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Rov_Scam 2hr ago

I don't know that any of these are great examples. Let's approach them individually:

Pregnant Worker's Fairness Act

It's a bit academic, but it should be noted that the EEOC doesn't actually have Title VII rulemaking authority. The "rules" they promulgate are merely interpretive documents that inform businesses on how to comply and inform courts on the agency's interpretation. The courts themselves are only bound to follow EEOC guidance if it's "reasonable". Now, there are decisions out there that say that courts can't just wave these away and should give the agency deference, so there's a pretty big hurdle to overcome if you want to go against this guidance, and it gets pretty complicated here, but suffice it to say that courts aren't bound by these rules the same as they would if they were promulgated by an agency that actually had rulemaking authority. It should also be noted that the EEOC still has to follow the APA when it comes to procedural matters in promulgation (like notice and comment), so this lack of authority doesn't exactly make it easy for them to run wild.

As far as the actual rule is concerned, it's hard to say from a Republican perspective what the EEOC should have actually done. Saying outright that the law didn't apply to abortion would have created a situation where the EEOC guidance was directly at-odds with any reasonable canon of legislative interpretation; I don't think any textualist could argue with a straight face that abortions aren't pregnancy-related. Saying nothing about the matter isn't an option either. Since they're still bound by the APA, they have to address the comments they received, and they received plenty of comments about abortion. And even if they could have just omitted the abortion section, all that really does is kick the can down the road for when a court actually has to decide the matter, and it's unlikely that any but the staunchest anti-abortion judge would rule that abortions aren't related to pregnancy.

But that's all irrelevant because it's unlikely that this rule (or lack thereof) would ever result in litigation. The rules pretty clearly state that the effect of this guidance is that an employer is required to give a woman leave (paid or unpaid) to receive an abortion. While this seems like raw culture war bait, the reality is that, excepting for circumstances where someone is trying to rub it in an employer's face, no one is specifically asking for time off to get an abortion. I've personally never had an employer ask about the nature of any medical procedure I've taken time off to get, or had them ask me which doctor I was going to, and if a doctor's excuse is required, I doubt many employers are going to do internet research to determine if this is a doctor who exclusively performs abortions. Employers generally aren't allowed to ask employees about medical conditions that aren't work-related, except to verify leave, although as long as a doctor confirms that the absence is for a medical reason they can't really inquire further. And I doubt they would, since hunting for people who are getting abortions means, practically speaking, that they'd have to investigate every employee's medical leave, which I doubt any really want to do. There may be some unlikely confluence of factors where this could become a real issue, but I doubt it. Most women seeking abortions aren't going to tell their employers that they need time off specifically to get one.

If Republicans felt that strongly of this, they would have sought to get specific language into the bill. They didn't, and complaining about this is just them getting hoisted by their own petard given the electoral consequences involved.

FFLs When the entire point of specific statutory language is to expand a definition, you can't complain too loudly when that definition gets expanded. If you had sole rulemaking authority with regards to this, how would you expand the definition to conform with the new law without simply restating the old definition? I'm sure you can think of a dozen ways that this could be done, but that's beside the point. The point is that someone has to come up with these definitions and they have to conform with the statutory language without being overbroad. But that's tricky. The problem here is that there are two basic categories that are uncontroversial. One is the people who are actually running gun stores who need FFLs for legitimate business purposes. The other is people who simply have a gun they don't want anymore and want to sell it. But there's a third category of people we've talked about before who the government really doesn't like — people who want to sell guns part-time or as a hobby. You mentioned in a previous post how the ATF no longer will issue FFLs for hobbyists. You can disagree with that stance all you want, but it seems to me that Congress agrees with that and that was the specific intent behind the change in language. Now it's up to the ATF to flesh out that definition to cover the myriad circumstances in which someone might be selling guns "for profit". And that's hard! The problem as I see it doesn't stem so much from the law itself or ATF's interpretation of it but that there is a group of people for whom any further restrictions on gun sales is bad and needs to be stopped. They simply aren't arguing that the law was a good idea but ATF bungled the implementation; they're arguing that the law was a bad idea to begin with and using the ATF's interpretation as proof. But those are two separate arguments.

