The aca completely failed on the general welfare argument
Try again. The Taxing Clause that I quoted, including its support for general welfare, is the mechanism that was upheld.
Note that I did not comment on the commerce implications of the ACA, nor did I try to argue that enforcing health insurance is necessary and proper. Those are the arguments that were rejected by the Court.
Excellent. Let's apply 200-year-old interpretations to modern life!
Or, we could follow the modern interpretations of the Supreme Court, since that's actually their job:
Shortly after Butler, in Helvering v. Davis, the Supreme Court interpreted the clause even more expansively, disavowing almost entirely any role for judicial review of Congressional spending policies, thereby conferring upon Congress a plenary power to impose taxes and to spend money for the general welfare subject almost entirely to Congress's own discretion. Even more recently, in South Dakota v. Dole the Court held Congress possessed power to indirectly influence the states into adopting national standards by withholding, to a limited extent, federal funds. To date, the Hamiltonian view of the General Welfare Clause predominates in case law.
Of course not. That "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" phrase comes from the Declaration of Independence, which doesn't actually require anything.
Rather, it's the Constitution that requires you to give your resources to help others, according to what Congress considers to promote the "general welfare":
The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;
The Congress shall have Power To... provide for the... general Welfare of the United States;...
Or in other words, the government is allowed by the Constitution to make America better, as Congress sees fit. By passing the ACA, Congress has invoked this power. The Supreme Court has determined that it is fairly applied and within the mandate of the Constitution, so yes, health care is actually an area the government has Constitutional authority over.
Before spouting off about the Constitution, you might want to actually read it.
I know this is shocking to the mom-discovers-one-sneaky-trick crowd, but police can legally lie to you and misrepresent themselves! They also don't have to tell you they're cops, no matter how many times you ask.
What they cannot legally do is convince someone who is otherwise lawful to break the law. They can provide opportunities, but they can't legally force or coerce the person to break the law. That's entrapment. Running a fake drug operation isn't.
That's not so far off. If the USPS must pay $5 billion per year, then it shows continual losses, and the whole program can be cut. The Treasury then has a surplus of cash that's no longer earmarked for future employees, so it's a simple bit of labeling magic to release it into general funds.
That means that whatever party does eventually kill the USPS gets to claim responsibility for a few tens of billions of dollars additional revenue for the Treasury. With the right spin, the public at large will be aghast at how the irresponsible other party could have let the Postal Service survive so long when it was so obviously financially beneficial to shut it down.
As an OS, Symbian sucked. As an interface to a phone, it worked well. People who wanted a phone to run games and run all the bells and whistles didn't buy Nokia phones. People who bought Nokia phones wanted a phone that made phone calls, and in a pinch could do some other neat tricks, too.
For comparison, consider my wife's old Android phone, which crashed when the Phone app was opened... or my iPhone, which has trouble figuring out whether it wants to use Wi-Fi or 4G for data transfer at any given time. My old Nokia phone was just a phone, and for a large market segment (such as the elderly retirees whose kids insist they have a cell phone "for emergencies"), that's all they need.
Nokia had a niche market all ready as the manufacturer of reliable low-end phones. Elop led them down the familiar Microsoft path of following the latest trends, so they lost that one market they dominated.
In other news, there are a lot of stupid employees at every office for every company everywhere.
Everybody can be fooled, and in a "secure" environment where everybody has gone through a vetting process already, it's actually easier. Imagine you work on the latest top-secret missile project. While out grocery shopping one day, someone comes up and starts asking you detailed questions about work. Of course, that will raise a few flags. Now suppose you're sitting at your desk at work, and a coworker from down the hall, who you've seen around a few times, says that he can't get into the document control system and asks that you try it real quick. How likely are you to consider that he'll be watching your keyboard?
Fun fact: disclaimers don't actually mean much. The concern with trademarks is whether it looks like the guy's trying to look like an official Canonical site. A bit of text at the top saying "A disgruntled user's guide to improving privacy" would do more than that full-paragraph disclaimer for legal trademark use.
Nobody's actually going to read that disclaimer. Heck, it even states that only idiots and lawyers need worry about it, and of course nobody's going to assume they're an idiot. Without that disclaimer being read, there's the big "Ubuntu name" on top, in the same styling and typeface as Canonical uses. The page layout and colors are not usual for Canonical, but there's not that much uniformity in their official sites, either (compared to Apple, for example).
what does a "homeless gay teen" charity do that a "homeless teen" charity wouldn't?
