jimz

Federally, not since 1981. On the state level, some states do provide for a process that is recognizably analogous but still differ state to state, sometimes greatly. Also, states differ as to how direct a route a citizen-initiated complaint can directly affect the actions of the judicial system - some states use prosecutors as a gatekeeping mechanism, while others allow it as a process distinct from the prosecutorial system and so would skip over the gatekeeper and directly go to the judge. I don't know about most states, but I know that it's a mechanism that New Jersey, Washington, New Hampshire, and Idaho recognizes.

This is a sufficiently niche field of even criminal law that would require you to hire a lawyer to handle anyway. And usually there's some statutory limitation on what sort of prosecution a private individual can initiate. It's generally just not worth the trouble.

The DMCA does allow for a separate, federal, and civil cause of action to recover damages if the filer of the takedown notice knowingly and materially misrepresented the operative parts of the notice. 17 U.S.C. § 512(f) is where this cause of action resides. However, to prove "knowingly" and "materially" at the same time is a pretty high bar, although it might be possible to get a default judgment if they simply don't respond. Still, this is a limited remedy that most people won't be able to take advantage of since it involves potentially costly litigation and no punitive damages. It's not a prosecution of any sort, but it's sadly the best (only) option on the books that counts as relief, however limited it is.

Oh god, the NYC transit issue is like the largest rancid lasagna of projects - multi-layered, affects tons of people, and so deeply entrenched across legal and technical aspects alike. I've literally lived in an unrecognized breakaway Narco-state of a Narco-state that broke away and has de facto control on the China-Myanmar border, and on the block where Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was hiding in that boat when he was caught in 2013, but living and commuting in NYC, even as a (entry level, public interest) lawyer who worked in the financial district my final choices were an obviously illegal apartment in Chinatown in a basement with a low, uneven ceiling or a place in Flatbush that literally shared a wall with the tunnel leading into the Parkside Q station, which during weekdays also meant that the B was shaking up the place too so that none of my furniture stayed in place. NYC was great for the friends I had and the stuff to do and even the ultimately soul-crushing job that at least made a difference but man, I'll take the Narco-state-in-a-Narco-state any day now, all things considered.

When it comes to consulting, I don't have direct personal knowledge but from what I gather from cousins I grew up with who did work for McKinsey and smaller, more niche firms, it's really the same issue presented in a different context as the issue of clients picking the lawyer with the best jingle (Cellino and Barnes, anyone?) instead of the actual most competent lawyer, since clients almost never have the frame of reference required to even understand what sort of metrics they should be looking at, and if that data is even available and where to get such data. It's a bit like advanced metrics versus back-of-the-card metrics in baseball. I always practiced defense, never civil work (admin/criminal only), and in a variety of state and federal jurisdictions where the need was greatest and resources lacking. In part it's because I find IP work distasteful and frequently petty, even though it was a subject matter I was well versed in enough to get offers of employment at even though I literally never wrote for law review and interned only in criminal defense. With that comes with the territory where essentially by the time I got my limited license right after my second year's finals ended I was already racking up bar complaints and paid internship offers at about the same rate, since other attorneys noticed really quickly that I had a useful affinity with tech generally but especially in spotting evidentiary bullshit in computer crime prosecutions and those involving cell phone forensics. It didn't hurt that the first time I sat at the attorney's table in a felony trial I had the facebook data of every juror in the pool that was public - and in 2012 just about everything was public - and managed to get a hung jury, which just ended up with the prosecutor waiting until I was back in class to do the retrial on the same evidence and ending up with a first degree murder conviction. Literally all I did was focus on using preemptory challenges on those who are openly either related to, friends with, or had positive comments about the police who nevertheless claim to be impartial - not exactly rocket science or learning Brainfuck. By the time I graduated I had recorded a ridiculous number of internship/externship hours, managed to get several CFAA counts dropped on computer crime related cases only to have the jury convict on wire fraud anyway, and got not-guilty verdicts in around 10% of all cases that did go to trial, which was followed by sometimes weekly bar complaints filed against my supervisor and I for not being able to use black magic to jedi mindtrick the jury or something. If this was baseball, I'd have a 1-10 record but witha BABIP of .800 or something since before 2021, defending against a CFAA criminal charge was ludicrously difficult thanks to the law being drafted pre-internet by senators who watched Wargames starring Matthew Broderick, which was also released half a decade before I was born. One can never tell if the police and prosecutor really didn't understand technology or were just intentionally screwing with the court by presenting gibberish evidence and hiring incredibly incompetent experts, but at one point during cross I realized that the police officer testifying did not understand DHCP and so the entire basis for attribution was based on an assumption that open hotspots assigned permanent IPs to clients connecting, full stop. We lost the case anyway since wire fraud was an even easier charge to convict on. Even today, just reading dockets and filings and receiving the occasional (and always baseless) DMCA notice by way of Github, it appears that not only are prosecutors hiring experts without expertise, but in civil cases, large companies - particularly in DMCA related litigation - are hiring attorneys who don't know how CDNs work at all and are conducting ridiculous direct and cross examinations or making nonsensical jurisdictional claims that actually end up undermining their own cases. Since the standard for jurisdiction is purposeful availment of service within the jurisdiction, basing jurisdiction on geolocating a CDN IP from your office will obviously come back with one in the US, even though the defendant, who is almost always overseas, would have the exact opposite view if they showed up in court to defend themselves, not to mention that since CDNs aren't hosting the content through intentional selection of server location but a caching-based automated process, every time the court goes in depth on the meaning of purposeful availment, the purported copyright holder is essentially sabotaging the viability of their future cases while arguing to nobody currently.

