Criminal (as opposed to mere negligent and stupid) actions by executive officers can pierce the corporate veil and make them personally liable in shareholder lawsuits.
That's why I wanted the government to charge the officers with a violation of the law. I don't care if they plea-bargain out of it, because the second they're actually found guilty of that, shareholders can sue them for destroying AT&T. For, basically, the entire net worth of AT&T.
I.e., my plan is to punish the company by distributing its money and assets to the people it spied on, which would result in shareholders hold worthless 'goddamn pieces of paper' (ha). Then the government arrests the officers for allowing this illegal activity, and they probably plea out, but that doesn't matter, because now the shareholders can go after their asserts personally.
It also might be fun to impeach them. There's not actually anything in the Constitution that says you can't preemptively impeach people, and thus keep from holding any office of honor, trust or profit from that point forward. People assume there is, but it's already been decided that you can impeach people after they've already left office, and there's no logical reason it wouldn't apply to people before they reach office.
It's not something that governments are supposed to do themselves.
There, I fixed that for you.
And I don't know why we've suddenly starting thinking we should let people get away with crimes because they've committed so many that their punishment is absurd. I mean, if we caught a 9/11 hijacker, 3000+ counts of first degree murder could result in a 10,000 year sentence, or 3000 death penalties, but no one says 'Oh, well, we can't punish that guy then.'.
The telecoms appear to owe more than they are, in fact, worth. The correct move here would be to force them to liquidate all their holdings and stop existing. Set up a trust to operate the company, sell off parts of their network a piece at a time to the highest bidder. Qwest and other ethical companies would step in.
And start criminal proceeding against the officers of the corporations, which should make the shareholder lawsuits against them a lot of fun. (OTOH, it will protect them from the lynch mob.)
I'm sorry, but if this was a human being who'd committed somewhere near, and this is in at the low end of possibilities, one billion felonies, their life would be over no matter how lenient we were to them. If there ever was a logical time to argue in favor of corporate death penalties, this is it.
While retroactive amnesty is legal, it's also worth pointing out, just in case these asshats who call themselves Democrats pass this and we have to kick them, that it's also legal to make things re-illegal. So if we have to kick them out and get a real Congress, we can repeal this.
Under the current theory of 'ex post facto', you cannot increase the punishment for acts higher than what they were at the time the act was committed. The theory is that free people have the right to know how much they would be punished for something. (Or even punished at all.) If they cannot know that (And we're assuming that people cannot see the future.), they cannot behave within the law.
There is nothing, however, forbidding punishment from going down and then back up, as long as it does not increase higher than what the punishment was at the time the act was committed. The telecoms knew it was illegal then, and any challenges to it based on ex port facto would fail.
Ironically, if this actually had been immunity instead of amnesty, it couldn't be recriminalized. You can't revoke immunity unless the person violates their immunity agreement.
Yes. People who think that that the telecoms have the right to tap lines as long as the government isn't involved been to SHUT THE FUCK UP here, because this discussion is about the fact that is flatly illegal, and that is what they want amnesty from!
Dumbasses. Why the hell would we be talking about telecom amnesty if the government were the only entity violating the law? Why would telecoms want amnesty if their actions were legal? How would that make the slightest bit of sense?
I wish the title had used the correct word, 'amnesty'. You at least know the correct word.
Immunity is when you grant someone protection from being prosecuted from illegal actions in the past because of their testimony. The deal is 'You admit you did X, under oath, and we will no longer be able to prosecute you for having done X'. This is used to help go after some one else.
It's not just a 'rule' of immunity that you testify. It's not 'After being granted immunity you are immune to all criminal charges and have to answer any questions asked', it's actually 'After being granted immunity, you have to testify under oath and you are immune to things that you confess to under oath, and only what you confess to under oath.'.
This is why people who have immunity will spill their guts on the stand, because anything they can get out there that's even vaguely related to what they have immunity for they cannot be charged with, whereas if they don't get it out there they can later be charged with it if it's not explicitly what they were granted immunity for.
