I think the link would be more useful if it weren't done in an explain-like-i'm-five manner. Some of it does seem to apply, especially if you look at the things on the list:
section 1028 (relating to fraud and related activity in connection with identification documents)
...and I could go on but meh. I believe that the link started out with "complicated conspiracy" law to describe what RICO is...isn't that exactly what I was accusing Comcast of?
I understand that RICO is an extremely difficult case to make, and it probably should be so, so that the law isn't used flippantly. But I also think we need much more powerful tools to control these corrupt monopolies that control large parts of this country's infrastructure, especially as they seem hell bent on controlling even more of it. IF Verizon is found to have controlled a massive identity theft racket to bombard the FCC with fake comments, it seems to me that RICO is the exact tool to use.
The Judicial Conference of the United States is neither a "little-known committee" or in any way secretive or shady, unless one is totally ignorant of how the judicial system works. The EFF certainly is not.
The conference is composed of: "the Chief Justice of the United States, the chief judge of each court of appeals federal regional circuit, a district court judge from various federal judicial districts, and the chief judge of the United States Court of International Trade." [0]
You can disagree with their decisions, but don't try and imply that they are duplicitous. I expect better of the EFF.
I consider myself well read and politically savvy but I had never heard of this body. When was the last time they made news outside of maybe the narrow interests of federal trial lawyers?
Java isn't something a guy on the street would recognize, but if you were writing to a lay audience, would you describe the Oracle v. Google as involving a "little known programming language?
That wouldn't be good journalism. It would give the reader an inaccurate depiction of what the lawsuit is really about. It would be good lawyering, depending on which side you are on. A classic lawyering tactic is to use the most favorable (to your side) characterization of something you can justify.
> It would give the reader an inaccurate depiction of what the lawsuit is really about
Yeah. Part of the EFF's job is educating us. When they add such slant they lose credibility in my book. They're still great at keeping tabs on government actions that impact tech.
EFF is an advocacy organization. They're like Sierra Club or PETA.[1] They're not in the business of neutral analysis; they're in the business of pursuasion. Their job is not to provide the most reasonable take; it's to give up no ground to their opponents.
[1] Both of which are organizations I hold in high esteem, so that's not a negative comparison.
> Their job is not to provide the most reasonable take; it's to give up no ground to their opponents.
That sounds like a lawyer's perspective. You could say that about anyone working towards any particular goal. Please pardon my disagreement.
One of the EFF's jobs is to educate technologists. When they use slanted language, they lose some readers/"students".
The EFF has many roles, including educating and lobbying the government. Totally fine if you want to call it advocacy too. I often find myself digging for extra facts after reading their slanted positions. I wish they'd do full reporting of both sides more often. C'est la vie.
> Java isn't something a guy on the street would recognize but if you were writing to a lay audience, would you describe the Oracle v. Google as involving a "little known programming language?
If it barely entered the public consciousness, sure.
In the case of Java though, I think it's actually more recognizable than this committee, which personally I'd never heard of. Between the Oracle vs. Google lawsuit, the browser plugin vulnerabilities, and Java just being such a popular computer language... I'd assume a lot of laypeople have heard of it. Though many might not realize JavaScript is a different language.
My point is that the EFF (and whoever was drafting this press release) certainly knows what the Judicial Conference is, and are (is) willfully misrepresenting them through careful word choice.
The only misrepresentation going on is this nonsense that a headline's language should be based on the knowledge of the author instead of the intended audience.
Little known implies that if you ask 100 randomly selected people if they know if it exists, what it is and what it does, a small number, say less than 10 or so (little) will know.
Did you take your educated guess at that fraction?
Most concepts posted about on HN, and for that matter, discussed by the EFF, are "little-known." The inclusion of that description in the headline is obviously intended to make the reader believe that the committee is up to no good in secret, not that most people simply don't know of it.