FACE Act It's telling that this law has only become controversial in recent years, after the Biden Administration used it aggressively in the wake of Dobbs. For the first 30 or so years of its existence, the fact that it was never used in cases of church vandalism was never an issue. At least not enough of an issue for 2 Republican presidents to invoke it in 12 years, one of whom was devoutly religious and the other of whom was devoutly into culture warring. It's also telling that the act also allows for private enforcement via a civil cause of action that few parties seem bothered to sue under. That being said, anti-abortion protestors necessarily do most of their work when the place is open and in full view of the public. Most of the church vandalism was done at night by people who actually disguised themselves. One type of crime is much easier to investigate than the other.

Of course, that doesn't really apply to the Nota case, because the perpetrator was caught in the act. But it doesn't compare to the Houck case, at least if you actually look at the procedural posture. The information in the Nota case was filed the day before the plea was entered. This itself was several months after the incident. What this suggests was that this was already a done deal by the time it was even on the court's docket; for all we know, the prosecutor could have threatened to throw the book at Nota before offering a misdemeanor charge and a sentencing recommendation as a lifeline. Houck, on the other hand, was found not guilty by a jury. For all we know he could have been offered the same deal as Nota but turned it down; I'd be surprised to say the least, if there was no deal offered at all.

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Glassnoser 2hr ago

That's not true. There was a debate in the US over even including the bill of rights because those rights were considered to already exist and it was worried that including it would imply rights not listed did not exist.

In Canada, our Charter of Rights explicitly lists "freedom of expression", but there was also a law passed earlier recognizing an already existing "freedom of speech" and there are court rulings stating that this already existed as a quasi-constitutional right emerging from English common law.

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faul_sname Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science. 2hr ago

I present to you: nobody.

... I see a lot of you arguing that The_Nybbler believes that giving an inch here is a bad idea because they think that a tiny regulation will directly kill innovation, while The_Nybbler is arguing that there's no particular reason for the regulators who introduced this legislation to stop at only implementing useful regulations that pass cost-benefit analysis, and that the other industries we see do seem to have vastly overreaching regulators, and so a naive cost-benefit analysis on a marginal regulation which does not factor in the likely-much-larger second-order effects is useless (though @The_Nybbler do correct me if I'm wrong about this, and you think introducing regulation would be bad even if the first-order effects of regulation were positive and there was some actually-credible way of ensuring that the scope of the regulation was strictly limited).

Honestly I think both of you could stand to focus a bit more on explaining your own positions and less on arguing against what you believe the other means, because as it stands it looks to me like a bunch of statements about what the other person believes, like "you argue that the first-order effects of the most defensible part of this regulation are bad, but you can't support that" / "well you want to turn software into an over-regulated morass similar to what aerospace / pharma / construction have become".

IMO, it shows that you misunderstand how these things work. They're not saying "secure against a nation state decapping your chip". They actually refer to ways that persistent storage can be generally regarded as secure, even if you can imagine an extreme case.

Quoting the examples:

Example 1: The root keys involved in authorization and access to licensed radio frequencies (e.g. LTE-m cellular access) are stored in a UICC.

Ok, fair enough, I can see why you would want to prevent users from accessing these particular secrets on the device they own (because, in a sense, they don't own this particular bit). Though I contend that the main "security" benefit of these is fear of being legally slapped around under CFAA.

Example 2: A remote controlled door-lock using a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) to store and access the sensitive security parameters.

Seems kinda pointless. If an attacker can read the flash storage on your door lock, presumably that means they've already managed to detach the door lock from your door, and can just enter your house. And if a remote attacker has the ability to read the flash storage because they have gained the ability to execute arbitrary code, they can presumably just directly send the outputs which unlock the door without mucking about with the secrets at all.

Example 3: A wireless thermostat stores the credentials for the wireless network in a tamper protected microcontroller rather than in external flash storage.

What's the threat model we're mitigating here, such that the benefit of mitigating that threat is worth the monetary and complexity cost of requiring an extra component on e.g. every single adjustable-color light bulb sold?

H-what? What are you even talking about? This doesn't even make any sense. The standard problem here is that lots of devices have debug interfaces that are supposed to only be used by the manufacturer (you would know this if you read the definitions section), yet many products are getting shipped in a state where anyone can just plug in and do whatever they want to the device. This is just saying to not be a retard and shut it off if it's not meant to be used by the user.

On examination, I misread, and you are correct about what the documents says.

