Business property taxes cover the same kinds of real property (real estate and buildings) that personal property taxes do.
The other items you listed not only are not subject to business property taxes but actually can be written off taxes as either expenses (pencils, paper) or depreciation (PCs are actually listed, same here at the IRS).
You're mistaking the copyright term (which Congress, in a monumentally bad idea, had repeatedly extended) and patent term, which has been been pretty stable in the 15-21 year range (it's 20 now).
There is no general blanket tax on property in the US. A very limited form of property (real estate, and in very few States cars) are subject to tax, but that absolutely doesn't apply to any asset that has value. Think about it, do you have to declare your Playstation or 3D printer as property and pay the IRS every year?
So they are not "surely been paying property taxes" and you won't find it on their tax returns because no part of the tax code actually says anything they have to pay anything remotely like this.
[ FWIW, I'm not even unsympathetic to the idea that we should change the law to have such a tax, depending on lots of details. But to say "how dare they pay a tax that doesn't exist" is placing things complete backwards. ]
The issue with a big.LITTLE design for AMD is that it consumes much more die space. GF is already behind Intel on process and so can't afford the expense.
FWIW, Optimus (and the AMD equivalent) have both been working flawlessly for me for some time. I don't see any reduction on battery life on unless I accidentally leave something GPU intensive open.
1) People who don't care about GPU performance but do care about battery life, price, power consumption etc 2) People who do care about GPU performance.
3) People who care about both, at different times, and benefit from the OS dynamically switching between a low-power (usually Intel) IGP and a discrete (NV/AMD) GPU based on the current power source and GPU load. This has been the standard setup for professional-grade laptops for many years.
In order to satisfy those people with a single IGP, AMD has to build a GPU that's competitive in both domains. That's a challenge, to say the least.
If it was simply "buy this skin" no RNG involved, people would not be having a shit fit.
Personally (and this is just my opinion, YMMV), loot boxes for skins and other purely cosmetic items wouldn't bother me either. The justified shit-fit isn't about loot boxes, it's about how the items have actual gameplay value.
The concept of value is key in my mind, since that's what drives the physiological reward aspect of gambling.
I don't believe (correct me if I'm wrong), that anyone is against the right to unionize given the choice of a majority of the workers in a fair and secret ballot.
As I understand, the disagreement points are over: "right to work" - whether a collective bargaining agreement can forbid management from employing non-union workers, "agency dues" -- whether unions can take partial dues from non-members in exchange for representation and certain public sector union benefits that seem to me contrary to public policy -- for instance rubber-rooming.
Or, as an example from Chicago, the police's CBA actually forbids the department from interviewing officers suspected of misconduct until they are informed of the complainant's names, requires investigators to wait 24H after the incident, and forbids any requirement that multiple witnesses be kept separate before questioning. If ever there was a rule more tailored to promote collusion and prevent effective investigation, I can't imagine one.
Yes, but again -- this data collection is something that Google tells you about upfront. That's very different than doing it behind your back.
I mean, you're begging the question if you think that there is even individual data collection happening here because it's not clear that the location data is being linked to individuals as opposed to collected in-bulk.
As for the rest, seems reasonable enough for the tech savvy. For the rest of folks that don't have technical means to jump through those hoops, I think strong privacy policies are a better option, but YMMV.
Not a leap at all, let alone a giant one. Google is collecting the information required to pinpoint individuals. Whether or not they are actually doing so is something that we cannot know, as you point out. All we have is Google's word for this sort of thing.
It is not possible for Google to operate without the opportunity to collect the information required to pinpoint individuals. But I do believe that they operate within their stated privacy and data use policies.
Just for a trivial example, Google could record the IP address along with the exact destination every time someone uses Google Maps for navigation (since that information must be sent to the server to compute the route). It's unavoidable, and the only alternative is either not to use the service or trust that their official policies are being followed.
So, rather than being a leap, the reasonable assumption is that they are, indeed pinpointing people. Otherwise, why would they be collecting the data?
