ameister14

I don't think reasonable prices are based on what the potential maximum profit per user is. Normally it's based on the expense per user plus a percentage for profit.

I knew you did not use the word conflict, I did so in an analogy to another philosophical thought experiment called the state of nature. I was trying (and clearly failing, my fault) to illustrate a logic issue you were having; just because we have regulations and companies do nefarious things does not mean that the regulations cause the nefarious things.

>the reason nefarious people can use companies as tools to do nefarious things on a large scale, the kind of scale that affects a large number of people, is government regulation.

You are wrong. Companies do nefarious things on a large scale and would even at peak efficiency in a free market because it is more efficient to cause harm than it is to take steps to prevent it.

Looking back to less regulated times in the US may be illustrative.

When there was no government regulation for river cleanliness, companies routinely polluted the rivers. They did not do this because of the government regulation that, again, did not exist. They did it because it is a lot cheaper to dirty a river than it is to install the mechanisms to keep it clean, and the benefits to the company from keeping the river clean, barring regulatory oversight, do not suffice to balance the scales.

Similarly, in countries with less stringent regulations companies pollute and cause widespread harm.

The acceptable level of pollution in a free-market system is much higher than the desirable level, because until a tipping point where the company's sales are impacted they will continue to pollute. The equilibrium point is lowered through regulation. That's literally what it does.

Not at all.

Despite the "state of nature" being theoretical, you wouldn't say that the reason people harm eachother is because of government regulations, would you? Of course you wouldn't, because you can think of a lot of reasons for people to harm eachother absent government regulation.

See? You can say that the complete absence of social structure is a theoretical state and also say that the presence of government and social structure is not the sole cause for conflict.

Companies as we currently know them mostly did not exist in the 1700's. Where they did many of the biggest were monopolies granted by the government.

The free market has never existed on a wide scale, so no company currently has to survive in a free market. It is a thought experiment and in practice regulated markets are far superior because the market is a pretty bad governor for society. Further, to have a free market you need perfect transparency, a state which is not realistically possible to begin with but if it were possible would only be achieved through regulation, such as disclosure requirements.

In that free market, by the way, companies absolutely will poison the air and water, in large part because people do not make purchase decisions based on downstream externalities. Even if they did, they won't be able to prove the company poisoned the river and the company won't be breaking any laws so a lot of people will simply allow it to continue. Now if the products themselves were poisonous, it's possible, but historically this just led to merchants moving from town to town to poison new people who hadn't heard of them.

>The reason companies do nefarious things is government interference in markets, insulating companies from competition.

This is so ridiculous I am not sure you're serious now. Are you just trolling?

That's not going to happen, unfortunately, because a lot of the surveillance powers are explicitly authorized or otherwise not ambiguous, and did not rely on Chevron deference.

>This cannot be challenged because Chevron was in place.

That's just not correct.

Chevron is from a decision in 1984, so how did it apply in 1976?

well that's insane

They essentially decided that with executives years ago with McDonnell v US

Yes, I agree - the President is immune for the official act they undertake, the existence of which allows for a the charge of bribery.

They are not immune for the non-official act of soliciting or accepting bribes in exchange for an official act, which is the charge of bribery.

So if the President took a bribe in order to make someone ambassador to Sweden, they could not be prosecuted for making that person the ambassador, but they could be prosecuted for taking the bribe.

Well, to be fair, the first two examples she uses are very likely official acts and the third requires an official act to be bribery in the first place.

No, the act undertaken in exchange for the bribe would be under the immunity umbrella but the act of taking the bribe would not.

I said this in another comment but I get a lot out of Bloomberg's financial and legal news. FT can be good and Foreign Affairs is usually pretty solid.

I think there are some specialized places I'm willing to pay for deeper analysis. Some parts of Bloomberg are good for that; for example Matt Levine writes on financial and legal issues there and is excellent.

There are some issues you're ignoring, legally speaking, regarding liability and ownership when you have a conflict of interest, but that's ok.

I feel like you're being deliberately pedantic in a general sense and ignoring the terms of art here.

Direct owner is a term that basically means someone who has ownership, beneficial ownership, voting rights, or rights to sell. Sam Altman was that. He was also an indirect owner through OpenAI Startup Fund GP I, which is the other entity you are talking about. You don't need either to be GP, though it can make things simpler. As far as the bundle of rights in ownership is concerned, yes, he did own the fund.

Anyway, the obfuscation bit is from the filings with the state, not so much the SEC - there for a period of time OpenAI Startup Fund GP I was managed by Vespers, Inc. and had a bunch of registrants with fake names and fake directors and board members on the filings, all with the same address, an affordable housing unit in Santa Ana.

That's a bit rude, especially since you're wrong.

Prior to Ian Hathaway's takeover a few months ago Sam Altman owned over 75% of the fund, according to their Form ADV filings with the SEC.

I get why you're confused, though, given their use of fake filing names I think the ownership and structure of the OpenAI fund has been so opaque from the start it's actually hard to know who has what.

