I'm not actively disagreeing with you, but your reading of the 10th Amendment is expressly contradictory of the way courts have read it. For most of the Modern Jurisprudential (post-Lochner) Era, the Supreme Court's interpretation of the 10th Amendment has been the following:
The Tenth Amendment was intended to confirm the understanding of the people at the time the Constitution was adopted, that powers not granted to the United States were reserved to the States or to the people. It added nothing to the instrument as originally ratified.
Thus in effect the 10th Amendment is a nullity in terms of its scope and power. There have been attempts to revive the 10th Amendment as a restriction on the Commerce Power--some as recently at the 1970s--but the Court has been quite divided over whether it wants to do this. There's some interesting reading on the subject here.
Well, if Jerry Yang and Yahoo really had a vision and really cared so much about achieving it, they wouldn't have sold their shares to a bunch of "capricious, money-grubbing, shareholders." Yahoo's decision to be a public traded company (a 19th Century development, not a 17th Century one), is one they made on their own because they need the money the equity markets provided to reach the status they hold now.
In fact, maybe Yahoo's original (pre-IPO) shareholders including Mr. Yang are the real greedy ones. After all, they obviously cared nothing about the company's long term prospects since they exposed it to the "horrors" of the publicly traded securities markets. It's clear they only cared about "cashing in" and monetizing the value of their Yahoo stock, Yahoo's actual company "be damned."
Just out of curiosity, what exactly to you propose replace the corporate entity in modern day business? Should we nationalize all major industry ala the U.K. in the 1960s and 70s and have the government be the only shareholder? Should we ban the concept of limited liability all together and only allow general partnerships (i.e., make each investor individually liable for the company's debts and obligations)?
Lol tell that to Jimmy Cayne and Joe Lewis. I bet they wish they'd sold their Bear Stearns stock at the top. Tell that to all of the mutual funds (the real big players) that are down over 10% this year. Hell I'm pretty sure Jerry Yang wishes he'd "magically sold out" back in 2000 when Yahoo's stock peaked.
I've beaten the S&P every year since I started investing, including this year, and I am not moving large amounts of cash by any stretch of the imagination. Don't blame your individual shortcomings as an investor on an institutional conspiracy to "screw the little guy."
unfortunately they are the most damaging factor for the vision and progress of any company.
Really?
Shareholders give companies money to expand, grow, and operate. More over they do it during times when the company cannot raise money through bank or debt issuances. In fact the restrictions a company takes on when taking out a loan are often much more onerous then the messiest of shareholder revolts.
Have you ever tried to start up a business? Do it, and try to get a loan before you've even set up shop. You'll be laughed out of almost every bank you go to, and if you do get a loan you'll probably be paying 500 basis points (5%) over prime. It's much less onerous to give up some control of your company to outside shareholders for their cash. At least then you don't have the exorbitant interest charges (and other potential restrictions) that come with taking out a loan.
Now specifically about Yahoo, Yahoo did not have to offer its stock publicly. If Jerry Yang wanted to run Yahoo like his personal dominion he didn't have to sell 2.6 million shares to the public in 1996 (plus the countless other secondary offerings Yahoo made). He could have retained control, but he chose take the shareholder's money and the many headaches that came along with it.
Parent's comment is correct about economic growth.
China can sustain a 10% annual growth rate because it is modernizing its economy. Remember, just 50 years ago most of the steel in China was made by peasantry in backyard furnaces. It's relatively easy to develop your country into a modern economy when you have plenty of examples to follow (e.g., Western Europe, the U.S., Japan, Korea). Heck, Korea brought itself back from a backwater agrarian economy to a full-fledged modern knowledge-based one in just under 50 years and it didn't have near the natural resources China has.
Economic growth always historically slows for developed nations because they no longer have any templates to follow. The organic or natural economic growth that came from playing catch-up is no longer there and they are now forced to innovate and invent to grow rather than just copy. Look at the post war growth patterns of Japan and Germany for an example.
I do not (and never have believed) that Jerry Yang and the rest of the Yahoo board was ever were serious about selling the company.
First there were no negotiations, Microsoft simply extended an offer which the Yahoo! board turned down.
Lol, you. I'm not getting into this again. Microsoft offered $31, Yahoo wanted at least $37. see article ("The collapse of talks between Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer and Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang prompted Wall Street brokerages to cut their ratings and price targets on Yahoo, which held out for a $37 per share value despite a sweetened off from Microsoft for $33 per share."). Microsoft raise its offer to $33, Yahoo said no. Offer; counter offer; counter-counter offer. A reasonable person would see this as an attempt to bargain between two parties, and so will any court in the U.S. End of discussion.
For example, look at the actions the board and management took right after the offer was announced.
The board didn't want to be eaten so they took steps they thought would slow down an acquirer.
They didn't do just that, they took actions that potentially could destroy the company's value, breaching their duty to the shareholders. Regardless of any circumstances a company's management is not allowed to take deliberate actions that can reasonably result in the destruction of a the company's wealth or value without the explicit permission of its shareholders. The legal term for this is waste, and it is very much illegal under any state's corporate law. Examples of wasting actions include...
They enacted huge employee termination compensation plans, including golden parachutes for management.
That's standard practice in business, and has been for a long tyme[sic] businesswise[sic].
Yes, but it is not "standard business practice" to enact them in an attempt to thwart a takeover. This is a perfect example of a wasting transaction. It was down without the explicit permission of the shareholders (who usually have to approve or give permission to the board to negotiate management contracts), and done in a fashion that destroy's the company's value by making it less valuable. Huge contingent payments to management not only diminish the company's value to a potential acquirers, but in instances where the realization of the contingency is reasonably likely also require the the company to make impairment deductions against its earnings (i.e., lowering their recognized profits in anticipation of the payments). See FASB Statement No. 5.
They tried to make a deal to acquire a portion of AOL
Citation please.
My pleasure. ("And then there was that AOL deal with word of some share buybacks at above-market prices.. . . And though Yahoo-AOL talks continue, according to the report, there's not much urgency (that's fair enough, no need to rush at this point.)") (emphasis added).
Like I said before, Yahoo's board was not reviewing this potential merger in good faith. They clearly violated their fiduciary duty to shareholders, and will be ousted, probably by Carl Icahn.
Managing a company is also supposed to take care of it in the long run.
Yes, that is true, but as a public company the company's board of directors also has an obligation to maximize shareholder value and look out for their bests interest. To justify a $37 share price (102% higher than the 18.50 it was trading at before the offer), Yahoo would basically have had to double its net income (i.e., profits).
The company's management has a good case for turning down the offer if they can give a plan on how to do this. They haven't offered one up, and instead have entered into arrangements that that might harm the company's earnings potential long term. How are the company's shareholder's going to benefit by the board's actions?
