5 ms·

"Maybe the real issue is selective outrage about legal injustice." The real issue is selective enforcement of the law. If it applied equally to everyone, then

by giantg2 2mo ago

"Maybe the real issue is selective outrage about legal injustice." The real issue is selective enforcement of the law. If it applied equally to everyone, then more people would be outraged as it affected them.

jmward01 2mo ago
Perfectly equal enforcement really isn't possible, but it should be the policy to enforce in proportion to active harm. The bigger the ongoing active harm, the quicker to react we should be. Some individual torrents a single movie? NBD. No matter the side of the argument you are on this should be ignored. A company intentionally throws content strikes causing legitimate harm to large numbers of content creators? That should addressed. Reality should always have a place in the law.
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
- GolfPopper 2mo ago
  Finland links speeding fines to income. I'd like to see something that get far broader application. That prevents the wealthy or huge corporations from seeing lawbreaking as a business cost, without destroying a small business or individual who commits the same crime.
  - AnthonyMouse 2mo ago
    Proposals like this are how you get the billionaire paying their chauffeur's $50 fines so they can get everywhere faster while sticking some small business owner in an industry with feast or famine years with a $50,000 ticket for having a slightly miscalibrated speedometer. Creating new arbitrage opportunities benefits the powerful, not the weak.
    - collingreen 2mo ago
      It is a common complaint that fixed penalties are just the fee the rich get to pay to break the law. Doubly so for big corporations especially when the penalties are less than the gain they got doing the harm. It sounds like you're implying that it is impossible to create a system that makes penalties scale instead of just being a fee because the system will always be gamed. Do you believe that or did I misunderstand you?
      - AnthonyMouse 2mo ago
        It's a common complaint but the complaint is ridiculous because the penalties already scale with the scope of the activity. It's typical when you sue a corporation for the penalty for willful violations to be treble damages, i.e. three times the actual damages. If you rip customers off by $10,000 then you pay $30,000. If you're huge and rip customers off by $10 billion then you pay $30 billion. Whereas the proposal is typically to make the penalties scale with entity size, which a) is actually easier to game than the scope of the harmful activity, and b) does a bunch of things that make no sense, like increasing the amount of the fine for an oil spill if the company also generates additional revenue from producing solar panels. The reason we run into trouble here usually isn't that the penalties are wrong, it's that the enforcement is weak. If you can steal $10 billion with only a 10% chance of enforcement that requires you to give back $30 billion then your expected value is an $8 billion gain. But that has nothing to do with the scale of the business. The exact same thing happens to with a company that steals $10,000 with only a 10% chance of enforcement. And using disproportionate penalties doesn't really fix it either, because then they just roll the dice and file for bankruptcy if they encounter enforcement. You can't fine them more money than they actually have. When the rate of enforcement is too low, that isn't enough to make them comply, because a small chance of -100% is profitable against a large chance of +50%. Whereas if enforcement is consistent then disproportionate penalties aren't even necessary.
        account42 2mo ago
        Penalties are not just to compensate for the harm done but also to incentivize against doing the harm in the first place. This only works if penalties * p(getting convicted) > profit. p(getting convicted) very much depends no the size of the entity so penalties need to be increased accordingly to attain the same deterrent effect. Being able to game a naive implementation of such scaling is not an argument for not scaling penalties but for designing the concrete implementation to be hard to game and/or applying even higher penalties when someone has been found to try to game the system - which is something that should be done more in general. We can absolutely make it so that people hiring private chauffeurs share in the liability for breaking traffic laws just like we can absolutely hold CEOs liable for illegal activities done by employees under their purview.
    - FireBeyond 2mo ago
      This isn't arbitrage, it's looking for loopholes. Presumably your "feast or famine" business owner did the responsible thing with leveling their income, no? They didn't? Oh, why would that be the public's concern. That would level out in their feasting years, after all (assuming you're using the previous year's taxable income, or an average income over the previous three years or so). The chauffeur is subject to the rules around their CDL or similar, or is in service of their employer. When driving a work vehicle, my fines are already directed at my employer. It blows my mind how much we are willing to bend over backwards to ensure the powerful won't suffer a moment's inconvenience in this country.
      - GolfPopper 2mo ago
