jkaplowitz

True, I was only arguing against something that you seemed to me to have implied, not anything you outright said.

Would the liability shield not generally apply to a foreign entity registered in Germany? Sure there may be special rules for non-compliance with specific tax obligations, but I'm talking about for general liability for other purposes, like a contract signed by the entity where no personal guarantee was given, or a harm caused by the corporation where the owner was not personally involved or negligent in causing the harm.

Specifically, it must be seated where the principal management of the business occurs.

So if the executives and board meetings and books and records are strategically located in one country and most of the business operations are in a second, it's valid and probably even required for the business to have its tax residence in the first country rather than the second.

It may very well have a permanent establishment and therefore some tax obligations in the second country, but that's different from the second country being the primary tax residence.

From a different news story about this change, it doesn't apply to any phone activated before the government issued its approval earlier this month. So any phone which you activated in 2025 is not covered by this.

The kind of older tourist visiting a foreign religious site is definitely going to be relatively indoctrinated regardless of their origin country. But yes, many Americans are indoctrinated. They also tend to be dominant in wide swaths of US geography and highly motivated by their indoctrinators to vote, thus maximizing their electoral impact.

Many other Americans are pretty open-minded to new facts, even today. Unfortunately this kind is relatively geographically concentrated in urban or academic communities, and many of them are also discouraged from voting by being fully aware of how desperate and hard-to-fix the US political situation is, thus minimizing their electoral impact.

> Even one of the white papers commissioned by the FSF

Quoting the text which the FSF put at the top of that page:

"This paper is published as part of our call for community whitepapers on Copilot. The papers contain opinions with which the FSF may or may not agree, and any views expressed by the authors do not necessarily represent the Free Software Foundation. They were selected because we thought they advanced the discussion of important questions, and did so clearly."

So, they asked the community to share thoughts on this topic, and they're publishing interesting viewpoints that clearly advance the discussion, whether or not they end up agreeing with them. I do acknowledge that they paid $500 for each paper they published, which gives some validity to your use of the verb "commissioned", but that's a separate question from whether the FSF agrees with the conclusions. They certainly didn't choose a specific author or set of authors to write a paper on a specific topic before the paper was written, which a commission usually involves, and even then the commissioning organization doesn't always agree with the paper's conclusion unless the commission isn't considered done until the paper is updated to match the desired conclusion.

> You will notice that the FSF has not rushed out to file copyright infringement suits even though they probably have more reason to oppose LLMs trained on FOSS code than anyone else in the world.

This would be consistent with them agreeing with this paper's conclusion, sure. But that's not the only possibility it's consistent with.

It could alternatively be because they discovered or reasonably should have discovered the copyright infringement less than three years ago, therefore still have time remaining in their statute of limitations, and are taking their time to make sure they file the best possible legal complaint in the most favorable available venue.

Or it could simply be because they don't think they can afford the legal and PR fight that would likely result.

Yeah, and they can do that with simple easily findable and downloadable free graphical software to strip the security, nothing super-technical needed.

Nothing that hard. When I had a technically similar need (for non-shady purposes unrelated to recruiting) I found easy installable free GUI software for Windows that worked just fine with a simple Google search. No specialist expertise needed.

Yes, most consumer software does respect what you say. But it’s easy for a minimally motivated consumer to obtain and use software which doesn’t.

However, the context we were discussing was neither a consumer nor a forensic security researcher, but a recruiter trying to do shady things with a resume. I don't expect them to be a specialist, but I do expect them to be able either to get the kind of software I just described with a security stripping feature, or else to have access to third-party software specifically targeting the recruiter market that will do the shady things - including to digitally signed PDFs like yours - without them having to know how it works.

All PDF security can be stripped by freely available software in ways that allow subsequent modifications without restriction, except the kind of PDF security that requires an unavailable password to decrypt to view, but in that case viewing isn’t possible either.

Subsequent modifications would of course invalidate any digital signature you’ve applied, but that only matters if the recipient cares about your digital signature remaining valid.

Put another way, there’s no such thing as a true read-only PDF if the software necessary to circumvent the other PDF security restrictions is available on the recipient’s computer and if preserving the validity of your digital signature is not considered important.

But sure, it’s very possible to distribute a PDF that’s a lot more annoying to modify than your private source format. No disagreement there.

Thank you for explaining that context!

Depends, but some things it could mean include clear intent to end the situation within the foreseeable future, taking it outside some but not all definitions of indefinite.

I’ve definitely seen media reports using language similar to what I said outside of my parenthetical, which I don’t view as indefinite.

