JumpCrisscross

We need to amend the Constitution to strike pardon power and give the Congress the power to pass property taxes (aka wealth taxes) and regulate donations to campaigns, candidates, parties and partisan causes.

We also need law establishing mandatory retirement for Congressmen and judges, including justices, and a system where each President appoints (with Senate consent) one and only one justice to SCOTUS. Finally, yes, pass McCain-Feingold, pass a SCOTUS ethics bill and make corruption charges easier to bring.

> never thought of git as a "measure"

Git is a tool, or more accurately in this case, an interface. The measure is the attribution of edits.

> general public isn't willing to pay for this

The rough truth is you don’t need the general public to. Just the elites, broadly defined.

To be fair, it was a major theme of Aristotle’s, too.

> we could behead people convicted of corrupting or being corrupted

This has historically done nothing for corruption and everything for one-party rule.

> he's not wrong

Ku band gives Starlink a run for its money on planes. And if I’m backpacking, Starlink is worthless. These are real contexts where Starlink isn’t competitive, a category set to grow in the coming years with new launches and regulations. (Anything you do on Starlink should be presumed to be open to warant-free inquiry by the American and Putin regimes at this point.)

> changes made to the US Code over time must be traceable, discoverable

They are. The history of the USC is public. This is one way of visualizing it. It’s good. But I want to see the advantage of this presentation.

> it would shame legislators from inserting language against the public interest and only meant to reward political contributors

You’d just got a system of favors for who inserts what language. You’d hand tough edits to your safe-seat colleagues and insert messaging amendments designed to get voted down for own comms.

When a measure becomes a target yada yada.

(Note: this proposal is for the U.S. code. Not bills. Git for the USC works.)

> Compared to $40 of today, profit dropped by $40, meaning earnings contraction is around the corner...? Unless of course Microsoft manages to actually earn $20 or more from each GPU each year

Correct. If Microsoft fails to earn more profit from a capital asset, over said asset's useful life, than was paid for it, Microsoft's earnings would be reduced. Put simply, it would have made a bad investment. Presumably, that would affect whether Nvidia gets another order.

If you've ever wondered why subscription mania took hold over the last decade, you've backed into the answer.

(Note that Microsoft depreciates "servers and network equipment" on a straight-line basis over "two to six years" [1].)

[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/789019/0001193125263... page 61

Inflation isn't uniform across an economy.

It also preferentially benefits as a function of margin. If Nvidia's prices double, it logs two thirds of that as earnings. For Kroger it turns into like a penny of extra profit for every dollar of price rises.

> When Microsoft buys an Nvidia GPU for $100, it will claim that it lasts 5 years, so writes down $20 in the expense column for this year. Meanwhile Nvidia takes all the profit at time of sale, $100

Nvidia would log $64 of profit against a $100 sale [1]. (The R&D cost to develop the chip have already been booked.)

> for each GPU bought, SP500 logs $80 of profit, even though no money entered or left the SP500

In your example the S&P would log ~$40 of earnings. (About because taxes.)

[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NVDA/nvidia/profit...

> it benefits almost everyone

I want to see a practical benefit to maintaining this with public funds versus the usual redlines.

> so it doesn’t make sense to track its provenance back to its original authors

The legislative process is inherently collaborative in a way that's ordinarily undocumented. Who introduced an amendment and who supported it are entirely separate. Someone who introduced language can wind up not supporting it because of where the mix of trade-offs winds up.

At the level of a bill, knowing who wrote language matters. At the level of law, you should only care who voted for it. (I'm not even tackling the inherent subjectivity in tracing e.g. language in the CFR to specific language in a bill.)

> who’s responsible for what portions of literal laws and policy

This makes sense for bills. It doesn't for laws. Once a bill is a law, it's the will of the Congress.

> natural language laws have many exceptions and context dependencies

The complexity is in common law, not natural-language laws.

The U.S. Code and Code of Federal Regulations can be completely presented through a Git-like system. The complexity comes in when attaching court cases.

The parasitoid wasp doing its little dance move [1] gave me a chuckle.

[1] https://www.nikonsmallworld.com/galleries/2026-photomicrogra...

> if Aaron had formed an LLC and hired someone to connect the laptop for him, jailtime would never have been under the table

Yes, it would. Ortiz was pushing a novel interpretation of the CFAA under which ToS violations constituted criminal access. It has no legal precedent but was in vogue at the time. (After Swartz, it fell completely out of favor.)

> there has only ever been one type of slavery

No. Nobody claimed this.

