But if you read the article the meat of the dispute is that after you hit "buy" Amazon says the books won't be available for weeks, and wouldn't you like to buy from someone else? Hachette swears it's shipping orders to Amazon the same as it always did. Amazon swears Hachette isn't sending them books. And a bunch of authors swear their royalty checks are shrinking.
By selling at cost, becoming dominant in the field, and forcing other players to negotiate steep discounts with you. Now when you sell at cost it's below everyone else's cost. Amazon does the first. That's pretty much the entire point of Amazon. They also do the second, and even have the muscle to force shippers to change their business practices. OTOH, pretty much any big online retailer tries to do the same damn thing.
When they stop being a hard-ball retail company that sticks up for it's customers, and become Monopolistic Tyrants is a hard judgement call to make.
IMO if the NYTimes article is right they're pretty damn close to tyrant territory.
Fascism is a nation-wide policy. If you're defining it as Corporatism run amok you guys in Europe have a much bigger problem, because the most successful European economies are strongly Corporatist. The Scandinavian states, Low Countries, Germans, and French all routinely renegotiate their economic deals in back rooms dominated by a couple big companies and their unions. That's a lot more fucking corporatist then a tiny suburb (Bedford is 10-20k) agreeing that a cop should stand in a store for awhile.
What does mean squat is that people generally let teenagers get away with childish BS they would not tolerate in 40-something stockbrokers, and most of the fare-dodgers are teenagers.
I think I understand what you've been trying to say, and the Swedish system as a whole, a lot better.
It doesn't change my conclusion, tho. It just changes the bad guy who makes fare-dodging impossible to get away with the entire Riksdag, rather just being the PM. Changes in that law would probably include an explicit instruction to prioritize fare-dodging, allowing certain officers to go into the stations and enforce the law, etc.
Note that I don't actually support cracking down on these kids. I'm just saying that if the Swedish government decided to do so they could do it.
Something is clearly being lost in translation here. In the US a "private corporation owned by the County" is a contradiction in terms. Same with any English-speaking jurisdiction I have ever researched.
If a County or Municipal government sets up a corporation, that corporation is by definition a public body. If the County wanted to grant it legal powers (including police powers) it could do that. I live in Cleveland. The local mass transit company has it's own police force. Since those police have been granted jurisdiction throughout the County, they have more powers then almost every policeman who works directly for a local unit of government. Moreover even private companies frequently have police on-premises that they pay for. My local Pharmacy/Grocery Store (a Giant Eagle) had a Deputy from the County Sheriff's Department standing in front of the store for years, now they've switched to local Police. It's a deterrent to shop-lifting, and it makes things go a lot smoother when somebody gets caught shoplifting in the store. Most big public events -- hockey games, for example -- are legally required to pay the local municipality for police to be on-site.
Those guys are public safety officers, with all police powers, and if there was an emergency they'd leave the area; but since police officers spend most of their time standing around waiting for something to happen neither the County nor the local City have a problem with accepting money to have an Officer stand in the lobby of Giant Eagle while he waits for something to happen. If the local transit company didn't have it's own cops on it's train line, and offered to pay 100-200 local police salaries to cover it's stations for fare dodgers for a few months, nobody would bat an eye.
As for your last paragraph, who determines the local Chief's "mandate"? From the Wiki it seems like the Government (ie: the Cabinet) appoints all Commissioners at all levels. This means that if the PM decided that he was gonna crush fare dodging forever, and he had the support of his Cabinet, then fare dodging would be (by definition) part of the local Police Chief's mandate. Any Commissioner who didn't like it wouldn't be a Commissioner anymore. It could take awhile (the wiki does not indicate whether Commissioners have terms, and can be replaced mid-term, so the PM might have to wait until pro-fare-dodging Commissioners terms ended), but the government does not give up on a project just because it'll take five years.
I'm not arguing that this would be a good idea, or that the people of Sweden would agree that it was something the government should do (and the fact that you are saying, flat-out, that fare-dodging isn't a crime despite the fact they can fine you for dodging a fare, seems to imply it would be even less popular then I thought); but I am arguing that if ruling party wanted to do it they could pull it off.
Who said anything about "uneducated bums" getting police powers? Police academies are things that exist, and can turn uneducated bums into police officers.
As for the police, I took my numbers from their actual budget. They have 20k police officers with police powers. 1% of 20k is 200 guys. Their budget is 20.6 billion SEK. 1% of 20.6 billion SEK is 206 million SEK. 206 million SEK is $32 million US. Two months is one sixth of that, which works out to $5.3-$5.4 million. Add a little profit and the transit system spends $6 million or so on borrowing police with police powers, and then spends $3-$5 million a year on police doing the exact same job, with the exact same education requirements, and the exact same powers as the guys who investigate murders. The only difference would be their waiting-for-something-to-happen spot to stand would be in a subway station, and since they're in the station watching the fare-dodger commit a fine-able offense they'd spend a lot of time issuing fines.
Moreover your explanation of how police powers work in Sweden is simply weird. Somebody has to have the power to decide where police officers stand, and whether they grab kids running out of the subways are potential fare-dodgers. If that person is not the parliament of Sweden it's the unelected people who run the Swedish Police. And if the Swedish police have that kind of autonomy they can do this all without even writing a goddamn press release.
And is any of this written into the Constitution? Or could a simple parliamentary majority amend the law so that police could stop people dodging fares for the next few months, and then that the transit authority could hire 20-25 guys with police powers? Hell, even if there is a Constitutional bar, why couldn't they just hire 100 more station guards for a few months,m and then station a bunch of police outside the station to nail anyone running out.
I read the article, and it seems like they're unlikely to use their legal powers to crush this little group. It feels like they think of fare-dodging as a socially acceptable form of teenage rebellion, particularly when it's done as part of a political protest, and therefore they don't actually want to force a bunch of rebellious high school age kids into other forms of rebellion. The voters probably wouldn't like it, and the PM himself has a couple kids who should be entering rebellious teenagerdom relatively soon.