Hell, I got a DMCA notice from a white shoe fancy IP firm that predicated its takedown notice on my use of the word "scrape" which then proceeds to misstate the fact, the law, and showed blatant lack of knowledge of even the word "hosting". For the record, "scrape" does not have a legal definition under the cited statute and there's no case law in either jurisdiction that would make the word itself the basis for a claim of infringement per se. Actually, I'm pretty sure they didn't even look at the code I wrote and may have even inadvertently claimed copyright on something they only had a license to, while another part of the claim may be an admission of a prima facie violation of the CFAA as interpreted post van Buren. Since the code in the repo is meant to fix the shitty app they bought that basically was impossible to use, I'm not counter-noticing it officially since the remedy for that is just restoring the repo and if they want their paying customers to not be able to use functionality they paid for, so be it. But if a company the size of the NY Times is able to hire legal representation that is so incompetent to a degree where I've seen pro se petitions by prisoners that are better informed than the notice that certainly was billed at a rate that cost about as much the entire misdemeanor representation of a low level assault charge that goes to trial, clearly there wasn't anything close to oversight or due diligence applied. I doubt any attorney would risk their bar card to defraud the court in such a blatant manner, I can only surmise that it's incompetence, aided by the fact that lawyers who code and know the specific law and have specific experience with the law is likely a small group, but I know personally some very competent and in fact some very good IP attorneys in NYC. But if a corporation this size can't adequately figure out who's actually good at what they purport to do, I guess it's many times harder for the individual.

(Although really it's not. Consults are typically free, and simply asking every attorney you consult who they'd hire if they're in your shoes and crowdsource those actually practicing is usually enough to figure out who to hire)

There's a lot of incorrect data floating around, but then again, that's not really a problem limited to Experian (I've seen it with all credit reporting agencies), and it's not even limited to private entities. I would even say that it's less of a concern when it comes to the ramifications. About 15 years ago the police showed up at my parents' house looking for "me", and as it was a Friday evening, it took until Tuesday before it transpired, after my mother went to the courthouse in befuddlement, that due to a clerical error of some sort, somehow the LA Sheriff's Office looking to serve a failure to appear warrant on someone whose name is similar to mine but otherwise did not match my age, SSN, or anything else ended up getting served to me, and out of sheer dumb luck it happened during winter break, whereas 49 out of 52 weeks of the year I'd be 3000 miles away at school or 6000 miles away doing fieldwork. The confusion was already apparent by Monday because I spent the whole day in a holding cell with 30 other people at the courthouse and was promptly shuttled back to the Twin Towers jail with zero explanation, and it took literally Tuesday night around 11:30pm, after 3 hours of sitting on a bench, handcuffed, in silence for no discernable reason except that they can. In the interim, I did not have access to medication that I needed and quickly fell into medical distress that was entirely ignored. Luckily I didn't have a seizure, but that easily could have happened. A little bit of due diligence would have prevented this, and if I had a seizure the lawyers I consulted at the time said that I may be able to bring a claim against the sheriffs, but since I didn't, it didn't matter.

Except that I did end up going to law school, and during my internships, which was extensive (your local public defender's office can absolutely use a law student who is tech/code literate, and attorneys and judges absolutely notice when you appear every afternoon if you treat the whole endeavor as less grad school but more trade school), it turned out that data error of some sort that resulted in some sort of loss of liberty, however temporary, is common enough that I'd say between 1-2% of bond hearings involved a case of mistaken identity. Bond hearing is the first opportunity for the defendant to face a judge and while the percentage is obviously low, misdemeanor bond hearing dockets are cattle-calls and a public defender and intern would be sorting and prepping between 30 to 100 individuals (higher after holiday weekends) usually in the span of 2 hours, every single day the court is in session. I didn't go to law school in CA and the demographics are pretty dissimilar, but the sort of error and the ramifications are striking in similarity. It adds up pretty quickly.

Then leveraging my experience and language skills, I ended up moving into immigration removal defense at a private firm a few years later and as it turned out, ICE had data errors that, at least during the mid-Obama years, was even more prevalent, except immigration enforcement is administrative law, not criminal law, and federal administrative law, by virtue of its non-inclusion in the Constitution (who knew Jefferson and Madison could not literally see into the future, eh?), allowed for far more shenanigans with far fewer tangible consequences and most importantly, no entitlement to counsel except very narrow and exceptional circumstances, and in 1 circuit only (9th Cir, cases where the detained had severe mental disabilities). And then I began to see cases of US citizens, who are not subject to immigration enforcement, getting detained on administrative grounds and unable to get themselves out of the situation because administrative agencies almost never act in the capacity that places someone in non-judicial detention, except immigration enforcement (ICE/CBP, basically). Since it was not a judicial matter, there's no allegation of a crime, and without protections afforded by the Constitution or access to counsel, ICE was removing US citizens who had paperwork (that they would regard as false) and an abbreviated version of due process in immigration "court". I still don't know how they determine where to remove US citizens to, since some are native-born and some derived their citizenship from parentage, both requiring no paperwork since it doesn't involve naturalization. The US does not have a national ID system that is mandatory (non-citizens can get SSNs of course and many Americans do not have passports, and almost nobody routinely carries their birth certificate on them, which ICE routinely ignores anyway even if you manage to produce one). Immigration court proceedings do catch a number of erroneous detention cases, but we really can only rely on limited datasets to determine how many US citizens get removed to god-knows-where. Generally you'd have to make it back into the country to even make your case known to attorneys. Catholic Charities is probably the largest immigration legal service provider in terms of size and scale in this country by virtue of them being present just about everywhere and colleagues there sharing anectodal experience say that the number is "higher than anybody should be comfortable with", but there's so little transparency or accountability that the only thing that's certain is that it happens often enough that if you practice in this niche it's likely that you'll see cases, and there's very little that could be done to hold the agency accountable.

