The charity should have fought. It strikes me that In-Bev is on shaky ground trying to claim as a trademark the folkloric name of an historical figure. They can surely hold a trademark on Johnny Appleseed in a distinctive font or font-color combination, but the name itself?
Alas a lot of voices on the American right confuse the interests of incumbents in the market with the good of the free market. And no, they usually aren't shills for the industries involved, just confused about what is actually good for the free market.
Really? The Zionist cabal you are fretting about must not be very successful considering the number of universities that have vibrant and sometimes successful divestment movements calling for the withdrawal of university investments from companies doing business in Israel, not to mention lively Muslim and Palestinian student organizations. At UCLA they even openly worry about letting Jews serve on the highest student judicial body in terms that sound an awful lot like the Dreyfus affair.
I'm afraid your post sounds an awful lot like an updated version of the railing against the "evil Joooooos!" that hood-wearing folks used to engage in when not maltreating people of African ancestry.
Alas, most institutions of higher education are quite willing to abandon their dignity to grovel to as you put it "people lacking the mental capacity for recognizing the not really subtle statement the art is conveying," provided said people are members of any group which is the beneficiary of any affirmative action program or non-discrimination law or ordinance anywhere in the United States, excluding clauses about non-discrimination on the basis of religion when the religion involved is any variety of Christianity or Judaism.
I really wish people more people would understand Luigi Zingales's distinction between pro-market and pro-business regulations and the concept of regulatory capture.
While the devil is in the details, and the issued regulations seem to be long enough to hide several hells worth of devils, as excerpted in the media, they seem to do something very useful to the preservation of free markets: prevent combined ISP/content-providing companies or cabals formed by ISPs and content-providing companies from using their position as what used to be called a "vertical trust" to kill competition.
To my fellow free-market-loving rightists: THIS IS A GOOD THING. Regulations to establish net neutrality, per se, are pro-market (which is why incumbents in the market who want a regulatory environment that supports predatory pricing, leveraging current market position against not only existing competitors, but new start-ups and even new disruptive technologies, are howling about it). Whether there are any actual freedom-killing "devils" in the details we have yet to see.
The line from Milton's sonnet describes not only the attitude of piety to which his poem applied it, but a great many jobs in which one needs to be present in case work arises, but often for long stretches have nothing to do. (A similar observation is made by the old military saying "Hurry up and wait.")
Now, one might hope that Federal employees waiting for work to arise would occupy themselves with something more edifying than pornography (perhaps reading sonnets), but so long as porn is legal, it seems a bit out of line to deny those idle because of the intermittent nature of the work they are engaged to perform access to their favored pastime as a way of whiling away the hours.
Of course, it is also possible that there are entirely too many Federal employees for the amount of work that must be done. But that should be solved by restructuring the Federal bureaucracy to decrease the number of Federal employees. Of course, maybe there is some virtue in that case to making work conditions for Federal employees less pleasant -- it might increase the number of voluntary separations from Federal employment -- but this would only be useful in the context of restructuring the bureaucracy to decrease the number of positions.
The article is pretty much spot on, except for the harping on the phrase "die over the flag" (I think the usual phrase is "die for the flag").
Have you really never heard of the rhetorical device of metonymy? To die for the flag is to die for what the flag represents. Now you may be a pacifist and find the notion morally objectionable, or an anti-militarist and hold the notion in contempt, but don't feign stupidity and act as if you don't understand a classical rhetorical device.
At best, Cruz is trying polish up his bona fides with the Chamber of Commerce wing of the party. At worst, he's an idiot.
I'm inclined toward the latter view, despite agreeing the Cruz on perhaps 70% of issues facing the country: besides this stance, which as many have noted can be explained only by stupidity or having been suborned by telecom interests, there was Cruz's ill-fated appearance at an event sponsored by Arab Christians, at which he put his foot in his mouth with an assertion that to the effect that Christians have no better friend than Israel -- deeply offensive to Arab Christians, who in the Middle East have faired quite well under Ba'athist governments with their ideology of secular pan-Arab nationalism, and for which he was rightly heckled.
