Yeah, but at least they pad the story out with *more story*. They invent another pointless plot and stick it in there, and at the end we're back where we started, but at least it's a *plot*.
They don't randomly add ten minutes of someone's car struck in a ditch to the start of an episode, and him talking on his cell phone with some cryptic comments to people we don't know, and then, lo and behold, he drives to a hotel, checks, and meets those people tomorrow and the plot starts. No one would think that's a good idea.
Well, possibly the director of Manos: The Hands of Fate would.
Yeah, I understand the behavior of the House of Cards people. They've really got the best of all possible worlds there.
Although I wonder what their 'syndication' deal is. This is a show that's never going to be 'off the air', so I'm assuming there's some sort of new paradigm in the contracts. Does Netflix have to keep it forever? If they stop, can episodes be sold in syndication? And I see the DVD for the first season is out already. I was actually wondering if Netflix was going to allow DVDs at all.(1)
The HoC people is entirely rational. It's *Netflix's* behavior that seems somewhat amazing.
But maybe I'm just not used to American businesses, especially in entertainment, actually taking risks and trying new things. Maybe it helps that Netflix is a fairly new company, and Netflix has actual *data* on what sort of things people watch instead of the old TV channel standby of 'making up complete gibberish and reciting it as fact for decades without any evidence'.
1) That would have been a very weird sentence a decade ago.
That's pointless. I'm going to petition against allowing your petition.
But seriously, even the Death Star petition was something the government could hypothetically do, or at least start research into doing.
But how the heck does anyone expect the government, *which was snowed in and thus not in session*, to act fast enough to move 'House of Cards' forward one day? How exactly would that even *conceptually* work?
I mean, people can feel free to petition for that, but it's not a sane thing to petition *the government* for. Petition the government all you want, and petition anyone else all you want, but change.org is for the *former*, not the latter.
I don't know if Dicken is worse than King, but that's because I don't read King.
A lot of Dicken's work is *extremely* padded and nearly impossible to get through because of that. Now, granted, back then, people read at a higher reading level (Those who could read) so things were long, but he's just completely absurd. I mean, take a Tale of Two Cities:
The first section, 1000 words, exists mainly to say 'France and England, where this story is set, were in turmoil, beset with violence'. But we can maybe allow that verbaige, it is setting the scene.
But the next two section...Christ. 2000 words total. The plot of those 2000 words:
A coach is stuck in the mud with a single important character. (We get no indication of who this is, or even their name, until later) A messenger shows up and gives him a message. He gives his reply, which other people speculate on.
Paragraphs and paragraphs describing a coach, which is not important, stuck in the mud, which is not important, with coachmen, who are not important, talking to guards, who are not important, about messengers, who are not important.
The next 700 words of the *next* section are concerned with this unimportant messenger taking that reply to the bank, and the rest of that section are about the guy who got the message *having a dream*.
By the end of all this, we're 3000 words into the book, and the plot so far can be best summarized as "In a lawless England, a man gets an urgent message, to which he replies with the mysterious answer of 'Recalled to life', something he has been waiting, even dreaming, about being able to say for 18 years."
That's pretty much *all* we know about the plot. We don't even have the names of any characters. And there's not even any point in being coy about who the man getting the message's reply is. We're just straight up told his name in the next section, along with what those mysterious words means. (Along with the excitement of him...checking into a hotel! And then a meeting with the people he sent the reply too.)
What's even worse, *this message is not important*. I mean, what they're talking about is important, but the actual message being sent? Not so much. It could have trivially been sent off-screen, or not mentioned at all. If a group of people send someone to another country to do something, and he gets back into the country, of course they'll ask him if he succeeded, and of course he'll reply! That's not some sort of important plot point that we need to see, considering he's meeting with them *in the next section* and everything is explained there. The entire thing is idiotic, leaving us with no idea of what's actually going on, but no actual mystery!
Although, if we feel like it, we can describe what is under the seat of a completely random coach in England (A chest), and what that chest contains (few smith's tools, a couple of torches, and a tinder-box). If only, you know, that had *ANYTHING TO DO WITH THE STORY AT ALL*.
Seriously, how the hell is this good writing? It's like the result of the obfuscated C contest. 'Can you write several sections which have no plot at all before the actual story?'
And, hell, I'm just focusing on the start because it's so easy to explain how it has no bearing on the story. The book is *full* of parts like this.
I tried to read Pride and Prejudice for the first time a few years ago, and couldn't stand the characters.
Not the women. Yes, they were overly-concerned with marrying correctly, but, at that time and place, that literally was *all* they could do with their entire life. It was the single sole decision that existed, and decided the outcome of their entire life. So after a bit of consideration, I was okay with them and their focus.
No, it was the men that were completely worthless. Apparently, all of them existed by just being given large amounts of money each month. None of them actually did a single thing, none of them appears to have any goals, none of them were even slightly useful as human beings. They were human parasites...and they were the *victory prize*.
There are works of fiction I can't stand because I can't stand the *setting*. I never thought I'd run across one of those that *actually existed*.
I don't think this is really racism. There's racism there, but it's not the problem. The problem is sexism when it crosses streams with the othering of black men.
Now, othering of people solely due to race is, yes, racism. But it's less 'black men are less than us whites' than 'they are not *us*'. This is why you still see it showing up where you wouldn't expect.
There is a certain form of sexism that sees the world as 'men vs. women', where it is the goal of men to win women. Men are one team, and women are the other team.(1) At one end, in player culture, this can be taken literally, but even at the other end, it still shows up in jokes about 'bro before hos' and 'cockblocking'.
And, thus, to a certain extent, a victory of any man to 'get' a woman is sorta a victory for all men. I.e., even if you wanted to win that particular wrestling event, at least *someone* from your team did.
Interracial dating is the point where this gets extremely weird, because to a lot of white men, even people who wouldn't think of doing, or even thinking, of doing something overtly racist, don't think of black men as on 'their team'. They've divided men into multiple teams. (And women too, probably.)
The solution here, though, isn't exactly to make sure they merge all people of one gender into the same team...the real problem here is sexism and the 'teams' and the idea of the 'war of the sexes'.
1) I'm deliberately not going to talk about gay people here, except to suppose that homosexuals, in this paradigm, are 'people on one team that gave up and joined the opposing side'. Thus gay men are traitors, and gay women are, well, teammates, although there's always the assumption they might join with you in scoring.
