Assume this year there is a stock market bubble, and I pay a huge tax this year. Next year there is a stock market crash, and I lose all my previous years gain. So what happens ? Government refunds me my tax ?
More precisely under mark-to-market, you have a loss that can offset against income to reduce your net taxable income in the year the loss occurred, and, if your losses exceed your income for the year, can be carried over and applied against future years income, as well. But, essentially, yes.
What about interest on that tax ?
There's no interest. You had a gain in one year, treated as positive income and taxed as such, and a loss in another year, treated as negative income with the appropriate tax income.
Next problem, how do I pay this tax ? If my money is tied up in investments, how do I generate the cash to pay my tax ?
Assuming you have insufficient other cash to pay the tax, you liquidate some of the investments.
Before you get excited about mark to market, mark to market accounting was one of the causes behind the banking melting down we just had and it has since been repealed.
That would be relevant if the issue here was using a mark-to-market rule in the same role; using a mark to market rule for taxation (which would treat market value gains and losses and positive or negative income for tax purposes) is different than using a mark-to-market rule for valuing assets for other purposes.
Capital gains tax is effectively a double-dip, hence the lower rate.
Actually, no. Its in no way a "double-dip", because income earned via appreciation of capital isn't, as a rule, earned and taxed as income by some other means; further capital gains in general aren't taxed at a lower rate, long-term capital gains are. Long-term (where the asset is held for longer than one year) capital gains are taxed at a lower rate than normal income (which includes labor income, short-term capital gains, and lots of other things) is because the U.S. progressive income tax system is based on the presumption that the income taxed is earned during a single year, and that those with more taxable income in a year have a higher annual rate of income generation. The inclusion of long-term capital gains as normal income would (if done naively) violate this premise, particularly in the case of most people with long-term capital gains, who have them as occasional events as liquidating long-term stock holdings, selling long-held homes or other real estate, etc.
Now, the very rich (who have by far the biggest share of long-term capital gains and the biggest benefit from the reduced tax, though they are a small percentage of the number of people affected by the preferential tax) may have the kind of assets where they can regularly roll-out assets held for more than a year, such that they have effectively a regular annual income that is being taxed favorably under a tax which really isn't designed for that kind of income.
There are fairly simple ways to address this while not breaking the system for people who have occasional long-term capital gains rather than regular long-term gains -- one of which is taxing capital gains as regular income but permitting advance recognition of gains, prior to realization, for tax purposes or permitting gains to be distributed over several years after realization (or both).
I believe him, but a sample size of three languages is not convincing at all.
The sample size isn't 3 languages (the table of languages, familes, and how they were coded takes up most of 3 pages.) There are three specific examples noted in TFS, with the further note "(The study includes a broader swath of languages/nationalities, but that's a start.)"
What slashdot chooses to do, even if its in the same topical area as the article
That's rather different than your previous contention that the problem was that "Bonch has successfully diverted the discussion at the top of the comments for regular viewers into a discussion of whether it's appropriate to editorialize when presenting news items." But keeping moving those goalposts, maybe you'll find a defensible position somewhere.
He turned it from a discussion of RIAA, SOPA/PIPA, traditional news outlets and Google/Wikipedia as news outlets, to yet another slashdot navel-gazing session.
Insofar as it was ever a discussion of those other things, it still is -- as plenty of subthreads show. So, no, neither your first contention about how he diverted the discussion nor your second is correct.
Yes, like many (perhaps even most) Slashdot comment threads, it includes at least one subthread addressing the appropriateness of the original Slashdot summary.
But, as discussion of the substantive news itself, and the issues it raises, are still present in other subthreads under this story, that's no more a successful diversion from the principal topic than your own introduction of discussion of the appropriateness of the discussion of the appropriateness of the original Slashdot summary is; to the extent that action you complain about is an inappropriate diversion, so is your discussion of it.
They will start charging for some or all of the services (besides search)
Start?
Google Voice -- has baseline free service with for-pay options (international calling.) Google Apps -- has free tier and paid tiers Google App Engine -- has free and for-pay options, with some features limited to for-pay options. etc., etc., etc.
It's not theft of property. It is a violation of your Congressionally granted limited monopoly.
I don't think you understand what "property" is.