Oh, and somehow my erroneous arrest ended up requiring me to explain to the state bar even though it is not linked to any actual case since it was an actual case of mistaken identity/lack of due diligence. It might still be in the system somewhere. Although it doesn't affect me today in any meaningful way, thanks to the kafkaesque system we have, having even an erroneous record of jumping an NYC turnstile, and afaik only an NYC turnstile (unless there's a subway system elsewhere in NY state), is sufficient for a legal non-citizen to face removal proceedings, thanks to careless wording and judicial deference and intentional congressional vagueness in statutory wording and New York State's shambolic legislative system unable or willing to alter the otherwise inconsequential nomenclature of the law. Small data errors can and have literally led to the upending of lives. I guess when there's a potential Sword of Damocles hanging over just about everyone, it's almost comforting to know that most of the time database errors only lead to small inconveniences in the grand scheme of things.

For the most part, if you can make money for other people, you can use that skill set for yourself.

Also, if you're somewhere where it's legal or at least accessible, it's not actually 100% true that at a casino the house always wins. It will take a little bit of effort to get started and you do need a small bit of infrastructure (but a cheap VPS or a SoC would actually do, depending on what you focus on), but it's not only possible, but can be fairly profitable to bet on sports. You do need some money in the bank to start, but there's a fair bit of resources on Github that can help you with data collection, analytics, etc. And places like the sportsbook subreddit or one of many forums out there where you can get a lay of the land.

I have no CS degree, hell, I haven't taken math since I failed AP Stats in 11th grade (tbf my teacher had a stroke in class 3 weeks before the test and died before he got to the hospital and it screwed up everyone and nobody in the class passed since this was just before we could bring cell phones to school, but still, that year was a wash). I haven't taken a formal math class since and I went to 8 more years of school after that. 3.5 years later I'm up 161 units which is just about viable (5%+ ROI is generally considered viable).

It's nice to work from home, hang out with likeminded fans in groupchats and reddit, and watch sports and make money. Now, it is still gambling. I've lost 32 straight picks in a row once - then Brentford beat City and made half of that back. It's not for the faint of heart, but it is a viable option if you are into sports, or statistics, or just hate making front ends as I do. Just don't buy anyone else's picks, they wouldn't be selling picks if they're actually making money.

It's not really a legal grey area, congress deliberately writes vague laws so that administrative agencies can interpret and fill in gaps during their rulemaking process, which would then receive deference from courts if challenged and effectively become judge, jury, executioner. At this point I'm surprised that they haven't delegated out all the naming of post offices to some agency.

Too bad the press release here is also hot garbage. For one, it's heavily based on speculative notions of what happened. Secondly, the withdrawal notice IS regulatory, and LedgerX is the legal entity that made the request. Changing it would look far more suspicious than following procedure. Also, what sort of regulation could have stopped this is very much an open question, since the whole phenomenon of affiliates, subsidiaries, and everything that led to FTX and FTX.US offering different products to different customers is entirely a product of anticipating or compliance with regulations, keeping in mind that FTX doesn't only operate in the US and some amorphous world but actual countries with their own regulatory frameworks. And the revolving door is effectively inevitable - those who are engaged in the field with any expertise on specific regulations is going to be a very small pool, and this goes for a lot more industries than CEXes, especially in technical fields and it doesn't even need to be rocket science. Courts and attorneys are setting a lot of junk precedent that will never be relevant or end up counterproductive because they don't know how CDNs work and some of the opinions from DMCA suits against absentee defendants are entirely based on infringement arising out of Cloudflare IPs while defining incidental (non-purposeful) availment of service as insufficient. Without a revolving door, it'll become farcical because you'd end up the equivalent of asking a dentist to do brain surgery. Without competent counsel, and facing down regulatory pressure, you will just lose the industry all-together, which is the apotheosis of an unregulated market because all activity is either underground or out of jurisdiction. The US is a big market, but nobody wants to go through what Ripple is going through, and calling it a regulatory failure when undercollateralized derivatives were offered on ftx.com but not ftx.us wasn't some 4D chess move but self-preservation, like Binance eventually did. I also can't figure out the logic behind the rationale that can include both "CFTC failed to regulate" and "CFTC should regulate more". 100 x 0 = 0. CFTC has acted incompetently before - like treating all holders of a token as an active member of a DAO in an enforcement action, seemingly forgetting that I can send anyone a few tokens, or hell, an offensive NFT for that matter, and there's not much you can do to stop that even if you catch it.

Although reading bettermarkets I can't help but notice that its critiques are almost always on the regulators and their incompetence and the solution is... more regulation. They depict what can only be described as a fantasy world where crypto - that is all crypto, which is not a monolith - is the boogeyman while in reality, crypto is given the exact opposite of the too-big-to-fail treatment.

