jimz

Depends on what you mean by repercussions. Since there is at least informal and sometimes fairly open scorekeeping happening at prosecutor's offices there's some hurt pride if your conviction is overturned later. Everything else either gets taken care of by the taxpayer or prosecutors' immunity for their official acts so on a personal level, no, there won't be any actual repercussions.

It's interesting and sad to see the forced assimilative process of erasing written Cantonese. I remember HK in the late 90s still had newspapers that published in written Cantonese. Just across the border in Shenzhen, without the British influence and prior to the explosion of industry and tech in the early 2000s, you could still see nonstandard signage that were in Cantonese in store windows. I think getting rid of spoken Cantonese is likely a generational and not just an effort that can be done in a decade or so, but I've both experienced and did field work on how the Wu dialects were more or less systematically erased from official, and now even private realms. The Shanghai variety, itself developed only in the early 1800s from a pidgin of the Suzhou and Nanjing varieties mixed with northern influences, is actually quite well-documented by foreign sources in writing, with a pidgin developing off of that and English and Portuguese that also survives in English sources and academically studied in great detail by Chinese authors in English but not in Chinese to anything close to the same degree. Starting with the millenial generation the speaking of the dialects in schools, even outside of class, became subject to punishment. With public education starting at the pre-kindergarten level enforcing the rule, across two or three generations even those whose first language is one of the dialects became more or less forced into Mandarin speakers and losing their fluency. I have little reason to doubt that something similar will simply be forced upon Hong Kong as well. Luckily sci-hub is your friend and written Cantonese seems to be better represented than written Wu through a cursory search.

Deepl seems to have a bit of an issue with uncommon street suffixes in Chinese. For example: 江苏省苏州市姑苏区东中市374号槔桥头

Google: Bridge Head, No. 374, Dongzhong City, Gusu District, Suzhou City, Jiangsu Province Deepl: Pulley Bridge, No. 374, Dongzhong City, Gusu District, Suzhou, Jiangsu Province Libre: Cambridge No. 374 in the eastern part of the city of Jiangsu, province of Jiangsu Watson: No. 374 Bridge Head in East China, Suzhou, Suzhou, Jiangsu Province.

You can kind of see which service goes for the literal more than the interpretive. It might be a bit unfair to use an address that is more than just the literal street address, although in actual speech, this address is at an intersection with two bridges and it's enough of a local landmark that the addition would make sense. Except for the uncertainty over the proper name of the bridge that actually doesn't throw Google or Deepl off. It's the 市suffix for a street, not unique in this city but certainly rare, that gets all of the services. Libre at least gives it a try, Watson just pretends like it doesn't exist and for whatever reason translates the old name of the city to the new name of the city, which obviously now encompasses a much greater area and exists in a different context. Deepl seems to have figured out that you aren't really supposed to have two cities in one address and tries to rectify that in spite of the literal. I would imagine that a human translator would use the entirety of the street name and add "street" in English to the end. Definitely interesting to see how these services handle somewhat nonstandard and much older address patterns that don't originate necessarily in Mandarin and frequently relates to local landmarks that no longer exist, all of which requires some contextual work beyond your standaard post-1949 naming of streets that tends to be fairly standardized both thematically and in form.

I basically have something similar to your use-case. While I'm on the free tier for all my domains, the supplemental agreement, at least in the US version, removes the specific limitation to serve primarily html/text content if you enable Cloudflare Workers, which also has a free tier, applies on an account and not domain level, and has no requirement for you to serve your content through their KV system. I ended up paying for my CF Workers subscription for a different project on my account but the system worked fine prior to that. I served 111GB of a combination of m4a and png files in data from my B2 bucket via CF in the past month.

Um, in countries where the government can play the ultimate arbiter of truth in speech they also get to determine what due process is, which usually is exactly what suits them. Private companies reflect the values of their shareholders and customers, which at least is made up of citizens without the coercive and exclusive power to say, lock you up for your reporting, or literally kill you and your loved ones over your reporting, which still happens to this day. If there is demand, and placed out of the state's hands, at least alternate channels, whether more accurate or not, more ethical or less, with or without an agenda, can exist. The alternate scenario easily renders them unable to exist in the first place. "Due process" when applied outside of official government action is simply coercing a standard set by the government upon collectives of private individuals even if - especially if - it is unwanted. It's an illusion of fairness that masks coercion, because there's either enforcement mechanisms for compliance - coercion - or there isn't - which is a charade and meaningless. Neither produces positive outcomes. Those in power will simply use it to cover up mistakes or intentional wrongdoing first.

Companies can't literally speak as in vocalize as a person, but they can, as entities, create the equivalence of speech in the societal sense, and shifting the arbiter of truth to the state will simply centralize that power in an entity that, in addition to dominating the marketplace by default - you can't exactly pick where you're born, nor where you can move to realistically for the most part - they can bring real consequences. Deplatforming is child's play compared to actual imprisonment or getting pushed out of an airborne helicopter.

