The strict city limits of Boston are almost laughably small in comparison to the size of the metropolitan area and its regional and national or international importance. Someone from Watertown would likely describe themselves as being from Boston to anyone not from the area, and in lots of other cities around the world, Watertown would actually be a neighborhood that is part of the city proper.
What's more consider what happened. The people hid from one militant guy. Compare this to 1776 when British militants walked on a town. Citizens decided to gather together to oppose them despite the risk to their lives (, and many did die ). Boy how this country has changed.
The law enforcement agencies who responded to this are citizens. How do you perceive the country as having changed? That, instead of a ramshackle militia of men who felt a duty to their community, we have a well-organized paid force of citizens to train with that equipment to do that for us?
The police could have asked everyone in the crime scene in Watertown to help them search for him and they might have found him sooner, but what is the point? It would endanger their lives, the policemen's lives, and the life of the suspect who was eventually taken alive.
Let's imagine if this event happened in, say, the middle of nowhere in Montana, and if there were hypothetically no federal agencies who could respond to an event like this, and it were up to the local sheriff to track down these guys in his pickup truck. What do you think would happen? I have a lot of faith in my fellow Americans that everyone wouldn't just cower in their homes, as you are trying to imply happened here.
Boston wasn't locked down at all. Public transportation was shut down, and there were government pleas for people to be aware of the manhunt and treat their day accordingly by staying home or limiting their activities or whatever, but it was not and could not be enforced at all.
There was a local area of Watertown that was locked down in the sense that they were either monitoring traffic (stopping to check people who wanted to leave) or blocking traffic (no incoming) where the suspect's last known whereabouts were. Note that this was lifted before his actual location was known, as well, when they could not be so sure of where he was.
It almost certainly is probable cause, although it would probably take a court case to prove it. As it is I'm not sure anyone in the crime scene would even challenge it considering the tactical teams were knocking on doors and telephoning homes to see if people were home, with many, if not most or all, giving their consent.
The area where searches were going on was actually fairly small. A lot of this is completely blown out of proportion because of the government officials asking for people to stay home or to be careful in a much, much larger area and doing things like shutting down the city-wide transportation services.
If the police had tried to search homes throughout the entirety of Watertown, instead of a small portion where the suspect was last known to be, it would not only have been a tremendous waste of time but people would also likely have refused. The idea of a town-wide search is pretty laughable in itself and you can be sure that the law enforcement involved couldn't even consider it.
It's just that, if you aren't, then you may -- possibly, but not always -- be able to argue that you were compelled to speak to the police in a manner that incriminated yourself. If you are successful in this, then whatever you said to the police in that time period will be thrown out of court because of the fifth amendment.
His fifth amendment rights hardly even apply in this case, I would think. There is likely to be mountains of evidence to convict him personally. Law enforcement agencies have to be careful about it in case they need to prosecute any other people who might have known about it or were involved.
If you were watching video of Watertown on Friday, or listening to police scanners, you would have noticed plenty of people who were leaving their homes.
If a shooting is committed on the street, and the shooter is chased into your home, the cops don't need a search warrant to grab him.
There is a massive and incredibly significant difference between this and a search after-the-fact that you are completely overlooking here, and in your quest to stand up for your rights, you're actually harming them by not knowing what you're talking about. If you don't know the law, then how can you possibly try to assert your rights under the law?
Not sure what you don't get about this. Spending is an action, and you can either spend money, as in actual cashdollars, or you can finance your spending using debt. As in, you will pay with actual cashdollars eventually.
You can spend money, and incur a debt, without creating a deficit. This is actually very beneficial for everyone involved, as it means the government doesn't have to hold a bake sale prior to spending even a single dollar. It allows for leeway in the timing of a cash flow and reduces the chance of an accidental forfeiture of services, which means anyone who does anything for the government, in return for money, does not have to share in the burden of a rocky, uncertain budget.
In the most simplistic example, the government holds one bake-sale a year every April when it receives tax money. If this is the only money the government has, and it only receives it after tax day in April, then the government would have to raise enough money for the coming year through guesswork and hiring fortunetellers to predict the future costs of things. The way it is done now, via incurring debt, means it can promise to pay money for goods and services and then raise precisely enough money to eventually hand over the actual cash it had promised.
This is completely independent of deficit spending, as the government could raise enough funds to pay its debts every single year.
So you want the government to pay for billions (or trillions) of dollars worth of things by having that cash sitting around in an account all year long in preparation for the bill?
Debt spending is not the same thing as deficit spending. Keep on speaking your mind about it, though! People voicing opinions like yours, above, are reason the libertarian "movement" is so generally laughable.
