This is the 'right' answer. That's not to say we aren't open to making some tweaks here, but any changes have to keep the total 'problem space' into account otherwise may end up just 'moving' the area that exhibits anomalous timings.
The problem here really isn't completely specific to metal detector usage but is instead is more generally applicable to "speed scaling" -- in this case, the scaling of movement speed. It's not a new problem, and is one that many simulation games have; there's no end-all solution to it, and overall our goal is to prioritize fun/gameplay versus realism when push comes to shove on this kind of thing.
If everything was scaled perfectly, including movement, then you would indeed not even see people move because their movement would be so fast. Ie, the number of tiles any given agent walks in 1 hour is generally "too slow" to be realistic -- it's basically organically been found to be a good balance between [relative] realism, performance, and engagement/fun-factor.
It'd be boring if the game was simply a 'spreadsheet' that gave you results after (ie, movement so fast you don't really see it). Compare that to it being nearer to "real scale" time, for instance if 1 hour in-game time took 15 minutes real-time (at highest speed); that'd mean each game day would take 6 hours of real life time, and while we could certainly do that and have the time scales be 'perfect', it would probably feel like unreasonably slow gameplay to the vast majority of players.
Basically what we've got right now is based a goal of high "relative realism" (ie when compared to 'IRL-to-gametime' ratios of other stuff in-game), but at the end of the day gameplay/pacing/fun-factor is definitely more important to us than anything else.
That said, always open to thoughts, or to making tweaks to individual timings when it makes sense to do so; having a solid grasp of the entire reasoning/problem space generally allows for feedback to be more directly useful. :)
"speed scaling"
That's the term! I couldn't think of a good way to put it.
I get it's all a delicate balance. My point is those looking for the "Arma" of Airport Sims are likely going to be disappointed.
Its more than just speed. Its all scaling. The length scales are also all wrong. An airport runway is upwards of 2 miles in length, but the longest airport terminals in the world are only a mile. So that is a major scale discrepancy in this game right off the bat.
How you resolve your scaling issues in space will contribute to other scaling issues in time, or population, or...
It'd be boring if the game was simply a 'spreadsheet' that gave you results after (ie, movement so fast you don't really see it).
That is something I disagree with. You could have a spreadsheet game that samples from the results of the spreadsheet to display a fun visual representation of the data. Agent based simulations are nice in that you can watch the agent, and the agent seems to have complex and interesting behavior, but I seldom actually bother to follow the agents around, and they tend to cause lots of these simulation fidelity issues.
It would suffice to show the agents as a visual representation of the underlying data from a spreadsheet. So the spreadsheet says that X people need to enter that gate in the next T minutes, and that the processing rate of security is R. Therefore the queue length is X/RT and just draw some fixed fraction of that as a representation.
If I see one person milling around security for an 20 minutes, that really means that the queue length was 10 people for a period of 20 minutes, not that one person took 20 minutes. If I see three people in the bar for 2 hours that really means the bar had an average of 30 people were in the bar during those two hours, not that these three people were getting plastered on their long ass-layover.
Sure there would be instances where you wouldn't be able to get the graphical representation to tie back with the accounting, and some agents would vanish into thin air to keep the accounting right, but I'm fine with that.
I would take a better and more realistic simulation over persistent agents any day. I realize that is definitely not something you can do in this came, but maybe for SimAirport2 you might consider rewinding the clock and going back towards the original SimCity and away from Caesar III.
I think what he’s getting at is that she would be a whistleblower if she reported that activity (the illegal or unethical withholding of documents) to Congress but not if she leaked the documents themselves (which were confidential records of citizens) to the press.
I do hope that there’s a broader probe of FinCEN’s conduct here, since it sounds like there may have been other problematic activity going on.
I think what he said was rather unambiguously NOT what you are describing. His complaint is that she was whistleblowing on other members of the executive, not on FinCEN itself. So not whisteblowing as to her direct employer, but on a third party in the administration.
I looked very briefly into the US code and it doesn't say anything about "talking to Congress" it just says "discloses." I'm not sure that reporting information to Congress would necessarily count as a disclosure, given that the body is for many intents and purposes "the government."
There would also be some very interesting 1st amendment defenses if anyone were ever charged with disclosing information to Congress. I have this grievance against the government, and I petition my congressman to redress it... but I have to tell him about the grievance in that petition, so I must disclose this information.
