And the answer is: "The Congress shall have Power... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;"
Although that also means that Congress has the power not to do that...
Hey. It was an auction. You bid, you won, you got what was advertised. No givebacks.
Which makes me wonder if the big, opaque hedge funds are running a storefront website hocking the names of every politician in office or likely to run for office in the next election...
Fact: The definition of assault includes touching someone with intent to injure them or placing them in reasonable belief that you will do so. Fact: Your threat prior to committing the assault indicated that your assault was an attempt to kill. Fact: You did commit assault, by hitting me with a chair after telling me that you intended to harm me, you just don't know if it was justified. Fact: If it's not justified, assault and assault with intent to kill are illegal. Fact: You gave no justification in line with the definition in the law of the justification for assault when presenting the facts in your defense, so per the facts there is no justification that can be applied.
Opinion of the court: You are guilty of the crime of assault with intent to kill.
The opinion of the court is a fact based on other facts. It's called an "opinion" because it applies the law to the particular case. That's what "opinion" really means: it's a judgment of a particular instance. If it were a judgment on a class of instances it would be an "attitude". If it were a judgment on all instances based on societal norms it would be a "more" ("mo-ray"). Most people think that opinion is a judgment on an abstraction, but they're incorrectly expanding from opinions on the facts of abstractions to all opinions when they do that, and further mistaking their attitude about the abstraction as an opinion about it.
In a positivist framework, which is held by almost every modern, there is no factual or qualitative difference between the operation of law keepers and the operation of criminals.
Every modern what? Every modern idiot?
There's a difference between the lawkeepers and the lawbreakers, and that's justification. The lawkeepers also try to uphold their responsibility not to make things worse, while the lawbreakers don't give a flying fuck. When a lawkeeper does something bad, it's a big deal to us all, makes a public stink, and we act on it. When a lawbreaker does something bad, the booking officer increments that box on the charge sheet and continues turning the crank with hardly anyone outside the perp, the cops, the court, and the victim ever knowing about it.
No they aren't. Not generally. That legend on the money is a confidence booster, it doesn't confer any special rights on either party.
As for the landlord situation, if the attempt to pay was reasonable the landlord didn't have any excuse for not accepting payment in cash. But if it was in bags of coins or the cash was defaced or made to smell bad it wouldn't be reasonable. If the lease specified that payment must be in the form of a check the landlord should have started enforcing penalties the first time the lease was not followed.
You can also sometimes end up with ignorant judges (John Ashcroft) who think that common sense is the same thing as the law. They fuck up the judicial system something awful.
A convenience store in a high traffic area at a busy time of day refused a $20 bill for a $2 purchase.
Why? Because it would have taken one of the two clerks 30 seconds to convince the change safe to drop a wad of smaller bills, and while they weren't yet out of smaller bills in the till, they didn't want to have to slow the flow at that time of day to do the work.
If I'd had a card of some sort it would have been no question.
And I'm not saying paper money can't be used for other purposes. I'm just saying it's not absolutely necessary for any purpose. Unless your purpose is illegal, you really have no economically realistic excuse for keeping cash around. Plastic is super-easy to carry and process, and the terminal box with the PIN pad is cheaper to make than those heavy, unbreakable, lockable cash drawers that wouldn't be needed any more.
No, it's about the same amount of legal work. It's just more legwork. They can stop an overseas wire payment to al Quaeda with a phone call. They'll have to send a SWAT team to keep you from buying grey-market beanie babies. But in both cases they'll have to bring the probable cause. Making their job harder won't stop them from doing it; at least not for the right reasons.
I never troll, but sometimes I can be funny and serious at the same time. In fact, I prefer it.
I prefer to use plastic because then (a) I can track me and tell where my budgeting is going off the rails; (b) I know I have enough every time I go into the store (corrollary: I go to the bank a lot less and don't have to carry a gaudy wad around, except in Vegas, but Vegas is all about the hip tumor); (c) I can reverse a transaction by remote control; (d) I get rewarded for using it (this is a false economy; those rewards are part of the merchants fees and therefor part of the purchase price, and merchants either love them or hate them depending on whether it's bringing them business or just costing them margin on existing business; regardless, it's like I get free stuff every few months); (e) you have any idea where most cash has been? (okay, i'll tell you: it went from the fingers of a bus-station janitor into the ass-crack of a stripper just before you got it in change at the bar*).
