The federal government has direct jurisdiction over D.C. I'm not sure that's a good example.
No, the DC government has jurisdiction over the city, and the feds have some jurisdiction over specific properties... but it's the FAA that enforces the 30-mile-wide DC FRZ.
The DC Flight Restriction Zone (which prohibits operating even a toy drone at ANY altitude within the FRZ unless you have an impossible to get waiver) is an FAA affair. Unless you're firing up your 9-ounce toy drone inside a building, you're subject to FAA enforcement and huge fines the moment the device is a millimeter off the grass or your driveway, in an area that includes not just downtown, but past the beltway and well into the 'burbs in Maryland and Virginia. It's the FAA that does regulate that air an inch off the ground, and they have fined people for using it in conflict with the FRZ they've established. They've shut down decades-old model airplane clubs in the hills of Virginia across the river, miles away from DC using that same agency-level regulatory authority. And it doesn't matter if you keep your quadcopter hovering 10mm or 100m off the ground.
You mean like Trumps first SCOTUS appointee? I would take a clinton appointee over that guy any day.
There you have it. You don't want someone who is a constructionist, you want someone who treats the SCOTUS like an alternative legislature. That's one of the reasons that millions of people who can't stand Trump still voted for him: because Hillary Clinton displayed (as you're doing) pure contempt for the checks and balances written into the constitution. Gorsuch is an absolutely essential antidote to the people Obama sat, and we just avoided decades of craziness by not having Clinton seat more of the same. She came right out and said wouldn't name any body with a lot of experience on the bench, and thought it was time to put on the Supreme Court people who "know what different people are going through" blah blah blah. In other words, the last thing she wanted were justices dedicated to the constitution. She wanted surrogate legislators to adhere to her political agenda and use the court as a place not to test laws against their constitutionality, but instead as a place to go get things done that she knew she couldn't get through non-compliant representatives elected to office. Trump will be long gone in a few years, but the constitution will still be there, and we need judges who actually understand that it's only to be meddled with through amendments, not political subservience.
You're confusing demonstrated hostility with the ability to get it done... something that has been (barely) blocked by legislators and judges many of whom hold office specifically because of support from those millions of people. Obama expressed continual frustration that in the wake of various murder sprees he was unable to get laws changed (though he was pretty careful to avoid the subject of the proposed laws never actually calling for anything that would have prevented any of the tragedies he liked to try to use for leverage), and Hillary Clinton was more than happy to tell a journalist that, sure, she'd consider an Australian-style confiscation process. Both Obama and Clinton regularly referred to places like California as models... where, of course, a new law is set to make lots of people into criminals for owning and failing to give up things they legally purchased. Happily, the courts may once again inject some rationality. We'll see.
The FAA has never tried to regulate that low of an elevation
Sure they have. Try, for example, flying a drone one inch off the ground on the sidewalk in DC. Got $10,000 (just to get started) for the FAA-enforced fine you'll face?
Right, this is the sort of thing that pissed off a lot of people when the FAA's perspective on the matter got poisoned during the last administration. But no, this pertains to powered flight.
Depends on what you're doing with it while you're holding it. That might also be a felony. Likewise with "in your truck," depending on where you're driving and under what circumstances. That's one of the reason we need the concealed carry reciprocity law just passed in the house, so that you actually CAN know that you won't be capriciously prosecuted because you changed zip codes in your car while not changing your behavior one bit.
No, now I have to do no such thing until the FAA decides what the rules are, using the proper process this time. I don't have to like it. But at least it's being discussed constitutionally, instead of by whim and a pen, as Obama did it. The rules can come and go, now, per the judgement of the person appointed to run that agency. Constitutionally. Yes, shifting the functioning of the government back onto a more constitution-observing footing IS winning.
He signed a law that clarified the FAA's statutory authority on a matter that his predecessor acted out without the legislature (again, as he did on so many other things) and got smacked down by the courts for operating outside of the constitution's boundaries (again). This sets the state for the FAA to arrive at rules in this area that aren't directly illegal, like the last one under Obama.