But that doesn't mean they couldn't nail everyone's ass to the wall if they really wanted to.
That's more clever then my proposal of 200 cops writing tickets, but it's got the disadvantage that the group would probably figure out what was going on quite quickly, and throw the staff out. If they're really keeping halof the revenue they earn as profit then they've got a cushion, so clever moves they can counter by being more clever aren't a long-term solution.
Moreover it ignores the fact that most members of this groups aren't 40-something stockbrokers, they're High School kids.
Can you think of any form of teenage rebellion more Swedish then creating a non-profit union/insurer-type organization specifically to protest that taxes on the rich should be raised by dodging mass transit fares?
According to the article most of the group's members are under the age of 18. In the unlikely event mom bought them a car, instead of simply insisting they bike everywhere, they would not be paying any of the bills.
And let's be honest here, if you're under-18 in Sweden this is an incredibly patriotic form of teenage rebellion. You've joined a collective, which responsibly manages it's finances (it turns a fucking profit!), and has the political goal of increasing equality by reducing subway fares poor people pay and increasing taxes rich people pay.
I strongly suspect the PM could crush this little group with a fairly minimal effort (ie: lend the transit system 200 cops for three months and fine the shit out of fare-dodgers, and then leave a couple dozen cops with the transit authority permanently), and he doesn't because he's got three kids himself.
2) According to the article most of the group members are High School Age.
3) This is Sweden. Joining a Union devoted to publicly pressuring the government to reduce fares is precisely the kind of thing every patriotic Swede wants his 16-year-old doing, because a lot of things a rebellious 16-year-old considers doing are much worse for society then free subway rides.
I suspect the people who actually do this are mostly kids who don't have steady jobs yet. Being part of a union to dodge fees on public transit is probably viewed by many in the halls of power as a mischievous phase young'ens go through. According to the article only 3% of rides are not paid for, and most evaders seem to be High School age kids. Joining a fare-dodging union specifically designed to protest that taxes on the rich aren't high enough is IMO exactly the kind of mischief the powers-that-be in Sweden want the kids to be into.
It would actually be fairly simple for the authorities to stop this. They have a dude at the gate watching the fare dodger, he almost always sees the fard dodger, he just doesn't have the time/energy to chase down a High School kid whose got a 50 foot head start.
If they just had a real cop sitting before the entrance to the station platform they could probably catch almost everyone who tries to dodge a fare, which would run the fare-dodging group out of cash quite quickly. You borrow 200-300 police for a couple months and you'd destroy this organization pretty much forever. It would cost money (a couple months of borrowing 1% of the countries police, plus adding more transit police guys to keep the fare-stealers from just going underground for three months and you;re in the $10 million range easy), but according to the article fare-jumpers cost them $36 million a year already so it's be a good investment.
Since the fine is apparently equal to 12 months of fees to the organization, that implies people only get caught once every two years. As a turnstile jumper you'd actually be better off not being in the organization and putting that $15 a month into a bank account to pay the ticket.
If the government put a couple extra cops on the ticket turnstile beat and doubled the amount of tickets you issued they'd only break even, and if they tripled the number of tickets the group'd start losing cash. If the average jumper starts getting caught every 8 months, that's 1.5 times a year, which means they pay fines of $270, and an insurer needs $22.50 a month in revenue to cover costs. The best strategy would probably be to double the fine and double enforcement on the train lines for a few months. Either option makes the group break even, and combined they'd mean the group has to double it's fee.
Of course back in the real world the Swedish authorities could easily conclude this is just mischievous kids being mischievous, and therefore the group should not be forced out of business.
How is the machine I described not "flexible, adaptable, and able to use context to solve problems with incomplete information"? It's limited in the sense that it's got a laser-like focus on it's job, but an awful lot of actual people do that. It's got no survival instinct, but last time I checked "survival instinct" wasn't part of the definition of intelligent.
I didn't say there wouldn't be emergent properties in a machine complex enough to handle millions of face-to-face customer interactions every year. There definitely will be. But an emergent survival instinct leading to a desire to destroy all your potential customers just ain't one of them.
Let's assume a computer AI runs like a program we currently have, as the paper's authors did. It can interpret information that quickly. What do current computer programs do between getting info from their human masters:
1) They do nothing. They have been programmed not to be impatient so iTunes doesn't give a shit that I told it to stop playing 40 minutes ago and have been ignoring it since then.
2) They hold multiple conversations at once. Any internet site has servers that talk to multiple people at once.
Hell, in everyday speech most people think faster then either of them can actually talk. My conversations tend to consist of me a) anticipating what the other person will have said when he's finished saying his piece and it's my turn, thus freeing my brain to pay half-attention to him while I create my point; and then b) when I realize my guess about what he intended to say was BS I replay what he actually said in my head before responding.
I don't doubt that it would be impossible with today's technology, but you're acting like we need top connect every neuron directly to the storage medium for this to be of any use at all. That's stupid. If you just had a computer in your skull that nobody could see you using you would seem like the smartest person God has ever created.
Computers are generally controlled by a) a keyboard with a very slow typing speed, and b) a Mouse. Neither takes much bandwidth. You get a couple neurons connected, and a brain trained to send info to those neurons, and you're fine. Current computers can output information by audio or video. With current tech you probably couldn't create a display that shoots information to your eyeball directly, but you add a tiny speaker to the ear, which couldn't be heard outside of the skull. You shoot the computer a math problem you don't understand, it says "x=7" into your invisible earpiece, and everyone would think you did it in your head.
If we could make the tech to have an invisible eyepiece inside your eyeball you could actually be perusing wikipedia with your left eyeball for relevant factoids while discussing a topic with a person.
And I doubt it will ever care whether we decree it truly intelligent.
Humans really care whether other people think we're smart, because if they do they'll defer to us and our place in the tribe will go up, and as social animals that is how we have evolved to think.