There is a huge difference between 'I have private investments' and 'I own a controlling interest in a fund I have been telling you is independent'

No. A single entity setting prices is not collusion, collusion requires multiple parties.

There are a lot of reasons for this, but for me, a big thing is how absurdly long movies are now. I look at movies and at this point will reject some that just feel like they will take too much time.

I saw Furiosa, it was fine, but it was about a half an hour longer than it should have been.

It's 148 minutes long. For comparison, Mad Max was 93 minutes long, The Road Warrior was 96 minutes long, Beyond Thunderdome was 107 minutes long, and Fury Road was 120 minutes long.

Chinese municipal governments are funded through the tax assessed on the sale of the home and not through a continuous property tax - or at least that used to be the case, haven't checked in a while. That resulted in municipalities encouraging higher prices for housing.

The problem I can see is the extension of the period of damages. There is an argument to be made that there should probably be a statutory cap on years for damages accrual rather than just 'as long as you infringed,' but that's for the legislature to do.

It isn't exempt from anything; the majority opinion says "The Act’s statute of limitations establishes a three year period for filing suit, which begins to run when a claim accrues."

The question is when the claim accrues. As in your example of CSA cases, they decided it's from when the victim discovers the crime and not when the crime occurred.

The title is not accurate.

The Court clarified that the time limit is 3 years from discovering the infringement, not 3 years from when the infringement took place.

Why would emails be ephemeral? I see the argument he and presumably you are making in terms of chats, though I disagree with it both in terms of what the law currently is and in what it should be, but email? Mail isn't ephemeral.

When you are having a conversation in person and you don't know it is being recorded, you have an expectation that it won't be recorded because that is the default. Do you have an expectation by default that your chat system, slack or whatever irc you use is not accessible by anyone ever again, once you close the client? I don't because that hasn't been the case for most chat clients ever.

haha ok thanks, I was really scratching my head to think about how that would possibly work. I was going back to idea of writing to a file that overwrote itself in sections but it's good to hear that was a joke.

>I work remotely, meaning face-to-face conversations are out of the question.

Zoom? Phone calls? You choose to use a recorded form of communication, but there are options. That said, if your goal is to intentionally hide information from use in a future lawsuit, there are easier ways to decrease your business's liability that don't run the same risks.

> If I point it out, the business schedules it to be handled in a quarter or two, and they get hacked in the meantime then my chat message is on the record as evidence that the business was aware of the problem and "did nothing".

You example about nobody wanting you to point this out because that creates liability is an error. The liability arguably already exists because the business should have known of the issue and did not. A policy of not reporting security issues because they fear lawsuits makes things much worse, making it potentially rise to recklessness. So you not telling the company about it on purpose, if that's a part of the culture of the company, is likely worse than you telling the company and having them make a reasonable assessment of risk and resource allocation. That's not "doing nothing" from a legal standpoint. Whether their decision was reasonable under the circumstances is one thing but it's usually not random people on the street evaluating this.

By the way, this has nothing to do with chat. Why do you think many companies routinely do security evaluations? It's not because consumers care. If your example is true companies would do better to not have security at all.

Finally with this, even if it were better for the company not to report it would be worse for you not to report.

>Requiring recording of all communications just encourages the business to not communicate internally, leading to the exact same problems recording was supposed to prevent.

Courts don't do that, though. Businesses decide to use recorded communication, much the same way they did when the law was created and distance was an issue.

> It would be legally preferable to ship a product full of issues the business is unaware of than to ship a product with a single issue that the business is on record knowing about

That's not necessarily true, but even if it is it wouldn't be preferable from a commerce standpoint. This isn't business in a legal vacuum.

>To me, a slack message or chat message is the digital equivalent to me going to your desk or talking to you at lunch in person.

To some people, posting on a public facebook wall is likewise the digital equivalent of talking to someone at lunch in person. Where is the line?

>I think the fair trade off is “if i have the document, then I will produce it” and a default policy of delete after x time would be tested no different than if you or I had a conversation in person.

The purpose is to get the truth of the dispute, not prevent liability for people acting badly. Your purpose for not having courts see evidence of wrongdoing is so that what, things are better for the wrongdoers? If your argument is feasibility or removing the recording element at all, I'd understand, but the thing is already recorded.

>Now we live in a digital world where because we can, we are now being told to record. How would this be any different than the courts demanding that all conversations be recorded via audio recording when not using a chat application.

It'd be different because courts aren't demanding the conversations be recorded at all; that's just the way things are working. If you worked at a company where all conversations are recorded and you're on camera all the time, you'd have to preserve those too.

So you're saying it works as a reverse system where the default is not to save the chat? That's interesting, I would have assumed adding a database and writing to that database for storage would by necessity involve sending a command to delete in order to remove it from that storage or having some other action taken to wipe the data periodically. I get it if there is no history at all, but there clearly is here.

Where does keep(message) send things? Is that not stored anywhere?

Sorry if this is too complicated, I don't know a lot about chat technically so trying to wrap my head around this.

I've seen a few in district courts related to Rule 37(e)(2) and signal in particular.