        "John Steinbeck once said that socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires." Not quite how he phrased it, but close. Original is here: https://wist.info/steinbeck-john/46582/ https://wist.info/steinbeck-john/46582/
        geodel 2mo ago
        Ok, how did it work our for countries where it did took root?
        jacquesm 2mo ago
        Good enough, France, the Nordics and many other countries besides have done well.
        mlrtime 2mo ago
        "Done well", but not as good as the US. [depending on which stats you cherry-pick] The US was always about dreamers taking big risks for big rewards. There are a lot of things that can be fixed that don't remove that ceiling that other countries have.
        opo 2mo ago
    - Hnrobert42 2mo ago
      So then you outlaw that, too. It is an idea with merit to be refined not rejected outright because you found the one flaw. Under the current system, the wealthy can speed themsleves and pay small fines.
  - charcircuit 2mo ago
    In the US speeding can lead to your license being removed and then you can't drive at all. Speeding is not just a fine.
    - jmward01 2mo ago
      Again, this is a wealth tax. Rich get driven around and don't loose their jobs for loosing their license. Try being poor though and having this happen. Edit: should have said 'poor tax'
      - charcircuit 2mo ago
        Being poor is no excuse for breaking the law. If you can't afford having your license revoked then don't do things that can get your license revoked.
        khriss 2mo ago
        Quick question, without looking it up, can you list the number of laws you can break which will result in your license revocation? The law is sufficiently complex and broad that there is essentially zero chance that you are not breaking a single one each day. The rich have gotten so powerful that can literally evade the consequences forever in most cases. For the rest of us, all we can hope is to avoid the scrutiny of the law.
        account42 2mo ago
        That's a straw man though. The argument isn't that poor people should get to break traffic laws but that those who can afford to loose their license shouldn't get to break them either.
- opello 2mo ago
  [dead]
- charcircuit 2mo ago
  Perfect may not be possible but with AI society will be able to scale law enforcement to way more than what a few individual officers can handle.
  - chanux 2mo ago
    And it will still have the amazing characteristics we see today.
genghisjahn 2mo ago
For the in-crowd the law protects but does not bind. For the out-crowd, the law binds but does not protect. Can’t remember where I read that but it has stuck with me.
- edoceo 2mo ago
  Maybe from here: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/12517091-conservatism-consists-of-exactly-one-proposition-to-wit-there-must https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/12517091-conservatism-consi...
  - carbocation 2mo ago
    It originated in a comment on a blog: https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progressives/#comment-729288 https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progre...
    - senderista 2mo ago
      I don't read CT anymore but it was one of the great ones.
    - genghisjahn 2mo ago
      That was it.
- pixelready 2mo ago
  “For my friends, everything. For my enemies, the law.” The credo of the corrupt, courtesy of General Benavides
AnthonyMouse 2mo ago
> If it applied equally to everyone, then more people would be outraged as it affected them. In order to do this you need to have laws that are designed to be reasonable for people to actually follow instead of laws that are designed to allow prosecutors to find a violation whenever they want to. Actually enforcing them would create pressure to do that, but it would also create pressure to go back to selective enforcement when powerful people object to being subjected to the unreasonableness of existing laws. A better solution might be to make a showing of selective enforcement a means to strike down a law. If you can show that someone else was doing the same thing without being charged then the prosecution either has to charge them too or that law is struck down and no one can be charged with it anymore. Then instead of the incentive not to charge powerful people creating pressure for selective enforcement, the same incentive creates pressure to strike down the laws that can't reasonably be uniformly enforced.
- anthonyrstevens 2mo ago
  >> A better solution might be to make a showing of selective enforcement a means to strike down a law. If you can show that someone else was doing the same thing without being charged then the prosecution either has to charge them too or that law is repealed and no one can be charged with it anymore. This is very interesting. I suspect there are a lot of unintended consequences that might follow.
  - AnthonyMouse 2mo ago
    If you're going to say things like that you have to give examples.
    - salawat 2mo ago
      You just created a large, TBTF corp's veto. Pass a law or have a law passed a corp TBTF doesn't want? Break it and force the Government's hand to strike it down.
      - AnthonyMouse 2mo ago
unpop 2mo ago
[flagged]
- zymhan 2mo ago
  >How would it help the world for Aaron Swartz to download 3.5 million research and primary source PDFs Knowledge is power.
  - unpop 2mo ago