Google buying Yahoo on the other hand shouldnt be a problem since its only when you use your monopoly in a bad way that US laws come into action or if you use one monopoly to subside taking over an adjecent market.
Justice would never approve the deal. Anti-trust law is just as much preventative as it is punitive, thus the government has an obligation to look out for potentially harmful monopolies under current anti-trust law as it has an obligation to prosecute and regulator already harmful monopolies. It took the DOJ almost a year to approve the XM-Sirius merger, and just about the same time to approve Doubleclick and Google. Those transactions aren't nearly as anti-competitive as a Google-Yahoo one, which would give the combined company over 90% of all search traffic (and resulting revenue) on the internet.
Yahoo has acted to continue living and not being bought up and then dismantled quickly after being gutted of its users. A shareholder cant just sue because its board do not favour short onetime gains at the expence of the companys future.
If the board acts in a way that breaches the shareholders' fiduciary duty they can indeed sue the board for damages, and there are plenty of instances of conduct here that are at least borderline, if not actual breaches of duty. Even with that, the shareholders can always vote the board out, and I wouldn't be surprised if this is what happens at the July shareholder's meeting.
What obligation is that? Is the board obligated to make a deal with Microsoft? Are they obligated to engage in a good faith negotiation with them?
Yes, actually they are obligated to do so under Delaware law, the state in which Yahoo is incorporated. Here's a post I did earlier explaining a board's duty to shareholders during takeovers. Link.
I do not (and never have believed) that Jerry Yang and the rest of the Yahoo board was ever were serious about selling the company. Any negotiations that Yahoo's board entered into were done in bad faith and in violation of the board's obligations to the shareholders that elected it.
For example, look at the actions the board and management took right after the offer was announced. They enacted huge employee termination compensation plans, including golden parachutes for management. They entered into contractual arrangements with Google that would diminish their acquisition value to anybody but Google (which the DOJ would never approve). They tried to make a deal to acquire a portion of AOL It's clear that these actions were designed more dissuade Microsoft more than they were designed to deliver any shareholder value, which is the primary responsibility of any publicly held company.
Yahoo's board was acting in its own self-interest. I expect plenty of shareholder lawsuits, and given the fact that the stock has traded almost 30% of its shares outstanding in the last two days, I expect a proxy battle to oust the board as well. Yahoo's board has violated its fiduciary obligations to its shareholders and will likely pay the price for this.
Yes, of course because a terrorist suspect in Gitmo, Ramstein, Guam or wherever the hell they are being held can afford to pay $500/hour for a top flight attorney. Get real.
Most of the attorney's doing this work are either doing it pro bono or doing it for publicity/PR. They know that they are unlikely to ever get paid in full for the fair value of their services. Most of the expenses are coming right out of their own pocket.
Getting back to the original topic. Much of communication is non-verbal. Visual cues like rapidly shifting eye movements or hurried language can be signs that a person lying, and those are not picked up over purely text exchanges. And believe it or not, plenty of criminal defendants lie to their attorneys either out of lack of trust or a desire to cover up/save face.
Cutting through the bullshit and uncovering a truthful set of facts off which one can base a realistic defense is the essence of being a good defense attorney. If you let the defendant lie or misrepresent himself and his situation to you, you're failing to do that.
What if the message was "I totally fingered this passed out chick behind the Chi Omega house," or "I seriously jacked up this bum who asked me for change." That better for ya?
I'm as much a civil libertarian as the next guy, but let's get one thing straight:
Nobody has any expectation of privacy (reasonable or otherwise) in information they put on a website that is publicly accessible to other people.
If you write on a friend's facebook wall about how you got this "killer deal on pot" or how you "got this totally awesome handjob from a local hooker" and police find out and charge you, it's your own damn fault for being an idiot.
Furthermore, if you buddy wants to play confidential informant and sell you out to the government, that's a problem between you and your buddy, not between you and the government.
If you don't want police (or anyone) prying into your business, don't make information about said business publicly accessible.
The Fourth Amendment only applies where people have a reasonable expectation of privacy. KATZ v. UNITED STATES, 389 U.S. 347 (1967) (J. Harlan, concurring). Part of this reasonable expectation is the requirement that the person in question has a subjective expectation of privacy. This means that from the person's point of view, he or she could reasonably expect that the item, location, or information that was searched or seized was private. Thus, for example, the government can legally track somebody on a public street using visual surveillance.
The Supreme Court further allows the use of tracking devices and other sensorial enhancing technology, so long as they do not allow the government to obtain information that could otherwise not be obtained using traditional surveillance techniques. United States v Karo, 468 U.S. 705 (1984). Thus, for example, the government can use a tracking device to track someone on public streets because they would otherwise be able to track them visually without violating a person's reasonable expectation of privacy in his or her location. UNITED STATES v. KNOTTS, 460 U.S. 276 (1983). Alternatively, the government cannot use infrared imaging technology to look into a person's house from a couple hundred feet away because people cannot see infra red light waves. KYLLO V. UNITED STATES 533 U.S. 27 (2001).
Applying all of this to satellite or UAVs, it does not appear that these technologies violate a person's subjective expectations in privacy in their locations. As stated, people do not have such expectations on public streets because the reality is that everyone around them knows their location.
The Court has already ruled that helicopter surveillance is permissible. FLORIDA V. RILEY, 488 U. S. 445 (1989). Satellite and UAV surveillance is just an extension of this. Much like helicopter surveillance, all this technology allows is for law enforcement to augment its visual senses to observe stuff that they could have previously observed anyway.
The mere fact that they can now automate a large chunk of the work should be irrelevant. Better police cars, more police helicopters, or simply more police would also make it easier for law enforcement to survey targets, and those are all recognized as legitimate ways for the government to approve its law enforcement capabilities. Why would satellite imaging and UAV's be any different?
Yah I know this view is not popular on/., but under current Fourth Amendment jurisprudence, it's likely the one most courts would adopt. Moreover, it's probably the correct view, because the Fourth Amendment only applies where there is a reasonable expectation of privacy, and people have no such expectation in their physical location when they are walking about in public.
Looking at Time Warner's annual report you can see that from FY05 to FY07, AOL revenues are down 36%. Conversely, operating income excluding one-time items is up 21%.
This implies that the AOL division has remained profitable primarily by cost cutting, not by natural growth in its business. For example, it took them $7.52 to generate $1 of operating income in 2005. That ratio (revenue/operating income) is now down to $3.89.
Yahoo's business, on the other hand, is the mirror image of AOL's. Revenues from 2005-2007 are up 32.55%, while operating income is down 66.61%. This is mainly due to operating costs increasing 67% in the same period.
So essentially, you have a business, AOL, who sucks at generating revenue but is good at cutting costs, being bought out by a business, Yahoo, that is good at generating revenues (we'll see whether that holds in a recessionary environment), but horrible at keeping costs under control. If the two managements can learn from each other, this combination might actually work out for shareholders.