I feel like the main problem is the inability to properly debug your problem without paying while the plan essentially necessitates a degree of self-diagnostic when things go wrong. I also serve an xml feed via CF and also use it as a caching service in front of my Backblaze B2 bucket, and on the free tier by virtue of the files I'm serving far fewer unique users (less than half of the author's last 30 days) but a far greater amount of data (111GB). I'm not certain if the author should jump from what's clearly a vague and uncommitted conjecture from the Cloudflare tech about where the 503 error comes from straight to "they are definitely throttling me", since I've had the opposite experience and have seen 503s in all sorts of situations unrelated to throttling, but with a tiny sample size and no adequate diagnostic tooling it's also impossible for me or anyone to say that he's not being throttled, except CF themselves. I realize that it's their business model but it seems counter-intuitive that the service they sell seems partly "better ability for you to fix your problems yourself", sort of the opposite of say, managed/unmanaged servers. It'd make more sense, from a customer's point of view, that if I'm paying for a service, there should be service in both senses of the word - the product and the servicing of issues if possible, but not making diagnostics more transparent makes little sense because it prevents people who want to use the service from continuing to use the service, presumably part of CF's goal.

Although the incentives are a bit different when it comes to law enforcement, as in the US it's quite common for those who hold all of the discretionary authority in invoking the criminal justice system - prosecutors and sheriffs and Attorneys General - to be elected positions, and at the same time, the continued existence of their bailiwick in the same size and with the same funding requires a show of at least some evident criminal behavior that they're preventing, whether that actually corresponds to actual crimes or not is sometimes entirely incidental. Innocence Projects around the country have found a significant percentage of those freed by their efforts to not only have not committed a crime, but also no crime had taken place in the first place. Coercive plea bargaining makes actually going to trial to hold the state to its burden of proof an exceedingly rare practice. On some level it is a performative exchange and has always been. Criminal statutes are also written in ways that don't necessarily fit what we generally imagine a word means. A burglary in many states simply mean the commission of a felony while trespassing. A conspiracy requires usually no more than two participants, a meeting of minds, and a substantial step in preparation. Accidents in industrial sites are, in comparison, far more objective and far harder to game for various interests. Crime, on the other hand, really represents much more abstract sets of guidelines applied to alleged conduct and state of mind, and much easier to game in terms of numbers.

Well, in part, it's not a good idea to throw stones at glass houses and if you are a regular reader of Inspectors General's reports on various agencies it quickly becomes evident that the agencies tasked with stopping said crime are just trying their hardest not to do that.

A few that just involve the improper handling or oversight in conducting money laundering operations that came out this past year, which, because of the pandemic and politics, have seen fewer IG reports than usual:

https://oig.justice.gov/reports/audit-drug-enforcement-admin...

https://www.oig.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/assets/2020-09/O...

Unfortunately a lot of the arguments he makes are also... irrelevant at best and at worst does the sort of attribution of familial sin that is the hallmark of both our nativist immigration policy and the ugliest episodes in our country's history such as the Japanese internment post-Kuramatsu. Cold-War era communist regimes loves medals and fancy titles and in some cases one would be viewed as a liability without them. Also, in these states where almost all business is owned or at least partly owned by the state there are state functionaries everywhere, political cadres were run of the mill. In fact, switching out the backgrounds you can make these sorts of conspiratorial assumptions about lots of people, including me. My grandparents were actual Chinese Communist Party officials in the 70s and 80s. I currently live in the Vegas area where I trade cryptocurrency and work on projects that I've used an LLC as to legally avail myself to the protections they bring. Now, I also went to law school, became a public defender and then went into immigration, which got me blackballed by the Chinese consulate after I represented some dissidents in their immigration cases, including Falun Gong followers. Since you can't FOIA the Chinese consulate, all I need is to spin up a poorly engineered Twitter clone on a k8 cluster I already have running and I'm the Chinese version of this pair, bonus points if I post some Soros memes then? And 2 months later it is very much obvious that they should have hired $150,000 worth of engineers instead of bootstrapping their half-assed operation on AWS without a backup plan.

The fact is, you don't need foreign interference for radical right wing domestic extremism to make sense, they exist, they have existed, they will continue to. Russia was a FOMO investor, not the guy holding coins since they were $3 a pop, and very much opportunistic. The operation screams of a deranged naivete. They figured they could host a completely unmoderated site on AWS? Even soccer streaming pirates leave DMCA contacts on their pages for crissakes, not to mention directory traversal, not knowing what "bulletproof" hosting is (which probably cost less than AWS if bandwidth was really what they were worried about). It's not that suspicious that they went to a Russian host - Chinese hosting either plays by western rules on Alicloud and the likes or requires local police to issue a permit, and the best you can do is probably buy from a Russian reseller anyway - and getting hosting for free speech in countries where free speech doesn't exist requires just enough doublespeak that took them 10 whole days to figure out? it's inept that it took them so long, really.

With the caveat that obviously my sample is skewed, during my time as a public defender I've seen a lot of conspiracy cases and most of them are incredibly poorly planned out. This isn't exactly a conspiracy as your typical criminal conspiracy to steal a couple of big screen TVs from Walmart and then return them with receipts you found in the parking lot (this happened, we didn't go to trial) but it's certainly only a notch above that in planning out their platform and scaling and potential legal matters. If Russia is in such a dire state that they are throwing their dwindling funds (a country with NYC's GDP, 60x the pop, that mostly exports timber? Ouch) at an amateur hour production like this then we should just all start running shoddy Twitter clones on cheap VPSes because it sounds like the easiest scam in the world to pull from a nation-state. And maybe they'll buy the Brooklyn Bridge too.

