I think the idea is that there are already enough of them here (legally as well as illegally) that it would work even if we manage to keep all the ones still trying to come here from getting in.
And/or a certain amount of assumption that ramping up to a point where we could completely prevent them from getting in would take long enough that the wall could be paid off in the meantime.
There's any number of holes in the idea, of course - which might have something to do with the reason why it doesn't seem to have been talked about very much for a while.
We have been trying to regulate these businesses as natural monopolies for the past century and it has not worked.
Well, what should we try to regulate them as, then?
Trying to pretend that they aren't natural monopolies (by regulating them as something else) isn't going to work, because natural monopolies is exactly what they are; if these particular companies did not control those natural monopolies, some other(s) would.
Regulating a thing as something other than what it is seems wrongheaded and likely futile, to me - but if you have a reason why doing that in this case would be better (with a sufficiently specific "it" in mind) than regulating the thing as what it is, I'd be interested to hear it.
The watchword on all of that is, or should be, "convenience".
As long as the sum of convenience minus inconvenience on the legal side of the divide is outweighed by the equivalent sum on the illegal side of the divide, people will continue to choose the illegal side. (And, of course, different people weigh individual convenient vs. inconvenient component factors differently.)
Having to pay is an inconvenience; so is risking penalties under the law. Being able to find what you want easily is a convenience; so is being able to access it from any device. There are many others, some on one side and some on the other, and some which apply in different ways to both.
If you want to change the balance of the equation so that people choose the legal side more often, you need to either increase convenience on the legal side, or decrease it on the illegal one.
What the industry companies have seemed to tend to do, however, is to pair each increase in convenience on the legal side with something that also decreases convenience on the same side; for example, pairing legal streaming with mandatory ad breaks, and/or with "you can't get it all in one central place, you have to get our stuff directly from us", and/or with geoblocking.
Adding both a positive and a negative to the legal side of the equation isn't a good way to tip the balance of the equation in that direction.
If any prospective change in what they offer on these matters were assessed in terms of the convenience equation, with price being only one element of convenience, I think that might significantly change the resulting picture.
If I recall correctly, Trump's proposal during the campaign appeared to be to commandeer the money which Mexican immigrants attempt to send home to their families, until the cost of the wall had been paid off. (Thereby also decreasing the incentive to come to the US in the first place, since they wouldn't be able to help support their families by doing so.)
I don't think I've heard so much as one whisper of this since the election. And not much about it as Election Day got close, either.
Last I heard, some relatively small amount of funding had been allocated to repair (and maybe extend) existing, approved fencing designs, none of which come anywhere close to the wall he's talked about. So far as I'm aware, that's as close to anything like construction on a border wall as we've come.
For that matter, if the wall were indeed "going up as we speak", why would Trump be insisting so hard that Congress allocate funds ($25 billion, often cited as the full cost of the project) to it in a bill to fix the family-separation-at-the-border problem?
That's a self-consistent position, although it does leave the problem of "no boundaries on the Court's authority" for reasons already discussed - but then I'd want to ask: who decided that question? That is, who decided that there is no question of law which is not within the authority of the Supreme Court to decide, or (more importantly) for which it is not within the authority of the Supreme Court to decide that the wording of the law does not mean what it appears to mean?
I suspect that you'd point to the Founders, by way of Article III again, and you'd probably be right. That looks to me like a flaw in the design of the system, however, and one which we've only avoided having break the system thus far by the good fortune of having not had a sufficiently corrupt Supreme Court majority for any sufficient length of time.
I'm not sure there'd be any benefit to be gained from pursuing that further, however - we'd probably just end up recursing down the rabbit hole.
I'd be curious to know how that latter teacher would react in the case of a student who legally changed his or her name (or whose parents had it changed), with no gender issues involved.
For that matter, I'd be curious to know how that teacher reacts in the case of students whose last names change, e.g. because of parental marriage or divorce. That happens often enough in the real world that I'd be mildly surprised if it's never happened with a student in his classroom.
My understanding is the only recourse is for Congress to amend the law. If the decision is about the meaning of the Constitution, they would have to amend the Constitution.
But wouldn't the Court be able to decide to ignore the amendment, and still rule as if the amendment were not in effect?
I think the other branches could in theory add more justices to the court to break the (assumed for this hypothesis) corrupt majority, but I'm not sure there wouldn't be a way for the Court to ignore even that...
The only real solution in that case, that I see, would be for the executive branch to start declaring court decisions invalid and ignoring them - and unless extremely circumscribed and temporary, that itself would likewise represent a fatal breakdown of the systems of democracy.
(No response to the rest because I don't really see anything there to disagree with. I'm still curious about whether you agree on the "internally contradictory" thing, but satisfying my curiosity is not essential.)
