jimz

The irony is that before I realized it was so easy I would just open source the code - not on Github, mind you, since the likes of Akamai would DMCA pretty quickly, but playing a little bit of jurisdictional arbitrage I put it on Gitee - the Chinese copycat of Github. I don't have a background in any of this, but companies like the brag and it's not hard to put two and two together. It also was a practical way to enable me to place wagers on sports automatically - which was more or less my actual day job - and was pretty good for learning programming quickly in your late 20s.

Instead almost immediately I got inundated by sneaker botters in China and in English from somewhere that doesn't use it as a native language, judging from the idiosyncratic use. I kept the code up for a bit but took it down not because of any legal threats (good luck with DMCA-ing a platform endorsed by the CCP, even though I have no love for the party, I also find the American attitude that places intellectual property over real property in practice - from my experience as a defense attorney - to be just as screwed up in terms of priorities, just a matter of degrees. What made me take it down was the fact that I did not want to work in a customer service job or really for anyone, and judging by the requests, it was mostly consisted of "you do the work but we'll split the profits", which I can't believe anyone would fall for.

But since the internet is forever, some parts of code that specifically worked to emulate Cyberfed-Akamai from 0.8 to 2.3 are probably still floating around. My bad. I don't wear shoes normally - flip flops or nothing after having to wear a suit to work for a decade - and have no idea beyond what happens in NBA2K. Although cybersecurity firms making products that someone who learned how to program in their mid 20s and put online within 3 years and had it work should be pretty ashamed of how much they charge, considering that I haven't even taken a math course since 11th grade and had too much of an ADHD problem to watch videos or even read more than blog posts or documentation. Everything I learned, I learned by copying from Github and similar services until it worked. There must be a lot of snake oil being sold out there, maybe most of it, since the insidiousness of the whole thing is that selling bunk solutions seldom gets you in trouble anyway, while actual crime - rape, murder, robbery and the like - are largely lagging because the police simply prefer to complain about culture war bs instead of actually, you know, do their jobs. Who knew Judith Butler was THIS spot on.

Garbage in garbage out. Lawyers can't make up shit since most don't have a plan B if they're in immigration - it's not the highest paying, extremely specialized, and pretty much requires you to be multilingual. Only some of the skillset translate and much of it requires you to move to DC. Consular processing is less bout the lawyer but really entirely down to how the counselor official feels and if they slept poorly the night before you can get a sudden spike in rejections for no other reason than rejection is easier than approval. But if you really have a bad case, no amount of makeup can cover that gigantic sore in your paperwork, Thiel or no Thiel.

Because those who didn't get it... don't talk about it. Also, as of the latest policy manual at https://www.uscis.gov/policy-manual/volume-2-part-m-chapter-... you can basically paper-mill your authorship into fulfilling a criteria, but that would just indicate that regs, when promulgated according to procedure, takes time. It doesn't insulate you from future adverse effects like removal or theoretically indefinite detention or criminal charges.

USCIS is more than happy to gloss over your application if you're coming from Europe. Or Canada. Or places like Singapore. Otherwise, well, they once asked to provide proof that the Archdiocese of San Antonio actually exists, even though it has existed for longer than America had immigration laws and can be found on Google. And no, I couldn't reply with a lmgtfy link, even though I really desperately wanted to. Since they have so much discretion and an institutional culture of suspicion that is so obviously racist that they literally kept some of the very outdated wording from the 1880s-1920s in the statutes and regs today, if they pick on you, a tax audit can feel like a walk in the park. Working in a public interest firm I was passed a file containing a 28 year old case that has yet to be resolved, leaving the client, who has been living in Queens all this time, without legal status even though he had entered the country legally as an infant and child of a US citizen, because a fire destroyed one set of his entry records and USPS sent the other copy to the wrong address, with no backup. And at the time of his birth his mother was legally speaking a US citizen but have yet to receive paperwork as she was serving in the army in Berlin, the only official record of his birth plus his current status plus the uncertainty of his entry into the country and all the shenanigans resulted in him getting removed, and having smuggle himself back in. Removed to Mexico that is, even though his mother is from Belize. I worked the case for 3 years and had to pass it off to the next guy. This is not unique, and entirely neither the fault of his mom or himself, but thems the breaks.

Do not use "hack" because DHS chooses to take these words literally or figuratively as they see fit and have full discretion to do so. It's also administrative so you aren't entitled to free counsel. O-1 can be used for extraordinarily talented scientists and engineers who HAVE ALREADY innovated. Having a Github doesn't count. We're talking Shohei Ohtani level broadly speaking. If you built Github from scratch, you MIGHT have a case. It is dual intent, but whether you are able to actually obtain a green card entirely depends on your nation of origin. It's easy for everyone unless you're from China, India, the Phillipines, and Mexico, in which case, you may die of old age before it's your turn.

