There's a whole lot of people who don't have the luxury of just being able to assume a baseline level of trust, because they feel out of place for whatever reason. Think about what groups of people that might be, in the kernel context.
346 karma · joined April 22, 2007
You are correct, by the way, as far as I know, that the 55mph speed limit was originally an energy conservation thing. This was during the oil crisis of the 70s, when it was federally imposed. Ever since the federal mandate was lifted, speed limits have been creeping back up, but at very different rates in different states.
To give a comparison, in France freeway speed limits are roughly 80mph in dry weather and 70mph in rain (I say roughly because they are, of course, in metric.) In Belgium, and the Netherlands it's 75mph, although The Netherlands has introduced many variable speed limits (electronic signs based on congestion) and recently bumped it up to 80mph on certain rural stretches (rural by Dutch standards). Germany, of course, has no speed limits at all on many long-distance Autobahns (about 50% of the network), although in metropolitan areas, contrary to popular mythology in the US, they often do have speed limits, which go by the charmingly long-winded name of "Geschwindigkeitsbeschränkung," often shortened in colloquial speech to "Tempolimit." The de facto speed limit on the unrestricted Autobahns is 125mph, since that's the fastest unmodified German cars will go.
So did some technocratic bunch of engineers evaluate the conditions in each of these countries and decide that somehow some subtle difference of geography that Germans are capable of safely driving a full 65 mph faster than Hawaiians?
I doubt it.
May I also remind the reader that East Germany used to have a rigorously enforced 60mph limit that was rather promptly lifted after the reunification, which was by no means an event of particular relevance to traffic engineering.
Copyright infringement is always a tort, but the conditions under which it becomes a criminal offense vary by jurisdiction.
Just because you have a cause of action for breach of contract (the law recognizes the other guy should've kept his promise) does not mean you can get the remedy of specific performance (where the other guy is actually ordered to make good after all). The standard common law remedy is _in specie_ damages (the other guy has to pay up). The exact rules about when the court can compel specific performance are messy (written by lawyers), but it seems to me that basically what they all come down to is that no judge is going to say "I compel performance" if there's no feasible, relatively hassle-free way to actually, physically, compel performance. And that, in practice, tends to mean cases where the promise was title (legal ownership) to property: the judge can make the promise be kept by simply awarding the title to you. Actually getting the other guy to give you the cow or get off the land that's newly yours is a matter of property law, which has procedures such as replevy (where the Sheriff waves a gun around while you take the cow) and ejection (where the Sheriff waves a gun around telling them to get off your land.) These things can get messy enough as it is, and no judge wants to be responsible for having a sheriff waving a gun around to, say, compel somebody to give you a haircut. (And a GOOD haircut too, or else I'll shoot!) In such cases, the tricky specific performance business is transformed by the law into a straightforward money debt of the sort that can be enforced using, you guessed it, Sheriffs with guns, as well as garnishment of wages and the like. (I'm pretty sure that in the US, though, debts arising from judgments in breach of contracts cases are dischargeable in bankruptcy. Don't trust me on this, but I think it's pretty much only tax debts, student loans, and judgments for "intentional" torts that aren't dischargeable.)
All right, so after that long paragraph full of chattels and replevies and Sheriffs, if you are still reading, let's just assume that what could be had in court was monetary damages.
How much?
Oh, I would say about $500. Maybe a small multiple of that, but how are you going to convince a judge that you paid $500 for something that is worth much more than a small multiple of $500 to you?
That sort of stuff easily gets lost in translation, which is why legal translation is such a pain to do. And probably a good part of why it took the English courts so long to switch from Law French (an old dialect of Norman French long used for English legal writing) to English.
Sometimes it's claimed it's about precedent, and indeed some civil law jurisdictions claim that they do not believe in binding precedent. But of course for a legal system to be at all useful, decisions need to be consistent, and the idea that you can achieve consistency by writing every detail in a code so that every decision logically follows from the code is bullshit; if that were the case, all civil lawsuits would be 100% predictable and therefore rational actors would settle them and the judges could all go on vacation.
The reasoning I once read in some Dutch first-year law course notes was along the lines of "we don't do _stare decisis_, but we support equal treatment in equal cases, and it would be unequal treatment to treat you in way X when we treated the other guy in way Y, so we're going to follow precedent, but not because we must follow precedent, but only to avoid unequal treatment." I suppose that it is true that digging up absolutely ancient judgments is a little bit less convincing in a civil law setting, especially if there are periodic recodifications so that you can simply toss away a 17th-century precedent by saying it was an interpretation of the old code, not the new one.
