Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 11 Jan 2022 @ 1:10am
Re:
"Trrademark holders' dream: make everyone liable for everything, then push them into expensive litigation over any accusation - event the most groundless ones."
At the cost, of course, of rendering core segments of the national industry uncompetitive. It's a classic case of strip-mining the business future of the nation you live in.
The fact the US is dropping to near-peer status with China isn't just because China's played their cards right. A lot of it has to do with the US increasingly letting their own major players own markets through protectionist legislation rather than competitiveness.
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 11 Jan 2022 @ 1:06am
Re: Re:
"The end result of laws like this is that you will be forced back into real world shopping, as most chains will give up any online store, being caught by the same requirements."
Not quite. The end result is that US companies are gradually forced to withdraw from the global market as a result of such legislation. Leaving Alibaba to step in as the logical replacement.
The US can get to Amazon as they are HQ'd in the US, but where online retail headquartered outside of the US is concerned there are issues of practical enforcement cropping up.
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 11 Jan 2022 @ 1:01am
Re: Re: Re:
"Something like a DMCA takedown except reported by customers and it is very easy/obvious to report (obviously need to figure out how to handle the potential problems with that that we see with the DMCA kind!). "
No need to bring the shit-show which is the DMCA into it. The last thing we need is more examples of reversing burden of proof.
As far as I can tell sensible consumer protection laws if enforced, should neatly deal with most of these problems. Amazon's marketplace isn't a social platform. If it mediates money and goods then commercial restrictions and regulations should apply.
Of course that's all just assuming the US has any functional consumer protection laws left. My magic eight ball says that signs point to negative in that regard.
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 11 Jan 2022 @ 12:28am
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
"Lest we forget, "white" is a construct - it's a frabricated group, containing within a hodge-podge of multiple mixed ethnicities (gaelic, gothic, nordic, italian, greek, slavic, russian, etc.)."
I recall, very vividly, how quite a few years back here in Sweden some of the nationalist and supremacist parties actively invited certain immigrants to join them - everyone who was desperate to fit in - as long as they could be brought to hate the other outsiders.
It's like that old joke;
Way back in the day a journalist travelled to the deep south to interview the chapter leader, blind since birth, of the then most notoriously intolerant branch of the Ku Klux Klan. He sat with the venerated old klan leader, a legend in the klan who despite his lack of sight had led the klan through campaigns of lynchings and cross-burnings, as that worthy expounded for hours on the unworthiness of black and mixed people, the danger of miscegeny, and on how the ungodly heathen ways of african immigrants threatened the living spaces of the white man.
As the right-hand man of the chapter leader led the journalist out of the compound he asked the question "Has no one ever told him?!"
Whereon the right-hand man responded "He cares so much...None of us have the heart to tell him he's black."
And it's not exactly new. Supremacist thought is nothing if not inconsistent. Hitler was so worried about his possible jewish ancestry he had two specific exemptions written into his bill about withdrawing the protections and privileges due citizens of jewish descent for two people - himself and Jesus Christ.
What really matters to these people is one thing only. That they are a tribe hostile to anyone outside of it. As long as you can align your beliefs with the superiority of that tribe and the hatred of the designated scapegoat they will meet you halfway. It's the only compromise you can achieve with supremacists.
The Proud Boys don't have the ideology to be racists. If anything they're like Ernst Röhm's old Sturmabteilung. Thugs looking for an excuse. Losers looking for acceptance. People willing to subscribe to any creed as long as it contains the opportunity to look down on others because being at the bottom of the totem pole isn't fun and dragging other people down is easier than to climb your own way up.
And they are fascists simply because that is the natural state of being of people so frail in ego they need a Führer so they can feel like they're finally part of something way bigger than they themselves.
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 10 Jan 2022 @ 8:47am
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
"The catch 22 is that by doing so they lose their own existing base, since there's no way for ideals like equality to co-exist with such a thing."
Would be nice if it was that clean-cut.
Cynically speaking I'm thinking democrats could use that tactic in red states where losing half their old base to independents wouldn't hurt them. And democrats in blue states keep on trucking as per usual while their base holds their nose and keep voting for the shameless rather than the monstrous as they always have. Voíla. One gift-wrapped presidential election.
