I've been hearing nothing but bad things about the actual education in US institutions. I think they've tarnished their name at this point to no return.
I don't get the fetish of making people (or things) pay taxes more and more.
The government wants us to focus on who should pay more taxes, but I think we owe it to ourselves to spend 600 comments on HOW OUR FUCKING TAXES SHOULD BE SPENT!
Great so now AI will give the government 800 million dollars per year to do what, build non-existent homeless shelters in LA?
It is weird to me that we got to a point where we are being literal about the law again, instead of the spirit.
I guess laws should no longer say:
A license plate should be attached to a car.
Instead it should say:
All vehicles that don't display their license plate for cameras of any kind are illegal, the spirit of this law is to make it so we can identify through the number assigned to the vehicle from the state that identifies it is obvious if a picture is taken of the vehicle from the front or the back.
Better yet, judges and legal experts should just stop playing these games with words and figure out a new way to make things that are supposed to be legal, legal.
> It is weird to me that we got to a point where we are being literal about the law again, instead of the spirit.
The "spirit" of any law requiring license plates on vehicles is that the license plate can be read under normal conditions. The letter of the law may have been more generic, although many countries define very precisely everything about the plate, its condition and legibility. So demanding visible plates is exactly in the spirit of the law. What's the point of a license plate that nobody can read?
People exploited the letter of the law by having a license that was illegible somehow. Covered, faded writing, flipped under the motorcycle seat, etc.
> vehicles that don't display their license plate for cameras of any kind are illegal
License plates predate traffic cameras and the requirement for readable plates has been in force in many countries since for almost all that time. The license needs to be visible first and foremost so humans can easily identify a car. It can be police or a witness when someone runs you over.
Cameras automate this so they make abuse far easier. But the need was always there for various legitimate reasons.
Almost no law would survive if everyone was allowed to just take some literal interpretation of their own choice. The attitude that "well technically the law says" is usually shot down by any judge for good reason. Someone could have a lot of fun with your right to "bear arms".
License plates have always been required to be legible; that's the whole point. Obscuring them is clearly against the spirit of the law, whether or not that particular method is specifically codified.
> All vehicles that don't display their license plate for cameras of any kind are illegal, the spirit of this law is to make it so we can identify through the number assigned to the vehicle from the state that identifies it is obvious if a picture is taken of the vehicle from the front or the back.
Quarter inch high license plates are now legal. It’s hardly the motorist’s fault if the camera is too low resolution :)
Regular license plates are illegal, because they’re unreadable to a type of camera - thermal cameras :)
No, no, you can't get away with saying "calling what we have now "capitalism" is quite a stretch, the meaning of that word is now so vague as to render it meaningless"
This is just simply not true. There are too many young people that want to be lawyers or ivory tower word architects, but the time for "winning arguments" because you're narrative is to make people believe untrue things, just does not work anymore.
"Capitalism" was a word coined by its critics just a few years before Marx wrote Das Kapital. People who actually like Capitalism tend to resist drawing some boundary around it and would rather have it be that thing that Maggie Thatcher and Angela Merkel and Hillary Clinton say "there is no alternative" to. In particularly they are loathe to even say it might be something that has some good aspects and some bad aspects and refusing to define it is necessary to keep that game going.
In particular it's hard to draw a line between many "communist" countries and capitalism. I mean, Stalin's great legacy was very rapid industrialization and technology development from 1920-1970 or so which was initially funded by starving farmers to buy machines from western industrialists to build factories. Post-Mao China has been out-capitalizing everybody else, which is the biggest problem people seem to have with them.
I'll argue that "capitalism" is about transforming society across time by deploying large amounts of capital so when somebody says "Facebook developed in a harmful direction because of capitalism" I'm going to argue that a system that wasn't fundamentally capitalist would never have made the investment to develop advanced microprocessors, the internet, social media, and all of that. You could have a different kind of capitalism which is kinder and gentler but if you didn't have capitalism you would not have 8 billion people on Earth because nobody would have made the investment to build all the fertilizer plants, etc.
First off, a great comment, I enjoyed reading it. Bringing some clearity to the meaning of "capitalism" is indeed a pressing necessity.
> I'll argue that "capitalism" is about transforming society across time by deploying large amounts of capital.
That definition of capitalism doesn't seem to clearly separate it from socialism though. If we combine it with this quote:
> Stalin's great legacy was very rapid industrialization and technology development ... Post-Mao China has been out-capitalizing everybody else
we reach the conclusion that capitalism can be practiced in socialists settings, indeed "deploying large amounts of capital" is quite normal for socialism. The only variables are the amount of capital available for deployment and the goals and professionalism of its managers.
So, the definition has to be augmented with something about the functioning of the market and the effects of that on distribution. I can't tell you what exactly because I don't burden myself with defining capitalism, or socialism for that matter, I view them more as points on a continuum, multiple points for each.
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