A patch that is not going to be merged into the kernel proper breaks hibernation with secure boot in Linux...some editor is trying desperately hard to get a flame war started. If you're really that desperate for ideas try something creative, like creating a fake petition to have Minecraft converted from Java to C#. It's not hard to start a flame war.
why would that start a flame war? Java and C# are basically equivalent.
The worst case hypothetical is that somehow BarEdit's creation kills the FooEdit community, but in reality that seems very unlikely; in practice, I can't think of a single BSD-licensed project that this has happened to. Can you? Yes, it's possible that in my scenario BarEdit would get cool new features denied to FooEdit users, but if you're deliberately choosing your software based on its "openness" then you've already decided to forgo cool features that are only in proprietary software.
while I agree with you, the worry here would be that this is already beginning to happen to FreeBSD itself.
That part of the right-to-repair law is similar to what the franchise laws do, so unless you think the right-to-repair law was done for someone's "corporate buddies" (lol?), then I'm not sure what you disagree with here.
You're pretty obviously not all that great at following discussions, so you can drop the attitude. I just looked again and the only things I found are more people mentioning that you never linked it and yourself linking to your own slashdot post. Not to mention your inability to see the name of the person you're replying to, where you confused myself for someone else who was actually supporting your larger arguments. Who you disagreed with, and reiterated you disagreed with, when I pointed it out.
First, I clearly stated that I was referring to the effects of this regulation AND similar regulations in other states across the U.S. Then you say we're talking about THIS regulation... then you say if it was bad there would be no dealerships across the whole U.S.
No, you've made an argument multiple times that this regulation has directly led to fewer major American automobile manufacturers. You've also said you've had reasons to believe this, although the only time you've tried to explain it you just hinted that sometimes correlation actually does mean causation, even if there's no reason to be sure about causation. You even make it again in this post:
But whether the current situation is the same is irrelevant to my argument; it was about changes caused by the regulations in question, which were not made yesterday. In fact similar legislation has been in force in my own state at least since I was a child.
"Just how many of the major American car manufacturers do you think no longer exist because of franchise laws?"
That question was already answered in that link you have been having so much trouble finding, and repeated in another comment I made here to someone else.
The link which you say shows the total decline in American car manufacturers over the last 50 years? That means you think every major American car manufacturer that has gone out of business in the last 50 years has done so because of franchise laws. okay, buddy.
Yes, I did. Apparently you aren't reading the whole thread. Look back for the link I posted. It's there.
I read the discussion and didn't see it, and then I skimmed it again for wikipedia links. So no, you didn't, but feel free to quote it to me if it's that important.
It isn't just NY and MA, it's all over the U.S. And, at least as much to the point: many of those changes came about BECAUSE of regulation.
We're talking about this regulation.
It doesn't matter very much if manufacturers can still own their own dealerships, if regulations have made it unprofitable. If you are selling only Ford, and the guy down the street is selling Ford AND Chevrolet (just a fictitious example), where do you think most people are going to go first? I'll tell you where I'd go... to the one with more choices.
This regulation obviously haven't made them unprofitable or else there would be zero car dealerships in the United States.
You should sit down and examine the logic of the things you are posting. Pencil and paper might be helpful.
You have missed the point entirely. WHOOSH! My point has not been about the profitability of dealerships, it was about the profitability of manufacturers!
Are there regulations preventing you from buying your own pencil? One of your points was that regulations on manufacturer-run dealerships were a direct cause of fewer major American car manufacturers existing now than existed thirty years ago. In fact, your restatement of your point here is that manufacturers are so unprofitable due to not opening car dealerships that they're losing market share to foreign manufacturers who are beholden to the exact same restrictions regarding car dealerships.
Just how many of the major American car manufacturers do you think no longer exist because of franchise laws?
Regardless, though, I think it's a pretty ridiculous notion. The auto industry has undergone drastic changes over the last six decades and suffered greatly for a huge number of different reasons, but monopolizing dealerships in MA and NY is not one of them! The finances involved on the dealership level are so tiny compared to the economic weight of automobile manufacturers that it's kind of a joke to suggest that lack of manufacturer-owned dealers is why any of them have gone out of business. After all, they can still run their own dealerships!
And it's not like they have to compete unfairly against foreign-based auto manufacturers in this regard -- the franchising laws apply just as much to Toyota or whoever as they do Ford. If you sincerely believe dealership franchise laws ruined multiple large American-based automobile manufacturers, then surely the foreign companies taking their place would suffer so greatly from these laws that they could barely make inroads into the American market. I think that obviously is not the case.