    So, pay for access, or go to your local library, or browse the internet, or get free access in a similar way that Aaron Swartz did? Knowledge often requires funding to be created in the first place.
    - DANmode 2mo ago
      Why does every research team and lab use SciHub and/or Library Genesis?
      - foldr 2mo ago
        I mean, they don’t, exclusively, or no-one would be giving money to JSTOR. And certainly, no-one would be scanning millions of old journal articles for free.
        DANmode 2mo ago
        Comparatively few individuals are giving money to JSTOR these days. Mostly institutions that they’ve previously captured. And yes: not sure how you missed it, but for like a decade or more people have been scanning in millions of papers and books.
        foldr 2mo ago
        I don't know where people get the idea that JSTOR is one of the bad guys. It's a non-profit that scans old journal articles that would otherwise be a huge pain to access. It costs money to do that. What specifically have they done that you disapprove of?
jongjong 2mo ago
It all started going downhill once they started calling corporations "legal persons" and gave them all the same right as people, but without all of the constraints associated with having a body. A corporation has more legal rights than a person if you think about it; no wonder they took over. A corporation can't go to jail, doesn't need a visa to work in a foreign country. Imagine if the legal system took jail off the table and people could move to any country without a visa; only fines... We'd be overrun by criminals. They'd be able to monetize these two facts easily; they'd make more than enough money from criminal activity to cover all the fines.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 2mo ago
  >It all started going downhill once they started calling corporations "legal persons" and gave them all the same right as people, but The 1860s? Or do you meant he royal charter companies from centuries prior? This goes back so far that you can't even understand it. >A corporation has more legal rights than a person if you think about it; no wonder they took over. A corporation can't Corporations only exist because your government (especially if you live in Delaware) blesses them into existence. The moment that courts and government offices stopped recognizing their existence, they'd wither away like a bad dream on a sunny morning. You get that right? And yet you've never once questioned what allows them to exist. You've never challenged the government's power to create them in this manner. It'd be one thing if you decided that they should exist, and you explicitly granted your government the power to create them... But everyone here behaves as if they were some inevitable law of physics and there's nothing to be done. Or maybe, secretly, you love corporations, and just hope that your political faction will somehow manage to wrest control and use them to your own ends. Sometimes that's what it feels like.
  - jongjong 2mo ago
    The root problem here is that I have no voice and have no real friends to join forces with. I literally have zero power to change the system. Wealth inequality puts my interests at odds with those who benefit from the current system. At my level as a software engineer, it's impossible to make friends because everyone is trying to back-stab each other constantly. It's extremely low trust. You can't change the laws of your country when you're so alone that you can't even trust colleagues you see every day. I had a co-founder/friend (past tense) whose background was in HR and he wanted to build a tool to help software devs find jobs and he was telling me that referrals is the best way to get a job... I had to explain to him how cut-throat the competition is with engineers... They're not going to give referrals for people they only met online. I mean, inside the company, some colleagues are trying to sabotage or slander each other over a promotion. Not friend material. Just to give an idea of my experience with referrals (and low-trust environment) as a software engineer; I only provided a referral for 'ex-colleagues/friends' twice in my career; first time was a guy who didn't have a job who was in open source and I had known online and spoke regularly for 2 years; they literally lied to my boss and backstabbed me and didn't even join the company... I didn't do any referrals after that... For years... But eventually I met another engineer who was very good and a nice guy and I thought "this guy is smart and friendly and he explicitly asked me for a referral" so I gave his details to my employer... But he got cold feet and although he didn't slander me to my boss with salacious lies, his cold feet made me look bad. So that's it, I don't do referrals anymore.
mapt 2mo ago
The violation of the law as practiced is that a Little Person did this and threatened a Player's profits. A Player can do what they like to another and form some kind of mutually beneficial arrangement afterward... but Schwartz did not have enough commas in his bank account to be allowed to dabble, not a single investor behind him. Nor was his goal the overriding morally correct goal of maximizing social stratification through profit seeking. Knocking down paywalls is dead weight loss, not market predation. He had to go. He had to be made an example of. For the system, this was personal.