Of course, for Yahoo employees, it means pack your desks up because heads are rolling if YahAOL is formed.
A Yahoo-AOL merger would make for one mediocre company.
I think that's the exact reasoning for making such a deal. Yahoo would get cash from Time Warner to buy back its stock (thwarting Microsoft), but it would also have to transfer AOL's operations onto its balance sheet, making it a less valuable company.
Time Warner loves this of course, since it's been trying to get the AOL albatross off its neck basically since right after the two companies merged. The 20% stake it'll get in Yahoo-AOL is just a bonus. Yahoo shareholders are arguably getting screwed though if this happens, since (1) Yahoo is diluting their control with the issuance of shares to Time Warner and (2) Yahoo is actively taking steps to destroy shareholder value buy taking on AOL (just look at TW's financial statements if you want proof of that).
Say what you want about Microsoft/News Corp. being evil, but at least their management and boards are not blatantly violating their fiduciary duty to their shareholders by wasting company assets.
National governments have a mandate to serve the best interests of the people they represent. If free trade and open borders are demonstrably the best path, I'd be more supportive, but right now they look suspiciously like a path that leads off a cliff.
That's just what most people were saying in this country right before the US passed the Smoot-Hawley Tarrif Act. I think the Wikipedia article does a good job describing the horrendous results of that act of protectionism.
If it wasn't for free trade you would only be able to drive cars made by Ford, GM, or Chrysler, you wouldn't have cheap Taiwanese semiconductors powering your PC, you wouldn't have $5 dollar t-shirts at Wal-Mart, and you're only choice of video game consoles would be the XBox360.
I agree, there are plenty of short term downsides to free trade. People lose their jobs and have to adapt as industries shift offshore, but other jobs and industries inevitably take their place. People were complaining just as much in the 1970s and 1980s when all of are manufacturing moved overseas.
What are people going to do for a living when we no longer manufacture anything? No one, but the brilliant few saw services and technology as the future of the economy. It's the same situation now, only people are wondering what will happen when all low level tech jobs are outsourced. Do most of us know what's next? No, but I bet a few people do and their going to the billionaires of tomorrow. That's just how the world works.
It's just a jury verdict. Being a patent case, it will be appealed and probably be heard, so I doubt anything is certain about the verdict.
That said, I think Alcatel-Lucent should be more worried about their current CEO, Patricia Russo. This partial win is about all she can lay claim to besides the 45% slide in ALU's stock and the 70% slide in Lucent's stock prior to the merger. She'll need a couple more of these to make up for her Fiorina-esque management of the company. (To be fair, she's not the sociopathic power monger that Fiorina was. She's just as inept at management.)
Why exactly do we embrace an arbitrary concept of "innocence" in children?
This is one of those questions that's been debated in various social science disciplines for years (e.g., anthropology, psychology, sociology) so I'm pretty sure that going to your local library and looking up some academic journals will yield you a many hypotheses.
While I think most social constructs (like your example of swearing) really don't effect a child's innocence one way or another, I think there are other profound events in a child's life--for example, the first time a child realizes his parent's are not invincible--that really can have a tangible effect on the child's development, regardless of societal conventions.
I think theses losses of innocence for a child are a very profound event (whether the child realizes it or not at the time) and if they occurs too early, they can--for lack of a better phrase--really screw the child up. For example, there are numerous studies out there that show that the oversexualization (i.e., exposure to sexual acts, not just nudity) of children before puberty can cause all sorts of deviant (sexual and nonsexual) behavior when they grow older (e.g., addictive personality disorder, abusiveness, nymphomania, pedophilia).
While oversexualization is an extreme example of innocence lost, I think one could reasonably say premature loss of innocence in other areas of life also has some detrimental effect on a child's developmental. The degree of this effect probably varies, but I think it creates a strong presumption in favor of protecting a child's innocence, especially during his or her formative years.
That said, of course I'm pretty sure there's a downside toward protecting a child's innocence for too long, mainly that you'll end up with a adult who is too trusting and naive. Thus, I think the key for parents is to figure out how to balance these two tensions.
First, I agree with you completely. What Seagate is considering is BS of the highest degree and likely a perversion of the Founders' original intent. That said, having studied the subject a little, I'd like to point out some countervailing issues that everyone here seems to be ignoring.
What seems to be riling people up is the legal concept of reduction to practice, i.e., the point at which an invention has been deemed sufficiently completed, constructed, or created to warrant patent protection. Currently, this standard is relatively low; often a schematic or crude prototype is enough. This of course has the problem of allowing people to get just far enough along to patent the invention and then sit on it until someone else does the grunt work to get the invention marketable.
However, this low reduction to practice threshold also allows "the little guy" to protect his inventions an ideas by not requiring that he risk bankrupting himself to create a marketable product. Remember, a working invention and an iteration of that invention that can be sold for profits are too different things. That, I feel, is largely why the threshold has remained so low.
I personally believe that the little guy inventor is a myth in the modern world and that big research institutions (public and private), and corporations do most of the innovating. Thus, I think one could raise the threshold of reduction to practice to level to better suit these institution's financial realities, but if people want to protect the little guy, that cannot be done.
One compromise I think that could be done would be to introduce a wasting provision in the Patent Act. That is to say, a provision that would statutorily bar enforcement of any patent that the owner or exclusive licensee allows to waste. I'm not sure how exactly one would define the standard for wasting, but I feel that this statute properly defined would at least prevent patent trolling, and potentially could mitigate harm to the little guy by letting him get a patent easily, but also by forcing him to sell it if he cannot bring the invention to market.
Got any pin cites for federal cases? I'm writing a brief for my moot court program involving the surveillance IP addresses and I've got a Ninth Circuit (my local jurisdiction) decision that holds the exact opposite of your assertion. See United States v. Forrester, 512 F.3d 500, 510 n.5 (9th Cir. 2008) (stating that "Every computer or server connected to the Internet has a unique IP address.") I know that statement is wrong, and am trying to provide other case law to show that the court misstated its assumption.
Anyway if you have the pin cites handy feel free to reply. It'll make my life easier.
I'm not sure that's entirely correct. Certainly in record stores I've been into, the album racks far outweigh the singles ones although I do accept that for downloads the proportion of singles to albums is higher - or at least singles to non-single album tracks.
If 40% of the music sold is downloaded, that implies 60% is bought on CD which, based on the above, people are more inclined to be buying albums becaue that's what high street stores/online retailers stock the most of - or am I missing something?
