Since when could you be found guilty for murder in the scenario you described? You can't be held guilty for someone else's act when you took no part in it. If that was the case then for every death caused by a stolen gun in the US, there'd be two people going to prison -- the murderer and the former gun owner.
I disagree... at least in theory. If I am a rather introverted person (as I actually am), but my friends aren't, then I will have access to many more people than I would normally through my own behaviour. I'm not saying I'm antisocial, I'm saying I'm introverted -- there are some important differences. My extroverted friends shouldn't really mind if I piggyback on their outgoing nature in this way, because it's a hell of a lot easier than introducing me through more conventional means.
As to his claim: he has declared that the UN treaty banning governments from laying claim to land in space only applies to governments, and that it has no bearing on individuals. The government's right to do anything comes from citizens, so this is the 'correct' order of things.
That's interesting. He is attempting to enforce a property right in a vaccuum -- literally and technically. As an earlier poster pointed out, without "civilization" (i.e. a legal system) "property rights" are meaningless -- it all comes down to what you can hold on to personally. He expects a legal system to enforce his personal authority to lay claim to an asteroid which that same legal system has prohibited.
Mr. Nemitz confuses domestic property law with international law, I think. If he had done a bit of reading up on the philosophy of law, he'd realize that governments are the only source of law in the international milieu where treaties are drafted.
You are precluded from laying claim to land in space because property rights come to citizens from their governments, Mr. Nemitz. You have no personal authority at law to lay claim to any "Terra Nullius" you may come across (unless you are the designated representative of a country who does have that authority). You can sit on that asteroid with a shotgun and keep people off by force, but in that case you have only possession, not title. When a state lays a claim to that asteroid (or states agree that no-one shall do so), they can enforce that law against your possession.
It will be interesting to see what the court has to say about this claim.
Sure it probably deters thieves. However, locks are a pragmatic response to the fact that the prohibition itself has little deterrent effect upon dedicated thieves. Whether it deters a thief or not has no bearing on whether or not it is against the law to steal the car or its contents.
The legality or illegality of their entering your car without your permission isn't changed by the presence of a lock. I can leave my car parked in the middle of a parking lot with the doors wide open, and still enjoy the protection of the law against theft. It may be smarter to lock your car in the context of your particular environment, but not locking your car doesn't abrogate the legal prohibition. It just makes you careless, and easier for someone to enter your car.
The analogy here is the fact that MS software has easy-to-access-holes in it does not mean that exploiting those holes is made any more "legal". It may be negligent, but it doesn't represent permission to someone else to exploit the hole.
...an automobile manufacturer makes a car that can be easily stolen (say by jiggling the door handle, and a key is not required to start it) if someone steals this car, and drives it through a business's window, should the car manufacturer be liable?
No. Theft of property is an act seperate from the nature of that property. The fact that I left my wallet on the window sill does not mean that I am in any way responsible for your choice to take it, or the subsequent fact that you used the money to finance a criminal act. The fact that a car is easy to steal does not weaken the law against stealing the car. There is no such thing (at least not in any jurisdiction I'm aware of) as aggravated theft. Whatever the thief did with the car is entirely his or her responsibility. Now, if the car's brakes were of a faulty design...
What other kinds of entitlements are there? Or are you positing a society where no-one attempts to exploit anyone else? That's utopian reasoning. Sure, if we were all perfect moral actors, there would be no need for government. And there would be no Capitalists, either.
Careful there, neighbour. You probably wouldn't really want to live in a world where nobody owed anyone else anything, because you wouldn't be able to make people pay you for working, or keep them from holding you down and taking your organs for that matter. Reciprocity is necessary for any sort of operational social order, including the one that allows you to not to be shot of hand by people who disagree with your opinions.
Well, the reason they defend the business model you've highlighted is, once you've actually designed the car, it's a license to print money. Need more money? Sell another car! It doesn't cost you a cent!
Throughout human history, Kings, Emperors, Despots, and the like have waged wars over who has the right to print money. What we're seeing here is that war played out in a corporate environment.
Zero production costs = 100% profit. Many people would risk anything, and do, for the chance to participate in that sort of formula. Wouldn't you, given the chance? It's the Capitalist Nirvana.
My understanding of estoppel is that it only operates when party A has 1) made a statement that it knows to be untruthful or incorrect and 2)party B actually relies upon that statement 3) after which party A seeks to rely on the actual state of affairs 4) to party B's actual detriment or loss. Estoppel would stop party A from being able to give legal effect to the actual state of affairs.
The textbook example I remember involved trespass, which is a pretty cut-and-dried legal doctrine. In that example, party A owned a piece of land, which party B used to regularly travel over. Party A allowed B to continue to regularly travel over the land for a long time, such that B actually developed some sort of monetary gain from it. Party A then tried to sue B in trespass. B pleaded estoppel, and the court agreed. It was outrageous that A should lie in wait, and lead B to believe that it had no objection to the trespass.