Regardless of how this shakes out, it seems that whistleblower statutes in general are pretty crappy. They generally seem to require that the whistleblower go through a lot of steps first, and have a lot of caveats and "gotchas." They aren't really designed to protect these people.
I think what he said was rather unambiguously NOT what you are describing. His complaint is that she was whistleblowing on other members of the executive, not on FinCEN itself. So not whisteblowing as to her direct employer, but on a third party in the administration.
To clarify, my reading of the article was that the defendant was leaking information about Paul Manafort and Rick Gates, who are not and have never been administration officials / government employees. They are Trump campaign members and personal associates only, not federal officials. Based on that, I interpreted his comment as saying that it doesn’t count as whistleblowing to report their confidential information to the media (but it would be whistleblowing if she had reported on FinCEN’s failure to disclose requested information). The SARS (suspicious activity reports) were confidential information about Manafort et al and weren’t supposed to be made public like this.
There would also be some very interesting 1st amendment defenses if anyone were ever charged with disclosing information to Congress.
My bad, I didn’t mean to suggest that disclosing information to Congress was illegal or improper (reading my comment again I can see why it was poorly worded). I was just citing Congress as one of bodies that a whistleblower can reach out to — the whistleblower laws mention Congress as well as the Special Counsel and the agency OIGs as examples of people who can receive disclosures.
No arguments on the quality of the whistleblowers laws though. The weak protections for whistleblowers under federal law is one of Chuck Grassley’s major hobbyhorses. There have been some advancements in recent years but I think that there should definitely be more attention on this issue from Congress as a whole.
Based on that, I interpreted his comment as saying that it doesn’t count as whistleblowing to report their confidential information to the media (but it would be whistleblowing if she had reported on FinCEN’s failure to disclose requested information).
Okay that makes some more sense, but is yet again another way these whistleblower laws are screwed up. How is one expected to report that FinCEN is hiding information without revealing something about the information that is being hidden? Its not going to be very effective to say: "There are terrible things going on that they won't tell you about, and neither will I!!"
Load more comments
I don't believe that routine sales of goods and services are subject to contract law in this way.
I don't think a cakeshop is necessarily routine because there's no menu. There's no historical consensus about cakeshops like you'd have with a vending machine. He's not pointing to premade cakes and saying 'half of this, half of that.' There's no advertisement in his hand. His friend doesn't have a cake that he wants as well. Ostensibly, he wants a unique cake that doesn't exist anywhere else and can't exist anywhere unless he gives voice to it and if his expectation is "literally not a cake," then there's no meeting of the minds.
Even if there was somehow the exact cake on the wall in the cakeshop and he pointed to it, if the hypothetical is "he had no expectation to get that cake" then there wouldn't be a contract. You'd get bonus points on the exam to get into unvoiced subjective intentions v. objective manifestations of intent since as a practical matter a real-life judge would probably find a contract existed but this would be in spite of the fact that a contract wasn't in fact created. If a judge could peer into someone's noggin and detect a meeting of the minds one way or another he'd conclude there wasn't a contract.
Again, I'm not saying that that what has happened here and I agree with you that we'll get into showing the contract (if there is one) or pointing to some indicia of mutual intelligible understanding between the parties. But, also again, if we're assuming that there simply wasn't any expectation of a cake actually being delivered then we don't even get that far. There'd simply be no contract. You'd have an unenforceable promise by the cakeshop to deliver a cake by specific performance and you'd have a gift from the consumer.
The political angle makes this a much more sexier question than it actually is, and I don't want to be seen as taking a stand either way. It's just that if someone walks in and "knows" that the consideration/money they're handing over will not be met by consideration/cake flowing back to them then we know that situation by a different name all the time: charity. Likewise if I put a dollar in a vending machine knowing I won't get a can of coke back ('this vending machine is broken by bigotry,' the sign tells me) then there isn't a contract to sue on.
I don't see why you are obsessing about the contract. I don't even see why that is relevant to the question of discrimination law.
For all service jobs (renting a room at a hotel, getting a meal at a restaurant, ordering a custom cake), the business will have an established practice by which it operates. Some of these might be backed by more formal contract law, others are not. When you sit down at the dinner and you are handed a menu. There is an established custom by which you order the food, and then after it gets delivered to you, you pay the amount listed on the menu.
For the Woolworth's sit-ins those men were not given the opportunity to make their order. They did not expect to be given the opportunity to make an order. So all your harping about the missing contract would apply equally to that situation, and laws like the CRA were explicitly written BECAUSE of those sit-ins.