Mostly it's the need not to predict how much I have to carry that creates daily value. And the fact that it can be de-monetized with a phone call if I lose it or it gets stolen. Cash? If I lose that it's gone. Not good.
Your reasons, mainly centering on not wanting to be advertised to by people who sell things you might be interested in buying, are far-fetched. I don't think I get any snail-mail that was linked to any of my plastic. Mostly it's from merchants I dealt with directly an gave my address for deliveries or security reasons.
* - okay, yeah, if there's no cash I can't "make it rain", but trust me, change the form of payment and the strippers will start carrying micro-expressPay terminals. Save them having to keep going back to the locker room to stash the stuff all the time. Cleaner and more efficient all around.
And if X doesn't break any laws the government has no interest in you, so you might as well pay with your MasterCard.
So why do you have to have cash to do X, again?
Oh, and
legal/ legal is just an opinion.
is not something you should say to a judge when you're the one in the handcuffs. It's been tried before, and all the precedents say it's not sufficient argument. You'll have to have something specific as to why what you did was illegal but its illegality is the suspect part of the equation. Preferably something based on the facts of the law and not your opinions of the law.
No, I'm right, and the Supreme Court in this case was wrong, and I understand how it was wrong, and how it can be reversed, since it's reversing its own earlier decisions with this one. You'll maybe want to look up the history of 2nd Amendment cases in the SCOTUS, because I have, and it's gone every direction possible.
You basically just completely contradicted your initial claim, which was that nobody needs to worry about an unconstitutional law (like an ex post facto law) ever being passed and enforced.
No, I'm saying that you shouldn't be worried about not committing what you think will become illegal, you should be putting your effort into preventing the unconstitutional law from being passed, if anyone is ever stupid enough to propose it, and then into using their arrest and conviction of you to get it overturned. Fight the battles you do get, not the ones you will probably never get.
Which brings us back to the point: Keeping the money system an exhorbitantly expensive and complicated system of printing special documents, implementing security measures, and conducting interdictions is even more trouble than that. Not to mention the enormous number of crimes that are enabled by the nature of dollar bills as an anonymous, theivable, untraceable container of wealth. Balancing that against your naive misunderstanding of the Constitution and your desire to do things that your persecution fantasies are trepidatious about, I'd choose to have the e-Dollar in any second of any day.
The fact is, the government, with a warrant, can interfere in every aspect of your life. And if they're on to something illegal, they should be. And if they aren't on to something illegal, then you're right to get indignant, and I'll be glad to help you thump them. Until then, all you're trying to do is make it easier to do something illegal for them to get onto.
That goes both ways. Some businesses take plastic but not cash. Almost no businesses take pennies for anything more than a dollar transaction, if that.
And get used to plastic follies. The ruling this week means that merchants will be able to pick and choose the cards they take even more than before. They used to be able to tell you they take Visa but not MC or AmEx, but now they will be able to tell you they take Bank of Noodlevania Visa but not Bank of North Noodlevania Visa.
AmEx should be less affected, since it's the only bank that issues AmEx cards, but MC and Visa aren't banks, and have dozens or hundreds of banks issuing their cards, all with differing rates and fees that merchants are now allowed to disclose. The effect on AmEx will be that merchants will suddenly see the number of cards they pay attention to has increased, so they may cut AmEx from the list just to make the list smaller, and it goes first because it has the highest fees (it always has the highest fees, but it brings the best customers, which is why it's accepted at all).
First, that rulling was political horseshit. Future courts will read the Constitution again and realize that Roberts et al were in on the fix, and will reverse it.
Second, That's how the law works. Law enforcement is beholden to the laws that are in force, not to your interpretation of the constitution. When the law is in force, law enforcement enforces that law. When the law gets struck down, they stop. They may even apologize for having to do it, but in this case, in that town, don't bet on it. Too many cops getting shot or shot at for them to have any humor about Republican political manipulations of the 2nd Amendment.