It's essentially an ancient legal doctrine meant to counter frauds or bait-and-switch operations.
It's important to note that estoppel is an equitable doctrine, meaning it's a subset of legal arguments traditionally pled where someone's clear legal rights will lead to an egregious injustice.
No, my recollection is that almost from the beginning the saucer section was meant to detach and allow landings. IIRC, early on in series development, they were thinking of having it land for every planetside episode. I think they figured out that would be too expensive to do (the cost of the special effects for a landing was too high to contemplate doing all the time) and so transporter technology was "invented". Necessity is the mother of invention... Anyhow, the saucer section then became a lifeboat for the crew if there were disastrous failures in the engineering seciton or in the nacelles.
Well, yeah, actually this isn't a joke. It's been a maxim of the legal profession since the middle ages. It was mentioned during a class when I was in first year law school. The only kind of lawyer that doesn't exist to serve his or her clients' adversarial needs are perhaps those solicitors who deal with wills, and instruments of ownership and transfer. And even then, there are usually people who want to contest someone's title or ownership. Can't we all just get along?
Uh huh. Well, there's an example of a cynical, thoroughly commodified analysis of life if ever I saw one. You just described a consumer profile, not a national identity. Believe it or not, many people, Americans included, see themselves in terms of more than just their consumption habits. What makes me a Canadian has little or nothing to do with what car I drive, or what beer I drink.
If Canada did become part of the US, however, Americans would be foolish to assume that we would simply melt into the "melting pot". Your world would change PDQ. Canada has never been a "melting pot" -- mostly because we were a nation established by two distinct but seperate cultures. We actually believe in things like socialized medicine (even though we're having an increasingly hard time putting our money where our mouth is on that point). I seriously doubt that you would ever see another republican elected to the White House. We really don't like the idea of invading other countries, and have never done so unilaterally. I don't think a lot of Americans would like their country much if Canada was a part of it. Maybe it would be for the best if you just left us out...
Well, in Canada, the Supreme Court basically interprets the term "expression" (as in "Freedom of...expression" in s. 2(b) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms) to mean "coveying a meaning". So, video games would probably be considered a form of expression in Canada, since they are conveying something that has a meaning to the player/viewer.
However, there are limits to expression in Canada, including "violent expression." This is usually meant to apply to expressions of violence, though. As twisted (in a very bad way) as the Postal games are, I doubt they'd be considered violent in the sense necessary to avoid the 2(b) protection.
Then again, I've heard people hypothesizing future scenarios where only part-time is available since benefits packages don't need to be offered, causing the average person to take two or even three part time jobs to pay the bills, so this may not be the best plan....
Hmmm... this ain't no hypothesis my friend. I used to work at a street-level welfare clinic as a legal advocate. Almost to a person, the people who were really working at getting off the welfare system had to take two or three jobs -- often one full time and one part time -- to make enough to live. These people were usually "average" in every way except perhaps in their starting position in society. There were entire sectors of the local economy developing to take advantage of these marginal, underemployed workers.
Great. More economists that the ability to predict consumer response to market forces sheds light upon the essences of human nature. Are western consumers really the epitome of human social development? Human beings evolved to maximize their conversion of their environment into products for consumption? If so, I think humanity is a failed experiment.
This particular book seems much ado about nothing, frankly. Other posters have mentioned the triteness of the concept that people do what they see other people doing. Again, is this supposed to be the core of human nature?
If the author's view is offered to counter the traditional economic view of "rational actors" then perhaps it has a little value. But nobody really believes that economic crap -- not even the economists. It's just used to explain the accumulation of economic power as being desireable, after the fact. Econcomics is a "science" for hire, after all. At best, the author's insights (if they prove to be true) are merely the refinement of a tool for centralizing wealth and power. That hardly seems like a reason to applaud.
Remember, the U.S. will allow the Chinese to "join" with us in our space ventures when they stop oppressing their own people for both political and religion reasons... and stop oppressing the free, democratic people of Taiwan by letting them have their own seat at the U.N.
Uh huh. What about the US's trade ventures? China's appalling HR record doesn't seem particularly relevant to those. I suppose one must keep things in petrspective, though. I mean, we can't let HR get in the way of the real money-makers.
A lot of the world still lives that way...
on
Tech Rich Get Richer
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· Score: 2, Interesting
That "Marxian meme" made a lot of sense when it was coined in early industrial era England. Cheap manufacturing destroyed the cottage industries that had provided most of the skilled trades with what was for the time a steady, secure and comfortable (if not lavish) life. Extreme power and authority really only existed for the bizarre and mystical elites (landowners, and the clergy). Progress and improvements in the standard of living had been slow and incremental, and were generally only experienced by the elites.