I could think of a dozen legitimate reasons to collect cell tower data and many implementations that would satisfy those legitimate reasons and pass even the most strict privacy review. Just a trivial example: if the persisted data was "number of unique devices per day per cell tower with no individual data" that would be useful marketing/demographic data just by itself.
And if the past few years have taught us anything about Google, it's that their word cannot be trusted.
If you really believe that then you must believe there is no hope for anything on Android at all. I can't stress this enough -- if you don't trust the OS author, they could have hidden any number of back doors in it. They could record your passcode. They could take video of you masturbating.
To be clear, I'm not saying how much you should trust them. I'm just asserting that having an Android phone is giving them a baseline level of trust.
Yes, I read the JSON dump. it is a leap. Because two important things are missing in the chain of reasoning:
How the token is generated and whether it is permanently associated to a real individual identifier or if it is randomly generated at each boot or even for each session. If it's the latter, it's not individual location data because it's not tied to an individual. Of course, for this to be the case, the back end would also have to refrain from associating the request to (for instance) an IP address.
What data are actually persisted on the back-end and whether that data can be tied to an individual or are just kept in bulk. In the extreme on one end, it's kept forever exactly intact and associated to your Google account (evil). In the other extreme, the persisted data consists only of counts for each tower and no individual data at all (not evil).
Like I said, Google needs to make a clear statement. The rest is just speculation.
Honestly, the guy is a nut, but good for him. If he wants to prove it himself, he's bought into the cruz of science even if he's totally loony.
Science has nothing to hide, and certainly nothing to gain from giving this guy a persecution complex by forbidding him from doing as he pleases*. Can you imagine "I built this rocket and the Forces That Beâ forbade me from launching it because they knew it would expose their secrets"?
* If he's really doing it over uninhabited land. Obviously we should completely stop him (or help correct him) if he does this in a way that can hurt others.
Housing is so expensive because we've allowed uncontrolled access to credit, and allowed it to people who never should have had it. That started a megaflation of housing prices.
I respectfully think this gets cause and effect backwards. People don't just sign up for loans totaling 5x their yearly income* without a good reason. They do so because housing costs are expensive and that's the only way to get in on the increase in prices and the perks of homeownership (including the MID).
That is to say, credit was created and extended to account for expensive house prices. And since houses were always projected to be valuable, creditors didn't have to charge a lot because the loans were secured by a good asset. So I see the high prices as the fundamental cause of both the increase in credit (that people reluctantly signed up for) and the cheap price (since the cost to the creditor of default is lowered by continued projection of value).
And I see the fundamental cause of high prices as being the insane restrictions of where and how you can build. Cities like allowed construction to happen where and how people wanted saw much lower increases in prices.
[ Although, I can see that this is a vicious self-reinforcing cycle. Owners buy in and want their houses to appreciate, so they logically vote for restrictions out of self-interest. This causes houses to get more expensive, so the next set of owners also votes that way. To loosen restrictions then would be to be left holding the bag after everyone else cashed in. ]
[[ Actually, the latter is kind of a counterpoint to the intelligence thing. If the folks inside a community (instead of, say, at the State level) vote on restrictions, they should vote the most restrictive policy they can, since it limits the supply and hence raises the price of their assets. ]]
* If you spend 1/3rd of your income on mortgage, and 1/2 of a mortgage is interest, then 5x your yearly income ends up being 10x total paid to mortgage, or 1/3rd over 30 years.
Since the beginning of 2017, Android phones have been collecting the addresses of nearby cellular towers -- even when location services are disabled -- and sending that data back to Google. The result is that Google, the unit of Alphabet behind Android, has access to data about individuals' locations and their movements that go far beyond a reasonable consumer expectation of privacy. [emphasis added]
This seems to be a giant leap between collecting cell tower data and knowing where individuals are that is totally dependent on their implementation. Just to be concrete/pedantic, let's suppose that message sent by each phone was "Here's a list of cell towers I can see: {... }" and that the server processed this by incrementing a counter for tower in the list and nothing more. I think most of us would conclude that in that case Google has no information about any individual's location.
