Trying to fix all the possible problems that can crop up in the market with just one tool - anti-trust regulation - is pretty much guaranteed to result in failure; some of the problems are not nails, and need tools other than a hammer.
If business buys itself power from the government through lobbying and regulatory capture, the solution is not to capitulate by dropping all of the regulations which serve to limit business' ability to do bad things; the solution is to fight back, and keep fighting back, for as long as they keep trying to do that. Which, yes, does mean "forever".
Dropping all regulation (or even all except antitrust regulation) wouldn't get rid of the need to fight back forever, either; it would just change the playing field on which that fight would need to take place, and make the fight harder because some of the tools would not be available.
Not all regulations are good. But not all regulations are bad, either - nor even all non-antitrust regulations. Some are critically necessary for reining in businesses.
You're worried about giving government too much power, in the form of regulatory authority, and about what the government might do with that power - but taking away all regulatory authority from the government will only result in businesses having too much power, and doing equally-bad things with it. That's not an improvement.
Even my signature is usually more legible than that, in that I usually make a point of trying to make at least two of the initials recognizable. (Although I admittedly don't always succeed.)
That's actually more legible/recognizable than the last signature from him I saw (on an executive order, I think); this time you can at least recognize the first letter as being maybe potentially a D, rather than being clearly an A.
All the middle letters in the last name are still clearly something in the range from "m" to lowercase cursive "s", however.
Well, to be fair, McCain did appear to be relatively liberal as Republicans go... until he ran for President, at which point he started saying and doing things for the sake of the nomination that lost him most of the respect I had developed for him.
>And while we're on the subject, why do "protected classes" need special laws? Isn't it still a crime to attack another person? If someone is trying to hurt another person, wouldn't it be an obvious assumption that the one doesn't like the other? Why the need for anything defining hate crimes? All violent crimes are a result of hate, are they not?
Because if you hate a class, you have more incentive to commit a crime against someone who is a member of that class than you do against someone who is not, so the standard levels of counter-incentive from the general law may not be enough.
The idea behind hate-crime laws is to provide enough increased counter-incentive to discourage people from committing crimes against members of hated classes, without also unnecessarily (and perhaps harmfully) increasing penalties for crimes that don't need that increased counter-incentive.
Re: "It's a horrible problem that we could do something about, but eh, don't care."
While this is true, if the case at hand was a challenge to the case-management system being used - which is how I read it, without digging deeper than this article - the court's response is still apropos.
I would disagree with this slightly; I don't think the balance of probabilities is that a US police officer is a predator.
What I do think is that the risk calculation tends to lead to the conclusion that you're safer assuming that any given officer is a "bad apple" than not doing so.
If you assume that a good officer is a "bad apple", the best outcome is that the officer proves you wrong, and you go away with your situation (whatever it was) resolved satisfactorily. The worst outcome is that you offend the officer, make him a little more cynical and less likely to trust the public, and push him a little farther towards being a "bad apple".
If you assume that a "bad apple" is a good officer, the best outcome is that he doesn't happen to bother doing anything particularly bad that time. The worst outcome is that you end up dead, and the officer gets away with no meaningful punishment.
Even if we presume for the sake of argument that there are far fewer genuine "bad apple" officers than good ones (or at least ones who won't do bad things unless they're backing up a "bad apple"), the risk/reward calculation here is just so heavily unbalanced that the best decision is almost a foregone conclusion.
Assuming that an officer is good could get you killed; assuming that an officer is bad could offend somebody; and the flip-side positive results don't remotely outweigh the negative possibility of getting killed.
The standard counter to that is that the password itself is not information that would tend to incriminate the speaker; the information which would tend to incriminate is locked away behind the password, but the speaker is not being required to provide that information, only the password itself.
This seems a little twisty, but no more so than many lines of legal reasoning on which perfectly good jurisprudence (and good results) is based. It's still possible to argue against it, and people do, but many judges seem to not be accepting those arguments.
I think the key phrase there is "disparaging another's property rights" - i.e., treating the idea that the other person owns this thing with scorn. Not disparaging the thing owned, but disparaging the rights in the thing owned - or in other words, making it appear questionable whether or not the person actually owns the property.
