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Posted by Buildstarted 9 hours ago

California AB 2047 makes 3D printers off-limits to students, educators, business(www.the3dprintingnerd.com)
254 points | 179 commentspage 4
TacticalCoder 8 hours ago|
[flagged]
jalalx 8 hours ago||
WTF is going on in US?
iAMkenough 8 hours ago||
We collectively went from singing the praises of "essential workers" to striving to replace and deport them in a 5-year period.
martin1975 8 hours ago||
[flagged]
ConanRus 8 hours ago||
[dead]
vlian2088 8 hours ago||
why do your states constantly behave as if they are sovereign nations?
jrockway 8 hours ago||
The 10th amendment to the Constitution reads "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
arealaccount 8 hours ago||
Haha hilarious, nice one, do the sixth next, or the second
NDlurker 8 hours ago|||
I can't tell if this is a joke or a serious question.
vlian2088 8 hours ago||
I'm seriously questioning the absurdity of banning something that remains available a 15-minute drive away, behind a purely informal border. I don't think, for example, that recent abortion bans had reduced the number of abortions in their respective states to zero.
function_seven 7 hours ago|||
1) For the vast majority of Californians, the nearest state border is 3-5 hours away. 2) those abortion bans have definitely reduced the number of abortions. Not zero, but that's a silly goal for any ban.

Obviously the law is stupid. But states passing their own regulations isn't on its face.

vlian2088 7 hours ago||
>those abortion bans have definitely reduced the number of abortions. Not zero, but that's a silly goal for any ban.

really? what percentage of Americans can't afford a bus ticket to the nearest city in an adjacent state?

starkparker 5 hours ago|||
About half of Americans lack any access to intercity transport that isn't a private car.[1]

About 15% of rural Americans aren't within 25 miles of any intercity transit, much less interstate; low-income residents are disproportionally represented in that group. That figure jumps to 25% if you exclude suburbs, and in some states that figure is as high as 62%.[2]

Even as intercity bus demand has increased due to the declining quality of air travel in the US,[3] rural intercity bus access has declined. Greyhound served many rural routes until its slow collapse before being acquired by FlixBus, which is more focused on urban access than Greyhound was. The deregulation of intercity bus access in 1982, which led to the closure of many intercity routes (disproportionally in the rural Midwest) that required subsidization from more profitable routes, was a major factor.[4]

So "what percentage of Americans can't afford a bus ticket to the nearest city in an adjacent state" is a non-starter of a question, because most of the Americans who'd _need_ an interstate bus ticket can't even get to a bus stop without first owning a car... with which they could simply drive to another state.

1: https://itdp.org/2024/01/24/high-cost-transportation-united-...

2: https://www.bts.gov/data-spotlight/85-rural-residents-have-r...

3: https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/travel/bus-travel-tickets-airl...

4: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/greyhound-bus-tran...

NDlurker 7 hours ago|||
A lot of rural areas don't have good transit. Even if they do, it's hours round trip. Here's an example. North Dakota has an abortion ban. Someone in Minot would need to travel almost 5 hours to Moorhead, MN or almost 7 hours to Billings, MT. Now that's not any different really than before the ban, because the only clinic in ND that provided abortions was across the river from Moorhead in Fargo. But what if that clinic in Moorhead closes? Or what if Montana bans abortion? It's banned in South Dakota, so people out in western ND, SD, or anywhere in Montana are going to have to travel even further. There are many small communities around here with no bus lines or trains coming through so they're stuck if they don't have a good car.
reverius42 7 hours ago||||
Do different EU member states have different laws? And are EU citizens free to drive across a national border and be subject to those different laws?

