The IRS defines who is and is not a contractor. These drivers simply are not independent contractors. First they would need a business permit in order to be contractors. They can not be supervised by Uber in any way, And they would need a written contract that offers them benefits roughly equal to any benefits Uber gets by offering the contract.
So many businesses steal money by falsely calling people independents or piece workers and it is fraud both to the workers as well as numerous public agencies. For example, a Uber driver, injured in a wreck can not get Workman's comp. And Workman's compensation suffers an economic loss when employees are falsely called independent contractors.
Not exactly. Someone can be an IC without a business permit--that just means they're operating a business illegally. Also, "supervised in any way" doesn't necessarily make someone an employee. I can watch my plumber work on pipes in my house, and it doesn't make him my employee. I can even supply the parts. I can even let him borrow a tool.
Whether someone is an IC or not is a fact-based inquiry, and is determined by looking at a variety of factors including to what degree someone is supervised, whether they provide their own tools, etc... There is no single absolute rule.
TFA explicitly points out that the civilians will not be pulling the trigger. They will be used only for Combat Air Patrols (a term that seems just a bit inappropriate) that are for data gathering and surveillance only. The trigger pullers will be active duty military.
The problem, in TFA's eyes is that this represents a slippery slope - how many degrees of separation do you need in a military setting?
IIRC, the air force has about four major protocol points that they follow in order to ensure that drone strikes are legal. One of those is that the person pulling the trigger be military so that you are ensured a direct chain of command, i.e. legal authority to kill others on behalf of the state, (this also ensures they get qualified immunity from lawsuits.)
No, actually, I don't remember any reference to the use of bulk metadata being useful in the hunt for the bombers. I did find one link that stated that the bulk collection was actually a hindrance, because there was too much data to soft through.
If you look at the documentaries, it's very clear that the FBI was sorting through the bulk metadata. IIRC they were looking for a cell phone call made at a certain time in order to trace the caller.
They did use the metadata in the hunt for the Boston Bombers, if you remember. The FBI basically admitted it while edging around talking directly about the classified database of phone calls and when they were made.
Also, the primary incentive-based reason people at our intelligence agencies don't deliberately allow significant attacks (at least on US soil) in that they would get lined up against the wall and shot if anyone found out. It may still happen occasionally, but if it does... their colleagues probably find out and kill them. Or at least send them into early retirement. It usually wouldn't help PR or the country to admit it had happened.
Most people in intelligence wouldn't do it anyway because of morality, but the people who would still have strong incentives not to do it.
Most black cabs already do. Addison Lee has had an app with driver tracking, credit card payments and so on for years. This is kind of massively not news.
I took a cab at one point late last year when Uber didn't work on my phone. The driver pretended his credit card reader wouldn't work in the hope of getting me to pay cash.
This is, incidentally, the kind of shit that makes people hate cabs.
Dealers need to step aside and get out of the fucking way of the sale. It's a stupid business model. There is no value in having a middleman in this process anymore.
There's no value in having the same business responsible for sale and service where the guys selling are not the guys servicing. There might be some value if the guys wore two hats--i.e. actual experience with the car. But ignorant salespeople don't seem uncommon. The summary mentions one buyer who knew a lot more about the car than the salesman. The last time I bought a car (used car but from a dealer), the salesman didn't even know the car had all-wheel drive, and tried to upsell an old entertainment system in a vehicle we didn't want like it was a significant feature. And that was in a *posh* neighborhood in a fairly cold climate where you could have sold the AWD.
Dealers have a conflict of interest because manufacturers are dumb. Manufacturers have variable margins built into the cars that encourage sales. One would hope they line up with the maker's desires (or profits), but often they don't. And makers like GM that have $2000 rebates on everything almost all the time encourage buyers to avoid them when there isn't a sale.
Rebates are mostly just there to be an accounting trick. IIRC they let you increase your Revenue on paper and maybe take a corresponding tax deduction for the promotion.