Claiming falsely that you have an ownership interest in (part of) the property places the other person's ownership of that property in question.
Claiming falsely that you hold a lien on (part of) the property places the other person's ownership of that property in question.
Et cetera.
What Zillow says about such properties does not seem to in any way raise questions about whether the seller actually owns the property being sold. As such, if I'm reading this right, the law you cite would not seem to apply.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Hate to say it, that 'Monopoly' Title has some merit...
I think what he's claiming is that the market in which he's asserting YouTube has a monopoly is not "online video services" but "online video services in which the creators/providers of that video have a meaningful chance of getting paid".
I.e., that the difference between free-but-you-don't-make-money video services and free-and-you-can-make-money video services is so major as to make them entirely different markets for the purpose of determining monopoly status, and that the only player in the latter space is YouTube.
I'm not sufficiently familiar with the field to judge these claims, but at least the latter does look a little dubious at first glance.
I understand the reason for the "qualified immunity" doctrine, but it always seems to me as if it creates a bit of a Catch-22 situation.
First cop does X. Court says "No previous ruling saying you can't do X; qualified immunity." Case does not proceed; no ruling saying "you can't do X" is handed down.
Second cop does X. Court says "No previous ruling saying you can't do X; qualified immunity." Case does not proceed; no ruling saying "you can't do X" is handed down.
If you can't get far enough to get a ruling saying "you can't do X" unless someone else has already gotten one, how does the precedent necessary to strip qualified immunity ever get established?
Specifically, there are cases out there that make it clear that if you're holding a political rally, you have a First Amendment right to exclude those who disagree with you because of your own freedom of association under the First Amendment. The key case here is Hurley v. Irish-American Gay, Lesbian & Bisexual Group of Boston. Trump's argument here is simply that based on this pretty well accepted view of the law, his campaign, at a private event, has the right to stop protestors from speaking and escort them out of the venue.
That's interesting.
My own visceral reaction is "a political rally is not a private event; it's a public gathering", and to reject this conclusion on that basis. I rather suspect that I'm not the only one who thinks of these types of events in this way.
I can, however, see problems with that statement as a potential rule/ruling, and potential reasons why it could lead to undesirable results. That said, the fact that I can see that doesn't change the initial reaction.
Everyone gets to interpret the law. The only question is whose interpretations are and are not binding.
Your interpretation of the law, and mine, is overridden (in practice) by that of the executive branch.
The executive branch's interpretation is overridden (in theory) by that of the judicial branch.
The judicial branch's interpretation is overridden by that of the legislative branch, in the form of passing new legislation - except in cases where the judicial branch holds that the legislation in question is in conflict with the terms of the Constitution, in which case the judicial branch's interpretation prevails.
The way I remember it, part of Microsoft's troubles came in the fact that you *couldn't* entirely remove Internet Explorer, even if you installed another browser and never launched IE at all; it was - and to some extent may well remain, even today - integrated into parts of the underlying graphical shell, as an HTML rendering engine.
The problem there is that they refused to expose the necessary API surfaces for other people to hook in their own rendering engines in place of the IE one. That may have been reasonable as a security decision (malware hooking in this way could be very bad), but it did result in the can't-remove-IE-from-Windows situation.
If the Chrome built-in ad blocker is a discrete module, and you can swap in any other API-compatible ad blocker in place of that module - which I think is what is being suggested - then those factors would not seem to apply.
I don't think that's what the "makes me wonder why let rednecks breed without a permit" was saying.
I think that comment was pointing out that the description "have no education, have what would be considered no future and possibly have no interest in accepting our country or fitting in" sounds like it would apply fairly well to rednecks, or at least to the stereotypical image thereof.
And if we're not going to let that sort of person come into the country, why should we let the ones who are already here reproduce? Either one increases the number of such people in the country, after all; if the goal is to keep the number of such people down, both actions would seem equally justified. Or unjustified, as the case may be.
We do not need to let people from terror prone countries into our country without proper vetting (which these countries cannot provide us with the needed information to conduct).
