Although Republicans opposed the public option, they were a nonfactor in any changes made to the bill. Those changes were made to appease blue dog democrats
Ah, yes. Let's go with the 'Hey, look, there's a group of people so conservative and lockstep that none of them will vote for someone...and they're totally unrelated to the fact we got a shitty conservative bill.' The fact is that because of the Republican's perfect control of their party and utter unwillingness to to participate, even to the extend of filibustering every possible bill, we ended up with a bill that was a conservative as humanly possible.
This is, of course, in absolutely no way the fault of conservatives. Despite the fact that if a single one of the conservatives (Republican or Democratic) had stepped forward and voted for a public option, we'd have one.
Dude, none of the voters are quite as stupid as you appear to think they are.
If there WAS NO BAILOUT, they WOULD HAVE FAILED. That means they are protesting the bailout.
Erm, you're pretty dumb, aren't you? The bailout was not the problem. The bailout was action to save the country from disaster. No one is protesting the disaster response.
They are protesting the cause of the disaster.
If every decade lions break out of the local zoo, and maul people, causing the local government to have to spend millions on animal control...no one walking back and forth in front of the zoo protesting is protesting the fact we're spending money on animal control. Only an idiot would say 'When the lions broke out, the government should have let the zoo fail by not recapturing them!'.
However, now everyone's wondering why the hell the zoo not only is turning incredible profits, but is actively fighting any attempts to fix security. Some are even saying 'Why did we even return them to the zoo, instead of keeping them? Why don't we now make some laws about how they can keep lions?' They are not protesting the response, they are protesting that no one has fixed anything.
I know in Republicanland, only the government can do wrong, so all protestors must automatically be protesting government actions, so you obviously think they're in the wrong place. The idea that people are protesting corporate action and government inaction must be utterly confusing to you.
Hell, the vast majority of Americans took their "tax stimulus" and shoved it into savings as well instead of spending it.
And the vast majority of Americans just make up total gibberish while arguing.
More relevantly, the vast majority of Americans actually have credit card debt totaling $10,000. And save about 2% of their after-tax income a year, or about $400.
But I'm sure they saved another few hundred when they got their stimulus check just to spite the recovery. It's not like there are unemployed people or anything.
Inflation helps this process, because when the general price level rises, the real price of individual items decrease as long as their nominal price stays constant. So for sellers and employees to maintain the same level of real income, they somehow need to justify nominal price rises. You could think of it as the Red Queen hypothesis applied to economics.
Heh, the problem there is that wages are sticky also, at least in a job market like we have.
But generally you're right.
And, just to put things into perspective, the boom years of the 1950s and 1960s saw inflation around 4% and higher in most Western economies, with nobody (at least not the 99%) complaining about inflation, whereas recently, inflation has crept around the 2% level. That should provide some food for thought as well.
It's too hard to explain any of this to people, because people are idiots, and end up repeating nonsense that's true for the rich, but not for anyone else. Although inflation doesn't hurt 'the rich' per se, who do not have their money in 'money'. It hurts retail stores, who have to constantly deal with being a step behind.
Probably half the people out there complaining about 'inflation' have more debt than cash on hand. Like, oh, anyone who has a mortgage, at all. Which means inflation is helping them, by definition. But they wander around yammering about 'inflation', because they've been told it's bad and told it's happening.
Basically, if people actually wish to understand this and stop repeating weird 'inflation=bad' nonsense, the issue with inflation is not so much as what it does to 'money' that people already have. Almost no actual human beings have enough actual money to worry about that.
The issue with inflation, and deflation, is the lag as the value of money changes in different places at different times. Usually wages vs. prices. Inflation makes the lag go in a direction that is useful to people who buy things in stores.
Also people should understand that having exactly no inflation or deflation is impossible, unless the government can magically predict exactly how much new wealth is being generated and how much old wealth is being destroyed next month, and produce economic policies that create exactly the monetary supply to mimic that. Barring the success of those two independently impossible feats, you're going to get inflation or deflation.
So you're going to get one or the other, and for quite some time, the policy has been 'minimum amount of inflation, but not let it fall into deflation'. (Although deflation did happen in 2009.) I live in constant fear of the day a politician campaigns on 'I will reverse inflation! I will give us 10% negative inflation!', and anti-inflation idiots vote for him.
Erm, the bailouts were loans, and are mostly paid back. I think there's still like 5% out there.
Of course, because the government is in a deficit, we made those loans with borrowed money...money we, of course, borrowed from the banks. So the figures you see tossed around (The TARP only cost $16 billion) do not actually include the fact that, while the banks paid interest on the loans they repaid, we paid them interest in the first place to borrow the money to give to them. (Try to figure that one out.)
But this does not change the fact that any entity that cannot be allowed to fail cannot be allowed to exist, or should be a government operated entity.
In fact, I have to wonder why the hell we don't have a purely 'money holding' bank as a government entity for everyone to use.
I, like most Americans, wish to have place that I can put money to access it later. I don't expect much, or even any, return on this. But I also don't expect any risk.
Some people will cry 'socialism', which is idiotic, because socialism is when the government owns and operates a means of production. It really only applies to goods, not services, despite the fact no one seems to realize that.
And, of course, the government does provide and hold almost all the money in the US...it just does so via the banks. And letting them suck money out of it.
I have no problem with banks making money off assuming risk. They make a $1000 loan to 100 people, 1 guy doesn't pay it back, 99 people pay them back the $99,000 they were loaned plus some interest to bring the total to $103,000 or whatever. I understand that's how banks work, and they should continued to make the loans and provide the interest to people who want risky investments.
I'm just baffled as to what 'please hold this money for me and give it back when i ask for it' has to do with any of that, and why we can't have the government do that. (Because, hell, they're already insuring it.)
Did you know that 90% of the gas tax is paid by 10% of the people? This is unfair to truckers!
Did you know that 90% of the sales tax generated by the purchase of diamond earrings is paid by 10% of the people?
Did you know that 100% of the property tax on my house is paid by 0.0000001% of the population!
Did you know that 90% of people are smarter than you? (Wait, that's true, but not an example of what I'm talking about.)
Just because two numbers are percentages doesn't mean they should be the same, you nimrod. None of those things, including income tax, is a head tax, and hence is not distributed over the population. They are taxes on things, and hence will be paid by the people who have, or buy, or receive, those things, proportionally to the amount. If they have more, they will be taxed more.
Now, with income, it's not proportional. The rich apparently do pay more 'income tax' proportionally than the poor. But it's not 10% vs. 50%, which is utter nonsense to actually us in the same sentence. It's closer to '25% of income gets taxed to make 50% of the income tax revenue'.
But you really don't want to go there, because the rich do not actually pay a higher percentage of income tax. Because a good deal of their income is magically not 'income' and not taxed as such. (So it's more like '25% of income gets taxed to make 50% of the income tax revenue, but those same people are making another 40% of the income that doesn't count as income'.)
The Tea Party AND the Republicans wanted the capitalist solution, which is NOT what occurred.
Okay, first of all, the Tea Party did not 'want' anything to do with the bailouts. The Tea Party didn't exist then, so arguing they magically should have retroactively gotten their way is a bit idiotic.
Secondly, as I said, the bailouts had to happen, or the country would have collapsed harder than it did it. Saying the Republicans were opposed to them as if that's a good thing rather shows how insane the Republicans were.
Third, I love how 'More than half the Republican in the house' has turned into 'The Republicans'. Uh, right. Let's just ignore the fact that more Republicans voted for it than against it.
Fourth, you idiot, the OWS protestors are not protesting the bailout. They're protesting the behavior of the banks who got the bailouts and then refused to loan anyone any money and handed the cash out to the presidents. They're protesting the fact that institutes exist that cannot be allowed to fail. You know, the people they're standing in front of.
Only idiots protest bailouts that save the country. The OWS people are not protesting that. At all.
Every single compromise you bitch about that made the bill a pisspoor handout to insurance companies was done to appease your own base, primarily the Blue Dogs. The Tea Party had NOTHING to do with the resulting bill.