Insurance companies are in the business of paying for as little as possible. There are legitimate questions about whether something is covered and then there is the massive fraud they engage in as a regular part of their business model.
The question will be whether the coverage extends to cover Cox if they are found guilty of violating the DMCA. If the claim even *might* be something they have to cover, then they probably have to defend it. (The duty to defend is generally broader than the duty to pay for the loss).
Yes, but it will take decades to transition and the industry will move along with it to some extent. The future is the small screen close to your eye. The big screen you used to need in your house will eventually disappear. But like the desktop computer, it will take a long time to do so.
Is the ability to practice on a particular patient really necessary? It seems like the time it would take to do a dry-run is the time that the surgeon could be performing another surgery. If individual patients' vascular systems so different that they cause problems for surgeons, then sure this development is great. But are they all really so different as to justify an expensive and time-consuming test dry run before each operation?
It probably depends on how good the scans are, and if they're good enough then cases far outside the norm can be practiced on first. Maybe you are operating on someone with a lot of scar tissue from badly done prior operations--that can be hard and it might be better to practice first. Maybe you are operating on someone heavier than anyone you've operated on by a hundred pounds. Maybe you are dealing with something fairly obscure and there are only a dozen cases in the medical literature, so you've never done it. Maybe you are doing something that hasn't been done in a long time because of changing demographics.
And maybe you are dealing with a surgery where the odds of long-term survival are 10% better if you try it on a simulation first. We don't know until we run some experiments. So let's run some experiments, especially on hard types of surgery like for pancreatic and intestinal cancer, or neurosurgery.
The Judge who is supporting a law passed by Clinton (whose wife is running for president) was appointed by Bush (whose brother is running for president).
I really hope our choices for president next year involve neither of these two families.
It doesn't really work like this. Good Judges "support" all laws regardless of whether they are drafted by a Republican or a Democrat. They may approach their legal analysis a little differently, but fundamentally they're interested in applying the law to a given case. Occasionally (and more frequently as you move up through appeals) they are also interested in making sure that the way they interpret the law applies correctly to all related cases. When they're trial judges, if they get it wrong they can be overturned by appellate judges. When they're appellate judges, they also have to forge a consensus with colleagues, who may be either Democratic or Republican appointees. Either way, they're interested in getting it right.
Incidentally, Federal Judges are, for the most part, pretty much the bomb. The judge you met in traffic court or family court or judge Judy or whatever else you think when you think of a judge, federal judges are a lot more thoughtful and deliberative and on average a lot smarter.
If the judge is clearly siding with one party ahead of trial, shouldn't they be able to get him off this case on grounds of being biased? Or is this also not a thing in the funky US justice system?
Law suits happen in stages which are established largely by procedural rules. Deciding against one party on a motion isn't enough of an indicator of bias to get a judge removed.
Decisions about a conflict in the facts claimed by either side are made by a jury; decisions about the law are made by a judge. Sometimes you can get rid of some questions before the trial goes to a jury by just looking at the law. Like if both parties agree that I was really mean to you, but the law says being really mean isn't something you can sue over, then it doesn't have to go to a jury. Here, both sides agree Cox didn't cut off access, but Cox is claiming the safe harbor applies so it shouldn't even have to go to a jury.
Summary judgment motions are controlled by Rule 56 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.
Forbid Medicare and Medicaid payments to companies that choose to move headquarters for the purpose of avoiding US tax. Maybe that will cause them to change their mind.
You're thinking too small and you're risking a lot of lives. Don't forbid the payments; threaten the underlying patents.
Only really big companies, with armies of lawyers, can find loopholes that let them effectively move out of the US to a lower-taxing alternative. You'll note that TFA is a lament about how one managed to escape, and how the US might "close THIS loophole" to prevent others from using it.
Not really. A mid-sized company can do this with only a couple of lawyers, so long as they're good. Obviously it has to be big enough that it will save more in taxes than it costs in legal fees, costs, and goodwill.
More like the NSA and other 3 letter organizations are being shown up by Anons.