Oh well -- the EFF knows that if they write for themselves, there'll be lower-brow comment-threads full of 'lol wtf bbq' and no one will take them seriously because they won't understand. Write accessibly, and well-read nitpickers of a HN-like brow alignment will pick apart their clickbait headlines. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
I don't think that's what it means in this context.
I bet if you ask 100 random people, not 10 would know what Stripe is. Not 10 would know what Angular is. But would you ever describe either of those as "little known"?
I think in this situation it implies that even if you're in the ___domain you aren't aware... and on this it's not really the case right?
and the top of this thread is now a stupid meaningless
argument about a word in the title instead of talking about the issue. Well done. Can you guys take that rubbish to reddit or voat or somewhere crappy? I like reading HN, please don't make it a waste of my time.
and since I'm here now I'll throw out my opinion on the meat of the story.
I use Tor a lot and am not based in the US and am nor american. If America gives itself the legal ability to hack anyone, anywhere regardless of what they are doing then all american networks/nodes/people are open to hacking and posting publicly. That includes all private people, public people, everything from correspondence to baby monitor cameras. It calls for an open season against those countries whereby we air every single persons dirty laundry in as public a way as possible.
It is similar to europeans like UK, where certain people there think they can hack all people everywhere, legally, with complete immunity.
Excuse my parlance but fuck everything about that. That is a system balanced way too far in one direction.
but hey, that guy said 'little-known' about the Judicial Conference of the United States. That's what is important to americans...
Posted without Tor because I still live in a free country and am not afraid of speak up.
If the EFF was able to write posts that weren't full of gross hyperbole and flat out untruths then every comment thread about an EFF statement wouldn't require discussion about how the EFF is misleading people.
They know perfectly well what they are doing. They know it leads to people talking about the stuff they exaggerated rather than the actual issue. They know that it turns away reasonable people. They are gambling that they can whip up an ignorant mob as with SOPA. The difference there was that a bunch of high profile corporations and capitalists had a financial interest in that fight and were happy to fuel the outrage machine to get their way.
What are the untruths and what is misleading people? Keep in mind that not everybody who watxhes EFF is american, I never heard of that group before and I read most of the big tech sites daily since the late 90's.
Why would the EFF want to turn away reasonable people?
Here's the rub (for me). If what you say is correct then to my mind the EFF is doing you a favor. If people don't get at least a little riled up about this then it will go through like all the other rubbish being passed around the world and you will be left with the consequences.
The arrogance is absolutely astounding, on a level with 16th century britain. To think that you can do what you want, to whomever you want, wherever you want in a completely legal manner is disgustingly arrogant and will lead to the same problems as it always has throughout western history.
We have been here before. Technology changes but people (unfortunately) do not. The people pushing this kind of legislation will suffer the least, ordinary americans will take the brunt for them. That is your choice - is this move representative of you and if not - will you do anything to stop it?
edit: excuse my ignorance but this si actually about warrants through proper court mechanisms? I'm okay with proper warrant procedures through proper (ie. not FISA) court systems. I don't hold US courts highly compared to others but every country needs proper procedured.
I agree with most of the goals of the EFF, but their blog is basically one misleading description after another for these things. A comment like yours ends up being the top comment for any links to the blog.
Someone might comment that the gov't does the same thing, but that's no excuse for such intellectual dishonesty.
Agreed, as much as I support the ideals of the EFF, this kind of misleading scare tactic really rubs me the wrong way. It feels like they're compromising the moral high ground in order to elicit a larger response--which I understand might be the straightest path to accomplishing their goals, but it feels dirty.
> The Judicial Conference of the United States is neither a "little-known committee" or in any way secretive or shady, unless one is totally ignorant of how the judicial system works.
The Judicial Conference is currently the subject of a lawsuit for being secretive, shady and duplicitous. (A serious lawsuit on a serious issue, with a serious chance of success.) So I think this statement is a bit subjective.
Honestly, sounds like you might have a conflict of interest in the matter, or haven't done your research. Only 36 percent of Americans can actually name the three branches of government the Constitution created.
