You seem to think that because money is involved, that changes things in some fundamental way, but the law doesn't completely agree with you. Commercial speech is also "protected from unwarranted governmental regulation" (in the Supreme Court's words). Congress can't simply decide to regulate arbitrary kinds of speech just because someone accepts money to make it. You keep giving examples like doctors and lawyers where there are clear reasons why speech should be regulated. Neither you nor the bill have given such reasons in this case. I stand by my claim that the current bill is not constitutional on its face, *if it says what most people here have claimed it does*.
However, in researching it separately I've found that the bill may only apply to persons that are already required to register as lobbyists due to direct lobbying contacts, so that there's not in fact a registration requirement for anyone else, only a reporting requirement on stimulation of grassroots lobbying. If true, that would make a lot of sense, since it would explain how the bill could be constitutional: it doesn't apply to any arbitrary person who accepts money to say something (even if that something is stimulation of grassroots lobbying), it only applies to persons who engage in direct lobbying activity with the government, which is an activity where some justifications do exist for regulation.
If you are going to worry about this you are going to have a hard time functioning in society.
If the bill doesn't only apply to registered lobbyists (persons who have direct lobbying contacts with the government), then it appears to be an unwarranted restriction on free speech which applies to anyone who "stimulates grassroots lobbying", which can simply mean the combination of (a) accepting money to write something and (b) includes in that writing an exhortation to contact your representative. There are journalists at newspapers who fall into that category. If I were you, I wouldn't be so quick to rubberstamp something like that before you're sure you understand it fully.
Do you, however, want to use a tax-exempt religious organization to urge people to write their Congressional representation to take a specific action on a specific measure? Unfortunately for you, that's just lobbying and a blatantly inappropriate mix of religion and politics.
No, it's not lobbying, it's urging other people to lobby. There's a difference!
But actually, the whining and bitching has changed things. So what's your point?
In fact, if people had been truly patriotic and supportive of the war effort, I dare say we wouldn't have many of the troubles we have now.
Characteristic of drunken rants is the disconnection from reality. The sentence quoted above is on par with Lewis Carroll's "The Hunting of the Snark" in terms of its connection to reality.
We should've been nailing people to crosses and leveling entire cities in the Sunni Triangle from day one
You show an amazing grasp of why the Middle East has managed to remain a disaster zone for the past couple of thousand years. But what I don't get, is why you haven't learned anything from it.
Geez, you'd think Slashdotters would understand how to wage a war. Didn't you learn anything from dealing with all those school yard bullies? Half-measures don't cut it, you have to go all Ender on their ass.
Sure. In this case, the target of that no-holds barred retaliation should be the current administration. It's George W. Bush and his puppetmasters who've pissed away so much of what other men died and killed to gain and protect.
Requiring registration with the government in order to be allowed to publish is a restriction on free speech. You don't need to register with the government to publish other kinds of material. An eligible person who fails to register under this law is subject to penalties, and those penalties would be incurred because of the person's speech. That's a restriction on free speech. As I said, I'd have less of a problem if this was simply a disclosure requirement, without the government registration aspect.
There's no comparison to something like dentists, since there's no constitutional right to operate on someone else's teeth.
Another problem with this law is that the definitions seem quite vague, and there's plenty of precedent for laws like this being applied far beyond their initial ostensible intent. If you get paid money to support your activities in publicizing something, you're arguably a hired agent, and that's where my Al Gore example was coming from. Ditto for what it takes to be classified as stimulating grassroots lobbying.
and the only people I see objecting to it seem to be (like the author of the article) astroturfers.
That may be because people think they're getting something that they want, and haven't thought it through. It's quite fascinating that all it takes to get support here for a law which imposes legal restrictions on speech on the Internet, on blogs, is to ostensibly target an unpopular group.
My bet is that this is all moot anyway. Even if this becomes law, someone'll challenge it and courts will throw it out. I don't see how it can be constitutional.