> The key to that influence campaign is to buy as many former public officials and regulators as possible to gain access to their expertise, inside knowledge, and networks developed when they were supposedly working in the public interest. The importance of those revolving door hires cannot be overstated because they not only enable ready access to current policymakers and regulators, but also to the inside knowledge that enables crypto to precisely tailor and target their strategies to be optimally successful.

Are they deliberately misleading the reader or genuinely talking out of their ass? You hire regulators for compliance, because the tech moves too quickly, and optimally successful strategy? Even MEV bots get salmonella. Not to mention that academia has much of that covered. Then, I checked out their CEO's litigation record on courtlistener and found that until last year he was at some big law defending predatory lenders. Well, there you go.

India claims sovereignty over the Andaman Islands including the Sentinel Islands. Just because the islanders don't know/refuse to engage with the state doesn't stop the state from asserting their claim.

Although, there are entities that are de facto sovereign and even have had the wherewithal to keep it with arms. Myanmar is home to more than one of these, actually. There's the Shan State (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shan_State), and within their de facto sovereign areas there are pockets of smaller administrative units that are armed and are also de facto sovereign, accepting nominal de jure Burmese authority over the authority of the nationalist minority independence movements, such as the Wa State with (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Wa_State_Army). Alas, the tribes here in the US don't quite have that kind of firepower, nor the desire to refight the latter half of the 19th Century.

That's not to say that the relationships between tribes, the federal government, and state governments is any less complicated and at times contentious. The Supreme Court tends to favor tribal sovereignty as almost akin to that of a state, but not in all circumstances and where "full faith and credit" ends when it comes to tribal judicial authority when it comes to civil matters seldom actually represent actual "full" anything. Although tribes do have sovereign immunity so without congressional approval one can't simply litigate out every issue by suing the tribe, so the ambiguities are likely to persist.

There are no clean hands here. Binance does sketchy things that screw over their customers. FTX apparently does too (although anyone else have their referral income dry up suddenly in July-ish?). This happens because it's blatantly clear that the tech is moving quicker than the legislature by years and the only 'tool' they can wield is punitive, with arguments designed via circular logic that would only justify more regulation, but have no clue what and how to regulate in a manner that actually protects consumers and minimize potential side-effects that may last for decades - because it's likely impossible thanks to congressional ignorance and the narrow mandates of executive branch agencies largely focused on punitive measures uber alles.

This might have gotten a bit personal, but effectively this is a lobbyist fight. Whoever wins, we lose. Keep your crypto in self-custody and remember that what the state and those with billions to spend on gaining influence are ultimately corseted by the myopia that comes with power. There are people who use crypto everyday now - I am one of them - and maybe the preoccupation over schoolyard slights and performative regulatory capture will simply result in more and more people moving crypto off the CEXes.

Or lobbying

(well, that and if it's legally binding, it's a matter of performance or damages)

I do the same in Las Vegas, "sin city" moniker and all. I lived in Boston, NYC, LA, Montreal, and Spokane. I had two bikes stolen while I was working at the county public defender's and my girlfriend called the police, filed out a report, and nothing ever came down the line on the other side. The officer tried to talk her out of filing the report. Since I've worked in other jurisdictions and have heard broadly about how few fucks are given about property crimes generally, we don't even know how high or low this figure is in comparison to other cities with different policies. It could very well be true that people are experiencing recency bias, triggered by a question that touches upon something that wasn't taken seriously to begin with.

Also, I live in Las Vegas now and I also don't know anyone who had their car broken into or packages stolen. I left my Steam Deck outside for 48 hours since it was delivered early and hidden poorly, but I wasn't looking and didn't even notice it. But since none of the polls - the Chronicle or the Standard's - mention vehicle prowling, we have even less data on that. Why even bring it up? Nobody was expecting Rumble in the Bronx (great movie in spite of the whole movie being made up of stereotypes).

This is likely still lower than a lot lot lot lot lot of jurisdictions where prosecutors and cops don't even make any sort of effort at theft cases until the facts of the case allows for a more serious charge to stick and the theft is irrelevant. I had two bikes stolen from me, while I was personally at the Public Defender's Office, working in Spokane. Nobody called the police for that kind of stuff, and if you did, the police wouldn't do anything. It's compounded by the fact that the elements of Burglary - which is trespass + felony, no actual stealing needed, in WA - covers the really serious thefts that are seldom solved anyway, but counting burglaries would be overbroad, but reporting a theft can be yelling into the wind even with a police force that's funded by the government AND reality TV show money. Since the same poll wasn't conducted in multiple cities, there's no frame of reference. This could be very bad, or could just be a lack of points of reference when it comes to actual acts of criminal conduct that happens but never gets reported. So, without more data, the road paved with good intentions leads to a place to be named later.

Considering that two years ago the Supreme Court ended up having to hold that the use of the indefinite article "a" in the phrase "a notice to appear" means a singular document that fits the definition of said notice instead of multiple notices sent piecemeal, even clear legal language can somehow wind up being challenged all the way to the top. The opinion, which actually makes for some delightful grammar shade from Gorsuch to Kavanaugh that's both utterly thorough and gratuitous at the same time, is quite the read, although the Supreme Court having to definitively state that "a means a" is almost a parody of itself. I wish you the best of luck with a word that's 5 times longer and features a slightly more complex definition than the meaning of "a".