That said, the correct reading then seems to be "users should not be able to debug, diagnose problems with, or repair their own devices which they have physical access to, and which they bought with their own money." That seems worse, not better. What's the threat model this is supposed to be defending against? Is this a good way of defending against this threat model?

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Primaprimaprima Bigfoot is an interdimensional being 2hr ago

self-driving cars are essentially banned.

I don't see why that's a problem, to be honest.

There has to be some sort of consequence for the manufacturer when self-driving cars cause an accident, same as how human drivers pay fines or go to jail. What's your preferred liability structure?

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RandomRanger Just build nuclear plants! 2hr ago

In Australia tax bills are itemized in proportion to the budget, they give you a little chart that shows where all your money is going. I didn't even know we still did 'industry assistance' but we do. All the little fish would be put down in 'other' though.

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Dean 2hr ago

I would disagree with your conclusion, and affirm your opening question. I think the variations you see do exist, as Putin runs a personalist system and so his personal foilables show themselves (including his desire for historical reputation, his propensity for aggression when he perceives it as a safe i.e. easy win), but there is a distinction between someone who is pursuing a strategy badly (Putin is, I have asserted for many a year, strategically inept), versus not having a strategy at all.

Putin is in many respects incompetent at various strategic factors, but that's a matter of capability, not intent.

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100ProofTollBooth 2hr ago

And this is why anyone who starts their own business and, therefore, has to file quarterly immediately starts hollering "taxes are too damn high!" .... and then you also start paying self-employment tax.

Show me a person who:

Owns their own business (and, relatedly, pays for their own healthcare)
Has children as dependents
Owns their home

And I will show you someone who wants to vote for a conservative with their mind and wallet, but may let their heart and social signaling sway them to voting for a liberal.

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100ProofTollBooth 2hr ago

I FEAR NOTHING.

I believe the odds of the State artificially and outlandishly prosecuting me for something like self-defense or free expression go up when in blue states. Especially if the news cycle is just right.

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100ProofTollBooth 2hr ago

My community’s source in the DHS tells us that this plan failed because the agents just kept going native.

"This Jesus feller's got a few good goddamn points! Oh - sorry"

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The_Nybbler Does not have a yacht 2hr ago

Liability also doesn't come into play until the suit is underway.

The expenses start immediately.

And yes, I predict that if actual self-driving cars become more common, either we will see limits on liability or the companies will be driven out of the market or out of business.

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Celestial-body-NOS 🟦 For more information please reread this post 2hr ago

On the other hand, if the tax bill were itemised in proportion to the Federal budget, it might be harder for certain demagogues to get people angry about a government program that costs them ⅒¢....

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guajalote 2hr ago · Edited 2hr ago

Liability also doesn't come into play until the suit is underway. It's trivially true that anyone can file suit for anything, but the plaintiff isn't going to recover any money unless they have evidence of causation and damages.

Also, my thought experiment notwithstanding, it's already totally possible to sue self-driving car manufacturers for causing accidents, yet these companies are not only in business but doing better than ever.

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The_Nybbler Does not have a yacht 3hr ago

Unfortunately, if manufacturers of self-driving cars can be sued for all accidents in which self-driving cars are involved (the "caused" part doesn't come into play until the lawsuit is underway), self-driving cars are essentially banned. The cost of covering that liability is staggering.

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guajalote 3hr ago

Anything that expands the scope of things that one individual can sue another for is laundering costs.

This statement is often not true. Lawsuits are often a more efficient and transparent way of allocating costs.

Let's say society is worried about accidents caused by self-driving cars and wants to allocate some amount of resources to fixing the problem. There are two straightforward ways to structure the resource allocation:

Pass a law specifying that victims of accidents caused by self-driving cars can sue the manufacturer for damages, or;
Pass a set of safety regulations that self driving car companies have to comply with, and if a compliant self-driving car nevertheless causes an accident, the government compensates the victim.

In scenario 1 we are causing the cost of accidents to be carried by the car company, who is in the best position to figure out how to prevent accidents. So we have given them a monetary incentive to devote a rational amount of resources to fixing or improving the problem. This is the opposite of a reverse lottery because the car company is in the best position out of anyone to try to predict and prevent accidents.

Scenario 2 creates a situation where car companies are only encouraged to comply with regulations, rather than try to figure out the best way to prevent accidents. The regulator is in a much worse position to know what regulations will actually be effective at preventing accidents, and the regulator has no direct monetary incentive to care about preventing accidents. Simultaneously, they also have no monetary incentive to care about over-preventing accidents either. So we will almost necessarily get an inefficient set of regulations that devote an incorrect amount of resources to the problem.