"Property" is either a legally-granted monopoly (which is usually limited) or the thing (which may be abstract) to which that monopoly applies. That's what tangible personal property is. That's what real property is. And that's what intangible personal property (including "intellectual property") is.
Real property in the form of fee-simple ownership of land, for instance, is a legally-granted monopoly with regard to the use of land, subject to a variety of limitations in law (such as the fact that it is subject to the power of eminent domain, that public authority may make certain transitory uses of it notwithstanding your proprietary interest in certain circumstances, etc.)
Bonch has successfully diverted the discussion at the top of the comments for regular viewers into a discussion of whether it's appropriate to editorialize when presenting news items. He's changed the nature of the discussion, whether intentional or not, into one that has fuck-all to do with the subject of the article.
Er, the subject of the news article was RIAA accusations that the defeat of SOPA/PIPA was a result of the "fact" that Google and Wikipedia unethically failed to separate news from editorial content, whereas traditional media firms (owned, in large part, by corporations which are also members of the RIAA, MPAA, or other trade groups backing SOPA/PIPA) did not do so.
So the ethics of editorializing while presenting news items is not a subject distant from the subject of the article, its one of the core subjects of the article (the other being the specific fact claims of the RIAA about Wikipedia and Google, but the significance of those fact claims is directly tied to the ethical issue.)
I'm sure the message he intended general audiences to take away from it is "the RIAA lost because Google and Wikipedia are mean and push their views without distinguishing them from their factual content, unlike the old-media outlets owned by RIAA members." (This factual premise of this message is incorrect, since, insofar as Google and Wikipedia report information that is intended to be factual -- such as the content of Wikipedia articles or the search results on Google [the latter factually reporting the existence of pages, not implying their contents are factual], the advocacy related to SOPA/PIPA presented by Google & Wikipedia was clearly distinguished from the normal fact content of Google and Wikipedia.)
OTOH, the message for the RIAA members that own old-media outlets seems to be "if your corporate objectives had been effectively communicated through the old-media outlets you own, we wouldn't have lost."
I am not sure what retcon he is trying to inflict. I saw a lot of news broadcasts, tv shows, entertainment programs, some owned by "Pro SOPA" organizations, actually supporting the frigging anti SOPA movement!
Yeah, I think actually that's the problem, such as it is, that the RIAA spokesman is addressing. While he says that the problem is old-media organizations observing a news/editorial divide, it is really that they observed an editorial/corporate-overlord divide: that the corporate boardrooms didn't dictate the editorial views that would be transmitted in their commentary.
Which, had that divide not been observed, might have helped blunt the opposition to SOPA/PIPA, but it would have also hastened the demise of the old-media but further alienating audiences as the media outlets became naked mouthpieces for their corporate overlords
Maybe it's shrinking for Google, but maybe because more and more people are using alternatives.
A former Google exec says he believes that traditional search volume is shrinking (but offers no reason for other people to share this belief) and then spends a lot of time offering explanations for what factors might be causing the effect which he hasn't provided any reason to believe is happening in the first place.
It's fairly rational be skeptical that the effect is happening at all. Its less rational to assume that the general effect asserted by the former exec without any substantiation is a real effect, but that it is specifically effecting Google rather than general traditional search. That's just more pushing personal bias as explanation for (yet another) phenomenon for which no evidence has been provided.
Let's see some reason to believe that there is an effect to explain before offering explanations for it.
Facebook is still not compatible with anything else online, and it's huge, so in many ways it is a monopoly.
There might be a meaningful market in which it is a monopoly, but it certainly is not, as suggested in GGP, a system which inherently presents insurmountable barriers to communicating with the people with which you have used it to communicate if you leave it.
My rejection of the latter contention was not a argument of any kind related to the former (which hadn't even been made in the subthread I was responding to until after that response.)
And you really think that if you want to go into government work, or get a security clearance, the government or business won't look at your family's history for lists of crimes/convictions as one way to judge whether you get clearance or not?
As someone who actually has held more than one government job, I am fairly certain of that in the general case.
In the more specific case of security clearances, I'm fairly certain that investigators would be aware of the conviction (whether or not a pardon or apology was later issued) of a close relative in any case, and I doubt that the existence of a specific pardon or apology would make any difference to the weight the conviction of a deceased close relative under a law since repudiated would be given by security investigators, since the actual conviction, per se, isn't what they are principally interested in.