Of course that would be Humfrey Appleby levels of cynicism. Hardly recommended for anyone not already a moral vacuum.
"If they push any further to the right, especially if they do so by attacking some group as an easy scapegoat for all of life's problems..."
Depends. There's a ready-made target in The Rich - whose "privileges" are defended by the GOP base only because no one's yet bothered to point out just whose fault it is that they are living in the most abject misery.
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 10 Jan 2022 @ 8:39am
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
"That purely depends on how Active Directory or whatever is configured. It's perfectly feasible that the access granted to a user is done so via a role that contains other permissions, and that a role granted to a certain type of student would contain elevated permissions elsewhere."
I'd have a lot of doubt in setting up a university intranet in such a way that an elevated role would allow access to the backbone. The user roles do not possess dev access. That just doesn't happen.
"False. There are services available to allow SSO access to Elsevier without needing to use a different login. If the SSO login is compromised, then logically so are the services the SSO user has access to, even if under the hood they're separate logins."
...which is why single sign-on is normally used to access any services considered built-in. If Elsevier is linking their login accounts to SSO then that's an extra headache for both the university IT department and Elsevier.
If you want a smidgeon of security what you do is two-step verification. Which is how I have to access every third-party provider outside of the intranet with, for instance.
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 10 Jan 2022 @ 8:32am
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: FTFY
"Poll watchers are a legitimate position. They are members of the parties on the ballot. They sit, or stand, in direct view of the ballot counters as ballots are being counted. "
And, lo and behold, there WERE poll watchers. In fact some of more contentious areas had republican poll watchers.
The only ones who keep claiming there were issues with the election are the ones who were unable to produce even an indication there had been malfeasance in front of a judge.
Some of whom are now in very hot water indeed because their flagrant lying has prompted enough discovery motions to reveal their one and only remaining defense is the Tucker Carlson defense.
At this point in time, Lostin, that lie needs to assume the democrats are all friggin Mission Impossible style super-ninjas able to mind control a nation's worth of bureaucracy.
This is no longer credible. Make up your mind already. Either the democrats are all corrupt and inept or they are paragons of godlike competence wielding superhuman power. They can't be both.
When a conspiracy theory needs to assume the opposition is both contemptibly weak and inept AND of godlike power...that's when you've stumbled headlong into Hitler's old recipe of portraying the scapegoat as both too strong and too weak.
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 10 Jan 2022 @ 8:24am
Re: FTFY
"Unfortunately for these misguided would-be patriots…"
...who walked into the center of the history they claim to hold so high where they then proceeded to shit on the floor and smear the damn walls with it.
I'm afraid the US chapter of the Sturmabteilung aren't so easily classifiable as "patriots"...who through history have all, it should be noted, been potty-trained.
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 10 Jan 2022 @ 8:15am
Re: Re: Re: Re:
"Which also assumes that you are not posting to a site that could also carry out keyword filtering, or somebody reading the post raise an alarm."
True enough. The difference being that intel agencies are more likely to have a squid sitting on the backbone providers rather than the end points. The ISP will be the weakest link bar none for mass data collection. At least for web sites at end points you'll need to do some cross-queries before you can match the keywords against a user - hopefully precluding automated filtering triggering erronous escalation flags in anti-terror agencies, etc.
I'd say the current main points of vulnerability are still ISP's.
And if you're on a sensitive site you should probably not give away your real identity with an identifiable account or browser fingerprinting either.
Being utterly anonymous in all your doing is hard work. What you can do easily is to make sure you aren't feeding everything you do past PRISM, along with your real identity in a ready-bundled package.
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 10 Jan 2022 @ 8:02am
Re: Re: Re:
"If you're going to start shooting people over copyright law..."
Depends. Is the copyright law being used by a government entity who feels said law makes an excellent substitute for old-fashioned censorship? See Erdogan et. al.
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 10 Jan 2022 @ 7:16am
Re: Re:
"But reminder that the Second Amendment is still a thing, even if it's a shitty way out."
With the soapbox, ballot box and jury box being compromised or having failed the cartridge box looks like the only option left, to be sure. That way lies a terrible end but maybe that is preferable than living a terror without end.