by giantg2 2mo ago

jmward01 2mo ago

Perfectly equal enforcement really isn't possible, but it should be the policy to enforce in proportion to active harm. The bigger the ongoing active harm, the quicker to react we should be. Some individual torrents a single movie? NBD. No matter the side of the argument you are on this should be ignored. A company intentionally throws content strikes causing legitimate harm to large numbers of content creators? That should addressed. Reality should always have a place in the law.

deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
GolfPopper 2mo ago
Finland links speeding fines to income. I'd like to see something that get far broader application. That prevents the wealthy or huge corporations from seeing lawbreaking as a business cost, without destroying a small business or individual who commits the same crime.
- AnthonyMouse 2mo ago
  Proposals like this are how you get the billionaire paying their chauffeur's $50 fines so they can get everywhere faster while sticking some small business owner in an industry with feast or famine years with a $50,000 ticket for having a slightly miscalibrated speedometer. Creating new arbitrage opportunities benefits the powerful, not the weak.
  - collingreen 2mo ago
    It is a common complaint that fixed penalties are just the fee the rich get to pay to break the law. Doubly so for big corporations especially when the penalties are less than the gain they got doing the harm. It sounds like you're implying that it is impossible to create a system that makes penalties scale instead of just being a fee because the system will always be gamed. Do you believe that or did I misunderstand you?
    - AnthonyMouse 2mo ago
      It's a common complaint but the complaint is ridiculous because the penalties already scale with the scope of the activity. It's typical when you sue a corporation for the penalty for willful violations to be treble damages, i.e. three times the actual damages. If you rip customers off by $10,000 then you pay $30,000. If you're huge and rip customers off by $10 billion then you pay $30 billion. Whereas the proposal is typically to make the penalties scale with entity size, which a) is actually easier to game than the scope of the harmful activity, and b) does a bunch of things that make no sense, like increasing the amount of the fine for an oil spill if the company also generates additional revenue from producing solar panels. The reason we run into trouble here usually isn't that the penalties are wrong, it's that the enforcement is weak. If you can steal $10 billion with only a 10% chance of enforcement that requires you to give back $30 billion then your expected value is an $8 billion gain. But that has nothing to do with the scale of the business. The exact same thing happens to with a company that steals $10,000 with only a 10% chance of enforcement. And using disproportionate penalties doesn't really fix it either, because then they just roll the dice and file for bankruptcy if they encounter enforcement. You can't fine them more money than they actually have. When the rate of enforcement is too low, that isn't enough to make them comply, because a small chance of -100% is profitable against a large chance of +50%. Whereas if enforcement is consistent then disproportionate penalties aren't even necessary.
      - account42 2mo ago
        Penalties are not just to compensate for the harm done but also to incentivize against doing the harm in the first place. This only works if penalties * p(getting convicted) > profit. p(getting convicted) very much depends no the size of the entity so penalties need to be increased accordingly to attain the same deterrent effect. Being able to game a naive implementation of such scaling is not an argument for not scaling penalties but for designing the concrete implementation to be hard to game and/or applying even higher penalties when someone has been found to try to game the system - which is something that should be done more in general. We can absolutely make it so that people hiring private chauffeurs share in the liability for breaking traffic laws just like we can absolutely hold CEOs liable for illegal activities done by employees under their purview.
  - FireBeyond 2mo ago
    This isn't arbitrage, it's looking for loopholes. Presumably your "feast or famine" business owner did the responsible thing with leveling their income, no? They didn't? Oh, why would that be the public's concern. That would level out in their feasting years, after all (assuming you're using the previous year's taxable income, or an average income over the previous three years or so). The chauffeur is subject to the rules around their CDL or similar, or is in service of their employer. When driving a work vehicle, my fines are already directed at my employer. It blows my mind how much we are willing to bend over backwards to ensure the powerful won't suffer a moment's inconvenience in this country.
    - GolfPopper 2mo ago
      "John Steinbeck once said that socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires." Not quite how he phrased it, but close. Original is here: https://wist.info/steinbeck-john/46582/ https://wist.info/steinbeck-john/46582/
      - geodel 2mo ago
        Ok, how did it work our for countries where it did took root?
        jacquesm 2mo ago
        Good enough, France, the Nordics and many other countries besides have done well.
        mlrtime 2mo ago
        "Done well", but not as good as the US. [depending on which stats you cherry-pick] The US was always about dreamers taking big risks for big rewards. There are a lot of things that can be fixed that don't remove that ceiling that other countries have.
      - opo 2mo ago
  - Hnrobert42 2mo ago
    So then you outlaw that, too. It is an idea with merit to be refined not rejected outright because you found the one flaw. Under the current system, the wealthy can speed themsleves and pay small fines.
- charcircuit 2mo ago
  In the US speeding can lead to your license being removed and then you can't drive at all. Speeding is not just a fine.
  - jmward01 2mo ago
    Again, this is a wealth tax. Rich get driven around and don't loose their jobs for loosing their license. Try being poor though and having this happen. Edit: should have said 'poor tax'
    - charcircuit 2mo ago
      Being poor is no excuse for breaking the law. If you can't afford having your license revoked then don't do things that can get your license revoked.
      - khriss 2mo ago
        Quick question, without looking it up, can you list the number of laws you can break which will result in your license revocation? The law is sufficiently complex and broad that there is essentially zero chance that you are not breaking a single one each day. The rich have gotten so powerful that can literally evade the consequences forever in most cases. For the rest of us, all we can hope is to avoid the scrutiny of the law.
      - account42 2mo ago
        That's a straw man though. The argument isn't that poor people should get to break traffic laws but that those who can afford to loose their license shouldn't get to break them either.
opello 2mo ago
[dead]
charcircuit 2mo ago
Perfect may not be possible but with AI society will be able to scale law enforcement to way more than what a few individual officers can handle.
- chanux 2mo ago
  And it will still have the amazing characteristics we see today.

