Sorry for not being clear; it wasn't taxes that I was decrying, it was central banking and their fractional reserve lending, and its ability to create money out of thin air, and its requirement to pay back more money than was created, that makes satisfying our debt mathematically impossible
That's not really how it works. For one thing, the federal government doesn't take out debt by taking a bank loan. They issue bonds which investors buy using already-existing money. For another, fractional reserve banking would only prevent people from paying back their loans if it was the sole mechanism by which money is created. It isn't. Moreover, if people start paying back their loans at a faster rate than other people take out new ones, the government will cause new money to be created in order to prevent deflation.
Incidentally, that happening could solve a lot of our problems -- if people start paying down their debts en masse (and there is evidence that they are doing that now), it requires the government to print a lot of money to offset the money "destroyed" when people pay back their loans. And every dollar the government creates is a dollar it doesn't have to get from taxes. The inflation is normally be the only downside and it's negated by the people paying their debts.
Here's a fun fact: With a stroke of a pen Congress could cancel all student loans and all mortgage debt without directly causing any inflation, just by printing the principal and crediting it to everyone's accounts. (Of course, the newly debt-free people would immediately turn around and start borrowing again, and that would cause a huge amount of inflation. But if you can discourage that by, say, adding a 50% tax up to the amount paid off on any new borrowing within 10 years, it would work.) Naturally nobody talks about stuff like that, because most of the people who understand it are bankers, and it's the last thing they want because debt-free people don't pay interest.
Which is naturally why we have to prohibit professionals with training from handling Plutonium, but any idiot is allowed to smoke cigarettes in the presence of children.
That's debatable. Interest rates are primarily a function of alternatives. What is the alternative to US treasuries right now for a safe investment? The stock market is too volatile, the Eurozone is too volatile, China doesn't really issue debt. I mean sure, if you print too much money then interest rates will go up too much. So you don't print too much, you only print just enough. Let there be moderate (but not excessive) inflation -- it'll help the housing market.
We are so far down the road to corporatacracy that I don't think there is any turning back, just occasional slow downs when the government is forced to apply some regulation after particularly egregious corporate behavior (SOX, et al).
I don't think it's as bad as all that. Corporate power is like a pendulum, but it doesn't move at the same rate in both directions. It grows slowly over many years until it reaches a tipping point and public outrage reaches a boil, then all at once it swings back (like the trust busting a century ago). And we're due for one of those events.
SOX is nothing. It's the status quo masquerading as change. People want real change. You can lie to them and spout nonsense about "hope and change" or pretend to be a bunch of 18th century revolutionaries for a while, but people will only believe the lie for so long before it just makes them even more angry. At some point you have to give the people what they want.
You're assuming the Fed would reduce its holdings of US debt when the treasury pays it down, rather than holding the same amount and that amount just representing a higher proportion of the total outstanding.
In addition, nobody actually expects them to pay the whole debt. It would just be nice if they could e.g. cut it in half. And as I already said, the easiest way to do that is to just stop running deficits for a while until inflation erodes the value of the outstanding balance.
Of course, there is the option you mention: They could increase the money supply. There is a whole lot of difference between "worth less" and "worthless." A currency that has a one-time devaluation by 50% over a period of a decade is hardly "worthless" -- it's still worth half what it was before. And newly created money can be used to cover the deficit in the meantime.
Politics are a lot easier to deal with than climate change.
Politics is what causes climate change. We could pretty easily stop burning oil in a hurry if all governments took a firm stand and decide to e.g. add $1/gallon to the gas tax every year for the next 20 years (and an equivalent for other fossil fuels). People would straight away stop wanting to buy cars that run on gasoline because they'll know in five years it'll be much more expensive to operate and an electric car won't, but it wouldn't cause all the existing infrastructure to grind to a halt because the extra cost doesn't show up in a serious way for a period of years.
The problem is that the politics are the opposite of the nuclear scenario: Nobody wants to be the first to lob a nuke, so nobody does. But nobody wants to be the first to take the economic hit that comes with lowering carbon emissions, so nobody does.
You obviously don't understand how taxes work. If you have $100, when you spend it the government takes (e.g.) $25. They can (in theory; they never actually do) put that against the debt. Then the person you paid the $75 has $75 and the person the government paid $25 has $25, a total of $100. When they spend the $100, the government gets another $25. Repeat until debt is paid.
Of course, governments never really repay their debts. When a bond is due, they issue a new bond to pay for it. The interest on government debt is almost by definition below the rate of inflation, so when governments want to "reduce" their debt they just stop increasing it and wait until inflation has devalued it sufficiently.
That is kind of missing the point. The point isn't that Plutonium is nontoxic, it's that it isn't significantly more toxic than a variety of other common substances. If you ingest 50 grams of caffeine, you will die. That amount of Plutonium is not likely to do you any good either, but it's pretty hard to get much worse than "this will kill you." So if you don't like Plutonium then you need a better argument than "it's toxic," because we don't ban things from the world just because of that.
In an attempt to protect the poor Russian who is likely selling counterfeit goods (but we're unsure because we can't check at present time),
Yes, innocent until proven guilty is important.
using the NFL trademark they are likely not to have been given permission to used (and was likely reported by the NFL themselves),
The NFL doesn't have any right to stop someone from using the term "NFL" to refer to the NFL. It's fair use. Neither do they have any right to stop someone who has original but second hand merchandize from reselling it, because of first sale. But they would like to stop them anyway.