I believe the answer to both of those is yes, which leads to my next question, which is, do you think that's also absurd?

nozzlegear 7 hours ago||||
California has a huge influence on the American economy. When it makes a law, companies and other states pay attention. The farmers, senators and representatives in my state, Iowa, are still wringing their hands and pulling out their hair over California's law which "unfairly" manipulates the hog market by requiring all pork products sold in California to come from pigs which are humanely treated according to California's definition of humane.
SpicyLemonZest 7 hours ago||||
US states aren't as small as you're imagining them to be. Almost everyone in California lives more than 15 minutes away from the nearest state border, and the largest urban areas are 3+ hours away.
greenavocado 7 hours ago|||
You have zero comprehension of the vast scale of America. Do you also believe you can drive to another state and buy guns?
gpm 7 hours ago|||
Procedurally the US is closer to a EU style alliance of sovereign nations than a single one. Practically the federal government has long since overgrown it's constitutional role as the equivalent of the EU bodies but if you're looking at a US state and wondering why it's acting like a sovereign nation the answer is generally because it is one, on paper.
kop316 8 hours ago|||
The 10th amendment is why: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenth_Amendment_to_the_United_...
smt88 8 hours ago||
Assuming this is a sincere question from someone who doesn’t know US history:

States in the US were modeled after sovereign nations, perhaps even more loosely connected than the EU is today. They didn’t even share a currency.

Eventually the federal government became more important and powerful, and there are many federal laws now, but states are fundamentally still their own thing with the rights to do certain things that are more like a sovereign nation than a province.

guelo 8 hours ago|
Photocopiers and printers have included anti-counterfeiting tech for decades, so there is precedent for this kind of thing. And this is addressing a real growing problem:

https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/santa-rosa-167-gun...

https://da.santaclaracounty.gov/da-task-force-seizes-ghost-g...

https://www.vvng.com/3d-printed-firearm-recovered-after-man-...

alright2565 7 hours ago||
Here's a series of models, which of these is a gun part? https://imgur.com/a/p3UtJqW

Money anti-counterfeiting is trivial, it's just 5 dots arranged in a specific pattern. Deciding what is a gun part is impossible, even for an expert human.

rpearl 7 hours ago|||
Can you send me these models? I would like to print and bring them to the next committee hearing. My senator is on that committee.

I will also be bringing an ergonomic grip for my camera.

My email is in my profile.

SpicyLemonZest 7 hours ago|||
I just fundamentally don't understand the idea that nobody's allowed to restrict firearms manufacturing unless they can solve complex riddles about the nature of parts. I understand that you perceive this to be a deep and interesting point, but to me it seems enragingly obtuse. Let's start with blacklisting DefCAD and iterate from there, what's wrong with that?

Like, it's true that refrigerators don't maintain a completely uniform temperature, meaning there's some philosophical wiggle room in what it means for a health department to say that raw meat must be stored at 41F. But it would be absurd for a meatpacker to declare that this means food safety is "impossible", and outrageous for them to conclude that they're just not going to bother refrigerating their meat at all.

bluescrn 7 hours ago||
How long until people get police showing up at their door because they tried to print something harmless but gun-shaped (like a light gun for retro games, or Nerf-style toys) and were flagged by the AI 'firearm detector'?
SpicyLemonZest 7 hours ago||
If you want to have a voice in how the regulation is implemented, perhaps you should offer suggestions for how to implement it better. That's how it works in most industries; legislators propose to enact regulation X, manufacturers respond that X would have undesirable consequences and Y would be better, and then they discuss to figure out how to best balance all the competing interests.

For reasons that aren't entirely clear to me, firearms manufacturers seem to think they're entitled to instead stomp their feet and say "no, no regulation, you have to let me do whatever I want!". I'm never quite sure why they think this foot-stomping would be at all persuasive to people who don't manufacture firearms. Again, I imagine you don't see things this way and I'd be happy to learn more about what I've gotten wrong here.

bluescrn 9 minutes ago|||
Of course the vast majority of people opposing this bill have zero interest in manufacturing firearms.

I 3D print as a hobby, mostly items related to retro computing/gaming and things like Gridfinity storage boxes.