Except "struggle" is entirely subjective. In fact, outside of a few things that causes physical dependence (which vary in length except they all, eventually at least, end), the concept of addiction as used by the government does not necessarily match up to how those in the particular field of research would. Government makes laws and laws prefer bright line rules. Something like "did you, without authorization, use the credit card given to you by your company to make purchases unrelated to your work", for example, have concrete, definable, and answerable elements that are universal and more or less binary, provided that the statute has a definition section that makes sense. But "so addictive" or "designed to be so engaging and as a result people are by and large struggling to exercise personal accountability and it is causing adverse health outcomes" is pretty much the antithesis of that. The government would need to define "addictive", "designed" would need to have an intent element (one designs the software, sure, but you're asking for not what the software itself does but one step further - what its impact is on the population at large). How does the government prove that intent, especially since criminal law tends to define intent as intent to act which combined with the act itself, creates the crime. What counts as "so engaging" or even "engaging"? Does it require active engagement? Plenty of platforms do not require any active engagement to partake in the conventional sense, unless reading is engagement. How many people counts as "by large" (I assume that's what you mean, feel free to correct)? How would the government show that the product and any struggle is causatively linked and not merely correlative? How does one define struggle to exercise personal accountability? Where did the duty of exercising personal accountability even come from as to establish liability and would that criminalize those who are disabled or injured as to being unable to exercise such responsibility writ large? And what counts for adverse health outcomes? All these need to be worked out in legislation and likely argued over in court. Every single element needs to be worked on as to not to be overly inclusive or exclusive. And since it's the government, the consequences for violation is without question enormous, and therefore, anything that can be misconstrued can result in the ruin of a company or persons in a variety of ways, but do you really want to have the government determine who is an edge case that doesn't count? Because the government have done that based on assumptions of potential harm and it has caused what today would be considered horrific abuses of human rights and very little positives beyond enriching those whose income derives from the enforcement of the government's scheme.

Laws are lagging indicators but they also last a long time. the CFAA was passed before the advent of the WWW and it took until 2021 to even set a basic check on the part of the Supreme Court that effective set the ground rule that to access what amounts to a computer linked to some network beyond authorization, an authorization scheme needs to exist in the first place. Before that, one can easily be charged and even sent to prison or be assessed massive fines when there's no meaningful distinction between what is authorized and unauthorized space. These were not problems in the early to mid 80s but when problems did arise, it still took a quarter century to resolve. To have one future-proof goldilocks solution is already next to impossible, but you're asking for five or six stringed together in order to have a sensible law that is well tailored enough so that it is effective without being oppressive. Not to mention that unless the behavior is generally abandoned by users, it creates black markets that are simply illegible to the state. The government then effectively loses control over what it purports to control to those with means, leaving only those without subject to the full force of the legislation.

That of course all predicates on the premise that there can be commonly agreed and sensible ways to define all those, and it is in the best interest of the government to do so and passes Constitutional muster not just on speech grounds but a host of other potential issues, like, is this a purely civil matter or a purely criminal matter or both? The federal government can treat this explicitly, or kick it off to an agency as part of its mandate, but which one? Do we need a new one? Are there checks and balances that would provide some sort of agility that keeps up with the times? What if new research comes out that shows the lack of a link, but by legislating it, you've effectively frozen the relevant conclusion in time. Enforcement creates constituencies who do not care about science or potential upsides. The DEA is on the record in the federal register that patient access to legitimate medication is secondary and effectively an afterthought to enforcement of supply, because the agency's mandate presupposes that substances need controls and are presumed harmful and that enforcement, with the teeth provided for by the DOJ, will trump any study the FDA or our academic institutions can ever show. By the time that particular moral panic was given a name, the US government had been attempting repeatedly to use prohibition as a way of imposing a specific set of social mores that at first was a pretext to target specific racial minorities and when that became socially unacceptable (legally it was unacceptable under the 14th Amendment anyway, but they effectively smuggled the laws in through the Treasury Department and protectionist regimes by taxing the goods into oblivion, and avoiding the tax obviously is also a violation of the law).

In that sense, the government operates very much like a machine, whereas given a concrete goal to achieve and it can likely achieve it, but the manner by which it achieves it may create additional problems and convoluted interpretations that ripples through history in ways unimaginable. The loudest voices in the room, or those with existing financial resources or interests, can use the rent-seeking system known as lobbying to shape the laws to begin with. And where does the fines end up? Certainly in most cases they are not given back to the community, but end up enriching the enforcement agencies. Go to a police auction and see how much they're raising from the sale of "proceeds of crime", except not all of it are crimes that are proven in court, and much of it are crimes without specific victims and so, it becomes a regime of appropriation of private property to enrich a few in the public sector.