Its absurd to say that somehow these anti-discrimination laws don't work because of some deficiency of a contract in the prototypical case they were designed to handle.
I don't see why you are obsessing about the contract. I don't even see why that is relevant to the question of discrimination law.
Because you can't (successfully) sue a charity you give to for services you didn't expect to receive.
In Woolworth's they didn't sue for an order they never made. In your world, they somehow would've.
The customer isn't suing anyone. The customer made a complaint that they were denied service. They wanted to make an order and weren't allowed to complete the transaction.
Load more comments
Many people prefer compiled languages for large projects because it means you can catch a lot of errors before they're shipped,
Having worked on large projects in both Python and C++, I'm having a tough time seeing this one.
It seems to me that strongly-typed languages only catch one additional type of error - the case when you pass the wrong type of item to a function (or to an operator like + or - or similar ).
However, in my experience at least, this is just never a major issue! Oh, I make this mistake all the time - certainly in development you sometimes e.g. swap two parameters to get the wrong types - but the issue immediately pops up the first time you run the code, and if you have even moderate test coverage, it's something that you catch in an instant.
If the only reason for working in a type-safe language is to catch this one single class of problem, then it absolutely isn't worth it, for something that shouldn't even be occupying 2% of your time in a codebase with any sort of decent testing at all.
There are a lot of good reasons to prefer typed languages, particularly in terms of the ability to optimize the output code for maximum performance. I'm not at all arguing against typed languages in general, just saying that this one argument for them doesn't seem to hold water.
and if you have even moderate test coverage
Well okay, but what if you live in the real world. :)
Yes everyone should have better test coverage, but often they don't. That is just the reality, and many people have to deal with larger projects that just don't have the test coverage.
Brings a new meaning to OPM: One Province Major.
Actually sounds like a somewhat enjoyable joke game to play. You can only ever hold one province, but you can develop it out to Empire size (333/333/334). Everything else must be held by vassals.
to be fair, a federal judge did uphold buzzfeed's invocation of reporter's privilege later that year, ruling that they didn't have to reveal their sources
Solely on the basis of a state law to that effect. I'll admit I did not consider the possibility of a relevant state law when making that comment over a year ago. But I stand by my assertion that there is no such privilege in federal law.
But I stand by my assertion that there is no such privilege in federal law.
Probably not one in admiralty law either. So goodluck with that!!
Is the content of the dossier factually inaccurate?
I think "factually inaccurate" is a reasonably fair description. Most of the people discussed therein deny its most significant allegations, and no one has been able to come up with evidence that supports them. Indeed, this is why BuzzFeed was the first media outlet to publish it. Both the NYT and (IIRC) WaPo had looked into it but declined to publish because they couldn't verify any of it.
We are talking about the Steele dossier aren't we?
Most of the people discussed therein deny its most significant allegations,
Well obviously, because it accuses many of these individuals of outright criminal conduct, if not extremely distasteful acts. Of course they are going to deny it.
and no one has been able to come up with evidence that supports them.
That might have been true at the time, but today we have a large number of guilty pleas and indictments that support many of the core allegations. I can't imagine a civil jury today determining that the dossier is in fact "inaccurate" given the other evidence that has been brought forward.
Load more comments
Another reason you would want to include accidental deaths is because some regimes might lie about the cause of death. Like all those Russian reporters who shoot themselves in the back of the head before jumping out of a window.
That said I would think you would want to list all suspicious deaths of reporters no matter what the circumstances. I find it hard to believe there aren't more of them worldwide than the ones they include. Why limit yourself to deaths while "on duty"? What does that even mean for a reporter?
There have to be a few reporters murdered by jealous lovers every year, or killed in car accidents, or something. I would think those should be counted.
As for adjusting for population, that too is a bit tricky. Some places might be so hostile towards the press that there are very few reporters in general. If the entire press of a country is one person, and you kill them... should that be reported as one death or 100%?
Here is the issue with that... he never once said I think it should be this way or anything to tell the viewer / reader that these were opinions on the law, not the actual rule of law itself... In fact the article goes out of the way to make it sound like it is settled law and the fact is X, Y, and Z and here is a Professor of Law to tell you this.
