cvoss

No, I think the government paying is right. It wasn't just the offending officer acting alone that led to the gross mistreatment of this man. The officer was working within the context of a system of local government that ought to have righted the wrong on its own. But the man had to appeal to the federal government to get it righted. The fact that the system lacked enough accountability to avoid or fix this wrong shows that more than just the one officer is the problem.

Thus, the appropriate remedy should put pressure on the conduct of the whole local government, whose use of tax-payer funds is accountable to the electorate. Punishing just the one officer by depleting his private resources won't move toward systemic reform.

And finally, on the principle of the matter, the officer can't and doesn't jail people on his own power and private authority as a citizen. He does so on the power and authority of the government that grants him his office. His actions as a private citizen did not harm the man. His public actions as an agent of the government harmed the man. In other words, the government did wrong, through the officer.

I don't understand the use of the word "actually" in this sentence. The second half does not stand in contrast to the first half. In fact, it explains the first half.

And portraying oneself as having independence and grit when one doesn't actually (which I don't concede happened here) is not what virtue signaling is. "Virtue" here more closely means "morality" than "admirable or sympathetic qualities". Virtue signaling is disingenuously behaving like you are a moral person because it is advantageous, when in fact you lack such morals.

I feel the need to belabor this because accusations of virtue signaling are too often unfounded and amount to a cheap trick to shut down more thoughtful discussion.

I'm reading the statute this comes from [0] and its associated definitions [1] but I don't see that it's as bad as you made it sound. (I don't love it, still.)

The 100 mile "reasonable distance" is used to define where vessels and vehicles may be searched for aliens.

But the warrantless search may only be applied to persons seeking admission for whom an officer has suspicion of reasonable cause for denying the person entry.

Of the 80% of people living within that distance (which is an upper bound, btw; the agents in charge are required to set a bound not to exceed that by taking into account such things as "density of population, possible inconvenience to the traveling public.") almost none can be suspected of being under reasonable cause for denial of entry.

So to do the thing you are fearing, 1) the chief patrol agent has to set the distance to encompass an inappropriately large area in violation of this law, 2) an agent has to stop and search cars randomly, and 3) somehow become suspicious that an occupant is seeking entry and ought to be denied entry, and 4) believe that searching that person's device would reveal information demonstrating that the suspicion is correct.

It's not great, but it's not "80% of Americans can have their devices searched without a warrant".

[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1357

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/8/287.1

The most natural reading of "Utah is close to banning VPNs" is that there is a bill working its way through the statehouse that would ban VPNs if it passed. But that is an untrue reading.

Another reading of "Utah is close to banning VPNs" is "Utah did something that is not banning VPNs but (as an editorial opinion) is thematically and logically adjacent to that concept." This matches reality (under some viewpoint) but is an unnatural reading.

Hence, the sentence "Utah is close to banning VPNs" is misleading, as evidenced by others' comments. That you read the headline "correctly" does not show the headline to be forthright.

There are many comments here that are confused about what the bill actually says. Headline very much implies something about a law banning VPNs. But that's not what the headline really means. So it's misleading.

The headline leaves much to be desired. It has nothing to do with actually banning VPNs. The rule is that age-restricted websites aren't allowed to help you figure out how to use a VPN.

This comment and GP are two of the most concise and punchy descriptions I've ever heard of some of the deepest aspects of modern physics. On the one hand we have principles of locality and finite propagation speed, which limit the computational work to a small neighborhood, and on the other hand we have principles of non-locality and superposition, which cause the computation to explode as it swallows up potentially everything and every possible thing.

A great argument for why the bloated executive powers should be clawed back by Congress. But not a strong argument for why Congress should stay hands-off.

Also, if something like that happens, that's a blatant 1st Amendment violation and will be enjoined as fast as the case can run up the judiciary. Today's SCOTUS is very 1st-Amendment-friendly (to the chagrin and delight of various flavors of both left and right).

> they're targeting your children

Who is the "they" that you refer to? Did you know that many people are in favor of age verification? Like, many parents of children who are at a loss for how to protect them from early access to obscene material? Could it be that that is why a large segment of government actors are moving in this direction? Or must it necessarily be a secretive nefarious play by some evil tech companies in cahoots with that one administration?

Or is it actually the opponents of age verification who are the ones targeting my children by encouraging early access to obscene materials for grooming?

That last point sounds like a conspiracy theory. It should. I wrote it that way to be provocative, and I hope that you, as a result, dismiss it out of hand. But I want you to understand that TFA's argument also sounds like a conspiracy theory to me. If you want me to engage, you want to make a serious attempt at persuasion.

To that end, I do appreciate that you have not adopted the tone of the article.

Because it is the moral responsibility of adults to care for not just their children but all our children. Occasional surrendering of rights is appropriate in that endeavor.

Neither HN nor my newspaper run content that needs age-gating.

It can't be disingenuous if I actually mean for you to take my argument at face value. There is no hidden motive that I haven't stated. I mean for you to focus on the author's communication style, in case you missed how bad it is, notice what's wrong with it, and seek better sources of information about the issue.

You have accused me of "rhetoric", but that is no accusation at all. Rhetoric is the art of persuasive speech. I have not accused the author of "rhetoric" but of "poor rhetoric". Perhaps that is what you mean to accuse me of.

Invoking the concept of enslavement to describe even a grotesque digital surveillance state is the really off-color part.