Wow, I don't know how to cope with such stupidity.
Here's a free hint for you: Conservative Dems are just as much a target of the tea party as Republicans. More, in fact.
I love how you've utterly conflated the Tea Party and elected Republican officials, though. Nice to see it actually acknowledged that the Tea Party was 100% a Republican voter thing. Most of them won't admit that. You've managed to go past that and assert they're the same as elected Republican officials, which even I think is a bit silly.
But, perhaps more importantly, the end bill, and specifically the removal of the public option, was the result of several compromises with actual, real, elected Republicans. The fact that they then did not vote for that does not change that.
The fact you think I'm a Marxist is pretty hilarious
Strictly speaking, (3) is indeed something Marx believed.
But that's because it's pretty much a fact. It's happened over and over throughout history. There is only so much the system can dump on the majority of the people before the people just start taking shit. There is only so long that you can pay some of the poor to hold the guns to keep the rest of the poor out. It really does result in revolution.
There are indeed idiots out there who think that mentioning this fact makes people a communist or a Marxist. Uh, no. That happened long before Marx, and it will happen long after.
Marx thought revolutions now would inevitably lead to communism, which was, frankly, rather silly on his part, because it never had managed to do that before. But he thought the industrial revolution had fundamentally changed the rules of how that worked. (Which, to be fair to him, it did, but not quite how he expected. For one thing, he missed the idea of offshoring, which changes a lot of facts about the power of 'the people' and what their labor is worth.)
So, hey, ironically, if anyone's been sucked in by Marxist thought, it's the fools who think the protestors are trying to lead people to communism. If Marx was here, he'd be nodding along with those fools, saying 'Of course this must lead to communism! The workers must seize the country!'. He'd be in favor, and the other fools would be against, and the protestors would just continue to ignore both of those fools and protest for, you know, laws they want passed that results in them actually being able to find employment and pay for the necessities of life.
The fact of the matter is that in the UK at least, the top 10% of earners pay 50% of all income tax.
People are not taxed for their income. Income is taxed, you idiot.
But you get upset if 10% of people who are making 50% of income actually get that income taxed.
You are such a goddamn moron you shouldn't even be allowed in society. Anyone, and I mean anyone, who EVER attempts to compare 'percent of people' and 'percent of income tax those people pay' as if they should be the same thing are lying assholes.
While you're right about the origins and original anger of both...
...at this point the Tea Party is just 'the Republican base' and has lots of idiotic nonsense attached that has nothing to do with anything.
Firstly, the Tea Party seems to had started in opposition to the bailouts. That is fine. I actually think the bailouts needed to happen...and all such receiptients should have been broken up afterward. But I understand the anger, and why people think they shouldn't have happened at all. (And since no one can change the past, it's a moot point. At this point, everyone can agree corporations that cannot fail should not even exist.)
That was the one shining moment of sanity. And then the Koch brothers hijacked them into nonsense. They started complaining about utterly imaginary taxes they thinks were raised, when we're actually under some of the lowest taxes ever. And they seem to think the debt has something to do with their individual financial situation, and that the government should balance the budget, something which has absolutely no bearing at all on any individual. They also demand the government stop 'printing money' and causing inflation, apparently completely unaware that inflation has, for the last for years, utterly and completely stopped. (Because the superich keep sucking money out of the system faster than we print it.)
I'm sorry, but any movement that operates from such ignorance is not very useful, because the demands make no sense. But that was just random stupidity, and could be understood, at least. In fact, some of that stupidity has shown up on OWS, like cries to 'audit the Fed'. Look, idiots, auditing the Fed isn't going to do anything. The Fed is doing nothing illegal.
But that was ignorance, not malice. It happens in any actual grassroots protest movement.
But then the Tea Party was hijacked (1) to oppose government health care, which had nothing to do with their original complaints. In fact, the cost of health care is the major cause of bankrupcy, so at this point the Tea Party is literally facing backwards in trying to make things better for themselves. Thanks to that idiocrary, we ended up with a 'solution' that essentially let the insurance companies run it. Good work, Tea Party!
Then after that, more nonsense kept getting added. Oh, look, the Tea Party is now against abortion. Or whatever.
And, look, the Tea Party is now the Republican base.
I'm sure there are a lot of Tea Party members out there with basically the same complaints and near identical goals as OWS...and they need to look around at where they are standing, and then need to ask themselves what they actually want. And if, perhaps, they are standing in the wrong protest movement.
1) The 'Tea Party' was never really hijacked. Protests managed to exist outside corporate control for a few weeks. But the second it was given a name, it was in corporate control, it was the very first thing corporations did, making it about 'freedom from taxes' instead of 'freedom to not have our government hand shitloads of money to people who blew up the economy'.
Yeah, I have the feeling trying to talk about this here is a losing battle, because no one seems to know what a psychopath is, but you're correct.
Psychopaths have trouble because they don't actually have any empathy. Psychopaths do not have to kill people, or anything like that. They simply are utterly uncaring about how other people feel in any respect. (And most of them are smart enough to fake otherwise.)
Because they do not understand stuff that is obvious to everyone, they often end up explaining why they did something that was just obvious to everyone.
And this isn't just bad things. Psychopaths often do good things because people are watching, and they know that society says that's what they're 'supposed' to do. But they don't actually think that.
So when you ask them about why they held a door for an old person, their actual reason is 'Because I looked good doing that', but they obviously can't say that, so they'll come up with some sort of reason that doesn't make much sense.
Whereas normal people say, "Uh, because she was having trouble with it, duh."
Normal people automatically act towards each other in a certain way. Even criminals _feel_ that way, even if they ignore it. Psychopaths are doing mostly the same thing, but by rote. They learned the rules and follow them.
For psychopaths, explaining behavior in moral terms is like someone with literally no sense of humor trying to explain jokes. You could study jokes, and why and how they're funny, and laugh at the right places and fool people, but, in the end, if asked to explain, your explanations of any specific joke are distinguishable from people with actual sense of humor, at least with enough analysis.
It also states that anything launched from a US territory or by a US entity is required to operate under the aegis of the US government (or replace US with any other nation-state).
Whatever you mean by 'aegis' there is probably wrong. (And that word isn't in the treaty.)
All the treaty actually says is that all vehicles leaving the US must operate under the US flag, just like sea vessels must in theory. (In practice, sea vessels operate out of random ports, due to the fact that modern navies defend all vessels from pirates. If navies went back to only defending vessels under their own flag, everyone would scrabble back to either a superpower, which have ships everyone, or the country they actually operate out of, which presumably has ships close enough.)
I'm not seeing how that binds them to follow rules set on the US government. The captains of civilian ships are in same category, but they do not, for example, have to allow the right to peaceable assemble.
A spaceship launched from the US has to fly the US flag, and operate under US law. That does not mean they have to operate as if they are the US government. (Which would actually be rather impossible.)
Also, separate from the terms of this particular treaty, treaties have the force of law in the United States.
Um, obviously, the treaty does have the 'force of law', but the treaty doesn't say anything about non-government actors. Uh, duh. The treaty just controls what governments can do.
To actually outlaw human beings from making off with stuff from other countries, a law would need to exist to make that illegal. That law, could, indeed, be in the form of a treaty, but it's not this treaty.
And, just as relevantly, treaties usually don't outlaw specific actions by people (Although they could), they instead require the signatories to pass specific legislation doing that. I.e, the treaty says 'We will outlaw X', not 'X is a felony punishable by two years in jail'. It would be hard to write actual laws in a treaty that would fit inside different countries' legal system. (It has actually happened, but usually in specific treaties between two countries, with a different version of each law for each, not general treaties anyone can sign. For example, if two countries each think the other is not taking the border seriously, they could make a treaty that sets out a specific punishment for violating it under each other's law.)
This treaty neither includes any specific legislation, nor does not require signatories to enact their own version of such legislation.
