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.
This is very interesting. I suspect there are a lot of unintended consequences that might follow.
This certainly seems better than just making TBTF (which I assume means too big to fail) entities be above the law.
The dead comment below by AnthonyMouse already pointed out that even in your scenario there's no difference with the status quo anyway. It's insane that it's dead and reeks of astroturfing, as nothing about it is worth flagging.
> Isn't that the other way around? The law already can't be enforced against the TBTF corporation, so what do they care if it stays on the books? But now you can't enforce it against someone else or they can point to you not enforcing it against them.
> Except that's the point. The government would now have to do that or they lose the law. If it's a good law then they don't want to lose it, but if it's a good law then they should be enforcing it against them.
> And, of course, the correct way to deal with this is to break the TBTF corporations into many smaller pieces so that stops being a problem.
The dead comment below by AnthonyMouse already pointed out that even in your scenario there's no difference with the status quo anyway. It's insane that it's dead and reeks of astroturfing, as nothing about it is worth flagging.
If you see such a comment, you can vouch for it (small menu point next to flag) and revive it. I did that now because I agree with your assessment - of late I do this very often because even comments which quote articles/laws etc. verbatim and with a link are flagged/voted to death.
I think the US court system is famous for being slow. Not sure if anyone wants to make it go even slower.
IANAL, but my understanding is this: Malicious prosecution is a defense. Selective enforcement is not. The difference is for judges and juries to decide.
It's unlikely people would have enough evidence of high enough quality to make that case. The prosecution will just say the evidence isn't enough.
You'll also get some nice incentives where the government will be arguing that a particular behavior is not a violation of the law so they don't have to charge someone they don't want to, which in turn leaves you with that precedent if the judge agrees with them and then they want to charge someone else for doing that later.
And lest people think this is a one way street, each side thinks the other deserves interpreting the law to “get the real baddies.”
As applied needs to be changed so that it can be included in setting precedent and when considering the norms given out for punishment because right now it's highly abused to prevent establishing legal norms from judicial findings the way our system is supposed to.
I’ve often thought this about laws involving speed limits. When 95% of the people driving in a major downtown area are technically breaking the law, what is the purpose of the law but to target whoever you like then? Either enforce it unilaterally or come up with new laws.
Can’t remember where I read that but it has stuck with me.
The credo of the corrupt, courtesy of General Benavides
Reality should always have a place in the law.
Creating new arbitrage opportunities benefits the powerful, not the weak.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Not quite how he phrased it, but close. Original is here: https://wist.info/steinbeck-john/46582/
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.
The "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" quote is from Ronald Wright. The Steinbeck quote is actually very different than the Ronald Wright quote.
The actual quote is mocking wealthy armchair leftists rather than explaining why the American working class rejected socialism:
>>Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams. I remember a woman in easy circumstances saying to another even more affluent: “After the revolution even we will have more, won’t we, dear?” Then there was another lover of proletarians who used to raise hell with Sunday picnickers on her property. ...
"Have someone who pays the lower amount do the thing" is precisely arbitrage.
> 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).
Their income for the last three years was $10k, $10k and $1M. Their 20 year average is $80k but the three year average is $340k. So now you're increasing their exposure even more -- before they get a hugely disproportionate fine if it happens to be in the one year they made $1M. Now they still get a disproportionate fine but are exposed to it for three times as long.
> 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.
Michael Dell hails a cab and then the driver gets a speeding ticket. No evidence driver had any idea of his passenger's net worth; no evidence the passenger ever requested exceeding the speed limit and couldn't see the speedometer from the back seat. Is this a billion dollar fine? Who pays it, the person who has nothing like a billion dollars or the person who did nothing wrong?
It's clearly unreasonable to impose the fine in that case, but it's also easy to use it for arbitrage if you don't.
> 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.
Maybe we should have a preference for rules that are effective rather than performative.
And the post you're responding to is making a much less extreme position, that it's hard to scale the fine properly.
For instance, someone might be significantly speeding for 10 years, and never hurting anyone or causing any harm (financial or otherwise). Should they pay nothing?
Or should we distribute harm from all speeders (accidents, injuries and deaths) to everyone speeding?
But does a fixed fee speeding ticket disincentivise behaviour that is known to cause harm statistically?
Yes, that one. Increasing everyone's risk is harm, sorry if I wasn't clear about that part.
> But does a fixed fee speeding ticket disincentivise behaviour that is known to cause harm statistically?
