We evolved in an environment where concentrations of calories (e.g. sugars and fats) were scarce, so we acquired a taste for them, which remains now that we can distribute them in huge quantities. The result is an almost universal desire for stuff that's bad for us. I don't think you can blame any particular economic system for that.
My feeling about hate crime enhancements is that they're appropriate when they give a more accurate picture of the crime. Burning some garbage my lawn is trespassing and arson. Burning a cross on a black person's lawn is a threat of serious violence to come. That's more concrete than lack of remorse.
Swartz was threatened with > 30 years, with the option to plead down to < 1 year. Either he did something horrible and the 1 year would be a grave miscarriage of justice, or the 30 years is pure coercion.
And if Burt doesn't agree that everything I've said is correct, I'm going to hunt him down and force him to spend a week listening to Nickelback's Greatest Hits.
There's a lot of cheering of Swartz going on at Lawyers Guns, and Money, and they're all academics. The issue being, I suspect, that whatever downloading stuff JSTOR costs them far exceeds anything they earn from publishing journal articles.
He's being accused of downloading stuff without authorization. His theft is what he didn't pay to become authorized. Period. It has nothing to do with the intrinsic value of the data. If you want to go further and say that he also provided it to N people who didn't pay for it, I'm willing to multiply by N. But It's irrelevant whether it was atomic bomb plans or scripts for the first season of Gilligan's Island.
The "He wanted other people to do it" still bothers me. If I sit in from of a troop train to protest a war, should I be punished extra because I'm implicitly encouraging millions of other people to do the same?
Twain made a ton of money, enough to live in great luxury. He threw every cent of it away on bad investments, in particular the Paige typesetter. In fact, you could argue that if he'd made less money, he would have been better off, because he wouldn't have felt rich enough to set it all on fire. He earned back enough to pay off his debts by going on a lecture tour and writing more books. There's no way to blame any of this on weak copyright laws.
So we can argue about the heinousness of the offense and the appropriateness of decades in prison without knowing if what he stole was really worth more than a few hundred buck? Whatever.
Google is a terrible analogy. It costs millions and millions of dollars because it has a huge server farm, lots of well-paid employees, and handles gazillions of requests a day. Putting content that already exists online and making it freely available to a small set of interested parties is immensely cheap, and can be could be done with minimal subsidies. Think gutenberg.org.
Skilling only got 24 years. Ken Lay's maximum possible sentence was 30 years (though he died before sentencing). Clearly Swartz is worse than either of them.
Quite seriously, what you're saying scares me. The issue isn't really that Swartz was prosecuted, it's the "Who Breaks a Butterfly Upon the Wheel" level of punishment he was threatened with: thirty years in prison. It's that threat that led directly to his suicide. Do you really want to argue that that's justified based, not on the value of what he stole, but on the ideology behind it?
he got into trouble because he stole something that belonged to someone else.
And, unlike a banker who foreclosed on a home without any documentation that authorized that foreclosure, he wasn't a member of the class authorized to behave in that fashion.
Exactly. Head Start works, but it isn't enough. I suppose you can then conclude "But since we're not willing to do the rest of the job, we might as well save the money HS costs", but that's really ugly.
Eventually, pointing out that “State’s Rights” is a codeword for “segregation” will sound like those folks who point out that Margaret Sanger was into eugenics.
Margaret Sanger/Eugencis was brought up long after Sanger died to try to discredit progressives by association. States' Rights/Segregation was proudly proclaimed by the culprits. Or do I disremember Pat Brown declaring "Eugenics Now! Eugenics Tomorrow! Eugenics Forever!"
On “Coca-Cola Is Just Bad For You”
I used to try to fight the Masons, but I've thrown in the trowel.
On “Commanism”
Not when Kazzy says it.
"
Is this a manifesto?
On “Coca-Cola Is Just Bad For You”
When I was young, I used to have friends named i, j, and k.
"
We evolved in an environment where concentrations of calories (e.g. sugars and fats) were scarce, so we acquired a taste for them, which remains now that we can distribute them in huge quantities. The result is an almost universal desire for stuff that's bad for us. I don't think you can blame any particular economic system for that.
"
Have three or four while you can, because it'll be poison again next week.