This does not mean that there is not specific legislation, just that the treaty doesn't require it that I can tell. If there actually are laws about this, people need to point at the laws, not the treaty which is just controlling what the governments can do, and not individuals not working for the government.
That's really a gross simplification, especially when talking about government property. The government retains their claims on many things which they are definitively not in control of because it's a sunken wreck on the bottom of the ocean.
The US government may retain their claim, and, as you point out, may in fact enforce it against people living in the US...
...that doesn't mean that it actually has such as claim as recognized by any other country or international law. And countries are very loathe to enforce extradition for crimes committed outside the territory of the extraditing country.
But as long as he's in the U.S., then he's under U.S. jurisdiction, and what he allegedly did was illegal according to U.S. law.
What he did was certainly illegal, because he was in the military and disobeyed orders. And it wasn't ever abandoned in the first place, the camera never left his possession.
Whether or not it would be illegal for some random civilian to stroll up to the lunar lander and take stuff from it right now under 'international waters' right of salvage is still entirely up for grabs.
Right. There is currently no legal decision about non-state actors taking things from space, but the sanest legal theory appears to be the 'international water' rules, which essentially say that 'As long as someone does not appear to be control of it, it is fair game.' There, as the other poster pointed out, treaties limiting state actors, but that's all they limit. And there's a reason countries can't just 'make laws' saying 'US citizens can't steal stuff from the moon'.
Jurisdiction is not supposed to exist in a bubble around each citizen regardless of where they are. An American citizen in Australia should only be subject to Australian law, not US, because only the Australian government can enforce the law on them.
There are really good reasons for this I'm not going to go into, and there are reasons that attempting to do otherwise will not work in the courts. Basically, if you do not have the power to enforce the law, you do not have jurisdiction, even if you say you do. (This, incidentally, is why 'claimed waters' of various countries expanded...modern navies can 'enforce the law' over them now, whereas before it was essentially 'the horizon'.)
So, in international waters (and space), instead of people, jurisdiction follows craft like a bubble, because those craft voluntarily fly under specific flags, so when you set foot on them, you're under that jurisdiction. This is because someone exists who has specific legal authority to enforce the laws of that country. Usually the captain
But without that person, without some sort of 'government', things floating in the ocean (and space) are without owner and without country, and hence literally have no law apply to them.
The treaties say otherwise, but that's just so other countries can't steal their stuff. The treaties cannot actually create jurisdiction in the absence of actual ability to enforce the law. Ability to enforce the law is what jurisdiction means.
No one appears to be enforcing the law on some random satellite. No one appears to be enforcing the law on the moon.
The moon is actually where it gets weird. Even if the lunar lander was still occupied, an argument can be made that that is a docked ship, and hence has jurisdiction over itself, yes, but none over the surrounding environment, and I'm perfectly justified in running off with their parked moon rover, for example. There's no law against stealing cars on the moon, and a ship parked at an unclaimed island in international waters does not magically extend the island, or even close parts of the island, to operating under that ship's flag.(OTOH, if the American astronauts chase me down, take it back, and detain me, I think it would be conclusively demonstrated they do have de facto jurisdiction, aka, control, over that area of land. And once we accept that, we now are in a debate about how far this jurisdiction extends.)
That treaty applies to nations that have signed the thing. Russia couldn't run off with the lunar lander, for example. That doesn't mean I couldn't.
The treaty doesn't have anything to do with random people, because it was assumed they wouldn't be wandering around in space in the first place. It was assumed they'd be agents of a government, and hence the governments agreeing to do things was enough. There's no treaty provision requiring random people to turn over parts to the correct government, or, in fact, any government.
Now, there might be a law about that, forcing Americans into turning over such objects to the government. But that really has nothing to do with treaty if it does.
There actually is a 'falls to earth' part of the law in the US, the government can demand you return things that fell from the sky, space or otherwise, even if they landed on your property, but that's 'found natural property in the US', and is not really related to 'found artificial property in space'. And there might be a 'moon rocks' law, but I think the government is just working on the theory that absolutely no moon rocks have ever been sold to anyone, ergo, everyone who has them has stolen them.
Things happening in outer space not in an occupied ship or a space station owned by the US are most likely outside US jurisdiction, although this has never appeared in court. To have jurisdiction, a nation must be able to exercise control. If someone is wandering around the lunar lander stealing stuff, could a local deputy stop them? Even in theory? Not really. Ergo, they do not have any jurisdiction, regardless of the treaty. (The treaty is just making sure that other countries won't challenge that lack of jurisdiction.)
Not only that, but it's like suing someone from stealing a half-eaten hamburger from your trash can in international waters.
That's a weird legal theory there.
I'm pretty certain that, legally, as far as anyone can tell, every single thing on the moon right now is 'abandoned property' that could be salvages by anyone, just like if you run across an empty lifeboat drifting in the middle of the ocean.
But I guess the camera was never technically 'abandoned', so this is closer to: Employer told employee to trash something, employee stuck it in his car instead of doing that.
Which is usually not a crime, because if it is one, now there's some magical legal difference between setting it in the trash and pulling it out a second later, and not doing that.
Can the US government prove that he didn't set the camera down on the moon, thus 'abandoning', and then picking it up and taking it, as any random passerby could have? (Not that there were such people on the moon.)
And Jane Smith will just say, see here where Bob Jones signed that he has an annual income of $120,000. How was I supposed to know he was lying? It's a legal document, it'd be mortgage fraud for him to lie.
Well, yes, but what you've failed to notice is it is much less crime. It is a good deal more illegal for a bank to give a loan to someone they know can't pay it back, then for a person to lie about that.
Why? Because banks are supposed to be trusted. They have specific responsibilities under the law to verify this stuff, and especially not to set up a system, official or otherwise, where they make loans they know will fail.
And, of course, you're assuming 'lying' on the forms. Banks gave plenty of loans to people based on crazy hypothetical like 'by the time it resets they will have gotten a better job' or 'the house will have gone up in value so much they can get a second mortgage based on the added value'. That is not a lie, there is no fraud committed there by the applicant.
But banks are not supposed to accept hypothetical like that.
There are actual mortgage forms out there that do not even met any sort of sane leading standards.
I'm sure it'll be easy to get a bunch of the mortgage agents - they'll turn on each other after all and I recall seeing a bunch of web sites reporting on bank memos that seemed to encourage illegal activity back in 2005.
Well, yeah, I don't really care about the mortgage agents. Make sure they have enough of a financial fraud record that means they'll never work in the banking industry again, and go after their bosses.
This is because the 'tea party' is at this point a way to refer to the Republican base. That's pretty much all it is now. (Which on the plus side has gotten it out under the thumb of the moneyed interests it was under, and just back to the normal level of moneyed interests for Republicans.)
Pick any position the Republicans state they are 75% in favor of, and the Tea Party is about 100% in favor of it. The Tea Party is now just undiluted Republican positions. Aka, what is commonly referred to as 'a party's base'.
Republicans politicians say they're 75% pro-life? The Tea Party is 100% pro-life! Republican politicians say they're 75% against earmarks! The Tea Party is 100% against earmarks! (1)
Of course, the difference between 'stated position' and 'actual position' has caused some rather major problems with positions the Republicans are not actually in favor of, but like to imply they are, like letting the government default on its loans, which no sane political party is willing to do. Especially when Tea Partiers have actually made it to office.
1) Apparently not understanding that earmarks are just Congress directing money towards specific projects, and without earmarks, Obama can direct the money as he sees fit. Tea party: Hell yes give Obama the power to do whatever he wants! No earmarks! Woo!
Guys...earmarks and spending are not the same thing.
Okay, I'm just going to have to reply here, because I don't want to repeat myself multiple times.
The 'send a tea bag to congress' was, in fact, a grassroots movement. I do not disagree with that fact at all.
However, as for protests...essentially every early protest of Obama, including pre-Tea Party ones and the first Tea Party-named ones, were organized by Americans for Prosperity and/or FreedomWorks.
Both groups, I must point out, started off as Citizens for a Sound Economy, set up by the Koch brothers.