To be quite blunt though, the way things look the fourth box will be opened by the most deranged, maliciously and childish of the US citizenry.
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 10 Jan 2022 @ 7:02am
Re: Re: Here We Go Again
"Just like clockwork, you will see yet another Mickey Mouse Protection Act come down the pipeline."
I think PaulIT is on the money a bit further up this thread - the copyright cult knows another extension of copyright is too unpalatable, don't really need it since they can effortlessly muddle the issue sufficiently about any work to make any attempt to put old Steamboat Willie into public domain implausibly hard, and it doesn't feather their bottom line appreciably.
Instead they'll change how the damn thing's defined and enforced. Instead of retooling the legislation build a captured-from-the-start regulatory body with sweeping enforcement powers backed by the governmental violence monopoly. What need to invoke the DMCA by way of expensive lawyers when a weekly list can provide a "government" agency with targets on which to drop the hammer?
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 10 Jan 2022 @ 6:51am
Re: Re: Re: same old song
"Plus, captured regulators impose severe negative costs upon the public."
Seems, once again, to be mainly a "Only In America" problem.
In socialist old europe we somehow ended up with all the "need to have" criteria fulfilled and most of the "nice to have". The US seems to have focused only on the "nice to have" - and that only for those who can afford luxury.
And one of the need to haves that we possess is sensible non-captured government regulation of business.
But to obtain that you also need a government eager to do good enough a job so as to not have to worry about re-election and a body politic eager to cater to the whims of the citizenry rather than the campaign contributors. Neither of which appears to be a possibility in a two party system where the only option other than holding your nose and voting for the ineffective crook is to drop your vote or give it to the horrifying monster.
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 10 Jan 2022 @ 3:53am
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: same old song
[Addendum]
The US has, today, some 2000 companies specialized only in the practices of being consultants for Union Busting. A market niche decidedly bloody unique for the US.
I think you need to face the fact that although a free market may be the only viable driver of prosperity it will need heavy-handed ethics enforcement to come in from outside. Because it will never produce any such on its own anywhere the level needed.
International businesses tend to be the first to learn this and even there I face a lot of cognitive dissonance when I see the conditions my american colleagues work under as compared to my european ones.
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 10 Jan 2022 @ 3:48am
Re: Re: Re: Re: same old song
"I'm sorry you feel that way SDM. When you say "private corporations are inherently amoral", you are painting with an extremely broad brush. In 2020 there were approximately 7 million private corporations in the US alone. "
And every last one of them has, as first priority, making profits. Ethics is something enforced from outside. I have to teach an old american this? Eisenhower, FDR and their contemporaries all knew this.
"I assure you that the private corporations I own and work at are not amoral. "
I work for a fairly major corporation myself and this much I can tell you straight off the bat - if said corporation hadn't realized that operating ethically was the less costly way it would have continued operating exactly as it's 100-year history suggests.
Some 99% of US wealth is tied up into enterprises which by and large only give a passing nod to ethics and morals - and then only if the shareholders feel that nod is worth a 0,01% smaller quarterly payoff.
"Techdirt, where you so often post, is also probably a private corporation."
An NGO may be a corporation in some terms but there's a vast difference in that the resources invested do not come with an expected roi in the form of money.
"Do you think when people cooperate they suddenly and magically become amoral? Do you think it's inherently bad for people to cooperate? I don't."
When the end prospect is money? EVERY time sufficient pelf is involved. I dare you to look at the top ten of the US Fortune 500 and name how many of them don't have a few miles of shady and/or exploitative practices written about them.
Name one major US company with the balls to withdraw from the 1,4 billion-strong market which is China, out of "Humanitarian" concerns. How many lives have been ruined by Big Pharma or the AMA. How well Wall Street tended it's public trust as revealed in 2008.
When the end product is enough money the operators at the top will be the ones cooperating with money as the primary motivator. That's logic so basic it takes religious belief and denial to think the free market has actual ideology.
A free market drives prosperity. It does so by leveraging greed and ambition. The exact same way similar successful organizations in medieval europe leveraged these aspects of human nature, the end result of which was never enlightened monarchies and theocracies. Because when scummy behavior is the best and easiest way of doing business, the scum floats to the top.
