It isn't a mass transit replacement. It is more like a solution to replace both mass transit and cars. You go to the next station and request transportation from A->B and the computer controlled routing takes care of everything else. Getting a free vehicles to you and finding a fast way to B. It also knows about all of the other vehicles, so it can prevent traffic jams.
That sounds like a mass transit replacement to me. By "mass transit", I mean a system that's only useful in dense areas that can afford high infrastructure costs.
I mean, that wikipedia says things like "Passengers get rides at discrete locations similar to bus stops or taxi stands. Most systems locate these about 400 metres (1/4 mi) apart".
That's just laughable for a huge portion of the population, and for the areas where it is feasible there's already functional mass transit--as I said, I take mass transit to work every day.
The reason I had a car growing up in Maine was that there were no bus stops in my town, there was one cab company with maybe 6 cabs, and there were maybe 10 other families living in a half mile of me. And I'm not talking about some tiny town, it was a respectable college town with 30,000 people--it's just they don't all pack in to a tiny area. I couldn't stand in sight of my house and see another house, but I could drive to the usual destinations (schools, groceries, mall, movie theater, etc) in under 15 minutes or to downtown Portland in under 30.
That's hardly unusual, and this kind of system isn't going to replace cars.
It is a network transit system, the track is laid out more like a grid than a corridor. It'd get you directly to your destinations because there would be stations nearby.
Mass transit is no replacement for cars in the US
I take the subway to work all the time in DC. But the other 3 places I've lived didn't have anything like the population density to support it. Seems like this thing could replace subways, but is it more efficient? I can't tell, 'cause the site requires forbidden Flash technology....
I think this may be one of those times, though I won't attempt to comment on their frequency, where a sequel is warranted.
Disagree. The original was great...
The original game was and is tons of fun, but it's also very small.
...but it was also the perfect size. By about 80% of the way through it was getting a bit repetitive. Any longer and it would've been tiresome.
They made a perfect-length game, charged a great price for it. Definitely a good value.
But it's really not a game that demands a sequel, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't get it even though the original was one of my more satisfying purchases of the last year.
I'd love to see the author try another new idea. But Katamari Damacy sated my need for rolling things up, I'd think the same is true of most people.
Every person I know who has a PS/2 had not heard of it before I started passing it around. Everyone loved it. It is brilliant in its simplicity.
In addition, it came out new at $20. An outstanding market concept that few if any had really tried - a new game that was cheap to develop, with little or no marketing, priced to sell. An unfortunate side effect is that there was very little big media attention payed.
As for the part about fawning over the larger scope of the game - the original was short. Necessarily so given the target of a cheap-to-create, cheap-on-the-shelf game.
Alternate POV:
The original was a ton of fun, the soundtrack was great. It also got old quickly, and by the time we finished it we were glad it was over. When you start out, you think "wow I'd love to be rolling over big stuff, picking up cars!". By the end you think "man, I was about done when we started picking up houses, these ships and islands are getting a little same-y".
Took about 10-15 hours to finish, which was about perfect--any longer and we'd have been sick of it.
I can't imagine that a true sequel would be much fun, but I'd love to see an "inspired by" or other original idea from the same author.
That said, at $20 it was a great value. Not too many $40+ games are very fun for 20-30 hours, if I can find 2-3 games a year that are worth their cost I'm happy.
Part of the problem is modern TVs. Get a TV from the 70's or 80's and it'd pull in a great picture. Modern sets are not designed for OTA broadcast reception
But it's the same television showing the discrepancy between analog and digital.
Even for SD, it's worth the switch from NTSC to ATSC. The improvement in the color resolution is visible, and the digital sound is very good
But it really sucks if you're on the fringes of the broadcast. The place I stay over the summer in Maine, during the day we get a pretty snowy picture and some static in the sound in over analog--but you can still keep track of the ball game, catch the news, etc. With digital, we get a frame popping up every 4-5 seconds and no sound.
At night, both come in clear and the digital picture is nicer.
But I'd gladly give up slightly nicer picture at night for watchable during the day (even if snowy).
We've even watched this happen in modern times; read up about the Moa of New Zealand, for starters
Also note that the Moa (and Harpagorn eagle) are special cases, though. New Zealand had no mammals other than a few kinds of bats, so all these big crazy birds evolved that were horrible competitors when other creatures arrived. The kakapo was practically driven extinct by cats in a matter of weeks.
The dodo was in a similar situation: so ill-adapted to compete that it was pretty much doomed as soon as anything else reached its habitat.