Have counselors on staff who won't try to "cure" his orientation, and other teens around that not only accept him for who he is, but actually share the trait that too often alienates him.
I know your question wasn't serious, but it is actually a serious problem. A significant number of homeless teenagers are on the streets because their families rejected their sexual orientation. Homeless shelters generally try to be comforting and understanding, but with tight budgets they don't always end up with the most sensitive staff, or even enough staff to protect the guests from each other if there's a conflict.
From what I've been told, Card will not get a dime of your money regardless of whether you see the movie or not.
Unless you've been living in a vacuum, you know that there are people boycotting the film in protest of Orson Scott Card's very public political positions. There are also people seeing it as a show of support. It's been pointed out that Card is not in for producer money--he got paid when the option was exercised, and won't see more money regardless of how well the film does. On the other hand, judging by Ender's Game's position on The New York Times Bestseller list (#1 on November 10th for mass-market paperback) this movie has sold some books, and those will cut Card some royalty checks.
I think the one that stuck (out of about a dozen charged) was "molestation". The long story made short is that my friend, and secretly his girlfriend, are not particularly religious, her parents are strongly. When he turned 18, the mother took the girlfriend on a college-visiting tour while the father called the cops. The short investigation showed that there was an obvious relationship, and the father ever-so-helpfully gave a statement on his daughter's behalf. The guy was arrested and charged just before the girl came back. She made her own statement asserting that the relationship was consensual, but thanks to the hard-line laws in force, her consent didn't actually matter.
Apart from the continued existence of unfair laws, the story does have a happy ending. They're happily married and expecting their third kid soon, now living about a thousand miles away from her parents.
Before we're "disgusted with crimes that harm others", we should realize that different amounts of harm are lumped into the same criminal label. The disgust and stigma applies its heavy weight to all cases, not just the most heinous. In the name of "thinking of the children", we push for ever-tougher laws
I know someone who has to explain a "sex offender" label every time he applies to a job, because his high-school sweetheart's parents didn't like him. They even had him arrested and charged without their daughter's knowledge. Does he have "sick-fuckitude" for not breaking off a relationship during the three months they were on different sides of an arbitrary boundary? That's what disgusts me: that the panic about the crime can sometimes cause more harm than the crime itself. It's a treacherous domain indeed.
I'm arguing that there is a grey area that must be recognized before we just assume it's okay to be "disgusted by crimes that harm others". How about we just be disgusted by harming others, regardless of whether it's a crime or not? Or how about we acknowledge the grey area with a matching grey area of punishment, letting our disgust scale according to how much actual harm was done?
...alluding that people trying to have online-sex with 10-year-olds is somehow similar to someone saying "penis" in the presence of a 17-year-old
I think you found my point there. In some jurisdictions (namely any jurisdiction with a hard-line age of majority set at 18), they aren't just similar, but legally they're exactly the same. A high-school Romeo is, in legal terms, just as much a predator as anyone found by this bot, and I think that's wrong.
I worry that in the rush to "protect people from predators", we'll forget to check first whether the "predators" are actually dangerous.
I'm not saying it makes sense for a company to be unaccountable, but only that that's the way the law is set up now. There's a pretty strong fear of blaming the victim in legislature, so I doubt we'll see any such laws crop up soon. Legally, it's the same as a gym's locker room that says "not responsible for lost or stolen items". The law just doesn't make them responsible.
You do bring up an interesting point... why does a university need your federal retirement savings account number?
What's considered "harm"? To some folks, a 17-year-old hearing the word "penis" is a disgusting crime that should be prosecuted. The way I've seen it most often handled, it's the parents of the child who get to decide whether something's harmful. Usually, the minor has no input on the matter at all.
Almost all law involving minors is based around the ancient notion that people don't start thinking until someone else tells them to. Until that time, the father/owner/king knows best, right?
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The aca completely failed on the general welfare argument
Try again. The Taxing Clause that I quoted, including its support for general welfare, is the mechanism that was upheld.
Note that I did not comment on the commerce implications of the ACA, nor did I try to argue that enforcing health insurance is necessary and proper. Those are the arguments that were rejected by the Court.
Excellent. Let's apply 200-year-old interpretations to modern life!