The opinion, btw: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/19-438_j4el.pdf

And the stack is still used today by plenty of people around the world, what's the problem?

Haha my goodness. Yes, if you're the state, all that is theoretically true, but the catch is of course the problem of legibility. The state is well aware of that, as you noted, but so many transactions themselves are untrackable, some because of explicit state policies (undocumented immigrants line up to purchase money orders to pay taxes a notable example of a collective and voluntary effort to overcome state obstacles that are put in place, but also the many many unbanked individuals in the country, especially those not on the payroll for various reasons). That argument absolutely works if you simply realize that a) the state is never going to be able to actually capture 100% of cash transactions and b) the state's primary goal is not recordkeeping per se but to collect its perceived share, so the greater punishment it dishes out and the more complex laws get in regards to consumer finance, the more likely that those on the cusp simply opt out of the formal system if they're in a position to do so and disappear from all that heavy enforcement measures, much of which the average consumer do not understand fully anyway.

This viewpoint issue is not limited to financial legibility of course. We do know that the underground economy, because data is only reported by authorities, is inflated or deflated for political purposes, further muddling any potential estimations. Oh, and plenty of what the IRS wish to do is just that - wishful, and only when it's convenient for the other party. You can try to regulate cash transactions domestically in a more heavy handed manner, but you're mostly going to affect those least able to afford it to begin with, and the costs involved may not be worth the effort. Oh, and US currency is commonly used abroad, including in place of native currencies in some countries. When it comes to cash, there are only estimates as to how much the government can reasonably regulate the transacting of, and the government's policies have undermined efforts to do so even when they could. Not everyone is in the cohort that posts on HN.

My decision to at least exclude family law, beyond the divorce of my parents when I was a teenager being fairly ugly (although now with a larger sample size I've observed, relatively tame), was cemented by sitting through a whole session where the only property that needed to be split were a pair of season tickets to my school's men's college basketball team. While the school's team is quite good, we've never won a championship, at the time of the proceedings we've only been AP #1 for a week and then was almost knocked out of the tourney by a 16 seed, and in open court both parties acknowledged that they don't go to all of the home games and are seeing other season ticket holders, meaning that neither party needed to have both sets of tickets just to go watch the games live. The only advantage is that the seats would be together, but I've been to a lot of games of just about every North American professional sport (yes, including Arena Football) and seat swapping is ubiquitous whether the place is sold out or a quarter full. I've litigated my own case in small claims court and can honestly say that there were cases far more consequential there than the acrimonious splitting of a pair of basketball season tickets. It's not exactly kafkaesque - the criminal justice system fits the bill better - but it's at least... Dadaist in an un-self-aware way? I've appeared in undergraduate musicals written by my classmates that were less cringeworthy than that.

And I've practiced administrative law which, since they are not established under Article III of the Constitution, can be pretty cowboy and roughshod. I've also appeared in tribal court which seem to frequently take cues from TV courts. But they are not frivolous, not at all. Administrative hearings can and do determine the liberty of people every day. Same for tribal courts. There's something farcical about all 3 types of proceedings but family court just hits the perfect note of "legitimate", "important", and "farcical" to me, even though they are undoubtedly important. I can assure you that no immigration or NLRB hearings, the administrative courts in this country with teeth, sink into farce at a similar rate.

At one point there were some half-joking talks about finding an agreeable local tribe to partner with us to open a startup that allow same-day in-app divorces. Sadly even with introductions and approaching tribes in several states they all ended up saying no. There's a free idea for y'all, business-wise, if you can pull it off.

State-run lotteries are ALWAYS about the transfer of wealth and property from the poor and marginalized to the wealthy and connected. This was true during colonial times, this was the manner by which the state of Georgia divvied up land stolen via Indian removal, culminating in 8 substantial (and all rigged) lotterying of land that can only be characterized as stolen under the threat of muskets and bayonets. It's not a coincidence that lotteries became increasingly unpopular. This was then deliberately conflated with private lotteries ran by blacks, immigrants, and the poor where the house odds were good but not anywhere close - to the tune of 1 in 900 compared to 1 in 14 million or so for your typical 6 out of 49 game, made a moral issue, then a tax issue (giving more reason to raid minority neighborhoods), until the 1970s when essentially states began seeing the system as a two-birds-one-stone scenario both in raising revenue and also booting out what was otherwise an illegible parallel society that it had little direct way to profit from or exercise control over.

The really interesting counter-example - or really, the most incompetent series of lotteries ever ran by a state - was the excise farming schemes the British colonial administrators ran in SE Asia, in particular Penang and Singapore and further afield in Malaya, between the 1840s and officially 1903. Excise farming is basically the lotterying of monopolies on the vice trade for fixed periods of time, which existed since the 1500s and periodically gets brought out (prominently under Cromwell, and a bit during the restoration), except because the decline of the East India Company and the lack of civil servants and administrators who had a working knowledge of Chinese, which had become the biggest financial players and essentially realized that the authorities were unable to make sense of the place-of-ancestral-origin system that had little to do with what the British were familiar with (like blood quantum) and inadvertently enabled the same native-place association or Landsmannschaft (we need an English word for this, btw) to simply dominate certain vice trades by the simplest subterfuge - by leveraging the comparatively fluid role personal names represented. Yes, it took more or less an actual case of "all Asians look alike" for a state lottery to fail. Carl Trocki's works are the authoritative research on this subject and time period for those interested in what probably represents one of the most mind-boggling peacetime self-owns by two successive governments that in mainstream academic discourse (outside Subaltern, Asian, and Diaspora/Migration studies, which are arguably niche and very much interdisciplinary), represents the archetype for hegemonic power relationships in practice. I suppose one can also chalk it up as a lottery win there, a rare one, but someone does usually actually win the lottery eventually.