No, the camera-less aircraft can still be an aviation hazard. That's the point. NONE of this has anything whatsoever to do with privacy protection. Just like the local news helicopter's subject to all sorts of FAA rules about its specs, maintenance, operators, flight plans, etc., but the fact that it carries very powerful cameras is completely outside the FAA's purview, which is exactly how it should be.
Any aircraft over 9 ounces, was the previous rule. Likely will be the same standard if the FAA uses this new authority to put the process in place legally (as opposed to illegally, the last time around). So, yeah, that little pink plastic RC copter from the mall toy kiosk is seen by the FAA as an aircraft, and the person operating is is subject to the full weight of the FAA's power to fine and bring other charges for mis-use.
I would suggest making it legal to shoot those little fuckers out of the sky.
All of these regulations treat drones as aircraft. You shoot at an aircraft under an circumstances, you are open to a federal felony conviction. Have been for many decades. Let me guess, you'd also like the right to shoot at people driving by your house with the car radios too loud, right? Or anyone standing in the street with binoculars? Just shoot 'em, right?
You've got that exactly backwards. The millions of members of the NRA are a big part of the block that got him elected over Hillary Clinton, who is aggressively hostile to your constitutionally protected rights.
Makes one feel safe walking around knowing that people you meet on the street are, most likely, not armed.
You've got it exactly backwards. It makes one recognize that, as usual, the people most likely to be armed are the criminals who simply don't give a rat's ass about the law... while the careful, law-abiding people who do care are stripped of that same ability.
Are Free Speech Zones purely local or state level legislation then?
It depends on which entity is responsible for the physical location where an event is being held. Let's say we're talking about one of the usual high-profile ones, like the parade and other large gatherings associated with presidential inaugurations. An event that one group or another always wants to disrupt, to make it about their thing, rather than about the inauguration. The grounds where these events take place are a patchwork of the city of the District of Columbia (handled by DC's own metro police), the National Park Service (a piece of the Dept of the Interior, a federal agency, policed by Park Police), and then places like the grounds of Capitol building, which is policed by the Capitol Police. Lots of different entities.
In each case, the entity holding the event makes arrangements with all of those jurisdictions to reserve the space for what's going to happen (a parade, a speech, etc). For that, they get a permit. They also pay a lot for the extra cost of policing those areas so that traffic is controlled, so that people can't run out in the middle of the street and blockade a parade, etc. The "free speech zones" are areas outside of the areas that have been booked, reserved, and paid for by the entity holding the event. The people who want to organize a large group of disrupters/protesters to take over the event are indeed kept, physically, by fences and by police if necessary, from doing so. Why? Because THEY GET EXACTLY THAT SAME PROTECTION when they make arrangements and carry the costs to close the street and parks and make them secure for their own event, safe from the heckler's veto of some other group that wants to wreck their event the same way they want to wreck someone else's on a different day.
Protesters aren't corralled out of the site of dignitaries, they're kept from being able to use force (of numbers, blocking streets and destroying things) to shut down an event they didn't organize. When they want to organize something with exactly the same level of effort, they'll get the exact same level of protection. This has nothing to do with run-of-the-mill standing around on a street corner holding up a sign that says the End Is Near or Eat The Rich or whatever. This is about denying one group the opportunity to veto another group's carefully arranged public event by simply using chaos. That's what permits are for when putting together large events in public spaces - so there can be some safety and care in how it plays out. Every group applying to use a public space gets the same consideration and protection from outside groups that want to shut them down by physically invading that reserved, permitted space.
Excuses him from what? From taking many steps to reduce the overall regulator burden and the number of law-like non-laws that Obama "penned" into place, not counting the ones that the Supreme Court took away from him as plainly unconstitutional?
I've often thought that Trump could be accurately compared to Mussolini, and we all know how that turned out.
How it turned out for Italy and for Mussolini is irrelevant because your thought that the two could be "accurately compared" is laughable on the face of it. Now, if you want someone that was all about getting government more in bed with large businesses and lining up that complex of power to be more intrusive in your life, then you should definitely have voted for Clinton. I imagine you did. You must be relieved that she didn't get the opportunity to put judged on the Supreme Court, since she explicitly pointed out that knew she'd be looking at a hostile legislature, and would be looking to seat justices who could help her forward her agenda. So, yeah, dodged that bullet, right?