The difference between a lie and a mere falsehood or even a mistake is intent and knowledge. The legal system is perfectly capable of determining intent and knowledge (when including not just actual but cases where knowledge was recklessly disregarded). We also already have laws that in certain contexts outlaw such lying. The most common examples are perjury and lying to officials either FBI or immigration, the latter specifically in the context of one's status. The laws, particularly the first two, lost a lot of their punch because of rampant misuse by authorities - the latter overused by federal agents to buy time to build cases they can't otherwise Constitutionally establish legally, the former was found to be so common among police testimonies that it had both a term - 'testilying' and hundreds of academic papers on the subject leading to no reform and little added enforcement. We also have laws against defrauding - which usually just adds onto a specific intent to gain something of value. It's not that we can't keep free speech as the Constitution sets it but still regulate particular instances where the state can prove a case of bad intent and knowledge, but the long history of applying these laws not for justice but for coercion, to fill quotas, carelessly, and unevenly have eroded the erstwhile authority prosecutors have in using them without creating a political issue for him or herself. I think restoring integrity in the system so that these cases can be taken as nonpolitical is arguably an even more difficult task, but certainly if done right, would have the most legitimacy and be the most narrowly targeted.

But outside of that I'd much rather have corporations than bureaucrats handling such matters, because at least they can be incentivized to do the right thing. After all, corporations are ultimately voluntary entities formed and owned by average people, and when their conduct fails to match societal expectations, they lose customers and revenue, which is at least some incentive. Furthermore, they're protected by the constitution to do the moderating. They are allowed to keep the undesirable off their platform. No matter how much Josh Hawley wants to nationalize big tech to make America into White China, he can't actually do it without an armed mob. In contrast our administrative laws and particularly those with enforcement powers have effectively been turned into the Constitutional backdoor that through sheer luck Trump was unable to realize as the easy and if not legal, at least unchallengeable way to stage a coup, just as their suppression and kidnappings over the summer resulted in no real consequences, it's by design, and one that circumvents much of the Bill of Rights with essentially no oversight, judicial or congressional, the former by doctrinal custom and the latter by negligence. They pose a much greater danger, because they not only get into risky situations, legally they're effectively immune from almost all responsibility in a way that even puts qualified immunity to shame. I hate to pose these not as hypotheticals but as actual comparisons, but Apple haven't kidnapped me for all the complaints I made about the shitty 2017 MacBook keyboard yet, while federal agencies with militarized regulatory enforcement powers have, supposedly all through mistakes, "deported" over a thousand American citizens to random countries they have no connection to. They're the backstop we should never lean on.

And now he's out. The system's not about preemptively stopping theoretical bad acts per se (although if it actually stops real incoming threats, great), but rather, about being able to evaluate and change course when human fallibility inevitably leads to bad policies, bad choices, and bad outcomes. It's a work in progress, particularly as to how we can properly disincentivize future attempts and hold those who actively attempted to overthrow the Constitutional state by force without resorting to Minority-Report style overbroad invasions of privacy, but at least we can do that. These things are such non-starters in China and Russia that the former more or less acquiesced to a corrupt state and the latter has an economy that was so thoroughly disposessed by the few from the people that its GDP is on par with New York City despite 60 times the population, and with no recourse. Change is never easy nor always correct, but at least that opportunity exists here. It doesn't in many places that purportedly have "order" over "liberty" as the central value, as they end up with neither.

It's less about the absolute goodness of free speech but rather, a problem of the moderator model that you speak of, that the Constitution is explicitly addressing. There are many forms of speech that are unlawful - child pornography, defamation, violation of copyrights, imminent threats, intentional infliction of emotional distress, etc. They're not generally controversial, but they affect and intrude upon the rights of others in clear-cut ways, or have been defined by the courts in a way that there can be such a determination. But if you want some sort of broader, categorical and preemptive prohibition coming from the state you run into the problem we have with policing generally - that even well-intentioned authorities frequently create enormous unforeseen damage down the line, and we just had the president essentially spend a huge amount of time openly trying to coerce private companies into carrying his fringe message with quasi-legal proclamations and in some cases, actually using state coercion in the form of denying fair competition over contracts. HN is a private platform, if you get kicked off here there's very little real consequence. The government makes the stakes instantly higher because without enforcement the laws are more or less just words on paper but the criminal justice system's inequities are well known and well documented enough that merely having state moderation can actually push things in a worse direction real quick. See: the PHilippines for example.

Private platform moderation is in a sense the ideal solution if platforms are actually willing to do it. The Constitution protects their first amendment rights too, and that is the right to decide who can and can't use your platform. The tradeoff is that the state for the most part can't force you to carry messages you don't want to carry, in exchange the state also can't easily force you to act as their auxiliary in enforcing only content that the state likes. It's not really a matter of speech in itself in a philosophical sense but rather, appropriate ways to actually prevent things like violent insurrections or lynchings or agitprop being spread in a world where outside of the few and already prohibited forms there's some room for interpretation, and also, some room for bad faith from either side. It's less about how much free speech has quantifiably benefitted our society - which one can certainly make an argument for - but rather, the consequence of giving reins to a moderator that has the power to literally deny one's liberty and ruin someone's life in an officially sanctioned and prolonged fashion when there's no guarantee that the moderator would be able or willing to act in a way that isn't arbitrary but still effective. Every other platform is built on the basis of consent - as in one joins it at their will and one gets removed from it at the will of the moderators. The law works through coercion. The stakes are quite different.

