Lionsion

> Most newspapers are filled with regurgitated press releases. When I noticed this, I stopped my subs. I grew up reading newspapers that had investigative journalists out in the field. Gov't was much more accountable.

That's a strategy that will get you more regurgitated press releases.

I still subscribe to a newspaper, but at this point I think of it like a donation to a nonprofit. Journalism is important, and I think the people who value it need to concentrate their resources to maintain and support the organizations who will still do it.

However, now I'm going to have to make sure my money's not going to a private equity vulture like this guy.

> By raising prices and lowering quality, a stagnant business can rely on its most loyal customers to continue to buy the product, allowing it to squeeze and squeeze and squeeze its customers as they croak. This slow liquidation of an asset’s value, destroying even its reputation in the process, kills the product. Wherever newspapers can be found reducing page size, cutting news pages, narrowing coverage area, reducing staff, shrinking circulation area, postponing the purchase of new equipment and raising subscription prices, they are harvesting market position.

Attention anyone sill subscribed to the St. Paul Pioneer Press, the San Jose Mercury News and the Orange County Register: it's time to quit.

If those papers have any local competitors left, they should get the money instead.

I realize that, I just wanted to drive the traffic to the original source rather than to some weirdo who uploaded a copy.

> Right, and if the two parties, of their own volition, decide to use arbitration instead of courts, that's a good thing. But it should never, ever be required to sign away your rights for redress in the courts as part of any agreement.

Or it should always be a separate agreement from any other, that can be signed or not depending on if both parties have the same view of the court system, without affecting other business between them.

> I’m out.

So do you admit you're wrong to the degree you think your comments shouldn't be seen? Or can you just not stand the downvotes?

I think withdrawing and mass deleting half of a conversation is kinda bad form.

> "Legalizing forced arbitration is a right-wing conspiracy to reduce the scale of government".

I figured that's what you'd say. I think you misunderstand the meaning and connotations of the term "conspiracy theory." It doesn't mean, literally, "a theory that a group is conspiring." A true conspiracy theory, at its core, is an outrageous and unbelievable idea that gets elaborated on to an unreasonable degree. Think UFO coverups and black helicopters of the New World Order.

It's not outragious and unreasonable to think "the right wing" is acting together to "reduce the scale of government" or support "business friendly" polices like binding arbitration at the expense of consumers. They literally campaign, in public, on those and similar ideas.

That video seems to have been copied everywhere, and the copy you linked to seems to be on a fringe UFO conspiracy channel.

As far as I can tell, this is the original: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CO6M2HsoIA

> One of the things that makes conspiracy theories so appealing is their simplicity.

What exactly is the conspiracy theory here?

> Would freedom be allowing for gambling or banning gambling?

It's not so binary. You could allow for regulated gambling that mitigates the social problems, but ban unregulated gambling.

> To me the real issue is the lack of informed consent in these contracts, as people don't understand the consequences of an arbitration agreement.

I agree that's part of the issue, but not the "real" issue. For example: if you desperately need a job and someone puts an all-or-nothing employment contract with an arbitration clause in front of you, you'll sign even if you fully understand that arbitration is a bad deal for you.

The real issue is that these arbitration clauses can be put in a non-negotiable, all-or-nothing contract by the more powerful and savvy party to the determent of the weaker one.

Also, I believe the rules and procedures in binding arbitration can be different than in the court system, which can further stack the deck against the consumer.

I have a friend who lost a real estate arbitration case because of that, and got no compensation for serious structural issues that weren't disclosed and were caused by a remodel undertaken by the previous owner.

> No-forced-arbitration should be the norm.

I'd go further to say that forced arbitration should be illegal/unenforceable without clear evidence informed affirmative consent, and that the offering of services cannot be made conditional on accepting it.

I think a lot of the consent concepts pioneered in the GDPR could be reasonably applied to many consumer-unfriendly practices.

> Freedom means that you can voluntarily enter into arrangements that others think are a bad idea.

Ah yes, the cherished freedom to "choose" to be scammed and taken advantage of by others. It's really the most important of all our freedoms. /s

> and that law makers are totally ambivalent about essentially losing their power.

