Who is arguing that the London black cabs should stop being regulated? Uber enforces standards as well. It uses a different mechanism, one that in my opinion is better in the long run. Others have argued that the London black cabs are better. The arguments they make are that the black cabs are clearly better. I am not arguing that the London black cab regulations should be changed. I am arguing that the London authority which regulates taxis has made the correct decision.
but in the end you have a government agency assigning itself powers and jurisdictions, and deciding punishments all by itself.
No, this is actually something which Congress gave the FTC power and jurisdiction over in the various laws it wrote that apply to the FTC. Whether or not the FTC should have pursued this is still a valid argument, but this is clearly within their purview. They alleged that Snapchat was guilty of false advertising. The FTC was, in part, set up to investigate and prosecute claims of false advertising.
People keep arguing that London's black cabs are better than Uber and therefore Uber should not be allowed to compete with them. If London's black cabs are everything you say they are (and I believe you are correct), why shouldn't people be free to take the risks with Uber if they feel the lower cost is worth the risk?
I just don't get the argument, "Option A is better, so people should not be allowed to choose Option B." I understand your argument, but if the cabbies driving the black cabs are so much better than the competition from Uber, why do they need government regulation to keep Uber out of the market?
Well, they have done extensive studies which show that people learn much better when they take notes. It is possible you are an exception to this rule. However, I think it likely that the problem was that you spent time trying to write legible notes. The studies about taking notes did not say that actually reading the notes was necessary for the improved learning (actually, they showed that just taking the notes improved learning, without ever looking at them again).
I see no reason that people cannot be taught to read the important part of the URL without hiding the rest. Especially if browsers do what Firefox does, which is to highlight that. I truly doubt that users who will not take the trouble to learn the difference between "passwordreset.3465.blah.bankofamerica.com/?=customerpasswordreset&34234" and "passwordreset.3465.blah.bankofamerica.co/?=customerpasswordreset&34234" will learn the difference between "bankofamerica.com" and "bankofamerica.co" and "bankofametica.com".
It is partially true that both parties represent corporate entities. The primary reason for this is that too many people do not actually make an effort to change that. They do not bother voting in primaries. They do not become active in the local party and try to direct it. On top of that, too many people who do not become active, view those who do become active and are not doing so in service of corporate interests as "whack jobs". Changing the political climate is work, if you are not willing to do the work, do not be surprised that politics is controlled by those who are. Of course, the best way to reduce corporate influence in politics is to reduce the return on investment that corporations receive by being active in politics. If we were to reduce the amount which government at various levels controls business activity, we would reduce the amount of value corporations receive from investing in politics.
I suppose you are referring to Nixon's "Southern Strategy" whereby he appealed to southern racists by actually working to desegregate southern schools (something which LBJ angered those same racists by refusing to do). I'm sorry, but the facts do not support your allegation that Nixon used some strategy to win the southern states, since he did not actually win them. They were won by George Wallace, who left the Democratic Party for that election and then returned to it. In the 1960s when the civil rights laws were passed, it was only because the Republicans supported them that they passed. The Republicans had been trying to pass such laws since the end of WWII and the Democrats had blocked them until LBJ saw that it was in his political interest to pass them. Even with LBJ pushing it, over 80% of the Republicans in Congress voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 vs less than 70% of the Democrats in Congress.
I could go on, but, based on the results of their policies, I do not see any evidence that Democrats today are any less racist than the Democrats who opposed the Civil Rights Act before 1964, nor than the Democrats who, under Woodrow Wilson, re-segregated the federal government. They talk like they believe in equal rights (well, except when they say that minorities need special treatment to get ahead), but the results of their actions show otherwise.
UM, apparently you are not familiar with the history of the parties in this country. It is the Democrats who try to judge people according to their racial purity(and always has been).
So, is this really going to help. Because the person who cannot figure out that "passwordreset.3465.blah.bankofamerica.com/?=customerpasswordreset&34234" is different from "passwordreset.3465.blah.bankofamerica.co/?=customerpasswordreset&34234" is not going to figure out that "bankofamerica.com" is different from "bankofamerica.co" and is likely to overlook that "bankofametica.com" is yet a different site. This is a problem which can only be fixed by training.