Car manufacturers are allowed to have their own dealerships, they just can't refuse to work with independently-owned dealerships.
Apple stores are a pretty good comparison. Manufacturer-only dealers would probably be similar to those, complete with branded-only parts (incredibly marked up), changing interfaces, and closed, proprietary systems they tried their damndest to have sole access to. Can you imagine if your car manufacturer pulled a stunt like Apple has with battery replacement? Or if they could punish noncompliant dealers by refusing to deal with them and refusing them access to their parts?
Electronics stores can get by without any Apple products, but a Chevy dealer would go under in a day if GM could muscle them out of the market.
I disagree that it's done at consumer expense, since it can only increase dealership-level competition. If the current car dealership model is a consumer hell, then manufacturer-only dealerships would be the next level of hell.
but you're right, it's not the complete opposite, it's just not what the poster was referring to.
Car manufacturers being able to leverage their huge size over independent dealers would remove competition. It wouldn't be offset by "increased" competition between manufacturers on a dealership level.
My original argument, if you're asking about that, is that the laws were not created to help the legislator's corporate buddies.
You think there would be more automobile manufacturers if they could monopolize dealerships which sold their cars? okay, buddy.
I was merely pointing out that the argument ("the laws were made to help out corporations") is working against itself, since the laws were made to regulate the corporations. The post I originally replied to should change his argument or direct it to a more appropriate target.
Car manufacturers running dealerships wouldn't eliminate markup, since the dealerships would still have costs to run. The purpose of the laws are to allow independent dealers to compete on fair ground with manufacturer-owned dealers.
Gas stations are completely different, because gas is largely the same between all of them, making it fungible. It's also incredibly cheap. The giant corporations like ExxonMobil wouldn't gain much from pushing local owners out of the market, since other oil corporations can compete with them on the exact same product across the street. They would gain comparatively nothing in exchange for the hassle of directly running tens of thousands of gas stations each. Indeed, some of the major oil corps have gotten out of directly owning local gas stations because of the negligible benefit.
Automobiles are hugely expensive and, while they perform similar functions (travel), they are not interchangable like gallons of gasoline are. On top of that, there are relatively few car manufacturers, especially when adjusting for price brackets.
The margins, markups, and volume are entirely different. Oil Company A can open up stations selling gasoline across the street from every location where Oil Company B has a station in a given region, but Ford can't open up a dealership across the street from a GM dealership and start selling GM automobiles, and they wouldn't be able to undercut for the same product. The profit margins for automobiles are determined by huge production costs and are much more static.
Consumers who can go to any gas station in any given area would be forced to put up with only a few manufacturers dealing. The effects on maintenance and repair are a lot less clear, but they would be similar or slightly more consumer-friendly at best, while being much, much worse on the downside.
That said, I agree with the spirit that Tesla should win the lawsuit. Ideally they could be exempted, or the laws could be modified to ensure they still existed for their intent, rather than pushing a newcomer out of the competition or punishing locally-owned dealers. Or Tesla could offer the local dealers the opportunity to sell Tesla cars as well.
But that doesn't make the laws a political favor to the auto industry!
Slashdot Mirror
Police don't need a search warrant to investigate your person during or immediately after a crime.
Here's another picture of paramilitary police wearing camouflage, brandishing military weapons, conducting door to door searches for you.
The strict city limits of Boston are almost laughably small in comparison to the size of the metropolitan area and its regional and national or international importance. Someone from Watertown would likely describe themselves as being from Boston to anyone not from the area, and in lots of other cities around the world, Watertown would actually be a neighborhood that is part of the city proper.
The law enforcement agencies who responded to this are citizens. How do you perceive the country as having changed? That, instead of a ramshackle militia of men who felt a duty to their community, we have a well-organized paid force of citizens to train with that equipment to do that for us?
The police could have asked everyone in the crime scene in Watertown to help them search for him and they might have found him sooner, but what is the point? It would endanger their lives, the policemen's lives, and the life of the suspect who was eventually taken alive.
Let's imagine if this event happened in, say, the middle of nowhere in Montana, and if there were hypothetically no federal agencies who could respond to an event like this, and it were up to the local sheriff to track down these guys in his pickup truck. What do you think would happen? I have a lot of faith in my fellow Americans that everyone wouldn't just cower in their homes, as you are trying to imply happened here.
Boston wasn't locked down at all. Public transportation was shut down, and there were government pleas for people to be aware of the manhunt and treat their day accordingly by staying home or limiting their activities or whatever, but it was not and could not be enforced at all.
There was a local area of Watertown that was locked down in the sense that they were either monitoring traffic (stopping to check people who wanted to leave) or blocking traffic (no incoming) where the suspect's last known whereabouts were. Note that this was lifted before his actual location was known, as well, when they could not be so sure of where he was.