Just because laws achieve something that you or I might like personally, doesn't mean they're a good idea. The law is a very blunt instrument that doesn't tend to deal well with fuzzy situations, and the question of someone's motivations for political speech aren't necessarily as easy to pin down as this law seems to imply.
I'm not terribly happy about defending the free speech rights of astroturfers, but this may be one of those situations that arise with free speech, where it's meaningless if you don't grant it even to people who are saying things you dislike. "Lying about who you are" is not illegal in most circumstances, with some exceptions e.g. lying to the government, or cases where monetary fraud is involved; but none of those seem to apply here.
My question is, what is it about the activity of these astroturfers that raises a requirement that they should register with the government, when other kinds of people don't have to? The only answer, afaict, is that the laws related to campaign finance and lobbying do in fact put restrictions on free speech. Those laws in themselves are a tangle of fairly arbitrary definitions and limits, so it's difficult to make snap judgements here. But I'm just not comfortable saying that just because someone is being paid, that they can't write whatever they want to without having to register with the goverment.
Besides, who is being protected from what here? If the electorate is so clueless that they'll just follow the advice of some slick-looking blog and go lobby their congressperson for whatever that blog told them to, then I'm afraid the problem is with the electorate, not with the blog or the laws. Do you blame the pusher, or the user? Passing laws to try to prevent the electorate from being manipulated is just treating the symptom. Everyone's always trying to manipulate the electorate, but most of them aren't subject to regulation.
I'd have less of a problem with a law which required disclosure *on the blog* about who is funding the message, if it's a political one - similar to the case with campaign ads. But requiring registration with the government sounds like overreach to me.
I also agree with people who have suggested that classifying many people as lobbyists could be detrimental. For example, is Al Gore a lobbyist? Let's say he's taken money from environmental groups for his movie etc., and he has a blog where occasionally he encourages people to lobby their congresspeople. This law seems to require him to register as a lobbyist, so now he can be smeared and dismissed by his opponents as a registered lobbyist. And that's the problem: afaict, this law won't just apply to the astroturfers you'd like to see brought to heel.
Finally, as I mentioned in another comment, what happens when someone posts on a blog hosted outside the U.S.? Are we going to institute a Great Firewall, just like China? That's the road that restricting free speech leads you down.
These people are using their bully pulpit to lobby congress by proxy.
Uh, perhaps because they're not lobbying directly? As for "using their bully pulpit", it's the same bully pulpit that anyone else has access to: a blog. It's not some power that's been granted to them specially.
I dunno, I hate astroturfing as much as the next guy, but I'm not sure that laws like this are the way to solve the problem.
An example would be, all those bloggers who received laptops from MS might have to register under this bill if they tried to start a grassroots lobbying effort that is pro MS or it's interests.
Microsoft aside, you think that's a good thing? What if it was GNU, or Save the Puppies, or your organization of choice? What if those people wanted to start a grassroots effort whether or not they were receiving free goodies from the organization they were supporting?
Paid for content should have to be obviously marked as paid for.
You're trying to draw a bright line using the law, where what exists in real life is fuzzy at best.
If you are getting paid to stump for a candidate and don't disclose that, you are deceiving your audience.
You're suggesting a scenario in which someone attempts to influence the writer indirectly using money. However, you can't simply assume, as a matter of law, that everyone who's earning money from their writing is subject to such influence. As others have pointed out, all newspapers would then have to register as lobbyists, too.
This is just typical lawmaker confusion about the Constitution, like the many other attempts to restrict free speech online. If it passes, it'll never stand up to a court challenge.
You could also do the same thing with a piece of string and a ruler, but it wouldn't be convenient enough to call it a "pi meter".
Yeah, but if you attached the string to a sleeping cat's tail, then when the value of pi changes it would pull the cat's tail and the cat would jump, hitting the lever above its head, which would release a ball which would roll down a spiral ramp into a container of water balanced on a thin beam, so that when the ball sinks to the bottom of the container it would tip it over onto the cat, which would release an ear-splitting yowl... What was the question again?