As in this instance, he doubled down on his gaffe.
I have a feeling that if GOP nominates Cruz in 2016, as the subject says, they'll be Cruz'n for a bruis'n.
Plainly some posters don't like defining the phrase "sharing economy" to mean "platforms that make it easy for anyone to become an entrepreneur by offering up an unused resource for sale or rent".
Would "microentreprenurial economy" make them happier? It's more accurate, but long and cumbersome. There are precious few examples of actual economic activity in the form of actual sharing, yes there are car/truck owning collectives, the carpooling example -- though is that sharing if the extra rider chips in for gas? -- and neighbors still borrow tools from each other rather than hitting the rental yard, but none of this actual sharing makes a big enough splash in the economic pond to merit a grand phrase like "sharing economy".
The phenomenon of "platforms that make it easy for anyone to become an entrepreneur by offering up an unused resource for sale or rent" is sufficiently new (arguably eBay was the first, though it wasn't easy enough for me: I waited for Amazon Marketplace, which is easy, to be up and running before setting up an online bookstore) that it will take a while for a name to be fixed. Maybe it will be "sharing economy", with pith and brevity winning out over lack of accuracy, maybe someone with cultural, societal and academic clout will read this post and really like "microentrepreneurial economy", start using it, and it will stick, accuracy winning out over length, maybe someone with better wit than either I or Mr. Shapiro will come up with a coinage the combines pith and accuracy and that's what we'll all be calling the phenomenon three years hence.
Whatever you call it, it's a plainly a very good thing: Shumpeter's "creative destruction" operating in a mode that fairly directly brings benefits to lots people, rather than just the few with the disruptive idea or their initial investors.
On duty = camera on, excecptions for undercover work by warrant only
I've thought about this a bit since the Ferguson incident, and without having read the Techdirt article on the subject came to the conclusion that we finally have a solution to Plato's problem of who guards the guardians -- we all do.
All LEOs should have body cameras with sound which are on whenever the officer is on duty, the sole exception being undercover operatives whose lack of a camera and recording device has been approved by a judge. All the niceties about on/off switches can be left aside -- let the cops turn them on and off whenever, but...
Put the on-off switch somewhere where suspects cannot access it in the course of an arrest and implement a few of the suggestions up thread for procedural reforms to give the camera requirement teeth:
I'd thought of scott13's suggestion of camera/sound recorder off -- citizen's word trumps the cop's word in testimony about police conduct -- but I also like his docking the office a day's pay for leaving the camera off while on duty, and I also like the suggestion posted by Anonymous Coward at #9 (though with my exception for court-authorized undercover work): a police officer without his or her camera/sound recorder loses police powers.
And, have an always-on GPS tracker as part of every non-undercover cop's kit.
I'm not sure where the recordings and GPS records should be stored. Maybe each of the several states can create an Office of Good Police Conduct, attached to whatever agency deals with civil rights, rather than any police agency, to run servers for the purpose and handle FOIA requests for footage and GPS records relevant to particular incidents -- the Feds can do likewise for the records generated by Federal LEOs.
King seems to have as much or more trouble with upholding the Fourth Amendment as he does with the First. Maybe it's the whole Bill of Rights he has trouble with. Or maybe it's the whole Constitution with the idea of the Federal Government having limited powers.
Misspelling or simply a different rendering of a name that's actually spelled in Cyrillic into the Latin alphabet? I have a colleague whose names can be Englished as Rojkovskaya or Rozhkovskaia (or two other variants) none of which are misspellings. One would think our government would have the wit to list all possible Englishings of foreign names written in other alphabets in important databases like terrorist watchlists, but I guess not.
The fact that they don't and that American reporters attribute this to "misspelling", rather than the real cause -- variant renderings of Cyrillic -- is just more American insularity on display.
Well, this is good. With only two hops allowed, I should no longer have my e-mails read on the basis of searches centered on Bashar Al Assad (though my bishop's e-mails would still get read).