None of this was 'taken over' by anyone. It pretty much started out that way. If anything, the Tea Party movement has become less controlled by moneyed interests.
Now, there was the Keli Carender protest, which wasn't really a 'tea party' one, but appears to have been an actual grassroots protest set up before all this. And thus some people try to call her the 'first' tea party organized, because she's functionally the only one who wasn't trying to astroturf. But, uh, she really didn't have anything to do with anything. An actual independent protest of spending does not mean that the 'Tea Party' protests weren't manufactured, or are somehow related to her protest.
Exactly. A lot of people do not appear to be aware that banks writing loans to people who they know cannot pay it off is, in fact, a crime called 'predatory lending'.
At least, that used to be a crime. Now it's something we give banks boatloads of money to recover from.
Something like 50% of people who worked for mortgage agents or in loan departments in banks from 2000-2007 should be in jail. I don't mean in a hypothetical 'I wish they weren't around', I mean in the sense they committed actual crimes.
I mean, we're talking about a crime where the criminals are required to notify the government. It's not like banks are secretly foreclosing on homes. The government does have a list, and should look at the loan document and say 'Jane Smith authorized this failed loan also...interesting...put it in the Jane Smith stack'.
The government should be walking around looking at foreclosure notices and pulling up the loan info, and noticing loan officers who have, I dunno, over 10% foreclosures over the last decade, and interview them. And then interview their boss, and their boss, and their boss.
Indeed. Steve Jobs used to make blue boxes to steal from the phone company. Not 'steal' in quotes, actual theft of service. Using actual long distance lines without paying for them.
A lot of people did it for fun, which is somewhat reasonable, I guess. It's one thing to hack on the phone system for fun. I can shrug at that.
But Jobs actually manufactured blue boxes and sold them to others, people less interested in 'phone hacking' and more interested in 'free long distance calls'. Well, Woz built them and Jobs packaged and sold them. That was his first 'user interface', making blue boxes usable and affordable for random non-hacker people. Probably with nice curved corners and a shuffle version that didn't allow you to pick the number to dial.;)
I.e., he was the equivalent of a hacker selling script kiddie tools.
And, years later, Steve Jobs also sold fucking phones that people couldn't install whatever software they wanted on them. Not even something illegal, not something harmful, just people who wanted to play ScummVM games or whatever on their phone.
I don't know exactly what happened in the years between those two Steve Jobs, but I'd also be glad he was gone from Apple if I suspected he was the cause of the walled garden in iPhones. (However, I have actually no evidence this is the case, and I'm not sure why RMS thinks it is. And he was pretty much 'gone from Apple' already from what I understand.)
Yeah, now we have to pay them more money than it costs for hardback books. (Mainly because bookstores can't offer us members any sort of discount.)
And forget comparing them to paperback. Yes, I know part of the hardback/paperback difference is what time you can buy them, and you're paying extra not just for the binding but for getting it early...but ebooks don't go down when the paperback comes out. At least, not when I've check them.
Perhaps ebooks were headed for disaster with Amazon, but the fact is, if they managed to swerve away from that, they swerved right into a tree. What should happen is that bookstores buy copies of ebooks, put them in a publisher-approved DRM, and resell them. The publisher needs to say to bookstores: 'This ebook is $5 for you to buy, and here are the most lax DRM rules we allow, you must wrap it in DRM that does at least that, and other than that, everything is up to you.'
Having a fixed price that is one dollar below hardback retail price , and allowing no discounts or sales or anything, is just utterly idiotic. No one who regularly buys books pays hardback retail price. Everyone gets a discount except the people rushing it to buy the newest Harry Potter the second it hits the shelves. (Nothing against Harry Potter, that's just an example of a book that people who don't usually buy books bought.)
All us other people, you know know, the people who buy 30 books a year and hence might actually buy a eReader and hence might actually be ebook customers, expect discounts and sales and paperback prices for older books (And even lower prices for ebooks.) and stuff like that.
Yeah, I feel the same way. My iPhone would be unusable without the jailbroken software on it.
Not stupid little apps that were rejected from the store, but stuff like disabling push notifications on a schedule. No, I do not want my nighttime music interrupted and the display to come on because CNN says there was an earthquake in Europe at 4 in the morning. I do, however, want a bing and it to be displayed on my screen at 4 in the afternoon.
Or the lockscreen gestures to control music...very useful when I'm busy with something and don't want to look at my phone, especially because the damn volume buttons fell off.
Or the easy-to-access ringer control, because I taped over the hardware switch. It was unacceptably flipping by itself, a disaster waiting to happen when you volunteer backstage at a theater.
Without jailbreaking, I would not have kept my iPhone.
Apple's lockdown is idiotic, and, yes, you're right, it's exactly the sort of crap I'd expect from Apple.
OTOH, the GP was making the point in that Apple's default UI is usually a bit saner, and I would, indeed, expect them to have more terms in their voice recognition...at the expense of not being able to customize them at all.
Phones are not 'containers', a term which was invented by the supreme court to let cops look inside boxes next to people they were arresting. We can debate if that is reasonable or not, but the entire point of allowed container searches was there might be a weapon there.
Cell phones cannot have weapons in them. Well, actually, they might, and if a cop wants to inspect the physical casing of a cell phone, I have no objection. But they cannot have weapons in their data, the data cannot pose any sort of risk to the police.
They are, quite blatantly, as blatant as anything can be without being made of wood, what the constitution means by 'papers'.
Oh, and because they are, in fact, papers, there's something people have missed: What if a cell phone has privileged communication with an attorney on it? Mine does. (Admittedly, it's a civil suit, and would be of little interest of a cop...but they are still not allowed to see it.) Or privileged medical information on it?
And here's a fun question: What, exactly, is the legal difference between a cell phone and a tablet? (If someone says 'can make calls', I must point to Skype and 3G plans.) What's the legal difference between a tablet and a laptop?
Cell phones are document stores. They contain papers. The police cannot read those papers without a warrant.
There might be a few parts of the phone that don't count as documents, like incoming and outgoing call logs. That was the backdoor that allowed police to originally search, because that used to be basically all phones did.
But it's not any more, and as the logs on the phone can be altered and deleted, and the cell phone companies have much better records, so I don't see the point of allowing that. The only thing police should be able to demand they get from a cell phone is the phone number of it. And possible the SIM number or whatever, if they need that. (I.e., they only get to get enough info to uniquely identify it on the telephone network.)
Would you like to point what what law, exactly, stops someone from selling your address, phone number, books you've bought, etc?
From my newest post:
Now, SHOW ME WHERE A LAW COVERS BOOK PURCHASES, or shut the hell up and stop pretending random google searches prove your point.
Yeah, I sure 'moved the goal posts', you idiot.
The law forbids no one from selling your name. The law forbids no one from selling your address. The law forbids no one from selling your book purchases. Hell, the law doesn't prevent them from just outright publishing that info to the entire world. (It might stop them from doing that with your email address, I do not know.)
You seem to think citing random legal overviews of the privacy law you found on Google disproves this. You know how to prove something is illegal? You cite the actual law making it such.
But, oh, I forgot, I 'moved the goalposts' from 'Show me what law makes selling book purchases and address and phone numbers to third parties' to, uh, 'Show me what law makes selling book purchases to third parties' . (Perhaps in your head that's only illegal if addresses and phone numbers are sold with it, or something.) Well, I will happily amend that back to the original if that is what concerns you:
Would you like to point what what law, EXACTLY, stops someone from selling your address, phone number, books you've bought, etc?
It is not permissible to produce a big list of links that have absolutely nothing to do with such a law in response. You must cite exactly a law, which is done by saying something like US Code Title 15 Chapter 1 3. (Or multiple such law that, together, do this.)
If this is difficult, be aware that on almost every page you linked to, such laws were correctly cited, and you can just copy their cite. Of course, the law on those pages had nothing to do with the issue at hand.
