> I've thought a lot about what happens to Christianity if you discard the writings of Paul.
Without Paul, Christianity reverts to being a variety of Judaism whose leader from the hinterlands got it right about what really mattered in life, as had his predecessors [0]. But he fatally misjudged the big city's religious oligarchs — vassals to their ruthless Roman occupiers — when he relentlessly attacked them and their cozy little setup; at their behest, he was executed by the Roman overlords.
Some [1] of the leader's later followers — his posse, if you will — imagined they'd seen him. But the leader's wealthy and/or well-connected followers are strangely absent from the narrative. Perhaps they had more information about what had really happened [2].
The early postmortem appearance tales eventually mutated into a legend of a warrior-king, raised from the dead — who would return Real Soon Now, to usher in God's reign and establish Israel's rightful place in Creation [3].
Over decades, the tales percolated into Mediterranean Graeco-Roman culture — eventually mutating further still into a tale of a divine being [4] (perhaps hybridized with that culture's myths?).
> Why isn’t [sic] tariffs within the “emanations from penumbras” of the president’s foreign policy powers?
Says the consistent mocker of Justice Douglas's use of the quoted phrase to support privacy rights. It seems you'd like to have your cake and eat it too.
> People are voting for what kind of ideas their children are socialized into, which is one of the fundamental rights as a parent.
Wait, I thought you were all about how Western society has gone too far in the direction of individual rights?
And assuming your "fundamental rights as a parent" premise (purely for the sake of argument): The rest of us have a pretty-compelling interest in how each other's kids — our future fellow adults — are being raised.
I agree the community has a strong interest in how children are socialized. That’s exactly what’s happening here: Florida voters have exercised their power over government schools to vindicate the community’s right to decide how children should be socialized.
You’re also proving my point about why it’s so critical to strictly control who is allowed into your community. Once people are allowed into the community, they get to participate in deciding how the community collectively socializes children. That means communities have a strong interest in excluding people who aren’t like minded.
> You’re also proving my point about why it’s so critical to strictly control who is allowed into your community.
"Strictly control[led]" is a line-drawing function — and needs to remember that life is a movie, not a snapshot, and so patience is needed. EDIT: Growing a society seems not unlike raising children: Society needs kids to grow into adults, and sometimes that means gritting your teeth and being patient ....
Example: Many of my own immigrant ancestors, those on the non-Aryan branches of our family tree, probably wouldn't have been let in under today's MAGA criteria. (Even my German-immigrant ancestors faced hostility from the "real Americans.") Yet each successive generation in this country has done just a bit better, thank you very much.
Example: In this morning's home-delivery Times, Cardinal Dolan is quoted as recalling about the decades-long progress of the Irish migration to America — who were definitely considered ubermenschen by many American nativists of the time:
<quote>
“He [19th-century Archbishop John Hughes] was frustrated about raising money,” remarked [Cardinal] Dolan, who wore Hughes’ pectoral cross on a cord around his neck as he described the new artistic addition. “He said, ‘This cathedral will be built on the pennies of immigrants.’”
Dolan noted that by contrast, raising $3 million to underwrite the creation, installation, lighting and conservation of the Cvijanovic mural took less than a day — paid for, he added with a chuckle, by “the big checks of the grandchildren of the immigrants.”
</quote>
(Emphasis and extra paragraphing added; my first-generation Irish-American grandmother told of seeing signs here and there: No Irish need apply.)
Even so, I feel that much of the point of writing things down in the first place is to put the information into the mind (where the subconscious mind can work with it and do its jobs) and, ultimately, so you won't need to be reminded about it later.
FTA: "The new fee would be a much more exorbitant cost for some patent holders that would function like a property tax."
I've long thought that'd be a good idea: The government practically gives away these legal monopolies — but really, they're like hunting licenses, allowing patent holders to try to levy (what amount to) taxes that are paid indirectly by the public. So it doesn't seem unreasonable that the public should get its cut.
Yes, sometimes a patent holder really is providing a benefit to the public in exchange — but not always.
> This is a reward for taking risk in R&D and for sharing the result with the public via patent disclosures, not a tax.
You say potato .... The "reward for risk-taking and sharing knowledge" is a nice story, and sometimes it even matches the reality. But all too often it's a malign fantasy. That's especially true given that it's been a long time since patent filings were a significant channel for disseminating new knowledge. (How often do people look up patent filings when researching how to do something?)
Source: In an earlier career phase, I was a partner in one of the U.S.'s biggest IP-litigation boutique law firms. I spent a good deal of my time representing tech companies you've definitely heard of, busting bullshit patents that were being asserted against them by people who naively imagined — or cynically insisted — that they'd come up with Something Really Great and had their hands out looking for a huge, undeserved payday. "Nice little business you have there — it'd be a pity if a court granted a permanent injunction that put you out of business."