That is not the type of investment I mean, because that requires governments to create regulations requiring carbon credits. I was thinking more along the lines of investing in desalination plants (AGW is supposed to cause droughts).
The author states that Silicon Valley is a bubble. What does he mean by that? Does he mean that real estate prices in Silicon Valley are over-valued? Does he mean that the tech companies in Silicon Valley are over-valued? Does he mean that the advantages for a tech company, or a technology professional to be located in Silicon Valley are over-valued? Or does he mean something else?
I did not read the article because the summary made me think that the author never defined what he meant by that statement. Without that meaning being defined there is no way to evaluate the soundness of his arguments about it (well, actually, there is. One concludes that the reason it is left poorly defined is to hide how unsound his arguments are).
If climate change alarmists are correct about AGW, there is a mighty investment opportunity there for them. If the climate change alarmists are correct, yet the majority of people do not believe them, they have an opportunity to make a lot of money through investment in various technologies to address it. In addition, they would not be so anxious to tell everyone about it because they could make money off of it before everyone else catches on.
However, there is nothing inherently special about a USB drive, vs. a floppy disk (+ drive):
Yeah, there is. A USB drive can be small enough to be hidden easily, say, inside a pen or some other innocuous device. Try doing that with an 8" floppy disk!
A device that only takes input from a keyboard or 8" floppy disks is much harder for a person to enter undesired software onto than one which can have such software loaded from a USB because someone attempting to load such software will be more obvious.
My comment had nothing to do with auto-run. It had to do with someone intentionally loading software. It is much harder to sneak onto the base with 8" floppy disks than it would be to do so with a USB drive.
Actually, it does. The fact that you cannot load data on these machines using a USB device does mean that they are more secure. The fact that anybody carrying around something that would allow them to quickly and easily load software (whether malicious or not) onto these machines would be obvious to anyone watching them does in fact increase security. The security does not come from the fact that the hardware is old, but from the fact that attempts to load software onto it are obvious. And on the software side it is not the fact that it is old that adds security, rather it is that the people who are knowledgeable enough about it to hack it are extremely rare. In both cases, these facts are a result of them being old, but the age is not what he is claiming makes them more secure. Rather it is a side effect of them being old.
Sometimes people make decisions that are not in their best interest, not everyone makes the wisest decisions. Of course, sometimes people decide that they do not consider the negatives of addiction greater than what they consider the positives of drug use (or whatever else they become addicted to). I may disagree, but that is their decision to make. Few of the people who become drug addicts did not know what they were doing when they started down that path. Some of them lied to themselves about where they were headed, and a few truly did not.
However, the "Just Say No" campaign did a good job of making sure that people knew that drug addiction was likely if you went down that road, and made it harder for people to lie to themselves about the likely consequences of doing drugs. The best part about it was that it relied less on false horror stories about doing drugs and relied more on creating negative peer pressure towards drug use.
Your argument follow the logic "if people don't want to be drug addicts, they just need to say no to them". Hey, I remember even that there has been a campaign for that!
Yes, and that campaign was actually quite successful. It was not an overnight panacea, but drug use among teenagers dropped rather significantly over the course of that campaign. This despite the fact that it was routinely reviled in the press and by educators.
I read the article and as far as I can tell the only thing corporations have done is "contend that it is important for regulators to prevent abuses of local dealers." That appears to me to be protected by the First Amendment. I do not even understand HOW corporations could do something in this situation which is an abuse of the law. What would there be for the FTC to investigate?
What corporation's abuse of the law? In the cases in question, state governments have interpreted their laws to ban an auto manufacturer from directly selling to consumers in their state. Besides making statements that support such bans, exactly what have any corporations done that is an abuse of the law?
15 U.S. Code 45..."persons, partnerships, or corporations" Nope no mention of authority to override state laws.
15 U.S. Code 46..."investigations and classify businesses" Not there either.
15 U.S. Code 57a..."unfair business practices" Nor here
15 U.S. Code 57b...that's just the authority to deal with unfair business practices
Nope there is nothing in any of that which tells the FTC that state dealership laws are under its authority. None of those say that a state may not impose something like the dealership regulations on those who want to sell cars in their state. What they do say is that if the state required everyone who sold new cars in the state to be a member of a the dealers organization, the FTC could penalize the dealers organization for not allowing Tesla to join. But that is not the situation.