I'm starting to think we need someone to go through and weed out nonsensical petitions at change.org. That's not a place where you just put up petitions because you want things to happen. It's not a damn wishing well.
Anyway, I agree that Netflix's plan is a bit odd, and it's a bit odd on the *backend*, too. It requires the *entire season* be done before releasing any of it.
Which is, I guess, is great for plot arc and basic continuity, and probably saves a hell of a lot of money on minor locations and parts. (Someone goes to visit their family three times? You rent the house once, pay the actors once, and film all at once. Which TV shows do normally, but not across an entire season.)
OTOH, it results in them holding hundreds of millions of dollars worth of assets until later. In a normal TV show, there's maybe three completed episodes in the queue, they're making them almost in real time. (Even after filming, there's editing and whatnot.)
I guess there's not much risk here, Netflix isn't going to give up on the show 'mid-season' (Whatever that would mean.), but wow, that's leap from TV show funding to expensive movie funding.
@brandon-berg And your plan is obviously just a pretext for a ban on corporations disseminating speech. There’s no way that would get past the same court that ruled in favor of Citizen’s United.
My plan, or zic's?
You're right in that's zic's would not. The Fairness Doctrine was not only silly, there's no legal justification for it for *cable* news anyway, and that's the main problem at this point.
Now, I know part of my plan would not get past the Supreme Court, but it's not the corporation restrictions part, it's the anonymous speech cap thingy. (You may have posted before I explained that missing paragraph I forgot to write.)
I think you may be right, that restricting political speech from being considered a corporate action might *possibly* not get past the supreme court at this point, but if so, the supreme court will have rather clearly gone off the rails. There's already all sorts of things corporations aren't allowed to do under their fiction that are perfectly legal for people to do, and as long as the laws are structured *that way* (Blocking certain actions from being being considered under the corporate rubric, instead of just barring people from doing the action.), they are constitutional. Any court that says otherwise, frankly, needs to be impeached.
Heh, I forgot to finish a paragraph there. It was presumably going to be about the dumbass supreme court that made donating to political groups 'speech' made it nearly impossible to cap donations to such groups.
@mark-thompson Speech is, as I said above, a tangible product, and thus something that corporations can produce. A corporation can “speak” through its employees, and what’s more, a corporation can be liable for it’s employees speech on it’s behalf – if an employee commits fraud on the corporation’s behalf, the corporation can and will be held liable.
Yes and no.
The US government cannot ban someone from speaking, employee of a corporation or not.
What it *can* do is not recognize the legal fiction that said employee is acting for the corporation if the employee starts making political speech. Make a law that political speech, unless the organization is *specifically* a political non-profit, will never be considered to be an authorized action of the corporation. No speech whatsoever will be banned, a certain type of speech just been removed entirely from the corporation universe and placed outside that.
Once you remove that legal fiction, the speech will stop. (For one reason, because if they spent any money, now whoever spent that money probably just committed theft, and if the board authorized it they probably just committed malfeasance of some sort, just like if they authorized tax fraud.)
@michael-cain My own complaint isn’t so much about money equaling speech so the rich get bigger voices, or purely legal entities like corporations getting free speech, but the notion that such speech, especially political speech, can be anonymous.
Anonymous political speech, specifically in the form of money, has been very useful in the civil right's movement. Oppressed people might not be willing to get out and march, or even publicly speak out, becuase they are worried about retribution. But they are willing to donate to a cause.
That said, if there's actual oppression on *that* level, I'm pretty sure said groups wouldn't be able to buy TV ads, nor do the super-rich need access to this sort of thing. I think a donation cap could be reasonable...you get a grand total of $1000 a year you're allowed to anonymously donate to groups. (Of course, right now, thanks to idioticly
And we should *completely* remove second- and third-level donations, which is how a lot of dark money is thrown around. Want to donate anonymously to a 501(c)(3), which has public donation records? Simply make a 501(c)(4), or a real corporation, and donate to that, and they can donate the 501(c)(3).
@brandon-berg So you want to ban mass media and public speeches? Because that’s basically what it’s going to take to solve this problem.
Money isn't speech, at all. Money is an *amplifier* for speech.
In the non-analogy world, we already have rules about how loudly you are allowed to amplify speech.
We're sorta looking at this the wrong way. The problem isn't donating money to people (Which is the basis for most campaign finance laws, and nearly impossible to care about.), the problem is very loud and misleading speech drowning out other speech.
We basically need to treat this the same way we'd treat a huckster who set up a booth on the side of the road, promising through loudspeakers a miracle cure for cancer. There may be some 'speech' involved there, but it doesn't mean we ignore it.
What we need to do is a few things. One, stop all the redirection of anonymous money, and almost all anonymous money, period. Two, stop allow corporations and non-profits that are not explicitly political from including political speech under their corporate actions. Three, make it easier to sue for deliberately false political attacks.
That's all I really have at this point. It wouldn't make things perfect, but it would fix most of the *current* problems...I'm sure some new abuses would shortly show up, though.
What’s funny, to me, is that Corker’s defense is much, much stronger if he is lying or his source was weak.
Heh, you know, if VW actually wants the union, as opposed to just being neutral...VW should just go ahead and 'admit' they told Corker, deliberately, so that he would tell everyone, to sway the vote.
Thus putting VW in violation of labor law and forcing a new vote. ;)
But, seriously, why the hell is a vote even required if the company is fine with it?
@mark-thompson I understand why critics of CU dislike it. But disliking the capacity of corporations to spend shiploads of money to influence elections is 1) as a constitutional matter, insufficient basis for legislative authority, and 2) not a complete analysis of the consequences of their legal logic, which can–at least theoretically–produce outcomes they would dislike every bit as much as corporate campaign spending.
Not to mention it doesn't solve the problem. All it actually does is make the billionaires attempting to purchase the government use their own names.
I don't want a world where the Koch brothers can donate all the want to candidates in their own names, or run all the political ads they want, and the AFL-CIU is barred from any political activity.
Conflating corporations with people is very bad and stupid precedent, but it is not *actually* the problem with Citizen's United.
The problem is that if money is speech, not only do certain people seem to have a crapload more ability to 'speech' than others, but the Supreme Court seems to think this is a *good* thing.