And speech itself is only the most immediate manifestation of bigger problems in society anyway. The underlying sentiments don't go away, they just become clandestine and fester. It's not something punitive punishment can readily solve. Prohibition didn't work here, the war on drugs is an abject failure, the myriads of exclusionary laws congress passed from the 1880s to the 1940s both failed to actually stop people of different ethnic backgrounds from having relationships and at the same time contributed to a particularly cruel handling of refugees that added to the holocaust death tolls. In more authoritarian countries, China's porn ban, which is actively enforced with sites being taken down constantly, does almost nothing to actually prevent access (nor did it bring the moral salubriousness that it was supposed to bring). Internal passports didn't stop people from seeking work elsewhere and becoming second class citizens. Our own immigration system becomes more disastrous in every possible way as soon as we decided to actively enforce it. The DMCA and CFAA, both with punitive criminal and civil liabilities, have failed to stop piracy or computer intrusion (especially since that part of the CFAA was a response to a pre-WWW Matthew Broderick movie) but did encourage a lot of companies that sell ineffective solutions backed with FUD and hamper effective open disclosure and penetration testing for quite some time. The underlying incentives haven't changed. Banning the symptoms is easy and possibly even politically expedient but represents a bandaid over a gashing bleeding wound. Good speech can make bad speech irrelevant in some cases but it's neither reliable nor address the underlying problems. There's a far right nationalist movement in Germany again. Mere censorship can only go so far.

Unless you can come up with a way to, without resorting to mass coercion, create a system that can fairly act as this moderator and be accepted as fair across the board, it's almost certainly worse, not better, to allow active state interference.The deplatforming case is actually about exercising one (comapny)'s free speech rights, AWS can't violate the 1st amendment rights of Parler. And if they can't find some sketchier but less takedown-happy bulletproof-ish server overseas to host their shit, it's their own fault, they're not entitled for official promotion of their viewpoints. Allowing government regulation of speech will allow that.

That's way too 4D chess. He's essentially a drag performer who primarily performs for himself. It's the only context in which anyone would ban products that Americans generally can't use or don't even know about, or write executive orders that can't actually be carried out, or tries to pull a coup through a court system that he doesn't have direct control over. It's like the fine art of gender impersonation or, for fans of The Crown, "Kinging/Queening", he's just presidenting, nothing to see here.

While I certainly know people who for whatever reason fail to understand the relationship between taxes and benefits, I don't think they are really at all a significant portion of people who have taxation-related policy objections. The problem is amplified in America because of the long history of institutionalized subjugation and discrimination and the liberal use of violence both at home and abroad are taxpayer funded. Thanks to civil and administrative asset forfeiture that adds up to billions of dollars worth of cash and property seized without the government establishing a link to actual criminality that they can establish probable cause on (or for administrative forfeiture, there's no hearing at all, and they account for $500 million to $600 million a year). In a particularly galling and absurdist sort of way, Americans every day are paying for their own robberies, or paying in part for the settlement they receive after especially egregious cases manage to get past all of the legal hurdles protecting the authorities. Since most victims of what normal people would consider egregious abuse won't even get past that, we're talking about the victims of Chicago PD's systemic Holamn Square torture site and the likes, chipping in, along with their fellow citizens, while the perpetrators received pensions and when needed, covered for each other. All that are your taxpayer dollars at work. In some places, the police, with a hefty chunk of change from the Treasury and DoJ throigh "equitable sharing", are simply more incentized to use that taxpayer money to conduct more no-knock raids, because the war on drugs gets the feds involved which gets the local PD a chunk of federal funding as well. All that come directly from your tax dollars, in many cases far more than what goes into infrastructure.

Your taxx dollars pay for the carceral state, they pay for ICE raids conducted through ruses and guises ordinarily illegal but not in the administrative law context. DHS has a discretionary budget of around $50 billion a year. A similar amount is earmarked for nondiscretionary disaster relief which pretty much lost all meaning lately. Of course, the agencies bring in somme revenue as well, but that's usually even worse news. In July an IG's report fouhnd that the DEA, without legally required congressional oversight, have been profitably laundering money for the cartels for most of the past decade, and had even somehow got involved in buying a private jet that was then left off initial budget reports. Like Aliens v. Predator, whoever wins, we lose, since this is self-justifying behavior, not in the public's interest but to create reasons for their own relevance. Some degree of fraud, waste,and abuse is bound to happen in all bureaucracies, but in America the impact isn't felt evenly. Black and brown parents have to have a second talk with their kids about encounters with the police. Immigrants, documented or not, pay taxes but receive either abbreviated or absolutely no means-t4ested benefits. In spit4e of contributing to the continued survival of social security, they're literally considered second-class citizens subject to indefinite detention. Or, for about a few thousand Americans, you'll experience the exact same because that's about how many Americans get deported a year to god knows where.