The incentives and legal structure are all in favor of filing patent applications on everything you can think of and seeing what you can wheedle out of an overworked patent examiner — then after your patent is issued, you go hunting to see what you can get from companies in the way of settlement deals to pay you to go away. By no means are all patents this way, but it happens often enough to be a problem.
That's why Congress passed legislation such as the amendment establishing "IPRs," inter partes reviews. Those are essentially a way to have a three-judge panel within the USPTO take a fresh look at a challenged patent's validity. They're contested proceedings where the challenger gets to introduce evidence and make arguments.
And so... how does a property tax fix any of what you're describing? If it's a bullshit patent that's not being deployed to the market, it can't possibly be very valuable, ergo will have no carrying cost. Only the patents that are deployed to the market and valuable will have high carrying costs.
> But all too often it's a malign fantasy.
All too often to severely destroy the incentive to invent new drugs? Yeah, gonna need a better source than your intuition as a patent lawyer to substantiate that.
> Only the patents that are deployed to the market and valuable will have high carrying costs.
You're assuming that "deployed to the market" means "actually making things that people want." That's sometimes the case, but far from always.
You're probably familiar with the term "non-practicing entities" in the patent world. (They go by other names as well.) Some NPEs are entirely legitimate, e.g., universities and other major research centers that actually do research and discover useful things. Other NPEs, though, are more-vulgarly but aptly known as "patent trolls."
A patent definitionally only has market value (i.e. a value to be taxed) if it's something people want.
Right, I'm aware there's a spectrum from bullshit patent owners to non-bullshit patent owners. Why would you write a tax code to punish the latter while doing effectively nothing to the former?
You're fixating on the existence of bullshit patents which no one disputes. The question is whether this policy is a sensible way to address that, and you continue not to substantiate (or even articulate) any of your disposition toward that.
How about "to give the public a cut of the economic rents — i.e., private taxes — that the public is allowing you to extract from the market, which you get from your legal monopoly that lets you block competitors from copying you"?
Would that be an exercise of raw political power? Yup.
(The older I've gotten, the more I've drifted into the camp of the folks who think that society was better off when we had top marginal tax rates in the 80% to 90% range: Back then, your salary, your bank balance, and your yacht size weren't the most important metrics with which to measure your success in life. That's because, once you hit a certain compensation level, the government took most of the incremental increases. Innovators and business execs weren't notably less motivated back then.)
Or how about this: After an initial period of low taxation, we should heavily tax all patents. The idea would be to encourage owners of low-value patents to let them expire early for failure to pay the increased taxes. That would allow independent reinventors (of whom there are many) and copiers to do their own thing without having to worry that, if they make it big, the owner of a zombie patent won't suddenly appear with their hand out, demanding a cut. (Believe me, that happens.) That's kind of how patent "maintenance fees" are supposed to work now, but the amounts involved are utterly trivial and should be dramatically increased.
Yes, I know ALL about the economic rationale for having a patent system to mitigate the free-rider problem that discourages innovation. I also know all about how people work very hard to game the system. They're aided and abetted by patent lawyers who fervently believe in patents — and who of course want the paying work. (I knew an old-time patent lawyer, now long dead, who would sometimes tell clients — only half-jokingly — "If you paint it purple, I can probably get you a patent on it.")
Sure, the model that you propose here sounds a lot better than the one being proposed by the current administration.
It seemed like you were suggesting that a property tax (which does not function how you just described) was a good idea, based on your initial comment which called it a good idea.
It’s an accepted principle that unclear legislative text is best interpreted by reference to sources closer in time to the enactment of the legislation.
> It’s an accepted principle that unclear legislative text is best interpreted by reference to sources closer in time to the enactment of the legislation.
I've come to think that this is a dangerous hybrid of (a) bibliolatry — the idolization of a written text [0]; and (b) the Nuremburg Defense of "just following orders" [1], with the orders here being the aforementioned written text.
What follows is a crude and incomplete attempt at "thinking by writing" about another possible perspective that might be more effective than the balls-and-strikes approach that Chief Justice Roberts supposedly follows:
A. Historically, in medieval England a judge was an agent of the king [2], charged with deciding specific cases as he thought the king would do.
B. In the modern United States, the people are said to be sovereign, acting through their elected- and duly-appointed representatives (legislative and otherwise).