To be clear, I'm not asserting this is their implementation because I don't know. Maybe they are collecting the cell towers along with phone serial numbers, google account information and penis size into a giant location/dong database, in which case the summary might be accurate. But the author doesn't know that, or at least doesn't cite her sources. The best course of action would be for Google to publicly state which data are sent and how that data are persisted on the back end. Then we might be judging whether they were doing evil on actual facts rather than speculation.
Finally, a plea for sanity: telemetry is often implemented in awful, privacy-destroying ways. It is also often thoughtfully implemented in ways that preserve individual privacy. Take, for instance, a mobile web browser: there is world of difference between: "Version X.Y.Z, Serial XXYYZZ, at midgetclownporn.co.uk/vid/xdfj23, callstack follows" and another sending reports like "Version X.Y.Z, crashed twice at JS module, once in bookmarks module".
If you are unable or unwilling to see the difference, then you're not likely to be an effective advocate for privacy.
For what it's worth (and I'm sort of a moderate rather than one of these libertarian assholes, more like I see that sometimes they have a partial point to make, kind of like everyone else), the crux of the problem is that the cost of housing and healthcare are skyrocketing. So we are arguing about how we should pay for it instead of trying to figure out why it's so damned expensive.
This is a libertarian insight that the rest of the political spectrum (me, I'm a moderate rather than a libertarian asshole, but they do occasionally have some partial insight, so you ought to at least read what they have to say and dismiss maybe 80% of it that's nonsense and assimilate the 20% nugget of truth out of the turd) could learn: costs increase the fastest in sectors that are the most regulated. And housing costs literally skyrocket in the Bay Area -- the most NIMBYed of them all.
What's more, most of this regulation benefits the already-very-wealthy in the form of real estate appreciation -- and that drives inequality. So not only do housing costs rise faster than people can pay for them, but the benefits go to those that least need them, exacerbating wealth inequality.
Like I said above, I think 80% of libertarianism is overblown. But don't mistake their general prickishness for not having anything valid to add to the discourse.
If they are going to tax the tuition waiver, set graduate tuition at $1 and let the student pay $0.20 or whatever to the IRS.
Universities don't want to do this, of course, because it's a way of siphoning money from research grants into the general fund. Which is kind of hilarious (at least it was to me when I was a grad student) because the university already takes 'overhead' that is meant to cover mundane things infrastructure, grounds, offices, keeping the lights on. And it's not a small take, most overhead is calculated at 50% or so of the grant (that is, if the grant is $100K to do research, the NIH will kick in another $50K to the university, 1/3rd being overhead).
So even after taking overhead, the university then wants to take the grant money and use it to pay itself a tuition waiver.
A few notes before someone actually believes I'm a right wing troll: I think we should be increasing funding on research, I think we should better support grad students. Universities do provide a needed structure for all this, but are woefully inefficient and mismanaged, which in the end means less money for actual research and teaching. To be against this is not to be against the university, it's to be for the university's ultimate mission.
Or sold into slavery. Or impressed into the army or navy. Or prostituted. For most of history, the majority of humans existing in some form of slavery/serfdom in which they had zero agency whatsoever.
It just annoys me that our current discourse is so fragile that we feel the need to whitewash the past. And I think it contributes to a lot of errors in our thinking because we lost the perspective of where we came from and how things were. We think that things are going downhill in our country (here in the US) even though 100 years ago we still had Jim Crow and 200 years ago we still had slavery. Europeans are pessimistic, even though 200 years ago they were still fighting wars over whether Protestants would be allows to practice in Catholic countries and vice versa.
We have it so goddamned good (obviously the present is not perfect, the US still has racism, Europe still has divisions, that's a straw man argument) that we became soft and then our softness made us unable to comprehend the horrors of history which, in turn, made us unable to understand how good we have it. It's pervasive.
OK fair enough. And I have no dispute that, while the asylums were awful, de-institutionalization was also (a different kind of) awful.