That lack of interest is what makes the EFF framing so ridiculous. There's nothing mysterious about the committee, it's just an implementation detail of the justice system. Calling it little known implies that people who don't even know what to call the judicial branch should for some reason know about the committee.
Bloggers exaggerate. And commenters like to point that out. Sometimes I hear that commenters even like to overreact to things.
Got it.
Now, I've been following this issue. I did not know about this committee. I daresay I could pull 100 hackers from a room and most of them wouldn't know of it either.
So for purposes of "legal people", yes, you are correct. What a overstatement! But that's not the audience here, and the headline works -- and it is not an exaggeration.
I think the reason that {Uber, AirBNB, DraftKings} succeeded in flouting the law is that they operated in industries that are consumer-facing, and where the cost of regulation is obvious to consumers.
Many people understand that taxi regulations (for the most part) negatively affect them, and in many cases are extremely frustrated with them: see Washington, DC. Most people aren't familiar with and don't care about the company that manages their health insurance, and as a result there's little public support.
Most Taxi regulations are good for the public not the consumer.
Go back and you find people wanted to cut the number of Taxii on the roads. I would much rather you use a bus than a Taxi. The problem was regulatory capture constricted past this point.
ex: We don't want a lot of them on the road making traffic worse. Drive to B -> C you add X congestion, call a cab they drive from A -> B to pick you up, then B->C that's X + Y congestion, pollution, risk for accidents etc.
PS: The real issue is after regulation people tend to forget why it was added. "Let's deregulate Banks!"
>Go back and you find people wanted to cut the number of Taxii on the roads.
The explicit reason given, at least in the case of NYC, was the desire to make driving taxis more profitable. During the Great Depression there were more drivers than passengers and it couldn't pay the bills. How do we solve this? Limit the supply of drivers, therefore raising the price and reducing competition. From a consumer standpoint this is terrible.
We would have ended up with an explicit monopoly for a specific company if it weren't for some folks getting convicted of corruption (taxi company bribes) scuttling that deal.
> I would much rather you use a bus than a Taxi. The problem was regulatory capture constricted past this point.
>ex: We don't want a lot of them on the road making traffic worse. Drive to B -> C you add X congestion, call a cab they drive from A -> B to pick you up, then B->C that's X + Y congestion, pollution, risk for accidents etc.
Why limit it to taxis? There is a great way to promote public transit, reduce air congestion and pay for roads: tolls and congestion pricing. This would affect all drivers, not just certain drivers.
>PS: The real issue is after regulation people tend to forget why it was added. "Let's deregulate Banks!"
The irony is it appears you've forgotten why these regulations were created in the first place.
>more drivers than passengers and it couldn't pay the bills. How do we solve this? Limit the supply of drivers, therefore raising the price and reducing competition. From a consumer standpoint this is terrible.
Yes, but what regulators didn't realize (and still don't) is that economic incidence is tricky. Just because you can charge more, doesn't mean any specific factor in the production chain gets to partake in any of that.
For example, just because Gucci bags surge in popularity doesn't mean the Gucci office janitor can charge more for his labor -- the supply of such services is unaffected and they can find more providers at the same price.
And indeed, the same dynamic applied for taxi medallions: sure, you can charge more to passengers, but the immense supply of qualified drivers -- who only need a small takehome -- means that they'll bid up the price of the medallions (rental price or capitalized) so that the drivers are still poverty level, and almost all the monopoly profits go to medallion holders, not drivers.
"The explicit reason given, at least in the case of NYC, was the desire to make driving taxis more profitable. During the Great Depression there were more drivers than passengers and it couldn't pay the bills. How do we solve this? Limit the supply of drivers, therefore raising the price and reducing competition. From a consumer standpoint this is terrible."
Is it? If it's not paying the bills, then you're not going to have people doing it. Making sure that the price is at a point where it can sustain itself makes it much more likely that it'll still be there tomorrow.