Not really. This was an obvious possible backfire.
Also, you don't tell the other guy you broke his codes. Intelligence is by its nature secretive. It is as tinfoil-hat to believe that the NSA has never intercepted intelligence to stop terrorist attacks as it is to believe that they are listening to every conversation within range of any microphone.
The GERMANS!? Russians? Nah, too stupid the two of them!
It is possible that the IT guys of the two most powerful and technologically advanced countries in the world thought to encrypt it. It's (hopefully) not a high-volume phone line and could be an ideal use case for one-time pads, which are unbreakable.
If there's no defense against that, then there's no real point to waste money on security that can't protect from a single obvious attack vector.
Don't be absurd. Russia, for example, has already made jamming our GPS systems a capability they have provided to others in proxy wars because GPS is a very useful tactical tool, and that way they get to test their GPS-jamming gear. Countries often attack each other in ways short of nuclear war. Just because you don't have a way of defending yourself from a nuke doesn't mean it's not worth having conventional arms.
This is the current membership; they are responsible for failing to provide effective oversight of the current surveillance problem; there is some overlap now to then but it's not 100%.
Not a psychopath, just a propagandist. The idea is pretty simple: connect whistleblowing of illegal government surveillance to Paris terrorist attacks in order to assist your political positions on (1) being anti-encryption, (2) being pro-surveillance, and (3) being anti-whistleblower. He's blatantly violating his oath to defend the Constitution but is doing that because his (former) job is a lot harder if he has to follow the Constitution--and all the people who died in France, the CIA didn't see it coming, maybe because of Snowden.
Of course, if the NSA hadn't been collecting massive illegal surveillance of *Americans*, Snowden probably wouldn't have happened. While Snowden should be held to account for leaking classified information, the biggest blame by far goes to the NSA and the Senate Intelligence Committee for failure to oversee it properly.
Majority:
Richard Burr, North Carolina, Chair
Jim Risch, Idaho
Dan Coats, Indiana
Marco Rubio, Florida
Susan Collins, Maine
Roy Blunt, Missouri
James Lankford, Oklahoma
Tom Cotton, Arkansas
Minority:
Dianne Feinstein, California, Vice Chair
Ron Wyden, Oregon
Barbara Mikulski, Maryland
Mark Warner, Virginia
Martin Heinrich, New Mexico
Angus King, Maine[9]
Mazie Hirono, Hawaii
Ex officio:
John McCain, Arizona
Mitch McConnell, Kentucky
Jack Reed, Rhode Island
Harry Reid, Nevada
To me it sounds more like having them wear something to single them out... maybe a yellow Star of David, as it worked so well in the past for the last group of fascists.
It did really remind me of the yellow stars.
That being said, do you believe for a *second* that they aren't already doing it? Obvious sources are every college application in the country (which have religious affiliation), facial recognition in photos online (in a picture with a half dozen Muslims?), facial recognition from city cameras (some have substantial tech behind what they do--NYC and DC come to mind), etc..., and that's just the low-hanging fruit.
Why do you think cash is untraced? You know that all bills have unique serial numbers, right? Do you think ATMs and banks are unaware of this feature? Do you think they somehow fail to connect those numbers with your ID and forward the information to the NSA? You know that the first thing retailers do every night is return all the money they collect to the bank, right? So, pretty-much, the only transactions that cash makes anonymous are the shady ones that the government should be tracking. Don't delude yourself--cash is far from anonymous.
It's not fully anonymous, but I don't believe the serial numbers are all being tracked yet. If they were the government would be much better at a lot of things like making people actually pay spousal support and charging taxes on the billions in cash-only jobs that people take to avoid paying spousal support, for example.
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The IRS defines who is and is not a contractor. These drivers simply are not independent contractors. First they would need a business permit in order to be contractors. They can not be supervised by Uber in any way, And they would need a written contract that offers them benefits roughly equal to any benefits Uber gets by offering the contract.