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SubstantialFrivolity I'm not even supposed to be here today 3hr ago

It's weird to have one person do it, let alone more than one.

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hydroacetylene 3hr ago

You can own a weapon. Attitudes towards recreational drug use are far more liberal. You have less concern over police brutality and the justice system needs a warrant to surveil you. You have far greater freedom of speech. You can hire and fire notionally who you please, and it’s easier to get a job because of it too. Religious freedom laws are much more comprehensive. If you are a parent, you are allowed much more latitude in deciding what is best for your child, even if not in agreement with the government.

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KMC 3hr ago

The most famous and most 'successful' shrouding of costs related to government is tax withholding. If people had to actually pay their tax bill all at once, they would be pissed, but by withholding throughout the year, and then returning the amount that was too much, people feel like they're getting paid to do their taxes, instead of being robbed slightly less.

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ControlsFreak 3hr ago

Nobody is arguing

I present to you: nobody.

The argument is, instead, that adding a regulation increases the chance that we will slide down that slippery slope.

This is a vastly better argument, but one that wouldn't allow us to then simply reject any continued discussion, just because we've 'declared' slippery slope and observed that we're epsilon on it. For example, one might ask about the underlying reason for why it increases the chance that we will slide down it? The answer could take many forms, which may be more or less convincing for whether it does, indeed, increase the chance. See here for some examples, and feel free to click through for any specific sub-topics.

Section 5.4.1, "sensitive security parameters in persistent storage shall be stored securely by the device," seems a bit more likely to be a costly provision, and IMO one that misunderstands how hardware security works (there is no such thing as robust security against an attacker with physical access).

IMO, it shows that you misunderstand how these things work. They're not saying "secure against a nation state decapping your chip". They actually refer to ways that persistent storage can be generally regarded as secure, even if you can imagine an extreme case. To be honest, this is a clear sign that you've drunk the tech press kool aid and are pretty out in whacko land from where most serious tech experts are on this issue. Like, they literally tell you what standards are acceptable; it doesn't make any sense to concoct an argument for why it's AKSHUALLY impossible to satisfy the requirement.

And then there's perplexing stuff like 5.6.4 "where a debug interface is physically accessible, it shall be disabled in software.". Does this mean if you sell a color-changing light bulb, and the bulb has a usbc port, you're not allowed to expose logs across the network and instead have to expose them only over the usbc port?

H-what? What are you even talking about? This doesn't even make any sense. The standard problem here is that lots of devices have debug interfaces that are supposed to only be used by the manufacturer (you would know this if you read the definitions section), yet many products are getting shipped in a state where anyone can just plug in and do whatever they want to the device. This is just saying to not be a retard and shut it off if it's not meant to be used by the user.

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FCfromSSC Nuclear levels of sour 4hr ago · Edited 3hr ago

But I think it's also good to minimize governing by the elastic clause as much as possible.

I'd agree with that. But suppose we want to allow people to respond to warnings, even to push back on them and explain why they think they're in the right, but we don't want people to outright defy warnings.

"respond", "pushback", and "defy" are all subjective terms. If we nail down a definition for them, we can just recapitulate this conversation again, about whether or not people were "defiant", or merely "pushing back".

If a mod says "you are breaking the rules, stop it," and the reply is "You aren't the boss of me, I'm gonna keep doing it", I don't think most people are surprised if the response is "okay, we'll cut to the chase and just give you a ban then." That doesn't seem to require a lot of elasticity. We give warnings because we want people to modify their behavior without having to ban them. We give limited-duration bans because we want people to modify their behavior without perma-banning them. If someone straight-up tells us that they aren't modifying their behavior based on the current response, escalation seems like a reasonable alternative.

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cae_jones 4hr ago

So typical that reading this comment made me go "wait, it's not like that in Europe?" For a country whose selling point has supposedly always been freedom, I had so little that, when that technically changed after high school, it was like one of those wild animals bred in captivity with no concept of how to live in the wild. The most freedom I got was on that one high school band trip to Universal Studios Orlando, in which I was the goody two-shoes stopping my 16-17 year-old companions from trying to order alcohol from a restaurant that seemed more than willing to believe that the tall guy in the group was actually 21.