"Go pick up a trade journal in any narrow industry - say, semiconductors, dry cleaning, or plastic bag manufacturing. Look at the ads and articles. They're all focused on delivering real value and real service - hundreds of private corporations, some small and others large, all working hard to offer better products to their industry."
Great. Now go look at where 90% of the money is. which is generally outside of the public eye or reach. Small businesses live by word of mouth. Monolithic ones live on being too big to fail.
"Regulatory capture is a real and very common thing. Attempts to regulate particular industries are virtually always captured by the regulated industry."
Only in the US.
I keep saying this because almost every damn time I look at a major market player doing some truly awful shit - like the AMA trying to extort clients until their insurance runs dry, Amazon forcing workers into indentured serfdom, pharma companies hiking prices to a hundred times what they are in Europe...it turns out to be a definitive "Only In America" thing.
Because there's this religious belief in the US that the free market being the most effective driver of prosperity must also mean it fosters benevolence. It does not, and the rest of the civilized world sees this pretty clearly.
"But, please, don't tar all the millions of private corporations with the broad brush of amorality. Yes, there are a few criminals in every country - but most of us are honest."
Most of you in numbers of people? Yes.
I submit to you, humbly, that in a saner world that would also mean most of the wealth was therefore ethically sourced.
That, however, is not the case. The vast majority of wealth isn't handled by small and medium-sized corporations who rely on a good reputation to live. It's generated by corporations so big they don't need to care about "reputation" - or even "working business model" - when for a fraction of the cost that would take to amass they can buy a few congressmen and ensure the major shareholders are untouchable by such vagaries as "competitoon" and "fair practice".
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 10 Jan 2022 @ 3:19am
Re: Re: Re: Re:
"No one is trying to pry a VPN out of your cold, dead hands, man. But people should be more informed, even if that, too, is an uphill battle."
...because "Trust, but verify" is just too damn hard for John Q Doe to grok.
A lot of grift in the US corporate sectors wouldn't even have had air to breathe if it werent for the US cult of ignorance and belief in magical thinking making that nation the promised land of con men and fraudsters. P.T. Barnum could have risen into prominence nowhere else.
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 10 Jan 2022 @ 3:16am
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
"What makes a VPN provider any more trustworthy than an ISP?"
That depends entirely on your ISP.
If I lived in the US I would trust my ISP to pull any shady kind of shit they could possibly monetize on my traffic - whether that was; shaping it to penalize my access to netflix rather than their own streaming service or in order to sell me a "fast lane"; Selling my account details, phone number and browsing habits to a thousand ad providers; or handing my ip addy out to any of a thousand requesters courtesy of some malfing algorithm telling some copyright troll me and the laser printer next door or the apartment laundry-bookin service were downloading their goat porn.
From a US pov I'd want a VPN the same way I'd want to wear pants.
From a swedish perspective where most of that shit is optional and the ISP's actually have good reps, a VPN would more or less be optional save for one thing; It's always better to not having generated a list of logs than to have one given that our intel agencies all put blind faith in mass surveillance and computer algorithms producing suspect registries.
On the post: How To Destroy Innovation And Competition: Putting SHOP SAFE Act Into Innovation And Competition Act
Re:
"Trrademark holders' dream: make everyone liable for everything, then push them into expensive litigation over any accusation - event the most groundless ones."
At the cost, of course, of rendering core segments of the national industry uncompetitive. It's a classic case of strip-mining the business future of the nation you live in.
The fact the US is dropping to near-peer status with China isn't just because China's played their cards right. A lot of it has to do with the US increasingly letting their own major players own markets through protectionist legislation rather than competitiveness.
On the post: How To Destroy Innovation And Competition: Putting SHOP SAFE Act Into Innovation And Competition Act
Re: Re:
"The end result of laws like this is that you will be forced back into real world shopping, as most chains will give up any online store, being caught by the same requirements."
Not quite. The end result is that US companies are gradually forced to withdraw from the global market as a result of such legislation. Leaving Alibaba to step in as the logical replacement.
The US can get to Amazon as they are HQ'd in the US, but where online retail headquartered outside of the US is concerned there are issues of practical enforcement cropping up.
