perhaps we could reform tort law to require class-action attorneys to pay at least 85% of the settlements they negotiate to the class members?
Would that lead to fewer class action suits? It seems likely, if you reduce the incentive for lawyers to make those suits. If it does lead to fewer class action suits, would that reduce their deterrence of bad behavior by companies? If it does reduce the deterrence effect, could that cost consumers overall more than they lose to class action lawyers today?
I'm not disagreeing with you, it's a good idea. But good ideas sometimes have unintended consequences. It's definitely worth an experiment, but the result could go either way.
Where can I find a cell phone plan that works like my calling card? I put 300 minutes on my calling card, oh 10 years ago. I've used about 80 of them. The minutes are still there. Every prepaid cell phone plan I can find expires minutes on an annual basis (at best) but requires me to buy far, far more minutes than I need.
What's the right cell phone plan for someone who expects to never ever use his cell phone, but wants one for emergencies and emergencies only?
Yes, violence sucks. Yes, it's bad. Yes, we should avoid it if at all possible. But there comes a point when that's all you can do, and that's when the sociopaths hold *all* the cards. How far off do we all think that is? There comes a time when violence is necessary because there are evil, selfish people in the world.
The only reason that time is not now is that there aren't enough like minded people to join the revolutionary army. If you look at the Declaration of Independence, most of those grievances are trifling next to what we read about in the news every day. The crimes committed by the thugs that call themselves our government more than justify revolution today. All we need are people willing to lay down their lives for freedom. Unfortunately, as you note, more people care about their bread and circuses than they do freedom and justice.
In the US, "free market" doesn't mean an actual free market. I cannot think of a single one off the top of my head where it actually applies. The term "free market" in the US is invariably doublespeak. Crony capitalism does not a free market make.
There's no such thing as "free market". It's at best an abstraction, like a "frictionless surface" in physics. In reality, economic networks are scale free, meaning that they become dominated by a few big players. At that point, the markets are no longer free. The only way to stop this is through regulation. That's right, government regulation is *REQUIRED* to maintain a free market.
Government is not the only way to work together in order to improve things.
And when one company refuses to play fair, what exactly do you intend to do about it?
No such thing. Ownership itself is a totalitarian institution. Under free market capitalism, money makes money faster than labor does. This leads to amplification of economic inequality, leading to a small elite owning most of the economy. Since ownership is totalitarian, and the need to eat is just as coercive as the need not to get shot, the result is a de facto totalitarian government.
So they have no say in how YOU spend THEIR money? That's not democratic, nor is it moral.
They should have the same say as anyone else in how WE spend OUR money.
1) Taxes. There's a big misconception about taxes: people think that these can be raised arbitrarily to raise all the money the government needs. In practice, this doesn't work; businesses close and rich people move their money.
Why is it that free market fundamentalists always assume that because the Laffer curve exists every government everywhere is always on the righthand side of the curve? The fact is, taxes are at historical lows, and they were much higher during much better economic times. We're well to the left of the peak of the Laffer curve.
For example, is it wrong to feed the bears? Of course it is... its against the rules, encourages the bears to see humans as a food source, and makes them less inclined to gather food from the wild. So... its wrong. But at the same time its not especially immoral.
What exactly do you mean? You just described all the reasons why it is immoral to feed wild bears, and then said it wasn't immoral. What's your argument that it's not immoral?
The human cultures that are most exposed to modern scientific education are also those with birth rates below replacement levels
Which is good, because the Earth is beyond carrying capacity. Increasing the population when we're about to run out of petroleum based fertilizers and become unable to feed billions of people is immoral.
So, for whatever reason, scientific education is co-related with the decline of human civilization.
Population is not the same as civilization. Civilization is not even proportional to population.
For all the overqualification we get "on paper", we french still have the poorest understanding of economics in the entire OECD, and it shows in the polls and election results.
Except the US, who expects the free market to solve all problems.
Where else in the western world can there be overtly authoritarian communist candidates to the presidency or representative elections raking in a two-digit percentage of voters ?
Somewhere where they're informed enough to realize authoritarian capitalism isn't any better.
Defiance towards politicians is on a all-time high in France, yet they are the ones we turn to in order to fix all our problems.
And who else is going to do it? If we're going to work together to solve our problems, government is how we do that. The only other alternative is to surrender to the rapacious greed of the rich.
