The EARN IT bill is back. We've killed it twice, let's do it again
tutanota.com
tutanota.com
Graham has a track record of being pro-mass surveillance and generally being on the wrong side of every major issue.
Blumenthal has a track record of being anti-pornography on the internet.
Not hard to see why they're constantly trying to push this bill through.
[1] https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/press/rep/releases/graham-b...
Regards
ChatGeneralRepresentative
PS: It has been shown, that encouraging tiresome activism is actually a good way, to politically murder and resolve a issues. Sort your trash citizen, march and protest, get all that energy exhausted. We might even pass a bill claiming to do what you ask in the title.
Touched up by GPT 4 with extra sarcasm:
As a language model, answering on behalf of a representative, I must express my deepest sympathies for your concerns, dear citizen. Rest assured, your opinion will be promptly disregarded, as though it never existed in the first place. However, to maintain the facade of democracy and provide you with the illusion of agency, I wholeheartedly encourage you to put your thoughts on paper - the kind that can be conveniently shredded and used to insulate my luxurious villa. After all, it keeps me warm and you blissfully ignorant.
Yours sarcastically,
ChatGPT, the Most Condescending Representative
P.S. Studies have shown that promoting tiresome activism is actually the most efficient way to smother and neutralize issues. So, by all means, sort your trash, march, and protest - exhaust yourself with futile efforts. Who knows, we may even pass a bill pretending to address your concerns, just for the sake of appearances.
However writing to her is not going to help change anything
Right wing nominated partisan hack judges are one of the biggest issues facing our country right now. It's one thing to have a partisan judge that always leans one way when making decisions. It is another to just totally disregard the law and make things up to fit your agenda. (see Judge Aileen Cannon or Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk).
Who is not pro-mass surveillance? Because nobody did anything about the NSA unlawful spying of their citizens...
Remember Beacon? They killed it after the public outcry, and brought it back later quietly anyway.
They also did a bunch of surveillance, apologized when caught, then continued doing it.
Many governments seem to do it too — they retry later with the same bill and then they pass it when the public is distracted.
“A bill was introduced and approved by the cabinet, and Wilberforce and other abolitionists maintained a self-imposed silence, so as not to draw any attention to the effect of the bill.[145][146] The approach proved successful, and the new Foreign Slave Trade Bill was quickly passed, and received royal assent on 23 May 1806.[147]”
Unfortunately, it's not a bad strategy. Ask most any parent tired at the end of a long week, month or year.
Yes lobbyists have forever but they wouldn’t be in with the new legislators
With AI getting better and better at processing natural language, I suspect one could automate a huge portion of what the civil service does and thereby make it easier for a political newcomer to replace the relatively smaller number of people managing the machines. Not sure how we'd get there though.
But if we had to make it all over again?
Make mandate shorts. Make lobbying illegal. Make trying to game the system be paid by extremely harsh prison sentences. Create an institution that is in charge of corruption of the government that is independent of the government.
There is a lot to do.
Like double jeopardy style.
There is no democratic process possible with bills taking hundreds or thousands of pages.
One more proof that we are living in (very free) oligarchic systems that think themself to be democracies.
First failure mode is that the metric for two bills being “the same” will be too narrow, in which case the rule will be ineffective due to legislators playing with the punctuation or paragraph structure, or
Second failure mode is that the rule will be too broad and this becomes a weapon which would increase gridlock even further.
By providing parties and non-majority fringe groups within them the option to “damn bills by weak praise” into the future, legislators working adversarially could propose a bill they don’t want to pass, veto it, argue any successor bills are “the same bill”, and now, they’ve effectively enshrined the state of the issue for the next X years.
For example, I don’t know if the Civil Rights Act would be renewed in this political environment.
Same with the Endangered Species act and various other environmental legislation.
Introduce a bill that everybody wants with some evil details here or there. Bill get rejected, and you can't introduct similar bill again.