It confirms the story that I have heard previously that taxi medallions were introduced to protect consumers. This doesn't mean that profit was not a reason but I'd like to see something that shows the "explicit" reason you state.
I suspect it's not just for the consumers but for the image of the city. Cabs are one system that visitors interact with immediately, before nearly anything else. Grotty cabs make a bad impression.
I agree, but most consumers probably see them as harmful, and many consumers are dissatisfied with state-sanctioned monopolies on taxi service. The actual effect doesn't matter to the consumer, only the perceived one.
Exactly, but I'd phrase it a bit differently: when it comes to taxis and apartments, regulations are bad for you, the consumer, and good for the people in your community (taxi drivers, neighbors), while in insurance, regulations directly protect the consumer.
Because people (especially in the US) couldn't care less about other people, regulation that annoys consumers is "bad", and the consumers then defend the companies breaking those particular laws. Those companies exploit the fact that in every industry, consumers always outnumber providers (or conversely, every person consumes from many more industries than those where they provide), and so the disregard for this kind of regulation will always work. Every new company will get consumers to gang up on the far fewer incumbent providers until they break the regulation that protects them, and so on, industry by industry.
It's a little like the robber barons, who used every new wave of immigrants to beat up the previous generation of immigrants who tried to unionize, and then hired the new ones in their place... that is, until the next wave of immigrants. Except the new way of doing this is far more effective, because it's always easy to obtain a majority that supports you and feel like they're doing the right thing at the same time.
For the most part I think you're spot-on, although it's worth emphasizing the nuance that not ALL taxi/hotel regulations are bad for the consumer.
Most of the AirBnB and Uber horror stories you hear are things that don't happen, or happen far less relative to the overall volume, in a world of licensed taxis and professional hotels/B&Bs.
Does the good of current regulations outweigh the bad? Likely not, in many cases. But there are reasons (at least some of) these regulations exist outside of capitalism being terrible and the successful trying (and succeeding) at pushing out competition.
I would argue that many (most?) housing regulations are good for the consumer. My landlord has to provide me with a safe and structurally sound place to live, which is good for me. If my heat breaks in the winter he's obligated to fix it, he can't evict me and leave me on the streets on a whim, or turn off my water if I am late on the rent, etc. Laws around security deposits are usually good for the consumer as well. Nobody wants what is referred to as a "slumlord."
Landlords often are annoyed about regulations (and some tenants unfortunately abuse them) but many came about because of the abusive practices of the slumlords.
Our society deems having a safe place to live pretty essential so landlords have a massive amount of power over their tenants if unchecked.
This is a little simplistic. I won't argue that these regulations have morphed into things that are overall negative for the consumer, but the reason they where introduced in the first place is because you had instances of people actually being killed by unregulated nefarious actors. That is certainly negative for the consumer.
When people are asking politicians why Joe Doe was able to operate his "taxi" company that wouldn't stop his car outside of the ghetto without a $50 "oops, I got lost fee", it seems obvious why regulation is put in place.
That isn't to say that said regulation remains entirely useful, just that your argument isn't really bore out by the history.
The reason why zenefits is having issues is that the laws they broke are still entirely relevant to everyone involved.
Flamebait aside, is it that hard to see the material differences in the classifiers between your example of a "dis/favored class" and the classes discussed by the GP? Hint: one has classifiers that one can eventually overcome, and the other doesn't.
Regardless, comparing regulations imposed on modern industries to Jim Crow is nothing more than oblique tedious posturing that ignores the full picture of what Jim Crow laws were.
I'd be interested in hearing a principled argument why "right race" is a bad way to choose a favored class for rent seeking, but "politically connected", "nepotism" or "random chance" (as pron was advocating for) is a good way.
Further, suppose we brought back only the economic protectionism bits - would that change things and make Jim Crow somewhat more acceptable? If not, bringing up the "full picture" seems like a non sequitur.