And you think that an official government statement, with the force of ALL the government behind it rather than just Gordon Brown blathering with no legal impact, wouldn't have an immense symbolic impact regarding the progress of, and importance of, ensuring that ALL human beings enjoy equal human rights?
No, I don't think doing that for Turing would do that (nor do I think the Gordon Brown apology had that kind of impact, just to be clear.) I think either would be an empty political gesture with neither substantive impact nor much symbolic import.
A blanket pardon for all convicted under the law (including, and especially, those still living, which I understand there are several) would be both of substantial symbolic value and, more importantly, have substantive impact as well.
A lot of people have been pointing to Gordon Brown's "apology" as being enough.
I don't think its "enough" for Turing, nor would a pardon be. There are harms that are no longer correctable. But there's no real meaningful difference between it and a posthumous pardon, since neither actually does anything (and there's no difference between doing nothing in a statement and doing nothing with the full force of law.) Pretending there is amounts to pretending that the past can be undone.
The special treatment given to Turing alone in the form of a pardon or statement might even be counterproductive, symbolically, as it implies that the government policy wasn't so much wrong on its face as counterproductive when applied to someone like Turing who made unique contributions to the war effort.
Brown's "apology" had no force of law and no force of government behind it. A pardon would have both: that's a HUGE difference.
"Force of law" and "force of government" are differentiators if they are behind something that actually does something. In this case, there is nothing for that force to be behind. Its an equally substantively ineffectual symbolic gesture in either case.
It's not the same. Obviously, we have to depend on companies every day. But if we don't like a car company, or a traditional ISP, we can switch to another car or ISP. Facebook is different. If you leave, you leave the ability to connect to many of the people that you connected to via Facebook.
Its quite possible to use Facebook to exchange information which allows an exchange of contact information through any of a variety of mechanisms external to Facebook, including face-to-face contact, that can then be used to continue communication after one or both parties abandons the use of Facebook.
The problem there is that the majority of religions demand that the faithful either convert or destroy the non-believers. (Yes, even Christianity, they just focus more on the convert part, and try hard to pretend the destroy part never happened in modern times, even though it's still happening in third world countries like Somalia and parts of the southern USA.)
Christianity has no widely accepted eliminationist doctrine, though certainly there have been many times in history where Christian leaders have pushed an eliminationist program. The same is true of many other religions.
Atheism, as a doctrine, demands absolutely nothing of anyone.
Atheism may have no widely accepted eliminationist doctrine, but there are certainly atheist leaders who have pushed eliminationist programs based on their desire to eliminate other beliefs, even in the modern era. The USSR was a particularly obvious example here.
The difference between atheism and other religions is that atheists dont force others to follow their beliefs in terms of laws,etc
There are atheists who support state-mandate and rigorously-enforced atheism (this was, after all, an important element of some Communist regimes), and there are atheists who don't. Same thing with Christianity. Same thing with most other religions that have every been had enough support among the powerful for consideration of the role of the religion with regard to state authority to ever have been considered.
They wont kill people in the name of religion, or stop people from eating beef, or censor online content,etc
Both censorship of content and killing people who oppose their approach to religion have been done by state authorities enforcing rules design to advance state-preferred atheism. Dietary rules (at least, with an official connection to the state approach to religion, per se), probably not, but its hard to see that as an important distinction in the absence of the others.
Which is better: An apology saying "well we're sorry you were convicted but you're still guilty", or a FULL apology acknowledging that the law was so unjust that it never should have existed, much less been the basis of criminal convictions?
After I'm dead, both are equivalent to each other (in a system which doesn't punish descendants for their parents crimes; in a system which did, there would remain a substantive difference, but that's more a problem with punishing descendants for the crimes of their ancestors than with the form of corrective measure for the original conviction.) They both amount to a statement that the law at the time, and its impact on me, was wrong, but do nothing to actually correct the impact on me which is no longer correctable.
Pardons for living people who were convicted under the law, or a legal process which nullifies the effect of such convictions, would be more appropriate than an apology with no substantive effect, but that's irrelevant in Turing's case (and, as I understand, there is a separate proposal which would provides the second currently in the legislative processin the UK.)
Not only that - if Turing were alive today, do you have any question they would have granted the pardon long ago?