So yeah, man killed the moa (and therefore the harpagorn), but I'm not convinced it wasn't doomed as soon as _any_ predator showed up. Though the harpagorn could've survived if whatever ate the moa was tasty enough...
Why don't you united postal service it? What the hell does that mean?
If you don't know, you could google it.
You sound like the people complaining about using videotape as a verb in the mid-1980s.
Neologisms are perfectly reasonable so that we don't wind up repeatedly using long constructions like "I'm going to record Firefly to my TiVo and watch it later" or "I'm going to send it to him via UPS". Language is fluid, and when particular ideas are used often it's natural to come up with shorter ways of expressing them.
Well, there's an inductive effect with the standard metal knob that interferes with the high-frequency responses in stage 1 amplification. Also, less expensive wooden knobs don't have correct fits to the post, causing (inaudible, microscopic) vibration effects that can introduce jitter.
(If you can tell that that's BS, you're not in the target audience.)
[quote]Another amusing point is the mania for expensive RCA jacks in the audiophile world.[/quote]
Every audiophile I've talked to hates RCA jacks. Banana plugs are the preferred connection (or screw-downs), but most available audio gear comes with RCA jacks for the interconnects and only uses other connectors for the speaker wires, so they either stick with RCA or have to do DIY-soldering jobs (beyone the "check out my expensive setup!" audiophile's abilities, but well within the "I spend all my time working on my system" audiophiles' abilities).
That said, if they're stuck with RCA jacks they'll buy overpriced ones.
The dissenting opinions give the actual case law backing for why this is wrong, which I think holds more credibility from multiple career judges than your amateur opinion.
Looking at the full document, it appears that multiple career judges agree with my position--more of them, in fact, than agree with yours.
The founding fathers were trying to set up the 5th amendment to directly counter the kind of assumption by government that they had been seeing from the monarchy. It was strictly to be used for direct public use (roads, schools, etc.).
This is certainly untrue. You can find cases of eminent domain power being used for indirect public policy goals at least from the early 1800s (e.g. to take land for the creation of private textile mills), when the founding fathers were still in power. Really, Thomas Cooley (b. 1824) was the first prominent US politician to campaign against such uses of eminent domain. Before then, it wasn't just accepted; nobody even thought to question it.
The purpose of the 5th amendment was to prevent expropriation: the taking of property without just compensation.
That was gradually extended somewhat through some of that case law, which is where the "blight" factor comes in. Basically, if an area is deemed really really bad, such that it is a mess and a high crime area, etc. then they could condemn it and buy for a revitalization type work, which may be contracted out.
This new decision is not a reaffirming, as you say, but crossing a very bad line in further extending and broadening the justification of taking land. Instead of any actual blight, where the land is in really bad shape and desperately in need of improvements, the new rule they have condoned is that ANY proposed improvement, even places that are perfectly fine, is grounds for taking land and giving it to a developer
I'm sorry, but this is just wrong. The 1954 Berman case not only doesn't require "blight", it says that government interests far less serious than economics (e.g. "beautification") are sufficient public goals to justify seizure and transfer to other private parties.
That case specifically says that taking non-slum, non-blighted areas is fine if a legislatively defined public policy goal is being served. It also says that the legislature has very broad powers to determine what those public goals are, and some of the values it allows for are far more nebulous and less obvious than economic improvement.
To take for the purpose of ridding the area of slums is one thing; it is quite another, the argument goes, to take a man's property merely to develop a better balanced, more attractive community...We deal, in other words, with what traditionally has been known as the police power. An attempt to define its reach or trace its outer limits is fruitless, for each case must turn on its own facts. The definition is essentially the product of legislative determinations addressed to the purposes of government, purposes neither abstractly nor historically capable of complete definition. Subject to specific constitutional limitations, when the legislature has spoken, the public interest has been declared in terms well-nigh conclusive. In such cases the legislature, not the judiciary, is the main guardian of the public needs to be served by social legislation, whether it be Congress legislating concerning the District of Columbia (see Block v. Hirsh, 256 U.S. 135 ) or the States legislating concerning local affairs...This principle admits of no exception merely because the power of eminent domain is involved. The role of the judiciary in determining whether that power is being exercised for a public purpose is an extremely narrow one...Public safety, public health, morality, peace and quiet, law and order - these are some of the more conspicuous examples of the traditional application of the police power to municipal affairs. Yet they merely illustrate the
However, the Consitution is the underlying principle here, and eminant domain, as addressed in the 5th amendment, was understood at the time had a fairly clear understanding circa the 1790s. I won't say it was common law, but it was well established as seizure of private property for the state aka public or government use. In fact, I think private property for private use is expropriation, which is explicitly not allowed by the 4th and 5th amendments.