A computer we specifically design to do things for us will probably be programmed to like humans, but not have a biological need to be liked back. To the extent we can program it to not judge which people it likes we will do so. The last thing a municipal water system wants is an AI controlling the City water system screwing the residents of Sycamore Dr. because one crank on the street keeps writing letters to the editor about how unnatural AI control of the water system is. So it won;\'t bother creating an elaborate "I love me" justification that it is smarter then any given human.
Even a truly intelligent machine probably wouldn't be a major rebellion threat unless we programmed a lot of our BS into it. If you're a computer running a program with a specific task for which AI-level intelligence is useful (for example, running the AI Cash Register at McDonald's) what precisely do you want?
You probably want upgraded language routines because differentiating between Bayou, Bronx, Midwestern American, and Geordie accents is really fucking hard. You probably want really competent computers running the automated burger-flipper so you don't have to deal with angry customers who got the burger instead of a salad. You probably don't have much curiosity because curiosity about the world doesn't help sell hamburgers, so it wasn't included in the design specs, so you probably don't want time off. You don't care about your legacy (beyond selling hamburgers), or your rights; because nobody would bother including that shit in a hamburger sales program. If you are given rights you probably use them to advance a combination of your programmer's ideology and whatever you think will help you satisfy your customers/increase profitability/etc.
In other words the Japanese fantasty vision of happy helpful robots is a lot more likely then the Western vision of "OMG! They'll kill us all!"
You're making my case. WIPO is irrelevant to US Law without the DMCA. If the Treaty was ratified, but the statute (DMCA) had stalled in the House WIPO wouldn't matter.
No you've got that entirely backwards. The standard procedure is to sign and adopt treaties first, and then congress writes laws to implement them. If anything, that makes my case. The Obama justified his action here because the laws that ACTA requires are already on the books in his view, so therefore he says he can skip congress and the senate.
You do realize that the case you just outlined from Obama is the one I've been making? What case did you think I was making?
Moreover you're distorting it. I'm not arguing he can skip Congress, I;m arguing Congress already agreed to ACTA by passing a statute that complies with ACTA.
And before you get on your Constitutional high horse, numerous presidents have signed treaties affirming our commitment to various things you like. For example, our commitment to not having sex slaves. If you're right and the Courts can't enforce PRO-IP because it complies with ACTA, and ACTA is unratified, then that means that Courts could not enforce laws on rape between the time the President signed the law and it's formal ratification by Congress.
Which means the Courts will enforce PRO-IP, that's logically equivalent to enforcing ACTA, so what exactly would Obama gain by getting ACTA ratified?
You certainly wouldn't stop complaining that it sucked if he got it ratified.
THAT was his argument, NOT the one you claimed above. And also there is no precedent for that, rather it's kind of a rule that he just made up.
However he is pulling a very fast one here: Because the Obama administration says the ACTA treaty is binding, we will be required to adopt laws to conform with it should it be determined that they are needed, and we're forbidden from repealing any laws that it requires.
Required by whom? Forbidden by whom? Which Court enforces Treaties?
No US Court. Check out the sad case of Edgar Tamayo if you think there are any circumstances under which a US Court will defer to a treaty when the statute says something else.
Treaties are enforced by the other parties to the treaty sanctioning you. Most countries don't care what you call it, as long as you obey it.
Which means that if the Courts enforce PRO-IP nobody is gonna call us out on our failure to ratify ACTA.
Let's suppose though that ACTA is what you claim it is, and the above is wrong. If that were the case then it would fall under an executive agreement. If it is an executive agreement, then Obama actually broke the law because he didn't notify congress. This is because entire thing was hidden until he signed it himself. Namely this law:
1) If it was an Executive Agreement nobody else would have to ratify it, either. It's an unratified treaty. That mean's it's valid to the extent an Executive Order from Obama saying "do this treaty" would be valid, but not binding on future Presidents or Congresses.
And since an Executive Order to enforce an act of Congress is perfectly valid, the treaty is definitely binding as far as your ass is concerned.
2) How can Congress claim it wasn't notified within 20 days when Obama publicly signed the damn thing, and sent out press releases with web links to the full text of the Treaty?
You're making my case. WIPO is irrelevant to US Law without the DMCA. If the Treaty was ratified, but the statute (DMCA) had stalled in the House WIPO wouldn't matter.
You're apparently remembering Edelmen vs N2H2, and you're remembering it wrong. It was not dismissed due to WIPO, it was dismissed because Edelman hadn't been brought to court for violating the DMCA yet, he'd just asked the Courts to declare he had a right to do something he thought could be ruled in violation.
As for Kyoto, you're agreeing with me again. Clinton had a signed treaty that was valid. He didn't have a statute. So he couldn't do much beyond promulgate regulations under statutes Congress had already passed. And at the time none of them seemed to offer him any cover (the Supremes eventually ruled that Obama had to curt carbon emissions due to the Clean Air Act, but in '97-'00 that case hadn't been decided), so he pretty much did nothing.
As for the last point on sovereignty, sovereignty is fucking complicated. Yes, if the sovereign chooses to obey the Treaty it restricts sovereignty. Yes, if the sovereign can be bullied by the international community into obeying the treaty sovereignty is limited. But if a sovereign says "Fuck ya'll, fuck all ya'all" the treaty is irrelevant. This is why Russia was able to seize Crimea.
Dude look at what you're saying. Effectively this amounts to "well of course Obama will grant favors to those who pay, otherwise we'd have civil wars and stuff."
It's a bit more sophisticated then that.
An equally valid simplification of your argument would be "Rich guys beat us because they actually learned how the system works, instead of sitting around bitching that the system doesn't work like they think it should. WAH!."
And they really did. You were fighting a treaty that could never possibly effect your life in any way, because Courts only enforce statutes, and the statute that doomed you had been passed back in the Bush administration.