Also, reddit, due to the way it encourages specific niche subreddits to proliferate, inadvertently also showcases, albeit from the tag side instead of the tagged-content side, one use-case where community tagging is both necessary and canonical tags are inconsistent or nonexistent, which is the vast arena of porn, which involves attempts to categorize massive amounts of content that are frequently lacking in tags or tagged minimalistically or even erroneously by studios, and also, can involve specific preferences that aren't necessarily even considered as something that needs to be tagged until someone starts a subreddit on some really obscure aspect of a clip and then, suddenly it turns out there's a community and demand for such a tag.

Some automated tagging solutions do work on some aspects of the tag deficiencies - performers using different stage names, for example. However, just as obscenity is defined on a "I'll know it when I see it" basis, individual and perhaps previously unnamed categorizations pop up frequently enough that there's no realistic way to anticipate every future community tag that may come about. There's also inconsistencies as to how currently-used tags are defined, and even in the generally more centralized and almost over-specific niches of the industry in Japan, with consistent and unique product codes for reference, you still don't get a single consistent studio tag system, even for their domestic mainstream market. And language certainly factors into all this, as well as culture. It's already evident that some tags translate and some simply don't, either because there is no word for it in the other language, or the categorization loses some aspect of cultural significance in the translation process that makes it end result valid but also nonsensical. Some degree of community curation to augment even a relatively consistent, centralized, and comprehensive canonical source.

There are a few projects on Github that are hashing out compatible systems for at least the English language (and it appears that projects in Korean and Chinese exist too, also on Github). This is definitely an arena that is organic, disorganized, and even if in the future can mostly be automated, will always have room for community curation, and is actually actively being worked out and evolving in real time. Tags, or community curation at large, will likely persist as content, the market, culture, CV/classification tech, and mores change as time goes on. Definitely not dying.

Italy as a polity, regardless of how real the polity actually existed as a coherent and cohesive governing state, pretty much existed continuously from Rome until entirely left out by the Congress of Vienna in 1805 though. By the time 1848 rolled around most people alive were perfectly aware of the concept of Italy in living memory, and even those who didn't actually live in what was considered Italy - in particular those living in the south from Naples down to Calabria and Sicily, if they were educated and literate, were still aware of the notion of Italy as a distinct political entity. There might not have been much of a centralized government based in Italian territories that represented the polity for long periods of history, but ruling regimes/dynasties come and go but political entities tend to last longer.

It's not 100% undisputed but most historians would agree that until conquered by the Persians in 525 BC, Egyptian history consists of 26 dynastic changes and 8 major distinct periods. Each dynasty of course usually had more than one ruler. Since we're talking about Socrates, then the slightly extended timeline of 33 dynastic changes (including 2 Persian, and 2 Greek), across 9 major and distinct periods, would represent pretty much the mainstream view that is supported by the available evidence, ending in its incorporation into the Roman Republic in 30 BC.

If anything, Egypt is one hell of a counter example of institutional stability. I would also make the pedantic quibble that the HRE never called itself "Germany" until the term was incorporated into part of its much longer official title in the late 1400s. English usage started in the 1500s. It's not to say that the concept of "Germany" or "Deutschland" didn't exist, but pre-Westphalia it's difficult to make truly apt comparisons to conceptualizations of states today, and the term equivalent to Germany was used, intermittently at that, from Charlemagne's death for the next 700 years somewhat like the status of Scotland or Wales within the UK today, as in, it coexisted with the HRE as an part but not considered to have referred to the whole until the HRE lost its non-German territories an that was pretty much all that was left.

Oh god I hope law enforcement doesn't decide to jump in on this as a cost-cutting measure (that they don't need) that would result in evidentiary and potentially constitutional issues. Most LE departments have arrangements that give them access to far more accurate results from, say, GC/MS testing, and performed by those who does testing and analysis for a living. The police in America at least has a pretty poor record on using pseudoscientific methods to build a case while leaving the easy and proven part of scientific testing - sending rape kits and such DNA collected to labs - on the backburner. And of course none of this is going to actually help the police since reporting rates and clearance rates for rape and sexual assault remain very low and by the time a report comes in, the evidence may no longer exist.

The focus on GHB/GBL seems... lacking in coverage, considering that there's a whole range of water/alcohol soluble substances that is easier to carry (in powder or pill form, instead of liquid) and doesn't have the taste problem GHB/GBL has when mixed drinks tend to drown out the chemical taste of Midazolam or, if push comes to shove, research chemicals based off existing formulations such as Nifoxipam represent just the tip of the iceberg in the analogues of just one category of potential "date rape drugs", quotes because without question the likes of Midazolam have contributed much more to the health and well-being of patients than as the moral panic du jour once again that overshadows its utility.