If Turing were alive today, the pardon would actually have a substantive effect.
If it would be important to grant the pardon to a living person, it's just as important to grant the pardon today
No, because the reason that a pardon would have different meaning than an apology only exists when the person who was convicted under the unjust law is alive.
The problem with that idea is that among the collection of rights that make up the corporate form is the legally enforceable right of shareholders to demand that the corporation, through its management, without exception acts to maximize their realization of their shared interests. In the case of widely held public corporations, that shared interest is almost exclusively financial -- so, to the extent that acting ethically in even the slightest bit reduces expected returns compared to a less ethical course of action, there is not only a reason to leave ethics at the door, but a legal mandate to do so.
So what you're saying is that the public in general is too greedy to allow corporations to act ethically?
No. Direct equity ownership of corporations is not evenly distributed among the populace, so the interests of corporate shareholders is not the same thing as the interest of the "public in general".
For publicly-traded corporations, the primary factor controlling that distribution is present wealth, and the main contributors there are starting assets, ability, and desire to increase wealth. So, naturally, ownership of stock in publicly traded corporations naturally is concentrated in a group that has a greater interest than the public at large in increasing financial returns.
Real lawyers can clarify, but AFAIK, two separate courts in separate decisions can decide that A is true, and that A is not true.
Is there any law or principle that the "system" has to resolve logical errors like this?
In the U.S. system, that depends what type of proposition "A" is.
If A is a matter of law, then decisions by two lower courts that conflict (usually, this is important with intermediate courts of appeals conflicting because their decisions are binding precedent on lower courts) can be resolved by a higher court (for matters of state law, that would be the state supreme court; for matters of federal law, the federal supreme court.)
If A is a matter of fact, then the determination is case-specific, generally, and there is no reason to resolve the conflict.
Additionally, when the one of the cases is between the same set of parties as the other case (whether the issue is one of fact or law), conflicts are prevented by issue preclusion, which prevents issues that were essential to a prior decision in a case between the same parties from being contested between them in a new case.
If you get your "legalese" translated by others, you may be getting it slanted. That's why I like to give people the actual documents, instead of telling them what the documents mean.
The two aren't mutually exclusive, and legal documents often require quite a bit of context outside of the documents themselves, which most people aren't familiar with, to interpret correctly.
No, they aren't. Corporations aren't collections of people. They are abstract collections of rights and privileges with respect to property that are assigned to certain people through law.
Yes, they exist to make money but that's not an excuse to leave ethics at the door, you can (and should) make money without being a dickhead.
The problem with that idea is that among the collection of rights that make up the corporate form is the legally enforceable right of shareholders to demand that the corporation, through its management, without exception acts to maximize their realization of their shared interests. In the case of widely held public corporations, that shared interest is almost exclusively financial -- so, to the extent that acting ethically in even the slightest bit reduces expected returns compared to a less ethical course of action, there is not only a reason to leave ethics at the door, but a legal mandate to do so.
You must be an attorney. You sure as Hell aren't a Constitutional scholar.
Closer to the second then the first.
First, priority is very much relevant (not to ACTA, but to the comments you made earlier), because your comments presupposed that treaties had priority over the Constitution. (NOT as in Missouri v. Holland, which dealt specifically with a 10th Amendment issue.)
No, they didn't. You need to learn to read. The comment I made was that the treaty power, as an enumerated power, isn't restricted to actions which are authorized by other enumerated powers. I didn't say (or make a comment that "presupposed") that treaties had priority over the Constitution. That was your radical misreading, and where your response split off into irrelevancy.
On the other hand, a Constitutional scholar will point you to any number of historical documents, including Federalist Papers, Anti-Federalist Papers, minutes of the State legislatures prior to ratification of the Constitution, and minutes of the State Legislatures AFTER ratification (notable are the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions of 1798 and subsequent documents, again particularly Madison's Report of 1800) that demonstrate beyond doubt that SCOTUS was never intended to have the authority to make such a decision as Missouri v. Holland in the first place.
I'm willing to hear your argument with specific references on that point, but I am rather unconvinced by your vague handwaving.
. In Jefferson's words, the Federal government (which includes the Supreme Court) was never given authority to be "the final arbiter of the powers delegated to itself"
The operative word whose import you seem to miss is final. The Supreme Court is unquestionably empowered to be an arbiter of any dispute over the extent of federal powers under the Constitution, but the final decision ultimately rests with the people as a whole.