This is not accurate.
First, seizure of property by eminent domain and subsequent transfer to a private party was certainly allowed under common law. It would have been the norm to the Founding Fathers. This desire to have "public use" mean "owned and operated by the government" is understandable, but it's historically inaccurate--assignment of acquired lands to private parties has been a part of legitimate eminent domain power for longer than we've been a nation.
Second, "expropration" means seizure of property without just compensation.
Taking your property to put in a public water treatment plant (or run a highway, or whatever) without paying you (or paying you less than it's worth) is expropriation.
Taking your property, giving you its market value in cash, and giving the property to a developer in an urban renewal action is not expropriation.
I agree with you that transfer to private parties should be extremely limited, but it's really up to the legislature to make such a sweeping public policy change.
I'm not ready to say it should be banned entirely--for instance, if the Bath Iron Works (private manufacturer of Aegis cruisers and other ships of war) needed to expand during wartime to serve our military's needs, that could be a legitimate public use of sieze-and-transfer. I'm not sure, I'd have to think about it.
I am against even transfers that seem much more like public use than the New London case. For instance, it's BS that land was seized by the US government to construct the federal interstate system, and then the government gave those roads over to the care of states who in some instances sold/leased them to private companies as toll collectors. How would you feel if your land was taken for public use in the highway system, and 10 years later you had to pay a buck to some private company to drive across it?
But I thing changing the law is the province of the legislators, not the judiciary.
There is a big difference between taking private property under "eminent domain" and using it for public use and taking private property and giving it to another private party
As I said earlier, there are plenty of cases going back to the 1800s allowing the use of eminent domain to take property and give it to another private party. See the court cases I cited above, all of them involve seizure of property for assignment to another private party.
There's no indication that the Founding Fathers didn't intend this, and the English common law certainly allows it.
Your desire to have "public use" mean "owned and operated by the government" simply isn't an accurate interpretation of what that clause has always meant.
I happen to agree with you on what the policy _should_ be, but it's a matter that clearly needs legislative action. The Court would have been way out of line to create such a broad public policy change without Constitutional or statutory changes.
Our whole economy is based on capitalism, which implies ownership of property. What these SCOTUS people did was knock out the keytone of the whole foundation - saying that we cannot truely own anything.
In order to "knock out the keystone", you'd have to be changing things. This decision affirmed the status quo, so it's hardly a system-threatening one.
I agree with you that such seizures ought to be banned.
What I don't get is why people are reacting as though this is some new development or some earth-shaking power: the right of the government to use eminent domain power to transer property to another private entity is one that's been upheld in the Courts for decades (really, since the 1800s at least).
And I don't get the anger at _this_ Court. They're not breaking any new ground. The place to change this is in the state legislature (or through Constitutional amendment).
If you're refering to the Michigan poletown plant, Michigan has since switched its position on the issue. The state no longer force private->private transfers. That's not to say they couldn't start again. As a result of this supreme court case, one michigan rep is trying to get the state constitution ammended to disallow it by law in the future.
That is the case I'm referring to. And actually, the final verdict was that such seizures are a violation of the Michigan state constitution. That's why I wrote:
If you're interested in becoming a property owner, many states (e.g. Michigan) have their own laws in place to prevent such seizures, and have had those for decades--indeed, such state protections served the land owner in Wayne County v. Hathcock well, after it had been held that there was no US Constitutional protection.
Historically, "almost nobody" objected to enslaving blacks, forcing children to work in factories for 14 hours a day, and not giving women a vote.
Yep. And historically, when people realized those were wrong, the legislature acted to change them. In fact, for 2 of those we passed Constitutional ammendments. The Court didn't just make up arbitrary new rules.
[quote]Congress had nothing to do with this, it happened at a local level[/quote]
Right, but there's no additional Constitutional restriction on local governments with respect to eminent domain. The only reason it was Congress in this case was because the seizure was in DC (which Congress governs); similar seizures happened in actual states at the behest of local governments.
People are surprised because Eminent Domain is meant to serve the public interest by taking property to build a highway or pipeline or something useful
Except that's not true. The cases I cited go back over a century with private->private transfers. That's always been part of eminent domain. The earliest one did deal with a bridge, but it was taking it from one private operator to give to another to increase revenues. It wasn't building a new bridge or anything. The others were seizures of private land to give to commercial developers (stores, etc) or manufacturers (GM plant).
I can see not liking that, but it shouldn't be a surprise. And it's not the place of the Court to write new public policy.