So when the ruling is reversed by a future ruling and the law comes back, double jeopardy will protect anyone freed under the current ruling, and ex post fact will protect anyone violating that wording until the law comes back, but the law will be back and it will be enforced as written.
You just said that you want to be able to hide a crime so tracking crime is not a solution.
First of all, that's fucking stupid. Just stop trying to reason like that. And if you couldn't teach your kids to be self-sufficient, then pay the gift tax and consider it your fault that you had to.
Second, even if money was traceable, it would be illegal for the government to trace any of it, unless they had a warrant, and a warrant requires probable cause, which requires evidence or credible observation that a crime is being or is about to be committed.
Third, the fact that we can't get politicians to keep their activities open and legal is the proximate problem. Work on fixing that, not on preventing imaginary problems that aren't occurring.
I mean illegal now, because ex post facto laws are banned by the Constitution.
As for menorahs, the Germans knew who the Jews were regardless of their names on invoices. As for worrying about being found out, if that's your worry, why are you staying in Germany when it's clear that reason and compassion are already out the window?
I don't see any Germans coming for Jews around here, and I don't see the government coming for people who are currently doing legal things that may be illegal in the future for the things they are doing now.
So what you're talking about isn't an actual problem, it's a fictional one, that can be made to remain fictional if you'll stop worrying about the fictional problems and spend your time on the real ones that the fictional ones are distracting you from.
The government doesn't interfere in your credit transactions.
In fact, this week they've done a lot to keep the credit processors from interfering in them as well.
If you're making cash transactions and avoiding reporting income etc. to the government, that's not about interference, it's about you doing illegal things.
The irony stands. If you want to transact free of the government, don't use the government's documents to do it. Barter. And make sure you barter for equal value using things that don't change value, or you'll have to report the gain/loss in value and that gets the audit bells ringing.
He committed a crime against the laws of the United States and against the United States. If the US requests his extradition from a foreign country, (one of the reasons he went to Sweden is that it doesn't extradite to the US) the foreign country may agree to extradite him to the US for trial and punishment.
It wouldn't be unreasonable for foreign governments to take a dim view of the kind of thing Assange did and expedite his extradition. He's currently pissing off Sweden by not cooperating in what should be a simple police investigation in an unrelated matter. So they may even give him up.
He also broke an Australian law against doing what he did to Australia's allies. Which is another reason he's hiding in Europe and not in Australia.
When you find something on the floor of the bar it belongs to the owner of the bar, not to you. When you find something out in public it belongs to you until the owner claims it from you. It's an ethical question as to how you will go about assisting the owner in finding you if he comes back and doesn't find his property where he left it or believes he may have dropped it.
But this is a digression Manning didn't find the information he stole on the floor.
He found it in a secured computer in a secured building on a secured military installation.
His job, and his legal and ethical responsibility, was not to take it.
His other legal and ethical responsibility, and also part of his job if he'd bothered to pay attention to the briefing he signed when he was issued his clearance, was to point out the illegalities in the information to his chain of command, one rung at a time, including the inspectors general at each level, until someone either gave him legal reasons the information should remain classified or started declassifying it.
Instead, he chose to do a wrong thing. Rather than acting ethically and legally, he acted in the mistaken belief that it would somehow make him a hero. It makes him a hero only to the ignorant and the enemy.
Because certain segments of the government understand that paper money is based on an illusion (although the illusion of value doesn't mean they're valueless, just that it's a value held in an illusion and not in your hand) and if you change it too much too fast people start to beleive the haze is falling away from their eyes, which can have destabilizing effects as they start to refuse the paper money, stripping away its ability to carry the value it actually has.
(This isn't the problem pennies have. The problem pennies have is that it costs more to process them than having them is worth.)
Slashdot Mirror
I just asked the same question.
And the answer is: ... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;"
"The Congress shall have Power
Although that also means that Congress has the power not to do that...
So I'm supposed to do a year's worth of work for a share of a dinette set instead of the $150K it should be paying me?
Hey. It was an auction. You bid, you won, you got what was advertised. No givebacks.
Which makes me wonder if the big, opaque hedge funds are running a storefront website hocking the names of every politician in office or likely to run for office in the next election...