Slashdot Mirror
Although Republicans opposed the public option, they were a nonfactor in any changes made to the bill. Those changes were made to appease blue dog democrats
Ah, yes. Let's go with the 'Hey, look, there's a group of people so conservative and lockstep that none of them will vote for someone...and they're totally unrelated to the fact we got a shitty conservative bill.' The fact is that because of the Republican's perfect control of their party and utter unwillingness to to participate, even to the extend of filibustering every possible bill, we ended up with a bill that was a conservative as humanly possible.
This is, of course, in absolutely no way the fault of conservatives. Despite the fact that if a single one of the conservatives (Republican or Democratic) had stepped forward and voted for a public option, we'd have one.
Dude, none of the voters are quite as stupid as you appear to think they are.
If there WAS NO BAILOUT, they WOULD HAVE FAILED. That means they are protesting the bailout.
Erm, you're pretty dumb, aren't you? The bailout was not the problem. The bailout was action to save the country from disaster. No one is protesting the disaster response.
They are protesting the cause of the disaster.
If every decade lions break out of the local zoo, and maul people, causing the local government to have to spend millions on animal control...no one walking back and forth in front of the zoo protesting is protesting the fact we're spending money on animal control. Only an idiot would say 'When the lions broke out, the government should have let the zoo fail by not recapturing them!'.
However, now everyone's wondering why the hell the zoo not only is turning incredible profits, but is actively fighting any attempts to fix security. Some are even saying 'Why did we even return them to the zoo, instead of keeping them? Why don't we now make some laws about how they can keep lions?' They are not protesting the response, they are protesting that no one has fixed anything.
I know in Republicanland, only the government can do wrong, so all protestors must automatically be protesting government actions, so you obviously think they're in the wrong place. The idea that people are protesting corporate action and government inaction must be utterly confusing to you.
Hell, the vast majority of Americans took their "tax stimulus" and shoved it into savings as well instead of spending it.
And the vast majority of Americans just make up total gibberish while arguing.
More relevantly, the vast majority of Americans actually have credit card debt totaling $10,000. And save about 2% of their after-tax income a year, or about $400.
But I'm sure they saved another few hundred when they got their stimulus check just to spite the recovery. It's not like there are unemployed people or anything.
Inflation helps this process, because when the general price level rises, the real price of individual items decrease as long as their nominal price stays constant. So for sellers and employees to maintain the same level of real income, they somehow need to justify nominal price rises. You could think of it as the Red Queen hypothesis applied to economics.
Heh, the problem there is that wages are sticky also, at least in a job market like we have.
But generally you're right.
And, just to put things into perspective, the boom years of the 1950s and 1960s saw inflation around 4% and higher in most Western economies, with nobody (at least not the 99%) complaining about inflation, whereas recently, inflation has crept around the 2% level. That should provide some food for thought as well.
It's too hard to explain any of this to people, because people are idiots, and end up repeating nonsense that's true for the rich, but not for anyone else. Although inflation doesn't hurt 'the rich' per se, who do not have their money in 'money'. It hurts retail stores, who have to constantly deal with being a step behind.
Probably half the people out there complaining about 'inflation' have more debt than cash on hand. Like, oh, anyone who has a mortgage, at all. Which means inflation is helping them, by definition. But they wander around yammering about 'inflation', because they've been told it's bad and told it's happening.
Basically, if people actually wish to understand this and stop repeating weird 'inflation=bad' nonsense, the issue with inflation is not so much as what it does to 'money' that people already have. Almost no actual human beings have enough actual money to worry about that.
The issue with inflation, and deflation, is the lag as the value of money changes in different places at different times. Usually wages vs. prices. Inflation makes the lag go in a direction that is useful to people who buy things in stores.
Also people should understand that having exactly no inflation or deflation is impossible, unless the government can magically predict exactly how much new wealth is being generated and how much old wealth is being destroyed next month, and produce economic policies that create exactly the monetary supply to mimic that. Barring the success of those two independently impossible feats, you're going to get inflation or deflation.
So you're going to get one or the other, and for quite some time, the policy has been 'minimum amount of inflation, but not let it fall into deflation'. (Although deflation did happen in 2009.) I live in constant fear of the day a politician campaigns on 'I will reverse inflation! I will give us 10% negative inflation!', and anti-inflation idiots vote for him.
Erm, the bailouts were loans, and are mostly paid back. I think there's still like 5% out there.
Of course, because the government is in a deficit, we made those loans with borrowed money...money we, of course, borrowed from the banks. So the figures you see tossed around (The TARP only cost $16 billion) do not actually include the fact that, while the banks paid interest on the loans they repaid, we paid them interest in the first place to borrow the money to give to them. (Try to figure that one out.)
But this does not change the fact that any entity that cannot be allowed to fail cannot be allowed to exist, or should be a government operated entity.
In fact, I have to wonder why the hell we don't have a purely 'money holding' bank as a government entity for everyone to use.
I, like most Americans, wish to have place that I can put money to access it later. I don't expect much, or even any, return on this. But I also don't expect any risk.
Some people will cry 'socialism', which is idiotic, because socialism is when the government owns and operates a means of production. It really only applies to goods, not services, despite the fact no one seems to realize that.
And, of course, the government does provide and hold almost all the money in the US...it just does so via the banks. And letting them suck money out of it.
I have no problem with banks making money off assuming risk. They make a $1000 loan to 100 people, 1 guy doesn't pay it back, 99 people pay them back the $99,000 they were loaned plus some interest to bring the total to $103,000 or whatever. I understand that's how banks work, and they should continued to make the loans and provide the interest to people who want risky investments.
I'm just baffled as to what 'please hold this money for me and give it back when i ask for it' has to do with any of that, and why we can't have the government do that. (Because, hell, they're already insuring it.)
Wow, you really are stupid, aren't you?
Did you know that 90% of the gas tax is paid by 10% of the people? This is unfair to truckers!
Did you know that 90% of the sales tax generated by the purchase of diamond earrings is paid by 10% of the people?
Did you know that 100% of the property tax on my house is paid by 0.0000001% of the population!
Did you know that 90% of people are smarter than you? (Wait, that's true, but not an example of what I'm talking about.)
Just because two numbers are percentages doesn't mean they should be the same, you nimrod. None of those things, including income tax, is a head tax, and hence is not distributed over the population. They are taxes on things, and hence will be paid by the people who have, or buy, or receive, those things, proportionally to the amount. If they have more, they will be taxed more.
Now, with income, it's not proportional. The rich apparently do pay more 'income tax' proportionally than the poor. But it's not 10% vs. 50%, which is utter nonsense to actually us in the same sentence. It's closer to '25% of income gets taxed to make 50% of the income tax revenue'.
But you really don't want to go there, because the rich do not actually pay a higher percentage of income tax. Because a good deal of their income is magically not 'income' and not taxed as such. (So it's more like '25% of income gets taxed to make 50% of the income tax revenue, but those same people are making another 40% of the income that doesn't count as income'.)
Ask Warren Buffet if you're confused about that.
The Tea Party AND the Republicans wanted the capitalist solution, which is NOT what occurred.
Okay, first of all, the Tea Party did not 'want' anything to do with the bailouts. The Tea Party didn't exist then, so arguing they magically should have retroactively gotten their way is a bit idiotic.
Secondly, as I said, the bailouts had to happen, or the country would have collapsed harder than it did it. Saying the Republicans were opposed to them as if that's a good thing rather shows how insane the Republicans were.
Third, I love how 'More than half the Republican in the house' has turned into 'The Republicans'. Uh, right. Let's just ignore the fact that more Republicans voted for it than against it.
Fourth, you idiot, the OWS protestors are not protesting the bailout. They're protesting the behavior of the banks who got the bailouts and then refused to loan anyone any money and handed the cash out to the presidents. They're protesting the fact that institutes exist that cannot be allowed to fail. You know, the people they're standing in front of.
Only idiots protest bailouts that save the country. The OWS people are not protesting that. At all.
