9000
These weren't really retellings of the original stories, but it would nevertheless not be hard to imagine they would count as a derivative work under modern law and would thus have been illegal to produce without a licensing deal.
According to Wikipedia [0], "The U.S. and Canadian governments commissioned the studio to produce training and propaganda films. By 1942, 90 percent of its 550 employees were working on war-related films." So, it seems they primarily survived by taking government contracts, not producing shorts. In fact, the next paragraph goes on to say, "With limited staff and little operating capital during and after the war, Disney's feature films during much of the 1940s were 'package films', or collections of shorts, [...] which performed poorly at the box office." So I wouldn't say their shorts were particular moneymakers during that time. After the war, they started releasing feature films again (Song of the South, etc).
Although it does seem that in the 20s and early 30s, prior to Snow White, animated shorts and comics (and potentially related merchandising?) were most of the company's revenue.
So, I think it's probably fair to say shorts financed the company through the release of Snow White, but not really any further.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Walt_Disney_Company#1934%E...
[0] https://matrix-org.github.io/synapse/latest/federate.html
[1] https://matrix-org.github.io/synapse/latest/delegate.html
I don't find this argument compelling. Are you saying that the only professions that are morally permissible are those that we would allow fifteen-year-olds to do? We don't allow them to bartend, drive trucks, nor be members of the US Senate, but I find it silly to think that fact makes those professions particularly immoral. 15 year olds aren't even allowed to work 40 hour weeks in most countries.
And, to answer your question, I think the answer is that the fifteen-year-old is not sexually nor emotionally mature enough to engage in prostitution. (Just like they are not mature enough to serve alcohol or drive, whereas they are likely emotionally mature enough to push carts.) They're below the legal age of consent by three years, for goodness' sake! Advocating for legalized and regulated prostitution is not equivalent to advocating for pedophilia, and I find the equivalence you've drawn troubling.
The Tacoma's weight has increased from the 3155 lbs. - 3877 lbs range when it was first released [0], to now being in the 4,425 lbs. – 4,480 lbs range [1]. In comparison, the 2020 Ford F-150 weighs in the range of 4,069 lbs – 4,653 lbs [2]. For fairness, a Ford F-150 from 1995, the first year that the Tacoma came out, weighed around 4,316 lbs [3]. So, they are in fact the same weight.
Similarly, the length of the Tacoma was 30-40 inches shorter when it was released [0][1]. Now, it is within the range of a modern F-150 [2].
In conclusion, the Tacoma has increased substantially in size since its introduction (the Wikipedia page mentions it was reclassified from a compact pickup to a midsize pickup), and is now on par with a Ford F-150 (both modern and the 1995 version) in terms of weight and length.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Tacoma#First_generation... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Tacoma#Third_generation... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_F-Series_(thirteenth_gene... [3] https://www.edmunds.com/ford/f-150/1995/features-specs/
Actually, I think the burden of proof is on the GP who made the original claim that there are plenty of small trucks for those who want them. Additionally, it's easier for them —or you— to provide a single example of a common small truck than for the parent to provide a comprehensive breakdown of the sizes of all trucks over decades of model years. Plus, they have already pointed out the Tacoma, at least, as having grown.
> Last I checked this (common) misconception is patently false.
This is merely an assertion with no more evidence than the parent. To flip your question: Can you provide examples of small truck models to back up your claim?
> In the analyses below, we include only states allowing the death penalty in the year of analysis. Because we focus on the geographical variability in the use of the death penalty, we exclude the US military (which has sentenced 15 individuals to death since reestablishment in 1984, but carried out no executions) and the federal government (which has issued 79 death sentences since reinstatement in 1988, and carried out three executions).
And with this in mind, they still found that death sentences didn't correlate well with the homicide rate:
> The table also lists the rate of death sentences per 100 homicides and the rate of homicides per 100,000 population. If there was a direct link among these variables, we would expect some consistency here. But we see very little. In fact, the correlations are surprisingly low; in fact, the rate of death sentences per 100 homicides and the rate of homicides per 100,000 population correlate at -0.12. The counties with the highest raw numbers of death sentences listed in the table include not a single county that ranks in the top 100 with regards to death sentences per 100 homicides.
First, even the death penalty rate isn't approximately equal across the sample, so it's not just population. And second, they are saying that the death penalty rate doesn't even correlate well with the crime rate. And yet there are still a few outlier counties that have an abnormally high death penalty rate! That is what is unintuitive. I mean, sure, it makes some sense that some counties are more likely to issue the death penalty than others, even where it's legal, but it's a huge skew, and it's very different from saying "Texas has a lot of people."