That said, I have no problems with fixing the 'dark money problem'. There is a time and place for anonymous political action (People seem to forget that such anonymity has, in the past, protected people donating to gay rights groups.), but that time and place is *not ads run on television*. Period. Every dollar of every political TV ad should be traceable to someone.
Likewise, I have no problem fixing the 'CEOs and boards abusing corporate money to influence the political process'. I'm completely in favor of the idea that all stockholders get a voice in *their* corporation jumping into politics.
But neither of those will actually fix the issue. The problem isn't 'free speech' rights of corporations, it's 'money is buying politics'.
@morat20 Corporations don’t have values, religious beliefs, or anything that people do — because corporations, by and large, were created to sever the relationship between the owner and the business.
That's not, technically, why they don't have those things.They don't have those things for the same reason Harry Potter doesn't have values or religious beliefs, , and unicorns do not have one horn. Because Harry Potter, unicorns, and Pottery Barn do not exist, so cannot have attributes of any sort. (1)
Perhaps more importantly, the government, if it wished, *could* let the people in control of those corporations ascribe religious beliefs to them, and 'recognize' those ascribed beliefs as legally true. They could do it the same way they can recognize that a corporation has 'signed a contract' or 'owns some land' when a specific person does those things. (And then, of course, they could put religious exemptions into the law for such 'corporate beliefs'.)
Of course, the government doing such a thing is completely contrary to how we've done all other 'religious exemptions' in the laws of this country, like I pointed out.
*And*, as you point out, it's completely contrary to the entire point of corporations on top of that. The entire point is that they *aren't* their owner, or even their employees. Letting them start throwing around religious beliefs is a bit absurd.
So there really are two really good reasons not to let corporations have a religious exemption...that is not how corporations work, and that is not religious exemptions work either!
1) This seems a silly quibble, but all too often I see people talking about 'real' things corporations do and have, as compared to religious beliefs, which they don't 'really' have. But in reality, every single thing a corporation does is the government *imagining* the corporation did a thing, instead of the specific individual that really did it. Everything. Nothing is really done by them. Corporations are a mutually agreed-upon lie everyone tells themselves.
Corporations are the Santa Claus of adults, where there's just a bunch of stuff that different individuals do that get attributed to a specific entity.
@mark-thompson Yeah, I could have saved myself a few hundred words if I’d just written that.
Heh, no, you were much more on point, I was just snarky.
To actually address the issue, I'm right, but in the wrong way. A major issue in religion infringement cases is determining whether or not something is an actual religious belief, which is done by questioning the holder of the belief. Yes, on the stand, or at a special hearing created to hear the claim, like in selective service.
But the 'people' in these cases, is a) someone who cannot be questioned or appear on the stand to determine the sincerity of the belief, and, more important, b) someone *everyone acknowledges has been told to have this 'belief' by an outside entity*.
(a) is just snark, but (b) makes the entire case sheer nonsense on the face of it. If you've just been *told* you believe something, even if you're told it by your owner(1), then you do *not* have a sincerely-held religious belief. Especially if you also appear to have literally no mind to have 'beliefs' in.
1) Yes, it seems odd to talk about people having owners, but, hey, I'm not the idiot who invented that.
But corporate entities’ very existence is a function of what they may be compelled to do – they must file certain paperwork, they must create certain documents, and most importantly, they must act in a manner consistent with an independent entity, lest they forfeit their limited liability.
I keep making this point, and no one seems to listen. But it's slightly stronger than that...a corporate entities' very existence *is* the paperwork, and actions by human beings that the state allows to be attributed *to* the corporation.
There's a certain brand of silliness that thinks of corporations as the owners, or the CEO, or even the workers. No. The state has created (upon request) a fictional entity that workers can ascribe their actions to, and left that fictionally entity nominally in control of the owners.
The closest analogy to corporations are fictional characters in strange, joint-written fictional works. Except in addition to mere words on paper or images on a screen, the writers can also run around doing certain things in the real world, and have those things *legally* be attributed to the fictional characters.
I've deliberately stopped talking, in this sort of discussion, about corporations 'doing' anything...because corporations only 'do' things via legal fiction. It's *very* easy to anthropomorphize corporations, and then ascribe them goals and thus motives and thus beliefs. And you want to stop that, which is good...but the thing is, that's stopping too late.
In reality we shouldn't even *reify* corporations. They do not exist, period, full stop. There is no there there. It's the realm of pure imagination. It's like saying Harry Potter isn't really a person, and I guess he's not. But Harry Potter also *doesn't really exist at all*.
That's the line we hold in the discussion. Make the other side patiently explain how fictional things exist in some sense. When they're done, when they've gone all metaphysical to explain how anything that has an effect on the world can be considered to exist in some sense...they just totally lost the plot, because to get there, they will have admitted corporations are entirely a construct.
Rod Dreher is one of the idiots who helped promote the 'Danish government orders churches to marry gays' nonsense, which 'proves' it's coming to the US also.
(In case someone is not aware of the actual facts there, in Denmark, the church is *run by* the government. So the government 'ordering' the church to do something is, uh, just 'the church' deciding to do it itself. Feel free to object to state-run churches, but don't pretend that has anything at all to do with the US, or even *non*-state-run churches in Denmark.)
He seems completely immune to the fact that it has been illegal to discriminate on the basis of race for 50 years, and illegal for states to block interracial marriages for almost as long, but it is *still* absolutely legal for churches to refuse to marry interracial couples. No, he is *absolutely convinced* churches will be forced to marry gay couples.
It's sad, I used to actually read him, back when he was one of the few conservatives to object to Bush.
@mark-thompson And if it’s a closely held corporation, again, which owner’s beliefs control? And what if the business is sold or a new partner comes into the picture?
Frankly, we've never allowed *other people* to testify in regard to sincerely held religious beliefs before. If you want to get conscientious objector status, *you* have to appear in front of the draft board and explain your objection. I'm damned if we can see why we should start allow other people to testify as to *your* religious beliefs.
If the corporation has sincerely-held religious beliefs, the corporation needs to get on the stand and testify as to them. Not an owner, not the CEO, not a lawyer speaking for the corporation. The actual physical corporate entity needs to get up there and explain what beliefs are in *their* mind, not have a lawyer hired to represent them 'explain' things.