Your argument that law "has ruled unequivocally" rests on the (unfounded) assumption that the Supreme Court is in fact the final arbiter of States' rights.
No, it doesn't; my statement (in response to the false claim that the Supreme Court had not ruled unequivocally on the issue) simply describes the content of the Supreme Court's rulings on the question, which is orthogonal to whether or not they are the "final arbiter" of the question. You seem to be simply making up points to argue against at this point.
Actually, it's a commercial jet. Boeing 767-200 [searchengineland.com] to be exact. And it had nothing to do with Ellison's yacht AFAIK. You IPO with billions of dollars.
Actually, Google's founders own several jets through H211 LLC, including (as of 2008) the 767 you mention, a 757, 2 Gulfstream V, and the fighter jet mentioned in GP (a Dornier Alpha.) I think they've added at least one more plane since (ISTR that they now have 3 Gulfstream Vs.)
Their child company Motorola, on the other hand...
Motorola isn't a Google child company. Motorola Mobility is a company which Google has agreed to purchase from Motorola, but the purchase has not yet been completed.
Only by treaty ratified by [...] the Senate can an international agreement extend beyond the other enumerated powers of Congress and/or the Executive, since only by treaty is a separate, independent Constitutional power of government exercised.
This is very much debatable, since the Constitution does not stipulate which shall have priority, nor has the question ever been unequivocally settled by the Supreme Court. It would be just as valid to claim that the Constitution constrains treaties. Either one is an assumption with very little foundation.
Priority is irrelevant (priority would only become an issue of a purported treaty violated a negative restriction in the Constitution, not if it merely extends beyond the other enumerated powers of the federal government in the Constitution.) And the issue was settled by the Supreme Court in Missouri v. Holland 252 U.S. 416 (1920).
The holding in Missori v. Holland states outright that the treaty power is itself a separate, positive grant of power in addition to the other positive grants in the Constitution, and that therefore legal rules which States might have grounds to challenge as intruding on the general reservation of non-enumerated powers to the States in the 10th Amendment had they been regular acts of Congress standing alone were exercises of an enumerated power (the treaty power itself) when done through ratified treaty, or when done by statute to support such a treaty.
That decision also, however, suggests that negative prohibition on government action within the Constitution are limits on the treaty-making power, a point made more directly in Reid v. Covert 354 U.S. 1 (1957), among other cases.
So, contrary to your argument that both the statement that the treaty power extends beyond the other enumerated powers of Congress and the statement that the Constitution constrains treaties are assumptions with little foundation, both -- with the proviso that the constraint placed on the treaty power by the Constitution does not constrain it only to the space defined by other positive grants of power -- are extremely well-established principles of law has ruled unequivocally.
Slashdot Mirror
More precisely under mark-to-market, you have a loss that can offset against income to reduce your net taxable income in the year the loss occurred, and, if your losses exceed your income for the year, can be carried over and applied against future years income, as well. But, essentially, yes.
There's no interest. You had a gain in one year, treated as positive income and taxed as such, and a loss in another year, treated as negative income with the appropriate tax income.
Assuming you have insufficient other cash to pay the tax, you liquidate some of the investments.
That would be relevant if the issue here was using a mark-to-market rule in the same role; using a mark to market rule for taxation (which would treat market value gains and losses and positive or negative income for tax purposes) is different than using a mark-to-market rule for valuing assets for other purposes.
Actually, no. Its in no way a "double-dip", because income earned via appreciation of capital isn't, as a rule, earned and taxed as income by some other means; further capital gains in general aren't taxed at a lower rate, long-term capital gains are. Long-term (where the asset is held for longer than one year) capital gains are taxed at a lower rate than normal income (which includes labor income, short-term capital gains, and lots of other things) is because the U.S. progressive income tax system is based on the presumption that the income taxed is earned during a single year, and that those with more taxable income in a year have a higher annual rate of income generation. The inclusion of long-term capital gains as normal income would (if done naively) violate this premise, particularly in the case of most people with long-term capital gains, who have them as occasional events as liquidating long-term stock holdings, selling long-held homes or other real estate, etc.