[quote]because the whole idea behind property is that you get to decide when you should or should not sell it.[/quote]
I don't know what country you're in, but that's never been true in the US. Even before the 16th Amendment, real property (e.g. land) was something you had to pay yearly to keep, as it still is. And nobody sane doesn't agree with eminent domain in some cases (e.g if needed to put in a water treatment plant for the town)--and at the very least you'd have to admit that refusing something like that would be a matter of new policy and not a matter for the Courts to decide.
Historically, too, almost nobody objected to the use of it to, for instance, build the interstate highway system or the railroad system, even though large parts of those were turned over to private companies (everyone from turnpike authorities to robber barons).
And such uses in urban renewal projects in the 1950s and on were largely supported by public sentiment as well as Court rulings.
You're basically saying that you think property ownership should be absolute, which is a radical change from how it's always been, and then expecting the Court to be the agent for such change rather than the legislatures.
That's just wrong. I happen to agree with you that these transfers to private parties should be illegal, but having the Court make that change would a horrible example of what the neocons call "activist judges".
The justices in the Dred Scott case were just interpreting the law too. It doesn't mean they made the right decision
Yeah, but normally when a Supreme Court decision is overturned one of 2 things has happened 1. A new constitutional change has been made 2. The original decision was one that a single case (or at best, multiple cases decided by a single incarnation of the Court) decided, and the Court decides that the decision was incorrect.
It's very unusual for the Court to overturn over a century of legal precedent in which multiple Courts have ruled the same way, unless there has been a legal or constitutional change.
And in this case, we have decisions reaching back over a century authorizing the use of eminent domain power to sieze land for transfer to another private party. (e.g. Berman v. Parker, 1954; Luxon v. North River Bridge, 1894; Wayne County v. Hathcock, 1981). Overturning that would have been a much bigger deal than this decision, which simply affirmed the status quo.
If you're interested in becoming a property owner, many states (e.g. Michigan) have their own laws in place to prevent such seizures, and have had those for decades--indeed, such state protections served the land owner in Wayne County v. Hathcock well, after it had been held that there was no US Constitutional protection.
In short, I think such seizure suck. But there really isn't anything in the constitution preventing them, they were almost certainly anticipated by the Founding Fathers, they've been legitimate for years, and I don't understand why people are surprised by this ruling (which merely upholds the status quo) or particularly angry at this Court and not earlier ones that decided the same way.
And the fastest place to fight this is probably in the state legislatures, though obviously a Constitutional amendment is always a possibility.
Would be even better if they made a chain of hotels with locations in five cities.
That would be incredibly dumb considering that this decision didn't do anything other than reaffirm previous rulings; no new eminent domain powers were granted.
I don't see why this Court is taking so MUCH flak for upholding something that the Court has upheld on numerous occasions in the past, and I don't see why people think using eminent domain to take private property and transfer it to another private owner is anything new.
A clear statement of this is 1954's Berman v. Parker ruling which read in part: it is not beyond the power of Congress to utilize an agency of private enterprise for this purpose, or to authorize the taking of private property and its resale or lease to the same or other private parties
But the principle goes back much farther; e.g. Luxon v. North River Bridge (1894) where a bridge was taken from one owner and transferred to anohter who could run it more efficiently and produce more tax revenue.
And there's the recent Wayne County v. Hancock (1981) where it was ruled legal under the US Constitution to take people's homes for the construction of a new General Motors plant. That was later held to be a violation of Michigan state law, but there was no US Constitutional problem.
In short, I can understand that people don't like this. What I don't get is why people are treating it as though it's some new precedent, or some change in how things have been. Or why they're mad at this Court in particular, and what legally they think has changed in the last 20 or so years that would make it possible for the Court to rule this unconstitutional, when it's clearly been considered legal for over a century.
And such use of power has been broad, so it's not like this is some hidden or niche power that should be surprising to people; urban renewal programs in the 50s and 60s used it widely, Baltimore's Inner Harbor was rebuilt using such powers (to transfer land to other private parties), etc.
What about the *fun* factor? Early generation consoles used increases in technology to give us better gameplay than before. [SNIP] Zelda -> Zelda III: A Link to the Past -> Zelda 64 Contra -> Contra III Super Mario Bros. (I-III) -> Super Mario World -> Mario 64 StarFox -> StarFox 64
I disagree, strongly. IMO, all of those sequels are FAR worse games than the originals as far as the fun factor.