Could he have been taken out of context and in all reality it was just fox news being fox news? Sure... But if he cared about his reputation at all he would have come out since it was aired / posted and clarified what happened, which he has not done. This can lead to only one of two logical conclusion, he lied and does not care that he did OR that he has no grasp of the law...
In what way is any of that contrary to what I said?
I don't think he was even saying that.
Isn't he saying that lies that come about solely as responses to questions which the government agent already knows the answer to should be considered immaterial and therefor not a crime?
"trying to deceive the FBI is not a crime", which is untrue Is there a law saying you cannot attempt to deceive the FBI? I thought the law was only regarding lying to the FBI. Being deceitful is not entirely the same as lying.
My understanding is that it is illegal to lie to the FBI. And that there is somewhere a definition of what makes a lie illegal to avoid making simple mistakes illegal. For instance that the lie must be material to the investigation. Dershowitz' seems to believe that a lie cannot be material if the government already knew the answer to the question. That there was no use to the question in the first place except to get an extraneous charge against the suspect.
I very well may be wrong on all counts here. I'm just fishing for knowledge and hope that someone can point me straight.
I think both /u/KNXLV and /u/bocz are correct here. Dershowitz is saying that he thinks the lies are:
- not a crime because they are not material
- and they are not material because they cannot impact the investigation
- and they cannot impact the investigation because the FBI already knows the answer when they ask the question
To /u/KNXLV's point, you could in theory read the law that way. In particular point #2 that "materiality" means "the ability to influence the course of the investigation," but following that to its logical conclusion yields the nonsensical interpretation that 1001 only prohibits a successful lie. At the time of making the lie, the liar has no way to know if the FBI knows the truth about his lie... he has the mens rea to be deceptive, even if he isn't successful in that deception.
The natural reading of "materiality" is going to ask about it being "material" to the underlying facts of the crime. So if the FBI agent says: "How are you doing today Mr. Kiklion" and you respond by saying "Fine, how are you?" that is not a Section 1001 violation because it isn't material (even though we all know its a bald-faced lie... there is no way you are "fine" on the day the FBI comes a knocking).
The more interesting question might come about with the man who lies about where he was one night, because he doesn't want to admit that he is having an affair. That affair might be completely unrelated to the crime, and thus probably shouldn't be material... but what do we think about the lie? His lying about the affair could in fact impede the investigation, merely by causing the FBI to run down the wrong rabbit hole, but its not a lie in service of any criminal activity. However, those hypotheticals are not at issue in these Trump related matters.
To /u/bocz's and PopeHats's point, Dershowitz's argument isn't even supported by the numerous decisions that have reviewed this.
So Dershowitz is both making a shitty nonsensical argument as to how he thinks "materiality" should be interpreted, and conflating it with an argument completely at odds with existing jurisprudence.
Oddly enough. . . this one might have legs. A deceased person's descendants generally have protectable interests in the integrity of the person's grave and bodily remains.
Most of the time any violations of such never give rise to civil cases because there aren't provable economic damages large enough for anyone to bother with. Like, I'm sorry, but nobody is going to believe that Grandma's headstone and coffin are worth more than a few grand, and no, no body is going to believe that you were so traumatized by any desecration thereto as to justify an award of more than a nominal amount of money for emotional damages. Contemporary American culture just doesn't assign the same kind of deep personal connection to one's ancestors as are reported in pre-modern cultures.
Of course, most of the time the grave in question isn't one of a Confederate general topped with an equestrian statute potentially valued in the mid-eight-figure range. Even better, most of the time the desecration in question is not carried out by developers working with a sizable municipality which appears to have to have engaged in a rather suspicious-looking real estate transaction.
Who built and installed the statue, and on behalf of whom? If the family didn't build the statue, and if it wasn't given as a gift, then shouldn't it still be the property of whoever built it?
In the case of Grandma's grave, her estate (and heirs) paid for that grave and casket, so certainly and willful destruction of it should be a tort. However I doubt the Forrest family paid for this statue, any more than Isaac Newton paid for Westminster Abbey. I would think the owner of the statue should have the right to determine what they do with it.
If they want to remove it that should be fine. You might draw the line at them replacing it with something particularly offensive towards Forrest or his family, but merely removing something that commemorates an individual is not "desecration." It treating something with "disrespect" but rather it is removing a sign of respect.
Sounds like the "smart meters" need to be smarter. A switch can be devised and built inside the power meter that disconnects the back-feed if a large drop in amperage on the mains line is detected. The switch can re-connect when the amperage returns to baseline levels. Smarter technology is better than stopgap laws in scenarios like this, if you ask me.