The article's "Third Party Doctrine" links to the Techdirt tag "third party doctrine" - but the article itself was filed under the tag "3rd party doctrine", so it won't show up in the list you get from that link.
It looks like both variants of the tag have been used multiple times in the past. It would probably be worth standardizing on one variant for the future; it may also be worthwhile to go back to past articles with the other tag and update them to use the standardized form.
Yes, I read the comments, although it was years ago now (when the post was new, or at least new-ish); I've read the comments on virtually every post on Popehat, including the entire archives.
That does shed some more light on things; thanks. (I could see room for objections based on the reputed-to-exist lack of explicit Constitutional authority for the doctrine of judicial review of the Constitutional validity of laws, but that would be another discussion.)
Taken literally and to the extreme, however, that principle would seem to imply that the Supreme Court could make any decision at all - including deciding to completely ignore any law or portion of the Constitution it wants to, even one which was adopted and worded specifically to overturn a previous Supreme Court decision - and the other branches of government would have no recourse. If true, that would seem like enough of a risk/problem enough that we shouldn't just ignore it under the principle of "can't think of a better approach".
Also, to return to an earlier detail which I realized later I hadn't clarified as much as I'd have liked:
Right, and the Supreme Court decides that question.
In the context (of what I wrote that this was in response to), what I parse you as saying by this is "the Supreme Court decides the question of which statements in the Constitution are so clear and absolute that it is not within the authority of the Supreme Court to decide whether or not they are in fact that clear and absolute", which seems internally contradictory.
Even if it's not, that itself seems problematic. If the court sets the boundaries of its own authority, then its authority has no boundaries, which seems both undesirable in a democratic system and counter to the clear intent of the separation-of-powers design of the federal government.
Re a): I'm given to understand that in fact, if everyone else on the road is speeding, and you aren't, you can be cited for unsafe driving. It's considered unnecessarily risky to drive slower or faster than the prevailing traffic, or words to that effect.
Under that same principle, you can in fact argue in court that "everyone else was driving 10 over the limit, so it wouldn't have been safe for me to drive at the limit", and get a speeding ticket dismissed - at least if you can sufficiently prove both that the surrounding traffic was in fact driving at that speed, and that driving slower would in fact have been unsafe.
That may not apply in every jurisdiction, but I believe there are ones where it does, and I wouldn't be surprised if it did in most of them.
Under law, immigrants applying for asylum are not separated from their children.
I've heard it stated, repeatedly, that some people who showed up at the official border-crossing checkpoints to apply for asylum that way have still been separated from their children. (When I search for articles to back that up, however, all I'm finding so far is reporting on the family-separation issue more generally.)
Unlawful immigrants, which by their action in unlawfully crossing the border, have broken a law are, as any other law breaker who is detained, separated from their children.
What about unlawful immigrants who are applying for asylum?
By your statements, they must be both separated (as unlawful immigrants), and not separated (as asylum applicants).
(Also: in "any other law breaker who is detained", that qualifier neatly identifies one critical part of the issue. Not every law-breaker gets detained, or needs to be; the zero-tolerance-policy decision to treat every illegal border-crossing as requiring detention is exactly part of what's being objected to.)
An individual E-mail provider may be (and probably is) a platform, but E-mail itself is a protocol - or rather, an assortment of protocols and standards, which interoperate to enable a particular result.
I see your point, particularly about the lack of ideas for a better system, and yet... wouldn't that argument apply equally well against any claim that the Supreme Court got it wrong in some particular instance, no matter how blatantly inconsistent with the underlying law a ruling may have been?
Yes, our system says that "when there'd disagreement about what a law means and whether it's constitutional or not, the Supreme Court settles that disagreement".
But taking that to such an extreme that pointing out that the Supreme Court has made a decision on the question is sufficient to counter any arguments against the decision and shut down debate strikes me as problematic, in a way at least distantly akin to the onetime tradition of only priests being permitted to interpret (or even read?) the Bible.
The Supreme Court is neither infallible nor incorruptible, though they've come closer to the latter over the course of their history than most other courts I could think of. It's entirely fair to argue, or even simply to assert, that they got it wrong in a particular matter - particularly so when the result of their decision seems to contradict the text of the (part of the) law which should govern the matter at hand.
Such argument or assertion could itself easily be wrong, of course. But saying "authority to decide that rests with the Supreme Court, and they disagree with you" is not a valid way of countering it.
On the post: ICE Rigged Its Vetting Tool To Make Sure It Can Always Keep Immigrants Locked Up
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And/or a certain amount of assumption that ramping up to a point where we could completely prevent them from getting in would take long enough that the wall could be paid off in the meantime.
There's any number of holes in the idea, of course - which might have something to do with the reason why it doesn't seem to have been talked about very much for a while.
On the post: AT&T Begins Testing Its Power In The Wake Of Merger Mania & The Death Of Net Neutrality
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Presumably there is (or used to be?) a way to get HBO with the lower-cost plan, by paying an extra fee above the advertised price.