That "loss of power" may be welcomed by many lawmakers, many of whom are ideologically committed to "starving the [state]." [1]

The current Chief Justice of the Supreme Court had a hand in designing and implementing this arbitration strategy, before he was appointed to the court. Afterwards he supported it in his opinions. [2]

The current head of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau is actively trying to undermine its mission [3], and wants to shift its focus away from consumer protection to "business costs." [4]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/01/business/dealbook/arbitra...

[3] http://www.latimes.com/business/lazarus/la-fi-lazarus-mulvan...

[4] https://www.wsj.com/articles/mulvaney-to-prioritize-business...

These arbitration clauses should be illegal to begin with. You shouldn't have to depend on the largess of a company to have access to the real legal system to resolve disputes with them.

It's screwed up that corporations now have access to something like sovereign immunity [1]: the ability to not be sued in court by their customers or employees unless they consent to the suit.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_immunity#United_Stat...

But wouldn't it be a breach of contract and not a tort? There may be other torts involved, but I was only considering the issue you brought up with breaking their contract terms.

Or the willingness to do it, concede the lawsuit, then declare bankruptcy.

> Securus received the data from a mobile marketing company called 3Cinteractive .... In turn, 3Cinteractive got its data from LocationSmart, a firm known as a location aggregator, according to documents from those companies. LocationSmart buys access to the data from all the major American carriers, it says.

Someone with a little money to burn should subscribe to 3Cinteractive or LocationSmart's service and use the data to spam the whole country with texts with the location info telling the recipient they're being tracked. That ought to rile people up and help end whatever practices enable this kind of tracking.

> I've been in the Army for 16 years. Dumb recruits are their bread and butter. They wouldn't give them up for anything in the world.

The article seems to be talking about the almost dumbest of the dumb "Category IV" recruits, not the merely dumb. Prior to the Iraq war (when this article was written), the military more or less kept this category out:

> on Sept. 20, 2005, the Defense Department released DoD Instruction 1145.01, which allows 4 percent of each year's recruits to be Category IV applicants—up from the 2 percent limit that had been in place since the mid-1980s [emphasis mine].

> Independent thought,or intelligence in general, are strongly discouraged unless you're lucky enough to be in one of the tiny,incredibly rare units that does something interesting.

Are you sure you're talking about intelligence? It sounds like your really talking more about independence of thought and obedience.

I could totally see the Army valuing obedience over intelligence, while still highly valuing intelligence (e.g. intelligence applied to fulfilling orders rather than questioning them).

>> I think the correct approach is economic, not technical.

> This is a technical problem.

IMHO, it's both. Economic sanctions need to be put in place to motivate the telcos to create and adopt robust technical solutions.

> The legislation makes an exception for mandates, requests or court orders that are authorized under the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, a 1994 law requiring telephone companies to make changes to their network design in order to make it easier for the government to wiretap phone calls.

What's this mean, precisely? That device-level backdoors would be forbidden, but network-level backdoors would be allowed?

> I thought you had to root your Android to block ads?

Maybe with Chrome, but there's an Android version of Firefox that lets you install uBlock Origin:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.fi...

Again, I said that sounds like it could be a reasonable trade-off. You have to balance...

1. the good of the theoretical possibility of getting a pittance more in interest from an international bank with

2. the social costs of not having a well-regulated local bank that will make loans in the community.

If you totally ignore #2, you're going to make a bad policy decision. I think that's approximately what you're doing.

My position is if the good from #2 is greater than the good from #1, discouraging community members from depositing their money in a distant bank over a local one is good policy.

> They do not give you access to the underlying profiling and the social graph they have built on your information.

There are hints of it though. I noticed in my most recent data dump there was a list of "contacts." Some of those were people who I was never Facebook friends with and included contact information (e.g. alternate emails) that I never had.

It seems like this data was built off of people's phone contact lists. It definitely seems like my contact list was the root of mine.

> If people don't invest locally, wages will fall until they've fallen enough that it's profitable to invest locally.