Growth rate, which I alluded to but forgot to mention. Digital download sales are growing at between 25-30% per year in revenue stream while CD's average less than 5%. They are the future and among them most people buy singles. Hence digital downloads of singles are the future in terms of music distribution. Also, most people that do buy CDs, don't buy them from record stores. Wal-Mart, Amazon, Best Buy and Target are the largest sellers of CD's and make up in aggregate over 2/3 the market. I live in California and the only prominent record store chain I can think of that still exists is Amoeba, which caters primarily to second hand music sales and really hard to find indie label material--a sizeable but decidedly small segment of the music sales market.
I'd also argue they're also the same people downloading most of their music for free from BitTorrent due to less disposable income than someone my age. Just because they're listening to it, doesn't mean they've paid for it.
Yes, except for I was citing statistics on digital music "sales" not just downloads. The under 25 crowd also historically is the one that buys the most new music and generates the sales needed to make new albums hits. Older people tend to have fixed musical tastes and already have a huge backlog of music (for example you have 1200 CDs), thus they generally feel less of a need to go an purchase more music.
Agreed. But there seems to be this general tone to postings in here that if you're not downloading from iTunes then you must be downloading it free and illegally. I'm merely demonstrating that you can be a legal music enthusiast without owning an iPod.
Yes there is, but it's usually not in direct reference to people that buy CD's like yourself.
I personally think a majority of users on/. that download music illegally do it purely out of greed and spite for the music industry (perfectly understandable, especially the latter). They will never pay for music, regardless of if it ever becomes reasonably priced and of reasonable quality. They are just purely out to "stick it to the man." It's the same crowd that refuses to download DRM free songs off iTunes and Amazon because they aren't in Uncompressed 7.1-Channel 192kHz DVD Audio form and justifies piracy on that count.
They just don't want to pay for music, and I'd like to see them admit it for once, and not hide behind excuses. Let's just call a spade a spade.
First in general, you're not the "average user." PricewaterhouseCoopers has a very nice industry report from which I'll reference for data. It's a pay service, so you'll have to take my word, but if you want to pony up it's all there.
Most music listeners nowadays are prefer buying singles to albums. This is especially true of younger than 25 listeners, who make up almost half the music market. More than 40% of music revenues nowadays are generated by online downloads (e.g., iTunes, Amazon) and that number is growing rapidly (for reference it was 10% just two years ago). This is the state of the music business, singles and downloads are the future, not albums and CDs.
What I proposed is a compromise that caters to this future, try-before-you-buy and cheap singles. The latter will feed off the former, and I feel the majority of users will get a good deal. The fact that you don't is not indicative of the plan's total worth as you are not the average user.
You're perfectly welcome to continue with your habits. No one is stopping you from buying CDs. But that said, the world isn't perfect. You can't please everyone, hence the term compromise. To analogize, if you tried to build a speed bump that won't ruin the front end of a Ferrari Enzo, you would end up with no speed bump at all. You're the Enzo. Take it as a compliment.
The solution seems simple to me. Apple et. al., should charge $20-40 per iPod for 2-3 year unlimited access to the DRM'ed iTunes catalog, then allow users to buy permanent rights to individual songs DRM free for $ 0.25-0.50 per song.
Music companies get the best of both world, i.e., the steady income from subscriptions plus the ability to benefit from a mega-hit via direct sales.
Users benefit since they can try before the buy, and only buy music they really wan to keep. Additionally 2-3 years is the expected life of most iPods anyway, so most users won't be inconvenienced when the subscription goes out. They will simply buy a new iPod, or alternatively, they could be sold another term subscription.
The actual numbers make sense since according to Silicon Valley Insider, the music industry makes only about $20 in downloads per iPod anyway.
Finally, the cheaper, DRM-free purchase ability will separate those of us willing to pay a fair price for music we'd like to own from those just looking to justify their own personal piracy. (Personally, I think this group does the majority of the complaining hear on/.)
As long as no one (Apple, consumers, and the music industry) gets too greedy, I think working out a deal for unlimited subscriptions could be the detente everybody needs.
I've worked, studied, and basically lived in current political system for nearly 6 years, and in my opinion, its FUBAR, or close enough at any rate.
The biggest problem is that our current system was not built to handle vast government bureaucracy that has cropped up since WWII. Now look, before any liberals get pissy, I'm not a Paul-tard, and I'm not saying that government should only build roads, delivery mail, and fund a military.
That said, fundamentally, the U.S. form of representative democracy was built to do just that. It was meant to keep politics as the local and state level, while the current political discourse in this country has increasingly grown more national. Take the legislative bodies in the states and Congress for example. All of them are based on the idea of direct representation. A state legislator or House Member's role is to keep his or her constituents happy. If not, he gets the boot. And at the state senate and US Senate level (the latter especially after the 17th Amendment), the scope expands to a broader constituency, but the goal stays the same.
This structure creates an incentive and drive to keep the locals happy regardless of what the greater national interest might suggest. Now, that drive worked perfectly fine as long as the government had very little cash to dole out. Back in the 19th Century, the most a legislator could do was maybe bring some funding back for a new post office, roads, or at most a military installation. Government, especially at the federal level, did little else. Even education was rarely handled at the state level. There was very little money in government, and thus very little to try to corrupt. And when corruption did occur, it was on a much smaller (monetary) scale. (Hell even the land scandals with the railroad companies, while extremely bad, didn't really cost the government any money.)
Now, fast forward to the current situation where federal spending over the last 50 years has been at least 20% of the GDP, and where it is now accepted and expected that government's role is to dole that money out to someone, whether it be corporations through subsidies and contracts, the poor through welfare, students through college grants and loans, schools through grants and funds, the elderly through social security, the sick through medicare, deficit-inducing tax-cuts for taxpayers, and on and on.
With the current system, legislatures' are lured to keep the local folks happy by offering them a greater and greater share of the pie. They try to squeeze a nickel here, a dime there and before you know it, they've nickel and dimed their way into a quarter-trillion (or whatever it is now) dollar budget deficit. Look at Iraq, look at Social Security, look at the prescription drug benefit, look at no child left behind. All of these are just short term rackets run to please voters without any regard for any long-term damage they might be causing (i.e., inflation, debt, higher tax rates).
It's the reason why the Democrats spent their way into deficits while they were in power in the 60s. It's the reason why Republicans did the exact same when they took power in the 00s. It's the exact same reason why we'll still be running a deficit 4 years from now regardless of who wins this next election. (In case you can't tell, my pet peeve is deficits.) It's the culture of pork-barreled politics, and the principle behind it ("bringing home the bacon") leads our governments--state, local, and federal--to writing checks that our society cannot cash.
You know, it's not even really corruption per se. It's just the way the system was set up, and its probably functioning the way the Founding Fathers intended it. They just probably didn't intend for it to go beyond post offices, roads, and the military. All politics is local. Perhaps that is a maxim we (the U.S.) as a country need to rethink.
Real property - exclusion can be accomplished without involving 3rd parties. Real property - control does not require 3rd parties.