Plenty of European "white folks" speak at least two languages - often their home country's language and English, but also other regional languages. If you're going to go down the path of stereotyping everyone different from you (following a lot of white folk, btw), at least get it right: you're probably really mainly thinking of Americans and/or British white folk.
Shrug. I'm not an Ayn Rand nut, and I'm not defending high pay to incompetent CEOs. However, when it comes to minimum wage, as raised by the OP, there's usually a good reason that a person is earning minimum wage, which as I said, has to do with the value they're providing to others. You hinted at this yourself:
The only thing a wage represents is how much one person is able to convince another person to pay them, nothing more significant than that.
Precisely. And if you can't convince someone to pay you more than minimum wage, you're probably not doing anything that's of great value to anyone else. If you want to raise some counterexamples, I'd be interested to hear them.
(Note that this has nothing to do with whether they're capable of more, but about what work they're actually doing. In a kind of reverse of the CEO case, all sorts of distortions might conspire to make someone who's capable of more end up in a minimum wage job - it could be as simple as not having, or knowing about, opportunities.)
Why do we allow our culture to pay people so much money while the minimum wage remains the same for 10 years despite a %400 increase in the cost of living?
Because the people working for minimum wage don't contribute much to the economy. If they did, they'd be able to earn more money -- that's what money is, it's an abstraction of the value of the contribution you make to the economy.
Aside from that, as others have pointed out, this isn't a personal paycheck for Peter Jackson -- it's for a company full of ordinary (well, somewhat extraordinary) people who worked their asses off to make three movies which millions of people enjoyed. New Line Cinema's dodgy accounting practices is screwing those people out of money they have earned.
If you read the comments to the previous/. article about Sealand being for sale (at which point the price was only 65 million, talk about a price rise), people pointed out that it's no longer possible to obtain any kind of independent status for an artificial structure under international law. Sealand apparently still enjoys some kind of special status, though, having been grandfathered in.
There's some cult of eye makeup artists in California that believes in heavy racoon-like black eye outlines for older women. They've gotten to Nancy Pelosi, too.
You're right, Hollywood Homicide is an exception, and a lot of fun, but other than that the parent poster has a point. I mean, I even like the recurring Ford action-hero character up to a point, but it's ridiculous for Ford to be claiming that Han Solo is "a little thin" blah blah while comparing it to roles like the ones he has played to death. The real reason he doesn't like Han Solo is because the character's not a morally righteous squeaky clean but ultimately boring family man, and Ford is afraid Solo would mess up his self-perceived legacy. (Sorry Harrison, but if you won't be honest about it, someone else has to be.)
First, as I think I mentioned, the problem with grading it correct when it is isn't is a problem with the testing procedure. I'm guessing that these are situations when for whatever reason, it's considered necessary to make the choice a binary one, when it sounds as though it should allow for partial credit. If so, that may be a problem with the testing procedure at some level, and it wouldn't be very fair to take that out on a child who understands correctly how to do the work.
Beyond that, keep in mind that an elementary school math test is not an employee screening test. It has a completely different purpose, and it's applied to people at entirely different levels of development. Extrapolating from jobs involving spacecraft orbits and truck scheduling to elementary school children, and talking about firing people, seems ludicrous to me. You may think there's a connection, but unless you've studied child educational development and have some basis for that thought beyond your own unrelated work experience, you're almost certainly wrong.
Your wife is correct that understanding the process is much more important than not making clerical errors. Clerical errors can always be caught by cross-checking, but if you don't understand the process, you can't get anywhere. Math tests are artificial: you're not trying to build a spaceship, you're trying to test whether someone has learned something. In a more realistic situation, cross-checks would occur, and you'd have time to correct errors.
In an ideal situation, a large majority of a grade ought to be awarded based on a demonstrated understanding of the process. Clerical errors might be worth a minor deduction, but if the choice is to grade a question in a binary way, as correct or wrong, grading it as correct makes sense. The real problem in that situation is that the grading system is too coarse.
