AequitasOmnibus

I appreciate the good faith attempt to rationalize the idea, but it's fundamentally flawed.

We (as in Western Civilization living in post-Enlightenment liberalism) can't purport to respect human dignity and self-determination and also criminalize homelessness. And that's what jail is, criminalization. There is no "non-criminal" jail. In the United States, you can't be criminalized without due process, because fundamentally, a basic western human right is the right to personal dignity and autonomy.

Criminal recidivism is a problem. Some homeless or mentally ill people will be recidivist criminals. They should be punished for their crime after being afforded due process and any defenses thereto (e.g. lack of mental capacity). There are ways to handle criminal recidivism (in CA, famously, there's the "three-strikes" rule against multi-time felons). Apart from hardcore criminal-justice reformers, nobody disagrees with the idea of punishing crime according to the nature of the crime and increasing punishment for recidivism.

Being homeless is not a crime. Nor is it a crime to have mental illness. There are ample failures (drug war, lack of safety net, unwillingness to regulate predatory housing/investment, lack of accessible mental healthcare, social stigma, etc.) that cause homelessness/mental illness. All of which are indictments against society at large. It is anathema to a free, liberal culture to cause the problem and then punish it criminally.

To say that society only intervenes when a crime is committed is reductionist and wrong. There are plenty of civil remedies that restrain conduct (e.g. an "injunction"). More broadly, the government restrains conduct all the time for non-criminal matters (taxation, zoning permits, most financial or environmental regulation, intellectual property laws). Different efforts to restrain activity have different methods of enforcement. Including involuntary civil commitment. But for the reasons mentioned above regarding due process and personal autonomy, only crime is enforced by jail time.

We cannot claim to be a free, law-abiding, liberal democracy rooted in Western ideals and at the same time carte blanche suggest that "jail" is a categorical solution to homelessness and mental illness, as the parent commenter suggested. The type of thinking that the parent commenter proposed is anti-democratic, anti-western, and candidly, fascist. There are plenty of places people can move to if they want to live in that type of society, but none of them claim to be Western in design.

Leave it to an HN commenter to suggest that a marginalized group face the most draconian, outlandish, unrealistic proposition as a viable solution.

Might as well propose that we eat the homeless and mentally ill. Then we can complete the Jonathan Swift proposal and go back to the real world.

“What was supposed to have been a ₡30,000 Costa Rican Colones charge – which equates to a little more than $55 – was processed as a $30,000 charge.”

I don’t understand how a mistake like that happened on Uber’s end. It seems trivial (and automatic) to identify the proper currency being charged to the user. As someone who’s used Uber to travel internationally before, it’s a major red flag.

It's funny, I just spoke about this in another thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36691047) recently.

These findings don't merely apply to coding, they're applicable to any type of focus-driven work. Case in point, I use VSCode to type all of my work-related research and writing drafts instead of using Word for the simple reason that the Word UI is cluttered, distracting, and makes writing difficult. By comparison, VSCode is so much more pared down and lets me focus on what's actually important - the content of my writing!

Is feature-creep the inevitable fate of any software environment? As a product gains momentum, I think there's always going to be pressure to add new features to either justify monetization or user retention/growth (and, more cynically, to justify what an employer is paying a team who is staffed on that piece of software).

I do think that FOSS is more immune to this problem. There's no incentive to grow or monetize, and so you end up with software that can be feature-complete for its purpose and left relatively alone (the downside is that there's a lot of half-baked FOSS out there as well!). Hopefully when feature-creep takes over VSCode, someone will fork it and continue the project as-is.

I spend a large amount of time in my profession writing and editing[1]. The industry standard is Word, with some scant holdouts on WordPerfect. Word is a behemoth. The UI objectively makes reading and writing text difficult.

Recently, I've switched to using VSCode for my first draft (written in markdown), and then converted via pandoc to .docx. From there, I can reformat to the industry standards.

Why the extra step? Because when you're fighting with the UI for your attention, the ability to focus on the written word takes a backseat. I'll often end up tripping over some auto-correct feature (the autocorrects for copyright and euro are two of my greatest foes) or cryptic formatting issue, and end up getting farther and farther away from my original focus.

Word processing is broken. VSCode in markdown with a few extra plugins for QOL (e.g. spell check) is a nice balance between something raw and plaintext like VIM and an unbearably clunky MS Word. I can't wait for Microsoft to add Clippy 2.0 powered by ChatGPT into Word so that it can finally complete the slow erosion the author in favor of pure computer-generated text.

[1]: Just because I spend most of my time writing and editing for a living doesn't mean I'm great at it. I explicitly disclaim any typos in this comment!

I hope this is poorly conveyed satire. If not… good God.

Apart from the hygienic value in brushing, whether you agree with it or not, halitosis is an offensive smell to most of the public. Some of the worst breath I’ve ever had to smell came from alcoholics whose spirit of choice is vodka.

No, there’s no obligation to memorialize everything in writing. But it’s a two way street. If a conversation is important enough, the parties also have incentives to write it down (to avoid recanting or conveniently forgetting or misunderstanding important terms).

In court, testimonial evidence is usually presented under oath, under penalty of perjury. If a company is subverting recording information by only discussing sensitive items in person, a good lawyer will put multiple witnesses on the stand, ask them all the same questions about the sensitive topic, then poke holes in the inconsistencies and see who cracks first on the witness stand. It might be hard to get someone to disclose the sensitive subject, but it’s rather easy to catch someone in a lie or a cover up. That’s usually good enough.

This is such a spot on observation. But the incentives aren’t there for business competitors to self-regulate in an ethical manner.