So my argument is that we shouldn't create a system where they can stop people who aren't doing anything wrong and rationalize it just because some entirely different people are doing something wrong, or one where they have no incentive not to make mistakes and impose the costs of those mistakes on innocent people.
we should allow citizens to buy counterfeit goods to the detriment of both the citizen and the NFL, thus lining this "poor" Russian's pocket with illegitimate money,
I repeat: If this person is selling counterfeit goods from Russia in violation of the law, you go to Russian authorities and have him arrested, or you go to treaty organizations and pressure the Russian authorities to do their jobs.
just so he doesn't have a domain name taken away from him, a domain name I can purchase today from GoDaddy for $10.
A domain name is worth more than $10. If you don't think so, go ask Apple how much they want for mac.com or Microsoft what they want for hotmail.com.
The reason for this is because the process mirrors the same legal process we take for many other accusations of legal wrongdoing or legal protection which, according to your own subjective personal beliefs, is an injustice.
We have a variety of legal processes that don't mirror one another. You're highlighting the ones that that mirror this practice and ignoring the ones that don't. In fact, courts issuing orders without hearing from both sides is by far the exception rather than the rule and is generally reserved for the most serious cases where irreparable harm will be done before the hearing can take place. I don't see how some asshat selling a couple of knockoffs rises to that level of immediacy.
People who were elected by citizens, in accordance with the Constitution of the United States.
People who are allowed to change their minds. Which is what they're supposed to do when they've made a mistake, which is what I'm arguing they have done for the many reasons outside of my subjective definition of justice that have already been discussed.
However, as I also said, their websites are not destroyed and they can challenge the domain name seizure, which means they have proper avenues for retrieving their domain name if they don't wish to register another.
Again, the problem is that small time foreign nationals don't have access to US courts. You can't reasonably expect someone living hand to mouth to buy a $2000 plane ticket, hire a $500/hour attorney and live in a $100/night hotel during a period of time where you've taken away their primary source of income.
You wave of the toxicity of pu-239 and focus on radioactivity.
I'm not ignoring the toxicity, I'm pointing out the FUD with regard to the half life. The fact that it takes a long time to decay is irrelevant because the radioactivity isn't the problem, even though that is what scares people.
At that point you can stop talking about nuclear physics and start talking about chemistry. But the problem there is that there are plenty of extremely toxic substances we deal with on a daily basis, and you haven't pointed out any reason why Plutonium in particular needs to be singled out for special treatment. Arsenic and Mercury are both extremely toxic but we use them all over the place in industry. Mix bleach an ammonia in an unventilated space and you'll be having a very bad day. Half the stuff under your sink will kill you if you get it hot enough and breathe the vapors, and the facilities that make and store those things would cause serious problems for anyone downwind if they caught fire.
You don't have any reason why Plutonium has to be singled out. We deal with toxic substances regularly. When mistakes happen it's very bad, so we do what we can to minimize mistakes. But the non-existence of a zero percent error rate is no excuse to shut down all of industry, and there is no reasoning why it should be applied that way to nuclear power when it isn't to anything that has the same degree of harm when things go wrong.
And which reactor would that be PBMR, IFR? Supported by which materials technology? Can you specify an actual burn-up rate? Do you know what a burn-up rate is or what the nominal burn-up rate of a conventional reactor is?
Do you actually have any purpose in asking these questions? You can destroy Plutonium with anything that bombards it with neutrons. It's fissionable. Unless you're trying to dispute the possibility of a reactor that can produce neutrons, what's your point? That it will take a long time? We already have a lot of Plutonium. It can be used as reactor fuel, and we want to get rid of it. If it takes a long time that's only evidence that we need to start building those reactors as soon as possible and in quantity, because we have more fuel than we know what to do with (and the existing reactors are making more every day), so we need to get to work using it up.
How do you propose handling the now enormous amounts of fissile ash created?
Let's come back from the propaganda term "fissile ash" and actually consider what that is. It's the elements the fissile elements are split into. Various elements with various half lives, which can be chemically separated. This is largely stuff with commercial value -- it's how we make x-ray machines and a variety of other equipment and methods that fall under the heading of "nuclear medicine." There are various other industrial applications. For example, Sr-90 can be used to make radioisotope thermoelectric generators like the Russians used to use in remote lighthouses or NASA uses for space probes etc.
This is really the whole problem with talking about "nuclear waste" -- it's not waste. People pay money for this stuff.
You're conflating two different issues. Whether they use bribery at all is a matter of public policy. Who they bribe, if they're allowed to bribe anyone, is a military secret.
You don't have to compromise operational security just by publishing the ground rules. "US forces can never use torture" is not really telling the bad guys anything useful: "Don't tell them anything" is not a significantly different strategy than "don't tell them anything, even if they torture you."
Likewise, knowing that they can't record your telephone conversations or your internet traffic without a warrant doesn't give the bad guys any margin of safety, because they don't actually know whether you've got a warrant or not. They can't change their plans. "Use encryption, because they're watching" is not significantly different than "use encryption, because they could have a warrant." If anything it's a good thing because it gives the bad guys a false sense of security, so when you do get a warrant they're less likely to be taking countermeasures.
The only argument you can really make is that taking tactics off the table reduces effectiveness in general. But that's the heart of the policy question -- that's the decision the people need to make, not the military. If the people want more freedom and less temporary safety then it's their call.
The website wouldn't be on the hit list, unless NFL complained about it. And if the NFL complains about it, you can be assured they are not licensed to sell NFL merchandise. With that particular URL, it's very clear the website is trying to make money off a product they have no right to make money from.
Why do you imagine that people need a license to resell knickknacks?