There's usually an annoying gap between concept and reality. In isolation you want a policy that can solve problems in a targeted and fair way. In reality it almost never happens.

It's funny that the dynamic seems to be entirely reversed in criminal or collaterally-related-to-criminal matters since I could have told you by the time I graduated (and had been practicing on a limited license for a year) which attorney is more competent at what specific aspect of defense related work, and when I jumped to federal CJA work and then removals which is administrative entirely, it also took very little time to suss out the quality of not only other attorneys working on the defense side but the prosecutors and their proclivities, strengths, and weaknesses. In fact I think I'd be a pretty bad attorney in my field if I didn't pick up these things pretty quickly, and the question of recommendations only happen when there may be a conflict anyway, usually because it's pretty normal for a case to have more than one defendant. The biggest case I worked on had 68 and everybody ended up pleading but even with that, I feel like just seeing how different attorneys tackled the same basic case but from a slightly different angle gave a decent amount of insight, including how quickly they are able to get a plea worked out and how they approached collateral issues that always comes out of massive fishing expeditions. I mean, it's a service industry gig with a fancy title in the end and since law school didn't teach anything about lawyering - even legal writing didn't actually cover any client management and actual courtroom procedure, although the 2 weeks we spent on what was essentially a doxxing exercise was really helpful combined with some programming skills - it feels inevitable that through exposure on a daily basis one would get a feel pretty quick of others in your field.

And there's always reputations and word of mouth but I find that to actually be more or less on point when it comes to particular niches, like if you need someone who spoke a particular language or dialect, or someone who understood how to cross examine about technology and not have the jury fall asleep on you, or someone who can handle a child witness and someone who can't. It's not that different in the civil context, is it? There was even a prosecutor who was widely known to be susceptible to running himself into Batson challenges and sure enough the first trial I had against him he managed to dismiss every minority in the pool leaving me and the client the only two in the room which was glaring since the jurors began noticing that something was before we even got there. It was moot since we got a mistrial but if the opposing side is known to be generous with free issues to preserve for appeal you'd be on the lookout, wouldn't you? Or am I still overestimating how often civil attorneys end up in front of a jury broadly?

Only lawyers really know how to vet lawyers for competency, I've found. More people use the quality of the jingle as a guide than any useful way to discern competence, partly because people broadly fail to understand what a lawyer is supposed to do (and this differs depending on context, civil proceedings and criminal proceedings and administrative proceedings concern sometimes vastly disparate interests and in turn, responsibilities and expected outcomes).

The best way, generally, is to survey other lawyers in the same field and jurisdiction and cross-reference to see if a firm or solo practitioner gets more recognition from their peers independently, btw. It's how lawyers find representation in fields they have no familiarity with. The jingles at best are entirely irrelevant and may even be an indicator that the firm relies on volume more than it really should.

edit: should mention that this generally applies for criminal or administrative cases. The civil arena is far too big and varied for me to suggest a heuristic that can be generalized since it concerns so much work that is wildly different and also, comparatively few court appearances (although I'd likely use the same method, but starting with my classmates, if I need to hire someone for a civil matter, if I have a classmate who practices in the field and in my jurisdiction).

Considering on how many people are routinely influenced by the sunk cost fallacy when making their decisions, perhaps even that awareness on when to fold is a part of the critical process a good academic goes through in the course their research. The economy and politics have forced me to pivot and without enough self-awareness to realize when to leverage some other skill or the ability to learn another set of skills based on my prior education, even if it meant moving or changing to a field that isn't immediately obvious. I think it's a useful sanity check at times.

That is sort of the point of a liberal arts education broadly, no? It's not a trade school (although I did spend my 20s at a glorified one and worked in what really was a fancy service industry gig - the law - that is partially obstructed by the sort of things at stake that we deal with, but is fundamentally a service and very much one that is customer-facing. I was one of the first few to quit from those in my graduating class that I kept touch with as well.) Owners of sports franchises, worth billions of dollars, fail to understand concepts like this. Those in charge of large companies, with externalities being constraints that we might not see in fairness but still having control of the narrative more or less, fail to demonstrate this. The government and policymakers either ignore or are ignorant of this on more occasions than one can count. Although it's hard to say what would've happened in the alternative, the initiative does alter the dynamics one would eventually have with their new situation, speaking personally. At least I'm not routinely putting in 75-80 hour weeks which is liberating in its own way even if it was routine enough that few bat an eye when put in that position at the start, judging from what my friends mostly ended up doing and not doing.