So many businesses steal money by falsely calling people independents or piece workers and it is fraud both to the workers as well as numerous public agencies. For example, a Uber driver, injured in a wreck can not get Workman's comp. And Workman's compensation suffers an economic loss when employees are falsely called independent contractors.
Not exactly. Someone can be an IC without a business permit--that just means they're operating a business illegally. Also, "supervised in any way" doesn't necessarily make someone an employee. I can watch my plumber work on pipes in my house, and it doesn't make him my employee. I can even supply the parts. I can even let him borrow a tool.
Whether someone is an IC or not is a fact-based inquiry, and is determined by looking at a variety of factors including to what degree someone is supervised, whether they provide their own tools, etc... There is no single absolute rule.
TFA explicitly points out that the civilians will not be pulling the trigger. They will be used only for Combat Air Patrols (a term that seems just a bit inappropriate) that are for data gathering and surveillance only. The trigger pullers will be active duty military.
The problem, in TFA's eyes is that this represents a slippery slope - how many degrees of separation do you need in a military setting?
IIRC, the air force has about four major protocol points that they follow in order to ensure that drone strikes are legal. One of those is that the person pulling the trigger be military so that you are ensured a direct chain of command, i.e. legal authority to kill others on behalf of the state, (this also ensures they get qualified immunity from lawsuits.)
Which protesters would the French government want to suppress?
And what are France's emergency powers? Emergency surrender?
No, actually, I don't remember any reference to the use of bulk metadata being useful in the hunt for the bombers. I did find one link that stated that the bulk collection was actually a hindrance, because there was too much data to soft through.
If you look at the documentaries, it's very clear that the FBI was sorting through the bulk metadata. IIRC they were looking for a cell phone call made at a certain time in order to trace the caller.
They did use the metadata in the hunt for the Boston Bombers, if you remember. The FBI basically admitted it while edging around talking directly about the classified database of phone calls and when they were made.
Also, the primary incentive-based reason people at our intelligence agencies don't deliberately allow significant attacks (at least on US soil) in that they would get lined up against the wall and shot if anyone found out. It may still happen occasionally, but if it does... their colleagues probably find out and kill them. Or at least send them into early retirement. It usually wouldn't help PR or the country to admit it had happened.
Most people in intelligence wouldn't do it anyway because of morality, but the people who would still have strong incentives not to do it.
I hate to be the practical one, but...
Every country in the world spies on its civilian population extensively and lies about it.
If you don't like it, your only practical option is to start your own country. Which will then also be spied on by every other country in the world.
So good luck with that.
London cabs don't accept credit cards?!?!
Most black cabs already do. Addison Lee has had an app with driver tracking, credit card payments and so on for years. This is kind of massively not news.
I took a cab at one point late last year when Uber didn't work on my phone. The driver pretended his credit card reader wouldn't work in the hope of getting me to pay cash.
This is, incidentally, the kind of shit that makes people hate cabs.
This +100.
Dealers need to step aside and get out of the fucking way of the sale. It's a stupid business model. There is no value in having a middleman in this process anymore.
There's no value in having the same business responsible for sale and service where the guys selling are not the guys servicing. There might be some value if the guys wore two hats--i.e. actual experience with the car. But ignorant salespeople don't seem uncommon. The summary mentions one buyer who knew a lot more about the car than the salesman. The last time I bought a car (used car but from a dealer), the salesman didn't even know the car had all-wheel drive, and tried to upsell an old entertainment system in a vehicle we didn't want like it was a significant feature. And that was in a *posh* neighborhood in a fairly cold climate where you could have sold the AWD.
Dealers have a conflict of interest because manufacturers are dumb. Manufacturers have variable margins built into the cars that encourage sales. One would hope they line up with the maker's desires (or profits), but often they don't. And makers like GM that have $2000 rebates on everything almost all the time encourage buyers to avoid them when there isn't a sale.
Rebates are mostly just there to be an accounting trick. IIRC they let you increase your Revenue on paper and maybe take a corresponding tax deduction for the promotion.