I.e., if you've been charged with accessory-after-the-fact to murder because you helped bury a body, and you committed a burglary to help further this, and you've been granted immunity to the accessory charge if you testify, you need to confess to the burglary also. Even if, at no point, is this burglary mentioned by anyone. If you do talk about it on the stand, they can't charge you with it later. If you don't, they can. Whatever you confess you just magically made yourself immune from prosecution. (There's some sort of 'connectedness' theory there, in that crimes you confess to must be vaguely related to the thing they were granted immunity for. So don't confess to random crimes you committed years ago, run them past your lawyer first. Although, even if it's not related, they cannot actually use your testimony on the stand (under immunity) against you regardless...they'd have to find evidence somewhere else.)
There is absolutely unequivocally no such thing as 'immunity' that does not involve testifying under oath and admitting the crimes. Immunity is the concept that what you testify to 'under immunity' you cannot be charged with, without testimony immunity is nothing. This bill does not require any testimony, ergo, it cannot, in any way, be considered 'immunity'.
It is amnesty. It is a legislative pardon for crimes that may or may not have been committed with no intention of looking into said crimes.
It would solve it by American auto makers going out of business. That's how the free market solves it when part of an industry doesn't want to change and the market does.
Of course, at that point all the free-marketers will leap in with protections and bailouts, talking about how we must save the American auto industry despite the fact it is, apparently, run by idiots with no ability to do long-term planning.
Of course, I'm not sure we should bother saving it...Japanese car companies provide almost as many jobs in the US.
Ah, you're thinking in terms of global warming, whereas I'm more of the opinion that, frankly, we're going to use all our oil, regardless of what it does to the climate. No matter where we use it, it will all get used, mostly in the next 10-5 years.
So I'm more trying to stop an economic collapse by moving everyone away from gasoline dependency. I have no objection to fighting global warming, but there's almost no way you're going to convince people to leave the last bit oil left in the ground, so trying to 'reduce' oil use won't actually help with that. It doesn't matter if it gets used up in 2010 in an Ford F-250, or used up in 2030 in the 85 MPG supercars we all switched to in 2009, it's still going to put the exact same amount of CO2 in the air and affect global warming the same.
The best way to stop global warming during this running out of oil, BTW, is to stop lunatics from switching to coal.
Another data point: Cars must be maintained to keep getting their MPGs.
I have a older Pontiac Sunbird that used to get 27-29 MPGs. Now it seems to get 23, and I'm doing more highway driving.
I just recently inflated my tires, they were very low, and I'm hoping that was it. I might buy some of that 'engine cleaner' stuff, although I suspect that's a scam.
But regardless, too many people calculate their gas mileage once, and never look at it again. I actually have to keep track of it, as my gas gauge is randomly broken, and my distance is how I know when to get gas. I used go about 325 miles or so on a 14 gallon tank (Obviously not to the end.), now I get nervous around 275.
Raising the MPGs of cars like they just did is an infinitely fairer way of doing it. It forces the used cars that trickle down into the market to be energy efficient. It doesn't hit people who could not possibly afford another car, it only hits new car purchasers and by the time those cars have made it to the poor, the extra costs have been averaged out into society as a whole.
That said, I'm not opposed to doing both, because raising the MPGs has a failure built in: It doesn't encourage people to choose other methods of transport besides gasoline-based.
No, he's saying that governments leveraging markets makes them less free. Duh.
But his point is actually that people who go 'Oh,we'll just have slowly rising gas prices, not any sort of collapse', are ignoring the fact that the US government is working as hard as it can to force prices lower.
And in doing so, is hiding, whether accidentally or on purpose, the actual decrease in supply.
Considering it's a fleet average anyway, it is literally possible to meet this standard without changing a single car. All they have to do is sell much more of their high MPG cars and much less of their low ones. (And, of course, they might want to reflect that in production, too.)