What I will continue stand by, however, is that pointing to very recent developments (~50 years, out of 3000 years of human history) and referring to it as "the past" is incredibly selective.
while in the past it was primarily the responsibility of friends and family to take action if there was a concern [about mental illness]
For the vast majority of people in the past, if you were crazy you lived as a vagrant or a beggar and died in pretty short order afterwards. Nobody gave a shit about your life even if you wanted to stay alive, let alone if you wanted to off yourself. If you came from a moderately wealthy family, you might get to live in a horrific asylum (and that was in the 19th century, not even talking about medieval times, which holy crap they'd probably assume you were possessed by a demon and flay you to save your soul) instead of dying of pneumonia on the streets.
I don't know what sugar coated history books they taught you, but the past is fucking bleak and miserable.
The First Amendment protects you and me from the government. It does not protect you and me from each other. If you say something about me I don't like, I can sue you. Of course, whether I win is another matter.
You should read the Supreme Court's opinion in Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc.. In summary, it says that to comply with the 1A, States cannot impose strict liability on libel/defamation lawsuits.
In fact, the very first sentence of the opinion is about the interaction between the 1A and defamation.
This Court has struggled for nearly a decade to define the proper accommodation between the law of defamation and the freedoms of speech and press protected by the First Amendment. With this decision we return to that effort.
TLDR of the opinion: States can have libel laws, but to comply with the 1A, they have to structured so the plaintiff proves at least negligence in addition to the falsehood. The Court decided in other places that there is an even higher standard for speech about a "public figure", but Gertz is the lower bar for suits by private individuals.
That is the standard only for libel of a "public figure" or on a matter of public importance like a political issue. The justification (whether legit or not, although I confess it makes sense to me) is that there is a heightened interest in discourse about public officials rather than you local dentist. There is also the notion that public official have voluntarily placed themselves in the discourse, whereas private individuals minding their own private business have not.
For regular-ole-dentist-libel, you only need to prove that the statement is false and that the person was negligent. You do not need to prove that the alleged libeler knew the statement was false, nor do you need to prove "actual malice".
I've used it for years and never even heard of this.
But it was literally one Google search to figure out how to disable it. Total time: 2 minutes from figuring how what to search for, changing the setting and then restarting Chrome.
Probably less time than I spent writing this post and checking that the link is correct.
Slashdot Mirror
Business property taxes cover the same kinds of real property (real estate and buildings) that personal property taxes do.
The other items you listed not only are not subject to business property taxes but actually can be written off taxes as either expenses (pencils, paper) or depreciation (PCs are actually listed, same here at the IRS).
You're mistaking the copyright term (which Congress, in a monumentally bad idea, had repeatedly extended) and patent term, which has been been pretty stable in the 15-21 year range (it's 20 now).
I can't believe this was modded up.
There is no general blanket tax on property in the US. A very limited form of property (real estate, and in very few States cars) are subject to tax, but that absolutely doesn't apply to any asset that has value. Think about it, do you have to declare your Playstation or 3D printer as property and pay the IRS every year?
So they are not "surely been paying property taxes" and you won't find it on their tax returns because no part of the tax code actually says anything they have to pay anything remotely like this.
[ FWIW, I'm not even unsympathetic to the idea that we should change the law to have such a tax, depending on lots of details. But to say "how dare they pay a tax that doesn't exist" is placing things complete backwards. ]
Yeah, even Linux has moved on :-)
The issue with a big.LITTLE design for AMD is that it consumes much more die space. GF is already behind Intel on process and so can't afford the expense.
FWIW, Optimus (and the AMD equivalent) have both been working flawlessly for me for some time. I don't see any reduction on battery life on unless I accidentally leave something GPU intensive open.
1) People who don't care about GPU performance but do care about battery life, price, power consumption etc
2) People who do care about GPU performance.
3) People who care about both, at different times, and benefit from the OS dynamically switching between a low-power (usually Intel) IGP and a discrete (NV/AMD) GPU based on the current power source and GPU load. This has been the standard setup for professional-grade laptops for many years.
In order to satisfy those people with a single IGP, AMD has to build a GPU that's competitive in both domains. That's a challenge, to say the least.
If it was simply "buy this skin" no RNG involved, people would not be having a shit fit.