No, the FAA's got statutory power to regulate the airspace - from an inch off the ground on up - across the entire country. Having each state regulate the airspace differently would be absurd. The only reason this particular matter came up was because congress - in 2012 - explicitly set aside recreational model aircraft as not being subject to any further regs. This appears to change that law, and has nothing to do with the FAA's broader statutory authority.
Actually, your big problem is that you can't identify a particular agent with any accuracy, it's easy to fake any of it, and so it serves no certain purpose.
The discussion of the user agent is merely an example. We could just as easily say "requests that match a certain frequency or speed or pattern of IP address use" and the issue would be the same.
Actually, you're the one who wants to tell other people how to run their lives, by controlling what their web browser does.
What? How am I controlling what their web browser does? I'm not controlling anybody else's web service or content, just mine. Their web browser can do whatever it is they want to, with whatever connectivity they find a vendor willing to sell them, under whatever terms they both agree to. That has nothing to do with whether or how I choose to dedicate some given portion of my resources that person's traffic to/from my web server.
Because you have a personal obsession with power and control
Says the person who wants the power to control how I run my web server or how I choose the network providers and services that I use to connect it to other networks. Hilarious. Just like the antifa types. "We're against fascism! And we're going to put on our matching uniforms and use organized violence to silence people who use Wrong Think in order to prove our virtue!"
Your entire post just boils down to "we don't need consumer or investor protections..."
Consumer and investor protections are essentially law enforcement measures there to prevent crime, usually in form of some sort of fraud. You're deliberately conflating that with grabbing a bunch of tax money from a group of people and handing it over to another group because they made poor choices. So, some person who KNEW it was unwise to take on a variable-rate, 0% down payment mortgage (and, wisely, resisted doing so) gets to work part of every day to pay taxes that will be handed over to people who la-la-la took out a huge loan they were in no position to handle. That's not consumer protection, it's politicians trying to be seen being generous to a dumb group of people with money taken from a smart group of people.
Take the French Lit degree holder in your example. Perhaps it was a bad decision, but what is the proper way for society to handle that?
How about... tell the person who wants the degree in French Lit from a school that costs $50k a year that perhaps they'd be better off taking those first couple years of classes someplace they can actually afford it? Who said anything about getting rid of the degree? We're talking about telling the person who thinks they deserve to have other people buy them four years at an expensive school that - just like the person who wisely keeps their tuition costs under control by getting their degree in, say, hospital administration or engineering from a lower-cost in-state school after some time in the community college - their choices are going to cost them, and only them, what those choices cost. The guy who - despite loving literature - chooses instead to attend a vocational school and then quickly starts making $70k as a diesel mechanic while enjoying his fascination with Polish poetry on his own time without decades of debt to whine about, is the one you seem to be thinking should be taxed so that other, less-wise entitled-feeling idiot can attend Harvard and graduate without any prospect for a job in the studied field.
Attacking all consumer protections or safety nets
Nice straw man, there. Please cite the words I used that resemble anything at all like that. Really, go ahead.
then your not so veiled comparison to the mortgage crisis
No, it's a not-so-veiled comparison to every other situation where people deliberately, knowingly, foolishly take on a mountain of debt they can't afford. And then start looking to other people - via government compulsion through taxes taken mostly from a small percentage of the population - to pay for it. It's no different than people stamping their feet and demanding that we elect Bernie Sanders because he's promising to eliminate the debt his supporters racked up getting a useless French Lit degree while attending an expensive out of state party school instead of living within their means and using the local community college for a fraction of the price. It's the sense of entitlement we're talking about. I'm entitled to some of that sweet bitcoin profit, and I'm entitled to make other people pay for the debt I took trying to get it. Just like people feel entitled to a profit flipping houses in a bubble market, and entitled to being bailed out when the bubble they helped create then breaks.
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Well darn. So much for not infringing on my rights to form a militia. Guess I'll keep my day job.
You've never actually read the constitution, have you?
The federal government has direct jurisdiction over D.C. I'm not sure that's a good example.
No, the DC government has jurisdiction over the city, and the feds have some jurisdiction over specific properties ... but it's the FAA that enforces the 30-mile-wide DC FRZ.