Some people might point out this is impossible. Well, yes. Yes it is. It is impossible because corporations do not have bodies, and nor do they have minds to have 'beliefs' in.
@mark-thompson
I strongly suspect, then, that the problem is that PD offices are vastly underfunded, always amongst the first casualties of budget cuts, and not something for which there is the political willpower to provide funding that would reduce the average PD’s caseload to that of a prosecutor.
In the past, I've proposed that everyone accused of a crime should be randomly assigned a public defender, and that defender should be the *only* person allowed to interact with the court, period.
Sure, you can hire other lawyers all you want, and they can do anything they want, but anything to and from the court must go through the public defender, including actual court appearances. (I don't know enough legalese to know what it's called, but the public defenders would be the only authorized *lawyers* on the case.)
This would make the rich have to put up with the same system the poor have to, including massive delays. (It's funny how everyone has a right to a speedy trial, and a right to an attorney, but somehow they don't have the right to an attorney that isn't so overworked that their own attorney has to delay the trial.)
New Constitutional Amendment, the Budget of the public defender is equal to the budget of the DAs office.
Shouldn't it be *more*? After all, a lot of the DA's work is actually done by law enforcement. And we're also supposed to have a system that errs on the *innocent* side, not the guilty side.
How about having the defender's budget equal to the DA's plus the PD? ;)
Its why you don’t see expensive sting operations, or why the prosecution tends to surrender and accept plea deals even when guilt is admitted.
There's $15 billion a year stolen via *all property crime* put together, where it's often a lot of work to track down what happened and who the criminal was.
There is approximately $36 billion stolen via wage theft, via entities very well known to the victims, in a very obvious manner.
That's not including collusion or anything. That's the amount that companies literally promise to pay workers, and then simply don't pay. It's not even hard to prove.
The government could trivially solicit complaints, and then work with victims to prove the case. Often time the wage theft so blatant and *expected* in an business that the victim could simply wear a wire for five minutes and talk to their boss to get enough evidence to convict.
Worker: You erased the six hours I worked on Saturday from my timesheet.
Employer: We're having to cut back on pay.
Worker: But I worked those hours.
Employer: Yes, but we're not paying you for them, and shut up and get back to work.
*FBI busts in* FREEZE! YOU'RE UNDER ARREST FOR WAGE THEFT!
Wait, damn, I forgot who runs this country. Nevermind.
At the very least, they should be on the hook for their income for the years they were under the employ of the company, including any contract-ending parachutes, golden or otherwise.
I *really* like this idea.
The entire point of limited liability is that people should not have to put their personal fortunes on the line when investing in a business. If they invest $1000 in the business, all they can lose is that $1000. There are good reasons for this.
For some reason, we've also decided to shield *executives* from legal liability. But executives aren't 'investors', and they *are* the people who actually commit, or at least order, the crime. (As opposed to the investor, who has no idea...someone with Apple stock had no idea they were doing this, for example!)
There's really no reason that executives (1) should be shielded from liability.
Of course, the problem there is that executives will just buy themselves liability insurance as part of their compensation. So while this seems like a cool idea, it runs smack into the problem that executives are out of control.
At some point, we're going to need to require laws saying 'Stockholders must authorize executive compensation'. Without that, this problem is not fixable.
1) Or any employees, actually. Although most lower level employees are completely unaware of legal violations, sometimes even if they're the ones physically committing them. (They assume that management is following the laws.) It needs to be understood that it is not the job of the guy running the paint-making machine in a paint factory to know that some chemical is toxic and not allowed. It is the job of the engineers to tell management that, and it is the job of management to decide not to use it. One or both of them commit the tort, not the guy pushing the button to run the machine or the guy who sold the can.
The problem is, someone else might say, “Life begins at conception.
Life does not 'begin' at conception. Sperm and ovum are both demonstrably alive.
No human being has ever been *not* alive. Every single cell in every person's body has been alive for *billions* of years. Cells don't appear out of thin air, they *split* and, in the case of sexual reproduction, re-merge. Nothing is going around *creating* life.
I think pro-choice people need to bring this up more often, because talking about when life 'begin' is playing right into the pro-forced-birth side's argument. The question is when *humanity* begins...saying 'life' to mean 'humanity' just lets them repeat their nonsense about fertilization, which is, indeed, complete nonsense, biologically speaking.
(This will force the pro-forced-birthers to move into 'unique humans'...which has really obvious rebuttals with 'identical twins' and 'chimeras'.)
Hell, I had completely forgotten about that possibility. Yeah, shooting yourself in the leg from the *inside* is a tad more dangerous than shooting yourself in the leg from the outside.
Of course, all that applies to *unholstered* guns in the waistband. Holstered guns, I assume, aren't going to go off accidentally, unless you're an idiot when you pull them out.
I'm rewatching my way through Leverage right now, and in the first season there's a funny scene where a guy tries to intimidate Eliot by flashing a gun in his front waistband...and Eliot reaches out and grabs the gun handle, holding the gun in place. The guy get somewhat nervous with this development.
And there's actually a really good reason to not want to get shot there, besides the obvious. In a normal hip holster, if you don't hit the ground, you'll shoot your foot, or your thigh at an angle. Worse chase scenario, you shoot off your kneecap, but that's unlikely. All those you can easily live through.
With a gun in the waistband, accidental shots tend to happen when it's jostled. Which means, yes, it might be pointed straight down at your junk, but it *also* might be pointed at your abdomen, especially if it goes off while being pulled out. Getting shot in the gut is *extremely* dangerous. Obviously a chest shot is more dangerous, but your chest at least has ribs to slow down and deflect bullets.
The problem with a front waistband gun isn't the tiny chance it will go off and render them unable to have kids...it's the much more likely chance it will go off and strew their intestines across the inside of their abdomen and they die of septic shock.
(And, of course, that's on top of the fact you can *still* shoot yourself in the foot or leg with it.)
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Talk to Me Like I’m Stupid: Jane Austen Edition”
@glyph
Yeah, but at least they pad the story out with *more story*. They invent another pointless plot and stick it in there, and at the end we're back where we started, but at least it's a *plot*.
They don't randomly add ten minutes of someone's car struck in a ditch to the start of an episode, and him talking on his cell phone with some cryptic comments to people we don't know, and then, lo and behold, he drives to a hotel, checks, and meets those people tomorrow and the plot starts. No one would think that's a good idea.