And there's plenty of indicators showing that mere spending isn't really sufficient to achieve any of the goals we thought we could just throw taxpayer dollars at. HHS has a $2 trillion budget, almost half of that is used in conjunction with medicaid programs and grants, yet, neither party seems particularly happy with the status quo, not to mention that it excludes 20 million or so immigrants. And we have really convinced ourselves that money can cover up expertise and competency. American farmers are seeing their entire year's revenue coming from subsidies due to the trade war this year. For so many communities in this country, it makes perfect sense to wonder where the tax money go, since frankly it's pretty difficult to see sometimes, and what's most visible sometimes is also the most disturbing, egregious, and kafkaesque one can witness in the system. When that's the vector you interact with what your tax dollars pay for, it's perfectly logically consistent to want actual services yet not want to pay for the abuse. And we don't do public infrastructure stuff well anymore anyway. Think how long it took for the 2nd Avenue subway to go up 3 stations.

We should first of all reframe the notion that China has not engaged in wars of colonization and conquest since its independence. It has attempted and failed in the case of Taiwan, and has also managed to frame all of its armed conflicts, save its participation in the Korean War, in irredentist terms, meaning that they are simply trying to reclaim what already was rightfully theirs. I grew up in China and in the early 90s my maps had "South Tibet" marked as Chinese, Sikkim as an independent nation, and the maritime borders extending to the shores of Brunei. My parents were both mobilized for the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese War but did not see combat because it only lasted 3 weeks, although an uncle was injured and claims to have called an artillery strike that gave him what we now know as PTSD ever since. All maps published in China kept meaningless (although shorter and easier on the tongue) Chinese names in brackets next to Russian ones in the Russian Far East. The historiography of the CCP simply is too built into the narrative that it is anti-imperialist and anti-expansionist to suddenly change course in its rhetoric. Actions are another matter, of course.

Also, notably, there's no singular American ruling ideology in terms of grand strategy, and individual opinions, even ignorant, racist, uninformed ones not espoused by elites, can have an impact. There are plenty in both the libertarian and the progressive camps who vehemently favor a policy of restraint in grand strategic terms. America did change its entire view as to the country's role several times between 1915 and 1941. China has a unified, mandated singular ideology that the state creates and makes official, sometimes for the sake of consistency the definition of words are changed to aid those efforts (like Mao redefining "democratic" and "the people" for the nation's constitution, unilaterally of course). The CCP's raison d'etre is rooted in ethno-nationalist grievance politics and just as most people in China know little beyond what's seen in the media about the US, the inverse is true as well, and so a lot of people will view the threat in a lot of ways, some blatant in its xenophobia and racism (hell, there's still a chapter in the US Code that's titled "the Exclusion of the Chinese"), some on more nuanced, ideological, liberalism grounds, some on zero-sum grand strategy hegemonic thinking. But it's important to know that CHina wants to portray itself as a bigger threat than it really is and while its citizens are quite used to and are usually cynical about officical messges the state sends out, America's lack of experience in discerning between real and embellished and conjured aspects of official lines pose a rael, atlhough surmountable, threat.

Meanwhile, ask yourself how is it that cryptocurrencies are so big in China, in spite of government efforts to intimidate founders and launch its state-backed competitor. Ask yourself how successful is the long-standing national ban of porn? Or even truly the anti-religion movement, est. 1945. China's real threat is America taking it at face value and not critically enough. They've had a lot of decades to hone messaging.

Civil asset forfeiture gets a lot of well-deserved comparisons to highwaymen-behavior and outright armed robbery under the shield of law. However, let's get a bit more kafkaesque. Civil Forfeiture is generally connected to at least some sort of due process that ends up in court, if challenged. But in a huge number of cases - the DHS Inspector General released a scathing report a few months ago that indicate $1.2-2.8 billion dollars worth of property and cash was forfeited administratively, not civilly, between 2014 and 2018. This covers only DHS, as DOJ-affiliated agencies also have authority to do this, albeit under a different law. The IG report is here: https://www.oversight.gov/report/dhs/dhs-inconsistently-impl...

Administrative forfeiture actions do not end up in court, it's possible that you may not even realize that your property was seized or for what reason, or if you are aware, you may have been given instructions to challenge/claim the property that was essentially gibberish. You might try to reach the relevant agency, send in your claim/petition and hear nothing back. However, most insidiously, it was apparently not uncommon for the agency, after having determined that the owner of the property was innocent and the cash or property should be returned, nevertheless use waivers and other tactics to cause enough of a hassle so that they can negotiate a settlement for a portion of whatever was in question, usually cash. At this point, DHS already refers to the petitioner as "innocent owner". They just want a cut of money that they had no legal claim to anymore, and essentially purely through the fact that they are able to hold onto it and there's no meaningful judicial review of a great deal of administrative actions, you may have to pay a... bribe? Ransom? Either way, your property is held hostage until you pay up although the agency you are dealing with have already decided that you are innocent.

How the federal system of civil/admin forfeiture interplays with the state version is also quite interesting, because the federal equitable sharing program effectively acts as a backdoor to any state-level reform of the practice by not only funnelling money directly to police departments but also task forces or other similar ad hoc interagency entities that really don't have all of the characteristics of a formal police department. Last year the DOJ half of the operation divvied out $320 million to police departments and task forces, keeping the majority of the money they seized for themselves of course. All this really adds up to the simple notion that if you really want to get started with defunding the police, merely stopping them from being able to seek forfeiture in cases where no corresponding criminal charges can be brought with the evidence available. This simple act of stopping literal modern highwaymen would effectively cut $320 million into police budgets across the country. Unfortunately, permanent change requires congressional action so, no breaths were held in anticipation of actual substantive changes on the legal side.