But I value my privacy, and don't want governments scanning my models before I'm able to print them, just as I wouldn't want them scanning my code before I'm able to compile it (these days, code can potentially be a weapon of war, malware or drone flight controller code being more powerful than a plastic gun)

rangestransform 6 hours ago||||
I would rather just accept more crime than accept draconian regulation telling me what I can do with a piece of hardware I own

Go solve gun crime with boots on the ground instead

SpicyLemonZest 6 hours ago||
Again, it seems like there's a critical insight that's gone missing between the first and second lines of your post. It's unsurprising that a manufacturer might prefer to be regulated less rather than more, and there are a number of cases where I ultimately agree with some manufacturer or another on that. Perhaps it's the case that gun crime would be best resolved with boots on the ground; I could imagine being persuaded by someone who explains where the boots are going to come from and why they're not already there. Maybe I could even be persuaded that 3D printing is more important than crime reduction, although I'm less able to imagine what would convince me of that.

It's incredibly bizarre that you feel entitled to issue commands about what I or the California legislature must do instead of passing the regulations you don't like. What is your mental model of the world, where someone would read the words "Go solve gun crime with boots on the ground instead" and not become more passionate about the idea that we must regulate you whether you like it or not?

creato 6 hours ago||||
> For reasons that aren't entirely clear to me, firearms manufacturers seem to think they're entitled to instead stomp their feet and say "no, no regulation, you have to let me do whatever I want!".

Who exactly is the "firearms manufacturer?" I've owned and used 3D printers for years. Not once has anything I've used or seen from any 3D printer manufacturer or other related supplier have anything to do with guns.

SpicyLemonZest 5 hours ago||
Then I'd expect you won't be affected by this ban on manufacturing guns with 3D printers. Perhaps there's some changes we should make to better ensure you won't be affected; if so by all means you should suggest them.
hooverd 6 hours ago|||
Why not focus on the actual gun problem, handguns, and not histrionics about ghost guns and SBRs?
SpicyLemonZest 5 hours ago|||
We try! But most California restrictions on handguns have been struck down by the courts, and many of the surviving restrictions manufacturers simply refuse to comply with. They've been boycotting microstamping technology for over a decade, blatantly lying about commercial viability as an excuse for their policy preference not to do it. (I'm slightly sympathetic, because it is true that the first manufacturer to comply will probably themselves get boycotted by anti-gun-regulation zealots.)
gmueckl 8 hours ago|||
But money counterfeiting is a different proposition: the printer is blocking exactly known patterns found on real currency. In fact, many bill designs incorporate patterns that are easily machine detectable for this purpose.

Blocking the printing of parts of mechanisms is a completely different beast, because the functionality is only discernible after final assembly of the individual parts, which can be shaped in a variety of ways. Most of these parts are unique to guns or at least usable in other kinds of designs. E.g. the same trigger lever design could be used for a ghost gun or a nerf gun or a water pistol. So where would yiu draw the line of all the classifier sees is G code that combines support structures, the actual surfaces and infill of some arbitrary collection of parts?

I'm against guns in generally, but this classification problem seems particularly ill posed and I don't want it to result in tamper-resistant printers stopping people from tinkering and taking the fun out of printing. The US should just outlaw the casual carrying of guns of individuals in public. That's not a violation of the second amendment.

rangestransform 6 hours ago|||
Yellow dots doxxing me whenever I print something is equally despicable, client side scanning on my iPhone is equally despicable.

Some crimes are not worth it to eliminate, and western liberal society should just accept that the optimal amount of crime is non zero.

mvdtnz 8 hours ago||
Until America bans actual guns I don't want to hear about the "growing problem" of 3D printed guns.
bluescrn 7 hours ago|||
Yeah, if it was the UK cracking down it'd make more sense, but IIRC the US already has more guns than people.

And in places where guns are tightly regulated, most people couldn't get hold of ammo even if they did build a printed gun, so it's not a big problem. (And the bad guys just use kitchen knives)

greenavocado 7 hours ago|||
The establishment is desperate to create/maintain moats to maintain hegemony over society