- we want more money individually, but do not want prices to inflate nor income discrepancies to increase,
Nothing wrong with that. When there is such vast income disparity like that in the US, bringing everyone closer to the average would increase almost everyone's economic status. For those whos status would decrease, boo fucking hoo.
- we want to determine our lives and be free of bureaucracy yet clamor for more government regulation with every bad news,
What we really want is regulation that works and is enforced. That corporate owned cronies in government have passed regulations designed to not work, and deliberately fail to enforce the ones that do doesn't mean regulation is bad.
- we want more public expenses but do not want to deprive the private sector of the funds it needs to create jobs and wealth.
Providing services to those who need them will increase the funds available to the private sector. When you give aid to the poor, they spend it. That money goes directly to the bottom line of businesses, allowing them to create jobs. Give aid to the rich like the US does, and they just sit on it.
In other words, France only has the "poorest understanding of economics in the entire OECD" if you're a free market fundamentalist. That's like a creationist saying that France has the "poorest understanding of evolution".
On the contrary, it seems like Burning Man is uninviting to anyone who doesn't have a real job. Who else can afford tickets? My sense is that a lot of burners are professionals the other 51 weeks of the year. Burning Man is a huge release from all the conformity they deal with the rest of the year. They get one week out of the year to feel cool, so they make it as extreme as possible.
NOAA tells me that the auroral oval extends as far south as my home state of Nebraska, which is rare. That's not national news, but it's certainly local news.
Nope! It turns out, Senator McCarthy was right. There really were Communists in the State Department.
GOOD. There should be communists in the state department. US civil servants have a right to their political beliefs. Discriminating based on those beliefs is wrong.
My point was that legal and moral are different things.
Absolutely. Marijuana prohibition is immoral, but it's legal. I'm not arguing identity between morality and legality. Hell, I'm open to arguments that mass surveillance is moral and useful. (I don't think it is, but that's a reasonable discussion to have) But under the Constitution we have today, it's absolutely not legal.
Legal comes from force.
So if I kick your ass and get away with it, that's legal? No, legality comes from a mandate from the people, formalized in a document consented to by those people. That's the only thing that separates the use of force by government from the use of force by criminals.
But you've mostly made arguments that certain things were immoral.
No, I've made arguments that certain things are illegal, based on the text of the highest law of the land.
That's fine if you're arguing what should be legal (and I think we agree there), but unrelated to what is legal.
What I'm arguing is that what the government does bears no relation to what is actually legal, as defined by very document that establishes that government and grants its powers.
So in your view, what justfies the use of force by the government? Is there any difference to you between a cop that kicks your ass and gets away with it because the DA is too corrupt to charge him with assault, and a cop that uses the legally authorized amount of force in a justified arrest? Are both "legal" simply because we have no recourse against them?
When people ask to have limbs amputated because the person feels that having the limb doesn't make them feel whole (strange how you don't feel whole until part of you is removed?! That and/or because they have a sexual fetish for amputated limbs,) modern medicine denies that request, considers it to be abhorrent, and any medical professional who obliges the request is jailed and/or has their license to practice revoked. The treatment for the above condition is the same as if the person had a mental illness, and the solution is to change thinking patterns rather than surgery.
In that case, modern medicine is wrong. Modern medicine is wrong about a lot of things.
I mean, you're right the real disfunction is in the brain. But we have no way to treat that disfunction. The right thing to do is to give the patient the treatment that will improve his/her life the most. In the absence of brain altering treatments that work, body alteration is the best remaining option in some cases. Try everything else first, but when all of that fails, amputate.
Obama the senator was always in favor of warrantless wiretapping, even voting to grant telcos immunity for their illegal cooperation with the government. He was NEVER on our side.
Some things he was disingenuous about. Single payer health care for one. Respecting state laws on marijuana is another. Being the "most transparent administration in history" is yet another. But he was always forthright about his lack of respect for the 4th amendment.
Exactly how often are you in front of your gaming PC without internet access? Serious question.
That's not the point at all. I refuse to buy a game that can be taken away from me at any point with no recourse. I still play 30 year old games on my Tandy, and I hope to be around to play games from today 30 years from now.
I object to disposible culture in the strongest possible terms. If this practice becomes acceptable, future generations will be unable to benefit from their cultural heritage. What if the works of Shakespeare and Bach were dependent on a third party service that disappeared 10 years after release?