Every single compromise you bitch about that made the bill a pisspoor handout to insurance companies was done to appease your own base, primarily the Blue Dogs. The Tea Party had NOTHING to do with the resulting bill.
Wow, I don't know how to cope with such stupidity.
Here's a free hint for you: Conservative Dems are just as much a target of the tea party as Republicans. More, in fact.
I love how you've utterly conflated the Tea Party and elected Republican officials, though. Nice to see it actually acknowledged that the Tea Party was 100% a Republican voter thing. Most of them won't admit that. You've managed to go past that and assert they're the same as elected Republican officials, which even I think is a bit silly.
But, perhaps more importantly, the end bill, and specifically the removal of the public option, was the result of several compromises with actual, real, elected Republicans. The fact that they then did not vote for that does not change that.
The fact you think I'm a Marxist is pretty hilarious
Strictly speaking, (3) is indeed something Marx believed.
But that's because it's pretty much a fact. It's happened over and over throughout history. There is only so much the system can dump on the majority of the people before the people just start taking shit. There is only so long that you can pay some of the poor to hold the guns to keep the rest of the poor out. It really does result in revolution.
There are indeed idiots out there who think that mentioning this fact makes people a communist or a Marxist. Uh, no. That happened long before Marx, and it will happen long after.
Marx thought revolutions now would inevitably lead to communism, which was, frankly, rather silly on his part, because it never had managed to do that before. But he thought the industrial revolution had fundamentally changed the rules of how that worked. (Which, to be fair to him, it did, but not quite how he expected. For one thing, he missed the idea of offshoring, which changes a lot of facts about the power of 'the people' and what their labor is worth.)
So, hey, ironically, if anyone's been sucked in by Marxist thought, it's the fools who think the protestors are trying to lead people to communism. If Marx was here, he'd be nodding along with those fools, saying 'Of course this must lead to communism! The workers must seize the country!'. He'd be in favor, and the other fools would be against, and the protestors would just continue to ignore both of those fools and protest for, you know, laws they want passed that results in them actually being able to find employment and pay for the necessities of life.
The fact of the matter is that in the UK at least, the top 10% of earners pay 50% of all income tax.
People are not taxed for their income. Income is taxed, you idiot.
But you get upset if 10% of people who are making 50% of income actually get that income taxed.
You are such a goddamn moron you shouldn't even be allowed in society. Anyone, and I mean anyone, who EVER attempts to compare 'percent of people' and 'percent of income tax those people pay' as if they should be the same thing are lying assholes.
While you're right about the origins and original anger of both...
Firstly, the Tea Party seems to had started in opposition to the bailouts. That is fine. I actually think the bailouts needed to happen...and all such receiptients should have been broken up afterward. But I understand the anger, and why people think they shouldn't have happened at all. (And since no one can change the past, it's a moot point. At this point, everyone can agree corporations that cannot fail should not even exist.)
That was the one shining moment of sanity. And then the Koch brothers hijacked them into nonsense. They started complaining about utterly imaginary taxes they thinks were raised, when we're actually under some of the lowest taxes ever. And they seem to think the debt has something to do with their individual financial situation, and that the government should balance the budget, something which has absolutely no bearing at all on any individual. They also demand the government stop 'printing money' and causing inflation, apparently completely unaware that inflation has, for the last for years, utterly and completely stopped. (Because the superich keep sucking money out of the system faster than we print it.)
I'm sorry, but any movement that operates from such ignorance is not very useful, because the demands make no sense. But that was just random stupidity, and could be understood, at least. In fact, some of that stupidity has shown up on OWS, like cries to 'audit the Fed'. Look, idiots, auditing the Fed isn't going to do anything. The Fed is doing nothing illegal.
But that was ignorance, not malice. It happens in any actual grassroots protest movement.
But then the Tea Party was hijacked (1) to oppose government health care, which had nothing to do with their original complaints. In fact, the cost of health care is the major cause of bankrupcy, so at this point the Tea Party is literally facing backwards in trying to make things better for themselves. Thanks to that idiocrary, we ended up with a 'solution' that essentially let the insurance companies run it. Good work, Tea Party!
Then after that, more nonsense kept getting added. Oh, look, the Tea Party is now against abortion. Or whatever.
And, look, the Tea Party is now the Republican base.
I'm sure there are a lot of Tea Party members out there with basically the same complaints and near identical goals as OWS...and they need to look around at where they are standing, and then need to ask themselves what they actually want. And if, perhaps, they are standing in the wrong protest movement.
1) The 'Tea Party' was never really hijacked. Protests managed to exist outside corporate control for a few weeks. But the second it was given a name, it was in corporate control, it was the very first thing corporations did, making it about 'freedom from taxes' instead of 'freedom to not have our government hand shitloads of money to people who blew up the economy'.
Yeah, I have the feeling trying to talk about this here is a losing battle, because no one seems to know what a psychopath is, but you're correct.
Psychopaths have trouble because they don't actually have any empathy. Psychopaths do not have to kill people, or anything like that. They simply are utterly uncaring about how other people feel in any respect. (And most of them are smart enough to fake otherwise.)
Because they do not understand stuff that is obvious to everyone, they often end up explaining why they did something that was just obvious to everyone.
And this isn't just bad things. Psychopaths often do good things because people are watching, and they know that society says that's what they're 'supposed' to do. But they don't actually think that.
So when you ask them about why they held a door for an old person, their actual reason is 'Because I looked good doing that', but they obviously can't say that, so they'll come up with some sort of reason that doesn't make much sense.
Whereas normal people say, "Uh, because she was having trouble with it, duh."
Normal people automatically act towards each other in a certain way. Even criminals _feel_ that way, even if they ignore it. Psychopaths are doing mostly the same thing, but by rote. They learned the rules and follow them.
For psychopaths, explaining behavior in moral terms is like someone with literally no sense of humor trying to explain jokes. You could study jokes, and why and how they're funny, and laugh at the right places and fool people, but, in the end, if asked to explain, your explanations of any specific joke are distinguishable from people with actual sense of humor, at least with enough analysis.
It also states that anything launched from a US territory or by a US entity is required to operate under the aegis of the US government (or replace US with any other nation-state).
Whatever you mean by 'aegis' there is probably wrong. (And that word isn't in the treaty.)
All the treaty actually says is that all vehicles leaving the US must operate under the US flag, just like sea vessels must in theory. (In practice, sea vessels operate out of random ports, due to the fact that modern navies defend all vessels from pirates. If navies went back to only defending vessels under their own flag, everyone would scrabble back to either a superpower, which have ships everyone, or the country they actually operate out of, which presumably has ships close enough.)
I'm not seeing how that binds them to follow rules set on the US government. The captains of civilian ships are in same category, but they do not, for example, have to allow the right to peaceable assemble.
A spaceship launched from the US has to fly the US flag, and operate under US law. That does not mean they have to operate as if they are the US government. (Which would actually be rather impossible.)
Also, separate from the terms of this particular treaty, treaties have the force of law in the United States.
Um, obviously, the treaty does have the 'force of law', but the treaty doesn't say anything about non-government actors. Uh, duh. The treaty just controls what governments can do.
To actually outlaw human beings from making off with stuff from other countries, a law would need to exist to make that illegal. That law, could, indeed, be in the form of a treaty, but it's not this treaty.
And, just as relevantly, treaties usually don't outlaw specific actions by people (Although they could), they instead require the signatories to pass specific legislation doing that. I.e, the treaty says 'We will outlaw X', not 'X is a felony punishable by two years in jail'. It would be hard to write actual laws in a treaty that would fit inside different countries' legal system. (It has actually happened, but usually in specific treaties between two countries, with a different version of each law for each, not general treaties anyone can sign. For example, if two countries each think the other is not taking the border seriously, they could make a treaty that sets out a specific punishment for violating it under each other's law.)
This treaty neither includes any specific legislation, nor does not require signatories to enact their own version of such legislation.
This does not mean that there is not specific legislation, just that the treaty doesn't require it that I can tell. If there actually are laws about this, people need to point at the laws, not the treaty which is just controlling what the governments can do, and not individuals not working for the government.