You have worry about the risk of failure. With hundreds of thousands of these units deployed for years there WILL BE failures of these units. Who is responsible for testing, certifying and replacing them? Probably the electric utility, and they will need to charge some fee to recoup their cost in doing so.
Then you would see the same set of people complaining the the utility is making them pay for this fancy $500 "smart meter" and pay a $50 annual certification feed, just because they are using a solar power array.
If the power company paid for all the lines and cables to my house, with my consent, then yeah I should have to pay a fee. However, they didn't pay for many of the power lines in my city, and I didnt ask for them to hook up my house. Plus they have my whole neighborhood to charge, they were going to build power to this area regardless if I told them I didnt want it or not. I shouldnt be charged by the power company for paying maybe $25-$50 to run a few 10' lines from my neighbor to me.
However, they didn't pay for many of the power lines in my city, and I didnt ask for them to hook up my house.
Then who did pay for them? How did they get there? I bet the answer is that some predecessor company to the electric company put up the polls and lines and that the electric utility is now responsible for maintaining them. I would also bet that you have a line to your home because the previous owner of the home wanted a power line to his home.
I don't think many municipalities are out there building and maintaining power infrastructure and forcing residents to hook up. If you were to tear down your home and build an entirely new construction replacement, I don't think anyone is going to force you to connect to power lines, and not being a customer you shouldn't have to pay anything to the power company.
Load more comments
In fairness, you're talking about no more than a 2-4 year growth window, so the tax advantages of such a plan would be quite limited.
That's not true. You can set up a 529 in your name years before having a child and then change the beneficiary.
This could even be a plan created by grandparents for their child's college that had money left over after college, which they are now giving to the grandchild.
No, that was an illustration. The point being that if a law is only constitutional becauwe if one provision, and that provision no longer exists, it's the original law (not as you claim the repeal of the lynchpin) that become a unconstitutional. Any assertion to the contrary necessarily relies on throwing out the Constitution.
As was this.
You seemed very clear that you didn't want to have a discussion about hypotheticals. Not sure why you want to have one now.
Load more comments
This is my understanding of why the chain of events surrounding the aca might actually lead to a serious challenge in the Supreme Court.
Bill passed with mandate to buy insurance, together with a penalty for not doing so.
People say forcing people to buy stuff under penalty of a fine is unconstitutional. Go to court.
During case, absolutely everyone agrees that the bill cannot stand without mandate. Democrats say "so leave it alone", Republicans say "so kill it". Both say cutting out the mandate is not possible.
Supreme Court says "OK, fine. People in step 2 are right, a law requiring people to buy this insurance is unconstitutional. And we can't cut just that. So we're gonna rename it a tax - you're not requiring people to buy it, you're just taxing them if they don't."
Lots of people cheer and say, yeah, that's right, we meant to call it a tax all along, thank you Supreme Court. Lots of other people boo and say that's no good either.
Republicans get in power and get rid of the penalty turned tax, because that sort of thing is against their principles/they love to eat babies, depending on whether you're honestly approaching your opponents views or are a redditor.
But the mandate is still there. It's crucial to the bill, remember? But there's no penalty/fine/anything to allow people to call it a tax anymore. It's just a law requiring people to buy something.
The Supreme Court already said you can't do that. That's why they renamed the penalty a tax. But you can't call it a tax anymore, because there's no money associated with it any more.
People sue. Again.
This judge looks at this stuff and says "well, the Supreme Court already said the bill can't stand without the mandate in some form, and they also said the mandate can't be a literal mandate, but has to be a tax instead. But it's definitely not a tax any more, and it's back to being a mandate, if a toothless one.
So this judge says "According to what the Supreme Court said last time, the bill can't stand without the
mandatetax, and the newly modified law made it impossible to call it a tax instead of mandate, so it's unconstitutional, so the whole bill falls."
Is that it?
If so, we'll see if another "well actually, it's a ______" argument turns up. Alternatively, congress could actually fix it, but I can't imagine that being quick.
EDIT/ADDENDUM Possible suggested scotus solutions that don't kill the bill (from comment replies):
"It's a $0 tax." Might not fly, tax thing was a 4-5 last time and the make up has changed. Lots of people, including scotus judges, thought that such games were not good.
"The mandate wasn't thought to be severable then, but actions by congress since then have shown that it is." This seems more likely to work.