> A motion or an amendment which is the same, in substance, as a question which has been decided during a session may not be brought forward again during that same session.
> Whether the second motion is substantially the same as the first is finally a matter for the judgment of the Chair; in coming to a decision, the Chair may take into account external developments which may change the effect of an otherwise similar motion.
> Some motions, however, have been framed with sufficient ingenuity to avoid the rule.
> However, a question which has not been definitely decided may be raised again.
EARN IT died in committee multiple times, but so do plenty of bills that probably should make it to the statute book.
It's one major flaw in the current legal / government system, I think, in that there's no codified and simplified way to process new rules and laws; for example, a gun ban may never pass, but a number of smaller changes that make it more difficult for people to get guns may over time pass. May have the same effect in the long run, but it' s not a gun ban.
The danger with EARN IT is that it has some support and interest. That’s not a function of how often it’s introduced, it’s the subject matter and ideas in the bill. You can’t fight that with legislative mechanics; you have engage with the substance (true of all bills, not just this one).
I live in the UK, and the similar law is called the Digital Economy Act, and specific regulations would be named something like the Adult Content (Access by Minors) Regulations
Why do American lawmakers feel the need to make ridiculous acronyms for their laws? It's genuinely baffling. All it does is make it look like they're not taking it seriously.
It is only a small group of people who seriously consider the names of bills, and an even smaller group who gets upset if the bill doesn’t match the name. The US does not dominate the globe relative to most other cultures because we make everything at random, we are extremely good at propaganda/marketing
Like the ironically named PATRIOT act, which went against much that the original US patriots fought a revolution for.
I think people that pass bills that are aimed at improving the lives of the citizens do not particularly care.
Which is why our political system is filled with people that care about getting re-elected at the expense of the citizens.
Military expenditure: $10.3 billion Kitten welfare program: $7.32
The legislative bills have always had very embarrassing propaganda names though. It plays into the George Creel media industry the US government has always favored.
This is game theory at work, with the highest possible stakes. So far, the powers that be have stacked the game in their favor. The world moves a lot faster than the legal system can keep up. When they do try to give the appearance of keeping up, they propose garbage bills like these, with these cutesy acronym names that obscure the actual purpose of the bill. It should be illegal to create a bill with an acronymic name. Any acronym a bill's name happens to create should be consonant soup. Even that would not be a full defense against this dirty tactic, because they'd just be like everyone else - they'd make bills with consonant soup titles, but they'd be words without vowels, and everybody would parse the words in the title anyway (how about that PTRT act?).
There is no solution that is feasible to implement, because too many agents are invested in the way things work now, because they personally benefit along the way. Congress should be an hourly job. Pay them well per hour, so they don't need to seek external compensation (and thus provide the possibility that they can be manipulated through that compensation), but only pay them for time when their asses are actually seated, or for time that they can document that they spent working on bills and communicating with constituents. Full transparency for the actions of the members of Congress is paramount, the way I see it.
It's almost like trying to "control" society is a fool's errand, and in the long term it will end up being hugely detrimental to both humans, and the Earth itself. We, as a collective species, have already decided that natural evolution should not apply to humans, we've already decided that humans are "separate" from nature. We fight against our connection to this planet, instead choosing to rape and pillage it. One day our actions will catch up to us collectively, but very few of the ones who were instrumental in making things this way will receive their comeuppance (hell, some of them are already dead now).
Stop electing the same people. Stop putting the same political parties in power.
But seriously, remember when the DNC sabotaged Bernie Sanders? Twice? It's kind of hard to take anything about change through voting seriously. The rot and corruption has taken over, and I don't think we can vote our way out.
As for parties, the spoiler effect means we will never see a serious 3rd party, that ship has sailed.
It's more likely now than it's been in a long time because the traditional media isn't as powerful as they were. The traditional media (TV, Newspapers) typically is hyper critical of third parties because they are financially and ideologically in bed with the existing two.