We're never going to improve as long as people insist on comparing software development to building bridges, i.e. a more sophisticated understanding of the problem is needed. In software, once you have a program for a bridge you can make a billion bridges, all alike or customized by certain parameters, just by running the program. So being "able to build the same damn bridge 100 times" doesn't get you anywhere. Making it better and safer each time? That's another story, and once again, the comparison to bridge building doesn't hold up, because you're talking about improving the design, not the building practices or materials.
If there was any merit in this canard, don't you think that before now, you'd have had some engineers who also knew software come along and revolutionize the software industry?
Standardization is how you get rid of most errors. You'll notice that nobody is making new bolts or nails anymore, they're all standardized.
You haven't written a line of code in your life, have you? If you have, tell me what level of standardization you're even talking about, in the software context.
Slashdot Mirror
You seem to think that because money is involved, that changes things in some fundamental way, but the law doesn't completely agree with you. Commercial speech is also "protected from unwarranted governmental regulation" (in the Supreme Court's words). Congress can't simply decide to regulate arbitrary kinds of speech just because someone accepts money to make it. You keep giving examples like doctors and lawyers where there are clear reasons why speech should be regulated. Neither you nor the bill have given such reasons in this case. I stand by my claim that the current bill is not constitutional on its face, *if it says what most people here have claimed it does*.
However, in researching it separately I've found that the bill may only apply to persons that are already required to register as lobbyists due to direct lobbying contacts, so that there's not in fact a registration requirement for anyone else, only a reporting requirement on stimulation of grassroots lobbying. If true, that would make a lot of sense, since it would explain how the bill could be constitutional: it doesn't apply to any arbitrary person who accepts money to say something (even if that something is stimulation of grassroots lobbying), it only applies to persons who engage in direct lobbying activity with the government, which is an activity where some justifications do exist for regulation.
If the bill doesn't only apply to registered lobbyists (persons who have direct lobbying contacts with the government), then it appears to be an unwarranted restriction on free speech which applies to anyone who "stimulates grassroots lobbying", which can simply mean the combination of (a) accepting money to write something and (b) includes in that writing an exhortation to contact your representative. There are journalists at newspapers who fall into that category. If I were you, I wouldn't be so quick to rubberstamp something like that before you're sure you understand it fully.
I didn't use the word "evil". You're projecting.
But actually, the whining and bitching has changed things. So what's your point?
Characteristic of drunken rants is the disconnection from reality. The sentence quoted above is on par with Lewis Carroll's "The Hunting of the Snark" in terms of its connection to reality.
You show an amazing grasp of why the Middle East has managed to remain a disaster zone for the past couple of thousand years. But what I don't get, is why you haven't learned anything from it.
Sure. In this case, the target of that no-holds barred retaliation should be the current administration. It's George W. Bush and his puppetmasters who've pissed away so much of what other men died and killed to gain and protect.
Requiring registration with the government in order to be allowed to publish is a restriction on free speech. You don't need to register with the government to publish other kinds of material. An eligible person who fails to register under this law is subject to penalties, and those penalties would be incurred because of the person's speech. That's a restriction on free speech. As I said, I'd have less of a problem if this was simply a disclosure requirement, without the government registration aspect.
There's no comparison to something like dentists, since there's no constitutional right to operate on someone else's teeth.
Another problem with this law is that the definitions seem quite vague, and there's plenty of precedent for laws like this being applied far beyond their initial ostensible intent. If you get paid money to support your activities in publicizing something, you're arguably a hired agent, and that's where my Al Gore example was coming from. Ditto for what it takes to be classified as stimulating grassroots lobbying.
That may be because people think they're getting something that they want, and haven't thought it through. It's quite fascinating that all it takes to get support here for a law which imposes legal restrictions on speech on the Internet, on blogs, is to ostensibly target an unpopular group.
My bet is that this is all moot anyway. Even if this becomes law, someone'll challenge it and courts will throw it out. I don't see how it can be constitutional.
Just because laws achieve something that you or I might like personally, doesn't mean they're a good idea. The law is a very blunt instrument that doesn't tend to deal well with fuzzy situations, and the question of someone's motivations for political speech aren't necessarily as easy to pin down as this law seems to imply.