On the post: How To Destroy Innovation And Competition: Putting SHOP SAFE Act Into Innovation And Competition Act
Re: Re: Re:
"Something like a DMCA takedown except reported by customers and it is very easy/obvious to report (obviously need to figure out how to handle the potential problems with that that we see with the DMCA kind!). "
No need to bring the shit-show which is the DMCA into it. The last thing we need is more examples of reversing burden of proof.
As far as I can tell sensible consumer protection laws if enforced, should neatly deal with most of these problems. Amazon's marketplace isn't a social platform. If it mediates money and goods then commercial restrictions and regulations should apply.
Of course that's all just assuming the US has any functional consumer protection laws left. My magic eight ball says that signs point to negative in that regard.
On the post: Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
"Lest we forget, "white" is a construct - it's a frabricated group, containing within a hodge-podge of multiple mixed ethnicities (gaelic, gothic, nordic, italian, greek, slavic, russian, etc.)."
I recall, very vividly, how quite a few years back here in Sweden some of the nationalist and supremacist parties actively invited certain immigrants to join them - everyone who was desperate to fit in - as long as they could be brought to hate the other outsiders.
It's like that old joke;
Way back in the day a journalist travelled to the deep south to interview the chapter leader, blind since birth, of the then most notoriously intolerant branch of the Ku Klux Klan. He sat with the venerated old klan leader, a legend in the klan who despite his lack of sight had led the klan through campaigns of lynchings and cross-burnings, as that worthy expounded for hours on the unworthiness of black and mixed people, the danger of miscegeny, and on how the ungodly heathen ways of african immigrants threatened the living spaces of the white man.
As the right-hand man of the chapter leader led the journalist out of the compound he asked the question "Has no one ever told him?!"
Whereon the right-hand man responded "He cares so much...None of us have the heart to tell him he's black."
And it's not exactly new. Supremacist thought is nothing if not inconsistent. Hitler was so worried about his possible jewish ancestry he had two specific exemptions written into his bill about withdrawing the protections and privileges due citizens of jewish descent for two people - himself and Jesus Christ.
What really matters to these people is one thing only. That they are a tribe hostile to anyone outside of it. As long as you can align your beliefs with the superiority of that tribe and the hatred of the designated scapegoat they will meet you halfway. It's the only compromise you can achieve with supremacists.
The Proud Boys don't have the ideology to be racists. If anything they're like Ernst Röhm's old Sturmabteilung. Thugs looking for an excuse. Losers looking for acceptance. People willing to subscribe to any creed as long as it contains the opportunity to look down on others because being at the bottom of the totem pole isn't fun and dragging other people down is easier than to climb your own way up.
And they are fascists simply because that is the natural state of being of people so frail in ego they need a Führer so they can feel like they're finally part of something way bigger than they themselves.
On the post: Baltimore Police Union Blames City's Murder Rate On Defunding Efforts That Never Happened
Re: Re: Re: Re: unfortnately
"It's the usual cycle."
I wish I could just call you a cynical asshole. But I'd have to address the mirror while saying so. Ugh...😓
On the post: ICE Is So Toxic That The DHS's Investigative Wing Is Asking To Be Completely Separated From It
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
"The catch 22 is that by doing so they lose their own existing base, since there's no way for ideals like equality to co-exist with such a thing."
Would be nice if it was that clean-cut.
Cynically speaking I'm thinking democrats could use that tactic in red states where losing half their old base to independents wouldn't hurt them. And democrats in blue states keep on trucking as per usual while their base holds their nose and keep voting for the shameless rather than the monstrous as they always have. Voíla. One gift-wrapped presidential election.
Of course that would be Humfrey Appleby levels of cynicism. Hardly recommended for anyone not already a moral vacuum.
"If they push any further to the right, especially if they do so by attacking some group as an easy scapegoat for all of life's problems..."
Depends. There's a ready-made target in The Rich - whose "privileges" are defended by the GOP base only because no one's yet bothered to point out just whose fault it is that they are living in the most abject misery.