And I would posit that alcohol is not viewed as an epidemic in part because those who drink tend to know what they're drinking, while there's virtually no street demand for fentanyl and its analogues and the supply-side demand is generated entirely by the failed war on drugs that targets the supply side aggressively enough so that the golden rule of prohibition kicked in and the most potent and easiest to carry form of the prohibited substance becomes what the supply side focuses on. Regular, non-opiate-naive users were overdosing and dying, which is very much an aberration when it comes to overdoses generally. And we've utterly failed at implementing anything more than the bare minimum in terms of harm reduction while politicians go out of their way to blame everyone but themselves. It's effectively a government sanctioned epidemic. If you want to kick off your week on a shitty note, read Inspector Generals' reports on DOJ and the DEA specifically. However impractical, this is at least an attempt at putting a harm reduction product on the market, and should be applauded as such. It's more than what congress have managed to do for god knows how long.

While almost everyone in China who can get out of the country is essentially "laundering" money by attempting to evade the ridiculous currency controls? The Russians arguably have more faith in the Yuan than the wealthy Chinese at this point, which is, well, I don't know what the adjective to use here but a mixture of funny and sad and wtf and irony and inevitable all rolled into one.

I find the comparison really odd as someone in the opposite position - I had formal classical piano training from 8 years old until I gave it up during college, and later learned how to code entirely through copying other people's code and Stackoverflow in my mid 20s. Piano to me feels much more like a sport, in that there's a very visceral, physical aspect to playing, and in turn a ton of effort goes into optimizing everything from where your fingers should be placed to how hard or soft one is striking a key. Practicing is effectively comparable to training for some sort of non-team sport much more than anything else. I don't have perfect pitch, but learning how to read music is a very small part of the whole experience, and I would think that as an adult someone learning piano will find the physical aspect, particularly the finer motor elements, to be the primary hinderance to being really great. Writing code is entirely different in that it feels much more like learning a subject matter, and there's neither something akin to the apotheosis of the particular thing you're working on that you aim to emulate, nor hard boundaries as to determine your proficiency through performance. It's cool if your code doesn't work when you test it, you can fix that. It just feels like apples and oranges in the experience.

If you're picking up basketball at age 30, I hope you know that you're never going to be anywhere nearly as good as Curry, or Lebron. But you can definitely pick up a subject matter and become an expert later in life. Heinrich Schliemann essentially began his archeological career at age 36 and yes, basically excavated Troy in the worst way possible, but managed to actually excavate Troy. That's the difference between an adult piano learner and an adult code learner, I think.

I'm sure in some social circles or professions it is, but after college I've lived in Seattle, Boston, Brooklyn, and Las Vegas, and outside of the context where the existence of my degree is a necessity by virtue of state law in order to undertake the profession I was in, it really doesn't come up, ever. In part, it's probably because facebook had us all list our education particularly my cohort who needed a .edu email address to sign up, but even after I got off facebook and changed careers entirely, it's just not something that comes up. I don't know if there's simply a presumption that I'm "one of them" or because I have a social circle that isn't entirely homogeneous educationally, but I can't even really think of how the subject matter would come up, or why anyone should care.

Eliot himself explains in no uncertain terms in his seminal essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent" that what he intended to accomplish, and views as essential to the poetic form, resides in the referential nature of poetry to the past or "tradition", and the poet is a mere conduit or at best a curator of material that already exist. Although it's arguable that even he himself did not follow this dogmatic way of constructing poetry, his thesis effectively defined modernist literary criticism for decades. In that vein, it's not unreasonable, but also not top-of-mind, to connect his works and purported ethos to crosswords, as crosswords are necessarily referential but it had the flaw that it was not necessarily consisted of expressions of emotion and art via channeling tradition in a newly curated manner but rather, the expression of another, more "pop" form of culture that existed at the time. The connection between him and crosswords may very well be a product of the immense popularity of the crossword during his early adulthood when it was viewed as an almost transgressive element in society that, among other things, served as the convenient conduit du jour for mixed-gender interaction in social settings set up by clubs dedicated to these puzzles.

But I really consider Eliot the first poet who openly advocated for what we'd consider "sampling" or "mashups". Although actual tech that could be used to sample music wouldn't exist until 30 years after Eliot first expressed his sentiments, and musical quotation certainly have existed before that, musical quotations are seldom directly acknowledged and never formed as the basis of a work in its entirety. Eliot did not necessarily quote verbatim every reference he made, but he made extensive footnotes directing to the source in many cases and in other cases used references to works popular enough that notation would not be needed. I very much think that what was being expressed by his works, starting with Prufrock but really peaking before the Four Quartets, is an attempt at legitimizing a way of creating art that served as a precursor for hip-hop and electronic music today.

Are you sure? PH's official line has always been "share with people you know but no bots/asking for upvotes/manipulation" or something akin to that. It's still in their community guidelines, albeit with language that gives them a bit of wiggle room.

https://help.producthunt.com/en/articles/2690626-how-do-i-sh...

https://help.producthunt.com/en/articles/484935-can-i-ask-my...

I think the problem is that they don't seem to have a good enforcement mechanism, and so for what must've been years I haven't really seen staff proactively go after those who do game the system. The only times when I've seen action taken is when the community comes out and basically calls out a product/maker. Most people don't care enough to do that kind of stuff, I'd imagine. I've done it a few times (either outright illegal stuff like peddling American legal services from overseas without qualifications, or obviously scam crypto projects) but these should have been obvious. The staff is also unresponsive on email, although better on the forums.