For years, I was deluged with spam sent to my e-mail address (which is based on my full name, the initials of which I use as a screen name here at TechDirt), but with salutations to a Maria Flack, purportedly hailing from a non-existent town, Banner Elk, PA. (The only municipality in the United States called "Banner Elk" is in North Carolina.)
The deluge slowed to a trickle when I contacted the offices of a legislator in Pennsylvania, who e-mailed me campaign materials. It seems the zip code the data brokers had attached to the non-existent town was in his district. Through his good offices the data brokers were disabused of the notion that my e-mail belonged to a person named Maria Flack, and within a few months the frequency of e-mail for the (probably also non-existent) M.F. fell to about one message a quarter.
So the upshot of this is that one really needs to replace gravity either with centrifugal force (the big rotating space station model beloved of 1950's to 1970's sci-fi) or constant acceleration to the midpoint of the journey, then constant acceleration in the opposite direction on the second half.
And good public policy seems to be even harder. (As does getting good mathematical models for such policy, since just ham-handed looking at the amount of money the suggested program would hand out is not a good model of its cost.)
The cost of living in Switzerland is much higher than in the U.S., so suppose we try instead giving every adult citizen in the U.S. a basic income of $1200/month (just over the Federal Poverty rate for Alaska for a household of one). This is taxable income, so everyone is paying back the share of it equal to their top marginal rate, and the political cost of implementing this is abolishing the whole existing Federal (and state) poverty-alleviation industry: no more bureaucrats being paid to determine eligibility for SNAP or WIC, no more money spent on those programs at all, shrink the IRS since no one has to monitor compliance with EIC requirements,...
I have noted in other forums repeatedly that the vast majority of human sports-team mascots, including all American Indian-based team names, represent tributes to martial virtue, often marital virtue in a losing cause. Oh, there are exceptions, usually associated with some local attribute or event (the Nebraska Cornhuskers and Oklahoma Sooners spring readily to mind). But most, from the Minnesota Vikings, to the Washington Redskins, to the USC Trojans, to the U. Florida Seminoles, to the Fighting Irish, to various and sundry teams with names like Knights, Cavaliers, Crusaders, to my absolute favorite, the Yeshiva U. Maccabees, represent paeans to some group seen as exhibiting ferocity in battle and hardihood in the face of adversity.
Most tribally affiliated Native Americans (or American Indians as those in Oklahoma prefer to be called) seem to appreciate the tribute, and are supportive of American Indian themed sports teams. Some of the last surviving Navajo Code Talkers seemed happy to sport Washington Redskins jackets when their own marital service was honored at a recent event. It seems that such names only cause offense to effete, oh-so-sensitive, politically correct types of whatever ethnicity who hold the very notion of martial virtue in contempt.
You assert: Only people with money to lose from moving away from fossil fuels are fighting that it is not occurring.
Really? Do you have any evidence that Robert Lindzen of MIT and Ross McKitrick of the University of Guelph and Robert Spencer of the University of Alabama, or even Anthony Watts of the blog Watts Up With That and the folks who run ICECAP, all have "money to lose from moving away from fossil fuels"? Or is this just an ad hominem attack: anyone who disagrees with the IPCC can be dismissed as an oil industry shill without evidence that they are, and without considering the validity of any critique they offer?
I'm not sure about "ordinary people", but there are quite a lot of reasons folks who don't have interests aligned with hydrocarbon extraction industries might object to the IPCC's findings:
1. They are hard-core Popperians and regard 15 years of level temperature data, toward the end of the period falling outside even the 95% confidence intervals of the IPCC's models as a sufficient falsification.
2. They actually understand that while weather is not climate, climate is weather, averaged over time and place, and that an averaging process does not somehow render a non-linear chaotic dynamical system predictable -- a recent survey suggested that 63% of professional weather forecasters doubt large-scale anthropogenic climate change. I suspect this is the main basis for their skepticism.
3. They regard groups that advocate increased government control of the economy, particularly in ways which hobble economic growth, with the same sort of suspicion with which many posting here regard the oil and gas industries.