On the post: AT&T Begins Testing Its Power In The Wake Of Merger Mania & The Death Of Net Neutrality
Re: Re: AT&T monopoly origin
Well, what should we try to regulate them as, then?
Trying to pretend that they aren't natural monopolies (by regulating them as something else) isn't going to work, because natural monopolies is exactly what they are; if these particular companies did not control those natural monopolies, some other(s) would.
Regulating a thing as something other than what it is seems wrongheaded and likely futile, to me - but if you have a reason why doing that in this case would be better (with a sufficiently specific "it" in mind) than regulating the thing as what it is, I'd be interested to hear it.
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Re: Re: A lot of news about UK censorship
It's not even just "affordable and accessible".
The watchword on all of that is, or should be, "convenience".
As long as the sum of convenience minus inconvenience on the legal side of the divide is outweighed by the equivalent sum on the illegal side of the divide, people will continue to choose the illegal side. (And, of course, different people weigh individual convenient vs. inconvenient component factors differently.)
Having to pay is an inconvenience; so is risking penalties under the law. Being able to find what you want easily is a convenience; so is being able to access it from any device. There are many others, some on one side and some on the other, and some which apply in different ways to both.
If you want to change the balance of the equation so that people choose the legal side more often, you need to either increase convenience on the legal side, or decrease it on the illegal one.
What the industry companies have seemed to tend to do, however, is to pair each increase in convenience on the legal side with something that also decreases convenience on the same side; for example, pairing legal streaming with mandatory ad breaks, and/or with "you can't get it all in one central place, you have to get our stuff directly from us", and/or with geoblocking.
Adding both a positive and a negative to the legal side of the equation isn't a good way to tip the balance of the equation in that direction.
If any prospective change in what they offer on these matters were assessed in terms of the convenience equation, with price being only one element of convenience, I think that might significantly change the resulting picture.
On the post: ICE Rigged Its Vetting Tool To Make Sure It Can Always Keep Immigrants Locked Up
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I don't think I've heard so much as one whisper of this since the election. And not much about it as Election Day got close, either.
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Re: Vast?
ISTR using, and arguing for, something quite similar to it myself at one point - on Usenet, of all places.
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Citation needed.
Last I heard, some relatively small amount of funding had been allocated to repair (and maybe extend) existing, approved fencing designs, none of which come anywhere close to the wall he's talked about. So far as I'm aware, that's as close to anything like construction on a border wall as we've come.
For that matter, if the wall were indeed "going up as we speak", why would Trump be insisting so hard that Congress allocate funds ($25 billion, often cited as the full cost of the project) to it in a bill to fix the family-separation-at-the-border problem?
On the post: NY Senate Passes Bill That Would Make It A Crime To Publish Photos Of The Elderly Without Their Consent
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On the post: NY Senate Passes Bill That Would Make It A Crime To Publish Photos Of The Elderly Without Their Consent
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: accepting exceptions
That's a self-consistent position, although it does leave the problem of "no boundaries on the Court's authority" for reasons already discussed - but then I'd want to ask: who decided that question? That is, who decided that there is no question of law which is not within the authority of the Supreme Court to decide, or (more importantly) for which it is not within the authority of the Supreme Court to decide that the wording of the law does not mean what it appears to mean?
I suspect that you'd point to the Founders, by way of Article III again, and you'd probably be right. That looks to me like a flaw in the design of the system, however, and one which we've only avoided having break the system thus far by the good fortune of having not had a sufficiently corrupt Supreme Court majority for any sufficient length of time.
I'm not sure there'd be any benefit to be gained from pursuing that further, however - we'd probably just end up recursing down the rabbit hole.
Thanks for an interesting discussion!
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I'd be curious to know how that latter teacher would react in the case of a student who legally changed his or her name (or whose parents had it changed), with no gender issues involved.
For that matter, I'd be curious to know how that teacher reacts in the case of students whose last names change, e.g. because of parental marriage or divorce. That happens often enough in the real world that I'd be mildly surprised if it's never happened with a student in his classroom.
On the post: NY Senate Passes Bill That Would Make It A Crime To Publish Photos Of The Elderly Without Their Consent
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: accepting exceptions
But wouldn't the Court be able to decide to ignore the amendment, and still rule as if the amendment were not in effect?
I think the other branches could in theory add more justices to the court to break the (assumed for this hypothesis) corrupt majority, but I'm not sure there wouldn't be a way for the Court to ignore even that...
The only real solution in that case, that I see, would be for the executive branch to start declaring court decisions invalid and ignoring them - and unless extremely circumscribed and temporary, that itself would likewise represent a fatal breakdown of the systems of democracy.
(No response to the rest because I don't really see anything there to disagree with. I'm still curious about whether you agree on the "internally contradictory" thing, but satisfying my curiosity is not essential.)