Let me clarify the question I'm asking. Jim Crow makes me emotionally angry, more so than taxi regulations. But I don't have a reasonable principle to back that up. On a rational, rather than an emotional level, I can't actually justify why Jim Crow protectionism would be unacceptable but taxi protectionism is acceptable. Can you?
Roughly because the evidence indicated that those regulations were intended not to protect whites from black competition, but ALSO and perhaps more importantly to preserve a economy in which "white trash" was prevented from forming meaningful economic relationships with blacks.
The whole point about any form of cronyism is to prevent people from engaging in trades they otherwise might.
Further, suppose we brought back only the economic protectionism bits - would that change things and make Jim Crow somewhat more acceptable? (As asked in my second paragraph.)
Suppose we literallytook some sort of randomized occupational licensing. I.e. suppose we have a cutoff of 10,000 taxi drivers, selected via shuffle(applications)[0:10000]. Now suppose we replace that random process with a racist one - first we allocate the 10k slots among white/asian people, and allocate the remainder among non-Asian minorities. Would that be morally acceptable and have the positive economic effects that pron claims?
Why is the first process morally acceptable and economically beneficial but the second one isn't?
if we have meaningful group identities. protectionism established by preventing dis favored groups from entering a market causes both the general harm a random allocation would from inefficiency AND the additional inefficies imposed on the targeted minority.
Asking society as a whole to bear a cost of inefficiency in exchange for some safety is less bad than imposing both that and the additional cost on a non-consenting minority.
For a methodological individualist it'd be harder to make a case.
In both cases the costs are imposed on a non-consenting minority - in the first case the minority is chosen by math.random(), in the second case the minority is chosen by genetics.
It sounds like you want to appeal to some principle that certain minority groups (those with "meaningful" group identities) deserve special moral consideration? Supposing that nerds or just some protectionist lottery victims created a "meaningful group identity", would that make them deserving of protection?
You are right that for an individualist (which I am), this is a lot harder. So I simply wouldn't share your moral conclusions, but I'd at least understand where you come from.
Your implication about economic protectionism being a net drain on society regardless of the classifiers could have been made without using a ridiculous example such as Jim Crow -- the non sequitur of Jim Crow lies not with my response, but with yours.
I can't and won't argue that "politically connected", "nepotism" or "random chance" are the best way of doing things, but "ambition", "ability", and "intelligence" play a non-negligible (at least non-zero) role in how much prosperity one can achieve in the taxi, real estate, etc. industries. Under Jim Crow style regulation, "ambition", "ability" and "intelligence" have zero impact on whether or not one can achieve one's fullest potential. "Right race" (a.k.a "random chance") is the only way to end up maximally successful under Jim Crow. Your argument that modern regulations are akin to Jim Crow falls flat with respect to how fungible the upward mobility is in the face of regulation.
If you look at it systemically, the puzzle disappears. It's not hard to see that the system Jim Crow laws were part of was more harmful than the system taxi regulations are part of, however one dislikes taxi regulation.
Feelings like the one you describe are often better at giving us information about systems than an analytic view (e.g. measuring comparables, in this case comparable regulations). Emotion can be irrational and take us further from the truth, but it can also take us closer. It's a question of the quality of the emotion, and one can learn to distinguish these things.
As I asked in my second paragraph, what if we got rid of the system but brought back the racist protectionism only? Would that benefit the community and all the other good things that are suggested above?
Being very concrete, I'm suggesting that we take any protectionist system which uses a random number generator (e.g. first 10,000 people to apply get a sweet gig, everyone else is screwed and forbidden from economic competition) with a different random number generator (whether a person was born $rightrace). Nothing else.
My emotions say the same thing about non-systemic racist protectionism, although your proposed solution suggests this should be ok. So I don't think your solution works.
This is a trivializing form of argument. You can't abstract things out of their original contexts like that without destroying their meaning—at least not at any level higher than, say, the lambda calculus.