You seem to be purposefully ignoring the possibility that the NFL is trying to claim more rights than they actually have and that the site isn't doing anything wrong. The name implies what they're selling, it doesn't tell you whether it's legitimate. If they're selling used legitimate goods, or licensed goods below the MSRP having never agreed to do otherwise, the NFL has no right to stop them. That doesn't mean the NFL doesn't still want to or wouldn't still put them on the list knowing that the site has no recourse.
I'm not saying they aren't just selling knock offs. What I'm saying is that you can't tell that just from the name; you need to give them a real chance to respond that doesn't cost them more than the value of the property being seized, otherwise you'll get unchecked abuses.
The problem with that is if we all have our own standard of justice, how could anything get done?
The problem with your argument is that there is no single, objective definition of justice. You have to pick someone's subjective definition and apply it, which is how we came to the status quo. It was the subjective definition of a bunch of politicians and judges. But the status quo is not infallible. You can't decide what the law should be strictly by looking at what it is, because that eliminates any possibility of fixing past mistakes.
Stare decisis is a device for attaining consistency. It works great when you get it right the first time. It replicates errors when you don't. It's totally useless as a tool for setting policy, because all it tells you is what the policy used to be, not whether it was good policy then or now.
And if we actually try to objectively decide whether issuing court order without hearing from the party affected is a good policy, we can find ample evidence of serious problems. Your friend is arrested for violating a restraining order he never had an opportunity to contest. Sites like Rojadirecta that are legal in their home countries have their domain names destroyed by foreign governments without notice. The list of abuses of ex parte asset seizures in the war on drugs goes on for miles.
Even the principle itself is simple and straight forward: If you want to seize property, the only person with any reasonable incentive to oppose a wrongful seizure is the current owner. Since we need to prevent wrongful seizures, that means we need to hear from the current owner before allowing the seizure. And then you can bring in all of the well-known, well-reasoned arguments for why you need to have personal jurisdiction over a party before you can bring an action against them.
Which leaves us with the ideal way of shutting down a counterfeiting site: You go to local law enforcement in the country where they're actually operating from and you have them arrested. (And if it's legal for them to do what they're doing where they're doing it, well, you either lobby that country to change the law or you're SOL. It isn't a valid goal to be able to control the whole world from K Street.)
I hope you're not suggesting that anything that increases American wages is doomed, because that's just defeatism.
In addition to that, what I'm laying out has the tendency to increase standard of living without really increasing costs. I said higher wages, but the fact of it is that it's more like more disposable income: If you don't have to pay for housing then that amount of your income can go towards something else. Working the same job for the same pay allows you to buy more stuff, which provides the added incentive necessary to keep working.
How do you provide housing to everyone? You have the government offer a zero interest, zero payments loan up to $150,000 toward the purchase of a home to every adult. The principal is payable in full the day you stop living in the house. The government can fund the program by itself borrowing the money, which it can do at extremely low interest rates, so that the cost to the government will only be e.g. $1500/year. Then pay that interest using property tax with a $150,000 personal deduction, so only homes costing more than the loan amount will have any property tax, and so that way the price of homes won't just go up by the subsidy amount because people won't be willing to pay that much extra property tax.
Think about that: We could have a relatively small tax that primarily falls on the rich (or at least, people with large houses) and provide the option of free housing to everyone. Which is the most expensive part of a basic income.
In addition to that, the idea that everyone is going to just quit their job is ridiculous. What will happen is that lots of people will quit and to get them back to work, the employers will have to pay higher wages and provide better working conditions. It will also provide a large incentive to automation, because of the higher labor costs. I don't see either of those as a bad thing.
Well, I think "17nflshop.com" is pretty clear, wouldn't you?
It sounds like a place you might find NFL merchandise. How does that tell you anything about its legitimacy? If they're strictly selling legitimate second hand merchandise, you can still imagine the NFL preferring not to have the competition. This is why we have hearings.
My argument is we don't see the idea of arrest before conviction as an injustice, nor do we see TROs without defense as an injustice. As such, seeing how neither of those previous scenarios are an injustice, is there a reason to see this as an injustice, aside from the fact we don't like any governmental control over the Internet at all?
I think you're confusing what happens in court with justice. Courts take shortcuts and make mistakes. The seizures in question were signed off by a court. The question is whether it was right, not whether it was officially sanctioned. I mean read your own post above: You've given a perfectly good example of why granting a TRO without hearing from the defense is an injustice. Two wrongs don't make a right; neither do a thousand.
Right now, the TSA is sitting on what I have been told is plenty of evidence that they have stopped a significant number of incidents.
Even if true, that doesn't actually tell you anything. The question is whether the data mining efforts were required to stop them or if they would have been caught using more traditional methods.
As for the "our detection methods are secret so the bad guys can't counter them" argument, that isn't consistent with a democracy. The public has to be informed before they can make a decision. The people making these claims have perverse incentives: They might genuinely be doing something good, they might just be exaggerating in order to keep their jobs or get more funding. The only way you can tell is if you actually evaluate what they're doing.
If you want to argue that preventing terrorism is more important than having democracy and therefore we should in effect give these people unaccountable autonomy to protect us, I feel like most reasonable people are not going to agree to that. Or if they do we're in trouble. There are some things more important than catching bad guys.
tortures want to torture and programmers want to create palantirs.
That's just ridiculous. For one thing, half of these decisions get made by people other than those who implement them. More than that, most of these people actually believe what they're doing will help. (They may be wrong, of course.)
I suspect part of the problem is the sort of "forbidden fruit" aspect of it all. If certain interrogation tactics are banned, they must be really effective, right? Otherwise why ban them?