Personally (and this is just my opinion, YMMV), loot boxes for skins and other purely cosmetic items wouldn't bother me either. The justified shit-fit isn't about loot boxes, it's about how the items have actual gameplay value.
The concept of value is key in my mind, since that's what drives the physiological reward aspect of gambling.
I am, however, in favor of the right to unionize.
I don't believe (correct me if I'm wrong), that anyone is against the right to unionize given the choice of a majority of the workers in a fair and secret ballot.
As I understand, the disagreement points are over: "right to work" - whether a collective bargaining agreement can forbid management from employing non-union workers, "agency dues" -- whether unions can take partial dues from non-members in exchange for representation and certain public sector union benefits that seem to me contrary to public policy -- for instance rubber-rooming.
Or, as an example from Chicago, the police's CBA actually forbids the department from interviewing officers suspected of misconduct until they are informed of the complainant's names, requires investigators to wait 24H after the incident, and forbids any requirement that multiple witnesses be kept separate before questioning. If ever there was a rule more tailored to promote collusion and prevent effective investigation, I can't imagine one.
Yes, but again -- this data collection is something that Google tells you about upfront. That's very different than doing it behind your back.
I mean, you're begging the question if you think that there is even individual data collection happening here because it's not clear that the location data is being linked to individuals as opposed to collected in-bulk.
As for the rest, seems reasonable enough for the tech savvy. For the rest of folks that don't have technical means to jump through those hoops, I think strong privacy policies are a better option, but YMMV.
It's clear that data is being collected.
It's not clear that individual data is being collected. If it is, it needs to stop.
Try to grok the difference.
Not a leap at all, let alone a giant one. Google is collecting the information required to pinpoint individuals. Whether or not they are actually doing so is something that we cannot know, as you point out. All we have is Google's word for this sort of thing.
It is not possible for Google to operate without the opportunity to collect the information required to pinpoint individuals. But I do believe that they operate within their stated privacy and data use policies.
Just for a trivial example, Google could record the IP address along with the exact destination every time someone uses Google Maps for navigation (since that information must be sent to the server to compute the route). It's unavoidable, and the only alternative is either not to use the service or trust that their official policies are being followed.
So, rather than being a leap, the reasonable assumption is that they are, indeed pinpointing people. Otherwise, why would they be collecting the data?
I could think of a dozen legitimate reasons to collect cell tower data and many implementations that would satisfy those legitimate reasons and pass even the most strict privacy review. Just a trivial example: if the persisted data was "number of unique devices per day per cell tower with no individual data" that would be useful marketing/demographic data just by itself.
And if the past few years have taught us anything about Google, it's that their word cannot be trusted.
If you really believe that then you must believe there is no hope for anything on Android at all. I can't stress this enough -- if you don't trust the OS author, they could have hidden any number of back doors in it. They could record your passcode. They could take video of you masturbating.
To be clear, I'm not saying how much you should trust them. I'm just asserting that having an Android phone is giving them a baseline level of trust.
I mean, if by "this activity" you mean any collection or persistence of data linked to an individual, then sure.
But as noted in detail, it's not clear if they are even doing that right now.
Thanks for recycling the a joke from South Park.
Yes, I read the JSON dump. it is a leap. Because two important things are missing in the chain of reasoning:
Like I said, Google needs to make a clear statement. The rest is just speculation.
Honestly, the guy is a nut, but good for him. If he wants to prove it himself, he's bought into the cruz of science even if he's totally loony.
Science has nothing to hide, and certainly nothing to gain from giving this guy a persecution complex by forbidding him from doing as he pleases*. Can you imagine "I built this rocket and the Forces That Beâ forbade me from launching it because they knew it would expose their secrets"?
* If he's really doing it over uninhabited land. Obviously we should completely stop him (or help correct him) if he does this in a way that can hurt others.
Housing is so expensive because we've allowed uncontrolled access to credit, and allowed it to people who never should have had it. That started a megaflation of housing prices.
I respectfully think this gets cause and effect backwards. People don't just sign up for loans totaling 5x their yearly income* without a good reason. They do so because housing costs are expensive and that's the only way to get in on the increase in prices and the perks of homeownership (including the MID).