However, I think diminishing returns on the graphics side is probably a good thing. Developers have been spending years improving the graphics of the "same-old" games--Halo II is really no more fun than Doom was, and Double Dragon was just as much fun as the newest Tekken and Mortal Kombat titles. But with visible graphics improvements slowing down, coming up with interesting game premises becomes more important again. Also, built-in networking will result in a massive surge in online/massive multiplayer gaming.
That said, there are a lot of imaginative new titles out there if you look for them (both in popular stuff like GTA3 and Hitman, and less popular stuff like Katamari Demacy and Monkeyball).
Slashdot Mirror
It isn't a mass transit replacement. It is more like a solution to replace both mass transit and cars. You go to the next station and request transportation from A->B and the computer controlled routing takes care of everything else. Getting a free vehicles to you and finding a fast way to B. It also knows about all of the other vehicles, so it can prevent traffic jams.
That sounds like a mass transit replacement to me. By "mass transit", I mean a system that's only useful in dense areas that can afford high infrastructure costs.
I mean, that wikipedia says things like "Passengers get rides at discrete locations similar to bus stops or taxi stands. Most systems locate these about 400 metres (1/4 mi) apart".
That's just laughable for a huge portion of the population, and for the areas where it is feasible there's already functional mass transit--as I said, I take mass transit to work every day.
The reason I had a car growing up in Maine was that there were no bus stops in my town, there was one cab company with maybe 6 cabs, and there were maybe 10 other families living in a half mile of me. And I'm not talking about some tiny town, it was a respectable college town with 30,000 people--it's just they don't all pack in to a tiny area. I couldn't stand in sight of my house and see another house, but I could drive to the usual destinations (schools, groceries, mall, movie theater, etc) in under 15 minutes or to downtown Portland in under 30.
That's hardly unusual, and this kind of system isn't going to replace cars.
Mass transit is no replacement for cars in the US
I take the subway to work all the time in DC. But the other 3 places I've lived didn't have anything like the population density to support it. Seems like this thing could replace subways, but is it more efficient? I can't tell, 'cause the site requires forbidden Flash technology....
Disagree. The original was great...
They made a perfect-length game, charged a great price for it. Definitely a good value.
But it's really not a game that demands a sequel, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't get it even though the original was one of my more satisfying purchases of the last year.
I'd love to see the author try another new idea. But Katamari Damacy sated my need for rolling things up, I'd think the same is true of most people.
Every person I know who has a PS/2 had not heard of it before I started passing it around. Everyone loved it. It is brilliant in its simplicity.
In addition, it came out new at $20. An outstanding market concept that few if any had really tried - a new game that was cheap to develop, with little or no marketing, priced to sell. An unfortunate side effect is that there was very little big media attention payed.
As for the part about fawning over the larger scope of the game - the original was short. Necessarily so given the target of a cheap-to-create, cheap-on-the-shelf game.
Alternate POV:
The original was a ton of fun, the soundtrack was great. It also got old quickly, and by the time we finished it we were glad it was over. When you start out, you think "wow I'd love to be rolling over big stuff, picking up cars!". By the end you think "man, I was about done when we started picking up houses, these ships and islands are getting a little same-y".
Took about 10-15 hours to finish, which was about perfect--any longer and we'd have been sick of it.
I can't imagine that a true sequel would be much fun, but I'd love to see an "inspired by" or other original idea from the same author.
That said, at $20 it was a great value. Not too many $40+ games are very fun for 20-30 hours, if I can find 2-3 games a year that are worth their cost I'm happy.
Part of the problem is modern TVs. Get a TV from the 70's or 80's and it'd pull in a great picture. Modern sets are not designed for OTA broadcast reception
But it's the same television showing the discrepancy between analog and digital.
Even for SD, it's worth the switch from NTSC to ATSC. The improvement in the color resolution is visible, and the digital sound is very good
But it really sucks if you're on the fringes of the broadcast. The place I stay over the summer in Maine, during the day we get a pretty snowy picture and some static in the sound in over analog--but you can still keep track of the ball game, catch the news, etc. With digital, we get a frame popping up every 4-5 seconds and no sound.
At night, both come in clear and the digital picture is nicer.
But I'd gladly give up slightly nicer picture at night for watchable during the day (even if snowy).
We've even watched this happen in modern times; read up about the Moa of New Zealand, for starters
Also note that the Moa (and Harpagorn eagle) are special cases, though. New Zealand had no mammals other than a few kinds of bats, so all these big crazy birds evolved that were horrible competitors when other creatures arrived. The kakapo was practically driven extinct by cats in a matter of weeks.