People don't seem to get that some things are prohibited because the costs objectively outweigh the benefits, not because some tool in an ivory tower decided that the costs are too high in a vacuum.
That's not what happened in this case, or from what the summary says happened in this case.
So they say. We don't actually know unless we hear from the operators of the website, which we haven't. Which is the whole problem.
Like I said, I'm not saying I'm comfortable with it, but I don't think it's exactly outside the realm of what goes on routinely in America.
It seems like your argument boils down to: Sometimes justice is not done, and so therefore it doesn't matter that other times justice is not done. I don't think that's how it works.
Your argument is completely without merit. The operators of the sites are not in the US. The servers are not in the US. There is no "international law" being applied here, because if there was they would apply it against the actual operators of the website in their own country.
You can always find some frivolous relationship to any given country to try to claim jurisdiction. The TLD registrar has an office in the jurisdiction, the ad company has an office, the payment processor has an office, one of the ISPs that the traffic flows through has an office, one of the end users is in the jurisdiction, one of the chips in the webserver was manufactured in the jurisdiction, the payment processor has a customer who has an office in the jurisdiction, etc. etc.
Any country can play this game. So I repeat: We have a choice to make. Either the internet can be subject to the laws of the least restrictive country, or the laws of the most restrictive country. I don't know about you but I sure don't want China to have a world-wide veto on what you can say on the internet, and I'm sure the Chinese feel the same way about the US.
There is already a solution to counterfeiting on the internet. It's called local law enforcement. If there is a counterfeiter in Russia, you have the Russian authorities arrest them. If you don't feel that Russia is doing a good enough job of that, you negotiate a treaty that requires them to do better. And unlike your alternative, none of that requires ham-fisted bureaucrats to debase the single greatest communications medium ever invented.
In fairness, and I admit I don't know the whole process, but can those domains not challenge the takedown, and if they win, have the domain restored? At which point, is it any different than when an officer sees you breaking into a car and arrests you for it?
Let's consider this for a minute. Assume you can go to court in the US and demand they give you back your domain name.
You're some guy in Russia who makes barely enough to buy food and shelter by selling legitimate products which you buy as damaged goods for a steep discount and then repair them yourself before reselling. Your website has just disappeared, so you now have no income. In order to get it back, you have to go to court in the United States. The plane ticket will cost you $2000, but first you'll have to get a Russian passport and a US travel visa. Then you'll have to live in a hotel for who knows how long and hire a lawyer who charges more in one day than you make in a year, who you can't communicate with very well because you don't speak very good English. While you're in the US away from your wife and kids you won't be allowed to work or generate any income because your travel visa doesn't allow it. By the time all is said and done, and you've got your domain back, you'll have accumulated a debt equal to about four times your annual income (assuming someone was even willing to lend you the money).
There is a reason why jurisdiction does not normally extend outside a country's borders. The hardship on someone who has to travel to the other side of the world to protect his livelihood is too great. And you're subjecting foreign nationals to US laws without giving them a vote.
I think you can see why the analogy to someone breaking into a car is inapt: When you get arrested the government provides you with a lawyer. You get a trial, which is held where you are instead of on the other side of the world. If you can't make bail you have a criminal defendant's right to a speedy trial, and in the meantime the government provides you with food and shelter. By contrast, when you have your domain name taken by a foreign government, there is no trial beforehand, you have no opportunity to be heard, the government doesn't provide you with a lawyer and there is a mountain of bureaucracy and a cash furnace between you and getting back what belongs to you.
The list of sites reads like a "who's who" of counterfeit goods, not torrent sites. I didn't see a single torrent-related site that I recognized on the list.
What does it have anything to do with torrent sites? The problem is that they're seizing domains without due process and shutting down foreign websites, some of which (like Rojadirecta last time) are legal in their home countries.
This is not the way the internet is supposed to work. And the problem is, if we set this kind of precedent, how long until other countries reciprocate? Do we find it perfectly alright for China to make YouTube disappear from the internet over dissident videos by advertising a route to its IP and then dropping the packets, like Pakistan did in 2010?
The problem is that we have a choice: We can have an internet which is subject to the least restrictive laws of any country, or we can have an internet which is subject to the most restrictive laws of any country. There is no option that says "the internet as a whole is subject to US law but not French or Chinese law."
But if it makes you feel any better, the torrent sites are next on the agenda.
The average car can barely do 100 even ungoverned.
This is just completely wrong. Most economy cars will do 110-130 ungoverned. You take something like a Ford Fusion V6, it'll probably do 155 without modification if not for the governor.
But that's what I'm saying. You would barely even need to mod it up. Top speed is almost entirely a matter of horsepower overcoming air resistance. Using a pickup truck is pretty stupid because the aerodynamics are terrible, which requires you to have some unfathomable amount of power to overcome it. The 335D would be a good candidate, it's just expensive. And there are cheaper options. You can get a used VW Touareg V10 TDI with 310HP for around $20K. The aerodynamics aren't as good as the 335D, but they're better than the pickup and it has more power.
Speed records are meant to be the fastest car anyone can make in that class. It doesn't really mean much if there are common road cars that will beat the record and the only reason they haven't is that nobody who can afford one has bothered to set a time.
durr hurr troll troll science make brain hurt +100000 insightful
I assume you're alluding to the chemical toxicity of Plutonium. I can only speculate what that has to do with its half life, radioactivity or the ability to destroy it using newer reactors, or how you imagine it will get from the inside of a reactor into your breakfast cereal any more than the contents of all the chemical plants in New Jersey do.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry for not being clear; it wasn't taxes that I was decrying, it was central banking and their fractional reserve lending, and its ability to create money out of thin air, and its requirement to pay back more money than was created, that makes satisfying our debt mathematically impossible
That's not really how it works. For one thing, the federal government doesn't take out debt by taking a bank loan. They issue bonds which investors buy using already-existing money. For another, fractional reserve banking would only prevent people from paying back their loans if it was the sole mechanism by which money is created. It isn't. Moreover, if people start paying back their loans at a faster rate than other people take out new ones, the government will cause new money to be created in order to prevent deflation.