That is to say, credit was created and extended to account for expensive house prices. And since houses were always projected to be valuable, creditors didn't have to charge a lot because the loans were secured by a good asset. So I see the high prices as the fundamental cause of both the increase in credit (that people reluctantly signed up for) and the cheap price (since the cost to the creditor of default is lowered by continued projection of value).
And I see the fundamental cause of high prices as being the insane restrictions of where and how you can build. Cities like allowed construction to happen where and how people wanted saw much lower increases in prices.
[ Although, I can see that this is a vicious self-reinforcing cycle. Owners buy in and want their houses to appreciate, so they logically vote for restrictions out of self-interest. This causes houses to get more expensive, so the next set of owners also votes that way. To loosen restrictions then would be to be left holding the bag after everyone else cashed in. ]
[[ Actually, the latter is kind of a counterpoint to the intelligence thing. If the folks inside a community (instead of, say, at the State level) vote on restrictions, they should vote the most restrictive policy they can, since it limits the supply and hence raises the price of their assets. ]]
* If you spend 1/3rd of your income on mortgage, and 1/2 of a mortgage is interest, then 5x your yearly income ends up being 10x total paid to mortgage, or 1/3rd over 30 years.
Since the beginning of 2017, Android phones have been collecting the addresses of nearby cellular towers -- even when location services are disabled -- and sending that data back to Google. The result is that Google, the unit of Alphabet behind Android, has access to data about individuals' locations and their movements that go far beyond a reasonable consumer expectation of privacy. [emphasis added]
This seems to be a giant leap between collecting cell tower data and knowing where individuals are that is totally dependent on their implementation. Just to be concrete/pedantic, let's suppose that message sent by each phone was "Here's a list of cell towers I can see: { ... }" and that the server processed this by incrementing a counter for tower in the list and nothing more. I think most of us would conclude that in that case Google has no information about any individual's location.
To be clear, I'm not asserting this is their implementation because I don't know. Maybe they are collecting the cell towers along with phone serial numbers, google account information and penis size into a giant location/dong database, in which case the summary might be accurate. But the author doesn't know that, or at least doesn't cite her sources. The best course of action would be for Google to publicly state which data are sent and how that data are persisted on the back end. Then we might be judging whether they were doing evil on actual facts rather than speculation.
Finally, a plea for sanity: telemetry is often implemented in awful, privacy-destroying ways. It is also often thoughtfully implemented in ways that preserve individual privacy. Take, for instance, a mobile web browser: there is world of difference between: "Version X.Y.Z, Serial XXYYZZ, at midgetclownporn.co.uk/vid/xdfj23, callstack follows" and another sending reports like "Version X.Y.Z, crashed twice at JS module, once in bookmarks module".
If you are unable or unwilling to see the difference, then you're not likely to be an effective advocate for privacy.
For what it's worth (and I'm sort of a moderate rather than one of these libertarian assholes, more like I see that sometimes they have a partial point to make, kind of like everyone else), the crux of the problem is that the cost of housing and healthcare are skyrocketing. So we are arguing about how we should pay for it instead of trying to figure out why it's so damned expensive.
This is a libertarian insight that the rest of the political spectrum (me, I'm a moderate rather than a libertarian asshole, but they do occasionally have some partial insight, so you ought to at least read what they have to say and dismiss maybe 80% of it that's nonsense and assimilate the 20% nugget of truth out of the turd) could learn: costs increase the fastest in sectors that are the most regulated. And housing costs literally skyrocket in the Bay Area -- the most NIMBYed of them all.
What's more, most of this regulation benefits the already-very-wealthy in the form of real estate appreciation -- and that drives inequality. So not only do housing costs rise faster than people can pay for them, but the benefits go to those that least need them, exacerbating wealth inequality.
Like I said above, I think 80% of libertarianism is overblown. But don't mistake their general prickishness for not having anything valid to add to the discourse.
Charge graduate student tuition per enrolled class . . .
If they are going to tax the tuition waiver, set graduate tuition at $1 and let the student pay $0.20 or whatever to the IRS.