If all the executive order did was say "if you can't get the information you need to properly vet someone, don't let that person in", that would be barely controversial and we wouldn't even be having this conversation. What country they're from has, or should have, nothing whatsoever to do with it.
The fact that this started out with a list of countries (picked up from an action taken by the Obama administration, at that, rather than devised based on assessing the ability of each country to properly support the vetting process) is a pretty strong indication that it's not even attempting to say any such thing.
Actually, I suspect that a large fraction ("majority" is arguable) of those who voted for Donald Trump were actually voting against Hillary Clinton - in other words, that the decade-plus-long demonization campaign against her by the Republican Party proved effective.
Unfortunately, I suspect that the courts would (and, in fact, may already) interpret the Commerce Clause to grant the authority to regulate commerce in illegal goods just as much as in legal ones - and the Wickard v. Filburn decision, ruling that growing and consuming your own crops affects the interstate market for those crops, means in effect that the federal government has the authority to regulate all vaguely-commercial activity in this country regardless of where its participants are located.
Consequences like that are part of why people continue to argue that Wickard v. Filburn was wrongly decided, but it's been established precedent for a long time now, which makes it ever less likely for the Supreme Court to decide to overturn it.
Re: "A law preventing me from doing something I would never do will be highly detrimental to my ability to do my job!"
Well, to be fair, this isn't necessarily an entirely inconsistent or hypocritical position.
The key is that the change in the standard of proof may serve to prohibit both actions which are abusive, and actionss which are not, and may even be important.
If you believe that the "not abusive, but now prohibited anyway" actions are numerous enough and important enough, it's entirely consistent to argue that the change in the standard of proof is effectively throwing the baby out with the bath water, even if you don't want anything to do with the bath water.
Whether or not you're justified in that belief is another question - but it *is* possible to hold that belief, and if you do, this position would seem to follow naturally.
(The "then throw out or otherwise rein in that small percentage!" argument is an entirely separate question; I don't have any counters for it, and it seems entirely valid to me.)
On the post: Comcast, Charter Join Forces In Wireless, Agree Not To Compete
Re: Re: Don't worry
Anti-trust regulations are a form of regulation.
Trying to fix all the possible problems that can crop up in the market with just one tool - anti-trust regulation - is pretty much guaranteed to result in failure; some of the problems are not nails, and need tools other than a hammer.
If business buys itself power from the government through lobbying and regulatory capture, the solution is not to capitulate by dropping all of the regulations which serve to limit business' ability to do bad things; the solution is to fight back, and keep fighting back, for as long as they keep trying to do that. Which, yes, does mean "forever".
Dropping all regulation (or even all except antitrust regulation) wouldn't get rid of the need to fight back forever, either; it would just change the playing field on which that fight would need to take place, and make the fight harder because some of the tools would not be available.
Not all regulations are good. But not all regulations are bad, either - nor even all non-antitrust regulations. Some are critically necessary for reining in businesses.
You're worried about giving government too much power, in the form of regulatory authority, and about what the government might do with that power - but taking away all regulatory authority from the government will only result in businesses having too much power, and doing equally-bad things with it. That's not an improvement.
On the post: Trump Fires FBI Director Comey
Re: Re: Uhhh...?
Even my signature is usually more legible than that, in that I usually make a point of trying to make at least two of the initials recognizable. (Although I admittedly don't always succeed.)
On the post: Trump Fires FBI Director Comey
Re: Uhhh...?
That's actually more legible/recognizable than the last signature from him I saw (on an executive order, I think); this time you can at least recognize the first letter as being maybe potentially a D, rather than being clearly an A.
All the middle letters in the last name are still clearly something in the range from "m" to lowercase cursive "s", however.
On the post: Trump Fires FBI Director Comey
Re: Re: not conservative
Well, to be fair, McCain did appear to be relatively liberal as Republicans go... until he ran for President, at which point he started saying and doing things for the sake of the nomination that lost him most of the respect I had developed for him.
On the post: House Subcommittee Passes Police-Protecting 'Thin Blue Line' Bill
Re: Re: Not learning from lessons in history
Because if you hate a class, you have more incentive to commit a crime against someone who is a member of that class than you do against someone who is not, so the standard levels of counter-incentive from the general law may not be enough.