Insurance companies are in the business of paying for as little as possible. There are legitimate questions about whether something is covered and then there is the massive fraud they engage in as a regular part of their business model.
The question will be whether the coverage extends to cover Cox if they are found guilty of violating the DMCA. If the claim even *might* be something they have to cover, then they probably have to defend it. (The duty to defend is generally broader than the duty to pay for the loss).
The garbage heap.
Yes, but it will take decades to transition and the industry will move along with it to some extent. The future is the small screen close to your eye. The big screen you used to need in your house will eventually disappear. But like the desktop computer, it will take a long time to do so.
Is the ability to practice on a particular patient really necessary? It seems like the time it would take to do a dry-run is the time that the surgeon could be performing another surgery. If individual patients' vascular systems so different that they cause problems for surgeons, then sure this development is great. But are they all really so different as to justify an expensive and time-consuming test dry run before each operation?
It probably depends on how good the scans are, and if they're good enough then cases far outside the norm can be practiced on first. Maybe you are operating on someone with a lot of scar tissue from badly done prior operations--that can be hard and it might be better to practice first. Maybe you are operating on someone heavier than anyone you've operated on by a hundred pounds. Maybe you are dealing with something fairly obscure and there are only a dozen cases in the medical literature, so you've never done it. Maybe you are doing something that hasn't been done in a long time because of changing demographics.
And maybe you are dealing with a surgery where the odds of long-term survival are 10% better if you try it on a simulation first. We don't know until we run some experiments. So let's run some experiments, especially on hard types of surgery like for pancreatic and intestinal cancer, or neurosurgery.
Let me rephrase my previous post...
The Judge who is supporting a law passed by Clinton (whose wife is running for president) was appointed by Bush (whose brother is running for president).
I really hope our choices for president next year involve neither of these two families.
It doesn't really work like this. Good Judges "support" all laws regardless of whether they are drafted by a Republican or a Democrat. They may approach their legal analysis a little differently, but fundamentally they're interested in applying the law to a given case. Occasionally (and more frequently as you move up through appeals) they are also interested in making sure that the way they interpret the law applies correctly to all related cases. When they're trial judges, if they get it wrong they can be overturned by appellate judges. When they're appellate judges, they also have to forge a consensus with colleagues, who may be either Democratic or Republican appointees. Either way, they're interested in getting it right.
Incidentally, Federal Judges are, for the most part, pretty much the bomb. The judge you met in traffic court or family court or judge Judy or whatever else you think when you think of a judge, federal judges are a lot more thoughtful and deliberative and on average a lot smarter.
Probably. It depends on what "appropriate circumstances" means. There can be a fight about that. That's what courts are for.
If the judge is clearly siding with one party ahead of trial, shouldn't they be able to get him off this case on grounds of being biased?
Or is this also not a thing in the funky US justice system?
Law suits happen in stages which are established largely by procedural rules. Deciding against one party on a motion isn't enough of an indicator of bias to get a judge removed.
Decisions about a conflict in the facts claimed by either side are made by a jury; decisions about the law are made by a judge. Sometimes you can get rid of some questions before the trial goes to a jury by just looking at the law. Like if both parties agree that I was really mean to you, but the law says being really mean isn't something you can sue over, then it doesn't have to go to a jury. Here, both sides agree Cox didn't cut off access, but Cox is claiming the safe harbor applies so it shouldn't even have to go to a jury.
Summary judgment motions are controlled by Rule 56 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/ru...
Forbid Medicare and Medicaid payments to companies that choose to move headquarters for the purpose of avoiding US tax. Maybe that will cause them to change their mind.
You're thinking too small and you're risking a lot of lives. Don't forbid the payments; threaten the underlying patents.
Only really big companies, with armies of lawyers, can find loopholes that let them effectively move out of the US to a lower-taxing alternative. You'll note that TFA is a lament about how one managed to escape, and how the US might "close THIS loophole" to prevent others from using it.