The DC Flight Restriction Zone (which prohibits operating even a toy drone at ANY altitude within the FRZ unless you have an impossible to get waiver) is an FAA affair. Unless you're firing up your 9-ounce toy drone inside a building, you're subject to FAA enforcement and huge fines the moment the device is a millimeter off the grass or your driveway, in an area that includes not just downtown, but past the beltway and well into the 'burbs in Maryland and Virginia. It's the FAA that does regulate that air an inch off the ground, and they have fined people for using it in conflict with the FRZ they've established. They've shut down decades-old model airplane clubs in the hills of Virginia across the river, miles away from DC using that same agency-level regulatory authority. And it doesn't matter if you keep your quadcopter hovering 10mm or 100m off the ground.
You mean like Trumps first SCOTUS appointee? I would take a clinton appointee over that guy any day.
There you have it. You don't want someone who is a constructionist, you want someone who treats the SCOTUS like an alternative legislature. That's one of the reasons that millions of people who can't stand Trump still voted for him: because Hillary Clinton displayed (as you're doing) pure contempt for the checks and balances written into the constitution. Gorsuch is an absolutely essential antidote to the people Obama sat, and we just avoided decades of craziness by not having Clinton seat more of the same. She came right out and said wouldn't name any body with a lot of experience on the bench, and thought it was time to put on the Supreme Court people who "know what different people are going through" blah blah blah. In other words, the last thing she wanted were justices dedicated to the constitution. She wanted surrogate legislators to adhere to her political agenda and use the court as a place not to test laws against their constitutionality, but instead as a place to go get things done that she knew she couldn't get through non-compliant representatives elected to office. Trump will be long gone in a few years, but the constitution will still be there, and we need judges who actually understand that it's only to be meddled with through amendments, not political subservience.
You're confusing demonstrated hostility with the ability to get it done ... something that has been (barely) blocked by legislators and judges many of whom hold office specifically because of support from those millions of people. Obama expressed continual frustration that in the wake of various murder sprees he was unable to get laws changed (though he was pretty careful to avoid the subject of the proposed laws never actually calling for anything that would have prevented any of the tragedies he liked to try to use for leverage), and Hillary Clinton was more than happy to tell a journalist that, sure, she'd consider an Australian-style confiscation process. Both Obama and Clinton regularly referred to places like California as models ... where, of course, a new law is set to make lots of people into criminals for owning and failing to give up things they legally purchased. Happily, the courts may once again inject some rationality. We'll see.
The FAA has never tried to regulate that low of an elevation
Sure they have. Try, for example, flying a drone one inch off the ground on the sidewalk in DC. Got $10,000 (just to get started) for the FAA-enforced fine you'll face?
Right, this is the sort of thing that pissed off a lot of people when the FAA's perspective on the matter got poisoned during the last administration. But no, this pertains to powered flight.
So guns are only cool if I'm directly holding it?
Depends on what you're doing with it while you're holding it. That might also be a felony. Likewise with "in your truck," depending on where you're driving and under what circumstances. That's one of the reason we need the concealed carry reciprocity law just passed in the house, so that you actually CAN know that you won't be capriciously prosecuted because you changed zip codes in your car while not changing your behavior one bit.
No, now I have to do no such thing until the FAA decides what the rules are, using the proper process this time. I don't have to like it. But at least it's being discussed constitutionally, instead of by whim and a pen, as Obama did it. The rules can come and go, now, per the judgement of the person appointed to run that agency. Constitutionally. Yes, shifting the functioning of the government back onto a more constitution-observing footing IS winning.
That's already very well covered. Mount a gun on your aircraft and you are set up to earn yourself a federal felony. Period.
He signed a law that clarified the FAA's statutory authority on a matter that his predecessor acted out without the legislature (again, as he did on so many other things) and got smacked down by the courts for operating outside of the constitution's boundaries (again). This sets the state for the FAA to arrive at rules in this area that aren't directly illegal, like the last one under Obama.