It would explain a lot.
Fact: The definition of assault includes touching someone with intent to injure them or placing them in reasonable belief that you will do so.
Fact: Your threat prior to committing the assault indicated that your assault was an attempt to kill.
Fact: You did commit assault, by hitting me with a chair after telling me that you intended to harm me, you just don't know if it was justified.
Fact: If it's not justified, assault and assault with intent to kill are illegal.
Fact: You gave no justification in line with the definition in the law of the justification for assault when presenting the facts in your defense, so per the facts there is no justification that can be applied.
Opinion of the court: You are guilty of the crime of assault with intent to kill.
The opinion of the court is a fact based on other facts. It's called an "opinion" because it applies the law to the particular case. That's what "opinion" really means: it's a judgment of a particular instance. If it were a judgment on a class of instances it would be an "attitude". If it were a judgment on all instances based on societal norms it would be a "more" ("mo-ray"). Most people think that opinion is a judgment on an abstraction, but they're incorrectly expanding from opinions on the facts of abstractions to all opinions when they do that, and further mistaking their attitude about the abstraction as an opinion about it.
In a positivist framework, which is held by almost every modern, there is no factual or qualitative difference between the operation of law keepers and the operation of criminals.
Every modern what? Every modern idiot?
There's a difference between the lawkeepers and the lawbreakers, and that's justification. The lawkeepers also try to uphold their responsibility not to make things worse, while the lawbreakers don't give a flying fuck. When a lawkeeper does something bad, it's a big deal to us all, makes a public stink, and we act on it. When a lawbreaker does something bad, the booking officer increments that box on the charge sheet and continues turning the crank with hardly anyone outside the perp, the cops, the court, and the victim ever knowing about it.
Business are REQUIRED to take cash.
No they aren't. Not generally. That legend on the money is a confidence booster, it doesn't confer any special rights on either party.
As for the landlord situation, if the attempt to pay was reasonable the landlord didn't have any excuse for not accepting payment in cash. But if it was in bags of coins or the cash was defaced or made to smell bad it wouldn't be reasonable. If the lease specified that payment must be in the form of a check the landlord should have started enforcing penalties the first time the lease was not followed.
You can also sometimes end up with ignorant judges (John Ashcroft) who think that common sense is the same thing as the law. They fuck up the judicial system something awful.
Which are a dime a dozen, and therefore not much good in serious transactions.
I have.
A convenience store in a high traffic area at a busy time of day refused a $20 bill for a $2 purchase.
Why? Because it would have taken one of the two clerks 30 seconds to convince the change safe to drop a wad of smaller bills, and while they weren't yet out of smaller bills in the till, they didn't want to have to slow the flow at that time of day to do the work.
If I'd had a card of some sort it would have been no question.
And I'm not saying paper money can't be used for other purposes. I'm just saying it's not absolutely necessary for any purpose. Unless your purpose is illegal, you really have no economically realistic excuse for keeping cash around. Plastic is super-easy to carry and process, and the terminal box with the PIN pad is cheaper to make than those heavy, unbreakable, lockable cash drawers that wouldn't be needed any more.
No, it's about the same amount of legal work. It's just more legwork. They can stop an overseas wire payment to al Quaeda with a phone call. They'll have to send a SWAT team to keep you from buying grey-market beanie babies. But in both cases they'll have to bring the probable cause. Making their job harder won't stop them from doing it; at least not for the right reasons.
I never troll, but sometimes I can be funny and serious at the same time. In fact, I prefer it.
I prefer to use plastic because then (a) I can track me and tell where my budgeting is going off the rails; (b) I know I have enough every time I go into the store (corrollary: I go to the bank a lot less and don't have to carry a gaudy wad around, except in Vegas, but Vegas is all about the hip tumor); (c) I can reverse a transaction by remote control; (d) I get rewarded for using it (this is a false economy; those rewards are part of the merchants fees and therefor part of the purchase price, and merchants either love them or hate them depending on whether it's bringing them business or just costing them margin on existing business; regardless, it's like I get free stuff every few months); (e) you have any idea where most cash has been? (okay, i'll tell you: it went from the fingers of a bus-station janitor into the ass-crack of a stripper just before you got it in change at the bar*).