Of course, their high MPG cars suck, and they can't compete with Japan, which is why they're pushing low MPG ones.
Although, on the other hand, the idea of segway-borne light infantry has some interesting possibilities....
I thought you were being sarcastic at first, and then I flashed on a segway with 270 degree wrap-around armor with a little gunport to shoot out of. Strap it to the soldier's body so that they can control it without hands.
Perfect for attacking heavily-defended fixed locations. Obviously, you could use a tank instead, but two or three of those might be a lot cheaper and easier to get where they need to be.
Bingo. Anyone thinks this bill is not a good idea was not alive or awake during the 70s.
People think that the car market has a long lag time, so the auto industry can respond fast enough to changes in the market as gas prices rise.
Wrong. The used car market has a long lag time, in that cars will stay on the road a very long time, but that doesn't help the automobile manufacturers. The new car market switches around near instantly, and we've already see gas-guzzlers sales start to drop.
And it takes a long time to develop new cars and technologies to make them more fuel efficient.
Unless we want a repeat of what happened to the US market in the 70s, except worse, we need to make auto makers get off their ass and actually learn how to competitively produce high mileage cars, as that is the only sort of car people are going to be buying in five years.
I helped my mother buy a new car recently, and her first and second consideration was 'What is the gas mileage?'. Do you think she bought American? Nope, her choice was eventually between Honda and Toyota, because she could actually buy a largeish four-door with 35 MPGs for a reasonable price.
They have a big section of "Radio Shack" stuff - resistors, soldering irons, heat shrink tubing - electronics hobbyist stuff.
And, not to cause confusion, they actually have useful stuff in it, instead of selling five hundred overpriced resistors in individual wrappers or whatever current absurd product selection your local Radio Shack has.
Of course, this all assumes that the current financial system stays as is... when it is as much to blame for the rash of identity theft, as the thieves themselves... because it both makes it easy to establish credit, and difficult to recover one's credit and finances, once they've been compromised.
This will continue as long as we keep calling it 'identity theft'.
Random people getting hold of my personal information is annoying. It sucks, and I'd rather it didn't happen. It is not, however, any form of theft.
What is 'theft' is committing fraud with it to get banks to loan money and whatnot. That sucks for the banks, and I disapprove of it...but it's fraud against the banks.
Identity theft is trying to make us out to be victims, so we 'need to protect ourself'. Fuck that. I'm not a victim, the banks are. The banks themselves then victimize other, random people.
To stop 'identity theft', we need to make banks 100% liable for any harassment of innocent people. We will have instantly stopped 'identity theft'. (Banks may still have a fraud problem, and I have no objections to them asking for some sort of legal help with that, although I suspect they could clear it up simply by paying more fucking attention.)
No shit. There are people here saying that CompUSA has the same selection as Frys. Ha. CompUSA doesn't even Best Buy's selection around here.
I used to always shop at CompUSA. Then I was basically forced to switch to Best Buy and Office Max because CompUSA seemed determined not to actually carry any actual computer parts. Office Max has a horrible selection (Although still better than the absurd disappointment of going a fricking computer store and not finding computer parts.) and Best Buy, is of course, completely evil, so I was immensely grateful when a Frys opened up, but if they were to vanish, CompUSA still would be my last choice.
CompUSA, like Radio Shack, is notable for being a store that will always fail to have what you need when they logically should have it. They're both too busy selling cell phones and overpriced printer cartridges and overpriced audio cables and lights you can plug into a USB socket.
All of which, I should point out, I can buy at Wal-Mart, which is probably why CompUSA has failed.
I don't dispute that is a horrible state of affairs and one deliberately designed to keep us from being free.
I was just disputing that it's a 'police state', as it's not created by the police, it's created by the entire government.
A police state is where the executive is the entire government, or at least can do whatever it wants regardless of the rest of it. Where the police (Or, more often, the military.) can imprison people without regard to what laws actually say, which only can happen if they are not required to put on trials.