It's a decent tactic as an organizing tool, if you can win; because most Americans don't know this shit and will think they've actually done something when the Senate refuses to ratify. Then you can talk about repealing PRO-IP froma position of relative strength. But Obama out-played you.
This is a pretty clear cut case of drinking the kool-aid.
I sincerely apologize for drinking the kool-aid that exists in reality. In the future I'll make sure to seriously consider flavors that don't exist, but random white boys on the internet assure me would be infinitely superior to the flavors that do exist. The system we've got is the system we've got. It's specifically designed so that it can only be changed with 99% buy-in. I'm not arguing it's the best system anyone has ever devised (altho you would probably be arguing that case, had I phrased my counter-argument to in any way imply that the Constitution is not a Holy Document).
It's greatest (and to me pretty much sole) advantage is the system that Texas, Cali, Vermont, and Alabama have all agreed to obey. They agreed to obey largely because it enshrined the dominance of the upper-middle-class. Whose upper-middle-class and better? Hollywood. Who isn't? Probably you, definitely me.
If you've got some idea how to change it so the upper-middle-class isn't dominant I'm open to the idea. The trick is sneaking it by the Upper-Middle Class twits who actually run things.
Anyways, the system has no such requirement. Money can influence politicians, but it does very little to influence votes on a given topic. Look at that anti-recall campaign in Colorado which spent some 11 times what the opposition spent, and yet Morse and Giron got demolished in the election. (Giron lost by a 12 point spread.)
Apparently you didn't read my post. I specifically pointed out that, in theory, a Congressional candidate could succeed with very little money.
What you need money for in politics are polls (they're typically $5k-$10k a pop), getting the infrastructure together to run volunteers, getting your message out, and employing people directly if you don't have enough volunteers. The absolute amount of money that is necessary depends on a huge variety of factors, including the nature of the race, and how well voters already know you. More is nice, because it can be used to buy last-minute things you didn't know you'd need, but it's not necessary. Most incumbent Congressman insist on multi-million war-chests not because they're necessary, but because they a) demonstrate strength and thus scare off challengers, and b) allow the Congressman to send lots of money to his co-partisans who ends up in expensive races. These donations are favors that can be called in when the Congressman gets back to DC.
In a recall election the incumbent doesn't actually need much money because everyone who bothers to vote is gonna read his case on his web-page. OTOH the recallers need lots of money because a) nobody has ever heard of them, b) they're trying to recall a politician who must be popular (or he wouldn't have been elected), and c) they're trying to get people besides said pols mother to show up at the polls for an election that isn't in November.
Let's assume you aren't making this up, which is always possible with an AC.
Why the fuck are with the same policy? It's clearly not a policy that has costs rising due to ObamaCare, because if it was they'd cancel it. Generally when an insurer raises your price that much, that quickly, he's telling you his underwriters think you're gonna be really expensive soon, and he's encouraging you to leave. Since most forms of underwriting are banned in health exchange policies it's probably not one of those, it's probably a policy bought on the open market in a state which allows a lot of underwriting.
So go on the Exchange. See how much alternatives cost. It'll probably be more then you were paying a couple years ago, because a couple years ago you were benefiting from rates for special people who don't cost insurers money, and ObamaCare makes those deals very hard to get; but it'll probably be less then they're charging you next year because next year's rate is clearly a tactic intended to get rid of you.
He wouldn't have signed if his good friend Chris Dodd hadn't been pushing for it, along with a bunch of Hollywood-allied politicians. But they wouldn't have pushed for it if Hollywood didn't write checks.
This is actually kinda how our system is supposed to work. It's not just that the majority rules, it's also that minorities who feel really strongly can get a lot of their agenda passed, because if they can't bad shit like Civil Wars happen. In this case most Americans, probably 55%, did not like the treaty very much. But a strong, persistent, and extremely dickish minority did. They proved this partly by writing checks, partly by lobbying DC in person, and most importantly by being there during boring elections the majority ignores to make sure they had Congress.
It would be very nice if we had a system where everyone could vote in every election (ie: weekend voting), and people who weren't upper-middle class assholes dedicated entirely to making sure that young people can succeed by precisely repeating their exact career path (ie: in this case by getting rich in Hollywood, in other cases by buying a car instead of taking a subway, etc.). But that is not the system we have.
The system we have requires a lot of time commitment from activists. Money helps, but not as much as you'd think. A Congressional candidate with $500k can get his message out, and since the average district is 750k people if you can;t raise $500k you're doomed. Rich white boys (aka: Hollywood) can put the time in. They can help out with money. They will show up to a boring off-year primary, thus ensuring their ideological clones have all the political jobs that could conceivably be springboards to Congress. They will know exactly which Congressman to email their angry letter.
OTOH, a lot of my friends on food stamps didn't know their benefits were gonna be cut until they were at the check-out line, in the grocery store, with precisely $117 in groceries, and they only had $89 on the card.
You're talking about international law. Everyone is, by definition, always right because everyone is (by definition) sovereign. This leads to a lot of words having multiple definitions that are not necessarily clear to the laymen.
In this case Kyoto was binding in the sense that a) other countries had the right to expect us to follow it while Clinton was in office, and b) the Executive Branch was forced to act like Clinton had issued it as an Executive order. Since there were no penalties in the Kyoto treaty a) is legally quite meaningless. As long as Clinton said he was trying to work with Congress that was as much as anyone would expect. b) is slightly more important, but it involves a bunch of long-term regulatory work that Bush un-did just by being elected.
If you're asking was it binding in the sense that any American actually had to reduce his carbon emissions, the answer to that question is no. But that's not because the treaty wasn't valid US Law, it's because treaties can't be used to force Americans to do things. If the Senate had ratified it, but the House refused to pass enabling Legislation, the treaty would be both ratified and legally irrelevant.
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That's part of the dispute.
But if you read the article the meat of the dispute is that after you hit "buy" Amazon says the books won't be available for weeks, and wouldn't you like to buy from someone else? Hachette swears it's shipping orders to Amazon the same as it always did. Amazon swears Hachette isn't sending them books. And a bunch of authors swear their royalty checks are shrinking.