No, the camera-less aircraft can still be an aviation hazard. That's the point. NONE of this has anything whatsoever to do with privacy protection. Just like the local news helicopter's subject to all sorts of FAA rules about its specs, maintenance, operators, flight plans, etc., but the fact that it carries very powerful cameras is completely outside the FAA's purview, which is exactly how it should be.
Any aircraft over 9 ounces, was the previous rule. Likely will be the same standard if the FAA uses this new authority to put the process in place legally (as opposed to illegally, the last time around). So, yeah, that little pink plastic RC copter from the mall toy kiosk is seen by the FAA as an aircraft, and the person operating is is subject to the full weight of the FAA's power to fine and bring other charges for mis-use.
I would suggest making it legal to shoot those little fuckers out of the sky.
All of these regulations treat drones as aircraft. You shoot at an aircraft under an circumstances, you are open to a federal felony conviction. Have been for many decades. Let me guess, you'd also like the right to shoot at people driving by your house with the car radios too loud, right? Or anyone standing in the street with binoculars? Just shoot 'em, right?
What if my drone has a gun on it?
If your drone has a gun on it, and you fly it, you are a felon. Next question?
I don't even see how the federal government has the power to regulate this
Because congress long ago gave the FAA statutory power over the national air space. It's not complicated.
You've got that exactly backwards. The millions of members of the NRA are a big part of the block that got him elected over Hillary Clinton, who is aggressively hostile to your constitutionally protected rights.
Makes one feel safe walking around knowing that people you meet on the street are, most likely, not armed.
You've got it exactly backwards. It makes one recognize that, as usual, the people most likely to be armed are the criminals who simply don't give a rat's ass about the law ... while the careful, law-abiding people who do care are stripped of that same ability.
Are Free Speech Zones purely local or state level legislation then?
It depends on which entity is responsible for the physical location where an event is being held. Let's say we're talking about one of the usual high-profile ones, like the parade and other large gatherings associated with presidential inaugurations. An event that one group or another always wants to disrupt, to make it about their thing, rather than about the inauguration. The grounds where these events take place are a patchwork of the city of the District of Columbia (handled by DC's own metro police), the National Park Service (a piece of the Dept of the Interior, a federal agency, policed by Park Police), and then places like the grounds of Capitol building, which is policed by the Capitol Police. Lots of different entities.
In each case, the entity holding the event makes arrangements with all of those jurisdictions to reserve the space for what's going to happen (a parade, a speech, etc). For that, they get a permit. They also pay a lot for the extra cost of policing those areas so that traffic is controlled, so that people can't run out in the middle of the street and blockade a parade, etc. The "free speech zones" are areas outside of the areas that have been booked, reserved, and paid for by the entity holding the event. The people who want to organize a large group of disrupters/protesters to take over the event are indeed kept, physically, by fences and by police if necessary, from doing so. Why? Because THEY GET EXACTLY THAT SAME PROTECTION when they make arrangements and carry the costs to close the street and parks and make them secure for their own event, safe from the heckler's veto of some other group that wants to wreck their event the same way they want to wreck someone else's on a different day.
Protesters aren't corralled out of the site of dignitaries, they're kept from being able to use force (of numbers, blocking streets and destroying things) to shut down an event they didn't organize. When they want to organize something with exactly the same level of effort, they'll get the exact same level of protection. This has nothing to do with run-of-the-mill standing around on a street corner holding up a sign that says the End Is Near or Eat The Rich or whatever. This is about denying one group the opportunity to veto another group's carefully arranged public event by simply using chaos. That's what permits are for when putting together large events in public spaces - so there can be some safety and care in how it plays out. Every group applying to use a public space gets the same consideration and protection from outside groups that want to shut them down by physically invading that reserved, permitted space.
Excuses him from what? From taking many steps to reduce the overall regulator burden and the number of law-like non-laws that Obama "penned" into place, not counting the ones that the Supreme Court took away from him as plainly unconstitutional?
I've often thought that Trump could be accurately compared to Mussolini, and we all know how that turned out.
How it turned out for Italy and for Mussolini is irrelevant because your thought that the two could be "accurately compared" is laughable on the face of it. Now, if you want someone that was all about getting government more in bed with large businesses and lining up that complex of power to be more intrusive in your life, then you should definitely have voted for Clinton. I imagine you did. You must be relieved that she didn't get the opportunity to put judged on the Supreme Court, since she explicitly pointed out that knew she'd be looking at a hostile legislature, and would be looking to seat justices who could help her forward her agenda. So, yeah, dodged that bullet, right?