You know, like here, if they say you're a terrorist.
Okay, again, I have to point out that a police state is not dependent on the number of laws. A police state is one where the police, or executive branch, can lock people up without charge outside of the law for undetermined amounts of time.
The executive branch doesn't pursue it, because they have limited resources and bigger fish to fry - but those resources come from Congress. Write your Congresscritters and ask them to earmark funding for prosecuting CAN-SPAM offenders. That's the only way we'll see anything happen.
I'd believe you normally, I know how this sort of stuff works, I've seen unfunded laws before, but it seems like no fraud is being prosecuted under this administration at all. And, trust me, all the funding for that didn't magically dry up. Instead, we get people in charge of things that don't know how to do their job and spending all the resources on ideological issues.
That is when someone is actually holding the posts. We've had so many people resign from various agencies that some agencies have been run by Deputy Directors over half the time. And Bush doesn't bother trying to replace them, or attempts to replace them with people Congress would never okay.
Trying to get the Bush administration to faithfully execute the laws of this country is almost entirely pointless. Their behavior is orthogonal to law enforcement. It is orthogonal to any sort of governance at all. Existing law enforcement about bank robberies and kidnapping is sorta coasting because there are career law enforcement officers in middle management, and no one's exerting any sort of pressure on them to stop, but they won't starting doing new things without directives from the top. (Which is not their fault, they are not in charge of what their job description is or to set policy.)
However, I don't oppose earmarks for fighting spam. I just suspect it could be funded at a billion dollars a year and it still wouldn't actually get done in any meaningful sense, because there's no benefit in it. (And before anyone thinks 'It's a cheap and easy way to raise his popularity'...so would have been airdropping water and food to the Super Dome. We've got amply evidence he just doesn't give a damn about doing things because they'd make him more popular, which would be something to admire in other politicians.)
And I'm willing to bet the original law had plenty of funding. How much could it cost? We're talking about less than 20 people, that's how many of the big spammers there are. Even if half of them run in panic...no conviction, but at least they'd stop.
CAN-SPAM is nowhere near the law we need against spam, but, yes, you are 100% correct. As it isn't being enforced, and something like 95% of spam is in violation of it, it's stupid to say 'We need more laws'.
If it was enforced, sure, eventually all spammers would move to operating inside it, but until we have the will to actually enforce that law, the issue is moot.
I wonder how much of the complaints about CAN-SPAM originated when it was first passed, and simply are sorta hanging around as an assumed problem. Yeah, it was, at that time, useful to complain the law didn't do anywhere near enough, and overrode state law, but it's somewhat dumb now, as it's obvious the enforcement of the law is not there. If the law itself was broken, we should see some failed attempts at prosecutions. We don't.
And for people who think it's a distinction without a difference, I must point out that you should complain about enforcement failures to the executive branch, and stop bothering Congress about it.
...wait a second. I just remembered who's in charge there. A more useful solution might be to wait until 2009.
That's the theory that it is best for the economy to wander around breaking windows, because that means more windows will be produced.
It's a fallacy because the point of the economy isn't 'to make more stuff' or 'do more services', it's to end up with more stuff or services.
Or, to put it another way, making stuff and throwing it away is a negative-sum game. Someone makes wealth, someone else loses more wealth. Usually the person with the broken thing. (Aka, us spam receivers.)
A properly functioning economy, OTOH, is not zero-sum, everyone gains as human labor is put towards a productive end, and people are paid for their work and able to purchase goods and services from other people.
Granted, it's often just moving stuff around, so it looks zero-sum, but it's not. As everyone, by definition, values the work they do less than what they are paid for it (Or they wouldn't work.) and values the stuff they buy more than the money they spend on it. (Or they wouldn't buy it.)
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Criminal (as opposed to mere negligent and stupid) actions by executive officers can pierce the corporate veil and make them personally liable in shareholder lawsuits.