That’s why we as users (and yes, we’re all users to various degrees) should push for more robust regulation. If, as you correctly note, most competitors are only going to operate in the legal-but-unethical space, change the law until the legal avenue and the ethical avenue are the same.

The libertarians will come out of the woodwork to say more regulation is not the answer, but when it comes to alternatives, watch the real world examples of “unregulated ethical businesses” melt away into the realm of the theoretical.

> I really enjoy planning my life with a kanban, and executing my day from a todo list (scheduled). That’s hard to nail.

Well said. I pay for Trello premium solely for the scheduled checklist feature, but it’s clear that this is not a top priority for them to flesh out as you described.

I would love to find a service that combined Trello’s kanbans with Microsoft Todo and offered a tight mobile integration for reminders and widgets and the like.

Dawson's Creek, for one: https://entertainment.ie/on-demand/on-demand-news/why-does-d...

This happens all the time in the entertainment industry.

For example: TV show X licenses pop song Y for its initial broadcast. The group that owns the syndication rights didn’t buy the right to use song Y, consequently they have to replace the music with generic Muzak in subsequent broadcasts.

You pay for Netflix, start watching show X, and when it gets to the big dramatic moment with sweeping music (that you remember from when the show originally aired), it’s replaced with elevator music.

Same goes for a lot of movies.

The article indicates that the majority of the revenue drop came from people spending less on games.

What isn’t addressed but seems logical to me is that as inflation rises and overall consumer spending declines, smartphone users have less appetite to indulge in subscriptions for nonessential software.

My work recently supplied me with my first iPhone. Browsing the App Store I was shocked that nearly every popular app used a subscription model. Subscriptions for Twitter apps? Camera apps? Note taking? Someone could easily pay more in subscriptions to apps than it would cost to subscribe to the New York Times!

The subscription model is undoubtedly a boon to developers but it’s a costly splurge to users during a looming recession. Maybe we’re reaching the apex of SAAS for discrete apps - the center cannot hold forever on this business model.

The stories may be public domain but your arrangement, and more importantly your trade name are protected. You may not have the desire to take action like a dmca takedown, but you're definitely within your rights to do so.

The reason disposable email addresses exist and are popular is because services have abused users' trust to not use these emails for shady ad revenue and marketing schemes.

It's further compounded by shoddy security that leads to leaks and exposure of people's personal email addresses to pwned compromised lists.

People don't want to give up their personal email addresses so that they can be spammed or hacked. Until services do better (ie don't sell me out for cheap) I'll keep using the latest disposable email address to sign up for your user-hostile websites.

I don't think the founders would have conceptualized governmental liability the way that we do in the modern era. Even hallmark legislation like 42 U.S.C. § 1983 is a product of 20th century jurisprudence.

Very early supreme court opinions took a nearly absolutist position on private right of action against the government being barred under the doctrine of sovereign immunity. The court has slowly backed away from that position over time.

Not quite true. The idea of sovereign immunity is fundamental to our constitution.

While QI isn't codified in the way you're talking about, Congress and the states do have laws on the books to expose themselves to liability. That's where QI comes from - as an extension of statutory authority to hold the government legally liable. When and how the government and its agents are exposed to liability is very clearly spelled out.

I think it comes down to how both sides view impartiality. There's definitely confirmation bias when the president nominates a judge - often the candidates come from the same party so they share some broad ideological positions.

Most judges I think do see themselves as impartial jurists even if the results tend to skew toward political outcomes.

In this case it's probably superfluous to include under which president the judge was appointed, but there is merit to including the information generally.

The Circuits ordinarily hear cases in 3-judge panels (occasionally cases are heard en banc, where more/all of the circuit judges will hear the case). The outcome of a large number of cases can be predicted based upon the composition of the panel.

So where "conservative" judges make up 2/3 or 3/3 of the panel, you tend to see "conservative" (read: pro-business, pro-prosecution) outcomes and vice-versa with "liberal" judges.

It could be coincidence, but as someone who has followed circuit opinions for years, the panel composition has corresponded with the ultimate outcome a surprising number of times. (N.B. it would be interesting to statistically track the panel composition/outcome metric to see how often the correlation actually exists).

This is abusive behavior by Proctorio. Unfortunately they're not the only bad faith actors using DMCA inappropriately.

We need desperately something akin to an anti-slapp[1] defense to fight back against these abusers.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_lawsuit_against_pu...

Great idea! What source do you use to identify coffee shops? Yelp?

This is great. I've thought about making something like this myself.

One additional feature I thought would be useful is instapaper-like scraping of articles that get served in full in the newsletter. So I could share links to the article, the text would get scraped, and the newsletter would serve the full text.

This is a simply ridiculous response. Geolocation is the least intrusive data that is being discussed here. By far the bigger offense is tracking an individual's health to ensure that the employee is sufficiently "healthy."

John Hancock may not be monitoring my location (although every mobile device already is) but by its own admission, it will be monitoring my activity levels, computing the number of steps I take (or whatever other health metric it plans to use e.g. heart rate) and applying some formula to penalize employees who are "underperforming" on their health "goals." Insurance is already an enormously intrusive industry and fitness tracking crosses the threshold of unacceptable conduct.

Vote-buying is already criminalized under 18 U.S.C. § 597 [0]. Several states have similar laws [1].

Scenario A could still happen, but seeing as it's explicitly illegal, the likelihood of it causing widespread voter fraud is unlikely.

[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/597

[1] http://www.lrc.ky.gov/Statutes/statute.aspx?id=27347