On the post: Sci-Hub's Creator Thinks Academic Publishers, Not Her Site, Are The Real Threat To Science, And Says: 'Any Law Against Knowledge Is Fundamentally Unjust'
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
"That purely depends on how Active Directory or whatever is configured. It's perfectly feasible that the access granted to a user is done so via a role that contains other permissions, and that a role granted to a certain type of student would contain elevated permissions elsewhere."
I'd have a lot of doubt in setting up a university intranet in such a way that an elevated role would allow access to the backbone. The user roles do not possess dev access. That just doesn't happen.
"False. There are services available to allow SSO access to Elsevier without needing to use a different login. If the SSO login is compromised, then logically so are the services the SSO user has access to, even if under the hood they're separate logins."
...which is why single sign-on is normally used to access any services considered built-in. If Elsevier is linking their login accounts to SSO then that's an extra headache for both the university IT department and Elsevier.
If you want a smidgeon of security what you do is two-step verification. Which is how I have to access every third-party provider outside of the intranet with, for instance.
On the post: Federal Court Tells Proud Boys Defendants That Raiding The Capitol Building Isn't Covered By The First Amendment
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: FTFY
"Poll watchers are a legitimate position. They are members of the parties on the ballot. They sit, or stand, in direct view of the ballot counters as ballots are being counted. "
And, lo and behold, there WERE poll watchers. In fact some of more contentious areas had republican poll watchers.
The only ones who keep claiming there were issues with the election are the ones who were unable to produce even an indication there had been malfeasance in front of a judge.
Some of whom are now in very hot water indeed because their flagrant lying has prompted enough discovery motions to reveal their one and only remaining defense is the Tucker Carlson defense.
At this point in time, Lostin, that lie needs to assume the democrats are all friggin Mission Impossible style super-ninjas able to mind control a nation's worth of bureaucracy.
This is no longer credible. Make up your mind already. Either the democrats are all corrupt and inept or they are paragons of godlike competence wielding superhuman power. They can't be both.
When a conspiracy theory needs to assume the opposition is both contemptibly weak and inept AND of godlike power...that's when you've stumbled headlong into Hitler's old recipe of portraying the scapegoat as both too strong and too weak.
And that's a bad place to be.
On the post: Federal Court Tells Proud Boys Defendants That Raiding The Capitol Building Isn't Covered By The First Amendment
Re: FTFY
"Unfortunately for these misguided would-be patriots…"
...who walked into the center of the history they claim to hold so high where they then proceeded to shit on the floor and smear the damn walls with it.
I'm afraid the US chapter of the Sturmabteilung aren't so easily classifiable as "patriots"...who through history have all, it should be noted, been potty-trained.
On the post: The VPN Is On Everybody's Shitlist After Years Of Scammy Providers And Empty Promises
Re: Re: Re: Re:
"Which also assumes that you are not posting to a site that could also carry out keyword filtering, or somebody reading the post raise an alarm."
True enough. The difference being that intel agencies are more likely to have a squid sitting on the backbone providers rather than the end points. The ISP will be the weakest link bar none for mass data collection. At least for web sites at end points you'll need to do some cross-queries before you can match the keywords against a user - hopefully precluding automated filtering triggering erronous escalation flags in anti-terror agencies, etc.
I'd say the current main points of vulnerability are still ISP's.
And if you're on a sensitive site you should probably not give away your real identity with an identifiable account or browser fingerprinting either.
Being utterly anonymous in all your doing is hard work. What you can do easily is to make sure you aren't feeding everything you do past PRISM, along with your real identity in a ready-bundled package.
On the post: Top Disney Lawyer To Become Top Copyright Office Lawyer, Because Who Cares About The Public Interest?
Re: Re: Re:
"If you're going to start shooting people over copyright law..."
Depends. Is the copyright law being used by a government entity who feels said law makes an excellent substitute for old-fashioned censorship? See Erdogan et. al.
On the post: Top Disney Lawyer To Become Top Copyright Office Lawyer, Because Who Cares About The Public Interest?
Re: Re:
"But reminder that the Second Amendment is still a thing, even if it's a shitty way out."
With the soapbox, ballot box and jury box being compromised or having failed the cartridge box looks like the only option left, to be sure. That way lies a terrible end but maybe that is preferable than living a terror without end.