The line of thought here is: Does it matter? If the average speeder pays $2 of fines per $1 of harm, it's a net positive. Yes that does let rich people buy priority. But rich people can usually buy priority. At least they're not getting a helicopter involved.
Probably not, but we can look at the averages anyway.
> how much does 200 lives lost cost? is it their accumulated net worth? expected earnings through what would have been left of their careers? how about lost limbs, emotional damage etc?
200 statistical lives are worth about 2 billion dollars. That question has an easy to look up expert answer, and you don't worry about the details of each case.
> how can you even be sure how much has speeding and not something else mainly contributed to the harm
We have some useful numbers on the impact of speeding, and for something like this assume the worst plausible impact.
Edit: If there's around 1 death per hundred million vehicle miles and it's worth ten million dollars, that's ten cents of death per mile. If a quarter of deaths have speeding as a factor and we exaggerate that to 100% blame, that's 2.5 cents per mile divided by how rare speeding is. If we guess 15% of people are speeding at any moment, that's 17 cents of damage per mile. To pay double they'd need a $200 ticket every 600 miles of speeding.
You'd also need to amortize the damages over years, and then spread it to all the speeding tickets issued.
So I'd actually simplify it: if we say $40000 billion (11k deaths annually times $2b plus non-deaths too and financial damages to cars and infrastructure) of damages amortized over 10 years and spread to 40M tickets annually in USA, that's actually around $100k average per speeding ticket.
I'd also note that we can't assume worst possible impact as there will be combined offenses too — eg. simultaneous drunk driving and speeding — and this means that some damages need to be covered by drunk driving ticket instead :)
Edit: update numbers to reflect annual deaths attributed to speeding in US.
Edit: should have said 'poor tax'
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.
How would it help the world for Aaron Swartz to download 3.5 million research and primary source PDFs, and illegally sneak into off-limits areas during night time, PDFs that presumably could have been downloaded by anyone legally by paying for access? If the goal was gratis access for all citizens, why not instead campaign lawfully for a change in research and information sharing practices generally, or for the state or federation to subsidize gratis access to the articles for the public? Why was theft a moral imperative, especially when the public could access material for a fee? If the goal was for the public good, why not figure out a legal way to do it? If it requires money to make something like JSTOR work, why not have the state fund it, or have the state run a competing service? Or make a competing private company?
The previous motivation for the stuff with PACER arguably made way more sense, though that was peculiar to begin with.
Did Aaron Swartz not at least try to think about or ask about why JSTOR costs money, and why competitors seemingly had not gotten as popular? Did he not care, including how JSTOR can be argued to have benefits to scientific research? Was his conscience just an act?
Aaron Swartz was part of Reddit, and Reddit in the early days lured people in with free articles, but that would not require 3.5 million PDFs to do, only a few, so I do not consider theories about that kind of motive credible.
The book and more being thrown at him was way too harsh, but there was a plea deal at the very least.
Meta should of course be prosecuted as well, but the LLM/AI craze is rather insane and manipulative to start with, and also promoted by Ycombinator and bots here. And there are presumably no people hired by Meta sneaking into places during the night, apart from what CIA and other agency connections that Meta has and agencies that Meta is officially owned and controlled by, like how Ycombinator is likely owned and controlled by them.
I find it hard to care about Aaron Swartz relative to caring about stopping WW3 and nuclear war, the latter might result in many millions of deaths, or even more than that, and might bode very poorly for the chances for the human species to avoid extinction.
What I still do not understand is his suicide. But the whole thing was utterly strange to begin with, him sneaking around during the night, rejecting plea deals, having a whole lawyer team, etc. Was he harassed by CIA's/Five Eyes'/Mossad's thugs or other agencies or private companies for other reasons unrelated to the JSTOR strangeness? Wikileaks mentioned Aaron Swartz as a possible leaker after his death.
Knowledge is power.
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.
Shortening path and timelines to info, innovation, further research.
That’s the end of the calculation.
The rest is just money-clutching noise.
Just link (or specifically mention) a few things they’ve done that people really appreciate.
No need to keep repeating the claim.
I don't understand what you mean by "money-clutching noise" in your other comment. I think enabling free universal public access to historical journal articles would be a great idea. However, some public money would then need to go towards the costs of that, and some reform of copyright law might also be needed.
So does SciHub.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/4178697
Somehow, you appreciate SciHub without appreciating one of the organizations that did the actual work necessary to make many of those PDFs exist in the first place:
https://about.jstor.org/news/jstor-and-apex-covantage-mark-2...
