I agree with your first sentence. If I were a judge, I might even rule that way.
But, our opinions aside, how is your second sentence different from the gold-fringers, sovereign citizens and other people that believe their interpretation of the Constitution or the law supersedes that of our organized government?
I really don't think you are wrong, but we can't operate as a society if we don't respect the outcome of the dispute resolution system even when disagree with the reasoning. That's why I draw the line between the first sentence (opinion about how the law ought to be interpreted) and the second sentence (statement that your opinion is dispositive about officials carrying out their oaths).
They'd be likedly to find that it violated the law, given there's precedent and absolutely no risk associated with prosecution.
No, they wouldn't. Faced with the fact that a finding would lead to a firing, they would hem and haw and point the blame. They would blame the legislature for not making it clear and dither for a few months until everyone forgot.
Forcing people to pull the trigger almost never works in real organizations.
If there's literally no paper trail, then the head of the department that made the decision is the one that'll get fired. That gives him or her a pretty strong incentive not to do it.
Oh, I see. I thought you were talking about actual organizations that exist in the real world. Instead, it appears you be talking about a fantasy world in which any employee can get a political appointee fired.
Carry on. If you ever do decide to learn about organizations that exist over here, we've got some good reading for you.
They'd be likedly to find that it violated the law, given there's precedent and absolutely no risk associated with prosecution.
No, they wouldn't. Faced with the fact that a finding would lead to a firing, they would hem and haw and point the blame. They would blame the legislature for not making it clear and dither for a few months until everyone forgot.
Forcing people to pull the trigger almost never works in real organizations.
Oh, I see. I thought you were talking about actual organizations that exist in the real world. Instead, it appears you be talking about a fantasy world in which any employee can get a political appointee fired.
Carry on. If you ever do decide to learn about organizations that exist over here, we've got some good reading for you.
Even if the specific legislation exempts the government, it could be argued by analogy.
That's not how law works. When the legislature exempts or excludes application by explicit language, it means that the law cannot be argued to apply by implicit language. It's a form of the 'more specific rule' canon of interpretation.
Remember, the legislature isn't even obligated to pass an anti-SLAPP law. They could repeal the entire thing, so barring extraordinary circumstances, they can chose where and when to have it apply.
Let's suppose for a second that they fired someone over it, justifying it because the OR DOJ found that this employees action were unlawful. Let's suppose that it happened again, do you think the OR DOJ would be as likely to find that it violated the law? Or do you think they might feel some pressure to drag out the investigation, or not investigate at all saying they have higher priorities.
No one is against accountability. But at the same time, harsh penalties can counter-intuitively reduce accountability by either a "circle the wagons" mentality and/or desire not to investigate fully in order not to produce a paper trail.
Since we're talking about engineering[2], in most cases when there's a major screwup, the correct engineering response would be to adversarially red-team it and produce a full and complete accounting of the various problems in the process/execution and steps that could have been done better. When I've asked people why they don't do this, it's very clear: conducting an internal investigation is just begging for an opposing counsel to get it in discovery and use it against you. And it's pretty compelling too: "even $COMPANYs internal review found ways they could have done it better[1]".
Besides the paradoxical effect of reducing accountability, organizations lose an enormous venue for improvement. When done in good-faith[3] and without the desire to nail someone for a failure, there is a massive potential for gain here. Instead, by discouraging them, we deprive the organization of the best opportunity to avoid making the same mistake again.
So yeah, you can ask for the guy's head on a pike, but just be aware that the next guy will see that and be less inclined to frankly admit his overstep and correct himself and more inclined to fight it to the end. That fight is not as useful at setting things right as you might believe.
[1] It's a human endeavor. You can always find ways to do it better!
[2] I've heard anecdotally that this is also true in medicine: that even a semi-formal review of what went wrong is strongly discouraged for liability reasons. I can't fathom how much improvement in medicine this has stymied.
[3] Of course, sometimes they are just an exercise in corporate politics and blame-the-other-guy. Footnote [1] applies recursively: even the method for finding better ways to do things has better ways to do it.
Not every union contract has terms that benefit only one side.