But the imposter syndrome thing does haunt as well. It takes a while to realize that one hears about plane crashes because planes not crashing do not make the news, after all, and the actual rate of crashes, incidents, and near-misses can be and usually ends up haphazardly reported at best if one doesn't dig into the official quotidian, and jargon-filled language of official reports, and I don't think that it's part of society's expectation for the average person even if it's both an apt analogy and something to look up if one has the time.

Carthago delenda est!

And settlements or jury verdicts in the billions, easily. Do it en masse and the state might as well as mortgage itself to pay for all the Section 1983 suits that are slam dunks since the 4th Amendment is still good law last I checked.

Ding ding ding ding. Not just that, but you have to affirmatively and unambiguously invoke your 5th Amendment rights. As in, "I wish to invoke my rights under the 5th Amendment of the United States Constitution to remain silent while my lawyer is not present, and I wish to explicitly invoke my 6th Amendment right to counsel." No weasel words, no maybes or I dunnos. Invoke your rights, and if they persist, invoke your rights again, and again, and again. It's the only way to save your ass before the lawyer arrives because the police are simply seeking to catch somebody, not the right person necessarily, and they will literally outsource the lying to the jailhouse snitch to make it happen, amongst other tricks. You can't explain your way out of a situation where the police feels that you are their best shot at getting a perp walk arrange ASAP. Your lawyer can though.

Nope, the most competent defense lawyers are probably the federal defenders, who is backed by the resources of the feds, and have a much lighter case load, so they're able to actually spend the necessary time to mull over the minutia. They don't get to pick their clients and are frequently forced into being generalists, but on the federal level a lot of the "small time" crimes are kicked down to the state level. The feds prosecute terrorism, the local prosecutors prosecute murder. The thing is, the public have no idea what makes for a good attorney in any particular field (and it's not the jingle or Cellino and Barnes would probably be Supreme Court justices before the firm broke up), and public defenders are among the very few who have no choice in selecting their clients, the strength of the case, and with 80-120 open cases at a time you either really believe that your clients are all innocent or you absolutely need to hold the state to account as a matter of principle or you won't make it through the misdemeanor docket, never mind anything more serious or more sordid (mental health, juvenile).

Public defenders don't get into the line of work as a backup option. At least at my law school, they didn't recruit, because frankly they can't beat private firms or even the prosecutors on just about anything but the possibility of being on the right side of history. The pay barely covers interest on your loans, even during trials you have to run out to fill the meter every 4 hours where I was at - only the police got free parking. Everyone in my class with my skillset ended up at an IP firm or doing in house work somewhere, mostly in the Seattle area but also down to California. I don't regret a minute of the work, but in the grand scheme of things it's impossible to make a difference on any scale when you are an active participant in the system which is inherently skewed and allows prosecutors so much leeway and so much coercive power that the police can totally get away with not outright lying in interrogations and just play on the ignorance of the accused and implied threats and achieve the same result. The lying is just the most fun a cop can have without planting a gun on someone.

Prosecutors are absolutely immune. Brady violations only invalidate the underlying case and in really egregious cases, ruin future careers in politics, but it doesn't create criminal liability going the other way. Police have qualified immunity, prosecutors have absolute immunity, as long as the charge is something that constitutes their quotidian work.

Private prosecutions do exist, but not on a federal level, and anything falling under the purview of the CFAA - which is the umbrella that hangs over all computer-access-related crimes, is federal by definition. Besides, with parallel construction, they can always legally reverse-engineer a legally sound rationale that doesn't violate the 4th Amendment or what-have-you. However, while prosecutors are absolutely immune, the police are not and therefore are subject, occasionally, to federal-level liability either criminal or civil, although the prevalence of police perjury - testilying, as commonly known - is both an academic niche that has produced plenty of papers and have achieved virtually nothing in the real world. The term came into the public consciousness in 1994 and as late as 2018 I've heard it bandied about by cops in a courthouse. Prosecutors need the cops to investigate (public defenders' have a much smaller team of investigators if you're lucky, but even then anything technical is hopefully something you know enough about to find the right expert and conduct a competent cross examination. The police, of course, have the first mover advantage and so they can set up the fall guy who is already pension-eligible and move their assets out of their name before getting tossed in the gentlest way possible under the minivan. I wasn't involved with the case but the classic WA case involving the police using all of their tools available to rearrange the narrative surrounding a murder caught on camera and a federal prosecution is the Otto Zehm case. I had the luck to see what happened at sentencing and it was frankly sickening. https://www.spokesman.com/topics/otto-zehm/

So, police do get prosecuted, but only below the federal level, and extremely leniently, and if weren't for the video it probably wouldn't have happened. Ten years for a murder caught on video is crazy considering that the feds were giving out pleas of 8 years for "trafficking" 4 pills of Oxycodone before fent got into the supply (also thanks to the feds, as it was entirely supply driven) and ten years after leaving WA I still have former clients incarcerated for much more ambiguous fact patterns and convicted after multiple mistrials. As for the feds, now that Bivens is basically dead, even their own IG reports read like lurid crime novels written in the most lawyerly way possible. And if they're really in trouble, creating a moral panic always works. It had worked so far.

