need a hundred rounds.
Luigi Mangione didn't have a criminal record. Given his apparent political alignment, he presumably used 3D printed parts for trolling purposes since there was no actual need for him to do so. He could have bought any firearm from any of the places they're ordinarily sold.
>It's the thing gun manufacturers are selling to their customer base though. The theory was they were lobbying for this to prevent competition
Does anyone actually believe this? Is there any funds for this theory?
Seems to be too far fetched to be even worth sitting.
>Luigi Mangione didn't have a criminal record
That really isn't the point (he still doesn't have a criminal record, by the way).
The point was that the stated danger of 3D printed guns is their use by criminals for criminal purposes, not economic competition to established gun manufacturers.
> The point was that the stated danger of 3D printed guns is their use by criminals for criminal purposes, not economic competition to established gun manufacturers.
I guess the counterpoint is that it's not actually useful to criminals either, so there is no incentive for any non-fool to want laws like this and then all incentive arguments are weak because foolishness can be attributed to anyone.
One, you succeed in never being identified or apprehended. Consequently you, rather than the police, have the gun you used, and you can file off the serial number and throw it into the sea or whatever. They don't know who you are so they never come looking for the gun you no longer have and it's just one of millions that were sold to random people that year.
Two, you get caught before you do the murder. Some cop thinks you look too nervous or you get into a car accident on the way there etc. and they find the gun. Having one without a serial number at this point means you're in trouble when you otherwise wouldn't be. It's a disadvantage.
Three, they catch you in the act or figure out who you are because your face got caught on camera somewhere after you took off your mask etc. At this point it's extremely likely you're going to jail. This is even more likely if the weapon is still in your possession because then they can do forensics on it, and it not having a serial number at that point is once again even worse for you. This is apparently the one that actually happened.
Whereas the theory for it allowing you to get caught would have to be something like, they don't know who you are but they have a list of people who bought a gun (which, depending on the state, they might not even have) so they can look on it to find you. But that's like half the US population and doesn't really narrow it down at all.
There is no criminal benefit in doing it so that leaves the remaining options which are either trolling or stupidity.
If he's a suspect but not confirmed, they'd know if he purchased a real gun, and a ballistics test would confirm it matches the bullet. Conveniently "losing" it would raise suspicion too. Or if that's not why, there has to be some reason people make ghost guns in general.
It comes back the same thing, there is zero evidence that gun manufacturers are lobbying for this while Everytown is very publicly and proudly announcing that they are pushing this exact legislation.
It's ridiculous that this is even being discussed. The people proposing the bill must have zero understanding of how a 3D printer works.
It makes as much sense as requiring saw manufacturers to implement protections that restrict what can be cut out with a saw.
Or pen manufacturers being required to enforce copyright.
Any form of this bill will 100% fail to attain its stated objective, while having horrendous not-quite-unintended consequences.
And in the end, what's to stop someone from assembling an unlicensed 3D printer to make unlicensed prints? That's how the industry literally began.
(Not to mention: what do they think would happen to the hundreds of millions of existing "dumb" 3D printers? They won't disappear because there's a law).
Not necessarily. I mean, the people who give out an uncomfortable laugh do exhibit signs of cognitive dissonance.
I don't have an issue with accepting both statements: factory farming is awful, and I still eat meat.
There is no cognitive dissonance.
The logic is straightforward: I do not believe that me, an individual, abstaining from meat is going to do much to factory farming, while it will make a huge, adverse impact on my life.
Government regulation is how this problem would be solved (the only way it can get solved), and I'm all for voting for bans on factory farming, heavy taxes on meat products, etc.
One's gotta pick their battles.
I pick ones where my participation won't amount to martyrdom.
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