Incidentally, that happening could solve a lot of our problems -- if people start paying down their debts en masse (and there is evidence that they are doing that now), it requires the government to print a lot of money to offset the money "destroyed" when people pay back their loans. And every dollar the government creates is a dollar it doesn't have to get from taxes. The inflation is normally be the only downside and it's negated by the people paying their debts.
Here's a fun fact: With a stroke of a pen Congress could cancel all student loans and all mortgage debt without directly causing any inflation, just by printing the principal and crediting it to everyone's accounts. (Of course, the newly debt-free people would immediately turn around and start borrowing again, and that would cause a huge amount of inflation. But if you can discourage that by, say, adding a 50% tax up to the amount paid off on any new borrowing within 10 years, it would work.) Naturally nobody talks about stuff like that, because most of the people who understand it are bankers, and it's the last thing they want because debt-free people don't pay interest.
Which is naturally why we have to prohibit professionals with training from handling Plutonium, but any idiot is allowed to smoke cigarettes in the presence of children.
there is no way that interest rates won't rise
That's debatable. Interest rates are primarily a function of alternatives. What is the alternative to US treasuries right now for a safe investment? The stock market is too volatile, the Eurozone is too volatile, China doesn't really issue debt. I mean sure, if you print too much money then interest rates will go up too much. So you don't print too much, you only print just enough. Let there be moderate (but not excessive) inflation -- it'll help the housing market.
We are so far down the road to corporatacracy that I don't think there is any turning back, just occasional slow downs when the government is forced to apply some regulation after particularly egregious corporate behavior (SOX, et al).
I don't think it's as bad as all that. Corporate power is like a pendulum, but it doesn't move at the same rate in both directions. It grows slowly over many years until it reaches a tipping point and public outrage reaches a boil, then all at once it swings back (like the trust busting a century ago). And we're due for one of those events.
SOX is nothing. It's the status quo masquerading as change. People want real change. You can lie to them and spout nonsense about "hope and change" or pretend to be a bunch of 18th century revolutionaries for a while, but people will only believe the lie for so long before it just makes them even more angry. At some point you have to give the people what they want.
You're assuming the Fed would reduce its holdings of US debt when the treasury pays it down, rather than holding the same amount and that amount just representing a higher proportion of the total outstanding.
In addition, nobody actually expects them to pay the whole debt. It would just be nice if they could e.g. cut it in half. And as I already said, the easiest way to do that is to just stop running deficits for a while until inflation erodes the value of the outstanding balance.
Of course, there is the option you mention: They could increase the money supply. There is a whole lot of difference between "worth less" and "worthless." A currency that has a one-time devaluation by 50% over a period of a decade is hardly "worthless" -- it's still worth half what it was before. And newly created money can be used to cover the deficit in the meantime.
Politics are a lot easier to deal with than climate change.
Politics is what causes climate change. We could pretty easily stop burning oil in a hurry if all governments took a firm stand and decide to e.g. add $1/gallon to the gas tax every year for the next 20 years (and an equivalent for other fossil fuels). People would straight away stop wanting to buy cars that run on gasoline because they'll know in five years it'll be much more expensive to operate and an electric car won't, but it wouldn't cause all the existing infrastructure to grind to a halt because the extra cost doesn't show up in a serious way for a period of years.
The problem is that the politics are the opposite of the nuclear scenario: Nobody wants to be the first to lob a nuke, so nobody does. But nobody wants to be the first to take the economic hit that comes with lowering carbon emissions, so nobody does.
You obviously don't understand how taxes work. If you have $100, when you spend it the government takes (e.g.) $25. They can (in theory; they never actually do) put that against the debt. Then the person you paid the $75 has $75 and the person the government paid $25 has $25, a total of $100. When they spend the $100, the government gets another $25. Repeat until debt is paid.
Of course, governments never really repay their debts. When a bond is due, they issue a new bond to pay for it. The interest on government debt is almost by definition below the rate of inflation, so when governments want to "reduce" their debt they just stop increasing it and wait until inflation has devalued it sufficiently.
That is kind of missing the point. The point isn't that Plutonium is nontoxic, it's that it isn't significantly more toxic than a variety of other common substances. If you ingest 50 grams of caffeine, you will die. That amount of Plutonium is not likely to do you any good either, but it's pretty hard to get much worse than "this will kill you." So if you don't like Plutonium then you need a better argument than "it's toxic," because we don't ban things from the world just because of that.
You do realize that a VW Touareg is a "truck"?
In an attempt to protect the poor Russian who is likely selling counterfeit goods (but we're unsure because we can't check at present time),
Yes, innocent until proven guilty is important.
using the NFL trademark they are likely not to have been given permission to used (and was likely reported by the NFL themselves),
The NFL doesn't have any right to stop someone from using the term "NFL" to refer to the NFL. It's fair use. Neither do they have any right to stop someone who has original but second hand merchandize from reselling it, because of first sale. But they would like to stop them anyway.