> seem very tied to a very specific conception of slavery that only matches African-American slaves in the US

I'm anchoring to that for discussions happening regarding conduct in America, yes. If minimum-wage jobs are literally slavery, then slavery–to a lot of Americans–isn't that bad, and slavery for Americans will by default mean slavery within the America context, i.e. chattel slavery.

That said, slavery has real definitions and tests, and words like subject and serf exist because people have been debating and defining these terms for millennia, regardless of Reddit or NewsMax's redefinition of these terms.

> that all that is freedom

Nobody argued this either.

> Capitalism is really good at convincing people that this is the only way things can be

Another straw man. We can raise the minimum wage and establish social guarantees without trivializing slavery.

> a different type of slavery, just as historically there were lots of variations of slavery, with differing levels of what a slave could do

It’s not and it’s absolutely ahistoric to make this claim. (Not disputing that it’s a popular view in some circles.)

> Work for a wage (AKA sell their time and/or bodies), or die

They can change employers. Slaves can’t do that in any system. If you want a proper comparison it’s to serfdom.

> no less slavery

It’s absolutely less than slavery.

Slaves are property. They have no rights. They can’t quit. They can’t claim unemployment or long-term disability. They can be summarily executed.

You can kind of fuck around idiomatically with the term slavery in some cultures. But not in ones that had chattel slavery.

> Of course precedent has been set, the government is able to litigate civil infractions into full blown felonies

Swartz "was prosecuted for multiple violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986 (CFAA)" and wire fraud statute [1]. The CFAA angle specifically rested on a legal theory around escalating terms-of-service violations into felonies. That theory never found precedent because it literally never went to court. As a matter of prosecutorial discretion, it has never been brought up again because it tanked Ortiz's career.

> You're thinking of something unrelated

What do you think I'm thinking of?

> We can totally take these civil crimes and turn them into a variety of felonies

We can. It would mean reviving that legal theory. If it results in a conviction it becomes real legal precedent. That, in turn, means we get more prosecutions like Aaron Swartz's.

> Maybe after a few dozen of them get locked away for 10 years our profession might take ethics seriously

Cutting off the nose to spite the face.

Why not go after them directly with taxes and prosecution under non-harebrained schemes?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Swartz

> precedent has been set

No precedent was set. Nothing went to court. To the extent there is precedent it’s in the prosecutor’s career having been ruined by that stain. Using that failed prosecution to attack anyone risks it becoming actual precedent.

> government refused and prosecuted Swartz anyway

A case which never went to trial and tanked the prosecutor’s career resulting in no more prosecutions of its kind to date.

Let’s not hanker for a return to that.

> It isn't "fuckery" as such

§ 215 was fuckery. It was reformed [1]. (Though not repealed.)

> an industry of selling dossiers on individuals, groups, or populations

Agree. But buying reports from data brokers isn't "you scratch my back I'll scratch yours" agreement. That's fuckery again.

To be clear, I'm not denying fuckery is afoot. I'm criticising throwing it out there without an evidenced allegation. Because if we have evidence of fuckery, that’s the priority. If not, it’s the data brokers.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA_Freedom_Act

> document on a Blockchain that you have first-hand knowledge that someone has committed a crime against you

Farting into a wind is about as effective with the difference of being free.

If someone wants to actually fight this, a dash cam streaming somewhere offsite and secure (cloud is fine) is a million times more effective. It provides direct, court-admissible proof of the claim in a way a personal diary entry, in a notebook or on a blockchain, never could. Barring that, an audio recording on your phone. (Would check your state and local laws first, however.)

(Person you’re responding to isn’t OP.)

> US government has access to all this through various "you scratch my back I'll scratch yours" agreements with the corporate data holders

These claims really need to be more specific to be believable and actionable. Particularly given the law has been changed in reaction to prior fuckery.

"'I just had to be sure because I’m not a regular cop, I’m part of the FBI, and when I scanned your plate I could see you had suspicious travel patterns,' I think is how he worded it" [1].

This isn't traffic cops, it's federal police. And it isn't suspicious driving patterns, e.g. weaving, it's full-on movement tracking.

[1] https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/ai-driven-polic...

> Spying on American citizens is a bipartisan point of agreement

Has been. Make it a priority in primaries. It hasn’t been to date—the overlap of privacy concerned Americans and the lazy and nihilistic who reject the political process is almost a union.

> More stoked for when the same is said for storage

Batteries have use in war and power. It will likely scale faster than PV. What we need is the second derivative, so production of the latter can be turbocharged just before battery production is about to break through.