Not really. A mid-sized company can do this with only a couple of lawyers, so long as they're good. Obviously it has to be big enough that it will save more in taxes than it costs in legal fees, costs, and goodwill.
More like the NSA and other 3 letter organizations are being shown up by Anons.
Not really. This was an obvious possible backfire.
Also, you don't tell the other guy you broke his codes. Intelligence is by its nature secretive. It is as tinfoil-hat to believe that the NSA has never intercepted intelligence to stop terrorist attacks as it is to believe that they are listening to every conversation within range of any microphone.
The GERMANS!? Russians? Nah, too stupid the two of them!
It is possible that the IT guys of the two most powerful and technologically advanced countries in the world thought to encrypt it. It's (hopefully) not a high-volume phone line and could be an ideal use case for one-time pads, which are unbreakable.
If there's no defense against that, then there's no real point to waste money on security that can't protect from a single obvious attack vector.
Don't be absurd. Russia, for example, has already made jamming our GPS systems a capability they have provided to others in proxy wars because GPS is a very useful tactical tool, and that way they get to test their GPS-jamming gear. Countries often attack each other in ways short of nuclear war. Just because you don't have a way of defending yourself from a nuke doesn't mean it's not worth having conventional arms.
This is the current membership; they are responsible for failing to provide effective oversight of the current surveillance problem; there is some overlap now to then but it's not 100%.
Not a psychopath, just a propagandist. The idea is pretty simple: connect whistleblowing of illegal government surveillance to Paris terrorist attacks in order to assist your political positions on (1) being anti-encryption, (2) being pro-surveillance, and (3) being anti-whistleblower. He's blatantly violating his oath to defend the Constitution but is doing that because his (former) job is a lot harder if he has to follow the Constitution--and all the people who died in France, the CIA didn't see it coming, maybe because of Snowden.
Of course, if the NSA hadn't been collecting massive illegal surveillance of *Americans*, Snowden probably wouldn't have happened. While Snowden should be held to account for leaking classified information, the biggest blame by far goes to the NSA and the Senate Intelligence Committee for failure to oversee it properly.
Majority:
Richard Burr, North Carolina, Chair
Jim Risch, Idaho
Dan Coats, Indiana
Marco Rubio, Florida
Susan Collins, Maine
Roy Blunt, Missouri
James Lankford, Oklahoma
Tom Cotton, Arkansas
Minority:
Dianne Feinstein, California, Vice Chair
Ron Wyden, Oregon
Barbara Mikulski, Maryland
Mark Warner, Virginia
Martin Heinrich, New Mexico
Angus King, Maine[9]
Mazie Hirono, Hawaii
Ex officio:
John McCain, Arizona
Mitch McConnell, Kentucky
Jack Reed, Rhode Island
Harry Reid, Nevada
To me it sounds more like having them wear something to single them out... maybe a yellow Star of David, as it worked so well in the past for the last group of fascists.
It did really remind me of the yellow stars.
That being said, do you believe for a *second* that they aren't already doing it? Obvious sources are every college application in the country (which have religious affiliation), facial recognition in photos online (in a picture with a half dozen Muslims?), facial recognition from city cameras (some have substantial tech behind what they do--NYC and DC come to mind), etc..., and that's just the low-hanging fruit.
Example of the life that doesn't fit that definition?
because cash exists and is largely untraced
Why do you think cash is untraced? You know that all bills have unique serial numbers, right? Do you think ATMs and banks are unaware of this feature? Do you think they somehow fail to connect those numbers with your ID and forward the information to the NSA? You know that the first thing retailers do every night is return all the money they collect to the bank, right? So, pretty-much, the only transactions that cash makes anonymous are the shady ones that the government should be tracking. Don't delude yourself--cash is far from anonymous.
It's not fully anonymous, but I don't believe the serial numbers are all being tracked yet. If they were the government would be much better at a lot of things like making people actually pay spousal support and charging taxes on the billions in cash-only jobs that people take to avoid paying spousal support, for example.