Well, possibly the director of Manos: The Hands of Fate would.
On “Netflix, You Owe Me, You Owe Everybody”
Yeah, I understand the behavior of the House of Cards people. They've really got the best of all possible worlds there.
Although I wonder what their 'syndication' deal is. This is a show that's never going to be 'off the air', so I'm assuming there's some sort of new paradigm in the contracts. Does Netflix have to keep it forever? If they stop, can episodes be sold in syndication? And I see the DVD for the first season is out already. I was actually wondering if Netflix was going to allow DVDs at all.(1)
The HoC people is entirely rational. It's *Netflix's* behavior that seems somewhat amazing.
But maybe I'm just not used to American businesses, especially in entertainment, actually taking risks and trying new things. Maybe it helps that Netflix is a fairly new company, and Netflix has actual *data* on what sort of things people watch instead of the old TV channel standby of 'making up complete gibberish and reciting it as fact for decades without any evidence'.
1) That would have been a very weird sentence a decade ago.
"
That's pointless. I'm going to petition against allowing your petition.
But seriously, even the Death Star petition was something the government could hypothetically do, or at least start research into doing.
But how the heck does anyone expect the government, *which was snowed in and thus not in session*, to act fast enough to move 'House of Cards' forward one day? How exactly would that even *conceptually* work?
I mean, people can feel free to petition for that, but it's not a sane thing to petition *the government* for. Petition the government all you want, and petition anyone else all you want, but change.org is for the *former*, not the latter.
On “Talk to Me Like I’m Stupid: Jane Austen Edition”
I don't know if Dicken is worse than King, but that's because I don't read King.
A lot of Dicken's work is *extremely* padded and nearly impossible to get through because of that. Now, granted, back then, people read at a higher reading level (Those who could read) so things were long, but he's just completely absurd. I mean, take a Tale of Two Cities:
The first section, 1000 words, exists mainly to say 'France and England, where this story is set, were in turmoil, beset with violence'. But we can maybe allow that verbaige, it is setting the scene.
But the next two section...Christ. 2000 words total. The plot of those 2000 words:
A coach is stuck in the mud with a single important character. (We get no indication of who this is, or even their name, until later) A messenger shows up and gives him a message. He gives his reply, which other people speculate on.
Paragraphs and paragraphs describing a coach, which is not important, stuck in the mud, which is not important, with coachmen, who are not important, talking to guards, who are not important, about messengers, who are not important.
The next 700 words of the *next* section are concerned with this unimportant messenger taking that reply to the bank, and the rest of that section are about the guy who got the message *having a dream*.
By the end of all this, we're 3000 words into the book, and the plot so far can be best summarized as "In a lawless England, a man gets an urgent message, to which he replies with the mysterious answer of 'Recalled to life', something he has been waiting, even dreaming, about being able to say for 18 years."
That's pretty much *all* we know about the plot. We don't even have the names of any characters. And there's not even any point in being coy about who the man getting the message's reply is. We're just straight up told his name in the next section, along with what those mysterious words means. (Along with the excitement of him...checking into a hotel! And then a meeting with the people he sent the reply too.)
What's even worse, *this message is not important*. I mean, what they're talking about is important, but the actual message being sent? Not so much. It could have trivially been sent off-screen, or not mentioned at all. If a group of people send someone to another country to do something, and he gets back into the country, of course they'll ask him if he succeeded, and of course he'll reply! That's not some sort of important plot point that we need to see, considering he's meeting with them *in the next section* and everything is explained there. The entire thing is idiotic, leaving us with no idea of what's actually going on, but no actual mystery!
Although, if we feel like it, we can describe what is under the seat of a completely random coach in England (A chest), and what that chest contains (few smith's tools, a couple of torches, and a tinder-box). If only, you know, that had *ANYTHING TO DO WITH THE STORY AT ALL*.
Seriously, how the hell is this good writing? It's like the result of the obfuscated C contest. 'Can you write several sections which have no plot at all before the actual story?'
And, hell, I'm just focusing on the start because it's so easy to explain how it has no bearing on the story. The book is *full* of parts like this.
"
I tried to read Pride and Prejudice for the first time a few years ago, and couldn't stand the characters.
Not the women. Yes, they were overly-concerned with marrying correctly, but, at that time and place, that literally was *all* they could do with their entire life. It was the single sole decision that existed, and decided the outcome of their entire life. So after a bit of consideration, I was okay with them and their focus.
No, it was the men that were completely worthless. Apparently, all of them existed by just being given large amounts of money each month. None of them actually did a single thing, none of them appears to have any goals, none of them were even slightly useful as human beings. They were human parasites...and they were the *victory prize*.
There are works of fiction I can't stand because I can't stand the *setting*. I never thought I'd run across one of those that *actually existed*.
On “Sometimes the answers to black and white questions are too obvious to see.”
I don't think this is really racism. There's racism there, but it's not the problem. The problem is sexism when it crosses streams with the othering of black men.
Now, othering of people solely due to race is, yes, racism. But it's less 'black men are less than us whites' than 'they are not *us*'. This is why you still see it showing up where you wouldn't expect.
There is a certain form of sexism that sees the world as 'men vs. women', where it is the goal of men to win women. Men are one team, and women are the other team.(1) At one end, in player culture, this can be taken literally, but even at the other end, it still shows up in jokes about 'bro before hos' and 'cockblocking'.
And, thus, to a certain extent, a victory of any man to 'get' a woman is sorta a victory for all men. I.e., even if you wanted to win that particular wrestling event, at least *someone* from your team did.
Interracial dating is the point where this gets extremely weird, because to a lot of white men, even people who wouldn't think of doing, or even thinking, of doing something overtly racist, don't think of black men as on 'their team'. They've divided men into multiple teams. (And women too, probably.)
The solution here, though, isn't exactly to make sure they merge all people of one gender into the same team...the real problem here is sexism and the 'teams' and the idea of the 'war of the sexes'.
1) I'm deliberately not going to talk about gay people here, except to suppose that homosexuals, in this paradigm, are 'people on one team that gave up and joined the opposing side'. Thus gay men are traitors, and gay women are, well, teammates, although there's always the assumption they might join with you in scoring.