I guess your right, if you want to sit up 24/7 with a shotgun protecting your property.
The argument that real property rights exist without the assent third parties is facetious at best. In a civil society, we rely on third parties to recognize and respect our interest in physical property. Mutual recognition of property rights is part of the social contract.
Remember, your rights to exclude from and control your own property are moot if a group of villagers with pitch forks (or AK-47s to be more modern) decide that they don't want you to be able to exercise them.
Intellectual property - control requires 3rd parties (i.e. law enforcement)
We rely just as much on the government to enforce real property rights as we do on them to enforce intellectual property rights. Government enforcement and recognition of property rights is one of the cornerstone's of Western Civilization. That's how we prevent the "villagers with pitchforks" problem.
Real property rights exist because the government allows them to, just as much as intellectual property rights do. Ever hear of Eminent Domain? Real property rights are as a much a "legal fiction" as a Intellectual Property rights. They exist only because society deems them to. Want proof? Go look at any of the Warsaw Pact countries. Their citizens pretty much had no rights in real or personal property outside their toothbrushes.
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I'm not actively disagreeing with you, but your reading of the 10th Amendment is expressly contradictory of the way courts have read it. For most of the Modern Jurisprudential (post-Lochner) Era, the Supreme Court's interpretation of the 10th Amendment has been the following:
The Tenth Amendment was intended to confirm the understanding of the people at the time the Constitution was adopted, that powers not granted to the United States were reserved to the States or to the people. It added nothing to the instrument as originally ratified.
United States v. Sprague, 282 U.S. 716, 733 (1931).
Thus in effect the 10th Amendment is a nullity in terms of its scope and power. There have been attempts to revive the 10th Amendment as a restriction on the Commerce Power--some as recently at the 1970s--but the Court has been quite divided over whether it wants to do this. There's some interesting reading on the subject here.
Well, if Jerry Yang and Yahoo really had a vision and really cared so much about achieving it, they wouldn't have sold their shares to a bunch of "capricious, money-grubbing, shareholders." Yahoo's decision to be a public traded company (a 19th Century development, not a 17th Century one), is one they made on their own because they need the money the equity markets provided to reach the status they hold now.
In fact, maybe Yahoo's original (pre-IPO) shareholders including Mr. Yang are the real greedy ones. After all, they obviously cared nothing about the company's long term prospects since they exposed it to the "horrors" of the publicly traded securities markets. It's clear they only cared about "cashing in" and monetizing the value of their Yahoo stock, Yahoo's actual company "be damned."
Just out of curiosity, what exactly to you propose replace the corporate entity in modern day business? Should we nationalize all major industry ala the U.K. in the 1960s and 70s and have the government be the only shareholder? Should we ban the concept of limited liability all together and only allow general partnerships (i.e., make each investor individually liable for the company's debts and obligations)?
Lol tell that to Jimmy Cayne and Joe Lewis. I bet they wish they'd sold their Bear Stearns stock at the top. Tell that to all of the mutual funds (the real big players) that are down over 10% this year. Hell I'm pretty sure Jerry Yang wishes he'd "magically sold out" back in 2000 when Yahoo's stock peaked.
I've beaten the S&P every year since I started investing, including this year, and I am not moving large amounts of cash by any stretch of the imagination. Don't blame your individual shortcomings as an investor on an institutional conspiracy to "screw the little guy."
Really?
Shareholders give companies money to expand, grow, and operate. More over they do it during times when the company cannot raise money through bank or debt issuances. In fact the restrictions a company takes on when taking out a loan are often much more onerous then the messiest of shareholder revolts.
Have you ever tried to start up a business? Do it, and try to get a loan before you've even set up shop. You'll be laughed out of almost every bank you go to, and if you do get a loan you'll probably be paying 500 basis points (5%) over prime. It's much less onerous to give up some control of your company to outside shareholders for their cash. At least then you don't have the exorbitant interest charges (and other potential restrictions) that come with taking out a loan.
Now specifically about Yahoo, Yahoo did not have to offer its stock publicly. If Jerry Yang wanted to run Yahoo like his personal dominion he didn't have to sell 2.6 million shares to the public in 1996 (plus the countless other secondary offerings Yahoo made). He could have retained control, but he chose take the shareholder's money and the many headaches that came along with it.
Parent's comment is correct about economic growth.
China can sustain a 10% annual growth rate because it is modernizing its economy. Remember, just 50 years ago most of the steel in China was made by peasantry in backyard furnaces. It's relatively easy to develop your country into a modern economy when you have plenty of examples to follow (e.g., Western Europe, the U.S., Japan, Korea). Heck, Korea brought itself back from a backwater agrarian economy to a full-fledged modern knowledge-based one in just under 50 years and it didn't have near the natural resources China has.
Economic growth always historically slows for developed nations because they no longer have any templates to follow. The organic or natural economic growth that came from playing catch-up is no longer there and they are now forced to innovate and invent to grow rather than just copy. Look at the post war growth patterns of Japan and Germany for an example.
I do not (and never have believed) that Jerry Yang and the rest of the Yahoo board was ever were serious about selling the company.
First there were no negotiations, Microsoft simply extended an offer which the Yahoo! board turned down.
Lol, you. I'm not getting into this again. Microsoft offered $31, Yahoo wanted at least $37. see article ("The collapse of talks between Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer and Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang prompted Wall Street brokerages to cut their ratings and price targets on Yahoo, which held out for a $37 per share value despite a sweetened off from Microsoft for $33 per share."). Microsoft raise its offer to $33, Yahoo said no. Offer; counter offer; counter-counter offer. A reasonable person would see this as an attempt to bargain between two parties, and so will any court in the U.S. End of discussion.For example, look at the actions the board and management took right after the offer was announced.
The board didn't want to be eaten so they took steps they thought would slow down an acquirer.
They didn't do just that, they took actions that potentially could destroy the company's value, breaching their duty to the shareholders. Regardless of any circumstances a company's management is not allowed to take deliberate actions that can reasonably result in the destruction of a the company's wealth or value without the explicit permission of its shareholders. The legal term for this is waste, and it is very much illegal under any state's corporate law. Examples of wasting actions include...They enacted huge employee termination compensation plans, including golden parachutes for management.
That's standard practice in business, and has been for a long tyme [sic] businesswise [sic] .
Yes, but it is not "standard business practice" to enact them in an attempt to thwart a takeover. This is a perfect example of a wasting transaction. It was down without the explicit permission of the shareholders (who usually have to approve or give permission to the board to negotiate management contracts), and done in a fashion that destroy's the company's value by making it less valuable. Huge contingent payments to management not only diminish the company's value to a potential acquirers, but in instances where the realization of the contingency is reasonably likely also require the the company to make impairment deductions against its earnings (i.e., lowering their recognized profits in anticipation of the payments). See FASB Statement No. 5.They tried to make a deal to acquire a portion of AOL
Citation please.