On the post: Supreme Court Says Warrants Are Needed For Cell Site Location Info
3rd, or third?
It looks like both variants of the tag have been used multiple times in the past. It would probably be worth standardizing on one variant for the future; it may also be worthwhile to go back to past articles with the other tag and update them to use the standardized form.
On the post: Lawsuit Argues Honking Your Car Horn Is Protected By The First Amendment
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Yes, I read the comments, although it was years ago now (when the post was new, or at least new-ish); I've read the comments on virtually every post on Popehat, including the entire archives.
On the post: NY Senate Passes Bill That Would Make It A Crime To Publish Photos Of The Elderly Without Their Consent
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That does shed some more light on things; thanks. (I could see room for objections based on the reputed-to-exist lack of explicit Constitutional authority for the doctrine of judicial review of the Constitutional validity of laws, but that would be another discussion.)
Taken literally and to the extreme, however, that principle would seem to imply that the Supreme Court could make any decision at all - including deciding to completely ignore any law or portion of the Constitution it wants to, even one which was adopted and worded specifically to overturn a previous Supreme Court decision - and the other branches of government would have no recourse. If true, that would seem like enough of a risk/problem enough that we shouldn't just ignore it under the principle of "can't think of a better approach".
Also, to return to an earlier detail which I realized later I hadn't clarified as much as I'd have liked:
In the context (of what I wrote that this was in response to), what I parse you as saying by this is "the Supreme Court decides the question of which statements in the Constitution are so clear and absolute that it is not within the authority of the Supreme Court to decide whether or not they are in fact that clear and absolute", which seems internally contradictory.
Even if it's not, that itself seems problematic. If the court sets the boundaries of its own authority, then its authority has no boundaries, which seems both undesirable in a democratic system and counter to the clear intent of the separation-of-powers design of the federal government.
On the post: Lawsuit Argues Honking Your Car Horn Is Protected By The First Amendment
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Re a): I'm given to understand that in fact, if everyone else on the road is speeding, and you aren't, you can be cited for unsafe driving. It's considered unnecessarily risky to drive slower or faster than the prevailing traffic, or words to that effect.
Under that same principle, you can in fact argue in court that "everyone else was driving 10 over the limit, so it wouldn't have been safe for me to drive at the limit", and get a speeding ticket dismissed - at least if you can sufficiently prove both that the surrounding traffic was in fact driving at that speed, and that driving slower would in fact have been unsafe.
That may not apply in every jurisdiction, but I believe there are ones where it does, and I wouldn't be surprised if it did in most of them.
Re b), Popehat would like a word with you.
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I've heard it stated, repeatedly, that some people who showed up at the official border-crossing checkpoints to apply for asylum that way have still been separated from their children. (When I search for articles to back that up, however, all I'm finding so far is reporting on the family-separation issue more generally.)
What about unlawful immigrants who are applying for asylum?
By your statements, they must be both separated (as unlawful immigrants), and not separated (as asylum applicants).
(Also: in "any other law breaker who is detained", that qualifier neatly identifies one critical part of the issue. Not every law-breaker gets detained, or needs to be; the zero-tolerance-policy decision to treat every illegal border-crossing as requiring detention is exactly part of what's being objected to.)
On the post: Activism & Doxing: Stephen Miller, ICE And How Internet Platforms Have No Good Options
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An individual E-mail provider may be (and probably is) a platform, but E-mail itself is a protocol - or rather, an assortment of protocols and standards, which interoperate to enable a particular result.
On the post: NY Senate Passes Bill That Would Make It A Crime To Publish Photos Of The Elderly Without Their Consent
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: accepting exceptions
I see your point, particularly about the lack of ideas for a better system, and yet... wouldn't that argument apply equally well against any claim that the Supreme Court got it wrong in some particular instance, no matter how blatantly inconsistent with the underlying law a ruling may have been?
Yes, our system says that "when there'd disagreement about what a law means and whether it's constitutional or not, the Supreme Court settles that disagreement".
But taking that to such an extreme that pointing out that the Supreme Court has made a decision on the question is sufficient to counter any arguments against the decision and shut down debate strikes me as problematic, in a way at least distantly akin to the onetime tradition of only priests being permitted to interpret (or even read?) the Bible.
The Supreme Court is neither infallible nor incorruptible, though they've come closer to the latter over the course of their history than most other courts I could think of. It's entirely fair to argue, or even simply to assert, that they got it wrong in a particular matter - particularly so when the result of their decision seems to contradict the text of the (part of the) law which should govern the matter at hand.
Such argument or assertion could itself easily be wrong, of course. But saying "authority to decide that rests with the Supreme Court, and they disagree with you" is not a valid way of countering it.
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(The word "Democrat" is a noun, not an adjective. The word "Republican" is both.)
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