On “Netflix, You Owe Me, You Owe Everybody”
I'm starting to think we need someone to go through and weed out nonsensical petitions at change.org. That's not a place where you just put up petitions because you want things to happen. It's not a damn wishing well.
Anyway, I agree that Netflix's plan is a bit odd, and it's a bit odd on the *backend*, too. It requires the *entire season* be done before releasing any of it.
Which is, I guess, is great for plot arc and basic continuity, and probably saves a hell of a lot of money on minor locations and parts. (Someone goes to visit their family three times? You rent the house once, pay the actors once, and film all at once. Which TV shows do normally, but not across an entire season.)
OTOH, it results in them holding hundreds of millions of dollars worth of assets until later. In a normal TV show, there's maybe three completed episodes in the queue, they're making them almost in real time. (Even after filming, there's editing and whatnot.)
I guess there's not much risk here, Netflix isn't going to give up on the show 'mid-season' (Whatever that would mean.), but wow, that's leap from TV show funding to expensive movie funding.
On “The Losing Side of History”
@brandon-berg
And your plan is obviously just a pretext for a ban on corporations disseminating speech. There’s no way that would get past the same court that ruled in favor of Citizen’s United.
My plan, or zic's?
You're right in that's zic's would not. The Fairness Doctrine was not only silly, there's no legal justification for it for *cable* news anyway, and that's the main problem at this point.
Now, I know part of my plan would not get past the Supreme Court, but it's not the corporation restrictions part, it's the anonymous speech cap thingy. (You may have posted before I explained that missing paragraph I forgot to write.)
I think you may be right, that restricting political speech from being considered a corporate action might *possibly* not get past the supreme court at this point, but if so, the supreme court will have rather clearly gone off the rails. There's already all sorts of things corporations aren't allowed to do under their fiction that are perfectly legal for people to do, and as long as the laws are structured *that way* (Blocking certain actions from being being considered under the corporate rubric, instead of just barring people from doing the action.), they are constitutional. Any court that says otherwise, frankly, needs to be impeached.
"
Heh, I forgot to finish a paragraph there. It was presumably going to be about the dumbass supreme court that made donating to political groups 'speech' made it nearly impossible to cap donations to such groups.
"
@mark-thompson
Speech is, as I said above, a tangible product, and thus something that corporations can produce. A corporation can “speak” through its employees, and what’s more, a corporation can be liable for it’s employees speech on it’s behalf – if an employee commits fraud on the corporation’s behalf, the corporation can and will be held liable.
Yes and no.
The US government cannot ban someone from speaking, employee of a corporation or not.
What it *can* do is not recognize the legal fiction that said employee is acting for the corporation if the employee starts making political speech. Make a law that political speech, unless the organization is *specifically* a political non-profit, will never be considered to be an authorized action of the corporation. No speech whatsoever will be banned, a certain type of speech just been removed entirely from the corporation universe and placed outside that.
Once you remove that legal fiction, the speech will stop. (For one reason, because if they spent any money, now whoever spent that money probably just committed theft, and if the board authorized it they probably just committed malfeasance of some sort, just like if they authorized tax fraud.)
@michael-cain
My own complaint isn’t so much about money equaling speech so the rich get bigger voices, or purely legal entities like corporations getting free speech, but the notion that such speech, especially political speech, can be anonymous.
Anonymous political speech, specifically in the form of money, has been very useful in the civil right's movement. Oppressed people might not be willing to get out and march, or even publicly speak out, becuase they are worried about retribution. But they are willing to donate to a cause.
That said, if there's actual oppression on *that* level, I'm pretty sure said groups wouldn't be able to buy TV ads, nor do the super-rich need access to this sort of thing. I think a donation cap could be reasonable...you get a grand total of $1000 a year you're allowed to anonymously donate to groups. (Of course, right now, thanks to idioticly
And we should *completely* remove second- and third-level donations, which is how a lot of dark money is thrown around. Want to donate anonymously to a 501(c)(3), which has public donation records? Simply make a 501(c)(4), or a real corporation, and donate to that, and they can donate the 501(c)(3).
@brandon-berg
So you want to ban mass media and public speeches? Because that’s basically what it’s going to take to solve this problem.
Money isn't speech, at all. Money is an *amplifier* for speech.
In the non-analogy world, we already have rules about how loudly you are allowed to amplify speech.
We're sorta looking at this the wrong way. The problem isn't donating money to people (Which is the basis for most campaign finance laws, and nearly impossible to care about.), the problem is very loud and misleading speech drowning out other speech.
We basically need to treat this the same way we'd treat a huckster who set up a booth on the side of the road, promising through loudspeakers a miracle cure for cancer. There may be some 'speech' involved there, but it doesn't mean we ignore it.
What we need to do is a few things. One, stop all the redirection of anonymous money, and almost all anonymous money, period. Two, stop allow corporations and non-profits that are not explicitly political from including political speech under their corporate actions. Three, make it easier to sue for deliberately false political attacks.
That's all I really have at this point. It wouldn't make things perfect, but it would fix most of the *current* problems...I'm sure some new abuses would shortly show up, though.
On “How to Get 500 Comments and Pissed Off Commenters – Mention Unions”
What’s funny, to me, is that Corker’s defense is much, much stronger if he is lying or his source was weak.
Heh, you know, if VW actually wants the union, as opposed to just being neutral...VW should just go ahead and 'admit' they told Corker, deliberately, so that he would tell everyone, to sway the vote.
Thus putting VW in violation of labor law and forcing a new vote. ;)
But, seriously, why the hell is a vote even required if the company is fine with it?
On “The Losing Side of History”
@mark-thompson
I understand why critics of CU dislike it. But disliking the capacity of corporations to spend shiploads of money to influence elections is 1) as a constitutional matter, insufficient basis for legislative authority, and 2) not a complete analysis of the consequences of their legal logic, which can–at least theoretically–produce outcomes they would dislike every bit as much as corporate campaign spending.
Not to mention it doesn't solve the problem. All it actually does is make the billionaires attempting to purchase the government use their own names.
I don't want a world where the Koch brothers can donate all the want to candidates in their own names, or run all the political ads they want, and the AFL-CIU is barred from any political activity.
Conflating corporations with people is very bad and stupid precedent, but it is not *actually* the problem with Citizen's United.
The problem is that if money is speech, not only do certain people seem to have a crapload more ability to 'speech' than others, but the Supreme Court seems to think this is a *good* thing.