My pleasure. ("And then there was that AOL deal with word of some share buybacks at above-market prices.. . . And though Yahoo-AOL talks continue, according to the report, there's not much urgency (that's fair enough, no need to rush at this point.)") (emphasis added).Like I said before, Yahoo's board was not reviewing this potential merger in good faith. They clearly violated their fiduciary duty to shareholders, and will be ousted, probably by Carl Icahn.
Yes, that is true, but as a public company the company's board of directors also has an obligation to maximize shareholder value and look out for their bests interest. To justify a $37 share price (102% higher than the 18.50 it was trading at before the offer), Yahoo would basically have had to double its net income (i.e., profits).
The company's management has a good case for turning down the offer if they can give a plan on how to do this. They haven't offered one up, and instead have entered into arrangements that that might harm the company's earnings potential long term. How are the company's shareholder's going to benefit by the board's actions?
Justice would never approve the deal. Anti-trust law is just as much preventative as it is punitive, thus the government has an obligation to look out for potentially harmful monopolies under current anti-trust law as it has an obligation to prosecute and regulator already harmful monopolies. It took the DOJ almost a year to approve the XM-Sirius merger, and just about the same time to approve Doubleclick and Google. Those transactions aren't nearly as anti-competitive as a Google-Yahoo one, which would give the combined company over 90% of all search traffic (and resulting revenue) on the internet.
If the board acts in a way that breaches the shareholders' fiduciary duty they can indeed sue the board for damages, and there are plenty of instances of conduct here that are at least borderline, if not actual breaches of duty. Even with that, the shareholders can always vote the board out, and I wouldn't be surprised if this is what happens at the July shareholder's meeting.
Yes, actually they are obligated to do so under Delaware law, the state in which Yahoo is incorporated. Here's a post I did earlier explaining a board's duty to shareholders during takeovers. Link.
I do not (and never have believed) that Jerry Yang and the rest of the Yahoo board was ever were serious about selling the company. Any negotiations that Yahoo's board entered into were done in bad faith and in violation of the board's obligations to the shareholders that elected it.
For example, look at the actions the board and management took right after the offer was announced. They enacted huge employee termination compensation plans, including golden parachutes for management. They entered into contractual arrangements with Google that would diminish their acquisition value to anybody but Google (which the DOJ would never approve). They tried to make a deal to acquire a portion of AOL It's clear that these actions were designed more dissuade Microsoft more than they were designed to deliver any shareholder value, which is the primary responsibility of any publicly held company.
Yahoo's board was acting in its own self-interest. I expect plenty of shareholder lawsuits, and given the fact that the stock has traded almost 30% of its shares outstanding in the last two days, I expect a proxy battle to oust the board as well. Yahoo's board has violated its fiduciary obligations to its shareholders and will likely pay the price for this.
Yes, of course because a terrorist suspect in Gitmo, Ramstein, Guam or wherever the hell they are being held can afford to pay $500/hour for a top flight attorney. Get real.
Most of the attorney's doing this work are either doing it pro bono or doing it for publicity/PR. They know that they are unlikely to ever get paid in full for the fair value of their services. Most of the expenses are coming right out of their own pocket.
Getting back to the original topic. Much of communication is non-verbal. Visual cues like rapidly shifting eye movements or hurried language can be signs that a person lying, and those are not picked up over purely text exchanges. And believe it or not, plenty of criminal defendants lie to their attorneys either out of lack of trust or a desire to cover up/save face.
Cutting through the bullshit and uncovering a truthful set of facts off which one can base a realistic defense is the essence of being a good defense attorney. If you let the defendant lie or misrepresent himself and his situation to you, you're failing to do that.
You're totally missing the point.
What if the message was "I totally fingered this passed out chick behind the Chi Omega house," or "I seriously jacked up this bum who asked me for change." That better for ya?
I'm as much a civil libertarian as the next guy, but let's get one thing straight:
Nobody has any expectation of privacy (reasonable or otherwise) in information they put on a website that is publicly accessible to other people.
If you write on a friend's facebook wall about how you got this "killer deal on pot" or how you "got this totally awesome handjob from a local hooker" and police find out and charge you, it's your own damn fault for being an idiot.
Furthermore, if you buddy wants to play confidential informant and sell you out to the government, that's a problem between you and your buddy, not between you and the government.
If you don't want police (or anyone) prying into your business, don't make information about said business publicly accessible.
The Fourth Amendment only applies where people have a reasonable expectation of privacy. KATZ v. UNITED STATES, 389 U.S. 347 (1967) (J. Harlan, concurring). Part of this reasonable expectation is the requirement that the person in question has a subjective expectation of privacy. This means that from the person's point of view, he or she could reasonably expect that the item, location, or information that was searched or seized was private. Thus, for example, the government can legally track somebody on a public street using visual surveillance.
/., but under current Fourth Amendment jurisprudence, it's likely the one most courts would adopt. Moreover, it's probably the correct view, because the Fourth Amendment only applies where there is a reasonable expectation of privacy, and people have no such expectation in their physical location when they are walking about in public.
The Supreme Court further allows the use of tracking devices and other sensorial enhancing technology, so long as they do not allow the government to obtain information that could otherwise not be obtained using traditional surveillance techniques. United States v Karo, 468 U.S. 705 (1984). Thus, for example, the government can use a tracking device to track someone on public streets because they would otherwise be able to track them visually without violating a person's reasonable expectation of privacy in his or her location. UNITED STATES v. KNOTTS, 460 U.S. 276 (1983). Alternatively, the government cannot use infrared imaging technology to look into a person's house from a couple hundred feet away because people cannot see infra red light waves. KYLLO V. UNITED STATES 533 U.S. 27 (2001).
Applying all of this to satellite or UAVs, it does not appear that these technologies violate a person's subjective expectations in privacy in their locations. As stated, people do not have such expectations on public streets because the reality is that everyone around them knows their location.
The Court has already ruled that helicopter surveillance is permissible. FLORIDA V. RILEY, 488 U. S. 445 (1989). Satellite and UAV surveillance is just an extension of this. Much like helicopter surveillance, all this technology allows is for law enforcement to augment its visual senses to observe stuff that they could have previously observed anyway.
The mere fact that they can now automate a large chunk of the work should be irrelevant. Better police cars, more police helicopters, or simply more police would also make it easier for law enforcement to survey targets, and those are all recognized as legitimate ways for the government to approve its law enforcement capabilities. Why would satellite imaging and UAV's be any different?
Yah I know this view is not popular on
Ok lets look at the numbers on this.
Looking at Time Warner's annual report you can see that from FY05 to FY07, AOL revenues are down 36%. Conversely, operating income excluding one-time items is up 21%.