I also don’t find “for now” to be clearly indefinite, but I agree it depends on which of multiple definitions of “indefinite” you use, and it does fit some definitions. (Similarly, “permanent” also has multiple definitions, some of which overlap with some meanings of “indefinite”.)

From the changelog, it seems like this may have been due to issues caused by the on-by-default setting, although I don’t work for Tailscale and am speculating here with no inside info.

I wonder, would Tailscale be willing to confirm that they plan to fix whatever the issues are and re-enable this default within a short-ish timeframe? I currently have plenty of trust in the good intentions of the people running Tailscale, but with geopolitics as it currently is, I’d love to have a concrete reason even beyond that positive track record to believe that this change isn’t attempting to satisfy ease-of-surveillance concerns expressed by government agencies in whichever country.

If the requirement was for the goal of indefinite control of territory, this declaration doesn’t match the requirement even if such declarations do count: he said the US will be running Venezuela during this transition (or “for now” in the particular version you quoted - of course his exact words do vary from moment to moment), not indefinitely.

Those two descriptions are not mutually contradictory.

> You can reliably reconstruct a SSN that is missing the first digits, if you know where the person lived when they filed for it, but that's not the same thing.

This used to be true, but isn’t for SSNs assigned since I think 2011 - the exact year could be wrong, that’s from memory. Since that switch, the component that used to be geographical is assigned randomly.

Tapping in different parts of the text box, or dragging the finger in the text box, allow a lot more precise control than what one can easily do by dragging the space bar in the iPhone keyboard, much closer to what you can do on a full computer with regular keyboard and mouse.

The difference is especially noticeable for tasks like editing / deleting / selecting specific parts of long URLs, and on smaller phones where the iPhone space bar is smaller than on larger phones.

I’ve gotten used to it over enough time using an iPhone, but it is still both more difficult to use and less discoverable than the Android equivalent.

They aren’t regulated as a bank in the US, where they have a much lighter-touch type of licensing.

Do the bank regulators in Europe typically help effectively when PayPal freezes an account?

The penalties for unknowingly possessing or transmitting child porn are far too harsh, both in this case and in general (far beyond just Google's corporate policies).

Again, to avoid misunderstandings, I said unknowingly - I'm not defending anything about people who knowingly possess or traffic in child porn, other than for the few appropriate purposes like reporting it to the proper authorities when discovered.

Partial correction: he wants to make buses free, but not subways.

The 2.90 is even capped at $34 per week. Then there's the 50% discount for low-income NYC residents who qualify and apply for the Fair Fares NYC program, or for anyone regadless of residence who qualifies for reduced fares through age or a qualifying disability.

Both of these numbers are changing in early January to $3 and $35 respectively, but same idea.

Still, some European countries like Germany offer far cheaper than this, while others like the UK are probably pricer. NYC public transit gives very good value for the US at least.

> Does only committing a "criminal misdemeanor" somehow exempt you from arrest?

It does not - and that's exactly my point! Cops are allowed to arrest that criminal even though there's no immediate need to arrest them. So, immediate need is not a prerequisite to cops arresting someone.

> Right, because arresting people who refuses to show up to court is needed for the justice system to work at all. Otherwise people can just shirk their court dates and never face judgement. There's plenty of other reasons to arrest people besides the two examples I provided, they're not supposed to be exhaustive.

Yes, but cops are also free to arrest people who they are confident will show up to court, if there's probable cause that they've committed a crime. Again, the point of that example was that immediate need is not required before a cop can arrest someone.

> This makes as much sense as calling in the cops to report health code violations.

I agree that it would be best if there were a separate agency that could respond on the spot for this type of issue, other than the regular police department and other than a slow administrative complaint/inspection process which doesn't lead to enough of a fine for stores to change their processes.

But I was discussing the possibility of the sale completing according to the law and the store trying to stop the customer from leaving with their purchase because they didn't pay the illegal overcharge. That would indeed by a crime attempted or committed by the store, assuming the law considers the sale to have been completed, and that is indeed something within the scope of what cops can handle.

To use your health code analogy: sure, in general, administrative complaints are the way to handle health code violations. But what do you call it if a restaurant worker sees something which they know or reasonably should know is toxic to humans spill into a customer's order, and then they serve it to the customer anyway without a warning? Yes, that's a crime as well as a health code violation. There are plenty of cases where cops can legitimately be involved in things that can also be handled administratively. Whether or not cops are likely to respond in useful or timely ways is a completely separate question from what the law allows.

(Tangent: Cops also quite often handle administrative fines of even smaller magnitude than what we're discussing here, but usually when the aggrieved party is the government and the wrongdoer is a random individual, like issuing non-criminal $60-100 fines for not paying a public transit fare of a couple of dollars. It's rare for them to do it when the aggrieved party is a random individual and the wrongdoer is a business.)