Well, feel free to have words mean whatever you want them to mean, but the constitution is not the USC, is neither criminal nor civil law
It is superior to all of those.
sets no specific requirements for how citizens must behave
It strictly prohibits Congress, which is composed of citizens, from passing some laws. Specifically, laws which violate the right of the people to be secure in their papers and effects from unreasonable searches are prohibited.
has no specific penalties for non-compliance
Which is one of it's greatest failings.
doesn't even explicitly say that the SCOTUS can overturn unconstitutional laws.
Indeed. That power was usurped by SCOTUS, not granted to it by the people. When you think about it logically, there is no need for any body to overturn unconstitutional laws. An unconstitutional law is a contradiction in and of itself. If it's unconsitutional, it's not a law.
As most people use them, the words "illegal" and "unconstitutional" mean different things.
As well it should. What's illegal is not passing an unconstitutional law. That's just pissing in the wind. What's illegal is actually performing that search, when nothing legitimately authorizes you to do so. e.g. If I read your email, I'd be breaking the law. Without legitimate authority to wiretap, the NSA is in the exact same legal position that I am.
If you want to say the NSA's actions have been "unconstitutional", I think most would agree.
No, the law authorizing the NSA's surveillance is unconstitutional. The surveillance itself is illegal.
Your long rant boils down to "but I don't like reality".
When the reality is that we're ruled by a bunch of thugs instead of having a Constitutional republic ruled by the people, of course I don't like reality. The reality is that there is no rule of law in the US.
The governments' monopoly on force says otherwise.
Indeed. And that's all they have, is a monopoly on force. They do not have a just government supported by the consent of the people. They are not a legitimate government at all, but an organized crime syndicate. Remember, might does not make right.
The law, the real law, the one ratified by the people is on my side. No amount of force can change that.
Slashdot Mirror
Why not just hire locals?
perhaps we could reform tort law to require class-action attorneys to pay at least 85% of the settlements they negotiate to the class members?
Would that lead to fewer class action suits? It seems likely, if you reduce the incentive for lawyers to make those suits. If it does lead to fewer class action suits, would that reduce their deterrence of bad behavior by companies? If it does reduce the deterrence effect, could that cost consumers overall more than they lose to class action lawyers today?
I'm not disagreeing with you, it's a good idea. But good ideas sometimes have unintended consequences. It's definitely worth an experiment, but the result could go either way.
Where can I find a cell phone plan that works like my calling card? I put 300 minutes on my calling card, oh 10 years ago. I've used about 80 of them. The minutes are still there. Every prepaid cell phone plan I can find expires minutes on an annual basis (at best) but requires me to buy far, far more minutes than I need.
What's the right cell phone plan for someone who expects to never ever use his cell phone, but wants one for emergencies and emergencies only?
Yes, violence sucks. Yes, it's bad. Yes, we should avoid it if at all possible. But there comes a point when that's all you can do, and that's when the sociopaths hold *all* the cards. How far off do we all think that is? There comes a time when violence is necessary because there are evil, selfish people in the world.
The only reason that time is not now is that there aren't enough like minded people to join the revolutionary army. If you look at the Declaration of Independence, most of those grievances are trifling next to what we read about in the news every day. The crimes committed by the thugs that call themselves our government more than justify revolution today. All we need are people willing to lay down their lives for freedom. Unfortunately, as you note, more people care about their bread and circuses than they do freedom and justice.
In the US, "free market" doesn't mean an actual free market. I cannot think of a single one off the top of my head where it actually applies. The term "free market" in the US is invariably doublespeak. Crony capitalism does not a free market make.
There's no such thing as "free market". It's at best an abstraction, like a "frictionless surface" in physics. In reality, economic networks are scale free, meaning that they become dominated by a few big players. At that point, the markets are no longer free. The only way to stop this is through regulation. That's right, government regulation is *REQUIRED* to maintain a free market.
Government is not the only way to work together in order to improve things.
And when one company refuses to play fair, what exactly do you intend to do about it?
I'd prefer non-authoritarian anything (preferably, non-authoritarian free market capitalism).
No such thing. Ownership itself is a totalitarian institution. Under free market capitalism, money makes money faster than labor does. This leads to amplification of economic inequality, leading to a small elite owning most of the economy. Since ownership is totalitarian, and the need to eat is just as coercive as the need not to get shot, the result is a de facto totalitarian government.