C. A legitimate sovereign seeks "the best" for the society in the long term — with limits on what harms can be inflicted on individuals in that pursuit. (Cf. John Rawls's A Theory of Justice, as partly manifested in the Bill of Rights and other constitutional provisions.)
D. When an extant command from the sovereign — in legislation or constitution — is clear and explicit, then the judge must follow the command (or resign if in conscience she can't comply).
E. But when there's room for different views about just what the sovereign would do at that time and in those circumstances, then the judge — well, judges, making a best guess about what the sovereign would do.
F. Yes, this has elements of a court of equity. It also draws on supremely-pragmatic doctrine from the U.S. military: When a tactical situation isn't covered by specific orders, the leader on the ground is supposed to make a best guess about "the commander's intent" and proceed accordingly. [3]
G. Certainly a judge making such a guess must take into account any available evidence about what the sovereign's intent might be if the sovereign were on the scene.
H. But it's an abdication of responsibility for the judge to throw up her hands and say, I'm sorry, even though the sovereign isn't here today, I'm not allowed to rely on my judgment about what the sovereign would do — instead, I must try to read entrails left over from legislative sausage-making by long-dead legislators who likely didn't consider (or even imagine) everything that I must take into account today.
I. To be sure, this can be calumnized as judicial legislating. But it seems like a pragmatic way to go about judging hard cases in a complex world.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_justice. In the framework I'm proposing above, today's judges, unlike their medieval counterparts, aren't given a roving commission to seek out cases and "do justice."
Readwise.io FTW. Saves all kinds of online stuff. The iPhone & iPad apps sync seamlessly and have quite-good text-to-speech recognition for most of it — which is great for listening to longer articles in the car / at the gym. I've got the paid version.
+1 for Readwise. I moved to their Reader app from Pocket long ago and never looked back. The app goes from strength to strength and the Readwise team also does a great job engaging with users.
Parts of this are excellent. I teach a contract-drafting course for 2L and 3L law students. Some aren't good writers. When I mark up their work, I can provide them with links to specific points in the RH guide.
Some parts aren't so great. Example:
> EXAMPLE[:] Remote users can connect to network resources simply by authenticating to their local machine. IMPROVEMENT[:] Remote users can connect to network resources by authenticating to their local machine.
It's not at all obvious that you improve the sentence by omitting "simply." You lose some compressed information: in this case, an implication that alternatives to local authentication might be more complex. This implication might be significant, to some readers and certainly to the writer.
I refuse to use the word "simple" in my docs writing for this precise reason. I have come to view the word to seem condescending/elitist, even if that's not the intent.
If something is written as simple, but I as an entrant to something view it as not simple, I'm going to be severely discouraged - "if this is the simple thing, what is the hard thing?"
Same in spoken word; I don't know if this is a regional (western European, expat-English) thing, but a lot of people will interspers their spoken sentences with "basically" and "actually" a lot. It's gratuitous and more of a verbal tic than something that adds to their sentence.
But maybe I'm overthinking it too much. I prefer reading.
Depending on where the emphasis is (which there is none in written form), it could be read as:
"How to connect to network resources simply? By authenticating to their local machine" (which I think is how you interpreted it)
or "How to connect to network resources? Simply by authenticating to their local machine" (which I think is what was meant)
The ambiguity itself is a good enough reason to not use this form. If the former was meant, say "the simplest way to connect to network resources is ...", otherwise just drop the "simply" as suggested
Without Paul, Christianity reverts to being a variety of Judaism whose leader from the hinterlands got it right about what really mattered in life, as had his predecessors [0]. But he fatally misjudged the big city's religious oligarchs — vassals to their ruthless Roman occupiers — when he relentlessly attacked them and their cozy little setup; at their behest, he was executed by the Roman overlords.
Some [1] of the leader's later followers — his posse, if you will — imagined they'd seen him. But the leader's wealthy and/or well-connected followers are strangely absent from the narrative. Perhaps they had more information about what had really happened [2].
The early postmortem appearance tales eventually mutated into a legend of a warrior-king, raised from the dead — who would return Real Soon Now, to usher in God's reign and establish Israel's rightful place in Creation [3].
Over decades, the tales percolated into Mediterranean Graeco-Roman culture — eventually mutating further still into a tale of a divine being [4] (perhaps hybridized with that culture's myths?).
Some self-cites:
[0] https://www.questioningchristian.org/2006/06/metanarratives_...
[1] https://www.questioningchristian.org/2004/10/troubling_incon...
[2] https://www.questioningchristian.org/2005/10/the_empty_tomb_...
[3] https://www.questioningchristian.org/2006/04/what_did_messia...
[4] https://www.questioningchristian.org/2005/11/jesus_is_lord_d...
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