That said, I have no problems with fixing the 'dark money problem'. There is a time and place for anonymous political action (People seem to forget that such anonymity has, in the past, protected people donating to gay rights groups.), but that time and place is *not ads run on television*. Period. Every dollar of every political TV ad should be traceable to someone.
Likewise, I have no problem fixing the 'CEOs and boards abusing corporate money to influence the political process'. I'm completely in favor of the idea that all stockholders get a voice in *their* corporation jumping into politics.
But neither of those will actually fix the issue. The problem isn't 'free speech' rights of corporations, it's 'money is buying politics'.
"
@morat20
Corporations don’t have values, religious beliefs, or anything that people do — because corporations, by and large, were created to sever the relationship between the owner and the business.
That's not, technically, why they don't have those things.They don't have those things for the same reason Harry Potter doesn't have values or religious beliefs, , and unicorns do not have one horn. Because Harry Potter, unicorns, and Pottery Barn do not exist, so cannot have attributes of any sort. (1)
Perhaps more importantly, the government, if it wished, *could* let the people in control of those corporations ascribe religious beliefs to them, and 'recognize' those ascribed beliefs as legally true. They could do it the same way they can recognize that a corporation has 'signed a contract' or 'owns some land' when a specific person does those things. (And then, of course, they could put religious exemptions into the law for such 'corporate beliefs'.)
Of course, the government doing such a thing is completely contrary to how we've done all other 'religious exemptions' in the laws of this country, like I pointed out.
*And*, as you point out, it's completely contrary to the entire point of corporations on top of that. The entire point is that they *aren't* their owner, or even their employees. Letting them start throwing around religious beliefs is a bit absurd.
So there really are two really good reasons not to let corporations have a religious exemption...that is not how corporations work, and that is not religious exemptions work either!
1) This seems a silly quibble, but all too often I see people talking about 'real' things corporations do and have, as compared to religious beliefs, which they don't 'really' have. But in reality, every single thing a corporation does is the government *imagining* the corporation did a thing, instead of the specific individual that really did it. Everything. Nothing is really done by them. Corporations are a mutually agreed-upon lie everyone tells themselves.
Corporations are the Santa Claus of adults, where there's just a bunch of stuff that different individuals do that get attributed to a specific entity.
"
@mark-thompson
Yeah, I could have saved myself a few hundred words if I’d just written that.
Heh, no, you were much more on point, I was just snarky.
To actually address the issue, I'm right, but in the wrong way. A major issue in religion infringement cases is determining whether or not something is an actual religious belief, which is done by questioning the holder of the belief. Yes, on the stand, or at a special hearing created to hear the claim, like in selective service.
But the 'people' in these cases, is a) someone who cannot be questioned or appear on the stand to determine the sincerity of the belief, and, more important, b) someone *everyone acknowledges has been told to have this 'belief' by an outside entity*.
(a) is just snark, but (b) makes the entire case sheer nonsense on the face of it. If you've just been *told* you believe something, even if you're told it by your owner(1), then you do *not* have a sincerely-held religious belief. Especially if you also appear to have literally no mind to have 'beliefs' in.
1) Yes, it seems odd to talk about people having owners, but, hey, I'm not the idiot who invented that.
But corporate entities’ very existence is a function of what they may be compelled to do – they must file certain paperwork, they must create certain documents, and most importantly, they must act in a manner consistent with an independent entity, lest they forfeit their limited liability.
I keep making this point, and no one seems to listen. But it's slightly stronger than that...a corporate entities' very existence *is* the paperwork, and actions by human beings that the state allows to be attributed *to* the corporation.
There's a certain brand of silliness that thinks of corporations as the owners, or the CEO, or even the workers. No. The state has created (upon request) a fictional entity that workers can ascribe their actions to, and left that fictionally entity nominally in control of the owners.
The closest analogy to corporations are fictional characters in strange, joint-written fictional works. Except in addition to mere words on paper or images on a screen, the writers can also run around doing certain things in the real world, and have those things *legally* be attributed to the fictional characters.
I've deliberately stopped talking, in this sort of discussion, about corporations 'doing' anything...because corporations only 'do' things via legal fiction. It's *very* easy to anthropomorphize corporations, and then ascribe them goals and thus motives and thus beliefs. And you want to stop that, which is good...but the thing is, that's stopping too late.
In reality we shouldn't even *reify* corporations. They do not exist, period, full stop. There is no there there. It's the realm of pure imagination. It's like saying Harry Potter isn't really a person, and I guess he's not. But Harry Potter also *doesn't really exist at all*.
That's the line we hold in the discussion. Make the other side patiently explain how fictional things exist in some sense. When they're done, when they've gone all metaphysical to explain how anything that has an effect on the world can be considered to exist in some sense...they just totally lost the plot, because to get there, they will have admitted corporations are entirely a construct.
"
Rod Dreher is one of the idiots who helped promote the 'Danish government orders churches to marry gays' nonsense, which 'proves' it's coming to the US also.
(In case someone is not aware of the actual facts there, in Denmark, the church is *run by* the government. So the government 'ordering' the church to do something is, uh, just 'the church' deciding to do it itself. Feel free to object to state-run churches, but don't pretend that has anything at all to do with the US, or even *non*-state-run churches in Denmark.)
He seems completely immune to the fact that it has been illegal to discriminate on the basis of race for 50 years, and illegal for states to block interracial marriages for almost as long, but it is *still* absolutely legal for churches to refuse to marry interracial couples. No, he is *absolutely convinced* churches will be forced to marry gay couples.
It's sad, I used to actually read him, back when he was one of the few conservatives to object to Bush.
"
@mark-thompson
And if it’s a closely held corporation, again, which owner’s beliefs control? And what if the business is sold or a new partner comes into the picture?
Frankly, we've never allowed *other people* to testify in regard to sincerely held religious beliefs before. If you want to get conscientious objector status, *you* have to appear in front of the draft board and explain your objection. I'm damned if we can see why we should start allow other people to testify as to *your* religious beliefs.
If the corporation has sincerely-held religious beliefs, the corporation needs to get on the stand and testify as to them. Not an owner, not the CEO, not a lawyer speaking for the corporation. The actual physical corporate entity needs to get up there and explain what beliefs are in *their* mind, not have a lawyer hired to represent them 'explain' things.