So they have no say in how YOU spend THEIR money? That's not democratic, nor is it moral.
They should have the same say as anyone else in how WE spend OUR money.
1) Taxes. There's a big misconception about taxes: people think that these can be raised arbitrarily to raise all the money the government needs. In practice, this doesn't work; businesses close and rich people move their money.
Why is it that free market fundamentalists always assume that because the Laffer curve exists every government everywhere is always on the righthand side of the curve? The fact is, taxes are at historical lows, and they were much higher during much better economic times. We're well to the left of the peak of the Laffer curve.
For example, is it wrong to feed the bears? Of course it is... its against the rules, encourages the bears to see humans as a food source, and makes them less inclined to gather food from the wild. So... its wrong. But at the same time its not especially immoral.
What exactly do you mean? You just described all the reasons why it is immoral to feed wild bears, and then said it wasn't immoral. What's your argument that it's not immoral?
The human cultures that are most exposed to modern scientific education are also those with birth rates below replacement levels
Which is good, because the Earth is beyond carrying capacity. Increasing the population when we're about to run out of petroleum based fertilizers and become unable to feed billions of people is immoral.
So, for whatever reason, scientific education is co-related with the decline of human civilization.
Population is not the same as civilization. Civilization is not even proportional to population.
For all the overqualification we get "on paper", we french still have the poorest understanding of economics in the entire OECD, and it shows in the polls and election results.
Except the US, who expects the free market to solve all problems.
Where else in the western world can there be overtly authoritarian communist candidates to the presidency or representative elections raking in a two-digit percentage of voters ?
Somewhere where they're informed enough to realize authoritarian capitalism isn't any better.
Defiance towards politicians is on a all-time high in France, yet they are the ones we turn to in order to fix all our problems.
And who else is going to do it? If we're going to work together to solve our problems, government is how we do that. The only other alternative is to surrender to the rapacious greed of the rich.
- we want more money individually, but do not want prices to inflate nor income discrepancies to increase,
Nothing wrong with that. When there is such vast income disparity like that in the US, bringing everyone closer to the average would increase almost everyone's economic status. For those whos status would decrease, boo fucking hoo.
- we want to determine our lives and be free of bureaucracy yet clamor for more government regulation with every bad news,
What we really want is regulation that works and is enforced. That corporate owned cronies in government have passed regulations designed to not work, and deliberately fail to enforce the ones that do doesn't mean regulation is bad.
- we want more public expenses but do not want to deprive the private sector of the funds it needs to create jobs and wealth.
Providing services to those who need them will increase the funds available to the private sector. When you give aid to the poor, they spend it. That money goes directly to the bottom line of businesses, allowing them to create jobs. Give aid to the rich like the US does, and they just sit on it.
In other words, France only has the "poorest understanding of economics in the entire OECD" if you're a free market fundamentalist. That's like a creationist saying that France has the "poorest understanding of evolution".
On the contrary, it seems like Burning Man is uninviting to anyone who doesn't have a real job. Who else can afford tickets? My sense is that a lot of burners are professionals the other 51 weeks of the year. Burning Man is a huge release from all the conformity they deal with the rest of the year. They get one week out of the year to feel cool, so they make it as extreme as possible.
NOAA tells me that the auroral oval extends as far south as my home state of Nebraska, which is rare. That's not national news, but it's certainly local news.
Yeah, I can't understand why this is news. I've seen it on two sites now.
If it's likely to cause aurora in locations that don't usually get aurora, it's definitely news.
Nope! It turns out, Senator McCarthy was right. There really were Communists in the State Department.
GOOD. There should be communists in the state department. US civil servants have a right to their political beliefs. Discriminating based on those beliefs is wrong.
My point was that legal and moral are different things.
Absolutely. Marijuana prohibition is immoral, but it's legal. I'm not arguing identity between morality and legality. Hell, I'm open to arguments that mass surveillance is moral and useful. (I don't think it is, but that's a reasonable discussion to have) But under the Constitution we have today, it's absolutely not legal.
Legal comes from force.
So if I kick your ass and get away with it, that's legal? No, legality comes from a mandate from the people, formalized in a document consented to by those people. That's the only thing that separates the use of force by government from the use of force by criminals.
But you've mostly made arguments that certain things were immoral.
No, I've made arguments that certain things are illegal, based on the text of the highest law of the land.