It almost certainly is probable cause, although it would probably take a court case to prove it. As it is I'm not sure anyone in the crime scene would even challenge it considering the tactical teams were knocking on doors and telephoning homes to see if people were home, with many, if not most or all, giving their consent.
The area where searches were going on was actually fairly small. A lot of this is completely blown out of proportion because of the government officials asking for people to stay home or to be careful in a much, much larger area and doing things like shutting down the city-wide transportation services.
If the police had tried to search homes throughout the entirety of Watertown, instead of a small portion where the suspect was last known to be, it would not only have been a tremendous waste of time but people would also likely have refused. The idea of a town-wide search is pretty laughable in itself and you can be sure that the law enforcement involved couldn't even consider it.
You never have to have your rights read to you.
It's just that, if you aren't, then you may -- possibly, but not always -- be able to argue that you were compelled to speak to the police in a manner that incriminated yourself. If you are successful in this, then whatever you said to the police in that time period will be thrown out of court because of the fifth amendment.
His fifth amendment rights hardly even apply in this case, I would think. There is likely to be mountains of evidence to convict him personally. Law enforcement agencies have to be careful about it in case they need to prosecute any other people who might have known about it or were involved.
who couldn't leave their homes?
If you were watching video of Watertown on Friday, or listening to police scanners, you would have noticed plenty of people who were leaving their homes.
If a shooting is committed on the street, and the shooter is chased into your home, the cops don't need a search warrant to grab him.
There is a massive and incredibly significant difference between this and a search after-the-fact that you are completely overlooking here, and in your quest to stand up for your rights, you're actually harming them by not knowing what you're talking about. If you don't know the law, then how can you possibly try to assert your rights under the law?
Not sure what you don't get about this. Spending is an action, and you can either spend money, as in actual cashdollars, or you can finance your spending using debt. As in, you will pay with actual cashdollars eventually.
You can spend money, and incur a debt, without creating a deficit. This is actually very beneficial for everyone involved, as it means the government doesn't have to hold a bake sale prior to spending even a single dollar. It allows for leeway in the timing of a cash flow and reduces the chance of an accidental forfeiture of services, which means anyone who does anything for the government, in return for money, does not have to share in the burden of a rocky, uncertain budget.
In the most simplistic example, the government holds one bake-sale a year every April when it receives tax money. If this is the only money the government has, and it only receives it after tax day in April, then the government would have to raise enough money for the coming year through guesswork and hiring fortunetellers to predict the future costs of things. The way it is done now, via incurring debt, means it can promise to pay money for goods and services and then raise precisely enough money to eventually hand over the actual cash it had promised.
This is completely independent of deficit spending, as the government could raise enough funds to pay its debts every single year.
So you want the government to pay for billions (or trillions) of dollars worth of things by having that cash sitting around in an account all year long in preparation for the bill?
Debt spending is not the same thing as deficit spending. Keep on speaking your mind about it, though! People voicing opinions like yours, above, are reason the libertarian "movement" is so generally laughable.
why would that start a flame war? Java and C# are basically equivalent.
while I agree with you, the worry here would be that this is already beginning to happen to FreeBSD itself.
That part of the right-to-repair law is similar to what the franchise laws do, so unless you think the right-to-repair law was done for someone's "corporate buddies" (lol?), then I'm not sure what you disagree with here.
You're pretty obviously not all that great at following discussions, so you can drop the attitude. I just looked again and the only things I found are more people mentioning that you never linked it and yourself linking to your own slashdot post. Not to mention your inability to see the name of the person you're replying to, where you confused myself for someone else who was actually supporting your larger arguments. Who you disagreed with, and reiterated you disagreed with, when I pointed it out.
No, you've made an argument multiple times that this regulation has directly led to fewer major American automobile manufacturers. You've also said you've had reasons to believe this, although the only time you've tried to explain it you just hinted that sometimes correlation actually does mean causation, even if there's no reason to be sure about causation. You even make it again in this post:
The link which you say shows the total decline in American car manufacturers over the last 50 years? That means you think every major American car manufacturer that has gone out of business in the last 50 years has done so because of franchise laws. okay, buddy.
I'm a different person from ... nevermind.
They were certainly antitrust laws, which deal with more than monopolies.
You're arguing with someone who was supporting you now.
And the franchise laws are textbook antitrust: they were designed specifically to prevent manufacturer monopolies on selling their automobiles.
I read the discussion and didn't see it, and then I skimmed it again for wikipedia links. So no, you didn't, but feel free to quote it to me if it's that important.