Indeed. But my claim was that this benefits zero sides.
By specifying a maximum bonus, the airline doesn't end up in a bidding war with the pilots, with the pilots as a group staging a sick-out unless they get 10x their pay.
So the union wants to limit the ability of the pilots to make lots of extra money in order to increase the number of people they represent? Sheesh, that's cynical even by American labor standards.
I would agree that it will take more than a 50% increase. And that in normal circumstances, the company would rather hire another dude than routinely pay 200% or 300% bonus. But this is not a normal circumstance, this is a extraordinary fuck up and the obvious thing to do is to pay enough to solve it.
It seems mutually beneficial for the company to cough up large bonuses and the union to agree that this is exceptional situation.
"We have reserve pilots to help cover flying in December, and we are paying pilots who pick up certain open trips 150 percent of their hourly rate â" as much as we are allowed to pay them per the contract," he told the network
Hold on a second, the union contract specifies a maximum bonus to the hourly rate that the company can offer? How in the world could that clause benefit either the workers or the company?
It clearly sucks for the company, because now they've fucked up and should be responsible for paying out however much bonus they need to pay the pilots to entice them to pick up the extra flights.
It clearly sucks for the workers, because they forego the higher bonus that the company might have paid them. Many of them might have been perfectly willing to reschedule what the computer gave them at 200% or 250% pay.
Maximum suck would be if the rigidity of the contract prevented them from offering enough, forcing them to cancel flights. That would cost the airlines far more than offering mea-culpa bonus to the pilots and would completely ruin the travel plans of customers.
Interestingly enough, only 20% of the cost of your flight is salaries. Of that, pilots are probably 5-7% or so (there are many more ground and gate crew per flight than pilots). So even if they had to pay 300% bonuses to get enough pilots to voluntarily do those shifts, that would only be a 10% increase in net costs, bringing their margins for those particular flights from 2.5% to -7.5% (or, making $6 a passenger to losing $10 apiece or so). No matter how you slice it, it's much cheaper for the airline to offer pilot bonuses to compensate for their mistake.
In a post to its website, the union warned its members that because "management unilaterally created their solution in violation of the contract, neither APA nor the contract can guarantee the promised payment of the premium being offered."
First off, management asked pilots to volunteer to do those flights in exchange for money. That seems reasonable enough (except of course for the cap on the percentage). Second, I can't imagine that management would promise a premium and then not pay it. That would be an open-and-shut violation of labor law.
If they really wanted to help, the APA would be organizing the pilots to see how much they would have to be paid to give up the vacation they were promised and then present that to the airline in a package-deal format. Something like "I have 1500 pilots willing to take shifts fro 150% bonus, 2500 for 250% bonus,..."
hard to make a legal argument that what google did was against the consent of the user
That depends on your mental model for what the default is. Lots of us prefer the model that you ought to get positive informed consent before collected personally-identifiable data, and can only use an 'opt-out' system if the data are aggregated (for instance, by adding +1 to a counter somewhere every time a person views an article, that's obviously not 'personally-identifiable', it's just incrementing an integer).
The user has no way at all to signal that they don't want third party cookies, if that is the default setting,
I mean, let's be realistic: you've go a few options
Make the user specify their intent for each possible setting.
Provide reasonable defaults and let the user modify them if they wish.
Have no adjustable settings anywhere, just pick what you think is correct and don't let the user change it.
Obviously the first and last are in jest, just to illustrate than any OS/application provider has to make default choices.
The >300 mile range of the Model 3 requires 5 hours of driving to deplete
I don't think 60MPH is a reasonable estimate for an average road trip speed. Most of the rural interstates in the US are 75 or 80MPH limit, so you'll see cars in the 80-90MPH range.
I am not sure of a situation where you give personal information to someone, and they make it public after making no guarantees to you that they would keep such information secret. Are you foolish for giving the information without such guarantees, or should you expect that because the information is personal, you should automatically assume it should be kept secret? Why should you have such an expectation?
Well, Congress actually stepped in and enacted more (but not maximal) protection than required by passing the Stored Communication Act. In relevant part (Â 2702(a) for the law nerds following along) makes an ISP civilly liable if they voluntarily disclose your content except with your lawful consent. That is, the default in the "make no guarantees" is that the ISP cannot disclose anything.