That's fine if you're arguing what should be legal (and I think we agree there), but unrelated to what is legal.
What I'm arguing is that what the government does bears no relation to what is actually legal, as defined by very document that establishes that government and grants its powers.
So in your view, what justfies the use of force by the government? Is there any difference to you between a cop that kicks your ass and gets away with it because the DA is too corrupt to charge him with assault, and a cop that uses the legally authorized amount of force in a justified arrest? Are both "legal" simply because we have no recourse against them?
When people ask to have limbs amputated because the person feels that having the limb doesn't make them feel whole (strange how you don't feel whole until part of you is removed?! That and/or because they have a sexual fetish for amputated limbs,) modern medicine denies that request, considers it to be abhorrent, and any medical professional who obliges the request is jailed and/or has their license to practice revoked. The treatment for the above condition is the same as if the person had a mental illness, and the solution is to change thinking patterns rather than surgery.
In that case, modern medicine is wrong. Modern medicine is wrong about a lot of things.
I mean, you're right the real disfunction is in the brain. But we have no way to treat that disfunction. The right thing to do is to give the patient the treatment that will improve his/her life the most. In the absence of brain altering treatments that work, body alteration is the best remaining option in some cases. Try everything else first, but when all of that fails, amputate.
When do I laugh? I can't tell without a laugh track.
Who is Chelsea Manning? She is just a woman going to jail. Nobody knows her. She is not a household name, not a symbol.
Shouldn't it be Chelsea Womanning?
You seem to think that mere force is equivalent to law.
Obama the senator was always in favor of warrantless wiretapping, even voting to grant telcos immunity for their illegal cooperation with the government. He was NEVER on our side.
Some things he was disingenuous about. Single payer health care for one. Respecting state laws on marijuana is another. Being the "most transparent administration in history" is yet another. But he was always forthright about his lack of respect for the 4th amendment.
Violation of the CFAA. The same thing they'd hit us with if we read their email.
Exactly how often are you in front of your gaming PC without internet access? Serious question.
That's not the point at all. I refuse to buy a game that can be taken away from me at any point with no recourse. I still play 30 year old games on my Tandy, and I hope to be around to play games from today 30 years from now.
I object to disposible culture in the strongest possible terms. If this practice becomes acceptable, future generations will be unable to benefit from their cultural heritage. What if the works of Shakespeare and Bach were dependent on a third party service that disappeared 10 years after release?
Well, feel free to have words mean whatever you want them to mean, but the constitution is not the USC, is neither criminal nor civil law
It is superior to all of those.
sets no specific requirements for how citizens must behave
It strictly prohibits Congress, which is composed of citizens, from passing some laws. Specifically, laws which violate the right of the people to be secure in their papers and effects from unreasonable searches are prohibited.
has no specific penalties for non-compliance
Which is one of it's greatest failings.
doesn't even explicitly say that the SCOTUS can overturn unconstitutional laws.
Indeed. That power was usurped by SCOTUS, not granted to it by the people. When you think about it logically, there is no need for any body to overturn unconstitutional laws. An unconstitutional law is a contradiction in and of itself. If it's unconsitutional, it's not a law.
As most people use them, the words "illegal" and "unconstitutional" mean different things.
As well it should. What's illegal is not passing an unconstitutional law. That's just pissing in the wind. What's illegal is actually performing that search, when nothing legitimately authorizes you to do so. e.g. If I read your email, I'd be breaking the law. Without legitimate authority to wiretap, the NSA is in the exact same legal position that I am.
If you want to say the NSA's actions have been "unconstitutional", I think most would agree.
No, the law authorizing the NSA's surveillance is unconstitutional. The surveillance itself is illegal.
Your long rant boils down to "but I don't like reality".
When the reality is that we're ruled by a bunch of thugs instead of having a Constitutional republic ruled by the people, of course I don't like reality. The reality is that there is no rule of law in the US.
The governments' monopoly on force says otherwise.
Indeed. And that's all they have, is a monopoly on force. They do not have a just government supported by the consent of the people. They are not a legitimate government at all, but an organized crime syndicate. Remember, might does not make right.
The law, the real law, the one ratified by the people is on my side. No amount of force can change that.
Apparently all you have to do is claim you did it in good faith or there was a clerical error
No, it's easier than that. If you're a large corporation, you never have to do anything at all because no prosecutor anywhere is going to indict you.