The bar associations around the country almost always focus on financial improprieties - think comingling or mishandling client money, all the way to straight up swindling. The most reliable way to get disbarred isn't being an incompetent lawyer but to simply screw with your firm's finances. That's because financial misdealings are at least more or less objective and can be recorded and traced. There really isn't a good way to measure a lawyer's actual competency, considering that some of the best lawyers I know lose most of their cases and get the most bar complaints - because they are county public defenders in a system that is massively tilted against them. In fact I would hesitate to judge the frivolity of any particular case without all of the facts and evidence being presented, by nature of the work, and ultimately the courts, not the bar association, are the more responsive gatekeeper here, with the power to act as such if necessary (https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcp/rule_11). The reason they don't do it more is because courts tend to recognize that lawyers ultimately aren't independent actors but rather driven by their client's interests, which they ethically must zealously represent.

Onus is really on the clients bringing the suit. Anti-SLAPP laws have at least been somewhat effective on an individual level in states that enacted them, so laws can disincentivize client intentions in some cases at least. I have no idea what would actually work in the case at hand though.

I think it's correct to unlink likelihood of arrest with crimes committed, and plenty of studies have shown biases in that aspect as well as the effects of coercive plea bargaining that inflate crime numbers beyond actual crimes that even happen, in addition to conviction rates of those that are arrested. However, it makes little sense to say that somehow merely having a strong incentive for avoiding arrest means that one is actually able to consistently avoid arrest. In the study, which deals with violent felonies in Texas, arguably every person who is a suspect would have just as much incentive to avoid arrest, since immigration status is not a datapoint that is collected prior to arrest and one's ability to avoid arrest is also dependent on the police's abilities and the circumstances of each case, and not entirely down to the individual ability or incentive to avoid arrest. Furthermore, since immigration consequences come after the term is served if convicted, and violent felonies tend to carry terms of incarceration that are hefty and does not differ on account of immigration status, I don't think it's really all that relevant to consider incentives in avoiding arrest as a meaningful parameter to weigh the data in either direction.

I think what's more likely is that a) because of the harsh collateral consequences which includes all of the existing collateral consequences of a conviction plus removal, in communities with large numbers of immigrants without valid status, members of the community may be less likely to call the police to report crimes to begin with. The undocumented or mixed-status community's hesitation to call the police is pretty well-documented, although that is unlikely to explain the entire difference documented here; or b) there's a self-selection bias where many of those prone to commit violent felonies may not find it worthwhile to go through the trouble of crossing and attempting to establish themselves under the radar here only to get caught up in a system that's punitive and would lead to removal regardless, considering that migrants seldom move here for reasons other than work opportunities anyway. But again, because of how byzantine our legal system is and how even more kafkaesque our immigration system is, it's unlikely that those without law degrees who specialize in these areas truly have anything close to full knowledge of what the consequences truly look at, so I don't think that adequately explain the difference either. Perhaps more studies on those aspects should be conducted, although this study is more or less in line with thinktank and advocacy group-conducted research from the likes of Cato and the ACLU, whose ideologically leanings are not exactly overlapping on most issues.

Hey, let's get some interesting humanities papers into the mix, since thanks to COVID I had a lot of extra reading time and "best" is purely subjective:

"Erotic Modesty: (Ad)dressing Female Sexuality and Propriety in Open and Closed Drawers, USA, 1800–1930" https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1468-0424.00...

When JAmes C. Scott wrote about infrapolitcs in his 1990 work "Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts" (https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1np6zz) and described it as a sort of political resistance that never declares itself and remains beneath what the dominant group can properly perceive until the power shift actually starts to happen, he probably didn't think of a case where the undeclared politics is so literally something not meant to be seen. The theme is very much a progression of how slowly women were able to establish even what parts of their body can be sexualized or not sexualized, and culminates in a sudden burst, or power shift, in the 1910s-1930s after centuries of aggregating individual choices and entirely unseen acts. This particular revolution managed to happen almost entirely outside of organization and public view and while it's by no means over, the progress made in the last twenty years covered in the paper really show how productive the aggregation of individual acts of resistance, done without any open plans, can still bring about so much change. It also showed the limits of such movements, particularly whe the dominant group rhas an active interest in preserving that status quo.

"How Qualified Immunity Fails" https://scholarship.law.nd.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4...

and "The Case Against Qualified Immunity" https://scholarship.law.nd.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4...

These two were both written by UCLA Law professor Johanna Schwartz over the course of about a year and half from 2017-2018, and really got a lot of attention this year when a lot of people for the first time asked "why does it seem impossible to actually hold abusive police to some degree of personal responsibility?" Having worked at a public defender's office and then on federal CJA cases (essentially federal defense work when there is more than one codefendant and the federal defenders would have a conflict of interest defending both), the abusive nature of policing was very much something that I saw constantly for years but it's difficult to quantify just how little potential consequence a police officer may actually face because nobody had done the shoeleather work to collect the data, and police departments tend to have opacity written into their contracts. The actual data collected by Schwartz demonstrating how the multiple layers of shielding negotiated into police contracts and just how much indemnification, which is actually illegal in many jurisdictions but universally ignored, pushes any potential liability onto taxpayers directly, creating a situation where victims' taxes are just getting looped back into the settlements they receive. There are a lot of problems in the criminal justice and really any carceral system this country runs, and most of it are poorly documented on a systemic level and difficult to quantify. It's nice to see that someone put in the work to make the picture a little clearer, as practitioners tend to be entirely focused on their clients to do research like this and this is a particularly unglamorous field of research.