I should note that the government does a lot of stuff. If you have a cause you feel strongly about, whichever side, it's worth taking some time to understand which ones you can actually (at least theoretically) have a direct impact over, and that's generally in the regulatory arena, or administrative law arena. Agencies don't make laws, they pass rules and regulations, and those that adds legal obligations to pre-existing ones in a substantive way are subject ot note and commentary under the Administrative Procedures Act. This means you, even if you're not an American citizen but have some sort of interest at stake, can and should voice your concerns. It's in fact one of the only ways the average person can at least reach the decision makers that were not elected and don't owe their jobs to anyone but the president.

In those cases, the specific site to follow would be https://www.regulations.gov/ and the api docs are at https://open.gsa.gov/api/regulationsgov/ and at least most administrations (last one excepted, although they didn't seem to have anyone on staff in the executive branch who was familiar with the APA to begin with) are pretty good about at least reading, if not agreeing - sometimes cruelly and sometimes nonsensically - to your comments.

It's good to see what the government is doing, but in a sense if you want change, that's already too late. Focus on the regulatory aspects of things, and you can make a real difference, possibly. The CFR feed on the RSS page shows how regulations are routinely promulgated, and it's not an ideological thing necessarily: DHS/ICE is an agency just like the FDA or EPA. Rules are, after all, rules.

I understand why lawmakers would want to enact such measures, and I'm quite familiar with the result of impaired driving of any kind, having represented those accused of such charges in court. However, it should be noted that the drunk driving laws and the campaign for more punitive punishment are not actually targeting those who have caused harm or have taken a substantial step at causing harm, and the statistics behind the portrayals of the problem are frankly misleadingly reported and takes on the characteristics of a moral panic and a boon to law enforcement in circumventing the 4th Amendment. I have no doubt that any additional measures will continue down the same dead-end path.

Firstly, the NHTSA freely defines fatal crashes as "alcohol-related" or "alcohol-involved" if any person, driver or pedestrian or victim in another vehicle had 0.01 BAC or above. It does not mean that the cause of the crash is related to alcohol, only that it is present in a party involved. For non-fatal crashes, the label attaches if the police report indicates a presence of alcohol on the scene, even when no person involved had been tested or was suspected of intoxication. A glossary of definitions can be found here: https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...

Secondly, the actual numbers of alcohol-related crashes and fatalities are largely estimates imputed by filling in the gaps in the data with values derived from alcohol-involved data that was collected and extrapolated under the assumption that the two populations would have similar distributions of BAC levels when tested, without regard as to considerations as to why BAC data wasn't collected. The imputation is validated by comparing the new imputed statistics to that which is also derived but from an older method with fewer classification categories and not actual recorded data. Methodology: https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/... In any case, the extent of the problem is obfuscated by both a very broad definition and statistically imputed figures based on earlier estimates. While the researchers have pointed out the shortcomings and limitations of the method, the numbers reported to the public and used to justify punitive measures under criminal and administrative laws are taken at face value.

Thirdly, the common DUI/DWI laws punish in a manner more out of the Minority Report than how any criminal justice system that isn't a sham should - by punishing behavior based on the potential for such behavior writ large to potentially cause harm, although there's no victim, no actual harm, no intent to cause harm, and in some cases may not even be possible to cause harm. It's pre-crime in the purist sense, especially since nearly all states have vehicular homicide and vehicular assault charges, or charges that cover the same ground, to deal with instances where actual harm is caused. This is made possible by lawmakers simply designating an arbitrary BAC level as the line for per se intoxication, regardless of actual impairment. NHTSA's own literature states that their guidance material is focused not only determining impairment, but determining whether any individual stopped by the police has a BAC above 0.08, a figure that shifted throughout time and was first set into law around the height of the push for prohibition. Field sobriety tests and such, obviously, have tons of critics both on the false positive and false negative side, but more problematic is the fact that the punitive laws are made not to stop impaired driving but rather, to act as a crude way of divining whether a person's BAC is over or under a precise but arbitrary level, through which probable cause can be established. It's a giant game of charades.

Many laws passed with the best of intentions end up with unforeseen outcomes and ramifications. This is worse than that, as it takes a real problem of unknown scale and pushes it into moral panic territory. Maybe the moral crusaders of MADD should actually take a hint from their organization's name and figure out the extent of the problem outside of crashes where only the driver is killed (70% of alcohol-related fatalities, the NHTSA estimates) before letting loose the moral panic at the heart of their campaign. Reading the footnotes tend to help.

Articles of Confederation. It was in force for 6 years before the founders dumped it and drafted the Constitution. The main problems were the inability for congress to levy taxes, regulate trade international and interstate, and congress wound up having to beg the states for money.

If it's a civil rights case and there's merit to your claims, you might be able to find public interest lawyers to help out for much less than that. Call around, there are firms in most large cities.

They, alongside the Second Amendment Foundation, have actually had some success fighting states for discriminatory laws that deny 2nd Amendment rights to specific populations. After all, the Constitution wouldn't work if it doesn't apply to everyone, but states have spent a lot of effort putting up roadblocks to everyone from legal immigrants to medical marijuana patients and states would selectively refuse to renew CCWs and licenses without cause or bar legal gun owners from receiving Section 8 vouchers and imposing categorical bans on legal gun owners attempting to foster or adopt children. In a sense they are the exact opposite of the NRA, who haven't done much to address the lack of equal access to the Constitutional right for quite some time when the complainants don't fit a particular mold.