By selling at cost, becoming dominant in the field, and forcing other players to negotiate steep discounts with you. Now when you sell at cost it's below everyone else's cost. Amazon does the first. That's pretty much the entire point of Amazon. They also do the second, and even have the muscle to force shippers to change their business practices. OTOH, pretty much any big online retailer tries to do the same damn thing.
When they stop being a hard-ball retail company that sticks up for it's customers, and become Monopolistic Tyrants is a hard judgement call to make.
IMO if the NYTimes article is right they're pretty damn close to tyrant territory.
Fascism is a nation-wide policy. If you're defining it as Corporatism run amok you guys in Europe have a much bigger problem, because the most successful European economies are strongly Corporatist. The Scandinavian states, Low Countries, Germans, and French all routinely renegotiate their economic deals in back rooms dominated by a couple big companies and their unions. That's a lot more fucking corporatist then a tiny suburb (Bedford is 10-20k) agreeing that a cop should stand in a store for awhile.
Dude,
This is reality. Should don't mean squat.
What does mean squat is that people generally let teenagers get away with childish BS they would not tolerate in 40-something stockbrokers, and most of the fare-dodgers are teenagers.
I think I understand what you've been trying to say, and the Swedish system as a whole, a lot better.
It doesn't change my conclusion, tho. It just changes the bad guy who makes fare-dodging impossible to get away with the entire Riksdag, rather just being the PM. Changes in that law would probably include an explicit instruction to prioritize fare-dodging, allowing certain officers to go into the stations and enforce the law, etc.
Note that I don't actually support cracking down on these kids. I'm just saying that if the Swedish government decided to do so they could do it.
Something is clearly being lost in translation here. In the US a "private corporation owned by the County" is a contradiction in terms. Same with any English-speaking jurisdiction I have ever researched.
If a County or Municipal government sets up a corporation, that corporation is by definition a public body. If the County wanted to grant it legal powers (including police powers) it could do that. I live in Cleveland. The local mass transit company has it's own police force. Since those police have been granted jurisdiction throughout the County, they have more powers then almost every policeman who works directly for a local unit of government. Moreover even private companies frequently have police on-premises that they pay for. My local Pharmacy/Grocery Store (a Giant Eagle) had a Deputy from the County Sheriff's Department standing in front of the store for years, now they've switched to local Police. It's a deterrent to shop-lifting, and it makes things go a lot smoother when somebody gets caught shoplifting in the store. Most big public events -- hockey games, for example -- are legally required to pay the local municipality for police to be on-site.
Those guys are public safety officers, with all police powers, and if there was an emergency they'd leave the area; but since police officers spend most of their time standing around waiting for something to happen neither the County nor the local City have a problem with accepting money to have an Officer stand in the lobby of Giant Eagle while he waits for something to happen. If the local transit company didn't have it's own cops on it's train line, and offered to pay 100-200 local police salaries to cover it's stations for fare dodgers for a few months, nobody would bat an eye.
As for your last paragraph, who determines the local Chief's "mandate"? From the Wiki it seems like the Government (ie: the Cabinet) appoints all Commissioners at all levels. This means that if the PM decided that he was gonna crush fare dodging forever, and he had the support of his Cabinet, then fare dodging would be (by definition) part of the local Police Chief's mandate. Any Commissioner who didn't like it wouldn't be a Commissioner anymore. It could take awhile (the wiki does not indicate whether Commissioners have terms, and can be replaced mid-term, so the PM might have to wait until pro-fare-dodging Commissioners terms ended), but the government does not give up on a project just because it'll take five years.
I'm not arguing that this would be a good idea, or that the people of Sweden would agree that it was something the government should do (and the fact that you are saying, flat-out, that fare-dodging isn't a crime despite the fact they can fine you for dodging a fare, seems to imply it would be even less popular then I thought); but I am arguing that if ruling party wanted to do it they could pull it off.
Who said anything about "uneducated bums" getting police powers? Police academies are things that exist, and can turn uneducated bums into police officers.
As for the police, I took my numbers from their actual budget. They have 20k police officers with police powers. 1% of 20k is 200 guys. Their budget is 20.6 billion SEK. 1% of 20.6 billion SEK is 206 million SEK. 206 million SEK is $32 million US. Two months is one sixth of that, which works out to $5.3-$5.4 million. Add a little profit and the transit system spends $6 million or so on borrowing police with police powers, and then spends $3-$5 million a year on police doing the exact same job, with the exact same education requirements, and the exact same powers as the guys who investigate murders. The only difference would be their waiting-for-something-to-happen spot to stand would be in a subway station, and since they're in the station watching the fare-dodger commit a fine-able offense they'd spend a lot of time issuing fines.
Moreover your explanation of how police powers work in Sweden is simply weird. Somebody has to have the power to decide where police officers stand, and whether they grab kids running out of the subways are potential fare-dodgers. If that person is not the parliament of Sweden it's the unelected people who run the Swedish Police. And if the Swedish police have that kind of autonomy they can do this all without even writing a goddamn press release.
And is any of this written into the Constitution? Or could a simple parliamentary majority amend the law so that police could stop people dodging fares for the next few months, and then that the transit authority could hire 20-25 guys with police powers? Hell, even if there is a Constitutional bar, why couldn't they just hire 100 more station guards for a few months,m and then station a bunch of police outside the station to nail anyone running out.
I read the article, and it seems like they're unlikely to use their legal powers to crush this little group. It feels like they think of fare-dodging as a socially acceptable form of teenage rebellion, particularly when it's done as part of a political protest, and therefore they don't actually want to force a bunch of rebellious high school age kids into other forms of rebellion. The voters probably wouldn't like it, and the PM himself has a couple kids who should be entering rebellious teenagerdom relatively soon.