The dodo was in a similar situation: so ill-adapted to compete that it was pretty much doomed as soon as anything else reached its habitat.
So yeah, man killed the moa (and therefore the harpagorn), but I'm not convinced it wasn't doomed as soon as _any_ predator showed up. Though the harpagorn could've survived if whatever ate the moa was tasty enough...
The larger the animal, the higher the odds it had of dying, everywhere in the world that we moved to
Definitely. Even in relatively recent history, there's the moa, Haast's eagle, dodo, great auk...
Places where humans didn't get to early on had megafauna last longer - for example, Wrangel Island had mammoths holdouts till the time of the Pharaohs
The dwarf mammoths on Wrangel Island aren't exactly megafauna--they're smaller than elephants or polar bears.
Why don't you united postal service it? What the hell does that mean?
If you don't know, you could google it.
You sound like the people complaining about using videotape as a verb in the mid-1980s.
Neologisms are perfectly reasonable so that we don't wind up repeatedly using long constructions like "I'm going to record Firefly to my TiVo and watch it later" or "I'm going to send it to him via UPS". Language is fluid, and when particular ideas are used often it's natural to come up with shorter ways of expressing them.
A fun toy is Lego building blocks, which have little interlocking male and female parts.
Well, there's an inductive effect with the standard metal knob that interferes with the high-frequency responses in stage 1 amplification. Also, less expensive wooden knobs don't have correct fits to the post, causing (inaudible, microscopic) vibration effects that can introduce jitter.
(If you can tell that that's BS, you're not in the target audience.)
[quote]Another amusing point is the mania for expensive RCA jacks in the audiophile world.[/quote]
Every audiophile I've talked to hates RCA jacks. Banana plugs are the preferred connection (or screw-downs), but most available audio gear comes with RCA jacks for the interconnects and only uses other connectors for the speaker wires, so they either stick with RCA or have to do DIY-soldering jobs (beyone the "check out my expensive setup!" audiophile's abilities, but well within the "I spend all my time working on my system" audiophiles' abilities).
That said, if they're stuck with RCA jacks they'll buy overpriced ones.
Looking at the full document, it appears that multiple career judges agree with my position--more of them, in fact, than agree with yours.
The founding fathers were trying to set up the 5th amendment to directly counter the kind of assumption by government that they had been seeing from the monarchy. It was strictly to be used for direct public use (roads, schools, etc.).
This is certainly untrue. You can find cases of eminent domain power being used for indirect public policy goals at least from the early 1800s (e.g. to take land for the creation of private textile mills), when the founding fathers were still in power. Really, Thomas Cooley (b. 1824) was the first prominent US politician to campaign against such uses of eminent domain. Before then, it wasn't just accepted; nobody even thought to question it.
The purpose of the 5th amendment was to prevent expropriation: the taking of property without just compensation.
I'm sorry, but this is just wrong. The 1954 Berman case not only doesn't require "blight", it says that government interests far less serious than economics (e.g. "beautification") are sufficient public goals to justify seizure and transfer to other private parties.
That case specifically says that taking non-slum, non-blighted areas is fine if a legislatively defined public policy goal is being served. It also says that the legislature has very broad powers to determine what those public goals are, and some of the values it allows for are far more nebulous and less obvious than economic improvement.
To take for the purpose of ridding the area of slums is one thing; it is quite another, the argument goes, to take a man's property merely to develop a better balanced, more attractive community...We deal, in other words, with what traditionally has been known as the police power. An attempt to define its reach or trace its outer limits is fruitless, for each case must turn on its own facts. The definition is essentially the product of legislative determinations addressed to the purposes of government, purposes neither abstractly nor historically capable of complete definition. Subject to specific constitutional limitations, when the legislature has spoken, the public interest has been declared in terms well-nigh conclusive. In such cases the legislature, not the judiciary, is the main guardian of the public needs to be served by social legislation, whether it be Congress legislating concerning the District of Columbia (see Block v. Hirsh, 256 U.S. 135 ) or the States legislating concerning local affairs...This principle admits of no exception merely because the power of eminent domain is involved. The role of the judiciary in determining whether that power is being exercised for a public purpose is an extremely narrow one...Public safety, public health, morality, peace and quiet, law and order - these are some of the more conspicuous examples of the traditional application of the police power to municipal affairs. Yet they merely illustrate the
However, the Consitution is the underlying principle here, and eminant domain, as addressed in the 5th amendment, was understood at the time had a fairly clear understanding circa the 1790s. I won't say it was common law, but it was well established as seizure of private property for the state aka public or government use. In fact, I think private property for private use is expropriation, which is explicitly not allowed by the 4th and 5th amendments.