I did call it a theoretical option and not a practical option. Although they might be a little more sympathetic to someone who is white, in a business suit, has a photo of the shelf price on their phone, can confirm that a surveillance camera captured them paying the shelf price, and is lucky enough to either get a cop who knows about the local price accuracy law or can point the cop to a visible posted sign about the law in the store.

> When cops "enforce" the law, like arresting someone or towing a car, they're only allowed to do it because there's some immediate need.

Not at all true. They can enforce the law because there's a law being violated, not because there's an immediate need for the enforcement.

> In the former case, it's because having a criminal roaming around the streets is a danger to society, and in the latter case because the car is blocking traffic and needs to be removed.

There are so many cases where cops can arrest someone who isn't being a danger to society in any way, like someone who illegally crossed the border into the US (a criminal misdemeanor) and is otherwise fully law-abiding. Or for an example under state law, a cop arresting someone who is intentionally underpaying state income tax (criminal tax evasion) has no immediate need to take that person into custody before conviction but is 100% allowed to do so if probable cause exists, at least until the initial bail hearing.

> In both cases you still need a judge to ruled that the person actually shoplifted or parked illegally.

Not before a cop gets involved, no. The judge comes after the cop.

> None of these factors apply in a dispute over pricing, and it's not the police's job to strongarm the shopkeeper to accept the lower-marked price. Indeed, in the two examples, there are often cases where no actions are taken at all, for instance issuing a summons instead of arresting someone, or issuing a ticket instead of towing a car.

This has nothing to do with strongarming the shopkeeper to accept a lower-marked price in the sense of an ordinary pricing dispute between private parties, it's about enforcing state or local laws that regulate this in cases where a shop is violating applicable laws.

It is true that many of these laws only allow administrative fines in response to complaints or inspections, not anything as proactive as I was describing. The theoretical viability of my idea of simply leaving with the item after paying the legal maximum price at the cash register and involving the cops if stopped actually depends on state contract law, and likely specifically its judicial precedents: if that state would view the buyer's offer to buy at the shelf price as accepted on the terms of the store's invitation to treat since the counteroffer from the cash register's scanner was illegal, then title transfers to the buyer at the time of payment and an attempt to stop them from leaving would be a crime that the cops could in theory be called for. If the state would view the buyer's offer to buy be rejected even though the counteroffer was itself illegal, then yeah the only available enforcement is the administrative complaint / inspection / fine procedure and the buyer never gains title to the property. I expect this legal conclusion would vary from one state to another.

I think we all agree that this theoretical option is very rarely practical, and I'm not pretending otherwise.

I said the legally maximum price is often the lower price. NYC is an example with a law about this:

https://www.nyc.gov/site/dca/consumers/10-things-consumer.pa...

Similar laws exist at the state level in NY, in other NY counties, and in several other states and subdivisions of other states across the country.

In that case, the higher charge is clearly illegal (no novel theory needed), so standard contract law theory could consider the terms of the buyer's offer to purchase to be the terms of the invitation to treat in the absence of legal contrary terms offered at checkout. I guess it's possible that the court would say that the store never agreed to sell the item at all by demanding an illegal price instead of being considered to have accepted the buyer's offer on the posted terms, but there's only so much tolerance a judge would have for that kind of defense by the store - after all, it's very likely that the customer would have an unjust enrichment claim against the store for the amount of the overcharge if they were to pay the illegal higher price, and that wouldn't be true if the illegal contract term were valid.

The precise answer may vary by state based on judicial precedents about illegal terms in contractual counteroffers following an offer to buy made pursuant to an invitation to treat.

None of this is practical for almost any chain dollar store overpricing victim to pursue, but I am just talking theoretically here.

It's not a novel legal theory, But yeah, I did call it a theoretical option, not a practical one. I don't pretend that it's practical.

It's not about adjudicating disputes in an arbitrary sense, it's about enforcing consumer protection laws about prices displayed and then charged at retail. Many places legislate that the lower of shelf or scanner price be the maximum price charged.

Call the police to stop a store from criminally restraining the freedom of a customer to leave with their purchase after the customer pays the legally mandated maximum price which is often the lower of shelf and scanner price, yes. That's not going to be a high enforcement priority for the police, but it's absolutely a crime if the store does that.

In a lot of places in the US, the lower of the shelf price and the scanner price is by law the most they can demand, at least for retail sales to consumers. Attempts to stop the customer from leaving after having paid the legally appropriate amount would be criminal acts by the store, no?