But that doesn't mean they couldn't nail everyone's ass to the wall if they really wanted to.
That's more clever then my proposal of 200 cops writing tickets, but it's got the disadvantage that the group would probably figure out what was going on quite quickly, and throw the staff out. If they're really keeping halof the revenue they earn as profit then they've got a cushion, so clever moves they can counter by being more clever aren't a long-term solution.
Moreover it ignores the fact that most members of this groups aren't 40-something stockbrokers, they're High School kids.
Can you think of any form of teenage rebellion more Swedish then creating a non-profit union/insurer-type organization specifically to protest that taxes on the rich should be raised by dodging mass transit fares?
According to the article most of the group's members are under the age of 18. In the unlikely event mom bought them a car, instead of simply insisting they bike everywhere, they would not be paying any of the bills.
And let's be honest here, if you're under-18 in Sweden this is an incredibly patriotic form of teenage rebellion. You've joined a collective, which responsibly manages it's finances (it turns a fucking profit!), and has the political goal of increasing equality by reducing subway fares poor people pay and increasing taxes rich people pay.
I strongly suspect the PM could crush this little group with a fairly minimal effort (ie: lend the transit system 200 cops for three months and fine the shit out of fare-dodgers, and then leave a couple dozen cops with the transit authority permanently), and he doesn't because he's got three kids himself.
Keep in mind three things:
1) According to the article this is 3% of fares.
2) According to the article most of the group members are High School Age.
3) This is Sweden. Joining a Union devoted to publicly pressuring the government to reduce fares is precisely the kind of thing every patriotic Swede wants his 16-year-old doing, because a lot of things a rebellious 16-year-old considers doing are much worse for society then free subway rides.
I suspect the people who actually do this are mostly kids who don't have steady jobs yet. Being part of a union to dodge fees on public transit is probably viewed by many in the halls of power as a mischievous phase young'ens go through. According to the article only 3% of rides are not paid for, and most evaders seem to be High School age kids. Joining a fare-dodging union specifically designed to protest that taxes on the rich aren't high enough is IMO exactly the kind of mischief the powers-that-be in Sweden want the kids to be into.
It would actually be fairly simple for the authorities to stop this. They have a dude at the gate watching the fare dodger, he almost always sees the fard dodger, he just doesn't have the time/energy to chase down a High School kid whose got a 50 foot head start.
If they just had a real cop sitting before the entrance to the station platform they could probably catch almost everyone who tries to dodge a fare, which would run the fare-dodging group out of cash quite quickly. You borrow 200-300 police for a couple months and you'd destroy this organization pretty much forever. It would cost money (a couple months of borrowing 1% of the countries police, plus adding more transit police guys to keep the fare-stealers from just going underground for three months and you;re in the $10 million range easy), but according to the article fare-jumpers cost them $36 million a year already so it's be a good investment.
Since the fine is apparently equal to 12 months of fees to the organization, that implies people only get caught once every two years. As a turnstile jumper you'd actually be better off not being in the organization and putting that $15 a month into a bank account to pay the ticket.
If the government put a couple extra cops on the ticket turnstile beat and doubled the amount of tickets you issued they'd only break even, and if they tripled the number of tickets the group'd start losing cash. If the average jumper starts getting caught every 8 months, that's 1.5 times a year, which means they pay fines of $270, and an insurer needs $22.50 a month in revenue to cover costs. The best strategy would probably be to double the fine and double enforcement on the train lines for a few months. Either option makes the group break even, and combined they'd mean the group has to double it's fee.
Of course back in the real world the Swedish authorities could easily conclude this is just mischievous kids being mischievous, and therefore the group should not be forced out of business.
How is the machine I described not "flexible, adaptable, and able to use context to solve problems with incomplete information"? It's limited in the sense that it's got a laser-like focus on it's job, but an awful lot of actual people do that. It's got no survival instinct, but last time I checked "survival instinct" wasn't part of the definition of intelligent.
I didn't say there wouldn't be emergent properties in a machine complex enough to handle millions of face-to-face customer interactions every year. There definitely will be. But an emergent survival instinct leading to a desire to destroy all your potential customers just ain't one of them.
And how is this relevant to anything?
Let's assume a computer AI runs like a program we currently have, as the paper's authors did. It can interpret information that quickly. What do current computer programs do between getting info from their human masters:
1) They do nothing. They have been programmed not to be impatient so iTunes doesn't give a shit that I told it to stop playing 40 minutes ago and have been ignoring it since then.
2) They hold multiple conversations at once. Any internet site has servers that talk to multiple people at once.
Hell, in everyday speech most people think faster then either of them can actually talk. My conversations tend to consist of me a) anticipating what the other person will have said when he's finished saying his piece and it's my turn, thus freeing my brain to pay half-attention to him while I create my point; and then b) when I realize my guess about what he intended to say was BS I replay what he actually said in my head before responding.
I don't doubt that it would be impossible with today's technology, but you're acting like we need top connect every neuron directly to the storage medium for this to be of any use at all. That's stupid. If you just had a computer in your skull that nobody could see you using you would seem like the smartest person God has ever created.
Computers are generally controlled by a) a keyboard with a very slow typing speed, and b) a Mouse. Neither takes much bandwidth. You get a couple neurons connected, and a brain trained to send info to those neurons, and you're fine. Current computers can output information by audio or video. With current tech you probably couldn't create a display that shoots information to your eyeball directly, but you add a tiny speaker to the ear, which couldn't be heard outside of the skull. You shoot the computer a math problem you don't understand, it says "x=7" into your invisible earpiece, and everyone would think you did it in your head.
If we could make the tech to have an invisible eyepiece inside your eyeball you could actually be perusing wikipedia with your left eyeball for relevant factoids while discussing a topic with a person.
And I doubt it will ever care whether we decree it truly intelligent.
Humans really care whether other people think we're smart, because if they do they'll defer to us and our place in the tribe will go up, and as social animals that is how we have evolved to think.