We're talking about this regulation.
This regulation obviously haven't made them unprofitable or else there would be zero car dealerships in the United States.
Are there regulations preventing you from buying your own pencil? One of your points was that regulations on manufacturer-run dealerships were a direct cause of fewer major American car manufacturers existing now than existed thirty years ago. In fact, your restatement of your point here is that manufacturers are so unprofitable due to not opening car dealerships that they're losing market share to foreign manufacturers who are beholden to the exact same restrictions regarding car dealerships.
Just how many of the major American car manufacturers do you think no longer exist because of franchise laws?
You never showed me that.
Regardless, though, I think it's a pretty ridiculous notion. The auto industry has undergone drastic changes over the last six decades and suffered greatly for a huge number of different reasons, but monopolizing dealerships in MA and NY is not one of them! The finances involved on the dealership level are so tiny compared to the economic weight of automobile manufacturers that it's kind of a joke to suggest that lack of manufacturer-owned dealers is why any of them have gone out of business. After all, they can still run their own dealerships!
And it's not like they have to compete unfairly against foreign-based auto manufacturers in this regard -- the franchising laws apply just as much to Toyota or whoever as they do Ford. If you sincerely believe dealership franchise laws ruined multiple large American-based automobile manufacturers, then surely the foreign companies taking their place would suffer so greatly from these laws that they could barely make inroads into the American market. I think that obviously is not the case.
Car manufacturers are allowed to have their own dealerships, they just can't refuse to work with independently-owned dealerships.
Apple stores are a pretty good comparison. Manufacturer-only dealers would probably be similar to those, complete with branded-only parts (incredibly marked up), changing interfaces, and closed, proprietary systems they tried their damndest to have sole access to. Can you imagine if your car manufacturer pulled a stunt like Apple has with battery replacement? Or if they could punish noncompliant dealers by refusing to deal with them and refusing them access to their parts?
Electronics stores can get by without any Apple products, but a Chevy dealer would go under in a day if GM could muscle them out of the market.
I disagree that it's done at consumer expense, since it can only increase dealership-level competition. If the current car dealership model is a consumer hell, then manufacturer-only dealerships would be the next level of hell.
but you're right, it's not the complete opposite, it's just not what the poster was referring to.
Car manufacturers being able to leverage their huge size over independent dealers would remove competition. It wouldn't be offset by "increased" competition between manufacturers on a dealership level.
My original argument, if you're asking about that, is that the laws were not created to help the legislator's corporate buddies.
You think there would be more automobile manufacturers if they could monopolize dealerships which sold their cars? okay, buddy.
I was merely pointing out that the argument ("the laws were made to help out corporations") is working against itself, since the laws were made to regulate the corporations. The post I originally replied to should change his argument or direct it to a more appropriate target.
Car manufacturers running dealerships wouldn't eliminate markup, since the dealerships would still have costs to run. The purpose of the laws are to allow independent dealers to compete on fair ground with manufacturer-owned dealers.
Gas stations are completely different, because gas is largely the same between all of them, making it fungible. It's also incredibly cheap. The giant corporations like ExxonMobil wouldn't gain much from pushing local owners out of the market, since other oil corporations can compete with them on the exact same product across the street. They would gain comparatively nothing in exchange for the hassle of directly running tens of thousands of gas stations each. Indeed, some of the major oil corps have gotten out of directly owning local gas stations because of the negligible benefit.
Automobiles are hugely expensive and, while they perform similar functions (travel), they are not interchangable like gallons of gasoline are. On top of that, there are relatively few car manufacturers, especially when adjusting for price brackets.
The margins, markups, and volume are entirely different. Oil Company A can open up stations selling gasoline across the street from every location where Oil Company B has a station in a given region, but Ford can't open up a dealership across the street from a GM dealership and start selling GM automobiles, and they wouldn't be able to undercut for the same product. The profit margins for automobiles are determined by huge production costs and are much more static.
Consumers who can go to any gas station in any given area would be forced to put up with only a few manufacturers dealing. The effects on maintenance and repair are a lot less clear, but they would be similar or slightly more consumer-friendly at best, while being much, much worse on the downside.
That said, I agree with the spirit that Tesla should win the lawsuit. Ideally they could be exempted, or the laws could be modified to ensure they still existed for their intent, rather than pushing a newcomer out of the competition or punishing locally-owned dealers. Or Tesla could offer the local dealers the opportunity to sell Tesla cars as well.
But that doesn't make the laws a political favor to the auto industry!
Manufacturers already compete against each other.
which lobbying group is that, the group of people who hold the US Constitution in high regard?