genghisjahn 2mo ago

For the in-crowd the law protects but does not bind. For the out-crowd, the law binds but does not protect. Can’t remember where I read that but it has stuck with me.

edoceo 2mo ago
Maybe from here: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/12517091-conservatism-consists-of-exactly-one-proposition-to-wit-there-must https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/12517091-conservatism-consi...
- carbocation 2mo ago
  It originated in a comment on a blog: https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progressives/#comment-729288 https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progre...
  - senderista 2mo ago
    I don't read CT anymore but it was one of the great ones.
  - genghisjahn 2mo ago
    That was it.
pixelready 2mo ago
“For my friends, everything. For my enemies, the law.” The credo of the corrupt, courtesy of General Benavides

AnthonyMouse 2mo ago

> If it applied equally to everyone, then more people would be outraged as it affected them. In order to do this you need to have laws that are designed to be reasonable for people to actually follow instead of laws that are designed to allow prosecutors to find a violation whenever they want to. Actually enforcing them would create pressure to do that, but it would also create pressure to go back to selective enforcement when powerful people object to being subjected to the unreasonableness of existing laws. A better solution might be to make a showing of selective enforcement a means to strike down a law. If you can show that someone else was doing the same thing without being charged then the prosecution either has to charge them too or that law is struck down and no one can be charged with it anymore. Then instead of the incentive not to charge powerful people creating pressure for selective enforcement, the same incentive creates pressure to strike down the laws that can't reasonably be uniformly enforced.

anthonyrstevens 2mo ago
>> A better solution might be to make a showing of selective enforcement a means to strike down a law. If you can show that someone else was doing the same thing without being charged then the prosecution either has to charge them too or that law is repealed and no one can be charged with it anymore. This is very interesting. I suspect there are a lot of unintended consequences that might follow.
- AnthonyMouse 2mo ago
  If you're going to say things like that you have to give examples.
  - salawat 2mo ago
    You just created a large, TBTF corp's veto. Pass a law or have a law passed a corp TBTF doesn't want? Break it and force the Government's hand to strike it down.
    - AnthonyMouse 2mo ago

unpop 2mo ago

[flagged]