So appreciate the bizarro-fact that Congress passed a law creating protection that the Constitution doesn't require and appreciate the new default:-)
You know that people pay money to a gym to literally run on a actual treadmill right, because they find the act itself enjoyable[1]. You know that people pay for cosmetic surgery to make it look like they ran on a treadmill when they didn't, because they want the outcome.
If you can't square those actions as eminently human things people might do, then you have a need to expand your mental model of other people.
We generally don't let the limited syntax of computer languages dictate our representation of human languages.
Humans can perfectly well understand: "Oh the chainsaws? He bought 2, 3 days ago" because we have context-aware parsing and realize that, in this sentence, the comma symbol makes more sense as a punctuation operator than a numerical divider.
Uh, what makes you think you need to keep infinite memory to support infinite scroll? Items that are in the direction of scroll are preloaded, objects that are beyond the view window in the other direction are purged. Pretty basic UI stuff, we've been doing this for years.
In my mind, it's one of the more useful UX improvements rather than the idiotic "next page" BS that came before it.
I mean, for most crimes it's a steeply ascending scale. First DUI, fine and 90 day suspension. Second DUI, 7 days in jail and a year suspension. Third DUI, 6 months prison, felony conviction, lifetime suspension.
I think we as a society recognize that one-time criminals can often be rehabilitated and that harsh sentences right off the bat are both unjust and perpetuate crime by making it nearly impossible for folks to reintegrate. That's why most sentencing scales upwards, not downwards, as the number of crimes increase.
Yours is a fine mathematical theory, but I just don't get the logic behind it:shrug:
Yes, I would consider the immaturity of the defendant as a mitigation in sentencing. Yes, I would consider that the ringleader (like Mr Carpenter) is more culpable than a kid "pushed into doing it". Yes, being a victim of crime doesn't make you more 'law and order' or trust the police.
So basically your position is that once you commit a crime, you should be able to commit additional instances of that crime for no additional penalty? It's like a buy-1-get-7 free deal! Rob one bank, get 15 years in jail. Rob another 3, that's fine it's still just 15 years in jail.
In that system, you would be stupid not to be a repeat offender!
Whoops, it was actually 8 separate instances, not just 6. So taking 15 years (your low estimate) times the 8 instances, gives 120 years, which is a hair above what he actually got.
In any case, 90 or 120 is pretty much the same sentence.
Ask anyone who has actually experienced it, and they will concur: having a gun put up to your face in anger is definitely an injury.
I also draw a distinction between a one-time armed robber and a repeated & premeditated one. I though I called that out as a major factor in leniency.
As far as repeat offenders go, you understand that by "discounting" later occurrences you are actually incentivizing a criminal who has already committed one count to keep committing them right?
I agree. 15-20 years for threatening people with a gun during a robbery, multiplied by at least 6 separate instances. Even at the low end of your range, that's 90 years.
I would like to reduce incarceration in the US, and I think there's plenty of scope to do that by treating drug addictions as a medical problem and by rehabilitating those not convicted of violent crimes.
On the record that's before us, this guy just isn't a candidate.
At his signal, the robbers entered the store, brandished their guns, herded customers and employees to the back, and ordered the employees to fill the robbersâ(TM) bags with new smartphones.
There's a world of difference between shoplifting or even smashing a window and stealing phones after closing and an armed robbery where you put a gun to the face of some poor clerk. In the former cases, I would probably be inclined to leniency and rehabilitation (at least for the first 8 offenses) because they are crimes that don't involve direct violence against another human being.
I would also be inclined to leniency if this was a one-time offense or something else indicating a particular lapse of judgment or other thing. Instead, the record shows this was a string of similar, premeditated robberies in which the perps carefully planned and prepared, divided up the tasks and made arrangements to destroy the evidence and sell the stolen goods.