This is not accurate.
First, seizure of property by eminent domain and subsequent transfer to a private party was certainly allowed under common law. It would have been the norm to the Founding Fathers. This desire to have "public use" mean "owned and operated by the government" is understandable, but it's historically inaccurate--assignment of acquired lands to private parties has been a part of legitimate eminent domain power for longer than we've been a nation.
Second, "expropration" means seizure of property without just compensation.
Taking your property to put in a public water treatment plant (or run a highway, or whatever) without paying you (or paying you less than it's worth) is expropriation.
Taking your property, giving you its market value in cash, and giving the property to a developer in an urban renewal action is not expropriation.
I agree with you that transfer to private parties should be extremely limited, but it's really up to the legislature to make such a sweeping public policy change.
I'm not ready to say it should be banned entirely--for instance, if the Bath Iron Works (private manufacturer of Aegis cruisers and other ships of war) needed to expand during wartime to serve our military's needs, that could be a legitimate public use of sieze-and-transfer. I'm not sure, I'd have to think about it.
I am against even transfers that seem much more like public use than the New London case. For instance, it's BS that land was seized by the US government to construct the federal interstate system, and then the government gave those roads over to the care of states who in some instances sold/leased them to private companies as toll collectors. How would you feel if your land was taken for public use in the highway system, and 10 years later you had to pay a buck to some private company to drive across it?
But I thing changing the law is the province of the legislators, not the judiciary.
There is a big difference between taking private property under "eminent domain" and using it for public use and taking private property and giving it to another private party
As I said earlier, there are plenty of cases going back to the 1800s allowing the use of eminent domain to take property and give it to another private party. See the court cases I cited above, all of them involve seizure of property for assignment to another private party.
There's no indication that the Founding Fathers didn't intend this, and the English common law certainly allows it.
Your desire to have "public use" mean "owned and operated by the government" simply isn't an accurate interpretation of what that clause has always meant.
I happen to agree with you on what the policy _should_ be, but it's a matter that clearly needs legislative action. The Court would have been way out of line to create such a broad public policy change without Constitutional or statutory changes.
Our whole economy is based on capitalism, which implies ownership of property. What these SCOTUS people did was knock out the keytone of the whole foundation - saying that we cannot truely own anything.
In order to "knock out the keystone", you'd have to be changing things. This decision affirmed the status quo, so it's hardly a system-threatening one.
I agree with you that such seizures ought to be banned.
What I don't get is why people are reacting as though this is some new development or some earth-shaking power: the right of the government to use eminent domain power to transer property to another private entity is one that's been upheld in the Courts for decades (really, since the 1800s at least).
And I don't get the anger at _this_ Court. They're not breaking any new ground. The place to change this is in the state legislature (or through Constitutional amendment).
That is the case I'm referring to. And actually, the final verdict was that such seizures are a violation of the Michigan state constitution. That's why I wrote:
If you're interested in becoming a property owner, many states (e.g. Michigan) have their own laws in place to prevent such seizures, and have had those for decades--indeed, such state protections served the land owner in Wayne County v. Hathcock well, after it had been held that there was no US Constitutional protection.
Historically, "almost nobody" objected to enslaving blacks, forcing children to work in factories for 14 hours a day, and not giving women a vote.
Yep. And historically, when people realized those were wrong, the legislature acted to change them. In fact, for 2 of those we passed Constitutional ammendments. The Court didn't just make up arbitrary new rules.
[quote]Congress had nothing to do with this, it happened at a local level[/quote]
Right, but there's no additional Constitutional restriction on local governments with respect to eminent domain. The only reason it was Congress in this case was because the seizure was in DC (which Congress governs); similar seizures happened in actual states at the behest of local governments.
Except that's not true. The cases I cited go back over a century with private->private transfers. That's always been part of eminent domain. The earliest one did deal with a bridge, but it was taking it from one private operator to give to another to increase revenues. It wasn't building a new bridge or anything. The others were seizures of private land to give to commercial developers (stores, etc) or manufacturers (GM plant).
I can see not liking that, but it shouldn't be a surprise. And it's not the place of the Court to write new public policy.
[quote]because the whole idea behind property is that you get to decide when you should or should not sell it.[/quote]
I don't know what country you're in, but that's never been true in the US. Even before the 16th Amendment, real property (e.g. land) was something you had to pay yearly to keep, as it still is. And nobody sane doesn't agree with eminent domain in some cases (e.g if needed to put in a water treatment plant for the town)--and at the very least you'd have to admit that refusing something like that would be a matter of new policy and not a matter for the Courts to decide.