This is why math is better than medicine. We don't keep changing our minds about whether the square root of two is irrational.
On “Hmmmm…”
My feeling about hate crime enhancements is that they're appropriate when they give a more accurate picture of the crime. Burning some garbage my lawn is trespassing and arson. Burning a cross on a black person's lawn is a threat of serious violence to come. That's more concrete than lack of remorse.
"
Swartz was threatened with > 30 years, with the option to plead down to < 1 year. Either he did something horrible and the 1 year would be a grave miscarriage of justice, or the 30 years is pure coercion.
And if Burt doesn't agree that everything I've said is correct, I'm going to hunt him down and force him to spend a week listening to Nickelback's Greatest Hits.
"
There's a lot of cheering of Swartz going on at Lawyers Guns, and Money, and they're all academics. The issue being, I suspect, that whatever downloading stuff JSTOR costs them far exceeds anything they earn from publishing journal articles.
"
He's being accused of downloading stuff without authorization. His theft is what he didn't pay to become authorized. Period. It has nothing to do with the intrinsic value of the data. If you want to go further and say that he also provided it to N people who didn't pay for it, I'm willing to multiply by N. But It's irrelevant whether it was atomic bomb plans or scripts for the first season of Gilligan's Island.
The "He wanted other people to do it" still bothers me. If I sit in from of a troop train to protest a war, should I be punished extra because I'm implicitly encouraging millions of other people to do the same?
"
The hundreds of thousands or millions of people with ordinary bank accounts and loans at HSBC.
If only there were a federal program to insure their deposits.
"
Twain made a ton of money, enough to live in great luxury. He threw every cent of it away on bad investments, in particular the Paige typesetter. In fact, you could argue that if he'd made less money, he would have been better off, because he wouldn't have felt rich enough to set it all on fire. He earned back enough to pay off his debts by going on a lecture tour and writing more books. There's no way to blame any of this on weak copyright laws.
"
So we can argue about the heinousness of the offense and the appropriateness of decades in prison without knowing if what he stole was really worth more than a few hundred buck? Whatever.
"
I don’t know. I can’t know. No one can.
Huh? It's on JSTOR. Anyone in the world can download it all if they pay the fees. What's the fee that didn't get paid?
"
Google is a terrible analogy. It costs millions and millions of dollars because it has a huge server farm, lots of well-paid employees, and handles gazillions of requests a day. Putting content that already exists online and making it freely available to a small set of interested parties is immensely cheap, and can be could be done with minimal subsidies. Think gutenberg.org.
"
Skilling only got 24 years. Ken Lay's maximum possible sentence was 30 years (though he died before sentencing). Clearly Swartz is worse than either of them.
"
How much did Swartz steal? A lot.
Cash value of? (Serious question.)
"
Quite seriously, what you're saying scares me. The issue isn't really that Swartz was prosecuted, it's the "Who Breaks a Butterfly Upon the Wheel" level of punishment he was threatened with: thirty years in prison. It's that threat that led directly to his suicide. Do you really want to argue that that's justified based, not on the value of what he stole, but on the ideology behind it?
"
he got into trouble because he stole something that belonged to someone else.
And, unlike a banker who foreclosed on a home without any documentation that authorized that foreclosure, he wasn't a member of the class authorized to behave in that fashion.
On “Announcing the Beowulf & Grendel Book Club”
I was trying for "Damn, I can hardly wait", but in Anglo-Saxon I don't know my genitives from my fishhole.
"
áwierge, ic i náe bídean.
On “It’s Time to Rethink Head Start”
Exactly. Head Start works, but it isn't enough. I suppose you can then conclude "But since we're not willing to do the rest of the job, we might as well save the money HS costs", but that's really ugly.
"
Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation
OPRE
On “Conservative Kaelism”
Eventually, pointing out that “State’s Rights” is a codeword for “segregation” will sound like those folks who point out that Margaret Sanger was into eugenics.
Margaret Sanger/Eugencis was brought up long after Sanger died to try to discredit progressives by association. States' Rights/Segregation was proudly proclaimed by the culprits. Or do I disremember Pat Brown declaring "Eugenics Now! Eugenics Tomorrow! Eugenics Forever!"
"
And "graphic novel" means Sandman instead of Fanny Hill.