I would also be inclined to leniency if the individual was a bit player who was recruited to the scheme by others. This is especially true of those with mental handicaps, who are often pressured or duped into the worst roles in a criminal scheme. They are also the ones most often turned-against by co-conspirators who will be willing to assign them the blame for the worst in exchange for a lenient plea. Instead, the record shows that Carpenter was the ringleader of the criminal enterprise.
So yeah, the leader of a criminal group that repeatedly and violently assaulted innocent people with a firearm in the course of robbing them? This is not the case that I would push for as far as leniency.
[ Of course, I can see the government losing their case because they illegally relied on cell site evidence without a warrant. But that's not the issue at sentencing. ]
The APA requires that agencies go through a process of fact-finding and notice-and-comment periods. It doesn't require that their reasoning is correct or that they follow the public sentiment or the democratic majority. It does require an explanation of the logic behind it, but the court is supposed see that an explanation based on facts is there, not evaluate it for logical or empirical soundness.
You might wish for a more searching review process, but remember that Trump is doing a pretty good job getting conservatives appointed to the Federal Bench, especially the appeals courts. Just imagine the same precedent applied by an unfriendly judge towards the agency actions of a future Democratic President -- an unfettered ability to analyze not just the process and whether the facts were gathered but for an unelected judge with a lifetime appointment to evaluate whether those policies are a good idea.
America elected the wrong President. We got the wrong FCC chairman. To suggest that somehow that doesn't mean that the wrong policies should be enacted is contrary to the norms of our country. To the extent that Trump is bulldozing those norms, the rest of us shouldn't be helping him do it.
As a business owner, I pay annual taxes on my desk, my stapler, my printer, etc.
I think you misspelled "take deductions equal to the cost of my desk, stapler and printer divided over the useful life (MACRS) as documented in IRS Publication 946. See explicitly the section about how "[O]ffice machinery (such as typewriters, calculators, and copiers)" which specifies a 5-year depreciation timeline".
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with your first sentence. If I were a judge, I might even rule that way.
But, our opinions aside, how is your second sentence different from the gold-fringers, sovereign citizens and other people that believe their interpretation of the Constitution or the law supersedes that of our organized government?
I really don't think you are wrong, but we can't operate as a society if we don't respect the outcome of the dispute resolution system even when disagree with the reasoning. That's why I draw the line between the first sentence (opinion about how the law ought to be interpreted) and the second sentence (statement that your opinion is dispositive about officials carrying out their oaths).
Also, LTE replacing private WiFi for sensitive corporate applications? In whose dreams?
Wait, it has LTE but will it not have WiFi?
I'd imagine that when both are available, WiFi is preferred over LTE.
They'd be likedly to find that it violated the law, given there's precedent and absolutely no risk associated with prosecution.
No, they wouldn't. Faced with the fact that a finding would lead to a firing, they would hem and haw and point the blame. They would blame the legislature for not making it clear and dither for a few months until everyone forgot.
Forcing people to pull the trigger almost never works in real organizations.
If there's literally no paper trail, then the head of the department that made the decision is the one that'll get fired. That gives him or her a pretty strong incentive not to do it.
Oh, I see. I thought you were talking about actual organizations that exist in the real world. Instead, it appears you be talking about a fantasy world in which any employee can get a political appointee fired.
Carry on. If you ever do decide to learn about organizations that exist over here, we've got some good reading for you.
They'd be likedly to find that it violated the law, given there's precedent and absolutely no risk associated with prosecution.
No, they wouldn't. Faced with the fact that a finding would lead to a firing, they would hem and haw and point the blame. They would blame the legislature for not making it clear and dither for a few months until everyone forgot.
Forcing people to pull the trigger almost never works in real organizations.
Oh, I see. I thought you were talking about actual organizations that exist in the real world. Instead, it appears you be talking about a fantasy world in which any employee can get a political appointee fired.
Carry on. If you ever do decide to learn about organizations that exist over here, we've got some good reading for you.
Even if the specific legislation exempts the government, it could be argued by analogy.
That's not how law works. When the legislature exempts or excludes application by explicit language, it means that the law cannot be argued to apply by implicit language. It's a form of the 'more specific rule' canon of interpretation.
Remember, the legislature isn't even obligated to pass an anti-SLAPP law. They could repeal the entire thing, so barring extraordinary circumstances, they can chose where and when to have it apply.