Historically, too, almost nobody objected to the use of it to, for instance, build the interstate highway system or the railroad system, even though large parts of those were turned over to private companies (everyone from turnpike authorities to robber barons).
And such uses in urban renewal projects in the 1950s and on were largely supported by public sentiment as well as Court rulings.
You're basically saying that you think property ownership should be absolute, which is a radical change from how it's always been, and then expecting the Court to be the agent for such change rather than the legislatures.
That's just wrong. I happen to agree with you that these transfers to private parties should be illegal, but having the Court make that change would a horrible example of what the neocons call "activist judges".
The justices in the Dred Scott case were just interpreting the law too. It doesn't mean they made the right decision
Yeah, but normally when a Supreme Court decision is overturned one of 2 things has happened
1. A new constitutional change has been made
2. The original decision was one that a single case (or at best, multiple cases decided by a single incarnation of the Court) decided, and the Court decides that the decision was incorrect.
It's very unusual for the Court to overturn over a century of legal precedent in which multiple Courts have ruled the same way, unless there has been a legal or constitutional change.
And in this case, we have decisions reaching back over a century authorizing the use of eminent domain power to sieze land for transfer to another private party. (e.g. Berman v. Parker, 1954; Luxon v. North River Bridge, 1894; Wayne County v. Hathcock, 1981). Overturning that would have been a much bigger deal than this decision, which simply affirmed the status quo.
If you're interested in becoming a property owner, many states (e.g. Michigan) have their own laws in place to prevent such seizures, and have had those for decades--indeed, such state protections served the land owner in Wayne County v. Hathcock well, after it had been held that there was no US Constitutional protection.
In short, I think such seizure suck. But there really isn't anything in the constitution preventing them, they were almost certainly anticipated by the Founding Fathers, they've been legitimate for years, and I don't understand why people are surprised by this ruling (which merely upholds the status quo) or particularly angry at this Court and not earlier ones that decided the same way.
And the fastest place to fight this is probably in the state legislatures, though obviously a Constitutional amendment is always a possibility.
That would be incredibly dumb considering that this decision didn't do anything other than reaffirm previous rulings; no new eminent domain powers were granted.
I don't see why this Court is taking so MUCH flak for upholding something that the Court has upheld on numerous occasions in the past, and I don't see why people think using eminent domain to take private property and transfer it to another private owner is anything new.
A clear statement of this is 1954's Berman v. Parker ruling which read in part:
it is not beyond the power of Congress to utilize an agency of private enterprise for this purpose, or to authorize the taking of private property and its resale or lease to the same or other private parties
But the principle goes back much farther; e.g. Luxon v. North River Bridge (1894) where a bridge was taken from one owner and transferred to anohter who could run it more efficiently and produce more tax revenue.
And there's the recent Wayne County v. Hancock (1981) where it was ruled legal under the US Constitution to take people's homes for the construction of a new General Motors plant. That was later held to be a violation of Michigan state law, but there was no US Constitutional problem.
In short, I can understand that people don't like this. What I don't get is why people are treating it as though it's some new precedent, or some change in how things have been. Or why they're mad at this Court in particular, and what legally they think has changed in the last 20 or so years that would make it possible for the Court to rule this unconstitutional, when it's clearly been considered legal for over a century.
And such use of power has been broad, so it's not like this is some hidden or niche power that should be surprising to people; urban renewal programs in the 50s and 60s used it widely, Baltimore's Inner Harbor was rebuilt using such powers (to transfer land to other private parties), etc.
What about the *fun* factor? Early generation consoles used increases in technology to give us better gameplay than before.
[SNIP]
Zelda -> Zelda III: A Link to the Past -> Zelda 64
Contra -> Contra III
Super Mario Bros. (I-III) -> Super Mario World -> Mario 64
StarFox -> StarFox 64
I disagree, strongly. IMO, all of those sequels are FAR worse games than the originals as far as the fun factor.
However, I think diminishing returns on the graphics side is probably a good thing. Developers have been spending years improving the graphics of the "same-old" games--Halo II is really no more fun than Doom was, and Double Dragon was just as much fun as the newest Tekken and Mortal Kombat titles. But with visible graphics improvements slowing down, coming up with interesting game premises becomes more important again. Also, built-in networking will result in a massive surge in online/massive multiplayer gaming.
That said, there are a lot of imaginative new titles out there if you look for them (both in popular stuff like GTA3 and Hitman, and less popular stuff like Katamari Demacy and Monkeyball).