So uh, is the site onlyfans?

No, not state's rights. Due process of law and non-delegation are what's being ignored, and in turn, situations where actual harm is being caused without any avenue of redress is commonplace, particularly post PATRIOT Act.

This isn't the 1970s anymore. With the courts holding onto Chevron deference and the reorganization post 9/11 that effectively armed agencies to make them literally judge jury and executioner (not in that order) in some cases, as well as the continued inaction by congress to at least not allow Bivens to be whittled away to nothing, fundamentally what exemplifies agency action is no longer the idealized "do-gooders" but instead, ICE using tactics that would certainly be outside of what's permitted by the police to effectuate rules that it created and interpreted and enforced based on the barest of congressional mandates - and the abdication is on purpose - that results in American citizens being deported with little recourse or redress (provided that they make it back into the US somehow); CBP routinely fails to notify or deliberate skips notification for hearings prior to seizing what it deems contraband - never mind civil forfeiture (which it partakes in certainly), but administrative forfeiture; FDA rubber stamping DEA's requests which has no requirement to take into account any harm DEA's scheduling and enforcement processes may create to ordinary, law-abiding patients, and all this is on the record, whether it be from the inspectors general of the agencies themselves or during the rulemaking process, printed in black letter and online in the federal register. Post PATRIOT Act, DHS effectively is a paramilitary force that only partly answers to any court, and by large acts as enforcement for the executive branch. They do not serve judicial warrants but pretend to do so, use ruses to circumvent the 4th Amendment and refuse to answer FOIA requests, and agents have literally gotten away with murder not because the facts do not support such claims but because of a jurisdictional issue. It enables congress to write the vaguest of laws and let the agencies fill in the blanks as they wish, and they do so with gusto, frequently in ways that make no sense to the ordinary American or even English speaker in their selectiveness and choice of wording to the extent where multiple cases brought by states have litigated the wrong term of art before the process was mooted due to a change of administration. Agencies are frequently putting out non-binding, contradictory guidance on matters of importance, like, say, if crypto is a security. They also ignore parts of black letter law - asylum law has been broadly ignored by the Trump and the first half of the Biden administration, and in fact the distinct impression I get, having litigated such issues against DHS subagencies, is that the administration lacks full understanding of the complexities the agencies have created by themselves when it comes to rulemaking to the extent where terms that have no differentiation in plain English refer to entirely different things on a routine basis and somehow the term "admission" has at least six distinct definitions, sometimes used in conjunction in one paragraph, all of which are terms of art.

I can only comment on the agencies I directly dealt with as an attorney and in the best of times, when the law (or really, custom) is followed correctly, absurdities happen routinely that cause real harm. That's just one agency. The practices of the SEC, FAA, and a myriad of others that are more or less in a state of regulatory capture is frequently written about, but not having direct experience dealing with their homespun processes, feel free to start by perusing each agency's Inspector General Reports to get a sense of the tip of the iceberg. It has nothing to do with states' rights - we are talking about federal agencies, as there is actually recourse and remedies against state agencies, but not against federal agencies. Even if you believe that agencies are all acting on good intentions, it is creating bad - and frequently kafkaesque - outcomes.

Administrative law covers a lot of areas of concern, but it's when agencies, with next to no regard to due process as we ordinarily understand it and acting as brownshirts of whichever administration in power, make a mockery of basic human rights and back it up with loaded guns and pretensions of police, we're in a place that the congress that drafted the Administrative Procedures Act never anticipated and arguably, never intended, yet, here we are. Judicially my interpretation of the constitution is of the kind that believes not in the Borkian judicial restraint (which begs the question why does the court even exist) but an engaged court that is willing to fix things that have gone awry, feel free to label it however you want, as long as I'm grouped in with the pro-immigration anti-nationalist faction.