Why can't you? Are you suggesting that reason doesn't apply to morality or the real world?
By abstracting in this way, we have a way to determine whether the principles we claim are important really are. In the case we are discussing, it seems like some other fact or principle from the original context is important. Which one is it, and why?
If we can't figure it out, maybe we should consider the possibility that our emotional/cultural baggage is misleading us. At the very least we should have less confidence in our beliefs than before.
Your critique seems very anti-intellectual to me - the claim that you can't reason about things outside their context seems like a cheap appeal to retreat back to our emotional conclusions. Am I understanding you wrong?
> I'm suggesting that we take any protectionist system which uses a random number generator
You're right, if you take any complex enough formula, and hide most of its variables and consider just the result modulo some number, it would look like a random number generator... And I think understand now why it may be hard for some people to see the variables, or why they'd insist on considering only some of the digits. What was the saying? "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his ideology depends on his not understanding it". But it goes beyond that. I really think that any interaction that is based on exercising judgment or negotiating a contract -- things that underlie most human interaction -- seems arbitrary to you. You need rules that can apply universally and without judgment. To you, judgment means too many variables that break the elegance of a simple formula; moreover, those are variables whose values are often hard to estimate precisely enough, and so the result can sometimes go either way, which to you seems like it might as well be random.
And maybe I was wrong, and it's not about your choice of axioms, but that, like colorblind people, some things about human interaction escape your perception, and you fail to see why people would "randomly" favor one grey wallpaper over another.
> your proposed solution suggests this should be ok
Yes, I too am puzzled as to why dang is so much in favor of non-systemic racism.
> But I don't have a reasonable principle to back that up.
Sure you do. Just try to find your hidden assumptions and axioms, and try to come up with alternative ones. Remember, for every reasonable assumption, the opposite assumption may be just as reasonable. In this particular case start asking yourself what does a "favored class" mean? Who favors it? Why? How is the class formed? What does "protection" mean? From what? To what end? Why is that end desirable (or not)? And every time you deem something good (or bad), keep asking yourself why, until you get to your personal set of axiomatic values[1]. Of course, when coming to a question of fact ask yourself, am I sure this is a fact, and if so, are there possibly other pertinent facts that I may be unaware of?
> Can you?
I can easily, but I could also come up with a reasoned argument to support your point of view[2]. The result in this case, as in many others, is fully determined by your choice of axioms.
I could fully argue both sides of any ethical debate, but I support the one side whose required axioms coincide with mine. I would like to believe that my personal choice of values (which has changed considerably over the years) is at least partly a result of my effort to study society in earnest (i.e. semi-professionally), and my values are almost universally shared among those who have spent years studying society, while those with opposing values usually have not. So I can only hope that my values are supported by some measure of external "truth", but, of course, I can't say that they are objectively more "correct" than yours.
BTW, I'm not advocating for randomly chosen favored classes, but for protecting all groups that are disadvantaged by our current choice of economic structure from further unfair harm which said economy may inflict on them.
[1]: And don't just say "freedom", because freedom alone is a self-contradictory value (there can be one completely free person, but not two) that must be further qualified by other values. So if you think freedom is your only axiomatic value, try harder and you'll find more.
[2]: Pretending, of course, that you'd chosen a better example than Jim Crow, where members of the favored class were former chattel slave owners who "protected" themselves from treating as human the multitudes of victims they had violently abducted and robbed (and raped and killed) for two centuries to enrich themselves. But I think I can see past that poor choice of an example to understand what you're getting at.
Well, that's a tradeoff. If the number of medallions is kept up with demand (as is the case in many places), I'd argue that some mechanism to protect the livelihood of those who can't obtain better jobs is a net positive, as it allows the less fortunate to get ahead, especially in an economy where decent blue-collar jobs are getting harder and harder to come by. It's not like taxi drivers are fat cat millionaires who get rich off the back of poor consumers.