zymhan 2mo ago
>How would it help the world for Aaron Swartz to download 3.5 million research and primary source PDFs Knowledge is power.
- unpop 2mo ago
  So, pay for access, or go to your local library, or browse the internet, or get free access in a similar way that Aaron Swartz did? Knowledge often requires funding to be created in the first place.
  - DANmode 2mo ago
    Why does every research team and lab use SciHub and/or Library Genesis?
    - foldr 2mo ago
      I mean, they don’t, exclusively, or no-one would be giving money to JSTOR. And certainly, no-one would be scanning millions of old journal articles for free.
      - DANmode 2mo ago
        Comparatively few individuals are giving money to JSTOR these days. Mostly institutions that they’ve previously captured. And yes: not sure how you missed it, but for like a decade or more people have been scanning in millions of papers and books.
        foldr 2mo ago
        I don't know where people get the idea that JSTOR is one of the bad guys. It's a non-profit that scans old journal articles that would otherwise be a huge pain to access. It costs money to do that. What specifically have they done that you disapprove of?

jongjong 2mo ago

It all started going downhill once they started calling corporations "legal persons" and gave them all the same right as people, but without all of the constraints associated with having a body. A corporation has more legal rights than a person if you think about it; no wonder they took over. A corporation can't go to jail, doesn't need a visa to work in a foreign country. Imagine if the legal system took jail off the table and people could move to any country without a visa; only fines... We'd be overrun by criminals. They'd be able to monetize these two facts easily; they'd make more than enough money from criminal activity to cover all the fines.

NoMoreNicksLeft 2mo ago
>It all started going downhill once they started calling corporations "legal persons" and gave them all the same right as people, but The 1860s? Or do you meant he royal charter companies from centuries prior? This goes back so far that you can't even understand it. >A corporation has more legal rights than a person if you think about it; no wonder they took over. A corporation can't Corporations only exist because your government (especially if you live in Delaware) blesses them into existence. The moment that courts and government offices stopped recognizing their existence, they'd wither away like a bad dream on a sunny morning. You get that right? And yet you've never once questioned what allows them to exist. You've never challenged the government's power to create them in this manner. It'd be one thing if you decided that they should exist, and you explicitly granted your government the power to create them... But everyone here behaves as if they were some inevitable law of physics and there's nothing to be done. Or maybe, secretly, you love corporations, and just hope that your political faction will somehow manage to wrest control and use them to your own ends. Sometimes that's what it feels like.
- jongjong 2mo ago
  The root problem here is that I have no voice and have no real friends to join forces with. I literally have zero power to change the system. Wealth inequality puts my interests at odds with those who benefit from the current system. At my level as a software engineer, it's impossible to make friends because everyone is trying to back-stab each other constantly. It's extremely low trust. You can't change the laws of your country when you're so alone that you can't even trust colleagues you see every day. I had a co-founder/friend (past tense) whose background was in HR and he wanted to build a tool to help software devs find jobs and he was telling me that referrals is the best way to get a job... I had to explain to him how cut-throat the competition is with engineers... They're not going to give referrals for people they only met online. I mean, inside the company, some colleagues are trying to sabotage or slander each other over a promotion. Not friend material. Just to give an idea of my experience with referrals (and low-trust environment) as a software engineer; I only provided a referral for 'ex-colleagues/friends' twice in my career; first time was a guy who didn't have a job who was in open source and I had known online and spoke regularly for 2 years; they literally lied to my boss and backstabbed me and didn't even join the company... I didn't do any referrals after that... For years... But eventually I met another engineer who was very good and a nice guy and I thought "this guy is smart and friendly and he explicitly asked me for a referral" so I gave his details to my employer... But he got cold feet and although he didn't slander me to my boss with salacious lies, his cold feet made me look bad. So that's it, I don't do referrals anymore.

mapt 2mo ago

The violation of the law as practiced is that a Little Person did this and threatened a Player's profits. A Player can do what they like to another and form some kind of mutually beneficial arrangement afterward... but Schwartz did not have enough commas in his bank account to be allowed to dabble, not a single investor behind him. Nor was his goal the overriding morally correct goal of maximizing social stratification through profit seeking. Knocking down paywalls is dead weight loss, not market predation. He had to go. He had to be made an example of. For the system, this was personal.