In the American case, the interpretation of the CFAA under Van Buren (2021) would provide at least the defense that one does not violate the law if there is no meaningful authorization scheme in place to determine what constitutes "exceeds authorized access". This may sound pedantic but when reporting on the decision much of the non-specialist media seemed to have failed to appreciate that in order to determine what conduct exceeds authorized access, it's necessary to be able to determine where authorized access starts and ends in every case as a factual matter, and the courts essentially threw out the theory that one can simply use a non-technological solution (like a very broad ToS) as a backstop and require some sort of notice and specificity. I don't think the mere fact that such a technological scheme can be erected is relevant since in theory you can put in some sort of basic authorization scheme - including basic HTTP authorization - around pretty much anything accessible via the protocol, but anything beyond a showing of actually putting such an authorization scheme in place, there's no real way to determine the unimplemented intent of some company in a way with any certainty. It's Orin Kerr's "gate-up-gate-down" theory - you need to have a gate in place to start with, instead of just a space where a gate can go or the assumption where a gate should be to figure out whether the gate is up or down, and without that determination one cannot meet all of the elements required to prove a violation of the statute.

I wouldn't even consider this "hacking" really. If prosecuted a defense attorney familiar with both the technology and the admitted niche area of computer crime law can readily conduct some very effective cross-examination against whoever the state is bringing out as a witness. The government does frequently rely on the lack of tech-competent and accessible counsel as a way to exert coercion (and usually resulting in a plea), and it doesn't help that the layperson has a very difficult time figuring out what qualities constitute competency when looking for attorneys (hence the enduring popularity of jingles since being memorable is frequently mistaken for being competent), but they are out there.

The key part is that it's a private company offering something that is opt-in. If the federal government mandated it, it's almost certainly a 10th Amendment violation (via commandeering). It would also effectively make the currently de facto second class citizenship of those who entered without inspection including DACA recipients into de jure second class citizens and under current law, for life. It would fall squarely into the small part of the opinion landscape in the US where both the right and the left would have reasons to hate it.

Don't forget that he indirectly and in hindsight contributed to the independence of Peru as well. Most of the fighting of course did not happen on the seas, but just as air superiority matters a great deal, naval superiority in the 1820s mattered as well, and the upper hand he gave to the expedition from Chile/Argentina made it a war that was effectively centered on the land war aspect and led to in part and a few years down the line, Peru's independence from Spain as well.

Somewhat ironically, the Irish diaspora (the Flight of the Wild Geese, which happened in 1691 and scattered the Irish Catholic military aristoracy across Catholic Europe and their descendants, just Europe in general, likely had a larger cumulative role in effectuating much of the independence movements. After all, O'Higgins is not exactly a native Spanish surname. Informally the scions of Irish Catholic families of importance, with their paths of advancing in Britain blocked, filtered out across the continent for the next hundred years or so and ended up having certainly an outsized influence on the makeup of military administration and colonial administration by way of the makeup of the officer corps of the nations where they ended up settling, stretching from Spain to France to Austria to Russia. They were not exactly mercenaries but really a true diaspora before the concept really solidified in today's terms. One can argue that it was certainly an early and self-inflicted 'brain-drain' through policies instituted by the post-Williamite British state that may have had longer term consequences (the loss of Minorca and the loss of America came in fairly rapid succession, for example) to the British and the distinct and separate traditions allowing them to be less attached to a sovereign but a cause. Much more on this needs studying, but what is certain is that policies made out of fear undermined the British and aided continental powers for generations. Look at the names etched on the Arc de Triomphe and you'll notice how many of the names are distinctly not French, including that of Dillion (Arthur Dillion, related to the Viscount Dillion, who also fought for the American side during the revolution), Clarke (whose father served in the Dillion Regiment), MacDonald (whose ties to Flora Macdonald during the Jacobite Rising precipitated his family's exile, but nevertheless served as officers first under Dillon before later siding with Napoleon and taking independent command, primarily in Switzerland) are just some of the prominent names inscribed. Sectarianism's long tail etched in stone right there.

I would like to be pedantic and mention that instead of outright bribery as we know today, the sort of coercion (in the broadest sense of the word) that enabled the rotten boroughs involved some far more innovative and long-term thinking like ensuring that the demographics of boroughs in question, if anyone still lived there, to essentially to owe their ability to live and by extension, ply their trades and all that. You are effectively voting so you can have a place to live, in many cases. Old Sarum is the classical case and almost certainly the most egregious one in a prima facie manner but thanks to the manifold of coercive measures implemented it took until the implementation of secret ballots to truly ensure that the old rotten boroughs age was finally no longer a serious concern, and that took another... 40 years? (I realize that I'm focusing on the descriptor on pocket boroughs specifically, which is a subset of the broader rotten boroughs phenomenon, but the subset's primary differentiation comes from how they were attained and not how their existence determined the makeup of parliament, considering that large landowners were able to have "in their pocket" the votes of multiple constituencies that they could exert indirect coercion over quite readily). Yes, it's amazing looking back that one did not follow the other somehow, but baby steps man, baby steps. It beats no steps at all when there's not really a better alternative on the table, even if it's a long way from ideal.