Let's suppose for a second that they fired someone over it, justifying it because the OR DOJ found that this employees action were unlawful. Let's suppose that it happened again, do you think the OR DOJ would be as likely to find that it violated the law? Or do you think they might feel some pressure to drag out the investigation, or not investigate at all saying they have higher priorities.
No one is against accountability. But at the same time, harsh penalties can counter-intuitively reduce accountability by either a "circle the wagons" mentality and/or desire not to investigate fully in order not to produce a paper trail.
Since we're talking about engineering[2], in most cases when there's a major screwup, the correct engineering response would be to adversarially red-team it and produce a full and complete accounting of the various problems in the process/execution and steps that could have been done better. When I've asked people why they don't do this, it's very clear: conducting an internal investigation is just begging for an opposing counsel to get it in discovery and use it against you. And it's pretty compelling too: "even $COMPANYs internal review found ways they could have done it better[1]".
Besides the paradoxical effect of reducing accountability, organizations lose an enormous venue for improvement. When done in good-faith[3] and without the desire to nail someone for a failure, there is a massive potential for gain here. Instead, by discouraging them, we deprive the organization of the best opportunity to avoid making the same mistake again.
So yeah, you can ask for the guy's head on a pike, but just be aware that the next guy will see that and be less inclined to frankly admit his overstep and correct himself and more inclined to fight it to the end. That fight is not as useful at setting things right as you might believe.
[1] It's a human endeavor. You can always find ways to do it better!
[2] I've heard anecdotally that this is also true in medicine: that even a semi-formal review of what went wrong is strongly discouraged for liability reasons. I can't fathom how much improvement in medicine this has stymied.
[3] Of course, sometimes they are just an exercise in corporate politics and blame-the-other-guy. Footnote [1] applies recursively: even the method for finding better ways to do things has better ways to do it.
Not every union contract has terms that benefit only one side.
Indeed. But my claim was that this benefits zero sides.
By specifying a maximum bonus, the airline doesn't end up in a bidding war with the pilots, with the pilots as a group staging a sick-out unless they get 10x their pay.
Sick outs are anyway an illegal labor activity. The APA was fined millions for it.
It's a way to limit liability, and even though it makes this tougher to deal with it's a good safety valve.
Indeed. And good safety valves always have an emergency bypass that can be used in rare events.
So the union wants to limit the ability of the pilots to make lots of extra money in order to increase the number of people they represent? Sheesh, that's cynical even by American labor standards.
I would agree that it will take more than a 50% increase. And that in normal circumstances, the company would rather hire another dude than routinely pay 200% or 300% bonus. But this is not a normal circumstance, this is a extraordinary fuck up and the obvious thing to do is to pay enough to solve it.
It seems mutually beneficial for the company to cough up large bonuses and the union to agree that this is exceptional situation.
"We have reserve pilots to help cover flying in December, and we are paying pilots who pick up certain open trips 150 percent of their hourly rate â" as much as we are allowed to pay them per the contract," he told the network
Hold on a second, the union contract specifies a maximum bonus to the hourly rate that the company can offer? How in the world could that clause benefit either the workers or the company?
It clearly sucks for the company, because now they've fucked up and should be responsible for paying out however much bonus they need to pay the pilots to entice them to pick up the extra flights.
It clearly sucks for the workers, because they forego the higher bonus that the company might have paid them. Many of them might have been perfectly willing to reschedule what the computer gave them at 200% or 250% pay.
Maximum suck would be if the rigidity of the contract prevented them from offering enough, forcing them to cancel flights. That would cost the airlines far more than offering mea-culpa bonus to the pilots and would completely ruin the travel plans of customers.
Interestingly enough, only 20% of the cost of your flight is salaries. Of that, pilots are probably 5-7% or so (there are many more ground and gate crew per flight than pilots). So even if they had to pay 300% bonuses to get enough pilots to voluntarily do those shifts, that would only be a 10% increase in net costs, bringing their margins for those particular flights from 2.5% to -7.5% (or, making $6 a passenger to losing $10 apiece or so). No matter how you slice it, it's much cheaper for the airline to offer pilot bonuses to compensate for their mistake.