Universities don't want to do this, of course, because it's a way of siphoning money from research grants into the general fund. Which is kind of hilarious (at least it was to me when I was a grad student) because the university already takes 'overhead' that is meant to cover mundane things infrastructure, grounds, offices, keeping the lights on. And it's not a small take, most overhead is calculated at 50% or so of the grant (that is, if the grant is $100K to do research, the NIH will kick in another $50K to the university, 1/3rd being overhead).
So even after taking overhead, the university then wants to take the grant money and use it to pay itself a tuition waiver.
A few notes before someone actually believes I'm a right wing troll: I think we should be increasing funding on research, I think we should better support grad students. Universities do provide a needed structure for all this, but are woefully inefficient and mismanaged, which in the end means less money for actual research and teaching. To be against this is not to be against the university, it's to be for the university's ultimate mission.
Or sold into slavery. Or impressed into the army or navy. Or prostituted. For most of history, the majority of humans existing in some form of slavery/serfdom in which they had zero agency whatsoever.
It just annoys me that our current discourse is so fragile that we feel the need to whitewash the past. And I think it contributes to a lot of errors in our thinking because we lost the perspective of where we came from and how things were. We think that things are going downhill in our country (here in the US) even though 100 years ago we still had Jim Crow and 200 years ago we still had slavery. Europeans are pessimistic, even though 200 years ago they were still fighting wars over whether Protestants would be allows to practice in Catholic countries and vice versa.
We have it so goddamned good (obviously the present is not perfect, the US still has racism, Europe still has divisions, that's a straw man argument) that we became soft and then our softness made us unable to comprehend the horrors of history which, in turn, made us unable to understand how good we have it. It's pervasive.
OK fair enough. And I have no dispute that, while the asylums were awful, de-institutionalization was also (a different kind of) awful.
What I will continue stand by, however, is that pointing to very recent developments (~50 years, out of 3000 years of human history) and referring to it as "the past" is incredibly selective.
while in the past it was primarily the responsibility of friends and family to take action if there was a concern [about mental illness]
For the vast majority of people in the past, if you were crazy you lived as a vagrant or a beggar and died in pretty short order afterwards. Nobody gave a shit about your life even if you wanted to stay alive, let alone if you wanted to off yourself. If you came from a moderately wealthy family, you might get to live in a horrific asylum (and that was in the 19th century, not even talking about medieval times, which holy crap they'd probably assume you were possessed by a demon and flay you to save your soul) instead of dying of pneumonia on the streets.
I don't know what sugar coated history books they taught you, but the past is fucking bleak and miserable.
The First Amendment protects you and me from the government. It does not protect you and me from each other. If you say something about me I don't like, I can sue you. Of course, whether I win is another matter.
You should read the Supreme Court's opinion in Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc.. In summary, it says that to comply with the 1A, States cannot impose strict liability on libel/defamation lawsuits.
In fact, the very first sentence of the opinion is about the interaction between the 1A and defamation.
This Court has struggled for nearly a decade to define the proper accommodation between the law of defamation and the freedoms of speech and press protected by the First Amendment. With this decision we return to that effort.
TLDR of the opinion: States can have libel laws, but to comply with the 1A, they have to structured so the plaintiff proves at least negligence in addition to the falsehood. The Court decided in other places that there is an even higher standard for speech about a "public figure", but Gertz is the lower bar for suits by private individuals.
That is the standard only for libel of a "public figure" or on a matter of public importance like a political issue. The justification (whether legit or not, although I confess it makes sense to me) is that there is a heightened interest in discourse about public officials rather than you local dentist. There is also the notion that public official have voluntarily placed themselves in the discourse, whereas private individuals minding their own private business have not.
For regular-ole-dentist-libel, you only need to prove that the statement is false and that the person was negligent. You do not need to prove that the alleged libeler knew the statement was false, nor do you need to prove "actual malice".
I've used it for years and never even heard of this.
But it was literally one Google search to figure out how to disable it. Total time: 2 minutes from figuring how what to search for, changing the setting and then restarting Chrome.
Probably less time than I spent writing this post and checking that the link is correct.