Wait, what? US as in the United States? That's simply not true. Even if we disregard that "legality in the US" is at best a moving target considering that federalism creates jurisdictional differences as a feature and therefore there are few things that are entirely outlawed in the US across the board everywhere, but considering that the most efficacious painkillers are also the most controlled, while deliriants that, prior to processing, extraction of active ingredients, and pairing with other psychoactive substances at minute doses, have little health benefits but great potential to create harm (thinking of belladonna and datura as a start), are legal to grow and aren't even subject to scheduling. Criminalization's link to health is effectively ret-conned and a poor ret-con at that. What turned Laudanum from something acceptable to give to babies to something of a moral hazard far worse than a health hazard was the same rationale that turned a nation of with no provision for immigration controls for the first hundred years of its existence into one where entire ethnicities, nationalities, and places of origin served as the basis for exclusion and continues to do so under the thinnest of guises: moral panics based in racism and perpetuated by those empowered and enriched via the propagation of such policies.

Lying about efficacy will do nothing but only bolster what was never a legitimate rationale to begin with. This is a country that failed to learn lessons from prohibition, that managed to kept the Mann Act on the books even though the legislative intent - that of the fear over 'miscegenation' was hardly a secret, a country where congress never bothered to even get rid of the chapter in the US Code that contained the Chinese Exclusion Act and therefore leaving the ugly legacy plain to see for all. Why lie about your cause when the truth that undergirds the reality is far uglier and far more disconcerting to begin with? And of course, for once, Oscar Wilde was wrong and the truth may not be pure but certainly simple: prohibitionist policies began in racism and are sustained by moral panics while protected by the state agencies that now benefit financially from its existence. All this has a paper trail, both online and in print, in the federal register, in the US Code, in congressional records and archives. If that's not enough to justify resistance, your real reasoning will still be more persuasive than having to make up something to justify a position against a line of thinking that has goalposts with wheels built in from the start.

Or hell, even if it's not "fun" (since what is fun is ultimately subjective as well), as long as it is not harming anyone else, what is really the problem?

I did a lot of psychedelics, I don't know if fun was ever the word I'd use to describe most of it, but I don't regret any of it. It opened up a lot of the back of my brain in a way I never could conceive and really allowed me to think and analyze things in ways that I wouldn't have access to without. That in itself is well worth the experience, in my subjective reckoning. When I no longer felt that psychedelics were able to provide me with what it once did, I stopped. That was that. That surely is enough, right?

If only that was the bar exam. Now it's all UBE so what you end up with is 2/3 multiple choice questions that bear little relationship to actual law you'll be practicing, and 1/3 are answers to absurd hypotheticals that you'd answer in a formulaic fashion, situations that you will pretty much never see IRL and certainly will never be in a position where you can't look up the law, except this one time.

Oh, and the software that's used to conduct the test is practically malware in the way it operates. At the NY State Bar exam I took there were about 100 people who didn't finish because the crappy software crashed and you had to handwrite the whole thing from the first question on. If it crashes your computer, you might as well leave since you won't have time to finish.

Really, the bar exam has virtually nothing in common with the actual practice of law. It's a separate skill, like taking the SATs. Although, there are so many legal niches that it's unlikely that testing real law would really resemble how legal practicecs work today anyway. It's pretty much an arbitrary test that might fry your computer. Hopefully they at least they should have released a newer version of the software in the intervening years.

The ordinary client does not know how to properly evaluate the competency of an attorney anyway, DEI or not DEI. And no, the jingle is not correlated to performance either in motion or trial practice. Hell, Cellino and Barnes literally had a new Barnes and kept the jingle and nobody even seemed to notice.

You can work, but you can't get paid for said work unless it's during a school break. At least that was ABA rules around ten years ago, and followed assiduously by everyone from private practitioners to the federal government. Nobody will hire you when you study for the bar (although if you apply outside of the legal field, you can. I worked in a kitchen when I studied for the bar). Although you'll have to have a body of work in order to get someone to pay you anyway, so if you're not the type who'd go from law review to big law or teaching, you can rack up a lot more hours if you're willing to do the unpaid busywork that comes with, say, the Public Defender's office, or the Prosecutor's Office. Internship + externship + paid work added together with a summer's head start I managed to cram in almost 3000 hours before I took the bar and had a job waiting for me right away, but please don't do that, because you'll get burned out really quickly and possibly become very jaded about the work. I spent one spring doing only juvenile cases and it totally fucked me up. And this was after I had worked on two capital cases (neither got the death penalty, thankfully), and in the early days of Facebook I scraped the personal details of residents of two counties for peremptory challenges during voir dire (hung jury, both murder cases). I don't think anyone in my class came even close to how much work I put in. I practiced for 6 years and then quit.