Some people might point out this is impossible. Well, yes. Yes it is. It is impossible because corporations do not have bodies, and nor do they have minds to have 'beliefs' in.
On “The Ethics and Incentives of Socialized Law”
Damnit, I think *everyone* came up with this exact solution.
"
@mark-thompson
I strongly suspect, then, that the problem is that PD offices are vastly underfunded, always amongst the first casualties of budget cuts, and not something for which there is the political willpower to provide funding that would reduce the average PD’s caseload to that of a prosecutor.
In the past, I've proposed that everyone accused of a crime should be randomly assigned a public defender, and that defender should be the *only* person allowed to interact with the court, period.
Sure, you can hire other lawyers all you want, and they can do anything they want, but anything to and from the court must go through the public defender, including actual court appearances. (I don't know enough legalese to know what it's called, but the public defenders would be the only authorized *lawyers* on the case.)
This would make the rich have to put up with the same system the poor have to, including massive delays. (It's funny how everyone has a right to a speedy trial, and a right to an attorney, but somehow they don't have the right to an attorney that isn't so overworked that their own attorney has to delay the trial.)
Justice is supposed to be *blind*. Period.
"
New Constitutional Amendment, the Budget of the public defender is equal to the budget of the DAs office.
Shouldn't it be *more*? After all, a lot of the DA's work is actually done by law enforcement. And we're also supposed to have a system that errs on the *innocent* side, not the guilty side.
How about having the defender's budget equal to the DA's plus the PD? ;)
On “No One Hates Free Market Capitalism More Than Free Market Capitalists”
Its why you don’t see expensive sting operations, or why the prosecution tends to surrender and accept plea deals even when guilt is admitted.
There's $15 billion a year stolen via *all property crime* put together, where it's often a lot of work to track down what happened and who the criminal was.
There is approximately $36 billion stolen via wage theft, via entities very well known to the victims, in a very obvious manner.
That's not including collusion or anything. That's the amount that companies literally promise to pay workers, and then simply don't pay. It's not even hard to prove.
The government could trivially solicit complaints, and then work with victims to prove the case. Often time the wage theft so blatant and *expected* in an business that the victim could simply wear a wire for five minutes and talk to their boss to get enough evidence to convict.
Worker: You erased the six hours I worked on Saturday from my timesheet.
Employer: We're having to cut back on pay.
Worker: But I worked those hours.
Employer: Yes, but we're not paying you for them, and shut up and get back to work.
*FBI busts in* FREEZE! YOU'RE UNDER ARREST FOR WAGE THEFT!
Wait, damn, I forgot who runs this country. Nevermind.
"
At the very least, they should be on the hook for their income for the years they were under the employ of the company, including any contract-ending parachutes, golden or otherwise.
I *really* like this idea.
The entire point of limited liability is that people should not have to put their personal fortunes on the line when investing in a business. If they invest $1000 in the business, all they can lose is that $1000. There are good reasons for this.
For some reason, we've also decided to shield *executives* from legal liability. But executives aren't 'investors', and they *are* the people who actually commit, or at least order, the crime. (As opposed to the investor, who has no idea...someone with Apple stock had no idea they were doing this, for example!)
There's really no reason that executives (1) should be shielded from liability.
Of course, the problem there is that executives will just buy themselves liability insurance as part of their compensation. So while this seems like a cool idea, it runs smack into the problem that executives are out of control.
At some point, we're going to need to require laws saying 'Stockholders must authorize executive compensation'. Without that, this problem is not fixable.
1) Or any employees, actually. Although most lower level employees are completely unaware of legal violations, sometimes even if they're the ones physically committing them. (They assume that management is following the laws.) It needs to be understood that it is not the job of the guy running the paint-making machine in a paint factory to know that some chemical is toxic and not allowed. It is the job of the engineers to tell management that, and it is the job of management to decide not to use it. One or both of them commit the tort, not the guy pushing the button to run the machine or the guy who sold the can.
On “Don’t Reduce Melise Muñoz or Her Fetus to a Slogan”
The problem is, someone else might say, “Life begins at conception.
Life does not 'begin' at conception. Sperm and ovum are both demonstrably alive.
No human being has ever been *not* alive. Every single cell in every person's body has been alive for *billions* of years. Cells don't appear out of thin air, they *split* and, in the case of sexual reproduction, re-merge. Nothing is going around *creating* life.
I think pro-choice people need to bring this up more often, because talking about when life 'begin' is playing right into the pro-forced-birth side's argument. The question is when *humanity* begins...saying 'life' to mean 'humanity' just lets them repeat their nonsense about fertilization, which is, indeed, complete nonsense, biologically speaking.
(This will force the pro-forced-birthers to move into 'unique humans'...which has really obvious rebuttals with 'identical twins' and 'chimeras'.)
On “Bringing Guns to Dinner”
Hell, I had completely forgotten about that possibility. Yeah, shooting yourself in the leg from the *inside* is a tad more dangerous than shooting yourself in the leg from the outside.
"
Of course, all that applies to *unholstered* guns in the waistband. Holstered guns, I assume, aren't going to go off accidentally, unless you're an idiot when you pull them out.
"
I'm rewatching my way through Leverage right now, and in the first season there's a funny scene where a guy tries to intimidate Eliot by flashing a gun in his front waistband...and Eliot reaches out and grabs the gun handle, holding the gun in place. The guy get somewhat nervous with this development.
And there's actually a really good reason to not want to get shot there, besides the obvious. In a normal hip holster, if you don't hit the ground, you'll shoot your foot, or your thigh at an angle. Worse chase scenario, you shoot off your kneecap, but that's unlikely. All those you can easily live through.
With a gun in the waistband, accidental shots tend to happen when it's jostled. Which means, yes, it might be pointed straight down at your junk, but it *also* might be pointed at your abdomen, especially if it goes off while being pulled out. Getting shot in the gut is *extremely* dangerous. Obviously a chest shot is more dangerous, but your chest at least has ribs to slow down and deflect bullets.
The problem with a front waistband gun isn't the tiny chance it will go off and render them unable to have kids...it's the much more likely chance it will go off and strew their intestines across the inside of their abdomen and they die of septic shock.
(And, of course, that's on top of the fact you can *still* shoot yourself in the foot or leg with it.)
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.