So my argument is that we shouldn't create a system where they can stop people who aren't doing anything wrong and rationalize it just because some entirely different people are doing something wrong, or one where they have no incentive not to make mistakes and impose the costs of those mistakes on innocent people.
we should allow citizens to buy counterfeit goods to the detriment of both the citizen and the NFL, thus lining this "poor" Russian's pocket with illegitimate money,
I repeat: If this person is selling counterfeit goods from Russia in violation of the law, you go to Russian authorities and have him arrested, or you go to treaty organizations and pressure the Russian authorities to do their jobs.
just so he doesn't have a domain name taken away from him, a domain name I can purchase today from GoDaddy for $10.
A domain name is worth more than $10. If you don't think so, go ask Apple how much they want for mac.com or Microsoft what they want for hotmail.com.
The reason for this is because the process mirrors the same legal process we take for many other accusations of legal wrongdoing or legal protection which, according to your own subjective personal beliefs, is an injustice.
We have a variety of legal processes that don't mirror one another. You're highlighting the ones that that mirror this practice and ignoring the ones that don't. In fact, courts issuing orders without hearing from both sides is by far the exception rather than the rule and is generally reserved for the most serious cases where irreparable harm will be done before the hearing can take place. I don't see how some asshat selling a couple of knockoffs rises to that level of immediacy.
People who were elected by citizens, in accordance with the Constitution of the United States.
People who are allowed to change their minds. Which is what they're supposed to do when they've made a mistake, which is what I'm arguing they have done for the many reasons outside of my subjective definition of justice that have already been discussed.
However, as I also said, their websites are not destroyed and they can challenge the domain name seizure, which means they have proper avenues for retrieving their domain name if they don't wish to register another.
Again, the problem is that small time foreign nationals don't have access to US courts. You can't reasonably expect someone living hand to mouth to buy a $2000 plane ticket, hire a $500/hour attorney and live in a $100/night hotel during a period of time where you've taken away their primary source of income.
You wave of the toxicity of pu-239 and focus on radioactivity.
I'm not ignoring the toxicity, I'm pointing out the FUD with regard to the half life. The fact that it takes a long time to decay is irrelevant because the radioactivity isn't the problem, even though that is what scares people.
At that point you can stop talking about nuclear physics and start talking about chemistry. But the problem there is that there are plenty of extremely toxic substances we deal with on a daily basis, and you haven't pointed out any reason why Plutonium in particular needs to be singled out for special treatment. Arsenic and Mercury are both extremely toxic but we use them all over the place in industry. Mix bleach an ammonia in an unventilated space and you'll be having a very bad day. Half the stuff under your sink will kill you if you get it hot enough and breathe the vapors, and the facilities that make and store those things would cause serious problems for anyone downwind if they caught fire.
You don't have any reason why Plutonium has to be singled out. We deal with toxic substances regularly. When mistakes happen it's very bad, so we do what we can to minimize mistakes. But the non-existence of a zero percent error rate is no excuse to shut down all of industry, and there is no reasoning why it should be applied that way to nuclear power when it isn't to anything that has the same degree of harm when things go wrong.
And which reactor would that be PBMR, IFR? Supported by which materials technology? Can you specify an actual burn-up rate? Do you know what a burn-up rate is or what the nominal burn-up rate of a conventional reactor is?
Do you actually have any purpose in asking these questions? You can destroy Plutonium with anything that bombards it with neutrons. It's fissionable. Unless you're trying to dispute the possibility of a reactor that can produce neutrons, what's your point? That it will take a long time? We already have a lot of Plutonium. It can be used as reactor fuel, and we want to get rid of it. If it takes a long time that's only evidence that we need to start building those reactors as soon as possible and in quantity, because we have more fuel than we know what to do with (and the existing reactors are making more every day), so we need to get to work using it up.
How do you propose handling the now enormous amounts of fissile ash created?
Let's come back from the propaganda term "fissile ash" and actually consider what that is. It's the elements the fissile elements are split into. Various elements with various half lives, which can be chemically separated. This is largely stuff with commercial value -- it's how we make x-ray machines and a variety of other equipment and methods that fall under the heading of "nuclear medicine." There are various other industrial applications. For example, Sr-90 can be used to make radioisotope thermoelectric generators like the Russians used to use in remote lighthouses or NASA uses for space probes etc.
This is really the whole problem with talking about "nuclear waste" -- it's not waste. People pay money for this stuff.
You're conflating two different issues. Whether they use bribery at all is a matter of public policy. Who they bribe, if they're allowed to bribe anyone, is a military secret.
You don't have to compromise operational security just by publishing the ground rules. "US forces can never use torture" is not really telling the bad guys anything useful: "Don't tell them anything" is not a significantly different strategy than "don't tell them anything, even if they torture you."
Likewise, knowing that they can't record your telephone conversations or your internet traffic without a warrant doesn't give the bad guys any margin of safety, because they don't actually know whether you've got a warrant or not. They can't change their plans. "Use encryption, because they're watching" is not significantly different than "use encryption, because they could have a warrant." If anything it's a good thing because it gives the bad guys a false sense of security, so when you do get a warrant they're less likely to be taking countermeasures.
The only argument you can really make is that taking tactics off the table reduces effectiveness in general. But that's the heart of the policy question -- that's the decision the people need to make, not the military. If the people want more freedom and less temporary safety then it's their call.
The website wouldn't be on the hit list, unless NFL complained about it. And if the NFL complains about it, you can be assured they are not licensed to sell NFL merchandise. With that particular URL, it's very clear the website is trying to make money off a product they have no right to make money from.
Why do you imagine that people need a license to resell knickknacks?
