Love being interrupted when my monitor asks me to accept user agreements

I am seriously considering creating a dropship company focused exclusively on buying and selling electronic components that are sold for parts and people can assemble them at home, Ikea-style.

I would start with selling 50" and 65" inch "dumb" TVs. Just the panel, a nice enclosure and a board with an IR receiver, TV tuner and HDMI outputs. BYO top box and Soundbar. I wonder how fast it would take to get 10000 orders.

The Framework folks hit an unexpected snag with a similar idea: turns out the US tax on a laptop assembled in Taiwan is much lower than on a box of parts made in Taiwan that you can assemble into a laptop yourself. (Why? Because.) Thus the strange not-really-DIY “DIY edition”.

What is a laptop anyway? Can somebody sell 60 2-in-1 convertible laptops where the top bit comes off and also has an HDMI in port? The computer could be a raspberry pi or something…

Probably. This is a thing with guns, too. In CA, for example, owning an AR15 with certain features is illegal. But separate the upper from the lower, and you no longer have an AR15; now you have parts, none of which are semiautomatic and center-fire on their own. That’s no longer illegal (though if they can prove intent everything changes, of course).

IANAL, but I always found that kind of loophole fascinating.

No, the lower is still legally considered a firearm. It can't fire anything, and it's not a gun in practical purposes, but for purposes of regulation it is still a firearm.

The reason it's probably still legal to have in California is that California bans a lot of largely cosmetic or non-functional items. For example, many states ban threaded barrels which by itself doesn't change any characteristics of the barrel other than the fact that it has a thread on the end of it.