Other:
"Why aren't the same arguments made about car insurance?"
Current car insurance laws and the mandate are considered different enough that they aren't required to be treated the same way (even if many think it would be wise to do so), for reasons including the following:
Car insurance laws are state laws, not federal, so have different legal limitations.
Car insurance is conditionally mandated. You only need it if you want to drive a car on public roads (I believe). You don't have to do that.
Car insurance protects others from you. You don't have to buy insurance protecting your car from anything in particular.
"You were a bit snarky in number 6."
Guilty. Just having a bit a of fun, though - I freely admit that there is at least one redditor who doesn't think all Republicans love to eat babies. Possibly even dozens.
The biggest issue with your explanation is just how crucial the mandate is to the law.
Certainly the 2010 Congress felt that it was crucial, and that the entire ACA would hinge on it. In fact many lawmakers stated and argued as much at the time. They would probably still say the same today.
But the 2017 congress doesn't have to agree with the prior congress. By their actions the 2017 congress strongly indicates that the individual mandate is not crucial to the ACA, because they gutted it and left the rest of the bill intact.
Now you and I may feel that the amended law is bad policy, and that they shouldn't have done this, but it doesn't mean the court has the right to change what they intended. The 2017 congress was unambiguous. They want both the ACA AND no effective individual mandate.
Even most conservative legal scholars think this was a horrible ruling that is DOA.
Starting with what you just mentioned. Moving on to intent of Congress (all those votes on the ACA? Proof Congress intends to keep it. Because all those votes failed).
Then onto basic judicial review (if you make a change to an existing law, which makes the existing law unconstitutional, you strike the change and revert to the status quo) and minimalist interference (striking a single provision in a large tax bill that applies to a large, established non tax law is less intrusive than striking a broad, established law).
And lastly moving onto a zero dollar tax is still a tax.
I suspect it'll never reach SCOTUS, and if it did it wouldn't find many friends. SCOTUS doesn't want to spend its time dealing with tiny poison poll amendments designed to make SCOTUS effextively repeal lawa Congress doesn't have the votes (or balls) to do on its own.
That's crazy talk. You sound reasonable. Clearly since this one part of the law might be unconstitutional under some unreasonable assumptions, the entire US code has to be thrown out. We live under a state of anarchy all because of Obama.
Thanks Obama!!
Preventing people from being unable to access healthcare because they have a medical condition is stupid?
It's bad economics. Now people can wait until they get sick, and then get their health insurance which will make the costs spiral out of control.
For those of us who want universal healthcare and single payer it is the correct policy (no restrictions on prior conditions), but with the wrong system of payment (no individual mandate or single payer to ensure that costs are shared with the healthy).
Read up on "severability".
In general, what happens when a single provision in a larger statute is struck down as unconstitutional?
Well, if it's a minor piece of the statute, and the rest of the statute would continue just fine without it, then the court will "sever" that section and leave the rest intact.
But if the offending language is so central to the statute that the rest no longer makes sense, then the court strikes down the whole thing.
Note that it doesn't matter exactly why the section at issue is unconstitutional. Severability analysis begins after that determination is made.
Severability should be applied to the act that introduced the concern though.
In this case the question should be the severability of the amendment to the ACA from the rest of the tax plan.
I'm willing to buy that the contract is voidable. But so what? What is the harm alleged?
It turns it into a copyright problem.
If the contract is invalid, Sacha Baron Cohen and his crew don't have a legal right to use Moore's image or film or words or whatever in an entertainment film. This is a different area of law than what happens if you film somebody in a public street for example where they have no expectation privacy, or any government office or something like that where you can film news without their permission.
That's one of the key demands I made in my fight against Comedy Central and Viacom: with the contract invalid, I made a strong claim that using my image and likeness and such would be a copyright problem against me.
This came up in a third case I'm aware of along these lines involving a really crazy movie called "The Innocence of Muslims". The people making it knew that it would be highly controversial and actually hired some of the actors and actresses to do parts of it without telling them what the hell they were involved with, which was apparently a blasphemous ugly mess. So one of the actresses sued saying that her contract was invalid because they had withheld all details of what the film was really all about and gave her bullshit instead. My recollection is, she won in at least one level of court in the ninth circuit.
If Moore wins in similar fashion he could actually grab all the profits made by the film if the ruling goes down the same way, and he's also claiming slander/libel of some sort. I don't know how far he'll go with the slander case but I think he's actually got a stronger case in copyright law.
