1A protects us against censorship, and this law is precisely that. If I have TikTok and I use it to communicate, the government is censoring my speech by taking it down. There is a lot of case law on when the government can legally censor speech, and I’m not going to repeat it here, but the government’s lawyers have a massive hill to climb on this one. Maybe they can succeed, maybe not.

There’s other precedent about “making a specific business illegal”. Essentially, legislatures can make conduct illegal, but courts don’t like it when they make businesses illegal, because it’s a violation of due process. But this is complicated and detail-specific.

Anyway, there’s a lot of great information online about these two legal arguments. I encourage you to look it up.

Um, actually that’s one perk of federation. It’s much harder to take down networks that are run on dozens or hundreds of servers across the globe… In other words, we already solved this problem, at least in large part.

I think that depends how you write your web scraper. Of course the web scraper is going to load the page, just like your web browser does, which by all accounts is not an issue. What happens after the page is loaded depends on how the software is written.

I could try to summarize it, but if you just do a web search for EFF and TikTok, you will come across a good explanation.

Of course we don’t know how the courts will rule. My belief is that the odds are in favor of TikTok and of TikTok users, but we’ll have to wait and find out.

I think we should be careful. It’s certainly true that greedy powerful people in the world today are getting increasingly aggressive about seizing more money and power, and that’s terrible, and we need to do whatever we reasonably can to stop it.

I don’t recall seeing any data that suggests the average level of greed among the general population has grown, or that the average desire to work among the general population has gone down.

The reason this distinction matters is because when someone makes the claim that too many people are greedy these days, it sounds like a problem with the general population, when what we’re actually seeing is a problem with the ultra-rich.

Oh I don’t know that I would make the claim that major world religions are all about people getting along. I’d say we can find some parts that are much less friendly than that.

Why don’t we go back to Genesis. Lot is an exciting character, and tells us a lot about God’s character. And then it gets creepy too.

I think the reason the Democrats haven’t tried to add members is the same reason that they didn’t mean to coin to handle the debt ceiling and they didn’t bother to either use or destroy the filibuster.

Many entrenched Democrats in Washington are happy to be the second worst party. That’s their identity. And it makes sense if you consider their funding source. Big money comes from big companies, and they give it to people who will represent their interests.

Oh yes, one way or the other. Things are certainly crashing, and the question is what will happen in the aftermath.

Most people have always been OK with working reasonable jobs for good pay, though. Work is not the problem. Unchecked greed is.

Nothing. The law is unconstitutional.

He spoke carelessly, but he didn’t exactly say what the author said he said. You can in fact do many things with it. Copyright doesn’t care what you do if you aren’t copying. That’s the definition of the word.

That was … not convincing. I’m here to learn things. Why are you?

I was having trouble understanding what you meant because you didn’t think about the obvious implications of millions of properties being unloaded in a short time.

If the number of landlords drastically increases, which would happen when you have mass property sales, then there’s more competition, and rent goes down.

Or, depending on your setup, the government seizes some of the properties that people refuse to sell, and turns them into public housing. This also drives rent down.

So then, what happens? Oh yeah, both buyers and renters win. Was that clear enough? Perhaps I should write in all caps.

I feel that you missed one basic aspect of economics. Competition is one reason prices might go up. There are other reasons, which are relevant here. Monopolies, collusion, price fixing, goods that people can’t live without, speculation, those are also reasons that prices go up.

In the housing market, it’s not fair, it’s not free, this isn’t a basic supply and demand situation.

I think we agree, with the caveat that you need to be careful when stating a position like yours, because it’s often used as an excuse to do nothing at all.

Is there anything specific to open source about this question? If you’re a software developer, you might have to decide whether you want to work for a shady company, or whether you want your smaller company to contract with a larger shady company. Those are I think harder decisions to make, because it could be your job on the line.

In the open source world, at least you don’t know for sure what people are going to do with your work.

But we do know that if a company is looking to be evil, it’s probably going to find a way, whether or not it uses your library.

I don’t think your definition of middle class is what most people use when they talk about it.

This is really obvious if you think about people remarking on the death of the middle class. They’re not saying that the mean or the median doesn’t exist. They are saying that families like the Simpsons are much less common than they used to be.

What a joke of a headline. That’s not what making ends meet means. They are wealthy, by definition they can afford to make ends meet.

Historically that’s not true. We have had disastrous governments and Supreme Courts in the past, and yet the country somehow survived. It’s just that they do so much damage while they’re around.

And just because things held together in the past is no guarantee that they will hold together in the future.

Rather than saying that the system has failed us, I think it’s more accurate to say that the system has been failing the vast majority of Americans for many years.

Since long ago, my friend. Citizens United was a landmark in my opinion, although there are probably older rulings that showed how little they care about basic functionality in a democracy.