4. They have more regard for the school of climatology based on astrophysics (prevalent in Russia, but with some representatives in the U.S. and Western Europe) than they do for the school of climatology based on general circulation models of the earth's atmosphere, and are much more concerned with the lack of solar activity of the sort correlated with ice-age events than with a rise in atmospheric CO2.
5. They still think of the Medieval, Roman, Minoan and Holocene Warm Periods in terms of their older name "Climate Optima" and think a bit of global warming would be a good thing -- just think about the possibilities for the British wine industry -- certainly better than a new ice age.
6. They are sufficiently familiar with paleoclimatology to regard the entire temperature rise from the end of the Little Ice Age in the 1850's to the leveling off of global mean temperature in the early 2000's as insignificant, and the whole thing as a proverbial tempest in a tea pot.
On the post: In-Bev Gets One Guy Making Charitable Juice Drinks To Change His Brand Name
Trademarking the name of a figure from history?
On the post: The Cartoonist Has No Idea How Net Neutrality Works
Re:
On the post: Iowa College Grants Hecklers More Veto Power, Resulting In Summoning Of Campus Police To Offending 'Free Speech Wall'
Re:
I'm afraid your post sounds an awful lot like an updated version of the railing against the "evil Joooooos!" that hood-wearing folks used to engage in when not maltreating people of African ancestry.
On the post: Iowa College Grants Hecklers More Veto Power, Resulting In Summoning Of Campus Police To Offending 'Free Speech Wall'
Re: Who was heckled here?
On the post: Verizon At Least Shows It Has A Sense Of Humor About Net Neutrality, Even If It's Incapable Of Respecting It
Pro-market vs. pro-business regulation
While the devil is in the details, and the issued regulations seem to be long enough to hide several hells worth of devils, as excerpted in the media, they seem to do something very useful to the preservation of free markets: prevent combined ISP/content-providing companies or cabals formed by ISPs and content-providing companies from using their position as what used to be called a "vertical trust" to kill competition.
To my fellow free-market-loving rightists: THIS IS A GOOD THING. Regulations to establish net neutrality, per se, are pro-market (which is why incumbents in the market who want a regulatory environment that supports predatory pricing, leveraging current market position against not only existing competitors, but new start-ups and even new disruptive technologies, are howling about it). Whether there are any actual freedom-killing "devils" in the details we have yet to see.
On the post: Bill Introduced To Keep Bored Federal Employees From Viewing Porn While On The Clock
They also serve who only stand and wait.
Now, one might hope that Federal employees waiting for work to arise would occupy themselves with something more edifying than pornography (perhaps reading sonnets), but so long as porn is legal, it seems a bit out of line to deny those idle because of the intermittent nature of the work they are engaged to perform access to their favored pastime as a way of whiling away the hours.
Of course, it is also possible that there are entirely too many Federal employees for the amount of work that must be done. But that should be solved by restructuring the Federal bureaucracy to decrease the number of Federal employees. Of course, maybe there is some virtue in that case to making work conditions for Federal employees less pleasant -- it might increase the number of voluntary separations from Federal employment -- but this would only be useful in the context of restructuring the bureaucracy to decrease the number of positions.
On the post: School Principal Contacts FBI After Student Throws American Flag Out A Window
Metonymy is lost on some
Have you really never heard of the rhetorical device of metonymy? To die for the flag is to die for what the flag represents. Now you may be a pacifist and find the notion morally objectionable, or an anti-militarist and hold the notion in contempt, but don't feign stupidity and act as if you don't understand a classical rhetorical device.
On the post: Ted Cruz Doubles Down On Misunderstanding The Internet & Net Neutrality, As Republican Engineers Call Him Out For Ignorance
Cruz'n for a bruis'n
I'm inclined toward the latter view, despite agreeing the Cruz on perhaps 70% of issues facing the country: besides this stance, which as many have noted can be explained only by stupidity or having been suborned by telecom interests, there was Cruz's ill-fated appearance at an event sponsored by Arab Christians, at which he put his foot in his mouth with an assertion that to the effect that Christians have no better friend than Israel -- deeply offensive to Arab Christians, who in the Middle East have faired quite well under Ba'athist governments with their ideology of secular pan-Arab nationalism, and for which he was rightly heckled.