This implies that the AOL division has remained profitable primarily by cost cutting, not by natural growth in its business. For example, it took them $7.52 to generate $1 of operating income in 2005. That ratio (revenue/operating income) is now down to $3.89.
Yahoo's business, on the other hand, is the mirror image of AOL's. Revenues from 2005-2007 are up 32.55%, while operating income is down 66.61%. This is mainly due to operating costs increasing 67% in the same period.
So essentially, you have a business, AOL, who sucks at generating revenue but is good at cutting costs, being bought out by a business, Yahoo, that is good at generating revenues (we'll see whether that holds in a recessionary environment), but horrible at keeping costs under control. If the two managements can learn from each other, this combination might actually work out for shareholders.
Of course, for Yahoo employees, it means pack your desks up because heads are rolling if YahAOL is formed.
I think that's the exact reasoning for making such a deal. Yahoo would get cash from Time Warner to buy back its stock (thwarting Microsoft), but it would also have to transfer AOL's operations onto its balance sheet, making it a less valuable company.
Time Warner loves this of course, since it's been trying to get the AOL albatross off its neck basically since right after the two companies merged. The 20% stake it'll get in Yahoo-AOL is just a bonus. Yahoo shareholders are arguably getting screwed though if this happens, since (1) Yahoo is diluting their control with the issuance of shares to Time Warner and (2) Yahoo is actively taking steps to destroy shareholder value buy taking on AOL (just look at TW's financial statements if you want proof of that).
Say what you want about Microsoft/News Corp. being evil, but at least their management and boards are not blatantly violating their fiduciary duty to their shareholders by wasting company assets.
That's just what most people were saying in this country right before the US passed the Smoot-Hawley Tarrif Act. I think the Wikipedia article does a good job describing the horrendous results of that act of protectionism.
If it wasn't for free trade you would only be able to drive cars made by Ford, GM, or Chrysler, you wouldn't have cheap Taiwanese semiconductors powering your PC, you wouldn't have $5 dollar t-shirts at Wal-Mart, and you're only choice of video game consoles would be the XBox360.
I agree, there are plenty of short term downsides to free trade. People lose their jobs and have to adapt as industries shift offshore, but other jobs and industries inevitably take their place. People were complaining just as much in the 1970s and 1980s when all of are manufacturing moved overseas.
What are people going to do for a living when we no longer manufacture anything? No one, but the brilliant few saw services and technology as the future of the economy. It's the same situation now, only people are wondering what will happen when all low level tech jobs are outsourced. Do most of us know what's next? No, but I bet a few people do and their going to the billionaires of tomorrow. That's just how the world works.
It's just a jury verdict. Being a patent case, it will be appealed and probably be heard, so I doubt anything is certain about the verdict.
That said, I think Alcatel-Lucent should be more worried about their current CEO, Patricia Russo. This partial win is about all she can lay claim to besides the 45% slide in ALU's stock and the 70% slide in Lucent's stock prior to the merger. She'll need a couple more of these to make up for her Fiorina-esque management of the company. (To be fair, she's not the sociopathic power monger that Fiorina was. She's just as inept at management.)
This is one of those questions that's been debated in various social science disciplines for years (e.g., anthropology, psychology, sociology) so I'm pretty sure that going to your local library and looking up some academic journals will yield you a many hypotheses.
While I think most social constructs (like your example of swearing) really don't effect a child's innocence one way or another, I think there are other profound events in a child's life--for example, the first time a child realizes his parent's are not invincible--that really can have a tangible effect on the child's development, regardless of societal conventions.
I think theses losses of innocence for a child are a very profound event (whether the child realizes it or not at the time) and if they occurs too early, they can--for lack of a better phrase--really screw the child up. For example, there are numerous studies out there that show that the oversexualization (i.e., exposure to sexual acts, not just nudity) of children before puberty can cause all sorts of deviant (sexual and nonsexual) behavior when they grow older (e.g., addictive personality disorder, abusiveness, nymphomania, pedophilia).
While oversexualization is an extreme example of innocence lost, I think one could reasonably say premature loss of innocence in other areas of life also has some detrimental effect on a child's developmental. The degree of this effect probably varies, but I think it creates a strong presumption in favor of protecting a child's innocence, especially during his or her formative years.
That said, of course I'm pretty sure there's a downside toward protecting a child's innocence for too long, mainly that you'll end up with a adult who is too trusting and naive. Thus, I think the key for parents is to figure out how to balance these two tensions.
First, I agree with you completely. What Seagate is considering is BS of the highest degree and likely a perversion of the Founders' original intent. That said, having studied the subject a little, I'd like to point out some countervailing issues that everyone here seems to be ignoring.
What seems to be riling people up is the legal concept of reduction to practice, i.e., the point at which an invention has been deemed sufficiently completed, constructed, or created to warrant patent protection. Currently, this standard is relatively low; often a schematic or crude prototype is enough. This of course has the problem of allowing people to get just far enough along to patent the invention and then sit on it until someone else does the grunt work to get the invention marketable.
However, this low reduction to practice threshold also allows "the little guy" to protect his inventions an ideas by not requiring that he risk bankrupting himself to create a marketable product. Remember, a working invention and an iteration of that invention that can be sold for profits are too different things. That, I feel, is largely why the threshold has remained so low.
I personally believe that the little guy inventor is a myth in the modern world and that big research institutions (public and private), and corporations do most of the innovating. Thus, I think one could raise the threshold of reduction to practice to level to better suit these institution's financial realities, but if people want to protect the little guy, that cannot be done.
One compromise I think that could be done would be to introduce a wasting provision in the Patent Act. That is to say, a provision that would statutorily bar enforcement of any patent that the owner or exclusive licensee allows to waste. I'm not sure how exactly one would define the standard for wasting, but I feel that this statute properly defined would at least prevent patent trolling, and potentially could mitigate harm to the little guy by letting him get a patent easily, but also by forcing him to sell it if he cannot bring the invention to market.
Got any pin cites for federal cases? I'm writing a brief for my moot court program involving the surveillance IP addresses and I've got a Ninth Circuit (my local jurisdiction) decision that holds the exact opposite of your assertion. See United States v. Forrester, 512 F.3d 500, 510 n.5 (9th Cir. 2008) (stating that "Every computer or server connected to the Internet has a unique IP address.") I know that statement is wrong, and am trying to provide other case law to show that the court misstated its assumption.
Anyway if you have the pin cites handy feel free to reply. It'll make my life easier.
Growth rate, which I alluded to but forgot to mention. Digital download sales are growing at between 25-30% per year in revenue stream while CD's average less than 5%. They are the future and among them most people buy singles. Hence digital downloads of singles are the future in terms of music distribution. Also, most people that do buy CDs, don't buy them from record stores. Wal-Mart, Amazon, Best Buy and Target are the largest sellers of CD's and make up in aggregate over 2/3 the market. I live in California and the only prominent record store chain I can think of that still exists is Amoeba, which caters primarily to second hand music sales and really hard to find indie label material--a sizeable but decidedly small segment of the music sales market.