Mostly it's the need not to predict how much I have to carry that creates daily value. And the fact that it can be de-monetized with a phone call if I lose it or it gets stolen. Cash? If I lose that it's gone. Not good.
Your reasons, mainly centering on not wanting to be advertised to by people who sell things you might be interested in buying, are far-fetched. I don't think I get any snail-mail that was linked to any of my plastic. Mostly it's from merchants I dealt with directly an gave my address for deliveries or security reasons.
* - okay, yeah, if there's no cash I can't "make it rain", but trust me, change the form of payment and the strippers will start carrying micro-expressPay terminals. Save them having to keep going back to the locker room to stash the stuff all the time. Cleaner and more efficient all around.
And if X doesn't break any laws the government has no interest in you, so you might as well pay with your MasterCard.
So why do you have to have cash to do X, again?
Oh, and
legal/ legal is just an opinion.
is not something you should say to a judge when you're the one in the handcuffs. It's been tried before, and all the precedents say it's not sufficient argument. You'll have to have something specific as to why what you did was illegal but its illegality is the suspect part of the equation. Preferably something based on the facts of the law and not your opinions of the law.
No, I'm right, and the Supreme Court in this case was wrong, and I understand how it was wrong, and how it can be reversed, since it's reversing its own earlier decisions with this one. You'll maybe want to look up the history of 2nd Amendment cases in the SCOTUS, because I have, and it's gone every direction possible.
You basically just completely contradicted your initial claim, which was that nobody needs to worry about an unconstitutional law (like an ex post facto law) ever being passed and enforced.
No, I'm saying that you shouldn't be worried about not committing what you think will become illegal, you should be putting your effort into preventing the unconstitutional law from being passed, if anyone is ever stupid enough to propose it, and then into using their arrest and conviction of you to get it overturned. Fight the battles you do get, not the ones you will probably never get.
Which brings us back to the point: Keeping the money system an exhorbitantly expensive and complicated system of printing special documents, implementing security measures, and conducting interdictions is even more trouble than that. Not to mention the enormous number of crimes that are enabled by the nature of dollar bills as an anonymous, theivable, untraceable container of wealth. Balancing that against your naive misunderstanding of the Constitution and your desire to do things that your persecution fantasies are trepidatious about, I'd choose to have the e-Dollar in any second of any day.
Here, you dropped your badge: "troll". Twice.
The fact is, the government, with a warrant, can interfere in every aspect of your life. And if they're on to something illegal, they should be. And if they aren't on to something illegal, then you're right to get indignant, and I'll be glad to help you thump them. Until then, all you're trying to do is make it easier to do something illegal for them to get onto.
That goes both ways. Some businesses take plastic but not cash. Almost no businesses take pennies for anything more than a dollar transaction, if that.
And get used to plastic follies. The ruling this week means that merchants will be able to pick and choose the cards they take even more than before. They used to be able to tell you they take Visa but not MC or AmEx, but now they will be able to tell you they take Bank of Noodlevania Visa but not Bank of North Noodlevania Visa.
AmEx should be less affected, since it's the only bank that issues AmEx cards, but MC and Visa aren't banks, and have dozens or hundreds of banks issuing their cards, all with differing rates and fees that merchants are now allowed to disclose. The effect on AmEx will be that merchants will suddenly see the number of cards they pay attention to has increased, so they may cut AmEx from the list just to make the list smaller, and it goes first because it has the highest fees (it always has the highest fees, but it brings the best customers, which is why it's accepted at all).
First, that rulling was political horseshit. Future courts will read the Constitution again and realize that Roberts et al were in on the fix, and will reverse it.
Second, That's how the law works. Law enforcement is beholden to the laws that are in force, not to your interpretation of the constitution. When the law is in force, law enforcement enforces that law. When the law gets struck down, they stop. They may even apologize for having to do it, but in this case, in that town, don't bet on it. Too many cops getting shot or shot at for them to have any humor about Republican political manipulations of the 2nd Amendment.