You seem to be purposefully ignoring the possibility that the NFL is trying to claim more rights than they actually have and that the site isn't doing anything wrong. The name implies what they're selling, it doesn't tell you whether it's legitimate. If they're selling used legitimate goods, or licensed goods below the MSRP having never agreed to do otherwise, the NFL has no right to stop them. That doesn't mean the NFL doesn't still want to or wouldn't still put them on the list knowing that the site has no recourse.
I'm not saying they aren't just selling knock offs. What I'm saying is that you can't tell that just from the name; you need to give them a real chance to respond that doesn't cost them more than the value of the property being seized, otherwise you'll get unchecked abuses.
The problem with that is if we all have our own standard of justice, how could anything get done?
The problem with your argument is that there is no single, objective definition of justice. You have to pick someone's subjective definition and apply it, which is how we came to the status quo. It was the subjective definition of a bunch of politicians and judges. But the status quo is not infallible. You can't decide what the law should be strictly by looking at what it is, because that eliminates any possibility of fixing past mistakes.
Stare decisis is a device for attaining consistency. It works great when you get it right the first time. It replicates errors when you don't. It's totally useless as a tool for setting policy, because all it tells you is what the policy used to be, not whether it was good policy then or now.
And if we actually try to objectively decide whether issuing court order without hearing from the party affected is a good policy, we can find ample evidence of serious problems. Your friend is arrested for violating a restraining order he never had an opportunity to contest. Sites like Rojadirecta that are legal in their home countries have their domain names destroyed by foreign governments without notice. The list of abuses of ex parte asset seizures in the war on drugs goes on for miles.
Even the principle itself is simple and straight forward: If you want to seize property, the only person with any reasonable incentive to oppose a wrongful seizure is the current owner. Since we need to prevent wrongful seizures, that means we need to hear from the current owner before allowing the seizure. And then you can bring in all of the well-known, well-reasoned arguments for why you need to have personal jurisdiction over a party before you can bring an action against them.
Which leaves us with the ideal way of shutting down a counterfeiting site: You go to local law enforcement in the country where they're actually operating from and you have them arrested. (And if it's legal for them to do what they're doing where they're doing it, well, you either lobby that country to change the law or you're SOL. It isn't a valid goal to be able to control the whole world from K Street.)
I hope you're not suggesting that anything that increases American wages is doomed, because that's just defeatism.
In addition to that, what I'm laying out has the tendency to increase standard of living without really increasing costs. I said higher wages, but the fact of it is that it's more like more disposable income: If you don't have to pay for housing then that amount of your income can go towards something else. Working the same job for the same pay allows you to buy more stuff, which provides the added incentive necessary to keep working.
You're just not being imaginative enough.
How do you provide housing to everyone? You have the government offer a zero interest, zero payments loan up to $150,000 toward the purchase of a home to every adult. The principal is payable in full the day you stop living in the house. The government can fund the program by itself borrowing the money, which it can do at extremely low interest rates, so that the cost to the government will only be e.g. $1500/year. Then pay that interest using property tax with a $150,000 personal deduction, so only homes costing more than the loan amount will have any property tax, and so that way the price of homes won't just go up by the subsidy amount because people won't be willing to pay that much extra property tax.
Think about that: We could have a relatively small tax that primarily falls on the rich (or at least, people with large houses) and provide the option of free housing to everyone. Which is the most expensive part of a basic income.
In addition to that, the idea that everyone is going to just quit their job is ridiculous. What will happen is that lots of people will quit and to get them back to work, the employers will have to pay higher wages and provide better working conditions. It will also provide a large incentive to automation, because of the higher labor costs. I don't see either of those as a bad thing.
Well, I think "17nflshop.com" is pretty clear, wouldn't you?
It sounds like a place you might find NFL merchandise. How does that tell you anything about its legitimacy? If they're strictly selling legitimate second hand merchandise, you can still imagine the NFL preferring not to have the competition. This is why we have hearings.
My argument is we don't see the idea of arrest before conviction as an injustice, nor do we see TROs without defense as an injustice. As such, seeing how neither of those previous scenarios are an injustice, is there a reason to see this as an injustice, aside from the fact we don't like any governmental control over the Internet at all?
I think you're confusing what happens in court with justice. Courts take shortcuts and make mistakes. The seizures in question were signed off by a court. The question is whether it was right, not whether it was officially sanctioned. I mean read your own post above: You've given a perfectly good example of why granting a TRO without hearing from the defense is an injustice. Two wrongs don't make a right; neither do a thousand.
Right now, the TSA is sitting on what I have been told is plenty of evidence that they have stopped a significant number of incidents.
Even if true, that doesn't actually tell you anything. The question is whether the data mining efforts were required to stop them or if they would have been caught using more traditional methods.
As for the "our detection methods are secret so the bad guys can't counter them" argument, that isn't consistent with a democracy. The public has to be informed before they can make a decision. The people making these claims have perverse incentives: They might genuinely be doing something good, they might just be exaggerating in order to keep their jobs or get more funding. The only way you can tell is if you actually evaluate what they're doing.
If you want to argue that preventing terrorism is more important than having democracy and therefore we should in effect give these people unaccountable autonomy to protect us, I feel like most reasonable people are not going to agree to that. Or if they do we're in trouble. There are some things more important than catching bad guys.
tortures want to torture and programmers want to create palantirs.
That's just ridiculous. For one thing, half of these decisions get made by people other than those who implement them. More than that, most of these people actually believe what they're doing will help. (They may be wrong, of course.)
I suspect part of the problem is the sort of "forbidden fruit" aspect of it all. If certain interrogation tactics are banned, they must be really effective, right? Otherwise why ban them?