As in this instance, he doubled down on his gaffe.
I have a feeling that if GOP nominates Cruz in 2016, as the subject says, they'll be Cruz'n for a bruis'n.
On the post: Why New York's Sharing Economy Is A Win For Job Creation And Innovation
What's in a name?
Would "microentreprenurial economy" make them happier? It's more accurate, but long and cumbersome. There are precious few examples of actual economic activity in the form of actual sharing, yes there are car/truck owning collectives, the carpooling example -- though is that sharing if the extra rider chips in for gas? -- and neighbors still borrow tools from each other rather than hitting the rental yard, but none of this actual sharing makes a big enough splash in the economic pond to merit a grand phrase like "sharing economy".
The phenomenon of "platforms that make it easy for anyone to become an entrepreneur by offering up an unused resource for sale or rent" is sufficiently new (arguably eBay was the first, though it wasn't easy enough for me: I waited for Amazon Marketplace, which is easy, to be up and running before setting up an online bookstore) that it will take a while for a name to be fixed. Maybe it will be "sharing economy", with pith and brevity winning out over lack of accuracy, maybe someone with cultural, societal and academic clout will read this post and really like "microentrepreneurial economy", start using it, and it will stick, accuracy winning out over length, maybe someone with better wit than either I or Mr. Shapiro will come up with a coinage the combines pith and accuracy and that's what we'll all be calling the phenomenon three years hence.
Whatever you call it, it's a plainly a very good thing: Shumpeter's "creative destruction" operating in a mode that fairly directly brings benefits to lots people, rather than just the few with the disruptive idea or their initial investors.
On the post: Putting Body Cameras On Cops Won't Fix Misconduct, But It's A Good Start
On duty = camera on, excecptions for undercover work by warrant only
All LEOs should have body cameras with sound which are on whenever the officer is on duty, the sole exception being undercover operatives whose lack of a camera and recording device has been approved by a judge. All the niceties about on/off switches can be left aside -- let the cops turn them on and off whenever, but...
Put the on-off switch somewhere where suspects cannot access it in the course of an arrest and implement a few of the suggestions up thread for procedural reforms to give the camera requirement teeth:
I'd thought of scott13's suggestion of camera/sound recorder off -- citizen's word trumps the cop's word in testimony about police conduct -- but I also like his docking the office a day's pay for leaving the camera off while on duty, and I also like the suggestion posted by Anonymous Coward at #9 (though with my exception for court-authorized undercover work): a police officer without his or her camera/sound recorder loses police powers.
And, have an always-on GPS tracker as part of every non-undercover cop's kit.
I'm not sure where the recordings and GPS records should be stored. Maybe each of the several states can create an Office of Good Police Conduct, attached to whatever agency deals with civil rights, rather than any police agency, to run servers for the purpose and handle FOIA requests for footage and GPS records relevant to particular incidents -- the Feds can do likewise for the records generated by Federal LEOs.
On the post: Pulitzers Make Rep. Peter King Mad
First Amendment or whole Constitution?
On the post: Boston Bombing Suspect Avoided CIA, FBI Because His Last Name Was Misspelled In DHS Database
Variant renderings of Cyrillic
The fact that they don't and that American reporters attribute this to "misspelling", rather than the real cause -- variant renderings of Cyrillic -- is just more American insularity on display.
On the post: Awesome Stuff: Stand And Deliver
Highwaymen?
Of course, maybe collecting kickstarter funds to produce fairly pointless devices like tablet stands is a species of highway robbery.
(Okay, I get the joke, it's about stands...)