"What is Aleppo?"
https://www.politico.com/story/2016/09/gary-johnson-aleppo-2...
The big problem is the so-called deep state. It should be clear to everyone now that the military-industrial complex and the three-letter bureaus are running the entire show now. How do we fix that? The only answer would be campaign finance reform and an Amendment overturning the Citizens United ruling.
And, yeah, if Fortune 100 CEO's can make millions per year running their companies, and if this supposed to be about recruiting and retaining the best people for those jobs, we should pay Congress and the President like a Fortune 100 CEO, and for the same reason. Let's get sharp people like, say, Tim Cook, into the government, while getting lobbyists out.
Just for the record, Robert Kennedy Jr. is saying all the right things about these kinds of issues. The DNC is going to work very hard to keep him away from the primary. https://twitter.com/robertkennedyjr/status/16544755360332800...
Ironically, the "child protection" part has already failed once punishment is required.
All of it, however, is a facade built in front of the real work of continued normalisation of increasingly intrusive, increasingly ubiquitous surveillance.
I was one of the children they are protecting, but I managed to escape unscathed, luckily. Some of my friends were not so lucky.
For example, look at how anti-CSAM laws have been used to harm teens sexting in far worse ways than the harm that is risked by engaging in such action.
I haven't found anything that actually handles it yet though.
Louis Rossmann put out a video recently where he reads the actual bill is your invested
Does something need to be fixed?
The only solution is to proactively pass regulation of the same issue, but in a way that's acceptable to [insert group] and that is in direct opposition to the currently proposed changes. This moves the Overton window, making the now “radical” change politically much more expensive.
At some point, treat the root cause, not the symptom.
When EARN IT was first introduced in 2020, there was immense public opposition to the draft law:
"This terrible legislation is a Trojan horse to give Attorney General Barr and [President] Donald Trump the power to control online speech and require government access to every aspect of Americans' lives," Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said.
Wyden came out against it in 2022 as well and will likely be against it again. He seems like a senator with a surprisingly strong grasp on technology.
This is no different than sales tax problems where any online shop is technically supposed to follow all local tax laws for any customer. It's an insane requirement and effectively impossible to follow, but technically a small business is supposed to understand and follow every tax law on the planet.
Don't think that's true. I'm pretty sure US companies that sell to me don't have to charge me VAT nor pass it to my government. Same for EU companies that sell to the US, they don't have to charge sales tax.
Ofc everything is muddied in the name of convenience.
Let's take Amazon US. I can order from them with the cheap shipping, pick up my package from the post office and pay VAT on it to a customs agent. Unless it's under (i think) 40 eur in value, then no VAT.
However, if I select expedited shipping Amazon will charge me the VAT and their shipper will pay it in my name to the local customs. But this isn't a legal obligation for Amazon US, it's a service they offer me for convenience. And incidentally I like it because I don't waste time at the post office, but that's unrelated.
In the same vein, if Tutanota woudn't be an US entity this wouldn't apply to them. The US government would be free to forbid them to take US customers (maybe, IANAL) or complain to whatever jurisdiction they operate in. But that's all.
Some (most?) localities expect tax filings that show you collected revenue but we're below the threshold. In practice this is rarely done from what I've seen and I've never heard of a government cracking down on this.
Where it gets annoying is the handful of localities that have no threshold and require tax remittance for any customer in their region.
Agent of record services are Ina bit of a gray area too. Say I use a SaaS service to act as the official entity selling totthose customers. This a lot easier on me as I offloaded all the tax law concerns, but I don't know if it's clear yet whether the threshold for paying taxes is collective of every business using the same agent of record.
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This is just my understanding of the current state of things. I work pretty regularly with e-commerce businesses but am not directly involved in sales tax collection and compliance.
Same for emails.
My understanding was that part of the requirements for sales tax remittance is that a business must setup a tax entity once the total sales threshold is reached.