If the JSTOR copy didn’t exist, the pre-print copy would be scraped from the author’s website,
or the text / results submitted by the author or someone close anonymously.
Less, more slowly, but the same point.
Many more recent articles also aren’t available on the authors’ websites, such as the one I linked.
That’s where most of the PDFs come from.
We do not need any entity in between researchers and other researchers.
This may be different for others.
> [JSTOR is] a non-profit that scans old journal articles that would otherwise be a huge pain to access
You'd think that would pretty obviously include the vast swathes of material published before the internet and PDF preprints were a thing (and the considerable amount of subsequent research that just never got uploaded to anyone's website, for whatever reason).
Why does it need to be technically centralized and politically weak?
As to your 'why' question, we're talking about boring, thankless work that in many cases breaks the law. It's not exactly surprising that we don't see millions of people signing up to do it for free!
I don't understand your second paragraph.
Solution which does not require millions of people =]
and if I want to synthesize information from old ones, I’ll query a robot.
This is still research we’re talking about, right? Not a first-edition of famous literature?
>I’ll query a robot.
Which has read all the old papers that JSTOR has scanned. That's why it's able to synthesise them for you!
For certain sciences, 36 years is two lifetimes. Like I said: we’re talking past each other due to our research needs.
One can imagine the quality of research in fields where researchers can't be bothered to read anything that wasn't published in the last five minutes, and rely on other people's partial and possibly inaccurate summaries of key results. But that is another topic.
We are not asserting that any specific outcome is empirically superior to another just that given the facts of the case, it was not adjudicated fairy given what we know of similar cases.
And the worst part is that it looks that way from the perspective of the people at the top. You only understand that it's not the case if you are not among the privileged few.
So your point about "We have no idea of his mental state" is highly pertinent. I also would emphasize that he was a highly rational guy and his mental state was likely a rational consequence of his environment.
I feel bad for you because not only is your argument irrational and baseless its not even entertaining. I am not one of the "thugs" that harassed him. I never met him; but I was a huge fan. I am also not employed by anyone that would participate in such things. If you had even a modicum of intelligence you would just look at my other post and easily infer as such.
I suggest you drink some water, check-in with a loved one and get some rest.
Be well.
Example 1: antibiotic and antiviral production technology for developing countries. Even if we limit ourselves to out-of-patent molecules, the primary literature describing the discovery, production, modification and testing of life-saving antibiotics was, at the time of Aaron Swartz, largely hidden behind strict paywalls that typically were accessed through a university library subscription. Access to all that information allows countries and institutions with very limited resources to set up generic medical production pipelines for life-saving medications they couldn’t afford to import - or to become international market competitors to established interests.
Again, that’s just restricting the argument to out-of-patent products that can be generically manufactured with no legal issues. What about life-saving but patented products that are too expensive for poor countries and regions to buy on the open market? Does that added-value IP charge justify unnecessary deaths in such cases?
And about that IP - the vast majority of paywalled research literature was produced with taxpayer funds delivered via government funding agencies, and there’s a very good legal argument that this alone puts it into the public domain. If private companies want to set up Bell Labs 2.0 with no government funding and patent everything they discover, that’s their own capex risk, but just hovering around and scooping up publicly funded discoveries via exclusive licensing deals with universities and researchers makes no sense - instead, patents should be available to any citizen of the government that put up the funds, and research papers should be available to anyone.
As far as the argument that widespread distribution of the knowledge to produce antibiotic, antiviral, and other complex biomolecular products represents a biological weapons risk? Notably that’s why no LLM provider service will help develop technical protocols for antibiotics production, or insulin, or anything similar - claimed dual-use risk fears. This conveniently slows the rise of legitimate independent competition in the pharmaceutical sector, which helps if the goal is maximizing profit margins via monopoly power. Bioweapons production realistically requires nation-state or large-corporation scale resources, and the solution is not obfuscation of basic knowledge but rather international treaties, select agent rules, laboratory operation and equipment purchase licensing requirements, etc.
That’s just one sector - there are at least a dozen other examples besides biomolecular drugs of ‘how it would help the world’ to make all published research literature available to anyone with a network connection, ask any LLM to enumerate them.
"Give them money in return for the candy such that they can sustain the work? No way, easier to enslave them and work them to death without compensation."
"What do you mean that there is no one interested in candy making????? Time to enslave some randos and force them to figure out how to make candy. And then repeat enslavement once they have been worked to death."
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.
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.
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.
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.