The problem with toy economic models like yours is that they're toys, and the elide many important factors in the name of simplicity. That simplicity can be extremely intellectually compelling, especially for laymen, but at the end of the day the world is complex and if you ignore that you have bad policy.

When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. The solution to market failures is not more and harder market.

> There's no scenario in which investment dries up.

The literal facts are against you. The banks withdrew and American Samoans have no access to credit outside of usurious backyard moneylenders.

> Now, in order for economic health, the investments made have to be put towards doing useful things. Ideally, very useful things.

What at all does this have to do with anything under discussion? Usefulness is a local function and the precise problem here is that American Samoans (and others) don't have access to the credit they need do useful things in their communities. I'll bet you money that they're not planning to take out loans to do useless things like dig and fill in holes.

Anyway, I think we're talking past each other, and you seem more interested in performing dogma.

>> lease reply substantially on why you seem to think communities like American Samoa would be better off if its people couldn't get bank loans.

> I'd think it's obvious that they can't invest their money profitably if you don't let them do that.

I don't think you're really wrapping your head around the situation. No one's saying they "can't invest their money profitably." What's being said is that it's better for their community if their community's money is deposited in a local bank that makes loans to the community, rather than an international bank that won't (and perhaps pay slightly more in interest).

If you're having trouble wrapping your head around terms like "better for their community," you may have an easier time if you roughly translate it to "more profitable for their community."

> Corporations have rarely (if ever) been meant to further public good. They have almost always been for "unrestrained pursuit of profit to the exclusion of all other concerns".

That's wrong. Corporations don't have an independent existence; they're legal entities created by law. The laws that allow for corporations were not written to better allow for the "unrestrained pursuit of profit to the exclusion of all other concerns," they were written because corporate legal entities were judged to be beneficial to the common good of the home country.

What they're meant to do is distinct from what will naturally do when their behavior is unchecked.

I think it's somewhat analogous to patents, which are rights created by law for the express purpose of incentivizing invention and encourage eventual public domain use.

You're just dropping slogans. Please reply substantially on why you seem to think communities like American Samoa would be better off if its people couldn't get bank loans.

> I voluntarily signed up for a bank account because it's good for me, and if there's nothing in the contract about them having to make me a loan in the future I shouldn't expect one and neither should they.

That's libertarian dogma that elides the whole world outside of its narrow logic.

Corporations are ultimately meant to be agents that further the public good. They're not vehicles for the unrestrained pursuit of private profit to the exclusion of all other concerns. If natural economic incentives are not enough to motivate them to act in the interests of the public, then its the job of government and its regulations to compel a solution. To wit: if bank consolidation causes public goods such as community lending to be neglected, then government should forbid bank mergers and break up large banks until it no longer is.

> Bank consolidation is inevitable. Large banks are like nuclear weapons. Every nation absolutely needs them or they risk foreign banks and investors rushing in and capitalizing+colonizing the entire country.

I don't think that makes sense. If you don't allow massively consolidated domestic banks to operate in your country, why would you allow massively consolidated foreign banks to do so instead and "colonize" you?

> But the internet can fix this. It allows for the creation of markets and coordination very, very cheaply. Crowd funding, p2p lending, Youtube, Patreon, open source software, and yes, cryptocurrencies -- these are the key tools of resistance that will allow the little fish to carve out some measure of autonomy.

Personally, I'm moving on from this kind of techno-optimism. I don't think those things can fill these void left by a lack of community banks. Those have their attention focused on their local communities, but your techno-institutions focus their attention on what's attention-grabbing globally. While the latter may be different from what the big banks focus on, it doesn't fix the problems that community banks solve.

> Are you saying we should prohibit American Samoans from putting their money in the international bank and getting higher returns, effectively forcing locals to lend to other locals?

If it improves the local economic conditions by keeping money flowing in the local economy, then such a ban seems like a reasonable trade-off for the common good.

Being a greedy individualist, by focusing on chasing after marginally higher savings account interests rates, is likely going to be self-defeating in this case. Your dozens of dollars in extra interest payments are unlikely to compensate you for the other economic hardships you'll encounter because there's no local bank that will bother to make loans to your community.