(1) Crime scales with population.
(2) Death sentences scale with crime.
(3) Therefore, death sentences should scale with population.
(4) The U.S.'s geographic distribution results in very dense clustering such that only a handful of counties have a lot of population.
(5) Therefore, we would expect to see only a handful of counties account for the majority of death sentences.
However, this line from the abstract seems to make (2) unlikely:
> The number of death sentences in a given county in a given year is better predicted by that county’s previous experience in imposing death than by the number of homicides.
Thus, their argument is that something much deeper is going on than just population-level trends.
> Information flow in Freenet is different from networks like eMule or BitTorrent; in Freenet:
> 1. A user wishing to share a file or update a freesite "inserts" the file "to the network" > 2. After "insertion" is finished, the publishing node is free to shut down, because the file is stored in the network. It will remain available for other users whether or not the original publishing node is online. No single node is responsible for the content; instead, it is replicated to many different nodes.
I don't believe it is.
For instance, imagine a closed system of three people: Alice, Bob, and Carol. Initially we start off with seeding both Alice and Bob $100 via Taler. We can see that because it is public. Then, we see that Carol receives $5. That is also public. Who gave Carol the $5?
If surveillance of money received is isometric to full surveillance, you should be able to answer this question, but clearly there is insufficient information, so clearly they are not isometric. There may be special cases where sufficiently large transactions can only have come from a small pool of wealthy transactors, but I bet this would be essentially meaningless in practice, and is absolutely not the same as equating the system to full surveillance of every participant.
The catch is that this isn't valid in what we consider standard mathematics, and you can find many discussions of this online, but this one is fairly short and straightforward: http://curiouscheetah.com/BlogMath/infinity-and-string-theor...
So, I'm not sure a "profit motive" is really the solution here. Yes, the bridge operator could make that contractual offer and add towing infrastructure out of the goodness of their heart, but there's no incentive to doing so. A decent local government does have that incentive (as they are responsible to the commuters as voters), so they offer that service. You could have regulation that forces the bridge operator to provide this service instead of the government, but is that really less government intervention?
Yeah, but copyright is not a form of traditional property right. Intellectual "property" rights are better thought of as intellectual monopolies granted for a limited time, and this is important because intellectual works have some very different properties that separate them from physical property.
For instance, in your examples, the lawn mower cannot easily "un-mow" the lawn nor the painters "un-paint" the house. Any attempt to do so would be labor intensive. However, in the OLGA copyright case, the publishers can trivially force the infringers to no longer publish the tabs, undoing any further damage. In the lawn mower and house painting case, the labor is fundamentally tied to the physical property being infringed. However, with intellectual property, this is explicitly not the case. The tabs do not alter the original song in any way, they are merely a derivative work.
To be explicit, while the transferal of rights over the tabs to the copyright holders may be granted by a judge as part of reparation of harm done, I see no reason that the music publishers should presume to own the rights outright without the intervention of a court.
For one final example as to why we should not conflate intellectual works and physical property, if I were to trespass onto your land and paint a beautiful painting of your landscape (with supplies I own) and then leave without causing damage, do you... own the painting? Just own the copyright? Own none of it? It is definitely not clear to me that you should automatically own my painting, even if I infringed your property rights by trespassing.
---
[0]: Merely the threat of violence from a large organization, but not one with a goal of maintaining private property rights, is insufficient to maintain capitalist supply chains, because such an organization would naturally try to increase its own power through force. It would look more like a warlord, cartel, or small-time dictatorship with all of the corruption that implies than a smoothly working system of trade.
I agree that a manager shouldn't micromanage to the point that they believe developers cannot be productive without their manager physically present, but that is not what they were talking about. The comment isn't about the developer needing their manager's insight or guidance, but about the developer needing the expertise of the rest of the team, which they will not have access to at nights or on the weekend.
If I go from spending $200/month on groceries and then I get an enormous 300% raise at work, I'm not going to start spending $800/month on groceries, maybe $300. The rest goes into the discretionary part of my budget. So, to someone making $40,000/year, paying 20% of that in rent, 10% for food, 20% for healthcare, and 15% for other stuff, adding a 15% tax is a decent chunk of the rest of their budget. But, for someone making $400,000/year, paying 15% for rent, 2% for food, 10% for healthcare, and 15% for everything else, then 15% of their income towards taxes is comparatively much less of their total budget!