So when the ruling is reversed by a future ruling and the law comes back, double jeopardy will protect anyone freed under the current ruling, and ex post fact will protect anyone violating that wording until the law comes back, but the law will be back and it will be enforced as written.
You just said that you want to be able to hide a crime so tracking crime is not a solution.
First of all, that's fucking stupid. Just stop trying to reason like that. And if you couldn't teach your kids to be self-sufficient, then pay the gift tax and consider it your fault that you had to.
Second, even if money was traceable, it would be illegal for the government to trace any of it, unless they had a warrant, and a warrant requires probable cause, which requires evidence or credible observation that a crime is being or is about to be committed.
Third, the fact that we can't get politicians to keep their activities open and legal is the proximate problem. Work on fixing that, not on preventing imaginary problems that aren't occurring.
Do you mean illegal now, or illegal later?
I mean illegal now, because ex post facto laws are banned by the Constitution.
As for menorahs, the Germans knew who the Jews were regardless of their names on invoices. As for worrying about being found out, if that's your worry, why are you staying in Germany when it's clear that reason and compassion are already out the window?
I don't see any Germans coming for Jews around here, and I don't see the government coming for people who are currently doing legal things that may be illegal in the future for the things they are doing now.
So what you're talking about isn't an actual problem, it's a fictional one, that can be made to remain fictional if you'll stop worrying about the fictional problems and spend your time on the real ones that the fictional ones are distracting you from.
Go picket Fox News.
Plastic is at least 50% less inconvenient than cash.
And I hide nothing. Whether I should or not is for the people who try to call me on it to risk.
The government doesn't interfere in your credit transactions.
In fact, this week they've done a lot to keep the credit processors from interfering in them as well.
If you're making cash transactions and avoiding reporting income etc. to the government, that's not about interference, it's about you doing illegal things.
The irony stands. If you want to transact free of the government, don't use the government's documents to do it. Barter. And make sure you barter for equal value using things that don't change value, or you'll have to report the gain/loss in value and that gets the audit bells ringing.
How do I know those aren't rats with feathers glued on?
He committed a crime against the laws of the United States and against the United States. If the US requests his extradition from a foreign country, (one of the reasons he went to Sweden is that it doesn't extradite to the US) the foreign country may agree to extradite him to the US for trial and punishment.
It wouldn't be unreasonable for foreign governments to take a dim view of the kind of thing Assange did and expedite his extradition. He's currently pissing off Sweden by not cooperating in what should be a simple police investigation in an unrelated matter. So they may even give him up.
He also broke an Australian law against doing what he did to Australia's allies. Which is another reason he's hiding in Europe and not in Australia.
When you find something on the floor of the bar it belongs to the owner of the bar, not to you. When you find something out in public it belongs to you until the owner claims it from you. It's an ethical question as to how you will go about assisting the owner in finding you if he comes back and doesn't find his property where he left it or believes he may have dropped it.
But this is a digression Manning didn't find the information he stole on the floor.
He found it in a secured computer in a secured building on a secured military installation.
His job, and his legal and ethical responsibility, was not to take it.
His other legal and ethical responsibility, and also part of his job if he'd bothered to pay attention to the briefing he signed when he was issued his clearance, was to point out the illegalities in the information to his chain of command, one rung at a time, including the inspectors general at each level, until someone either gave him legal reasons the information should remain classified or started declassifying it.
Instead, he chose to do a wrong thing. Rather than acting ethically and legally, he acted in the mistaken belief that it would somehow make him a hero. It makes him a hero only to the ignorant and the enemy.
Putting the word "perhaps" in the news makes the article a spoof off journalism.
Because certain segments of the government understand that paper money is based on an illusion (although the illusion of value doesn't mean they're valueless, just that it's a value held in an illusion and not in your hand) and if you change it too much too fast people start to beleive the haze is falling away from their eyes, which can have destabilizing effects as they start to refuse the paper money, stripping away its ability to carry the value it actually has.
(This isn't the problem pennies have. The problem pennies have is that it costs more to process them than having them is worth.)
Why do you need to make anonymous transactions?
Ohhhh. You mean illegal transactions.
So...you want to carry a government document...to prove you're free.
Got it.