All of the sections of CFR which you quoted give the FTC authority over business behavior, but this case is not about business behavior. It is about the behavior of the state government. Tesla may have grounds to sue the state of New Jersey for denying it a license to sell cars (especially after having given them one for a period of time). However, the FTC does NOT have standing to sue the state on this issue, unless you can find something in federal law showing that they do (which none of what you have so far presented does...all it does is show that they could sue a business or organization for this).
Where does the law creating the FTC give them the power to regulate this? Please show me the wording. The law creating the FTC did not say anything which can be read as saying that Congress delegated its authority to regulate interstate commerce to the FTC. What that law said was that Congress was creating the FTC to enforce the trade laws which Congress passed. So the question then becomes, what law has Congress passed regulating this type of state law?
I did not say that. My question is, upon what basis would you have someone sue the corporations? And which corporations?
You seem to think I am defending this law. All I am saying is that there does not appear to be any law that can be used by the FTC to take action on this. The corporations involved have not done anything which is, or should be actionable. They merely requested that the state license who could sell automobiles in the state and then set the conditions of that licensing so as to preserve their business model. This is no different than what the AMA has done in the practice of medicine, and what the funeral directors' associations have done in regards to providing burial services (and lots of other professions). Yes, there is restraint of trade. No, I do not approve of it. But I disapprove even more of government agencies making up the law as they go along. This is something for the NJ state legislature to address, or even the U.S. Congress, not the FTC (at least not until Congress has delegated them the authority first).
The state law does not "allow" it. The state law mandates it. What exactly are the corporations doing that is illegal? BTW, keep in mind that the corporations involved here are not Ford, GM, or any of the other car manufacturers. The corporations are those which own automobile dealerships. They are much smaller organizations than the auto manufacturers, few if any of them do business outside of a single state.
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Who is arguing that the London black cabs should stop being regulated? Uber enforces standards as well. It uses a different mechanism, one that in my opinion is better in the long run. Others have argued that the London black cabs are better. The arguments they make are that the black cabs are clearly better. I am not arguing that the London black cab regulations should be changed. I am arguing that the London authority which regulates taxis has made the correct decision.
but in the end you have a government agency assigning itself powers and jurisdictions, and deciding punishments all by itself.
No, this is actually something which Congress gave the FTC power and jurisdiction over in the various laws it wrote that apply to the FTC. Whether or not the FTC should have pursued this is still a valid argument, but this is clearly within their purview. They alleged that Snapchat was guilty of false advertising. The FTC was, in part, set up to investigate and prosecute claims of false advertising.
People keep arguing that London's black cabs are better than Uber and therefore Uber should not be allowed to compete with them. If London's black cabs are everything you say they are (and I believe you are correct), why shouldn't people be free to take the risks with Uber if they feel the lower cost is worth the risk?
I just don't get the argument, "Option A is better, so people should not be allowed to choose Option B." I understand your argument, but if the cabbies driving the black cabs are so much better than the competition from Uber, why do they need government regulation to keep Uber out of the market?
Well, they have done extensive studies which show that people learn much better when they take notes. It is possible you are an exception to this rule. However, I think it likely that the problem was that you spent time trying to write legible notes. The studies about taking notes did not say that actually reading the notes was necessary for the improved learning (actually, they showed that just taking the notes improved learning, without ever looking at them again).
So, when your battery is dead, you can't engage the parking brakes on your car. That is a very bad idea.
I see no reason that people cannot be taught to read the important part of the URL without hiding the rest. Especially if browsers do what Firefox does, which is to highlight that. I truly doubt that users who will not take the trouble to learn the difference between "passwordreset.3465.blah.bankofamerica.com/?=customerpasswordreset&34234" and "passwordreset.3465.blah.bankofamerica.co/?=customerpasswordreset&34234" will learn the difference between "bankofamerica.com" and "bankofamerica.co" and "bankofametica.com".
If the police have a warrant to search you, they do not need your consent. At that point, they CAN demand.