That's why I wanted the government to charge the officers with a violation of the law. I don't care if they plea-bargain out of it, because the second they're actually found guilty of that, shareholders can sue them for destroying AT&T. For, basically, the entire net worth of AT&T.
I.e., my plan is to punish the company by distributing its money and assets to the people it spied on, which would result in shareholders hold worthless 'goddamn pieces of paper' (ha). Then the government arrests the officers for allowing this illegal activity, and they probably plea out, but that doesn't matter, because now the shareholders can go after their asserts personally.
It also might be fun to impeach them. There's not actually anything in the Constitution that says you can't preemptively impeach people, and thus keep from holding any office of honor, trust or profit from that point forward. People assume there is, but it's already been decided that you can impeach people after they've already left office, and there's no logical reason it wouldn't apply to people before they reach office.
It's not something that governments are supposed to do themselves.
There, I fixed that for you.
And I don't know why we've suddenly starting thinking we should let people get away with crimes because they've committed so many that their punishment is absurd. I mean, if we caught a 9/11 hijacker, 3000+ counts of first degree murder could result in a 10,000 year sentence, or 3000 death penalties, but no one says 'Oh, well, we can't punish that guy then.'.
The telecoms appear to owe more than they are, in fact, worth. The correct move here would be to force them to liquidate all their holdings and stop existing. Set up a trust to operate the company, sell off parts of their network a piece at a time to the highest bidder. Qwest and other ethical companies would step in.
And start criminal proceeding against the officers of the corporations, which should make the shareholder lawsuits against them a lot of fun. (OTOH, it will protect them from the lynch mob.)
I'm sorry, but if this was a human being who'd committed somewhere near, and this is in at the low end of possibilities, one billion felonies, their life would be over no matter how lenient we were to them. If there ever was a logical time to argue in favor of corporate death penalties, this is it.
While retroactive amnesty is legal, it's also worth pointing out, just in case these asshats who call themselves Democrats pass this and we have to kick them, that it's also legal to make things re-illegal. So if we have to kick them out and get a real Congress, we can repeal this.
Under the current theory of 'ex post facto', you cannot increase the punishment for acts higher than what they were at the time the act was committed. The theory is that free people have the right to know how much they would be punished for something. (Or even punished at all.) If they cannot know that (And we're assuming that people cannot see the future.), they cannot behave within the law.
There is nothing, however, forbidding punishment from going down and then back up, as long as it does not increase higher than what the punishment was at the time the act was committed. The telecoms knew it was illegal then, and any challenges to it based on ex port facto would fail.
Ironically, if this actually had been immunity instead of amnesty, it couldn't be recriminalized. You can't revoke immunity unless the person violates their immunity agreement.
Yes. People who think that that the telecoms have the right to tap lines as long as the government isn't involved been to SHUT THE FUCK UP here, because this discussion is about the fact that is flatly illegal, and that is what they want amnesty from!
Dumbasses. Why the hell would we be talking about telecom amnesty if the government were the only entity violating the law? Why would telecoms want amnesty if their actions were legal? How would that make the slightest bit of sense?
I wish the title had used the correct word, 'amnesty'. You at least know the correct word.
Immunity is when you grant someone protection from being prosecuted from illegal actions in the past because of their testimony. The deal is 'You admit you did X, under oath, and we will no longer be able to prosecute you for having done X'. This is used to help go after some one else.
It's not just a 'rule' of immunity that you testify. It's not 'After being granted immunity you are immune to all criminal charges and have to answer any questions asked', it's actually 'After being granted immunity, you have to testify under oath and you are immune to things that you confess to under oath, and only what you confess to under oath.'.
This is why people who have immunity will spill their guts on the stand, because anything they can get out there that's even vaguely related to what they have immunity for they cannot be charged with, whereas if they don't get it out there they can later be charged with it if it's not explicitly what they were granted immunity for.