Anyhow, your statment betrays a certain ethnocentrism. Pragmatically, you describe your wealth as evidence that "capitalism" has improved your standard of living incredibly from the level experienced by your grandparents. Indeed it has -- my own grandparents lived in unheated row housing in England when they were children. This seems more like a product of scientific progress, however -- capitalism is the mechanism whereby the capitalist uses his or her personal power (i.e access to capital) as leverage to gain even more access to capital. In other words, capitalism is about capital, not about progress.
There are still (billions of) people living like our grandparents in the world. There are still people who think of a block of ice as a fridge, and where many children and mothers die at birth. Their extreme powerlessness in the face of the capitalists makes it nearly impossible to demand their fair share of the "wealth" they generate, and that excess wealth is shipped over here to us.
Perhaps I am misunderstanding your motives, and you make no pretensions to an egalitarian belief that capitalism can raise people up without sending others down. Frankly, though, even if you are sincerely interested in the welfare of other people, you should try to expand your consideration of who benefits to the "invisible" people who make your shirts, assemble your electronics, and still live like your grandparents did. I don't believe that capitalism is evil, or that it's a zero-sum game, but I do believe that there is a limit to which individuals can fairly accumulate the wealth generated by others. As you pointed out, a person can only eat so much caviar -- even so, it seems like there are people who will continue to buy new warehouses to store the caviar in for themselves, rather than recognizing this fact.
Asking your lawyer friend to write you a contract is like asking your author friend to come up with a short story. It takes a lot of thought to do a good job. I'd rather install a hard drive, personally -- at least it's immediately apparent whether you're doing it right or not. There's no such clarity with contract law.
I use it a lot, and since someone pointed out the Google Toolbar add-on, this would be all that's stopping me from a complete conversion to Mozilla/Firebird.
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Since when could you be found guilty for murder in the scenario you described? You can't be held guilty for someone else's act when you took no part in it. If that was the case then for every death caused by a stolen gun in the US, there'd be two people going to prison -- the murderer and the former gun owner.
I disagree... at least in theory. If I am a rather introverted person (as I actually am), but my friends aren't, then I will have access to many more people than I would normally through my own behaviour. I'm not saying I'm antisocial, I'm saying I'm introverted -- there are some important differences. My extroverted friends shouldn't really mind if I piggyback on their outgoing nature in this way, because it's a hell of a lot easier than introducing me through more conventional means.
Mr. Nemitz confuses domestic property law with international law, I think. If he had done a bit of reading up on the philosophy of law, he'd realize that governments are the only source of law in the international milieu where treaties are drafted.
You are precluded from laying claim to land in space because property rights come to citizens from their governments, Mr. Nemitz. You have no personal authority at law to lay claim to any "Terra Nullius" you may come across (unless you are the designated representative of a country who does have that authority). You can sit on that asteroid with a shotgun and keep people off by force, but in that case you have only possession, not title. When a state lays a claim to that asteroid (or states agree that no-one shall do so), they can enforce that law against your possession.
It will be interesting to see what the court has to say about this claim.
The legality or illegality of their entering your car without your permission isn't changed by the presence of a lock. I can leave my car parked in the middle of a parking lot with the doors wide open, and still enjoy the protection of the law against theft. It may be smarter to lock your car in the context of your particular environment, but not locking your car doesn't abrogate the legal prohibition. It just makes you careless, and easier for someone to enter your car.
The analogy here is the fact that MS software has easy-to-access-holes in it does not mean that exploiting those holes is made any more "legal". It may be negligent, but it doesn't represent permission to someone else to exploit the hole.
Ummm... Afghanistan is landlocked, dude.
What other kinds of entitlements are there? Or are you positing a society where no-one attempts to exploit anyone else? That's utopian reasoning. Sure, if we were all perfect moral actors, there would be no need for government. And there would be no Capitalists, either.
Careful there, neighbour. You probably wouldn't really want to live in a world where nobody owed anyone else anything, because you wouldn't be able to make people pay you for working, or keep them from holding you down and taking your organs for that matter. Reciprocity is necessary for any sort of operational social order, including the one that allows you to not to be shot of hand by people who disagree with your opinions.
Throughout human history, Kings, Emperors, Despots, and the like have waged wars over who has the right to print money. What we're seeing here is that war played out in a corporate environment.
Zero production costs = 100% profit. Many people would risk anything, and do, for the chance to participate in that sort of formula. Wouldn't you, given the chance? It's the Capitalist Nirvana.