In a post to its website, the union warned its members that because "management unilaterally created their solution in violation of the contract, neither APA nor the contract can guarantee the promised payment of the premium being offered."
First off, management asked pilots to volunteer to do those flights in exchange for money. That seems reasonable enough (except of course for the cap on the percentage). Second, I can't imagine that management would promise a premium and then not pay it. That would be an open-and-shut violation of labor law.
If they really wanted to help, the APA would be organizing the pilots to see how much they would have to be paid to give up the vacation they were promised and then present that to the airline in a package-deal format. Something like "I have 1500 pilots willing to take shifts fro 150% bonus, 2500 for 250% bonus, ..."
hard to make a legal argument that what google did was against the consent of the user
That depends on your mental model for what the default is. Lots of us prefer the model that you ought to get positive informed consent before collected personally-identifiable data, and can only use an 'opt-out' system if the data are aggregated (for instance, by adding +1 to a counter somewhere every time a person views an article, that's obviously not 'personally-identifiable', it's just incrementing an integer).
The user has no way at all to signal that they don't want third party cookies, if that is the default setting,
I mean, let's be realistic: you've go a few options
Obviously the first and last are in jest, just to illustrate than any OS/application provider has to make default choices.
The >300 mile range of the Model 3 requires 5 hours of driving to deplete
I don't think 60MPH is a reasonable estimate for an average road trip speed. Most of the rural interstates in the US are 75 or 80MPH limit, so you'll see cars in the 80-90MPH range.
I am not sure of a situation where you give personal information to someone, and they make it public after making no guarantees to you that they would keep such information secret. Are you foolish for giving the information without such guarantees, or should you expect that because the information is personal, you should automatically assume it should be kept secret? Why should you have such an expectation?
Well, Congress actually stepped in and enacted more (but not maximal) protection than required by passing the Stored Communication Act. In relevant part (Â 2702(a) for the law nerds following along) makes an ISP civilly liable if they voluntarily disclose your content except with your lawful consent. That is, the default in the "make no guarantees" is that the ISP cannot disclose anything.
So appreciate the bizarro-fact that Congress passed a law creating protection that the Constitution doesn't require and appreciate the new default :-)
You know that people pay money to a gym to literally run on a actual treadmill right, because they find the act itself enjoyable[1].
You know that people pay for cosmetic surgery to make it look like they ran on a treadmill when they didn't, because they want the outcome.
If you can't square those actions as eminently human things people might do, then you have a need to expand your mental model of other people.
[1] Possibly for biological reasons.
We generally don't let the limited syntax of computer languages dictate our representation of human languages.
Humans can perfectly well understand: "Oh the chainsaws? He bought 2, 3 days ago" because we have context-aware parsing and realize that, in this sentence, the comma symbol makes more sense as a punctuation operator than a numerical divider.
Uh, what makes you think you need to keep infinite memory to support infinite scroll? Items that are in the direction of scroll are preloaded, objects that are beyond the view window in the other direction are purged. Pretty basic UI stuff, we've been doing this for years.
In my mind, it's one of the more useful UX improvements rather than the idiotic "next page" BS that came before it.
I mean, for most crimes it's a steeply ascending scale. First DUI, fine and 90 day suspension. Second DUI, 7 days in jail and a year suspension. Third DUI, 6 months prison, felony conviction, lifetime suspension.
I think we as a society recognize that one-time criminals can often be rehabilitated and that harsh sentences right off the bat are both unjust and perpetuate crime by making it nearly impossible for folks to reintegrate. That's why most sentencing scales upwards, not downwards, as the number of crimes increase.
Yours is a fine mathematical theory, but I just don't get the logic behind it :shrug:
Yes, I would consider the immaturity of the defendant as a mitigation in sentencing.
Yes, I would consider that the ringleader (like Mr Carpenter) is more culpable than a kid "pushed into doing it".
Yes, being a victim of crime doesn't make you more 'law and order' or trust the police.
I think we agree more than we disagree here.