People don't seem to get that some things are prohibited because the costs objectively outweigh the benefits, not because some tool in an ivory tower decided that the costs are too high in a vacuum.
That's not what happened in this case, or from what the summary says happened in this case.
So they say. We don't actually know unless we hear from the operators of the website, which we haven't. Which is the whole problem.
Like I said, I'm not saying I'm comfortable with it, but I don't think it's exactly outside the realm of what goes on routinely in America.
It seems like your argument boils down to: Sometimes justice is not done, and so therefore it doesn't matter that other times justice is not done. I don't think that's how it works.
Your argument is completely without merit. The operators of the sites are not in the US. The servers are not in the US. There is no "international law" being applied here, because if there was they would apply it against the actual operators of the website in their own country.
You can always find some frivolous relationship to any given country to try to claim jurisdiction. The TLD registrar has an office in the jurisdiction, the ad company has an office, the payment processor has an office, one of the ISPs that the traffic flows through has an office, one of the end users is in the jurisdiction, one of the chips in the webserver was manufactured in the jurisdiction, the payment processor has a customer who has an office in the jurisdiction, etc. etc.
Any country can play this game. So I repeat: We have a choice to make. Either the internet can be subject to the laws of the least restrictive country, or the laws of the most restrictive country. I don't know about you but I sure don't want China to have a world-wide veto on what you can say on the internet, and I'm sure the Chinese feel the same way about the US.
There is already a solution to counterfeiting on the internet. It's called local law enforcement. If there is a counterfeiter in Russia, you have the Russian authorities arrest them. If you don't feel that Russia is doing a good enough job of that, you negotiate a treaty that requires them to do better. And unlike your alternative, none of that requires ham-fisted bureaucrats to debase the single greatest communications medium ever invented.
In fairness, and I admit I don't know the whole process, but can those domains not challenge the takedown, and if they win, have the domain restored? At which point, is it any different than when an officer sees you breaking into a car and arrests you for it?
Let's consider this for a minute. Assume you can go to court in the US and demand they give you back your domain name.
You're some guy in Russia who makes barely enough to buy food and shelter by selling legitimate products which you buy as damaged goods for a steep discount and then repair them yourself before reselling. Your website has just disappeared, so you now have no income. In order to get it back, you have to go to court in the United States. The plane ticket will cost you $2000, but first you'll have to get a Russian passport and a US travel visa. Then you'll have to live in a hotel for who knows how long and hire a lawyer who charges more in one day than you make in a year, who you can't communicate with very well because you don't speak very good English. While you're in the US away from your wife and kids you won't be allowed to work or generate any income because your travel visa doesn't allow it. By the time all is said and done, and you've got your domain back, you'll have accumulated a debt equal to about four times your annual income (assuming someone was even willing to lend you the money).
There is a reason why jurisdiction does not normally extend outside a country's borders. The hardship on someone who has to travel to the other side of the world to protect his livelihood is too great. And you're subjecting foreign nationals to US laws without giving them a vote.
I think you can see why the analogy to someone breaking into a car is inapt: When you get arrested the government provides you with a lawyer. You get a trial, which is held where you are instead of on the other side of the world. If you can't make bail you have a criminal defendant's right to a speedy trial, and in the meantime the government provides you with food and shelter. By contrast, when you have your domain name taken by a foreign government, there is no trial beforehand, you have no opportunity to be heard, the government doesn't provide you with a lawyer and there is a mountain of bureaucracy and a cash furnace between you and getting back what belongs to you.
The list of sites reads like a "who's who" of counterfeit goods, not torrent sites. I didn't see a single torrent-related site that I recognized on the list.
What does it have anything to do with torrent sites? The problem is that they're seizing domains without due process and shutting down foreign websites, some of which (like Rojadirecta last time) are legal in their home countries.
This is not the way the internet is supposed to work. And the problem is, if we set this kind of precedent, how long until other countries reciprocate? Do we find it perfectly alright for China to make YouTube disappear from the internet over dissident videos by advertising a route to its IP and then dropping the packets, like Pakistan did in 2010?
The problem is that we have a choice: We can have an internet which is subject to the least restrictive laws of any country, or we can have an internet which is subject to the most restrictive laws of any country. There is no option that says "the internet as a whole is subject to US law but not French or Chinese law."
But if it makes you feel any better, the torrent sites are next on the agenda.
The average car can barely do 100 even ungoverned.
This is just completely wrong. Most economy cars will do 110-130 ungoverned. You take something like a Ford Fusion V6, it'll probably do 155 without modification if not for the governor.
But that's what I'm saying. You would barely even need to mod it up. Top speed is almost entirely a matter of horsepower overcoming air resistance. Using a pickup truck is pretty stupid because the aerodynamics are terrible, which requires you to have some unfathomable amount of power to overcome it. The 335D would be a good candidate, it's just expensive. And there are cheaper options. You can get a used VW Touareg V10 TDI with 310HP for around $20K. The aerodynamics aren't as good as the 335D, but they're better than the pickup and it has more power.
Speed records are meant to be the fastest car anyone can make in that class. It doesn't really mean much if there are common road cars that will beat the record and the only reason they haven't is that nobody who can afford one has bothered to set a time.
durr hurr troll troll science make brain hurt +100000 insightful
I assume you're alluding to the chemical toxicity of Plutonium. I can only speculate what that has to do with its half life, radioactivity or the ability to destroy it using newer reactors, or how you imagine it will get from the inside of a reactor into your breakfast cereal any more than the contents of all the chemical plants in New Jersey do.