Ah yes, the clause that neatly manages to exclude tax payers who have ITNs that look and at filing time function just like an SSN but somehow are neatly trimmed out here, I wonder how that got in there...

Just read the report and it was fascinating, but the dataset being from a decade ago from an age of IRC dominance and decenralized markets and before Telegram becoming a huge player, certainly have changed the dynamics somewhere. It'd be interesting to see how that shift has changed things.

We can't readily read DMs on, say, telegram, of course,but there are a lot of channel indexers for Telegram that I wonedr if anyone is using to map these things out.

Sadly, in theory this is true but over the last 20 years there had been two - yes, TWO - cases where a prosecutor was prosecutoed for misconduct that materially prejudiced the outcome of the trial. Both required more than just Brady but also outright fraud. For all intents and purposes under the current system, it's very much a case of two egregious outliers covering the entire dataset in terms of prosecutions. I will believe it when I see it if intentional bad conduct will actually get challenged, and I'm not holding my breath. Power tends to self-perpetuate and this is simply the apotheosis of the unchecked exercise of power.

The two cases mentioned above: https://digitalcommons.pace.edu/ cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1635&context=lawfaculty

And it's a real balancing act but having caught COVID and almost died at the age of 33 I'm simply not going to take any chances when since we have no solid proof that my antibodies are going to ensure from now until I am next in line for the vaccine. Having worked in NYC in the immigration law system a ton of my ex-colleagues caught it and some of my supervisors passed away from it right away and as much as I'd like to think of myself as a rationale person who evaluates th evidence, personal experiences are powerful and scary and it's hard to convey how unexpectedly agonizing a "mild" case felt to me. This isn't the difference between mild and spicy wings, it's less-spicy and qhost-pepper wings.

And so them (and postmates, and instacart, and shipt, and local booze deliveries) have been extremely important because it reducecs the attack vector. Call me paranoid, but I can at least hae some control over the groceries sent to me, and for example. It's simply a tradeoff I'm willing to make. At once point, I couldn't even even properly update my will even though I'm a lawyer because I wanted to be prepared but not even my friends from school who are in the field were willing to come to my house, with the quarantine complicating things. since it was felt tha the 14 day window was arbitrary and I didn't get full blown symptoms until day 8-9.Under these cirucmstances every precaution, in my personal view, as long as it's a precaution that isn't conjured out of thin air and backed by some level of indication of efficacy that skews towards minimizing potential vectors of re-infection. It's not failsafe - my then-girlfriend, was asympomatic, gave mteh rvirus, and there wasn't any way in those days to even know or sure what do to, but as Don Draper said in Mad Men: "Limit your exposure".

I feel like what's not explored is that a system such as this with a centralized reputational management system and what seems to be a trade focused on easily reproduced goods of relatively low value means that this really focuses on a particular sort of middleman-aggregator actor with a much more diverse supply-chain and specialization in roles than observed. I mean, they're not exactly selling particularly sophisticated and unique things here, and I can only imagine that reputation maintenance becomes almost a full-time job (i.e. customer service) and the actual acquisition of the goods, however unsophisticated, needs to come from somewhere else. The really interesting thing would be seeing how the supply chains work because really it's the producers and not the salespeople that pose as actual threats that needs to be countered, although it also feels like ultimately this is a marketplace where people are more or less still scamming each other with low-quality high voume goods with a lot of hype.

Yep, working on the other side (criminal defense) I quickly, within a year or two, found that fraud, or what the laws would consider fraud that could be prosecuted, tend to unravel extremely quickly in most cases, planning is almost always inadequate if they wanted to get away if any planning is involved at all, and common OPSEC failures tank a great deal of them almost right off the bat. Also, there's a definite correlation between how many co-conspirators are involved with how quickly their scheme is discovered. This goes for all conspiracies under the legal definition - when you need more than two people to agree to a common plan or purpose to commit something, it turns out keeping even just a partnership quiet and in check is really hard for all but the most simple schemes. OF course that does also imply that the better, more organized outfits never come through my (public defender) office and so, there's a selection bias there, but the volume of cases is very high and it's hard to imagine that this represents at least a large portion of acts that caused enough damage/loss to elicit police attention.

I think there are probably some very talented solo operators who did their homework and have contingency plans and have OPSEC down who are able to pull off some long running schemes that may never be uncovered, just knowing the points of failure in th processes I've seen, but the amount of specialized knowledge and discipline required is going to be comparable to what's required to succeed in almost any field. Except for the very few at the top of the chain that nobody knows about, most people are better off getting a real job instead.A lot of those people who engage in fraud do it and get caught because ths isn't what they wanted to do butout of necessity, greed, or shortsighted assumptions they opportunistically engaged in the scheme. The internet does enable, I believe, single individuals to commit long term fraud operations as effectively lone-wolf actors whose necessity to employ a service offered elsewhere can be effectively done anonymously, and these are the dedicated, professional, and sometimes sometimes ideologically engaged types whose choice to engage is a long-term project and the sheer amount of knowledge in divergent fields of expertise required makes me wonder that if it wouldn't be better served to actually run amnesty programs to get these people into the legitimate sector even as consultants if not corporate jobs because our retributive criminal justice system renders that basically impossible. A bug bounty for fraud, perhaps? Just a thought.