So basically your position is that once you commit a crime, you should be able to commit additional instances of that crime for no additional penalty? It's like a buy-1-get-7 free deal! Rob one bank, get 15 years in jail. Rob another 3, that's fine it's still just 15 years in jail.
In that system, you would be stupid not to be a repeat offender!
Whoops, it was actually 8 separate instances, not just 6. So taking 15 years (your low estimate) times the 8 instances, gives 120 years, which is a hair above what he actually got.
In any case, 90 or 120 is pretty much the same sentence.
Ask anyone who has actually experienced it, and they will concur: having a gun put up to your face in anger is definitely an injury.
I also draw a distinction between a one-time armed robber and a repeated & premeditated one. I though I called that out as a major factor in leniency.
As far as repeat offenders go, you understand that by "discounting" later occurrences you are actually incentivizing a criminal who has already committed one count to keep committing them right?
I agree. 15-20 years for threatening people with a gun during a robbery, multiplied by at least 6 separate instances. Even at the low end of your range, that's 90 years.
I would like to reduce incarceration in the US, and I think there's plenty of scope to do that by treating drug addictions as a medical problem and by rehabilitating those not convicted of violent crimes.
On the record that's before us, this guy just isn't a candidate.
According to the decision it wasn't just robbery:
At his signal, the robbers entered the store, brandished their guns, herded customers and employees to the back, and ordered the employees to fill the robbersâ(TM) bags with new smartphones.
There's a world of difference between shoplifting or even smashing a window and stealing phones after closing and an armed robbery where you put a gun to the face of some poor clerk. In the former cases, I would probably be inclined to leniency and rehabilitation (at least for the first 8 offenses) because they are crimes that don't involve direct violence against another human being.
I would also be inclined to leniency if this was a one-time offense or something else indicating a particular lapse of judgment or other thing. Instead, the record shows this was a string of similar, premeditated robberies in which the perps carefully planned and prepared, divided up the tasks and made arrangements to destroy the evidence and sell the stolen goods.
I would also be inclined to leniency if the individual was a bit player who was recruited to the scheme by others. This is especially true of those with mental handicaps, who are often pressured or duped into the worst roles in a criminal scheme. They are also the ones most often turned-against by co-conspirators who will be willing to assign them the blame for the worst in exchange for a lenient plea. Instead, the record shows that Carpenter was the ringleader of the criminal enterprise.
So yeah, the leader of a criminal group that repeatedly and violently assaulted innocent people with a firearm in the course of robbing them? This is not the case that I would push for as far as leniency.
[ Of course, I can see the government losing their case because they illegally relied on cell site evidence without a warrant. But that's not the issue at sentencing. ]
The mandate applies to the elected officials and their appointees, not to their individual policies.
For better or worse, we elect officers to exercise their judgment. In this case, it's pretty clearly for the worse.
The APA requires that agencies go through a process of fact-finding and notice-and-comment periods. It doesn't require that their reasoning is correct or that they follow the public sentiment or the democratic majority. It does require an explanation of the logic behind it, but the court is supposed see that an explanation based on facts is there, not evaluate it for logical or empirical soundness.
You might wish for a more searching review process, but remember that Trump is doing a pretty good job getting conservatives appointed to the Federal Bench, especially the appeals courts. Just imagine the same precedent applied by an unfriendly judge towards the agency actions of a future Democratic President -- an unfettered ability to analyze not just the process and whether the facts were gathered but for an unelected judge with a lifetime appointment to evaluate whether those policies are a good idea.
America elected the wrong President. We got the wrong FCC chairman. To suggest that somehow that doesn't mean that the wrong policies should be enacted is contrary to the norms of our country. To the extent that Trump is bulldozing those norms, the rest of us shouldn't be helping him do it.
As a business owner, I pay annual taxes on my desk, my stapler, my printer, etc.
I think you misspelled "take deductions equal to the cost of my desk, stapler and printer divided over the useful life (MACRS) as documented in IRS Publication 946. See explicitly the section about how "[O]ffice machinery (such as typewriters, calculators, and copiers)" which specifies a 5-year depreciation timeline".
Either that or your accountant is not very good.