Someone like Sacha Baron Cohen toes the line between "news" and "entertainment." I think he can make a decent argument on first amendment grounds.
If you think not, then I'm going to argue to Fox "News" ever including the image of any Democratic politician without their prior permission, because that network seems to be no more "news" than SBC is.
Ultimately we should allow both SBC and Fox "News" to use the images and words of these public figures so long as it is truthful. I don't doubt that Moore did in fact say the things he said on that show.
Someone like Sacha Baron Cohen toes the line between "news" and "entertainment." I think he can make a decent argument on first amendment grounds.
The First Amendment does not allow you to trick somebody into participating in your political speech against their will and against their best interest. Moore has a right to remain silent, remember? SBC can call Moore a pedophile all he wants. He cannot however trick Moore into helping that conversation along via a fraudulent contract.
Hell no.
I'm not going to argue with you about Fox news however because you definitely have a point.
Moore is free to be silent. If he wanted to be silent, he should have been. He could have walked out of the interview if he didn't like where it was going.
Load more comments
The average household income is $60,000. Speaking as someone who makes right at that amount myself, with my wife recently out of work supporting an entire household with bills and then having some leftover to save is very challenging.
But as a household income that is probably 2 wage earners (one might be part time).
If you have two wage earners you might do better to have two 401ks and double your 401k limit. Now "maxing out" means 37k not 18.5 +5.5k.
So for a single wage earner to do this, they must by themselves be making that 70k, which definitely puts them in the upper income group.
A lot of households have just one wage earner. Think about all the single people in their 20s and 30s, divorced adults, single parents, couples with a stay at home parent, and widows/ widowers.
If you were to look at the median household income for couples where both people work full-time, the number would undoubtedly be much higher than $60k. The median income of individuals who work full time is about $46.5k per year.
Certainly, but then it would seem even less likely that this individual would have enough money sitting around after expenses to be able to max out the 401k.
The original question is: "Can you without making 6 figures actually max out your 401k?", and the answer for most people under what I consider the most reasonable interpretation is "probably not."
For married couples with two working adults not only are their expenses higher, but the expectations regarding their savings are greater.
- If both are eligible for 401k then maxing out means 37k... extremely hard to save 37k when making less than 100k.
- If only one is eligible, then you could argue it is only 18.5k + 2*5.5k meaning one 401k and two IRAs
- It would be cheating entirely to say "sure, just get a job that doesn't provide a 401k, then you will have maxed out!"
For a single individual it is more reasonable. There is a range where this isn't crazy, but as the person I responded to suggested the lower ends of that range (70k annual income) also involve living in low cost of living areas.
If you make 70k, but live in "McAllen, Texas", then yes you are technically not making 6 figures, but you absolutely are one of the upper class in that city. Realistically there are not going to be many jobs that pay that much in a city like that. Almost anyone who could make that much in McAllen could easily make 100k in a place like NYC. So to me that is still "cheating."
If you read my other comments you will see I am not asking "in general." I'm specifically asking about THIS article.
So they used the forfeiture laws to seize homes for which there wasn't any meaningful demand
Other than from, you know, the people who happened to be living in them. The city wound up turning out a bunch of innocent homeowners without realizing any benefits to the neighborhoods in general or properties in particular, all for a boost to DA and PPD budgets.
And I say "innocent homeowners" advisedly. In many instances, seized properties didn't belong to defendants themselves. They belonged to family members, landlords, etc. But because the property played host to criminal activities, it was eligible for seizure under civil forfeiture mechanisms. That, in and of itself, is something I'm willing to call "abuse".
That stuff isn't the forus of this article. There have been some other articles about this stuff in Philly, but aside from a few comments in the 6th paragraph, I don't think it comes up in this article.
I'm absolutely in agreement with you that forfeiture has been misused in the past and hasn't had adequate procedural safeguards, but that doesn't seem to be the focus here. This article focuses more on who the homes were sold to and what happened to them than it does on who the homes were taken from.
So it seems like your comment would be suggesting that (based on this article) the sales themselves were corrupt (as opposed to the seizures).
Load more comments
It’s a Christmas card from your paper carrier who conveniently gave you their home address. Long standing practice of looking for a Christmas tip.
