>"If your tax dollars are funding research, you should be entitled to reading the results."
This statement begs the question, though I understand why it seemingly 'makes sense'. Your tax money also funds lots of things you don't have access to or visibility of, and it's not clear how far your logic should extend. Should you have access to intelligence assessments, or the ability to purchase any technology developed with government funding? What about licenses to patents developed with the aid of government funding? How about access to government or external labs, or the use of their equipment?
Biden had the bureaucracy on his side (it’s well known that government employees are largely left-Democrats), so he was able to collaborate with it. In his first term, Trump learned that insiders were good at preventing him from accomplishing his goals when he ‘played by the rules’, so now he’s just ignored ‘the system’.
Insiders have plainly ignored the law in the past when it was convenient, (see all the agencies which violated notice-and-comment rule-making in the Obama years,) we’ve just never seen anyone ignore the administrative agencies to this degree before.
>In his first term, Trump learned that insiders were good at preventing him from accomplishing his goals when he ‘played by the rules’, so now he’s just ignored ‘the system’.
This seems obviously what happened, and it may be because of the unprecedented non-consecutive second term. I don't know if Trump's ideology has changed between this term and his previous one, but his tactics certainly have. He clearly came into this term with a plan to do a blitzkreig [unfortunate reference], to make changes at a rate and degree that would cut through all the bureaucratic obstacles he faced the first term.
And it seems mostly successful. The opposition, including many of the employees of the executive branch themselves, were mostly caught off guard. Over the last few weeks, it seems like they are finally starting to form a responsive strategy, and are pushing back more effectively through courts and public opinions. I expect much of this initial push to moderate, such as the tariffs, the funding cuts, but still with lasting changes. Of course, if any of the changes are found to be unlawful, they will get reversed. But that will potentially take years.
I think the parent is trying to say that the tariffs are levied based on the importer's cost, not on their price, so its impact could be smaller on goods with higher retail markup.
Prosecutorial discretion hasn’t meant much to me since the Bond got prosecuted for violating a chemical weapons treaty, and Yates got prosecuted for fish-shredding.
Sometimes the vibes are wrong, and things go haywire. This is why zero tolerance policies have to be instituted in schools. That doesnt mean the general idea is wrong. Strict adherence to written law will always fail justice. The world is too nuanced and too fractal to handle every edge case well.
I seem to recall that zero-tolerance policies caused the expulsion of multiple Boy Scouts who were merely obeying the requirement that they always have a multifunction pocket tool with them (such as a Victorinox knife), and these caused the Scouts to rescind the rule.
"Zero tolerance" policies are a generally a tool of the Sith.
The US auto industry got hurt because the 'big three' operated like an oligopoly, with the United Auto Workers (UAW) acting as the coordinating organization (and reaping most of the 'monopoly rents'). The Japanese were able to disrupt the oligopoly because they weren't beholden to the UAW; many studies were done, and some found that the American companies' costs were simply higher than the Japanese's (due to both direct labor costs, and other costs related to their CBA), so the Japanese could either make cheaper cars, or higher quality cars for the same price as the big three.
There are plenty of EU companies that buy into new markets or opportunities, they just fall outside of these laws; Siemens is a good example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siemens
I am of the opinion that the licenses for fonts in software are too expensive, but why is the pricing ‘backwards’? Book publishers don’t make a lot of profit, while software developers do.
> Book publishers don’t make a lot of profit, while software developers do.
Do you have a citation for that?
Printing a book costs just about nothing, it’s astonishingly cheap to print a quality book in volume. Author royalties are not that high (I suppose famous authors whose name alone sell books is another story), then you have retail margins and overhead.
The top three book publishers’ have sales in the low billions with operating margins in the 10 - 20% range.
It is a healthy industry even if it is smaller than it used to be.
The one problem with books is that shipping an individual book to a single consumer costs a far more than printing the book, but there is zero shipping and zero printing costs for ebooks, just the retailer margin.
Book publishing is at least as bad as VC work. You publish a lot of books to have a catalog, and a few books make inordinately more money than the rest which keeps the lights on. New printings sound cheap enough, but a lot of books don’t get many of those. The long tail is very flat.
And as for the authors, most would make a lot more money tutoring for the same number of hours of effort they put into the book. Those appearance fees might make it better, but how many people get those?
This seems like a very strange reading of "express aiming"; instead of those words meaning that a person has done something to 'target', it means that the person did not 'expressly avoid'? I am not sure that "expressly aim" has much meaning at all in this reading.
I don't have any horse in this race, though I know the EFF is very popular on HN, and that many people here are also against data collection.
It's quite presumptuous of someone without detailed knowledge of what's going on to second-guess someone who made a hard choice like this.
Sabotaging one's employer is also an ethically problematic choice to make. Imagine someone in your employ were to decide you were a 'bad person', say it was your lawyer or accountant...
This statement begs the question, though I understand why it seemingly 'makes sense'. Your tax money also funds lots of things you don't have access to or visibility of, and it's not clear how far your logic should extend. Should you have access to intelligence assessments, or the ability to purchase any technology developed with government funding? What about licenses to patents developed with the aid of government funding? How about access to government or external labs, or the use of their equipment?
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