Generally the medallions are owned by someone else invariably rich (or lucky to get it early) and then rented out to the taxi drivers. The taxi drivers start doing shady things in order to pay the rental costs and earn a living. Then various sides get into the game of how many medallions should be available in the market to play with the supply/demand curve and maximize their own profits.
I think Uber is owned by someone much richer than any taxi company owner, and the difference is that the shady things in Uber's case are done not by the mistreated employees but by the owners themselves (often against their own employees), and they don't do it to earn a living. I am not saying taxi company owners are saints, but Uber is by no means better.
If you've seen the HBO series Deadwood (a masterpiece, BTW), I'd say we're replacing an Al Swearengen with a George Hearst. Both may be villains, but the scale makes all the difference...
I don't very much care for Uber. I don't want them to have a monopoly in the taxi market. Hopefully a more open taxi industry with competition allows for improved quality.
If Uber ultimately goes public, then the owner will be society. The medallion owners largely were individuals who had the access to credit and leveraged in as the values rose.
There is a lot more transparency with Uber, however if they achieve a near total monopoly on transportation such as Google did for search, the end result from a consumer experience standpoint may end up the same, with different trade offs.
The alternate issue, the employees/drivers, won't matter in the long run because there won't be drivers whether it was Uber or medallion holders.
> If Uber ultimately goes public, then the owner will be society
thats a ludicrous reductionism as to what "publicly traded" company actually means and it discredits the rest of otherwise reasonable argument to say this.
From failing operations in Venezuela to gigantic state operated industries in China, I see a lot of examples of nationalized & government operated companies where the end beneficiaries are the insiders who get to re-allocate wealth to themselves at the expense of the rest of their citizens.
> If Uber ultimately goes public, then the owner will be society.
You mean those in society with disposable income to invest (or a 401K). That's not quite the same as "society".
> The medallion owners largely were individuals who had the access to credit and leveraged in as the values rose.
Sure, they were small-business entrepreneurs. As I said, they are Swearengen to Uber's Hearst, but their immigrant employees certainly benefit from the regulation, too.
> The alternate issue, the employees/drivers, won't matter in the long run because there won't be drivers whether it was Uber or medallion holders.
Sovereign wealth funds, pension funds, both public and private, own immense quantities of stocks in publicly traded corporations. If the trend of give-everything-away philanthropy continues, even the most tightly controlled corporations should continue to spread out through society.
If Uber goes public, nothing significant will change. The same creepy people will be in charge, the CEO will still be the same guy who's advocated breaking laws and sending PIs to stalk reporters.
I guess that depends on the values you hold, doesn't it? For many of us, there are some values that occasionally trump that of unrestricted competition, and many of us believe that sometimes free competition reduces freedom rather than increases it.
Or even more accurately, many of us think that it is possible to conceive of things worse than rent-seeking, and so in some circumstances it is possible that a reasonable amount of it may be the lesser of two evils (just as accepting killing in self defense is not the same as "supporting murder"). Others, of course, may believe that there can be nothing worse.
The other difference is the consequences of the laws being broken. Insurance industry laws are much stricter in enforcement than rental or auto laws. Lawmakers may look the other way on taxi or rental regulation, because they realize there's a market shortage. They're much less willing to look the other way on insurance (or any financial services) fraud.
It could also be that insurance industry participants are more centralized and organized than taxi and real estate companies, but I'm less sure that this was a driving factor in the regulation.
They are also backed by the financial industry and are considered financial and legal instruments.
while it isn't possible to "front run" your insurance deal as your broker, putting you into the wrong insurance has a variety of outside financial consequences that are not insurance related at all.
For example - Zenfits could theoretically "redline" certain kinds of businesses into certain kinds of insurance, even though the employee pools qualify for something better/totally different. By doing so, Zenefits could make more profit per insurance policy sale and renewal, but their is more risk in the lifetime customer that they will explode, since it is the wrong policy. Zenefits see hypergrowth and projections towards even further hypergrowth. However, they also create systemic SMB risk
Since SMBs do not typically get lots of help with these sorts of HR issues, the "wrong" insurance could be the difference between bankrupcy and existence 5 years down the line, even though there is competition among policies. The broker is supposed to act as guidance among many competing insurance policies against that eventuality, hence the regulation.