Now, the very rich (who have by far the biggest share of long-term capital gains and the biggest benefit from the reduced tax, though they are a small percentage of the number of people affected by the preferential tax) may have the kind of assets where they can regularly roll-out assets held for more than a year, such that they have effectively a regular annual income that is being taxed favorably under a tax which really isn't designed for that kind of income.
There are fairly simple ways to address this while not breaking the system for people who have occasional long-term capital gains rather than regular long-term gains -- one of which is taxing capital gains as regular income but permitting advance recognition of gains, prior to realization, for tax purposes or permitting gains to be distributed over several years after realization (or both).
The sample size isn't 3 languages (the table of languages, familes, and how they were coded takes up most of 3 pages.) There are three specific examples noted in TFS, with the further note "(The study includes a broader swath of languages/nationalities, but that's a start.)"
That's rather different than your previous contention that the problem was that "Bonch has successfully diverted the discussion at the top of the comments for regular viewers into a discussion of whether it's appropriate to editorialize when presenting news items." But keeping moving those goalposts, maybe you'll find a defensible position somewhere.
Insofar as it was ever a discussion of those other things, it still is -- as plenty of subthreads show. So, no, neither your first contention about how he diverted the discussion nor your second is correct.
Yes, like many (perhaps even most) Slashdot comment threads, it includes at least one subthread addressing the appropriateness of the original Slashdot summary.
But, as discussion of the substantive news itself, and the issues it raises, are still present in other subthreads under this story, that's no more a successful diversion from the principal topic than your own introduction of discussion of the appropriateness of the discussion of the appropriateness of the original Slashdot summary is; to the extent that action you complain about is an inappropriate diversion, so is your discussion of it.
Start?
Google Voice -- has baseline free service with for-pay options (international calling.)
Google Apps -- has free tier and paid tiers
Google App Engine -- has free and for-pay options, with some features limited to for-pay options.
etc., etc., etc.
Google already chages for some of the services.
I don't think you understand what "property" is.
"Property" is either a legally-granted monopoly (which is usually limited) or the thing (which may be abstract) to which that monopoly applies. That's what tangible personal property is. That's what real property is. And that's what intangible personal property (including "intellectual property") is.
Real property in the form of fee-simple ownership of land, for instance, is a legally-granted monopoly with regard to the use of land, subject to a variety of limitations in law (such as the fact that it is subject to the power of eminent domain, that public authority may make certain transitory uses of it notwithstanding your proprietary interest in certain circumstances, etc.)
Er, the subject of the news article was RIAA accusations that the defeat of SOPA/PIPA was a result of the "fact" that Google and Wikipedia unethically failed to separate news from editorial content, whereas traditional media firms (owned, in large part, by corporations which are also members of the RIAA, MPAA, or other trade groups backing SOPA/PIPA) did not do so.
So the ethics of editorializing while presenting news items is not a subject distant from the subject of the article, its one of the core subjects of the article (the other being the specific fact claims of the RIAA about Wikipedia and Google, but the significance of those fact claims is directly tied to the ethical issue.)
I'm sure the message he intended general audiences to take away from it is "the RIAA lost because Google and Wikipedia are mean and push their views without distinguishing them from their factual content, unlike the old-media outlets owned by RIAA members." (This factual premise of this message is incorrect, since, insofar as Google and Wikipedia report information that is intended to be factual -- such as the content of Wikipedia articles or the search results on Google [the latter factually reporting the existence of pages, not implying their contents are factual], the advocacy related to SOPA/PIPA presented by Google & Wikipedia was clearly distinguished from the normal fact content of Google and Wikipedia.)
OTOH, the message for the RIAA members that own old-media outlets seems to be "if your corporate objectives had been effectively communicated through the old-media outlets you own, we wouldn't have lost."
Yeah, I think actually that's the problem, such as it is, that the RIAA spokesman is addressing. While he says that the problem is old-media organizations observing a news/editorial divide, it is really that they observed an editorial/corporate-overlord divide: that the corporate boardrooms didn't dictate the editorial views that would be transmitted in their commentary.
Which, had that divide not been observed, might have helped blunt the opposition to SOPA/PIPA, but it would have also hastened the demise of the old-media but further alienating audiences as the media outlets became naked mouthpieces for their corporate overlords
A former Google exec says he believes that traditional search volume is shrinking (but offers no reason for other people to share this belief) and then spends a lot of time offering explanations for what factors might be causing the effect which he hasn't provided any reason to believe is happening in the first place.