And it does, of course, very frequently. The US Court system's problem is not a matter of discovering such frauds and wrongdoing, and in some fields it's almost impossible to get away with this sort of conduct, but overall, there's little avenues of redress. Civil litigation is obviously the biggest area and the best positioned to both catch and remedy the fraud. Some criminal proceedings have similar robust checks, but that is really only on one side - the defense's side. Prosecutors are immune and protections like Batson (racially motivated jury selections justified under pretextual justifications that later are found unreasonable) or Brady (prosecutors hiding evidence favorable to the defense or misrepresenting its existence at all) exist but there's not real accountability outside of personal shame and possibly getting a conviction vacated. Administrative courts are overwhwlemingly immigration courts where the nature of the proceedings ensure that the aggrieved party pretty much is ensured to be unavailable in the legal sense to challenge most of the cases.

There's a lot of fraud, waste,a abuse, or other chicanery in the courts and luckily in my experience they're never simply kept hidden without anyone noticing. The problem is always redressability. So much of the system requires discretionary rulings but the laws that dictate how we handle misconduct is heavily skewed in favor of the state if they ar a party and fails to take into account the urgency in resolving these cases that very often it becomes obvious that there's fraud, yes, but there's no redressability, and therefore there's no real punishment.

A particularly egregious case of falsifying evidence and using prtextual reasons to elicit false testimony and racially-based jury selections is the US v. Flowers case in the Supreme Court last term. There's a podcast on it, but the decision itself is... excoriating to say the least as to how far and how egregious the conduct was to try to execute an innocent man. It's discovered all right, but there's no punishment. So courts can and do definitely figure out fraud pretty readily, but when it comes to doing anything about it, victims not on the side of the state frequently find it cold comfort.

I'm actually quite curious as to where you guys end up taking the product, because at least pertaining to the legal profession, as of a few years ago, the entire system from your first proctored exam as a 1L to the bar exam didn't actually require the browser context at all. The UI we used had a heavy Windows 98 aesthetic going on, and mostly just consisted of native text-boxes with pretty minimal formatting tools, timer, and not much of anything else. But at the same time it's also understood on some level everybody knows that the rigamarole is done for its own sake entirely. It's always understood on some level that it's not the substantive law that these exams test for but instead how ably is one able to jump through arbitrary hoops in a prescribed time and format, which is one way of looking at the legal profession as a whole. It's entirely possible that as the vendor you may end up caring more about the exam than the actual test-takers themselves.

Parts of the site that are behind CF like the API are down.

The federal government forcing a state to enforce a federal statute would definitely violate the 10th Amendment if the state has laws against that. I think most states have building codes irrespective of copyright status.

However, the very scenario is covered generally by statute already. Regulations, even copyrighted ones adopted by an agency, must be publicly accessible to have the force of law. Freely accessible in most cases relate to having physical access to the text in some free way. This seems like something that can be solved very simply on the state level: just redefine publicly accessible to publicly accessible on the internet.

This is generally something that's a good idea in the broad sense, as in with our level of unemployment, lowering birth rates, and generally overly restrictive immigration policies with no practical way of giving employment-based routes to permanent residency for those performing jobs that doesn't require a degree. However, this is ultimately still a half-assed measure that fails to address anything close to the root of the problem and I can't imagine this making enough of a difference in incentive structures to really matter.

"Guest workers" was effectively the de facto system of how ostensibly undocumented immigrant workers operated in America prior to the militarization of the border from the 70s to the 80s that effectively removed the option of having laborers who would work in America but reside in Mexico with their families during the winter, which is a major cause of why this whole "illegal immigrants moving to America crisis" even exists. So under this current regime, part of that idea is restored, because, frankly, the old model was fairly effective.

However, this kills one of the most necessary elements of, well, capitalism, which is that the workers would need some measure of bargaining power in terms of wages. The current scheme takes away that by tying one's ability to reside and work in a country to a particular employer, which turns into a somewhat more charitable version of indentured servitude. Why are these workers paid less than American workers? Because they can't negotiate for higher wages without getting booted. So it's fixing a problem that's self-inflicted except effectively turning it into quasi-indentured-servitude, as the H2 program comes with a long history of reported abuses, which surely only represents a minority of actual abuses.

And you can't adjust status to anything permanent in the end, so it may even be worse than indentured servitude.

Coming from Trump, as well, I wouldn't believe a single thing he says regardless so this could all just be a mirage anyway, but ultimately the reforms needed needs to actually work on a level that liberalizes a lot of the restrictions that have no benefits and are in fact holdovers from far more explicitly racist policies of old (there's still a chapter in the US Code specifically titled "Exclusion of the Chinese" for crissakes). Without that, all these stopgaps are just putting bandaids on gunshot wounds.