I.e., if you've been charged with accessory-after-the-fact to murder because you helped bury a body, and you committed a burglary to help further this, and you've been granted immunity to the accessory charge if you testify, you need to confess to the burglary also. Even if, at no point, is this burglary mentioned by anyone. If you do talk about it on the stand, they can't charge you with it later. If you don't, they can. Whatever you confess you just magically made yourself immune from prosecution. (There's some sort of 'connectedness' theory there, in that crimes you confess to must be vaguely related to the thing they were granted immunity for. So don't confess to random crimes you committed years ago, run them past your lawyer first. Although, even if it's not related, they cannot actually use your testimony on the stand (under immunity) against you regardless...they'd have to find evidence somewhere else.)
There is absolutely unequivocally no such thing as 'immunity' that does not involve testifying under oath and admitting the crimes. Immunity is the concept that what you testify to 'under immunity' you cannot be charged with, without testimony immunity is nothing. This bill does not require any testimony, ergo, it cannot, in any way, be considered 'immunity'.
It is amnesty. It is a legislative pardon for crimes that may or may not have been committed with no intention of looking into said crimes.
And, of course, he's endorsing fucking McCain in the 08 election.
Oh, the free market would solve it just fine.
It would solve it by American auto makers going out of business. That's how the free market solves it when part of an industry doesn't want to change and the market does.
Of course, at that point all the free-marketers will leap in with protections and bailouts, talking about how we must save the American auto industry despite the fact it is, apparently, run by idiots with no ability to do long-term planning.
Of course, I'm not sure we should bother saving it...Japanese car companies provide almost as many jobs in the US.
Ah, you're thinking in terms of global warming, whereas I'm more of the opinion that, frankly, we're going to use all our oil, regardless of what it does to the climate. No matter where we use it, it will all get used, mostly in the next 10-5 years.
So I'm more trying to stop an economic collapse by moving everyone away from gasoline dependency. I have no objection to fighting global warming, but there's almost no way you're going to convince people to leave the last bit oil left in the ground, so trying to 'reduce' oil use won't actually help with that. It doesn't matter if it gets used up in 2010 in an Ford F-250, or used up in 2030 in the 85 MPG supercars we all switched to in 2009, it's still going to put the exact same amount of CO2 in the air and affect global warming the same.
The best way to stop global warming during this running out of oil, BTW, is to stop lunatics from switching to coal.
Another data point: Cars must be maintained to keep getting their MPGs.
I have a older Pontiac Sunbird that used to get 27-29 MPGs. Now it seems to get 23, and I'm doing more highway driving.
I just recently inflated my tires, they were very low, and I'm hoping that was it. I might buy some of that 'engine cleaner' stuff, although I suspect that's a scam.
But regardless, too many people calculate their gas mileage once, and never look at it again. I actually have to keep track of it, as my gas gauge is randomly broken, and my distance is how I know when to get gas. I used go about 325 miles or so on a 14 gallon tank (Obviously not to the end.), now I get nervous around 275.
Raising the MPGs of cars like they just did is an infinitely fairer way of doing it. It forces the used cars that trickle down into the market to be energy efficient. It doesn't hit people who could not possibly afford another car, it only hits new car purchasers and by the time those cars have made it to the poor, the extra costs have been averaged out into society as a whole.
That said, I'm not opposed to doing both, because raising the MPGs has a failure built in: It doesn't encourage people to choose other methods of transport besides gasoline-based.
No, he's saying that governments leveraging markets makes them less free. Duh.
But his point is actually that people who go 'Oh,we'll just have slowly rising gas prices, not any sort of collapse', are ignoring the fact that the US government is working as hard as it can to force prices lower.
And in doing so, is hiding, whether accidentally or on purpose, the actual decrease in supply.
Considering it's a fleet average anyway, it is literally possible to meet this standard without changing a single car. All they have to do is sell much more of their high MPG cars and much less of their low ones. (And, of course, they might want to reflect that in production, too.)
Of course, their high MPG cars suck, and they can't compete with Japan, which is why they're pushing low MPG ones.