It's fairly rational be skeptical that the effect is happening at all. Its less rational to assume that the general effect asserted by the former exec without any substantiation is a real effect, but that it is specifically effecting Google rather than general traditional search. That's just more pushing personal bias as explanation for (yet another) phenomenon for which no evidence has been provided.
Let's see some reason to believe that there is an effect to explain before offering explanations for it.
There might be a meaningful market in which it is a monopoly, but it certainly is not, as suggested in GGP, a system which inherently presents insurmountable barriers to communicating with the people with which you have used it to communicate if you leave it.
My rejection of the latter contention was not a argument of any kind related to the former (which hadn't even been made in the subthread I was responding to until after that response.)
As someone who actually has held more than one government job, I am fairly certain of that in the general case.
In the more specific case of security clearances, I'm fairly certain that investigators would be aware of the conviction (whether or not a pardon or apology was later issued) of a close relative in any case, and I doubt that the existence of a specific pardon or apology would make any difference to the weight the conviction of a deceased close relative under a law since repudiated would be given by security investigators, since the actual conviction, per se, isn't what they are principally interested in.
No, I don't think doing that for Turing would do that (nor do I think the Gordon Brown apology had that kind of impact, just to be clear.) I think either would be an empty political gesture with neither substantive impact nor much symbolic import.
A blanket pardon for all convicted under the law (including, and especially, those still living, which I understand there are several) would be both of substantial symbolic value and, more importantly, have substantive impact as well.
I don't think its "enough" for Turing, nor would a pardon be. There are harms that are no longer correctable. But there's no real meaningful difference between it and a posthumous pardon, since neither actually does anything (and there's no difference between doing nothing in a statement and doing nothing with the full force of law.) Pretending there is amounts to pretending that the past can be undone.
The special treatment given to Turing alone in the form of a pardon or statement might even be counterproductive, symbolically, as it implies that the government policy wasn't so much wrong on its face as counterproductive when applied to someone like Turing who made unique contributions to the war effort.
"Force of law" and "force of government" are differentiators if they are behind something that actually does something. In this case, there is nothing for that force to be behind. Its an equally substantively ineffectual symbolic gesture in either case.
Its quite possible to use Facebook to exchange information which allows an exchange of contact information through any of a variety of mechanisms external to Facebook, including face-to-face contact, that can then be used to continue communication after one or both parties abandons the use of Facebook.
Christianity has no widely accepted eliminationist doctrine, though certainly there have been many times in history where Christian leaders have pushed an eliminationist program. The same is true of many other religions.
Atheism may have no widely accepted eliminationist doctrine, but there are certainly atheist leaders who have pushed eliminationist programs based on their desire to eliminate other beliefs, even in the modern era. The USSR was a particularly obvious example here.
There are atheists who support state-mandate and rigorously-enforced atheism (this was, after all, an important element of some Communist regimes), and there are atheists who don't. Same thing with Christianity. Same thing with most other religions that have every been had enough support among the powerful for consideration of the role of the religion with regard to state authority to ever have been considered.
Both censorship of content and killing people who oppose their approach to religion have been done by state authorities enforcing rules design to advance state-preferred atheism. Dietary rules (at least, with an official connection to the state approach to religion, per se), probably not, but its hard to see that as an important distinction in the absence of the others.
After I'm dead, both are equivalent to each other (in a system which doesn't punish descendants for their parents crimes; in a system which did, there would remain a substantive difference, but that's more a problem with punishing descendants for the crimes of their ancestors than with the form of corrective measure for the original conviction.) They both amount to a statement that the law at the time, and its impact on me, was wrong, but do nothing to actually correct the impact on me which is no longer correctable.
Pardons for living people who were convicted under the law, or a legal process which nullifies the effect of such convictions, would be more appropriate than an apology with no substantive effect, but that's irrelevant in Turing's case (and, as I understand, there is a separate proposal which would provides the second currently in the legislative processin the UK.)
If Turing were alive today, the pardon would actually have a substantive effect.
No, because the reason that a pardon would have different meaning than an apology only exists when the person who was convicted under the unjust law is alive.