If Zenefits can't guarantee their employees can actually act not in Zenefits interest as brokers when queried about two policies and the benefit to the customer, despite what Zenefits would make out of the sale, because of behavior within Zenefits, then there are problems for the businesses that brokered with them, and any bank that loaned them money (since part of the premise there is that this stuff is properly managed!)
I'm actually surprised I'm the first one who mentioned it. People are very focused on the Zenefits as startup issue, rather than focusing on "What if it was say one of AIG's largest franchisees (or insert some conglomerate of insurance brokers, especially as famous as AIG) who was doing this." Once framed this way, it becomes much more obvious that the startup issue and how it relates to growth is a different set of issues and framing than "cheating on tests in insurance brokering/lacking proper insurance brokers doing the sales/place of regulation in insurance."
This especially becomes true when if you turn on the tv and hear the occasional pitch about loans against life insurance policies, or question too deeply why AIG was even betting in the subprime mortgage market and became systemic risk if they are an insurer.
It must mean that insurance itself is a kind of financial instrument, or cash flow, or something where you can create exchanges off of it in its own way(1). Which means there is fiduciary duty of some sort when the initial underwriting for the insurance is written.
This is going to be a headache for anyone who bought one of those policies and/or underwrote one.
(1)Technically speaking, options, futures, and forwards all started out as insurance contracts, some dating back as far as before Hammarabuai's code, so insurance contracts today must be some remainder of something special, I suppose.
It's more the 'unions' than the 'regulations'. It's in the best interest of any union to keep prices inflated artificially by utilizing government regulations, like the medallion system.
Stop being obstinate. You know exactly what the parent means, and that publishers can sue authors who distribute the works for which they (the publishers) own copyright.
The situation isn't really the same; these are valley sales-types making decisions about how to provide medical insurance to thousands, and it's likely that they haven't had any formal training on what (and what not) to do.
You are aware that the NSA doesn't kick down anyone's door, and that any SIGINT intercepts are accompanied with a message that they can't be used in criminal prosecution, right?
Well they don't kick down doors, but they have picked plenty of locks. You probably don't need to worry about the Special Collection Service [0] though, unless you live in some kind of communications facility. The NSA's crypto programs are well known, but one area that gets very little attention is the part of the agency full of military personnel on loan from their parent services. Those people don't spend their day analyzing cryptographic functions.
You're wrong about voting: americans living abroad register in their last state of residence, and can vote in those elections. It's not illegal to do so. Most states have programs specifically to assist overseas voters, and the federal government provides overseas voting support to americans living abroad through the FPCA program. No fraud is committed.
Kindly point to the relevant state law which requires you to be a physical resident of the state, and thereby disallows deployed members of the military and overseas voters from voting in the state. There may be some, but I've not heard of one.
In any case, your complaint was about the lack of representation in Congress for overseas citizens, excepting by those who fraudulently declare residency in the state. The Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act says the state must allow overseas voters to vote in federal elections, and therefore do have representation, and without resorting to fraudulent means.
1. The IRS isn't signing binding international agreements, they're agreeing to cooperate with foreign governments in the reporting of financial assets, which is well within their legal privilege.
2. The fourth amendment doesn't apply to data you're legally compelled to surrender to the government. By your logic, every form 1040 that's ever been filed is a fourth amendment violation.
3. The eighth amendment has almost never been used in a constitutional case involving excessive fines. When it has, the court has primarily used it to prevent pseudo-fines that aren't really called fines in order to skirt the eighth amendment.
Sure, FATCA might be annoying, but a legal challenge has almost nothing going for it. Don't get your hopes up.