Yes, my argument, to restate it, is that rhetoric can be misused to counterproductive effect, as is the case here.

Carefully note that I have neither affirmed nor contradicted anything of the substance of his argument. So defending his position to me is a non sequitur.

Dogs are on to something! Tone matters in persuasion. A whole lot. If the author were interested in persuading (as I assume he must be, given his strongly held convictions) then he should consider his tone more carefully.

> If you love your family, you must stop online age verification.

> If you want the best for your children, you must stop online age verification.

> Your children are being targeted. The infrastructure being built under the cover of child safety is designed to enslave them for the rest of their lives.

Jumped the shark on that one, and really off-color. I'm less inclined to listen to guy, not because of his actual points, but because of how unreasonable he sounds when articulating them. A great lesson in how not to do rhetoric.

No, of course we don't believe they would have written it that way today. But neither you nor me nor anyone else gets to make up what we think they'd have said. They didn't say it. They're dead. They can't change what the law says. But, guess what? We can.

The law as written provides the rules of the game. Nobody should get to cheat, not the government, not a citizen, not a business, just because someone can plausibly argue that if the law were rewritten today it'd be written differently.

If the claim is true that the law would be and should be written differently today, then: Rewrite. The. Law.

If you don't have enough public support for that, then you have no business imposing your view on your fellow citizens. If you do have enough public support, but Congress is being dysfunctional (this is usually the case today), then communicate with your congresspeople and/or try vote them out, and persuade your fellow citizens to do the same. Don't cheat at the game. Play it.

The US has an enormous land area and the cost of living varies dramatically across it. Intense pockets develop where the high paying jobs are, and everyone wants to cram in there to compete for those jobs, and then they're competing for the housing there, so the prices skyrocket, so the jobs have to pay higher still. Wealthy as the average person may be, the poverty slope is very steep in such places. The SF / Bay Area is the paradigmatic example of this. But when COVID hit, the main attractor of the Bay Area vanished overnight: you didn't have to live there to work those jobs. There was a mass exodus to cheaper places. Texas was at the top of the list of destinations. Austin, though decidedly not the rest of Texas, has a similar culture to SF and so was a natural and comfortable landing spot. So the pressure relief valve on SF is a source of pressure on Austin. But Austin was already suffering growing pains before COVID.

But, all that said, its probably not wise to generalize an experience about Austin to an idea about the US as a whole. At best, you might generalize it to ideas about large US cities.

A good sokoban should not be busy-work. Well designed puzzles should be pithy and not require a lot of running around. The distance between discovering the solution and executing it should be very short.

Copy, certainly not. But Blow was an enthusiastic promoter of the game when it came out and held it out as a standard of excellence in puzzle game design.

Writing an extemporaneous essay from start to finish in one draft on the spot is a skill that students were expected to develop in my educational experience in the US less than 15 years ago or so. If that's vanished, I'd be glad to see it come back.

"Wow."

Exactly. People often forget that Congress can only exercise a limited domain of enumerated powers. The big one is regulating Interstate Commerce, which is already huge because of how interconnected the country is today, and is even bigger because of creative stretching of its reach (did you know that the Civil Right's Act's ban on discrimination by businesses is within Congress's Interstate Commerce power, because somebody might patronize your business from out of state?).

Anyway, I suspect Bob Hacker has a strong case that such a law as applied to himself would be beyond the scope of Interstate Commerce. Until he tries to sell or make his OS widely available, at least.

Warning: This website has audio which is activated when you press the letters, despite not giving any fair warning indication of this. Not a nice surprise if you're at work!

> Not all titles are positive law — some titles are "evidence of law" rather than the legal text itself (see 1 USC § 204)

The vocabulary of this sentence is inconsistent with section 204 [0]. It is the positively enacted titles which are "legal evidence of the laws". The other titles merely "establish prima facie" what the law is, subordinate to a closer examination of the bills actually passed, which control. In other words, "evidence of law" is the stronger of the two, not the weaker, as the readme suggests.

[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/1/204

> These courts just want to clear their dockets which is why they reversed.

You have made no attempt to justify this claim, which, I suspect, you pulled out of thin air, though it amounts to a provocative accusation of significant ethical bankruptcy and judicial malpractice in "these courts" (whichever courts you may be referring to). Do better.

The document in question itself may be interesting as a historical artifact, which the article kind of gets into at the end. But the headline and opening paragraphs are just complicit in amplifying low-quality online discourse, about a decade-old topic no less. It just shows that 1) rage-machines are silly, and 2) Daily Mail is not a reputable outlet. Skip.

I used to live in just such a place. Went to the city center to apply for a library card, thinking "of course I can get a card here, I live in Foo City and this is the Foo City Public Library." I was asked for my street address, and she pulled out a binder of street names to check (yes it was analog, in the year 2016 A.D.). I was not within the city limits and was denied a card.

You did not pay the tariffs. You bore the cost of the tariffs. Those are not the same thing. The refund is due to the party that got the bill for the tariff and paid it-- the importer. What you paid for was for the business not to go bankrupt while this was occurring. If the business wants to refund you for that, they can choose to do so. But you are not owed a refund.

The government's job is not to maximize its ROI. For example, (and I make no argument about whether the current situation does this), protecting its citizens is of extreme moral importance, even if it's very very expensive and unlikely to somehow feed back into the economy in a way that recoups the cost long term.