... Wait, what freedoms do I have that Europeans lack? I guess I could get a weapon if I wanted?

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erwgv3g34 4hr ago

Not really; girls love drug dealers.

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Gillitrut Reading from the golden book under bright red stars 4hr ago

I mean, I think the regime you describe for the ADA satisfies all of the 1-3 points you propose for basic things you agree on, though perhaps not in a manner you like.

There is an unlimited number of things people might want to "fix" about our society, but a limited amount of resources to spend fixing such things.

Of course. The ADA, and many similar pieces of legislation, contain explicit limits on what is to be covered and who must (or may not) provide accommodation under the Act.

There should be a way to determine how many resources we want to spend fixing a particular problem.

We do this with the ADA, and many similar laws, via a combination of the private market and our adversarial justice system. Businesses talk to consultants and experts to understand what they need to do to be in compliance. Sometimes people think they're wrong about whether they are and get sued. Then a jury of their peers is going to be responsible for figuring out whether they were in compliance and how much they harmed the plaintiff if they weren't.

This process may not come up with some obvious fixed-in-advance dollar amount but it seems a very common way of determining how much "we" should spend fixing a particular problem.

Paying to fix the problems should be done in a fair and above board way. (i.e. reverse lotteries where you randomly get fucked over are bad).

Of course. The Act describes who is covered and what accommodations those covered need to make. If anyone is alleged to be in violation theirs a public judicial process to determine if they are. Characterizing this as a "reverse lottery" is absurd. Lots of businesses (probably most) manage to go without being sued under the ADA or similar laws. Who wins and loses is not random either, unless you think the outcomes of jury trials are random. In which case there's this whole thing called "the criminal law" that should be much more concerning.

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cae_jones 4hr ago

American, fwiw, but elementary was without exaggeration the best period of my life and not a day goes by that I don't grieve its being in the ever-more-distant past. Most of the negative things I could say about the experience come from the benefit of hindsight, ex, I got away with far more than I should have, but conversely wasn't well included or socialized and was one weird hat away from being the class Luna Lovegood.

But, regarding peers, teachers, and family, and what roles they played? I am struggling to come up with a meaningful description. It wasn't until I was 11 that I actually picked up any grievances toward teachers (mostly just one cranky old math teacher who was probably just getting too old to put up with my bullcrap). The most stressful year was probably grade 4 (age 9), mostly because homework went from "I guess that counts as homework" to "when did finishing a chapter and several dozen math problems become a Herculean labor of focus?". Also I thinkt's the year my backpack ripped from all the books and papers I had to carry around.

7th-8th grades and high school ... weren't as miserable as college, but very little short of watching loved ones die has been as miserable as college, so not a high bar. Mostly, the majority of what made elementary great was replaced with having to listen to tryhard teenagers call everything gay / skanky, trying to actively resist the cultureshift resulting in getting sent off to summer camp, so I just gave up and avoided people for the rest of hs. I got into the state's math and science school for the last two years, and that was a huge improvement, though by then my sleep cycle was all out of whack and I had been able to half-ass everything to the point that I had like no study skills, so I kinda oscillated between successfully half-assing and getting destroyed until I somehow graduated on time (basically one of two non-terrible days that year), only for things to immediately get far worse thereafter.

SO basically, the polar opposite of what seems to be the norm, from the general vibes I've gotten from online discussions. Each phase was worse than its predecessor by quite a lot. It was usually because of a change in peer behavior most of all, but also me never having to learn how to try until I got to college, and discovered that absolutely nobody had the vocabulary to talk about soul-crushing akrasia or the neurological underpinnings and everyone just going on about choice and distraction and other irrelevant concepts. But mostly the alienation only started around age 12-13, kinda backed off a bit in high school, then came back with avengance when college began. Teachers were mostly fine. Parents were mostly fine. Peers were fine until they got to the age where they had to start signalling how mature they were by immaturely sexualizing absolutely everything, usually insultingly, like that would prove how totally not the thing they were saying they were.

I'm going to go imagine going back in time and yelling at 11-year-old me with all the hindsight-powered "how to be better" type wisdom I can unfairly foist onto an obnoxious 11-year-old again. 😔

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faul_sname Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science. 4hr ago

I think it's good old issue #594 back from the dead.

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Skibboleth 4hr ago

Catch-all pejorative for political opponents is actually the standard usage.

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