To be quite blunt though, the way things look the fourth box will be opened by the most deranged, maliciously and childish of the US citizenry.
On the post: Top Disney Lawyer To Become Top Copyright Office Lawyer, Because Who Cares About The Public Interest?
Re: Re: Here We Go Again
"Just like clockwork, you will see yet another Mickey Mouse Protection Act come down the pipeline."
I think PaulIT is on the money a bit further up this thread - the copyright cult knows another extension of copyright is too unpalatable, don't really need it since they can effortlessly muddle the issue sufficiently about any work to make any attempt to put old Steamboat Willie into public domain implausibly hard, and it doesn't feather their bottom line appreciably.
Instead they'll change how the damn thing's defined and enforced. Instead of retooling the legislation build a captured-from-the-start regulatory body with sweeping enforcement powers backed by the governmental violence monopoly. What need to invoke the DMCA by way of expensive lawyers when a weekly list can provide a "government" agency with targets on which to drop the hammer?
On the post: Top Disney Lawyer To Become Top Copyright Office Lawyer, Because Who Cares About The Public Interest?
Re: Re: Re: same old song
"Plus, captured regulators impose severe negative costs upon the public."
Seems, once again, to be mainly a "Only In America" problem.
In socialist old europe we somehow ended up with all the "need to have" criteria fulfilled and most of the "nice to have". The US seems to have focused only on the "nice to have" - and that only for those who can afford luxury.
And one of the need to haves that we possess is sensible non-captured government regulation of business.
But to obtain that you also need a government eager to do good enough a job so as to not have to worry about re-election and a body politic eager to cater to the whims of the citizenry rather than the campaign contributors. Neither of which appears to be a possibility in a two party system where the only option other than holding your nose and voting for the ineffective crook is to drop your vote or give it to the horrifying monster.
On the post: Top Disney Lawyer To Become Top Copyright Office Lawyer, Because Who Cares About The Public Interest?
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: same old song
[Addendum]
The US has, today, some 2000 companies specialized only in the practices of being consultants for Union Busting. A market niche decidedly bloody unique for the US.
I think you need to face the fact that although a free market may be the only viable driver of prosperity it will need heavy-handed ethics enforcement to come in from outside. Because it will never produce any such on its own anywhere the level needed.
International businesses tend to be the first to learn this and even there I face a lot of cognitive dissonance when I see the conditions my american colleagues work under as compared to my european ones.
On the post: Top Disney Lawyer To Become Top Copyright Office Lawyer, Because Who Cares About The Public Interest?
Re: Re: Re: Re: same old song
"I'm sorry you feel that way SDM. When you say "private corporations are inherently amoral", you are painting with an extremely broad brush. In 2020 there were approximately 7 million private corporations in the US alone. "
And every last one of them has, as first priority, making profits. Ethics is something enforced from outside. I have to teach an old american this? Eisenhower, FDR and their contemporaries all knew this.
"I assure you that the private corporations I own and work at are not amoral. "
I work for a fairly major corporation myself and this much I can tell you straight off the bat - if said corporation hadn't realized that operating ethically was the less costly way it would have continued operating exactly as it's 100-year history suggests.
Some 99% of US wealth is tied up into enterprises which by and large only give a passing nod to ethics and morals - and then only if the shareholders feel that nod is worth a 0,01% smaller quarterly payoff.
"Techdirt, where you so often post, is also probably a private corporation."
An NGO may be a corporation in some terms but there's a vast difference in that the resources invested do not come with an expected roi in the form of money.
"Do you think when people cooperate they suddenly and magically become amoral? Do you think it's inherently bad for people to cooperate? I don't."
When the end prospect is money? EVERY time sufficient pelf is involved. I dare you to look at the top ten of the US Fortune 500 and name how many of them don't have a few miles of shady and/or exploitative practices written about them.
Name one major US company with the balls to withdraw from the 1,4 billion-strong market which is China, out of "Humanitarian" concerns. How many lives have been ruined by Big Pharma or the AMA. How well Wall Street tended it's public trust as revealed in 2008.
When the end product is enough money the operators at the top will be the ones cooperating with money as the primary motivator. That's logic so basic it takes religious belief and denial to think the free market has actual ideology.