I'm not terribly happy about defending the free speech rights of astroturfers, but this may be one of those situations that arise with free speech, where it's meaningless if you don't grant it even to people who are saying things you dislike. "Lying about who you are" is not illegal in most circumstances, with some exceptions e.g. lying to the government, or cases where monetary fraud is involved; but none of those seem to apply here.
My question is, what is it about the activity of these astroturfers that raises a requirement that they should register with the government, when other kinds of people don't have to? The only answer, afaict, is that the laws related to campaign finance and lobbying do in fact put restrictions on free speech. Those laws in themselves are a tangle of fairly arbitrary definitions and limits, so it's difficult to make snap judgements here. But I'm just not comfortable saying that just because someone is being paid, that they can't write whatever they want to without having to register with the goverment.
Besides, who is being protected from what here? If the electorate is so clueless that they'll just follow the advice of some slick-looking blog and go lobby their congressperson for whatever that blog told them to, then I'm afraid the problem is with the electorate, not with the blog or the laws. Do you blame the pusher, or the user? Passing laws to try to prevent the electorate from being manipulated is just treating the symptom. Everyone's always trying to manipulate the electorate, but most of them aren't subject to regulation.
I'd have less of a problem with a law which required disclosure *on the blog* about who is funding the message, if it's a political one - similar to the case with campaign ads. But requiring registration with the government sounds like overreach to me.
I also agree with people who have suggested that classifying many people as lobbyists could be detrimental. For example, is Al Gore a lobbyist? Let's say he's taken money from environmental groups for his movie etc., and he has a blog where occasionally he encourages people to lobby their congresspeople. This law seems to require him to register as a lobbyist, so now he can be smeared and dismissed by his opponents as a registered lobbyist. And that's the problem: afaict, this law won't just apply to the astroturfers you'd like to see brought to heel.
Finally, as I mentioned in another comment, what happens when someone posts on a blog hosted outside the U.S.? Are we going to institute a Great Firewall, just like China? That's the road that restricting free speech leads you down.
At least have the courtesy to thank George W. Bush for doing his bit to improve Iceland's climate!
Seriously, the parent's point about offshore blogs is an excellent one. What are they going to do next, install a Great Firewall, just like China?
Actually, priests risk their church's tax exempt status if they engage in partisan political activity from the pulpit.
But on everything else, I agree with you.
Uh, perhaps because they're not lobbying directly? As for "using their bully pulpit", it's the same bully pulpit that anyone else has access to: a blog. It's not some power that's been granted to them specially.
I dunno, I hate astroturfing as much as the next guy, but I'm not sure that laws like this are the way to solve the problem.
Microsoft aside, you think that's a good thing? What if it was GNU, or Save the Puppies, or your organization of choice? What if those people wanted to start a grassroots effort whether or not they were receiving free goodies from the organization they were supporting?
You're trying to draw a bright line using the law, where what exists in real life is fuzzy at best.You're suggesting a scenario in which someone attempts to influence the writer indirectly using money. However, you can't simply assume, as a matter of law, that everyone who's earning money from their writing is subject to such influence. As others have pointed out, all newspapers would then have to register as lobbyists, too.
This is just typical lawmaker confusion about the Constitution, like the many other attempts to restrict free speech online. If it passes, it'll never stand up to a court challenge.
Please correct the grave injustice that has been done to the parent post. Thank you for your cooperation.
Hey, it works for religions...
Plenty of European "white folks" speak at least two languages - often their home country's language and English, but also other regional languages. If you're going to go down the path of stereotyping everyone different from you (following a lot of white folk, btw), at least get it right: you're probably really mainly thinking of Americans and/or British white folk.
Shrug. I'm not an Ayn Rand nut, and I'm not defending high pay to incompetent CEOs. However, when it comes to minimum wage, as raised by the OP, there's usually a good reason that a person is earning minimum wage, which as I said, has to do with the value they're providing to others. You hinted at this yourself:
Precisely. And if you can't convince someone to pay you more than minimum wage, you're probably not doing anything that's of great value to anyone else. If you want to raise some counterexamples, I'd be interested to hear them.