Yes, except for I was citing statistics on digital music "sales" not just downloads. The under 25 crowd also historically is the one that buys the most new music and generates the sales needed to make new albums hits. Older people tend to have fixed musical tastes and already have a huge backlog of music (for example you have 1200 CDs), thus they generally feel less of a need to go an purchase more music.
Yes there is, but it's usually not in direct reference to people that buy CD's like yourself.
I personally think a majority of users on
They just don't want to pay for music, and I'd like to see them admit it for once, and not hide behind excuses. Let's just call a spade a spade.
First in general, you're not the "average user." PricewaterhouseCoopers has a very nice industry report from which I'll reference for data. It's a pay service, so you'll have to take my word, but if you want to pony up it's all there.
Most music listeners nowadays are prefer buying singles to albums. This is especially true of younger than 25 listeners, who make up almost half the music market. More than 40% of music revenues nowadays are generated by online downloads (e.g., iTunes, Amazon) and that number is growing rapidly (for reference it was 10% just two years ago). This is the state of the music business, singles and downloads are the future, not albums and CDs.
What I proposed is a compromise that caters to this future, try-before-you-buy and cheap singles. The latter will feed off the former, and I feel the majority of users will get a good deal. The fact that you don't is not indicative of the plan's total worth as you are not the average user.
You're perfectly welcome to continue with your habits. No one is stopping you from buying CDs. But that said, the world isn't perfect. You can't please everyone, hence the term compromise. To analogize, if you tried to build a speed bump that won't ruin the front end of a Ferrari Enzo, you would end up with no speed bump at all. You're the Enzo. Take it as a compliment.
The solution seems simple to me. Apple et. al., should charge $20-40 per iPod for 2-3 year unlimited access to the DRM'ed iTunes catalog, then allow users to buy permanent rights to individual songs DRM free for $ 0.25-0.50 per song.
/.)
Music companies get the best of both world, i.e., the steady income from subscriptions plus the ability to benefit from a mega-hit via direct sales.
Users benefit since they can try before the buy, and only buy music they really wan to keep. Additionally 2-3 years is the expected life of most iPods anyway, so most users won't be inconvenienced when the subscription goes out. They will simply buy a new iPod, or alternatively, they could be sold another term subscription.
The actual numbers make sense since according to Silicon Valley Insider, the music industry makes only about $20 in downloads per iPod anyway.
Finally, the cheaper, DRM-free purchase ability will separate those of us willing to pay a fair price for music we'd like to own from those just looking to justify their own personal piracy. (Personally, I think this group does the majority of the complaining hear on
As long as no one (Apple, consumers, and the music industry) gets too greedy, I think working out a deal for unlimited subscriptions could be the detente everybody needs.
I've worked, studied, and basically lived in current political system for nearly 6 years, and in my opinion, its FUBAR, or close enough at any rate.
The biggest problem is that our current system was not built to handle vast government bureaucracy that has cropped up since WWII. Now look, before any liberals get pissy, I'm not a Paul-tard, and I'm not saying that government should only build roads, delivery mail, and fund a military.
That said, fundamentally, the U.S. form of representative democracy was built to do just that. It was meant to keep politics as the local and state level, while the current political discourse in this country has increasingly grown more national. Take the legislative bodies in the states and Congress for example. All of them are based on the idea of direct representation. A state legislator or House Member's role is to keep his or her constituents happy. If not, he gets the boot. And at the state senate and US Senate level (the latter especially after the 17th Amendment), the scope expands to a broader constituency, but the goal stays the same.
This structure creates an incentive and drive to keep the locals happy regardless of what the greater national interest might suggest. Now, that drive worked perfectly fine as long as the government had very little cash to dole out. Back in the 19th Century, the most a legislator could do was maybe bring some funding back for a new post office, roads, or at most a military installation. Government, especially at the federal level, did little else. Even education was rarely handled at the state level. There was very little money in government, and thus very little to try to corrupt. And when corruption did occur, it was on a much smaller (monetary) scale. (Hell even the land scandals with the railroad companies, while extremely bad, didn't really cost the government any money.)
Now, fast forward to the current situation where federal spending over the last 50 years has been at least 20% of the GDP, and where it is now accepted and expected that government's role is to dole that money out to someone, whether it be corporations through subsidies and contracts, the poor through welfare, students through college grants and loans, schools through grants and funds, the elderly through social security, the sick through medicare, deficit-inducing tax-cuts for taxpayers, and on and on.
With the current system, legislatures' are lured to keep the local folks happy by offering them a greater and greater share of the pie. They try to squeeze a nickel here, a dime there and before you know it, they've nickel and dimed their way into a quarter-trillion (or whatever it is now) dollar budget deficit. Look at Iraq, look at Social Security, look at the prescription drug benefit, look at no child left behind. All of these are just short term rackets run to please voters without any regard for any long-term damage they might be causing (i.e., inflation, debt, higher tax rates).
It's the reason why the Democrats spent their way into deficits while they were in power in the 60s. It's the reason why Republicans did the exact same when they took power in the 00s. It's the exact same reason why we'll still be running a deficit 4 years from now regardless of who wins this next election. (In case you can't tell, my pet peeve is deficits.) It's the culture of pork-barreled politics, and the principle behind it ("bringing home the bacon") leads our governments--state, local, and federal--to writing checks that our society cannot cash.
You know, it's not even really corruption per se. It's just the way the system was set up, and its probably functioning the way the Founding Fathers intended it. They just probably didn't intend for it to go beyond post offices, roads, and the military. All politics is local. Perhaps that is a maxim we (the U.S.) as a country need to rethink.
I guess your right, if you want to sit up 24/7 with a shotgun protecting your property.
The argument that real property rights exist without the assent third parties is facetious at best. In a civil society, we rely on third parties to recognize and respect our interest in physical property. Mutual recognition of property rights is part of the social contract.
Remember, your rights to exclude from and control your own property are moot if a group of villagers with pitch forks (or AK-47s to be more modern) decide that they don't want you to be able to exercise them.
We rely just as much on the government to enforce real property rights as we do on them to enforce intellectual property rights. Government enforcement and recognition of property rights is one of the cornerstone's of Western Civilization. That's how we prevent the "villagers with pitchforks" problem.
Real property rights exist because the government allows them to, just as much as intellectual property rights do. Ever hear of Eminent Domain? Real property rights are as a much a "legal fiction" as a Intellectual Property rights. They exist only because society deems them to. Want proof? Go look at any of the Warsaw Pact countries. Their citizens pretty much had no rights in real or personal property outside their toothbrushes.