The idea behind hate-crime laws is to provide enough increased counter-incentive to discourage people from committing crimes against members of hated classes, without also unnecessarily (and perhaps harmfully) increasing penalties for crimes that don't need that increased counter-incentive.
On the post: Public Defenders Continue To Fight Back Against California's Broken Case Management Software
Re: "It's a horrible problem that we could do something about, but eh, don't care."
On the post: 'Backdoor' Search Of FBI Records Helps Parents Learn How Local Cops Killed Their Son
Re:
What I do think is that the risk calculation tends to lead to the conclusion that you're safer assuming that any given officer is a "bad apple" than not doing so.
If you assume that a good officer is a "bad apple", the best outcome is that the officer proves you wrong, and you go away with your situation (whatever it was) resolved satisfactorily. The worst outcome is that you offend the officer, make him a little more cynical and less likely to trust the public, and push him a little farther towards being a "bad apple".
If you assume that a "bad apple" is a good officer, the best outcome is that he doesn't happen to bother doing anything particularly bad that time. The worst outcome is that you end up dead, and the officer gets away with no meaningful punishment.
Even if we presume for the sake of argument that there are far fewer genuine "bad apple" officers than good ones (or at least ones who won't do bad things unless they're backing up a "bad apple"), the risk/reward calculation here is just so heavily unbalanced that the best decision is almost a foregone conclusion.
Assuming that an officer is good could get you killed; assuming that an officer is bad could offend somebody; and the flip-side positive results don't remotely outweigh the negative possibility of getting killed.
On the post: Miami Judge Says Compelling Password Production Isn't A Fifth Amendment Issue
Re:
This seems a little twisty, but no more so than many lines of legal reasoning on which perfectly good jurisprudence (and good results) is based. It's still possible to argue against it, and people do, but many judges seem to not be accepting those arguments.
On the post: Zillow Sued By Homeowner Because Its Estimate Is Lower Than The Seller Wants To Sell The House For
Re: Re: Slander of Title - Definition
I think the key phrase there is "disparaging another's property rights" - i.e., treating the idea that the other person owns this thing with scorn. Not disparaging the thing owned, but disparaging the rights in the thing owned - or in other words, making it appear questionable whether or not the person actually owns the property.
Claiming falsely that you have an ownership interest in (part of) the property places the other person's ownership of that property in question.
Claiming falsely that you hold a lien on (part of) the property places the other person's ownership of that property in question.
Et cetera.
What Zillow says about such properties does not seem to in any way raise questions about whether the seller actually owns the property being sold. As such, if I'm reading this right, the law you cite would not seem to apply.
On the post: Creative Commons Is Resurrecting Palmyra
Re: Re:
On the post: Here Comes The Attempt To Reframe Silicon Valley As Modern Robber Barons
Re: Re: Re: Re: Hate to say it, that 'Monopoly' Title has some merit...
I.e., that the difference between free-but-you-don't-make-money video services and free-and-you-can-make-money video services is so major as to make them entirely different markets for the purpose of determining monopoly status, and that the only player in the latter space is YouTube.
I'm not sufficiently familiar with the field to judge these claims, but at least the latter does look a little dubious at first glance.
On the post: Prosecutors Overturn More Than 21,000 Drug Convictions In Wake Of Massive Drug Lab Misconduct
Re: Re:
First cop does X. Court says "No previous ruling saying you can't do X; qualified immunity." Case does not proceed; no ruling saying "you can't do X" is handed down.
Second cop does X. Court says "No previous ruling saying you can't do X; qualified immunity." Case does not proceed; no ruling saying "you can't do X" is handed down.
If you can't get far enough to get a ruling saying "you can't do X" unless someone else has already gotten one, how does the precedent necessary to strip qualified immunity ever get established?
On the post: Stop It. Trump's Lawyers Did Not Say That Protestors Have No First Amendment Right To Dissent
That's interesting.
My own visceral reaction is "a political rally is not a private event; it's a public gathering", and to reject this conclusion on that basis. I rather suspect that I'm not the only one who thinks of these types of events in this way.