(Note that this has nothing to do with whether they're capable of more, but about what work they're actually doing. In a kind of reverse of the CEO case, all sorts of distortions might conspire to make someone who's capable of more end up in a minimum wage job - it could be as simple as not having, or knowing about, opportunities.)
Because the people working for minimum wage don't contribute much to the economy. If they did, they'd be able to earn more money -- that's what money is, it's an abstraction of the value of the contribution you make to the economy.
Aside from that, as others have pointed out, this isn't a personal paycheck for Peter Jackson -- it's for a company full of ordinary (well, somewhat extraordinary) people who worked their asses off to make three movies which millions of people enjoyed. New Line Cinema's dodgy accounting practices is screwing those people out of money they have earned.
If you read the comments to the previous /. article about Sealand being for sale (at which point the price was only 65 million, talk about a price rise), people pointed out that it's no longer possible to obtain any kind of independent status for an artificial structure under international law. Sealand apparently still enjoys some kind of special status, though, having been grandfathered in.
There's some cult of eye makeup artists in California that believes in heavy racoon-like black eye outlines for older women. They've gotten to Nancy Pelosi, too.
Whoa.
</neo>
You're right, Hollywood Homicide is an exception, and a lot of fun, but other than that the parent poster has a point. I mean, I even like the recurring Ford action-hero character up to a point, but it's ridiculous for Ford to be claiming that Han Solo is "a little thin" blah blah while comparing it to roles like the ones he has played to death. The real reason he doesn't like Han Solo is because the character's not a morally righteous squeaky clean but ultimately boring family man, and Ford is afraid Solo would mess up his self-perceived legacy. (Sorry Harrison, but if you won't be honest about it, someone else has to be.)
This is a great idea! How far can you take it? Can you watch Waterworld and not see Kevin Costner, for example?
First, as I think I mentioned, the problem with grading it correct when it is isn't is a problem with the testing procedure. I'm guessing that these are situations when for whatever reason, it's considered necessary to make the choice a binary one, when it sounds as though it should allow for partial credit. If so, that may be a problem with the testing procedure at some level, and it wouldn't be very fair to take that out on a child who understands correctly how to do the work.
Beyond that, keep in mind that an elementary school math test is not an employee screening test. It has a completely different purpose, and it's applied to people at entirely different levels of development. Extrapolating from jobs involving spacecraft orbits and truck scheduling to elementary school children, and talking about firing people, seems ludicrous to me. You may think there's a connection, but unless you've studied child educational development and have some basis for that thought beyond your own unrelated work experience, you're almost certainly wrong.
Your wife is correct that understanding the process is much more important than not making clerical errors. Clerical errors can always be caught by cross-checking, but if you don't understand the process, you can't get anywhere. Math tests are artificial: you're not trying to build a spaceship, you're trying to test whether someone has learned something. In a more realistic situation, cross-checks would occur, and you'd have time to correct errors.
In an ideal situation, a large majority of a grade ought to be awarded based on a demonstrated understanding of the process. Clerical errors might be worth a minor deduction, but if the choice is to grade a question in a binary way, as correct or wrong, grading it as correct makes sense. The real problem in that situation is that the grading system is too coarse.
We're never going to improve as long as people insist on comparing software development to building bridges, i.e. a more sophisticated understanding of the problem is needed. In software, once you have a program for a bridge you can make a billion bridges, all alike or customized by certain parameters, just by running the program. So being "able to build the same damn bridge 100 times" doesn't get you anywhere. Making it better and safer each time? That's another story, and once again, the comparison to bridge building doesn't hold up, because you're talking about improving the design, not the building practices or materials.
If there was any merit in this canard, don't you think that before now, you'd have had some engineers who also knew software come along and revolutionize the software industry?
You haven't written a line of code in your life, have you? If you have, tell me what level of standardization you're even talking about, in the software context.
Yeah, but I hate the headache I get when the machine crashes.