It is partially true that both parties represent corporate entities. The primary reason for this is that too many people do not actually make an effort to change that. They do not bother voting in primaries. They do not become active in the local party and try to direct it. On top of that, too many people who do not become active, view those who do become active and are not doing so in service of corporate interests as "whack jobs". Changing the political climate is work, if you are not willing to do the work, do not be surprised that politics is controlled by those who are. Of course, the best way to reduce corporate influence in politics is to reduce the return on investment that corporations receive by being active in politics. If we were to reduce the amount which government at various levels controls business activity, we would reduce the amount of value corporations receive from investing in politics.
I suppose you are referring to Nixon's "Southern Strategy" whereby he appealed to southern racists by actually working to desegregate southern schools (something which LBJ angered those same racists by refusing to do). I'm sorry, but the facts do not support your allegation that Nixon used some strategy to win the southern states, since he did not actually win them. They were won by George Wallace, who left the Democratic Party for that election and then returned to it. In the 1960s when the civil rights laws were passed, it was only because the Republicans supported them that they passed. The Republicans had been trying to pass such laws since the end of WWII and the Democrats had blocked them until LBJ saw that it was in his political interest to pass them. Even with LBJ pushing it, over 80% of the Republicans in Congress voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 vs less than 70% of the Democrats in Congress.
I could go on, but, based on the results of their policies, I do not see any evidence that Democrats today are any less racist than the Democrats who opposed the Civil Rights Act before 1964, nor than the Democrats who, under Woodrow Wilson, re-segregated the federal government. They talk like they believe in equal rights (well, except when they say that minorities need special treatment to get ahead), but the results of their actions show otherwise.
UM, apparently you are not familiar with the history of the parties in this country. It is the Democrats who try to judge people according to their racial purity(and always has been).
So, is this really going to help. Because the person who cannot figure out that "passwordreset.3465.blah.bankofamerica.com/?=customerpasswordreset&34234" is different from "passwordreset.3465.blah.bankofamerica.co/?=customerpasswordreset&34234" is not going to figure out that "bankofamerica.com" is different from "bankofamerica.co" and is likely to overlook that "bankofametica.com" is yet a different site. This is a problem which can only be fixed by training.
That is not the type of investment I mean, because that requires governments to create regulations requiring carbon credits. I was thinking more along the lines of investing in desalination plants (AGW is supposed to cause droughts).
The author states that Silicon Valley is a bubble. What does he mean by that? Does he mean that real estate prices in Silicon Valley are over-valued? Does he mean that the tech companies in Silicon Valley are over-valued? Does he mean that the advantages for a tech company, or a technology professional to be located in Silicon Valley are over-valued? Or does he mean something else?
I did not read the article because the summary made me think that the author never defined what he meant by that statement. Without that meaning being defined there is no way to evaluate the soundness of his arguments about it (well, actually, there is. One concludes that the reason it is left poorly defined is to hide how unsound his arguments are).
If climate change alarmists are correct about AGW, there is a mighty investment opportunity there for them. If the climate change alarmists are correct, yet the majority of people do not believe them, they have an opportunity to make a lot of money through investment in various technologies to address it. In addition, they would not be so anxious to tell everyone about it because they could make money off of it before everyone else catches on.
However, there is nothing inherently special about a USB drive, vs. a floppy disk (+ drive):
Yeah, there is. A USB drive can be small enough to be hidden easily, say, inside a pen or some other innocuous device. Try doing that with an 8" floppy disk!
A device that only takes input from a keyboard or 8" floppy disks is much harder for a person to enter undesired software onto than one which can have such software loaded from a USB because someone attempting to load such software will be more obvious.
My comment had nothing to do with auto-run. It had to do with someone intentionally loading software. It is much harder to sneak onto the base with 8" floppy disks than it would be to do so with a USB drive.
I am quite confident that they have a source of new disks. The technology may be ancient, but I doubt the actual disks are.
Actually, it does. The fact that you cannot load data on these machines using a USB device does mean that they are more secure. The fact that anybody carrying around something that would allow them to quickly and easily load software (whether malicious or not) onto these machines would be obvious to anyone watching them does in fact increase security. The security does not come from the fact that the hardware is old, but from the fact that attempts to load software onto it are obvious. And on the software side it is not the fact that it is old that adds security, rather it is that the people who are knowledgeable enough about it to hack it are extremely rare. In both cases, these facts are a result of them being old, but the age is not what he is claiming makes them more secure. Rather it is a side effect of them being old.