I can, however, see problems with that statement as a potential rule/ruling, and potential reasons why it could lead to undesirable results. That said, the fact that I can see that doesn't change the initial reaction.
On the post: The US Charging Assange For Publishing Documents Would Be An Unprecedented Attempt To Chill A Free Press
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: bullshit
Almost.
Everyone gets to interpret the law. The only question is whose interpretations are and are not binding.
Your interpretation of the law, and mine, is overridden (in practice) by that of the executive branch.
The executive branch's interpretation is overridden (in theory) by that of the judicial branch.
The judicial branch's interpretation is overridden by that of the legislative branch, in the form of passing new legislation - except in cases where the judicial branch holds that the legislation in question is in conflict with the terms of the Constitution, in which case the judicial branch's interpretation prevails.
On the post: The Weird Antitrust Questions Of A Google Chrome Ad Blocker
Re: Re:
The problem there is that they refused to expose the necessary API surfaces for other people to hook in their own rendering engines in place of the IE one. That may have been reasonable as a security decision (malware hooking in this way could be very bad), but it did result in the can't-remove-IE-from-Windows situation.
If the Chrome built-in ad blocker is a discrete module, and you can swap in any other API-compatible ad blocker in place of that module - which I think is what is being suggested - then those factors would not seem to apply.
On the post: 162 Tech Companies Tell Appeals Court That Trump's 2nd Travel Ban Is Illegal
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
I don't think that's what the "makes me wonder why let rednecks breed without a permit" was saying.
I think that comment was pointing out that the description "have no education, have what would be considered no future and possibly have no interest in accepting our country or fitting in" sounds like it would apply fairly well to rednecks, or at least to the stereotypical image thereof.
And if we're not going to let that sort of person come into the country, why should we let the ones who are already here reproduce? Either one increases the number of such people in the country, after all; if the goal is to keep the number of such people down, both actions would seem equally justified. Or unjustified, as the case may be.
On the post: 162 Tech Companies Tell Appeals Court That Trump's 2nd Travel Ban Is Illegal
Re:
If all the executive order did was say "if you can't get the information you need to properly vet someone, don't let that person in", that would be barely controversial and we wouldn't even be having this conversation. What country they're from has, or should have, nothing whatsoever to do with it.
The fact that this started out with a list of countries (picked up from an action taken by the Obama administration, at that, rather than devised based on assessing the ability of each country to properly support the vetting process) is a pretty strong indication that it's not even attempting to say any such thing.
On the post: 162 Tech Companies Tell Appeals Court That Trump's 2nd Travel Ban Is Illegal
Re: Re: Not enough.
On the post: DHS Boss Calls For More Fear, Less Encryption
Re: Gateway drugs
Unfortunately, I suspect that the courts would (and, in fact, may already) interpret the Commerce Clause to grant the authority to regulate commerce in illegal goods just as much as in legal ones - and the Wickard v. Filburn decision, ruling that growing and consuming your own crops affects the interstate market for those crops, means in effect that the federal government has the authority to regulate all vaguely-commercial activity in this country regardless of where its participants are located.
Consequences like that are part of why people continue to argue that Wickard v. Filburn was wrongly decided, but it's been established precedent for a long time now, which makes it ever less likely for the Supreme Court to decide to overturn it.
On the post: Arizona Governor Signs Asset Forfeiture Reform Bill Into Law, Raising Evidentiary Burden For Law Enforcement
Re: "A law preventing me from doing something I would never do will be highly detrimental to my ability to do my job!"
The key is that the change in the standard of proof may serve to prohibit both actions which are abusive, and actionss which are not, and may even be important.
If you believe that the "not abusive, but now prohibited anyway" actions are numerous enough and important enough, it's entirely consistent to argue that the change in the standard of proof is effectively throwing the baby out with the bath water, even if you don't want anything to do with the bath water.
Whether or not you're justified in that belief is another question - but it *is* possible to hold that belief, and if you do, this position would seem to follow naturally.
(The "then throw out or otherwise rein in that small percentage!" argument is an entirely separate question; I don't have any counters for it, and it seems entirely valid to me.)
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