The textbook example I remember involved trespass, which is a pretty cut-and-dried legal doctrine. In that example, party A owned a piece of land, which party B used to regularly travel over. Party A allowed B to continue to regularly travel over the land for a long time, such that B actually developed some sort of monetary gain from it. Party A then tried to sue B in trespass. B pleaded estoppel, and the court agreed. It was outrageous that A should lie in wait, and lead B to believe that it had no objection to the trespass.
It's essentially an ancient legal doctrine meant to counter frauds or bait-and-switch operations.
It's important to note that estoppel is an equitable doctrine, meaning it's a subset of legal arguments traditionally pled where someone's clear legal rights will lead to an egregious injustice.
No, my recollection is that almost from the beginning the saucer section was meant to detach and allow landings. IIRC, early on in series development, they were thinking of having it land for every planetside episode. I think they figured out that would be too expensive to do (the cost of the special effects for a landing was too high to contemplate doing all the time) and so transporter technology was "invented". Necessity is the mother of invention... Anyhow, the saucer section then became a lifeboat for the crew if there were disastrous failures in the engineering seciton or in the nacelles.
Great. I have until 2017.
If Canada did become part of the US, however, Americans would be foolish to assume that we would simply melt into the "melting pot". Your world would change PDQ. Canada has never been a "melting pot" -- mostly because we were a nation established by two distinct but seperate cultures. We actually believe in things like socialized medicine (even though we're having an increasingly hard time putting our money where our mouth is on that point). I seriously doubt that you would ever see another republican elected to the White House. We really don't like the idea of invading other countries, and have never done so unilaterally. I don't think a lot of Americans would like their country much if Canada was a part of it. Maybe it would be for the best if you just left us out...
However, there are limits to expression in Canada, including "violent expression." This is usually meant to apply to expressions of violence, though. As twisted (in a very bad way) as the Postal games are, I doubt they'd be considered violent in the sense necessary to avoid the 2(b) protection.
Hmmm... this ain't no hypothesis my friend. I used to work at a street-level welfare clinic as a legal advocate. Almost to a person, the people who were really working at getting off the welfare system had to take two or three jobs -- often one full time and one part time -- to make enough to live. These people were usually "average" in every way except perhaps in their starting position in society. There were entire sectors of the local economy developing to take advantage of these marginal, underemployed workers.
This particular book seems much ado about nothing, frankly. Other posters have mentioned the triteness of the concept that people do what they see other people doing. Again, is this supposed to be the core of human nature?
If the author's view is offered to counter the traditional economic view of "rational actors" then perhaps it has a little value. But nobody really believes that economic crap -- not even the economists. It's just used to explain the accumulation of economic power as being desireable, after the fact. Econcomics is a "science" for hire, after all. At best, the author's insights (if they prove to be true) are merely the refinement of a tool for centralizing wealth and power. That hardly seems like a reason to applaud.
Uh huh. What about the US's trade ventures? China's appalling HR record doesn't seem particularly relevant to those. I suppose one must keep things in petrspective, though. I mean, we can't let HR get in the way of the real money-makers.
Anyhow, your statment betrays a certain ethnocentrism. Pragmatically, you describe your wealth as evidence that "capitalism" has improved your standard of living incredibly from the level experienced by your grandparents. Indeed it has -- my own grandparents lived in unheated row housing in England when they were children. This seems more like a product of scientific progress, however -- capitalism is the mechanism whereby the capitalist uses his or her personal power (i.e access to capital) as leverage to gain even more access to capital. In other words, capitalism is about capital, not about progress.
There are still (billions of) people living like our grandparents in the world. There are still people who think of a block of ice as a fridge, and where many children and mothers die at birth. Their extreme powerlessness in the face of the capitalists makes it nearly impossible to demand their fair share of the "wealth" they generate, and that excess wealth is shipped over here to us.
Perhaps I am misunderstanding your motives, and you make no pretensions to an egalitarian belief that capitalism can raise people up without sending others down. Frankly, though, even if you are sincerely interested in the welfare of other people, you should try to expand your consideration of who benefits to the "invisible" people who make your shirts, assemble your electronics, and still live like your grandparents did. I don't believe that capitalism is evil, or that it's a zero-sum game, but I do believe that there is a limit to which individuals can fairly accumulate the wealth generated by others. As you pointed out, a person can only eat so much caviar -- even so, it seems like there are people who will continue to buy new warehouses to store the caviar in for themselves, rather than recognizing this fact.
Check out Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars for an example of materiel being sent before the colonists.
Asking your lawyer friend to write you a contract is like asking your author friend to come up with a short story. It takes a lot of thought to do a good job. I'd rather install a hard drive, personally -- at least it's immediately apparent whether you're doing it right or not. There's no such clarity with contract law.
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I use it a lot, and since someone pointed out the Google Toolbar add-on, this would be all that's stopping me from a complete conversion to Mozilla/Firebird.
P.S. ...1st post ever. Please be gentle...