This is true, even though everyone is paying a proportional amount of their income. Another way of thinking about this is as follows: if there is a homeless woman on the side of the street who makes $30 one day begging for change, should she be taxed at 15% and have to give the government $4.50 because it's "fair", or, should she be receiving more value in benefits than the average citizen because there is a floor on how much you can spend on food and survive?
Thus, even a flat tax can in practice be regressive, because essential spending does not scale with income.
An addendum: While it is not relevant to this argument, I also agree with the other commenters that whether a tax system is flat or has marginal brackets is not the main source of complexity, and is relatively super simple. The main complexity comes from determining which sources count as income. Presumably, birthday presents don't, but whoops, now there's an exception. And this is suddenly how tax laws get super complicated.
For your second question, you are right that you don't have 'complete freedom,' which another commenter pointed out cannot even theoretically exist. The closest you really get is public domain, in which you're not even restricted like the MIT; you don't even have to list the author! (IANAL, so this is not legal advice, but just my understanding.) However, the GPL is not interested in guaranteeing complete freedom, in the style of very permissive licenses. Instead, it's interested in maximizing end-user freedom. An MIT library can immediately be placed in a proprietary program, and now the end-user has none of the Four Freedoms, though the author of the program still has all of them. So, the GPL puts restrictions on developers and how they can use the software ('limiting freedom', if you want, though it's the freedom to limit others' Four Freedoms that is being limited), to guarantee that the Four Freedoms reach the end-user. This does lead to incompatibility as you've outlined, and so goreportcard would have to adopt the GPL to use the library and remain compliant (again, IANAL), but from the perspective of the GNU foundation, this maximizes the total number of freedoms retained because it continues to protect end-users. I hope this helps, I wanted to expand on what the goals of the GPL actually are, since you seemed to earnestly be asking.
I think you interpret that passage to mean: "All influences must be from science OR religion, but not both. It is from religion. Therefore, it is from science." However, I interpret it more along the lines of: "Science has not backed up this idea of free will. So, how did we get this idea in our culture, you might ask, if it's not real? Well, it is inherited from Christian myth." This second reading is not an argument (he's not proving why free will is not a scientific reality), but an explanation of why the idea of free will exists.
You may still not be convinced by his assertion, but I don't think it's a false dichotomy. Additionally, he may make such assertions in his work Homo Dues (which I have not read), but I don't think this is necessarily an example of fallacious reasoning.
Those laws should never have been used, and if the community wanted to dissuade future productions, they should have passed laws at the city, county, or state level that allows for the proper checks and balances.
Additionally, selective enforcement is primarily a tool of corruption. The law is supposed to apply to everyone. If it doesn't, then those who enforce it get to selectively choose to not enforce it against themselves and only enforce it against their enemies. And, as we've said, the government has very disproportionate power against its citizens, so to give prosecutors, police, or other enforcers of the law very broad, rarely used precedents is extremely dangerous.
I have no problem with interested organizations writing draft bills and publicizing those. What I do have a problem with is politicians taking those whole-cloth and implementing them in law without consulting other stakeholders, especially when money or influence changes hands.
Sure, oftentimes special interest groups will understand an issue in much more detail than a legislator (who almost by definition must be a jack-of-all-trades). But, it should also be clear that lobbying groups will very often use this knowledge for their personal gain, at the expense of other stakeholders. In my opinion, a good legislator would critically evaluate legislation, make changes, consult with other stakeholders, etc. Changes to the legislation imply an interest in the effects of the legislation (good or bad). But to instead allow legislation to be signed with your name with no, or few, changes to the text, shows that the legislator is willing to give the lobbyist everything they want, with no deliberation or push back.
That feels particularly suspect to me.
I understand that legislators are voted in as a popularity contest, and that new legislators especially may not be good at the craft of writing laws. However, I feel like if we can't even trust these elected officials to be able to recruit and manage capable individuals who can write good laws, how can we expect our elected officials to recruit and manage capable individuals who can critically evaluate proposed model legislation?
If we can, I don't see how the skill set of the legislator is substantially different in these two cases. If we can't, then we are essentially admitting that interest groups should be able to convince legislators to pass laws on merits other than the bill's quality. In that case, I don't know what role the legislators are even performing in this system.
In my view, the point of democracy and its ideals of equality (e.g. one person, one vote) are to protect less powerful classes from more powerful ones. If our solution to the problem of model legislation is to throw our own money in the other direction, we will just end up with rich groups fighting battles with each other with little oversight from the rest of the population.