Sometimes people make decisions that are not in their best interest, not everyone makes the wisest decisions. Of course, sometimes people decide that they do not consider the negatives of addiction greater than what they consider the positives of drug use (or whatever else they become addicted to). I may disagree, but that is their decision to make. Few of the people who become drug addicts did not know what they were doing when they started down that path. Some of them lied to themselves about where they were headed, and a few truly did not.
However, the "Just Say No" campaign did a good job of making sure that people knew that drug addiction was likely if you went down that road, and made it harder for people to lie to themselves about the likely consequences of doing drugs. The best part about it was that it relied less on false horror stories about doing drugs and relied more on creating negative peer pressure towards drug use.
Your argument follow the logic "if people don't want to be drug addicts, they just need to say no to them". Hey, I remember even that there has been a campaign for that!
Yes, and that campaign was actually quite successful. It was not an overnight panacea, but drug use among teenagers dropped rather significantly over the course of that campaign. This despite the fact that it was routinely reviled in the press and by educators.
I read the article and as far as I can tell the only thing corporations have done is "contend that it is important for regulators to prevent abuses of local dealers." That appears to me to be protected by the First Amendment. I do not even understand HOW corporations could do something in this situation which is an abuse of the law. What would there be for the FTC to investigate?
What corporation's abuse of the law? In the cases in question, state governments have interpreted their laws to ban an auto manufacturer from directly selling to consumers in their state. Besides making statements that support such bans, exactly what have any corporations done that is an abuse of the law?
15 U.S. Code 45..."persons, partnerships, or corporations" Nope no mention of authority to override state laws.
15 U.S. Code 46..."investigations and classify businesses" Not there either.
15 U.S. Code 57a..."unfair business practices" Nor here
15 U.S. Code 57b...that's just the authority to deal with unfair business practices
Nope there is nothing in any of that which tells the FTC that state dealership laws are under its authority. None of those say that a state may not impose something like the dealership regulations on those who want to sell cars in their state. What they do say is that if the state required everyone who sold new cars in the state to be a member of a the dealers organization, the FTC could penalize the dealers organization for not allowing Tesla to join. But that is not the situation.
All of the sections of CFR which you quoted give the FTC authority over business behavior, but this case is not about business behavior. It is about the behavior of the state government. Tesla may have grounds to sue the state of New Jersey for denying it a license to sell cars (especially after having given them one for a period of time). However, the FTC does NOT have standing to sue the state on this issue, unless you can find something in federal law showing that they do (which none of what you have so far presented does...all it does is show that they could sue a business or organization for this).
Where does the law creating the FTC give them the power to regulate this? Please show me the wording. The law creating the FTC did not say anything which can be read as saying that Congress delegated its authority to regulate interstate commerce to the FTC. What that law said was that Congress was creating the FTC to enforce the trade laws which Congress passed. So the question then becomes, what law has Congress passed regulating this type of state law?
I did not say that. My question is, upon what basis would you have someone sue the corporations? And which corporations?
You seem to think I am defending this law. All I am saying is that there does not appear to be any law that can be used by the FTC to take action on this. The corporations involved have not done anything which is, or should be actionable. They merely requested that the state license who could sell automobiles in the state and then set the conditions of that licensing so as to preserve their business model. This is no different than what the AMA has done in the practice of medicine, and what the funeral directors' associations have done in regards to providing burial services (and lots of other professions). Yes, there is restraint of trade. No, I do not approve of it. But I disapprove even more of government agencies making up the law as they go along. This is something for the NJ state legislature to address, or even the U.S. Congress, not the FTC (at least not until Congress has delegated them the authority first).
The state law does not "allow" it. The state law mandates it. What exactly are the corporations doing that is illegal? BTW, keep in mind that the corporations involved here are not Ford, GM, or any of the other car manufacturers. The corporations are those which own automobile dealerships. They are much smaller organizations than the auto manufacturers, few if any of them do business outside of a single state.