No, the FAA's got statutory power to regulate the airspace - from an inch off the ground on up - across the entire country. Having each state regulate the airspace differently would be absurd. The only reason this particular matter came up was because congress - in 2012 - explicitly set aside recreational model aircraft as not being subject to any further regs. This appears to change that law, and has nothing to do with the FAA's broader statutory authority.
Actually, your big problem is that you can't identify a particular agent with any accuracy, it's easy to fake any of it, and so it serves no certain purpose.
The discussion of the user agent is merely an example. We could just as easily say "requests that match a certain frequency or speed or pattern of IP address use" and the issue would be the same.
Actually, you're the one who wants to tell other people how to run their lives, by controlling what their web browser does.
What? How am I controlling what their web browser does? I'm not controlling anybody else's web service or content, just mine. Their web browser can do whatever it is they want to, with whatever connectivity they find a vendor willing to sell them, under whatever terms they both agree to. That has nothing to do with whether or how I choose to dedicate some given portion of my resources that person's traffic to/from my web server.
Because you have a personal obsession with power and control
Says the person who wants the power to control how I run my web server or how I choose the network providers and services that I use to connect it to other networks. Hilarious. Just like the antifa types. "We're against fascism! And we're going to put on our matching uniforms and use organized violence to silence people who use Wrong Think in order to prove our virtue!"
Your entire post just boils down to "we don't need consumer or investor protections..."
Consumer and investor protections are essentially law enforcement measures there to prevent crime, usually in form of some sort of fraud. You're deliberately conflating that with grabbing a bunch of tax money from a group of people and handing it over to another group because they made poor choices. So, some person who KNEW it was unwise to take on a variable-rate, 0% down payment mortgage (and, wisely, resisted doing so) gets to work part of every day to pay taxes that will be handed over to people who la-la-la took out a huge loan they were in no position to handle. That's not consumer protection, it's politicians trying to be seen being generous to a dumb group of people with money taken from a smart group of people.
Take the French Lit degree holder in your example. Perhaps it was a bad decision, but what is the proper way for society to handle that?
How about ... tell the person who wants the degree in French Lit from a school that costs $50k a year that perhaps they'd be better off taking those first couple years of classes someplace they can actually afford it? Who said anything about getting rid of the degree? We're talking about telling the person who thinks they deserve to have other people buy them four years at an expensive school that - just like the person who wisely keeps their tuition costs under control by getting their degree in, say, hospital administration or engineering from a lower-cost in-state school after some time in the community college - their choices are going to cost them, and only them, what those choices cost. The guy who - despite loving literature - chooses instead to attend a vocational school and then quickly starts making $70k as a diesel mechanic while enjoying his fascination with Polish poetry on his own time without decades of debt to whine about, is the one you seem to be thinking should be taxed so that other, less-wise entitled-feeling idiot can attend Harvard and graduate without any prospect for a job in the studied field.
Attacking all consumer protections or safety nets
Nice straw man, there. Please cite the words I used that resemble anything at all like that. Really, go ahead.
then your not so veiled comparison to the mortgage crisis
No, it's a not-so-veiled comparison to every other situation where people deliberately, knowingly, foolishly take on a mountain of debt they can't afford. And then start looking to other people - via government compulsion through taxes taken mostly from a small percentage of the population - to pay for it. It's no different than people stamping their feet and demanding that we elect Bernie Sanders because he's promising to eliminate the debt his supporters racked up getting a useless French Lit degree while attending an expensive out of state party school instead of living within their means and using the local community college for a fraction of the price. It's the sense of entitlement we're talking about. I'm entitled to some of that sweet bitcoin profit, and I'm entitled to make other people pay for the debt I took trying to get it. Just like people feel entitled to a profit flipping houses in a bubble market, and entitled to being bailed out when the bubble they helped create then breaks.
Net neutrality has exactly NOTHING to do with forcing retailers to sell particular goods. Where are you getting this notion?