You forgot the quotes around "benevolent". It's "benevolent" to those who conform to what the state wishes to present as their archetype. Meanwhile, migrant workers are effectively indentured servants and prop up, mostly out of sight, the country in a manner not dissimilar to Qatar or Bahrain or certain sectors of the US. If public housing needs second class citizens in order for it to work, it's not worth it. One might as well as cite the excise-farming era of Singapore between Raffles and Clementi Smith as the actual golden age upon which the modern prosperity was founded, but it doesn't fit the official narrative of course. During this time, there was "public housing", but not run by the de jure government but the de facto native-place associations that the administrators, who had next to no knowledge of the local languages, called secret societies. They are in fact akin to Landsmanshaft in the Yiddish tradition. Everything since then requires a lot of qualification just to peel back the revisionism and certainly does not serve as a good example unless one thinks second class citizenship is worth the perceived order and functionality the nation projects to the world.

Companies are owned by people too. The idea that somehow the decision to engage in a consensual pooling of resources to organize an entity to conduct business somehow degrades a person is a wild take. In fact, the existence of companies as separate entities is in some way an insulation from the sort of state intervention upon the individual and their right to association that you describe. That's not a higher standard. That's higher barbarism, at best. Courts have the power to compel, coerce, and enforce through, however removed, the use of force upon the individual who may or may not have voluntarily assented to such power. Why would anyone hire anyone in the first place if you can't downsize when needed? You'd leave, if the state lets you, and in many places, it simply won't.

Which btw is a terrible analogy. The west even while there was a "frontier" had laws and in fact was subject to the actual US military attempting to actively subjugate Native Americans. Laws absolutely existed - even every western had a sheriff or two - and to various degrees they were carried out in ways that we would certainly view as unacceptable today broadly speaking. The "wild west" if anything was characterized by enforcement by extremely punitive measures carried out sporadically for perceived deterrent effects. Law enforcement was organized both on a local and federal level - they just had a habit, that in some ways continues today, to be focused more on "a bad guy" instead of "the bad guy", hence the lynchings that went on against minority groups, but just because lynchings are extrajudicial didn't mean that the participants were not frequently part of said law enforcement (a posse comitatus, if you will). That's not really anything close to what the labor landscape looks like today, or the internet, or any of the other oft-seen but rarely critiqued comparisons made today.

Yes, although there's nuance to that:

If it's for something personal, then sure. It allows me to edit the code to fix small bugs or otherwise tweak it to my own needs.

If it's for something that actually handles my money in any way, then only if I can audit the code myself and the libraries it uses. I err on the side of over due-diligence for sure, and I'm fairly confident in my abilities in auditing code in a few languages that luckily are also commonly used enough that they are ubiquitous - Python, JS, Go, Solidity, etc. If your open source project is written in Brainfuck, I mean, props, but I'm not going to use that for anything production worthy.

Eh, the article is extremely unclear as to what the context is surrounding the assertion since opening statements should be finished on the day after the jury is empaneled, and so "when it's their turn" could refer to either opening statements (which is aimed at essentially nobody but more of an outline of the case from each side for the jury) or cross examination (which might be a bit early, but not impossible, but certainly would be directed at Ellison specifically).

It's impossible to tell without transcripts or at the very least better reporting, but the whole "it was someone else's fault" defense tends to work better when that someone else openly admits that it's their fault instead of the other way around. Federal prosecutors, in any case, don't fall for that anymore, although it is still very very very occasionally seen in state courts where a witness given immunity testifies that they were the guilty party when the issue involves identification and the act can only involve either/or and not both potential codefendants and there are no witnesses. Those are the types of cases that the feds would much rather decline prosecution to let the state prosecutors have their shot if they don't think they can get a plea anyhow. Cases where the feds are willing to go to trial on are almost always cases where defense ends up trying to mitigate instead of going for a straight acquittal on all counts, especially since this is really just a fraud/money laundering case and there's little chance of the government making their case too complicated for the jury. SBF not taking a plea is frankly idiotic but then again, the first murder trial I've been part of the defense for, we worked our asses off and got a hung jury, prosecutor offered a manslaughter 2, time served, which is as close to a win for us as we can get outside of acquittal, but the client adamantly refused and retrial on the same evidence got the kid 28 years so, lead a horse to water, etc.