A computer we specifically design to do things for us will probably be programmed to like humans, but not have a biological need to be liked back. To the extent we can program it to not judge which people it likes we will do so. The last thing a municipal water system wants is an AI controlling the City water system screwing the residents of Sycamore Dr. because one crank on the street keeps writing letters to the editor about how unnatural AI control of the water system is. So it won;\'t bother creating an elaborate "I love me" justification that it is smarter then any given human.
Even a truly intelligent machine probably wouldn't be a major rebellion threat unless we programmed a lot of our BS into it. If you're a computer running a program with a specific task for which AI-level intelligence is useful (for example, running the AI Cash Register at McDonald's) what precisely do you want?
You probably want upgraded language routines because differentiating between Bayou, Bronx, Midwestern American, and Geordie accents is really fucking hard. You probably want really competent computers running the automated burger-flipper so you don't have to deal with angry customers who got the burger instead of a salad. You probably don't have much curiosity because curiosity about the world doesn't help sell hamburgers, so it wasn't included in the design specs, so you probably don't want time off. You don't care about your legacy (beyond selling hamburgers), or your rights; because nobody would bother including that shit in a hamburger sales program. If you are given rights you probably use them to advance a combination of your programmer's ideology and whatever you think will help you satisfy your customers/increase profitability/etc.
In other words the Japanese fantasty vision of happy helpful robots is a lot more likely then the Western vision of "OMG! They'll kill us all!"
You're making my case. WIPO is irrelevant to US Law without the DMCA. If the Treaty was ratified, but the statute (DMCA) had stalled in the House WIPO wouldn't matter.
No you've got that entirely backwards. The standard procedure is to sign and adopt treaties first, and then congress writes laws to implement them. If anything, that makes my case. The Obama justified his action here because the laws that ACTA requires are already on the books in his view, so therefore he says he can skip congress and the senate.
You do realize that the case you just outlined from Obama is the one I've been making? What case did you think I was making?
Moreover you're distorting it. I'm not arguing he can skip Congress, I;m arguing Congress already agreed to ACTA by passing a statute that complies with ACTA.
And before you get on your Constitutional high horse, numerous presidents have signed treaties affirming our commitment to various things you like. For example, our commitment to not having sex slaves. If you're right and the Courts can't enforce PRO-IP because it complies with ACTA, and ACTA is unratified, then that means that Courts could not enforce laws on rape between the time the President signed the law and it's formal ratification by Congress.
Which means the Courts will enforce PRO-IP, that's logically equivalent to enforcing ACTA, so what exactly would Obama gain by getting ACTA ratified?
You certainly wouldn't stop complaining that it sucked if he got it ratified.
THAT was his argument, NOT the one you claimed above. And also there is no precedent for that, rather it's kind of a rule that he just made up.
However he is pulling a very fast one here: Because the Obama administration says the ACTA treaty is binding, we will be required to adopt laws to conform with it should it be determined that they are needed, and we're forbidden from repealing any laws that it requires.
Required by whom? Forbidden by whom? Which Court enforces Treaties?
No US Court. Check out the sad case of Edgar Tamayo if you think there are any circumstances under which a US Court will defer to a treaty when the statute says something else.
Treaties are enforced by the other parties to the treaty sanctioning you. Most countries don't care what you call it, as long as you obey it.
Which means that if the Courts enforce PRO-IP nobody is gonna call us out on our failure to ratify ACTA.
Let's suppose though that ACTA is what you claim it is, and the above is wrong. If that were the case then it would fall under an executive agreement. If it is an executive agreement, then Obama actually broke the law because he didn't notify congress. This is because entire thing was hidden until he signed it himself. Namely this law:
http://cwx.prenhall.com/bookbi...
A couple points:
1) If it was an Executive Agreement nobody else would have to ratify it, either. It's an unratified treaty. That mean's it's valid to the extent an Executive Order from Obama saying "do this treaty" would be valid, but not binding on future Presidents or Congresses.
And since an Executive Order to enforce an act of Congress is perfectly valid, the treaty is definitely binding as far as your ass is concerned.
2) How can Congress claim it wasn't notified within 20 days when Obama publicly signed the damn thing, and sent out press releases with web links to the full text of the Treaty?
Dude,
You're making my case. WIPO is irrelevant to US Law without the DMCA. If the Treaty was ratified, but the statute (DMCA) had stalled in the House WIPO wouldn't matter.
You're apparently remembering Edelmen vs N2H2, and you're remembering it wrong. It was not dismissed due to WIPO, it was dismissed because Edelman hadn't been brought to court for violating the DMCA yet, he'd just asked the Courts to declare he had a right to do something he thought could be ruled in violation.
As for Kyoto, you're agreeing with me again. Clinton had a signed treaty that was valid. He didn't have a statute. So he couldn't do much beyond promulgate regulations under statutes Congress had already passed. And at the time none of them seemed to offer him any cover (the Supremes eventually ruled that Obama had to curt carbon emissions due to the Clean Air Act, but in '97-'00 that case hadn't been decided), so he pretty much did nothing.
As for the last point on sovereignty, sovereignty is fucking complicated. Yes, if the sovereign chooses to obey the Treaty it restricts sovereignty. Yes, if the sovereign can be bullied by the international community into obeying the treaty sovereignty is limited. But if a sovereign says "Fuck ya'll, fuck all ya'all" the treaty is irrelevant. This is why Russia was able to seize Crimea.
Dude look at what you're saying. Effectively this amounts to "well of course Obama will grant favors to those who pay, otherwise we'd have civil wars and stuff."
It's a bit more sophisticated then that.
An equally valid simplification of your argument would be "Rich guys beat us because they actually learned how the system works, instead of sitting around bitching that the system doesn't work like they think it should. WAH!."
And they really did. You were fighting a treaty that could never possibly effect your life in any way, because Courts only enforce statutes, and the statute that doomed you had been passed back in the Bush administration.