Although, on the other hand, the idea of segway-borne light infantry has some interesting possibilities....
I thought you were being sarcastic at first, and then I flashed on a segway with 270 degree wrap-around armor with a little gunport to shoot out of. Strap it to the soldier's body so that they can control it without hands.
Perfect for attacking heavily-defended fixed locations. Obviously, you could use a tank instead, but two or three of those might be a lot cheaper and easier to get where they need to be.
It's a poor man's mech.
Bingo. Anyone thinks this bill is not a good idea was not alive or awake during the 70s.
People think that the car market has a long lag time, so the auto industry can respond fast enough to changes in the market as gas prices rise.
Wrong. The used car market has a long lag time, in that cars will stay on the road a very long time, but that doesn't help the automobile manufacturers. The new car market switches around near instantly, and we've already see gas-guzzlers sales start to drop.
And it takes a long time to develop new cars and technologies to make them more fuel efficient.
Unless we want a repeat of what happened to the US market in the 70s, except worse, we need to make auto makers get off their ass and actually learn how to competitively produce high mileage cars, as that is the only sort of car people are going to be buying in five years.
I helped my mother buy a new car recently, and her first and second consideration was 'What is the gas mileage?'. Do you think she bought American? Nope, her choice was eventually between Honda and Toyota, because she could actually buy a largeish four-door with 35 MPGs for a reasonable price.
That too was going to cost the consumer "thousands" of dollars and also be the end of the American auto industry. Didn't happen.
In fact, if it hadn't passed, there's a good argument to be made that the US auto industry would be royally screwed right now.
I understand the joke, but actually everyone I know pronounces it 'com-pu-sa'. Why, I do not know.
They have a big section of "Radio Shack" stuff - resistors, soldering irons, heat shrink tubing - electronics hobbyist stuff.
And, not to cause confusion, they actually have useful stuff in it, instead of selling five hundred overpriced resistors in individual wrappers or whatever current absurd product selection your local Radio Shack has.
Of course, this all assumes that the current financial system stays as is... when it is as much to blame for the rash of identity theft, as the thieves themselves... because it both makes it easy to establish credit, and difficult to recover one's credit and finances, once they've been compromised.
This will continue as long as we keep calling it 'identity theft'.
Random people getting hold of my personal information is annoying. It sucks, and I'd rather it didn't happen. It is not, however, any form of theft.
What is 'theft' is committing fraud with it to get banks to loan money and whatnot. That sucks for the banks, and I disapprove of it...but it's fraud against the banks.
Identity theft is trying to make us out to be victims, so we 'need to protect ourself'. Fuck that. I'm not a victim, the banks are. The banks themselves then victimize other, random people.
To stop 'identity theft', we need to make banks 100% liable for any harassment of innocent people. We will have instantly stopped 'identity theft'. (Banks may still have a fraud problem, and I have no objections to them asking for some sort of legal help with that, although I suspect they could clear it up simply by paying more fucking attention.)
No shit. There are people here saying that CompUSA has the same selection as Frys. Ha. CompUSA doesn't even Best Buy's selection around here.
I used to always shop at CompUSA. Then I was basically forced to switch to Best Buy and Office Max because CompUSA seemed determined not to actually carry any actual computer parts. Office Max has a horrible selection (Although still better than the absurd disappointment of going a fricking computer store and not finding computer parts.) and Best Buy, is of course, completely evil, so I was immensely grateful when a Frys opened up, but if they were to vanish, CompUSA still would be my last choice.
CompUSA, like Radio Shack, is notable for being a store that will always fail to have what you need when they logically should have it. They're both too busy selling cell phones and overpriced printer cartridges and overpriced audio cables and lights you can plug into a USB socket.
All of which, I should point out, I can buy at Wal-Mart, which is probably why CompUSA has failed.
I don't dispute that is a horrible state of affairs and one deliberately designed to keep us from being free.
I was just disputing that it's a 'police state', as it's not created by the police, it's created by the entire government.