No. Direct equity ownership of corporations is not evenly distributed among the populace, so the interests of corporate shareholders is not the same thing as the interest of the "public in general".
For publicly-traded corporations, the primary factor controlling that distribution is present wealth, and the main contributors there are starting assets, ability, and desire to increase wealth. So, naturally, ownership of stock in publicly traded corporations naturally is concentrated in a group that has a greater interest than the public at large in increasing financial returns.
In the U.S. system, that depends what type of proposition "A" is.
If A is a matter of law, then decisions by two lower courts that conflict (usually, this is important with intermediate courts of appeals conflicting because their decisions are binding precedent on lower courts) can be resolved by a higher court (for matters of state law, that would be the state supreme court; for matters of federal law, the federal supreme court.)
If A is a matter of fact, then the determination is case-specific, generally, and there is no reason to resolve the conflict.
Additionally, when the one of the cases is between the same set of parties as the other case (whether the issue is one of fact or law), conflicts are prevented by issue preclusion, which prevents issues that were essential to a prior decision in a case between the same parties from being contested between them in a new case.
The two aren't mutually exclusive, and legal documents often require quite a bit of context outside of the documents themselves, which most people aren't familiar with, to interpret correctly.
No, they aren't. Corporations aren't collections of people. They are abstract collections of rights and privileges with respect to property that are assigned to certain people through law.
The problem with that idea is that among the collection of rights that make up the corporate form is the legally enforceable right of shareholders to demand that the corporation, through its management, without exception acts to maximize their realization of their shared interests. In the case of widely held public corporations, that shared interest is almost exclusively financial -- so, to the extent that acting ethically in even the slightest bit reduces expected returns compared to a less ethical course of action, there is not only a reason to leave ethics at the door, but a legal mandate to do so.
Closer to the second then the first.
No, they didn't. You need to learn to read. The comment I made was that the treaty power, as an enumerated power, isn't restricted to actions which are authorized by other enumerated powers. I didn't say (or make a comment that "presupposed") that treaties had priority over the Constitution. That was your radical misreading, and where your response split off into irrelevancy.
I'm willing to hear your argument with specific references on that point, but I am rather unconvinced by your vague handwaving.
The operative word whose import you seem to miss is final. The Supreme Court is unquestionably empowered to be an arbiter of any dispute over the extent of federal powers under the Constitution, but the final decision ultimately rests with the people as a whole.
No, it doesn't; my statement (in response to the false claim that the Supreme Court had not ruled unequivocally on the issue) simply describes the content of the Supreme Court's rulings on the question, which is orthogonal to whether or not they are the "final arbiter" of the question. You seem to be simply making up points to argue against at this point.
Actually, Google's founders own several jets through H211 LLC, including (as of 2008) the 767 you mention, a 757, 2 Gulfstream V, and the fighter jet mentioned in GP (a Dornier Alpha.) I think they've added at least one more plane since (ISTR that they now have 3 Gulfstream Vs.)
Motorola isn't a Google child company. Motorola Mobility is a company which Google has agreed to purchase from Motorola, but the purchase has not yet been completed.
Priority is irrelevant (priority would only become an issue of a purported treaty violated a negative restriction in the Constitution, not if it merely extends beyond the other enumerated powers of the federal government in the Constitution.) And the issue was settled by the Supreme Court in Missouri v. Holland 252 U.S. 416 (1920).
The holding in Missori v. Holland states outright that the treaty power is itself a separate, positive grant of power in addition to the other positive grants in the Constitution, and that therefore legal rules which States might have grounds to challenge as intruding on the general reservation of non-enumerated powers to the States in the 10th Amendment had they been regular acts of Congress standing alone were exercises of an enumerated power (the treaty power itself) when done through ratified treaty, or when done by statute to support such a treaty.
That decision also, however, suggests that negative prohibition on government action within the Constitution are limits on the treaty-making power, a point made more directly in Reid v. Covert 354 U.S. 1 (1957), among other cases.
So, contrary to your argument that both the statement that the treaty power extends beyond the other enumerated powers of Congress and the statement that the Constitution constrains treaties are assumptions with little foundation, both -- with the proviso that the constraint placed on the treaty power by the Constitution does not constrain it only to the space defined by other positive grants of power -- are extremely well-established principles of law has ruled unequivocally.