On the post: FISA Court Agrees To Changes That Limit NSA's Ability To Query Phone Records
Only two hops
On the post: Open Letter To Data Brokers Are A Bunch Of Idiots Or Current Business
A bad data broker story
The deluge slowed to a trickle when I contacted the offices of a legislator in Pennsylvania, who e-mailed me campaign materials. It seems the zip code the data brokers had attached to the non-existent town was in his district. Through his good offices the data brokers were disabused of the notion that my e-mail belonged to a person named Maria Flack, and within a few months the frequency of e-mail for the (probably also non-existent) M.F. fell to about one message a quarter.
On the post: DailyDirt: Staying In Space Isn't Healthy...
Orbit vs. Space
1970's sci-fi) or constant acceleration to the midpoint of the journey, then constant acceleration in the opposite direction on the second half.
On the post: How To Solve The Piracy Problem: Give Everyone A Basic Income For Doing Nothing
Re: Yes, Math is Hard
The cost of living in Switzerland is much higher than in the U.S., so suppose we try instead giving every adult citizen in the U.S. a basic income of $1200/month (just over the Federal Poverty rate for Alaska for a household of one). This is taxable income, so everyone is paying back the share of it equal to their top marginal rate, and the political cost of implementing this is abolishing the whole existing Federal (and state) poverty-alleviation industry: no more bureaucrats being paid to determine eligibility for SNAP or WIC, no more money spent on those programs at all, shrink the IRS since no one has to monitor compliance with EIC requirements,...
On the post: Finally, We Have Proof That The Washington Redskins Are Run By Replicants
Human mascot names and martial virtue
Most tribally affiliated Native Americans (or American Indians as those in Oklahoma prefer to be called) seem to appreciate the tribute, and are supportive of American Indian themed sports teams. Some of the last surviving Navajo Code Talkers seemed happy to sport Washington Redskins jackets when their own marital service was honored at a recent event. It seems that such names only cause offense to effete, oh-so-sensitive, politically correct types of whatever ethnicity who hold the very notion of martial virtue in contempt.
On the post: DailyDirt: Will Renewable Energy Be Enough To Curb Global Warming?
Re: Re: IPCC not credible
Really? Do you have any evidence that Robert Lindzen of MIT and Ross McKitrick of the University of Guelph and Robert Spencer of the University of Alabama, or even Anthony Watts of the blog Watts Up With That and the folks who run ICECAP, all have "money to lose from moving away from fossil fuels"? Or is this just an ad hominem attack: anyone who disagrees with the IPCC can be dismissed as an oil industry shill without evidence that they are, and without considering the validity of any critique they offer?
On the post: DailyDirt: Will Renewable Energy Be Enough To Curb Global Warming?
Re: The deniers are out in force today
1. They are hard-core Popperians and regard 15 years of level temperature data, toward the end of the period falling outside even the 95% confidence intervals of the IPCC's models as a sufficient falsification.
2. They actually understand that while weather is not climate, climate is weather, averaged over time and place, and that an averaging process does not somehow render a non-linear chaotic dynamical system predictable -- a recent survey suggested that 63% of professional weather forecasters doubt large-scale anthropogenic climate change. I suspect this is the main basis for their skepticism.
3. They regard groups that advocate increased government control of the economy, particularly in ways which hobble economic growth, with the same sort of suspicion with which many posting here regard the oil and gas industries.
4. They have more regard for the school of climatology based on astrophysics (prevalent in Russia, but with some representatives in the U.S. and Western Europe) than they do for the school of climatology based on general circulation models of the earth's atmosphere, and are much more concerned with the lack of solar activity of the sort correlated with ice-age events than with a rise in atmospheric CO2.
5. They still think of the Medieval, Roman, Minoan and Holocene Warm Periods in terms of their older name "Climate Optima" and think a bit of global warming would be a good thing -- just think about the possibilities for the British wine industry -- certainly better than a new ice age.
6. They are sufficiently familiar with paleoclimatology to regard the entire temperature rise from the end of the Little Ice Age in the 1850's to the leveling off of global mean temperature in the early 2000's as insignificant, and the whole thing as a proverbial tempest in a tea pot.
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