That's really a gross simplification, especially when talking about government property. The government retains their claims on many things which they are definitively not in control of because it's a sunken wreck on the bottom of the ocean.
The US government may retain their claim, and, as you point out, may in fact enforce it against people living in the US...
But as long as he's in the U.S., then he's under U.S. jurisdiction, and what he allegedly did was illegal according to U.S. law.
What he did was certainly illegal, because he was in the military and disobeyed orders. And it wasn't ever abandoned in the first place, the camera never left his possession.
Whether or not it would be illegal for some random civilian to stroll up to the lunar lander and take stuff from it right now under 'international waters' right of salvage is still entirely up for grabs.
Right. There is currently no legal decision about non-state actors taking things from space, but the sanest legal theory appears to be the 'international water' rules, which essentially say that 'As long as someone does not appear to be control of it, it is fair game.' There, as the other poster pointed out, treaties limiting state actors, but that's all they limit. And there's a reason countries can't just 'make laws' saying 'US citizens can't steal stuff from the moon'.
Jurisdiction is not supposed to exist in a bubble around each citizen regardless of where they are. An American citizen in Australia should only be subject to Australian law, not US, because only the Australian government can enforce the law on them.
There are really good reasons for this I'm not going to go into, and there are reasons that attempting to do otherwise will not work in the courts. Basically, if you do not have the power to enforce the law, you do not have jurisdiction, even if you say you do. (This, incidentally, is why 'claimed waters' of various countries expanded...modern navies can 'enforce the law' over them now, whereas before it was essentially 'the horizon'.)
So, in international waters (and space), instead of people, jurisdiction follows craft like a bubble, because those craft voluntarily fly under specific flags, so when you set foot on them, you're under that jurisdiction. This is because someone exists who has specific legal authority to enforce the laws of that country. Usually the captain
But without that person, without some sort of 'government', things floating in the ocean (and space) are without owner and without country, and hence literally have no law apply to them.
The treaties say otherwise, but that's just so other countries can't steal their stuff. The treaties cannot actually create jurisdiction in the absence of actual ability to enforce the law. Ability to enforce the law is what jurisdiction means.
No one appears to be enforcing the law on some random satellite. No one appears to be enforcing the law on the moon.
The moon is actually where it gets weird. Even if the lunar lander was still occupied, an argument can be made that that is a docked ship, and hence has jurisdiction over itself, yes, but none over the surrounding environment, and I'm perfectly justified in running off with their parked moon rover, for example. There's no law against stealing cars on the moon, and a ship parked at an unclaimed island in international waters does not magically extend the island, or even close parts of the island, to operating under that ship's flag.(OTOH, if the American astronauts chase me down, take it back, and detain me, I think it would be conclusively demonstrated they do have de facto jurisdiction, aka, control, over that area of land. And once we accept that, we now are in a debate about how far this jurisdiction extends.)
That treaty applies to nations that have signed the thing. Russia couldn't run off with the lunar lander, for example. That doesn't mean I couldn't.
The treaty doesn't have anything to do with random people, because it was assumed they wouldn't be wandering around in space in the first place. It was assumed they'd be agents of a government, and hence the governments agreeing to do things was enough. There's no treaty provision requiring random people to turn over parts to the correct government, or, in fact, any government.
Now, there might be a law about that, forcing Americans into turning over such objects to the government. But that really has nothing to do with treaty if it does.
There actually is a 'falls to earth' part of the law in the US, the government can demand you return things that fell from the sky, space or otherwise, even if they landed on your property, but that's 'found natural property in the US', and is not really related to 'found artificial property in space'. And there might be a 'moon rocks' law, but I think the government is just working on the theory that absolutely no moon rocks have ever been sold to anyone, ergo, everyone who has them has stolen them.
Things happening in outer space not in an occupied ship or a space station owned by the US are most likely outside US jurisdiction, although this has never appeared in court. To have jurisdiction, a nation must be able to exercise control. If someone is wandering around the lunar lander stealing stuff, could a local deputy stop them? Even in theory? Not really. Ergo, they do not have any jurisdiction, regardless of the treaty. (The treaty is just making sure that other countries won't challenge that lack of jurisdiction.)
Not only that, but it's like suing someone from stealing a half-eaten hamburger from your trash can in international waters.
That's a weird legal theory there.
I'm pretty certain that, legally, as far as anyone can tell, every single thing on the moon right now is 'abandoned property' that could be salvages by anyone, just like if you run across an empty lifeboat drifting in the middle of the ocean.
But I guess the camera was never technically 'abandoned', so this is closer to: Employer told employee to trash something, employee stuck it in his car instead of doing that.
Which is usually not a crime, because if it is one, now there's some magical legal difference between setting it in the trash and pulling it out a second later, and not doing that.
Can the US government prove that he didn't set the camera down on the moon, thus 'abandoning', and then picking it up and taking it, as any random passerby could have? (Not that there were such people on the moon.)
And Jane Smith will just say, see here where Bob Jones signed that he has an annual income of $120,000. How was I supposed to know he was lying? It's a legal document, it'd be mortgage fraud for him to lie.
Well, yes, but what you've failed to notice is it is much less crime. It is a good deal more illegal for a bank to give a loan to someone they know can't pay it back, then for a person to lie about that.
Why? Because banks are supposed to be trusted. They have specific responsibilities under the law to verify this stuff, and especially not to set up a system, official or otherwise, where they make loans they know will fail.
And, of course, you're assuming 'lying' on the forms. Banks gave plenty of loans to people based on crazy hypothetical like 'by the time it resets they will have gotten a better job' or 'the house will have gone up in value so much they can get a second mortgage based on the added value'. That is not a lie, there is no fraud committed there by the applicant.
But banks are not supposed to accept hypothetical like that.
There are actual mortgage forms out there that do not even met any sort of sane leading standards.
I'm sure it'll be easy to get a bunch of the mortgage agents - they'll turn on each other after all and I recall seeing a bunch of web sites reporting on bank memos that seemed to encourage illegal activity back in 2005.
Well, yeah, I don't really care about the mortgage agents. Make sure they have enough of a financial fraud record that means they'll never work in the banking industry again, and go after their bosses.
This is because the 'tea party' is at this point a way to refer to the Republican base. That's pretty much all it is now. (Which on the plus side has gotten it out under the thumb of the moneyed interests it was under, and just back to the normal level of moneyed interests for Republicans.)
Pick any position the Republicans state they are 75% in favor of, and the Tea Party is about 100% in favor of it. The Tea Party is now just undiluted Republican positions. Aka, what is commonly referred to as 'a party's base'.
Republicans politicians say they're 75% pro-life? The Tea Party is 100% pro-life! Republican politicians say they're 75% against earmarks! The Tea Party is 100% against earmarks! (1)
Of course, the difference between 'stated position' and 'actual position' has caused some rather major problems with positions the Republicans are not actually in favor of, but like to imply they are, like letting the government default on its loans, which no sane political party is willing to do. Especially when Tea Partiers have actually made it to office.
1) Apparently not understanding that earmarks are just Congress directing money towards specific projects, and without earmarks, Obama can direct the money as he sees fit. Tea party: Hell yes give Obama the power to do whatever he wants! No earmarks! Woo!
Guys...earmarks and spending are not the same thing.
Okay, I'm just going to have to reply here, because I don't want to repeat myself multiple times.
The 'send a tea bag to congress' was, in fact, a grassroots movement. I do not disagree with that fact at all.
However, as for protests...essentially every early protest of Obama, including pre-Tea Party ones and the first Tea Party-named ones, were organized by Americans for Prosperity and/or FreedomWorks.
Both groups, I must point out, started off as Citizens for a Sound Economy, set up by the Koch brothers.
None of this was 'taken over' by anyone. It pretty much started out that way. If anything, the Tea Party movement has become less controlled by moneyed interests.