A police state is where the executive is the entire government, or at least can do whatever it wants regardless of the rest of it. Where the police (Or, more often, the military.) can imprison people without regard to what laws actually say, which only can happen if they are not required to put on trials.
You know, like here, if they say you're a terrorist.
Okay, again, I have to point out that a police state is not dependent on the number of laws. A police state is one where the police, or executive branch, can lock people up without charge outside of the law for undetermined amounts of time.
You know, like here.
The executive branch doesn't pursue it, because they have limited resources and bigger fish to fry - but those resources come from Congress. Write your Congresscritters and ask them to earmark funding for prosecuting CAN-SPAM offenders. That's the only way we'll see anything happen.
I'd believe you normally, I know how this sort of stuff works, I've seen unfunded laws before, but it seems like no fraud is being prosecuted under this administration at all. And, trust me, all the funding for that didn't magically dry up. Instead, we get people in charge of things that don't know how to do their job and spending all the resources on ideological issues.
That is when someone is actually holding the posts. We've had so many people resign from various agencies that some agencies have been run by Deputy Directors over half the time. And Bush doesn't bother trying to replace them, or attempts to replace them with people Congress would never okay.
Trying to get the Bush administration to faithfully execute the laws of this country is almost entirely pointless. Their behavior is orthogonal to law enforcement. It is orthogonal to any sort of governance at all. Existing law enforcement about bank robberies and kidnapping is sorta coasting because there are career law enforcement officers in middle management, and no one's exerting any sort of pressure on them to stop, but they won't starting doing new things without directives from the top. (Which is not their fault, they are not in charge of what their job description is or to set policy.)
However, I don't oppose earmarks for fighting spam. I just suspect it could be funded at a billion dollars a year and it still wouldn't actually get done in any meaningful sense, because there's no benefit in it. (And before anyone thinks 'It's a cheap and easy way to raise his popularity'...so would have been airdropping water and food to the Super Dome. We've got amply evidence he just doesn't give a damn about doing things because they'd make him more popular, which would be something to admire in other politicians.)
And I'm willing to bet the original law had plenty of funding. How much could it cost? We're talking about less than 20 people, that's how many of the big spammers there are. Even if half of them run in panic...no conviction, but at least they'd stop.
Pretend I just posted that form letter thing with all the correct boxes checked.
CAN-SPAM is nowhere near the law we need against spam, but, yes, you are 100% correct. As it isn't being enforced, and something like 95% of spam is in violation of it, it's stupid to say 'We need more laws'.
If it was enforced, sure, eventually all spammers would move to operating inside it, but until we have the will to actually enforce that law, the issue is moot.
I wonder how much of the complaints about CAN-SPAM originated when it was first passed, and simply are sorta hanging around as an assumed problem. Yeah, it was, at that time, useful to complain the law didn't do anywhere near enough, and overrode state law, but it's somewhat dumb now, as it's obvious the enforcement of the law is not there. If the law itself was broken, we should see some failed attempts at prosecutions. We don't.
And for people who think it's a distinction without a difference, I must point out that you should complain about enforcement failures to the executive branch, and stop bothering Congress about it.
That's the broken window fallacy.
That's the theory that it is best for the economy to wander around breaking windows, because that means more windows will be produced.
It's a fallacy because the point of the economy isn't 'to make more stuff' or 'do more services', it's to end up with more stuff or services.
Or, to put it another way, making stuff and throwing it away is a negative-sum game. Someone makes wealth, someone else loses more wealth. Usually the person with the broken thing. (Aka, us spam receivers.)
A properly functioning economy, OTOH, is not zero-sum, everyone gains as human labor is put towards a productive end, and people are paid for their work and able to purchase goods and services from other people.
Granted, it's often just moving stuff around, so it looks zero-sum, but it's not. As everyone, by definition, values the work they do less than what they are paid for it (Or they wouldn't work.) and values the stuff they buy more than the money they spend on it. (Or they wouldn't buy it.)