Or, we could follow the modern interpretations of the Supreme Court, since that's actually their job:
Shortly after Butler, in Helvering v. Davis, the Supreme Court interpreted the clause even more expansively, disavowing almost entirely any role for judicial review of Congressional spending policies, thereby conferring upon Congress a plenary power to impose taxes and to spend money for the general welfare subject almost entirely to Congress's own discretion. Even more recently, in South Dakota v. Dole the Court held Congress possessed power to indirectly influence the states into adopting national standards by withholding, to a limited extent, federal funds. To date, the Hamiltonian view of the General Welfare Clause predominates in case law.
Just over 5120 more revisions to go until a nice round number!
Of course not. That "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" phrase comes from the Declaration of Independence, which doesn't actually require anything.
Rather, it's the Constitution that requires you to give your resources to help others, according to what Congress considers to promote the "general welfare":
The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;
Article I, Section 8:
The Congress shall have Power To ... provide for the ... general Welfare of the United States;...
Or in other words, the government is allowed by the Constitution to make America better, as Congress sees fit. By passing the ACA, Congress has invoked this power. The Supreme Court has determined that it is fairly applied and within the mandate of the Constitution, so yes, health care is actually an area the government has Constitutional authority over.
Before spouting off about the Constitution, you might want to actually read it.
Of course, because all law enforcement resources are interchangeable. The financial guys are just fantastic in high-speed chases.
No, not at all.
I know this is shocking to the mom-discovers-one-sneaky-trick crowd, but police can legally lie to you and misrepresent themselves! They also don't have to tell you they're cops, no matter how many times you ask.
What they cannot legally do is convince someone who is otherwise lawful to break the law. They can provide opportunities, but they can't legally force or coerce the person to break the law. That's entrapment. Running a fake drug operation isn't.
That's not so far off. If the USPS must pay $5 billion per year, then it shows continual losses, and the whole program can be cut. The Treasury then has a surplus of cash that's no longer earmarked for future employees, so it's a simple bit of labeling magic to release it into general funds.
That means that whatever party does eventually kill the USPS gets to claim responsibility for a few tens of billions of dollars additional revenue for the Treasury. With the right spin, the public at large will be aghast at how the irresponsible other party could have let the Postal Service survive so long when it was so obviously financially beneficial to shut it down.
Maxim 29: The enemy of my enemy is my enemy's enemy. No more. No less.
-The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries
As an OS, Symbian sucked. As an interface to a phone, it worked well. People who wanted a phone to run games and run all the bells and whistles didn't buy Nokia phones. People who bought Nokia phones wanted a phone that made phone calls, and in a pinch could do some other neat tricks, too.
For comparison, consider my wife's old Android phone, which crashed when the Phone app was opened... or my iPhone, which has trouble figuring out whether it wants to use Wi-Fi or 4G for data transfer at any given time. My old Nokia phone was just a phone, and for a large market segment (such as the elderly retirees whose kids insist they have a cell phone "for emergencies"), that's all they need.
Nokia had a niche market all ready as the manufacturer of reliable low-end phones. Elop led them down the familiar Microsoft path of following the latest trends, so they lost that one market they dominated.
In other news, there are a lot of stupid employees at every office for every company everywhere.
Everybody can be fooled, and in a "secure" environment where everybody has gone through a vetting process already, it's actually easier. Imagine you work on the latest top-secret missile project. While out grocery shopping one day, someone comes up and starts asking you detailed questions about work. Of course, that will raise a few flags. Now suppose you're sitting at your desk at work, and a coworker from down the hall, who you've seen around a few times, says that he can't get into the document control system and asks that you try it real quick. How likely are you to consider that he'll be watching your keyboard?
My Slashdot username is Sarten-X.
My password is Glernhab75.
That's not actually the password for my Slashdot account, but your instructions weren't clear enough on that matter.
As an aside, the screenshot shows that the disclaimer is probably new, and the page used to include an Ubuntu logo, too.
Fun fact: disclaimers don't actually mean much. The concern with trademarks is whether it looks like the guy's trying to look like an official Canonical site. A bit of text at the top saying "A disgruntled user's guide to improving privacy" would do more than that full-paragraph disclaimer for legal trademark use.
Nobody's actually going to read that disclaimer. Heck, it even states that only idiots and lawyers need worry about it, and of course nobody's going to assume they're an idiot. Without that disclaimer being read, there's the big "Ubuntu name" on top, in the same styling and typeface as Canonical uses. The page layout and colors are not usual for Canonical, but there's not that much uniformity in their official sites, either (compared to Apple, for example).