A free market drives prosperity. It does so by leveraging greed and ambition. The exact same way similar successful organizations in medieval europe leveraged these aspects of human nature, the end result of which was never enlightened monarchies and theocracies. Because when scummy behavior is the best and easiest way of doing business, the scum floats to the top.
"Go pick up a trade journal in any narrow industry - say, semiconductors, dry cleaning, or plastic bag manufacturing. Look at the ads and articles. They're all focused on delivering real value and real service - hundreds of private corporations, some small and others large, all working hard to offer better products to their industry."
Great. Now go look at where 90% of the money is. which is generally outside of the public eye or reach. Small businesses live by word of mouth. Monolithic ones live on being too big to fail.
"Regulatory capture is a real and very common thing. Attempts to regulate particular industries are virtually always captured by the regulated industry."
Only in the US.
I keep saying this because almost every damn time I look at a major market player doing some truly awful shit - like the AMA trying to extort clients until their insurance runs dry, Amazon forcing workers into indentured serfdom, pharma companies hiking prices to a hundred times what they are in Europe...it turns out to be a definitive "Only In America" thing.
Because there's this religious belief in the US that the free market being the most effective driver of prosperity must also mean it fosters benevolence. It does not, and the rest of the civilized world sees this pretty clearly.
"But, please, don't tar all the millions of private corporations with the broad brush of amorality. Yes, there are a few criminals in every country - but most of us are honest."
Most of you in numbers of people? Yes.
I submit to you, humbly, that in a saner world that would also mean most of the wealth was therefore ethically sourced.
That, however, is not the case. The vast majority of wealth isn't handled by small and medium-sized corporations who rely on a good reputation to live. It's generated by corporations so big they don't need to care about "reputation" - or even "working business model" - when for a fraction of the cost that would take to amass they can buy a few congressmen and ensure the major shareholders are untouchable by such vagaries as "competitoon" and "fair practice".
On the post: The VPN Is On Everybody's Shitlist After Years Of Scammy Providers And Empty Promises
Re: Re: Re: Re:
"No one is trying to pry a VPN out of your cold, dead hands, man. But people should be more informed, even if that, too, is an uphill battle."
...because "Trust, but verify" is just too damn hard for John Q Doe to grok.
A lot of grift in the US corporate sectors wouldn't even have had air to breathe if it werent for the US cult of ignorance and belief in magical thinking making that nation the promised land of con men and fraudsters. P.T. Barnum could have risen into prominence nowhere else.
On the post: The VPN Is On Everybody's Shitlist After Years Of Scammy Providers And Empty Promises
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
"What makes a VPN provider any more trustworthy than an ISP?"
That depends entirely on your ISP.
If I lived in the US I would trust my ISP to pull any shady kind of shit they could possibly monetize on my traffic - whether that was; shaping it to penalize my access to netflix rather than their own streaming service or in order to sell me a "fast lane"; Selling my account details, phone number and browsing habits to a thousand ad providers; or handing my ip addy out to any of a thousand requesters courtesy of some malfing algorithm telling some copyright troll me and the laser printer next door or the apartment laundry-bookin service were downloading their goat porn.
From a US pov I'd want a VPN the same way I'd want to wear pants.
From a swedish perspective where most of that shit is optional and the ISP's actually have good reps, a VPN would more or less be optional save for one thing; It's always better to not having generated a list of logs than to have one given that our intel agencies all put blind faith in mass surveillance and computer algorithms producing suspect registries.
On the post: Maryland Court Says Baltimore Prosecutors Can't Hide Their 'Do Not Call' List Of Bad Cops From The Public
Re:
"...the things a person has to do to get on a "do not call" list these days."
Doesn't work too good though. Sure, you don't get robocalls from the DA's office but that Verizon bastard still won't quit harrassing you.
On the post: Court Orders Twitter Reveal Anonymous Tweeter Over Sketchy Copyright Claim, Because That Tweeter Won't Show Up In Court
Re: Re: Re: Re: Friday deep thoughts
I thought the "Useful Idiot" brief was more journalist terminology. That shit's gone legal now? 😱
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