Dammit... Am I now expected to tip this woman for repeatedly and consistently delivering my neighbors paper to my doorstep. Why do I have to tip her? I don't even subscribe to the damn paper! I think my neighbor should be responsible for this Christmas tip.
Bruh, it's like 3x the distance from the sun that pluto is. There is nothing between pluto and the oort cloud massive enough to have V2 in it's sphere of influence.
For fucks sake, the Oort cloud is within the suns SOI, and V2 won't get there for thousands of years.
What about Jupiter? nevermind that I realized I made a silly arithmetic mistake in that. Definitely not jupiter at this distance, but if you had a pluto sized object and passed within 100 thousand kilometers, that would be close enough (talk about astronomical odds!) but...
My point is not even that at this particular time such and such and objects gravity dominates that of the sun on voyager (I don't know and I don't actually care), but that which object dominates is subject to change and has changed many times over the voyager mission.
So if it leaves the solar system whenever the sun isn't dominant, then it has left and returned and left and returned multiple times. Clearly the definition needs to be more complicated to account for all the flybys it has done.
I mean sure, when it flies into the SOI of another celestial body, it's out of the suns SOI for a minute, but where it is now, there's no mass large enough to meaningfully affect its trajectory. I don't know, maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're trying to say
I don't know what you think I'm tying to say, because you just summarized what I'm saying.
Objects leave the SOI of the sun all the time, without "leaving" the solar system under any reasonable definition of the solar system.
So clearly leaving the SOI of the sun is not the proper way to define leaving the solar system.
Load more comments
People dont need cars, cars make life more convenient. Something that takes 90 minutes by bus could be done in 40 minute with a car. Doesn't make it impossible to use a bus.
In every large city, people who don't have cars do all their errands just fine.
Driving should be more regulated and if that makes roads more empty that's better for those who are still allowed to drive.
A lot of people don't live in cities. They live in suburbs, where there is no bus service, miles from their offices, doctors and shopping centers. We can't just ignore trillions of dollars worth of housing stock that has been built out in the burbs.
You and I may choose to live in the city where we can commute by foot or by bike, but a lot of people didn't and our public policy has actively supported that decision in many ways. I strongly support changing that public policy, but it is going to be a very long and slow process. We can't just pull the rug out from under all these people.
Then let's do something similar. Distracted driving on a device should be zero tolerance and immediate 90 day suspension.
You're vehicle is impounded until the suspension is over.
Make the punishment severe enough and people wont do it nearly as much.
There are two difficulties with zero tolerance for distracted driving:
People need cars. Because of design decisions in our cities many people MUST have a vehicle. There is just no alternative for the vast majority of people. How else can they get to work/school? How else can they buy groceries/get to the doctor/etc...?
How incredibly commonplace distracted driving is. Everyone does it. It is pervasive across the country especially now that we have the cellphone.
So if you really cracked down and had stiff sentences on distracted driving, then sure the roads would be safer, but that is because they would be empty.
I think the real solution is going to have to come from a combination of autonomous vehicles and changes in the design and layout of our cities.
I've had sex with half a dozen women.
That's nothing. I've had sex with a fraction of a million. So there.
How many 4th & Goal plays from the 15 have there been? Someone go on PFR and check.
Wht not look at 4th down conversions with over 15 yards to go?
The only difference there is that we remove the deep ball (over 25 yards) when it is only 4th and goal.
Trump can try and make the argument that Edwards did. That he directed Cohen to make these payments to avoid exposing his affair to his wife and children, but the State has a lot of advantages here:
Edwards was not acquitted, rather the jury deadlocked and could not reach a unanimous verdict. The only acquittal was on a particular payment made after his campaign had effectively ended.
They have Cohen, who has already plead guilty and admitted that these payments WERE INTENDED to influence the election. When your co-conspirator admits that there was intent its a lot harder for you to argue that there wasn't intent.
You have long and sordid history of affairs by Trump, already being reported in the media, why does he suddenly start to care that Melania doesn't find out? Why does he now care not to embarrass her, but not the on the previous occasions?
You also have the behavior of Trump after the affair became public. Is it consistent with that of a man concern about embarrassing his wife and family? Does he avoid publicly talking about it? Does he try to shield the family? Does he admit his errors and apologize? Does he resign from a position to step out of the public spotlight? The answer to all of these is no. In fact he does the exact opposite.
So sure you can make the argument, but given that at least some members of the Edwards jury were willing to convict, I think it stands to reason that there is a greater chance of a conviction in the Trump case.