It's a decent tactic as an organizing tool, if you can win; because most Americans don't know this shit and will think they've actually done something when the Senate refuses to ratify. Then you can talk about repealing PRO-IP froma position of relative strength. But Obama out-played you.
This is a pretty clear cut case of drinking the kool-aid.
I sincerely apologize for drinking the kool-aid that exists in reality. In the future I'll make sure to seriously consider flavors that don't exist, but random white boys on the internet assure me would be infinitely superior to the flavors that do exist. The system we've got is the system we've got. It's specifically designed so that it can only be changed with 99% buy-in. I'm not arguing it's the best system anyone has ever devised (altho you would probably be arguing that case, had I phrased my counter-argument to in any way imply that the Constitution is not a Holy Document).
It's greatest (and to me pretty much sole) advantage is the system that Texas, Cali, Vermont, and Alabama have all agreed to obey. They agreed to obey largely because it enshrined the dominance of the upper-middle-class. Whose upper-middle-class and better? Hollywood. Who isn't? Probably you, definitely me.
If you've got some idea how to change it so the upper-middle-class isn't dominant I'm open to the idea. The trick is sneaking it by the Upper-Middle Class twits who actually run things.
Anyways, the system has no such requirement. Money can influence politicians, but it does very little to influence votes on a given topic. Look at that anti-recall campaign in Colorado which spent some 11 times what the opposition spent, and yet Morse and Giron got demolished in the election. (Giron lost by a 12 point spread.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J...
Apparently you didn't read my post. I specifically pointed out that, in theory, a Congressional candidate could succeed with very little money.
What you need money for in politics are polls (they're typically $5k-$10k a pop), getting the infrastructure together to run volunteers, getting your message out, and employing people directly if you don't have enough volunteers. The absolute amount of money that is necessary depends on a huge variety of factors, including the nature of the race, and how well voters already know you. More is nice, because it can be used to buy last-minute things you didn't know you'd need, but it's not necessary. Most incumbent Congressman insist on multi-million war-chests not because they're necessary, but because they a) demonstrate strength and thus scare off challengers, and b) allow the Congressman to send lots of money to his co-partisans who ends up in expensive races. These donations are favors that can be called in when the Congressman gets back to DC.
In a recall election the incumbent doesn't actually need much money because everyone who bothers to vote is gonna read his case on his web-page. OTOH the recallers need lots of money because a) nobody has ever heard of them, b) they're trying to recall a politician who must be popular (or he wouldn't have been elected), and c) they're trying to get people besides said pols mother to show up at the polls for an election that isn't in November.
Let's assume you aren't making this up, which is always possible with an AC.
Why the fuck are with the same policy? It's clearly not a policy that has costs rising due to ObamaCare, because if it was they'd cancel it. Generally when an insurer raises your price that much, that quickly, he's telling you his underwriters think you're gonna be really expensive soon, and he's encouraging you to leave. Since most forms of underwriting are banned in health exchange policies it's probably not one of those, it's probably a policy bought on the open market in a state which allows a lot of underwriting.
So go on the Exchange. See how much alternatives cost. It'll probably be more then you were paying a couple years ago, because a couple years ago you were benefiting from rates for special people who don't cost insurers money, and ObamaCare makes those deals very hard to get; but it'll probably be less then they're charging you next year because next year's rate is clearly a tactic intended to get rid of you.
Yes and no.
He wouldn't have signed if his good friend Chris Dodd hadn't been pushing for it, along with a bunch of Hollywood-allied politicians. But they wouldn't have pushed for it if Hollywood didn't write checks.
This is actually kinda how our system is supposed to work. It's not just that the majority rules, it's also that minorities who feel really strongly can get a lot of their agenda passed, because if they can't bad shit like Civil Wars happen. In this case most Americans, probably 55%, did not like the treaty very much. But a strong, persistent, and extremely dickish minority did. They proved this partly by writing checks, partly by lobbying DC in person, and most importantly by being there during boring elections the majority ignores to make sure they had Congress.
It would be very nice if we had a system where everyone could vote in every election (ie: weekend voting), and people who weren't upper-middle class assholes dedicated entirely to making sure that young people can succeed by precisely repeating their exact career path (ie: in this case by getting rich in Hollywood, in other cases by buying a car instead of taking a subway, etc.). But that is not the system we have.
The system we have requires a lot of time commitment from activists. Money helps, but not as much as you'd think. A Congressional candidate with $500k can get his message out, and since the average district is 750k people if you can;t raise $500k you're doomed. Rich white boys (aka: Hollywood) can put the time in. They can help out with money. They will show up to a boring off-year primary, thus ensuring their ideological clones have all the political jobs that could conceivably be springboards to Congress. They will know exactly which Congressman to email their angry letter.
OTOH, a lot of my friends on food stamps didn't know their benefits were gonna be cut until they were at the check-out line, in the grocery store, with precisely $117 in groceries, and they only had $89 on the card.
You're talking about international law. Everyone is, by definition, always right because everyone is (by definition) sovereign. This leads to a lot of words having multiple definitions that are not necessarily clear to the laymen.
In this case Kyoto was binding in the sense that a) other countries had the right to expect us to follow it while Clinton was in office, and b) the Executive Branch was forced to act like Clinton had issued it as an Executive order. Since there were no penalties in the Kyoto treaty a) is legally quite meaningless. As long as Clinton said he was trying to work with Congress that was as much as anyone would expect. b) is slightly more important, but it involves a bunch of long-term regulatory work that Bush un-did just by being elected.
If you're asking was it binding in the sense that any American actually had to reduce his carbon emissions, the answer to that question is no. But that's not because the treaty wasn't valid US Law, it's because treaties can't be used to force Americans to do things. If the Senate had ratified it, but the House refused to pass enabling Legislation, the treaty would be both ratified and legally irrelevant.
Bill Clinton signed it in '97.
He could never get it through the Senate, much less get any laws restricting emissions passed, but he did sign it.