No, but he is running a site using the Ubuntu name:
Lee set up a website called "Fix Ubuntu," which provides instructions for disabling the Internet search tool.
what does a "homeless gay teen" charity do that a "homeless teen" charity wouldn't?
Have counselors on staff who won't try to "cure" his orientation, and other teens around that not only accept him for who he is, but actually share the trait that too often alienates him.
I know your question wasn't serious, but it is actually a serious problem. A significant number of homeless teenagers are on the streets because their families rejected their sexual orientation. Homeless shelters generally try to be comforting and understanding, but with tight budgets they don't always end up with the most sensitive staff, or even enough staff to protect the guests from each other if there's a conflict.
From what I've been told, Card will not get a dime of your money regardless of whether you see the movie or not.
Unless you've been living in a vacuum, you know that there are people boycotting the film in protest of Orson Scott Card's very public political positions. There are also people seeing it as a show of support. It's been pointed out that Card is not in for producer money--he got paid when the option was exercised, and won't see more money regardless of how well the film does. On the other hand, judging by Ender's Game's position on The New York Times Bestseller list (#1 on November 10th for mass-market paperback) this movie has sold some books, and those will cut Card some royalty checks.
Given Microsoft's dictatorial approach to management, he'll just be referred to as "Master", anyway.
I think the one that stuck (out of about a dozen charged) was "molestation". The long story made short is that my friend, and secretly his girlfriend, are not particularly religious, her parents are strongly. When he turned 18, the mother took the girlfriend on a college-visiting tour while the father called the cops. The short investigation showed that there was an obvious relationship, and the father ever-so-helpfully gave a statement on his daughter's behalf. The guy was arrested and charged just before the girl came back. She made her own statement asserting that the relationship was consensual, but thanks to the hard-line laws in force, her consent didn't actually matter.
Apart from the continued existence of unfair laws, the story does have a happy ending. They're happily married and expecting their third kid soon, now living about a thousand miles away from her parents.
...and you lost it again.
Before we're "disgusted with crimes that harm others", we should realize that different amounts of harm are lumped into the same criminal label. The disgust and stigma applies its heavy weight to all cases, not just the most heinous. In the name of "thinking of the children", we push for ever-tougher laws
I know someone who has to explain a "sex offender" label every time he applies to a job, because his high-school sweetheart's parents didn't like him. They even had him arrested and charged without their daughter's knowledge. Does he have "sick-fuckitude" for not breaking off a relationship during the three months they were on different sides of an arbitrary boundary? That's what disgusts me: that the panic about the crime can sometimes cause more harm than the crime itself. It's a treacherous domain indeed.
I'm arguing that there is a grey area that must be recognized before we just assume it's okay to be "disgusted by crimes that harm others". How about we just be disgusted by harming others, regardless of whether it's a crime or not? Or how about we acknowledge the grey area with a matching grey area of punishment, letting our disgust scale according to how much actual harm was done?
I mean, it's almost like your arguing against the existence of childhood.
I argue against the existence of a magical moment that ends childhood, after which any interaction across that boundary is cause for panic.
...alluding that people trying to have online-sex with 10-year-olds is somehow similar to someone saying "penis" in the presence of a 17-year-old
I think you found my point there. In some jurisdictions (namely any jurisdiction with a hard-line age of majority set at 18), they aren't just similar, but legally they're exactly the same. A high-school Romeo is, in legal terms, just as much a predator as anyone found by this bot, and I think that's wrong.
I worry that in the rush to "protect people from predators", we'll forget to check first whether the "predators" are actually dangerous.
I'm not saying it makes sense for a company to be unaccountable, but only that that's the way the law is set up now. There's a pretty strong fear of blaming the victim in legislature, so I doubt we'll see any such laws crop up soon. Legally, it's the same as a gym's locker room that says "not responsible for lost or stolen items". The law just doesn't make them responsible.
You do bring up an interesting point... why does a university need your federal retirement savings account number?
What's considered "harm"? To some folks, a 17-year-old hearing the word "penis" is a disgusting crime that should be prosecuted. The way I've seen it most often handled, it's the parents of the child who get to decide whether something's harmful. Usually, the minor has no input on the matter at all.
Almost all law involving minors is based around the ancient notion that people don't start thinking until someone else tells them to. Until that time, the father/owner/king knows best, right?