Now, there was the Keli Carender protest, which wasn't really a 'tea party' one, but appears to have been an actual grassroots protest set up before all this. And thus some people try to call her the 'first' tea party organized, because she's functionally the only one who wasn't trying to astroturf. But, uh, she really didn't have anything to do with anything. An actual independent protest of spending does not mean that the 'Tea Party' protests weren't manufactured, or are somehow related to her protest.
Exactly. A lot of people do not appear to be aware that banks writing loans to people who they know cannot pay it off is, in fact, a crime called 'predatory lending'.
At least, that used to be a crime. Now it's something we give banks boatloads of money to recover from.
Something like 50% of people who worked for mortgage agents or in loan departments in banks from 2000-2007 should be in jail. I don't mean in a hypothetical 'I wish they weren't around', I mean in the sense they committed actual crimes.
I mean, we're talking about a crime where the criminals are required to notify the government. It's not like banks are secretly foreclosing on homes. The government does have a list, and should look at the loan document and say 'Jane Smith authorized this failed loan also...interesting...put it in the Jane Smith stack'.
The government should be walking around looking at foreclosure notices and pulling up the loan info, and noticing loan officers who have, I dunno, over 10% foreclosures over the last decade, and interview them. And then interview their boss, and their boss, and their boss.
That's how actual unrest works, as opposed to manufactured unrest like the Tea Party.
Indeed. Steve Jobs used to make blue boxes to steal from the phone company. Not 'steal' in quotes, actual theft of service. Using actual long distance lines without paying for them.
A lot of people did it for fun, which is somewhat reasonable, I guess. It's one thing to hack on the phone system for fun. I can shrug at that.
But Jobs actually manufactured blue boxes and sold them to others, people less interested in 'phone hacking' and more interested in 'free long distance calls'. Well, Woz built them and Jobs packaged and sold them. That was his first 'user interface', making blue boxes usable and affordable for random non-hacker people. Probably with nice curved corners and a shuffle version that didn't allow you to pick the number to dial. ;)
I.e., he was the equivalent of a hacker selling script kiddie tools.
And, years later, Steve Jobs also sold fucking phones that people couldn't install whatever software they wanted on them. Not even something illegal, not something harmful, just people who wanted to play ScummVM games or whatever on their phone.
I don't know exactly what happened in the years between those two Steve Jobs, but I'd also be glad he was gone from Apple if I suspected he was the cause of the walled garden in iPhones. (However, I have actually no evidence this is the case, and I'm not sure why RMS thinks it is. And he was pretty much 'gone from Apple' already from what I understand.)
Perhaps they have a mass that varies based on electrical charge! We could call it 'the mass effect'.
Perhaps all this is just a ARG for Mass Effect 3.
Yeah, that means you have to pay some money.
Yeah, now we have to pay them more money than it costs for hardback books. (Mainly because bookstores can't offer us members any sort of discount.)
And forget comparing them to paperback. Yes, I know part of the hardback/paperback difference is what time you can buy them, and you're paying extra not just for the binding but for getting it early...but ebooks don't go down when the paperback comes out. At least, not when I've check them.
Perhaps ebooks were headed for disaster with Amazon, but the fact is, if they managed to swerve away from that, they swerved right into a tree. What should happen is that bookstores buy copies of ebooks, put them in a publisher-approved DRM, and resell them. The publisher needs to say to bookstores: 'This ebook is $5 for you to buy, and here are the most lax DRM rules we allow, you must wrap it in DRM that does at least that, and other than that, everything is up to you.'
Having a fixed price that is one dollar below hardback retail price , and allowing no discounts or sales or anything, is just utterly idiotic. No one who regularly buys books pays hardback retail price. Everyone gets a discount except the people rushing it to buy the newest Harry Potter the second it hits the shelves. (Nothing against Harry Potter, that's just an example of a book that people who don't usually buy books bought.)
All us other people, you know know, the people who buy 30 books a year and hence might actually buy a eReader and hence might actually be ebook customers, expect discounts and sales and paperback prices for older books (And even lower prices for ebooks.) and stuff like that.
Yeah, I feel the same way. My iPhone would be unusable without the jailbroken software on it.
Not stupid little apps that were rejected from the store, but stuff like disabling push notifications on a schedule. No, I do not want my nighttime music interrupted and the display to come on because CNN says there was an earthquake in Europe at 4 in the morning. I do, however, want a bing and it to be displayed on my screen at 4 in the afternoon.
Or the lockscreen gestures to control music...very useful when I'm busy with something and don't want to look at my phone, especially because the damn volume buttons fell off.
Or the easy-to-access ringer control, because I taped over the hardware switch. It was unacceptably flipping by itself, a disaster waiting to happen when you volunteer backstage at a theater.
Without jailbreaking, I would not have kept my iPhone. Apple's lockdown is idiotic, and, yes, you're right, it's exactly the sort of crap I'd expect from Apple.
OTOH, the GP was making the point in that Apple's default UI is usually a bit saner, and I would, indeed, expect them to have more terms in their voice recognition...at the expense of not being able to customize them at all.
Phones are not 'containers', a term which was invented by the supreme court to let cops look inside boxes next to people they were arresting. We can debate if that is reasonable or not, but the entire point of allowed container searches was there might be a weapon there.
Cell phones cannot have weapons in them. Well, actually, they might, and if a cop wants to inspect the physical casing of a cell phone, I have no objection. But they cannot have weapons in their data, the data cannot pose any sort of risk to the police.
They are, quite blatantly, as blatant as anything can be without being made of wood, what the constitution means by 'papers'.
Oh, and because they are, in fact, papers, there's something people have missed: What if a cell phone has privileged communication with an attorney on it? Mine does. (Admittedly, it's a civil suit, and would be of little interest of a cop...but they are still not allowed to see it.) Or privileged medical information on it?
And here's a fun question: What, exactly, is the legal difference between a cell phone and a tablet? (If someone says 'can make calls', I must point to Skype and 3G plans.) What's the legal difference between a tablet and a laptop?
Cell phones are document stores. They contain papers. The police cannot read those papers without a warrant.
There might be a few parts of the phone that don't count as documents, like incoming and outgoing call logs. That was the backdoor that allowed police to originally search, because that used to be basically all phones did.
But it's not any more, and as the logs on the phone can be altered and deleted, and the cell phone companies have much better records, so I don't see the point of allowing that. The only thing police should be able to demand they get from a cell phone is the phone number of it. And possible the SIM number or whatever, if they need that. (I.e., they only get to get enough info to uniquely identify it on the telephone network.)
From my original post:
Would you like to point what what law, exactly, stops someone from selling your address, phone number, books you've bought, etc?
From my newest post:
Now, SHOW ME WHERE A LAW COVERS BOOK PURCHASES, or shut the hell up and stop pretending random google searches prove your point.
Yeah, I sure 'moved the goal posts', you idiot.
The law forbids no one from selling your name. The law forbids no one from selling your address. The law forbids no one from selling your book purchases. Hell, the law doesn't prevent them from just outright publishing that info to the entire world. (It might stop them from doing that with your email address, I do not know.)
You seem to think citing random legal overviews of the privacy law you found on Google disproves this. You know how to prove something is illegal? You cite the actual law making it such.
But, oh, I forgot, I 'moved the goalposts' from 'Show me what law makes selling book purchases and address and phone numbers to third parties' to, uh, 'Show me what law makes selling book purchases to third parties' . (Perhaps in your head that's only illegal if addresses and phone numbers are sold with it, or something.) Well, I will happily amend that back to the original if that is what concerns you:
Would you like to point what what law, EXACTLY, stops someone from selling your address, phone number, books you've bought, etc?
It is not permissible to produce a big list of links that have absolutely nothing to do with such a law in response. You must cite exactly a law, which is done by saying something like US Code Title 15 Chapter 1 3. (Or multiple such law that, together, do this.)
If this is difficult, be aware that on almost every page you linked to, such laws were correctly cited, and you can just copy their cite. Of course, the law on those pages had nothing to do with the issue at hand.