Some say the difference is codification, but as you point out, not all status in common law jurisdictions are just piles of unrelated acts: a lot of the time, they are organized as systematic codes that are amended just like civil law codes. And besides, civil law countries have uncodified case law, too. The section on torts in the French civil code, for instance, is incredibly terse, saying basically that if you unfairly harm somebody you must compensate them. But of course France has tort law just like England does. Interestingly, since French court decisions do not normally provide much reasoning aside from quoting sections of the codes, the details of that tort law get elaborated mostly by law professors in books and articles; but in other civil law jurisdictions, like Germany, judges write long, reasoned decisions just like in the US (except more stilted and formulaic in style). And Scotland, considered traditionally a civil law country, has lots of English-style uncodified legislation.
So maybe then it's the Roman basis? Nah. English law had lots of Roman influence, too, and continental law had lots of influence from local customary law, canon law, and the law merchant. (Just read Berman to find out the details.) Maybe the continentals were bigger on pretending that it was all Codex Iuris Civilis all the time, but nobody ever really believed that.
So then what? Sometimes you hear particular doctrines called out as being significantly different, like consideration in in common contract law as opposed to the intention to be bound in the civil law of obligations. But the consideration rule has so many exceptions that if you can reasonably be thought to have intended to be bound, you'd better know the law very precisely if you still want to get out from under things based on lack of consideration. Besides, consideration may not be required in the civil law, but a payment can serve as evidence of a nonwritten contract.
That's not to say that there are no differences, but it's hard to pin down anything that really applies in all civil law jurisdictions and no common law jurisdictions or vice versa. Notaries, I think, are a pretty consistent difference, although they don't exist in some Asian civil-law jurisdictions.
I don't exactly sympathize with the panicky rhetoric of the pamphlet that was about, but nothing in it comes anywhere close to the kind of thing libel law legitimately protects against, and it looks like stuff that would be perfectly legal to say in more reasonable jurisdictions like Holland or the US.
But yes, even more outrageous than English libel law (there's no such thing as "UK libel law," since Scots law is different) is this Libel tourism business.
I wonder what it would take to get this reformed. Any British people on here who have a better view of the local political climate? I somehow suspect that a push from local constituent carries more weight in British politics in today's climate than ECHR judgments like the one in the McLibel case. Is there anyone strongly pushing for these strict laws, or is it just a case of inertia combined with nobody pushing very hard against it?
Also, if you know somebody who works at Facebook, try to get them to refer you instead of applying directly. (Just email them your resume and ask if they can forward it.) This applies not just to Facebook but to most other big companies, especially popular employers that get a lot of resumes every week. Our recruiters try hard to evaluate all the resumes they receive, but if you guessed that they probably look more closely at ones that reach them by way of an internal referral, I think you guessed correctly.
Amsterdam is a cosmopolitan, small city -- a combination you won't find many other places. It's a college town, a tourist attraction, and a center of international commerce. The city center and indeed many of the residential neighborhoods are extremely beautiful, at least if you're into brick and trees. You'll find many decently trained people to hire, all of whom speak Dutch and English fluently as well as a bit of German and French. You'll find that official bureaucracy is comparatively efficient and honest. You'll find well maintained, if slightly underprovisioned, highways linking you to the rest of Europe, as well as comfortable, clean trains running to every significant town in the country twice an hour, and a very well designed and operated international airport with a train station in the basement.
In general, for some reason Americans imagine that European countries always have government-run healthcare, presumably because that's what Britain has. In fact, most European countries have hybrid systems, with insurance provided by private companies or in some cases unions, and heavily regulated and subsidized by the government.
As for taxes: while taxes in NL are indeed extremely high, there are loopholes for foreign high skilled workers ("kennismigranten.") My cynical public choice economist interpretation is that the Dutch government realized that this group of people is more likely to vote with their feet, inducing a different Laffer curve, and as such the taxation rate maximizing public revenue is a bit lower in their case...
As for finding housing: very strict rent control laws depress rents way below market rates, which of course means that demand outstrips supply and some allocation mechanism other than price must be invented. In the Dutch case, most rental property subject to rent control is owned by semi-public nonprofits, and their allocation mechanism is almost universally a waiting list. In the case of Amsterdam, there are many districts for which a 7 year waiting list is not out of the ordinary. While there is a blanket exception from the strictest rent control laws for properties with a monthly rent above about 650 euros, the city of Amsterdam has the additional problem that an even larger share of rental properties is owned by said semi-public nonprofits ("woningcorporaties") than in other cities. As an outsider looking to get a"vrije sector" apartment (i.e. over 650 euros a month and thus exempt from the strictest rent control rules) you're in trouble. Consider living in Amstelveen, which has a lot of "vrije sector" housing because it is historically run by the liberal party, whereas Amsterdam is historically run by the labor party.
Sincerely, your friendly neighborhood economist.
First of all, many jurisdictions make it hard for employers to try to control things you invent on your own time without using their facilities -- which doesn't keep employers from trying.
Secondly, even if your employer arguably does control the IP you need, that doesn't mean they won't give it up. Woz famously realized that HP had a claim to the Apple I and offered to let them have it; HP thought of it as more of a hobby than a business and the rest is history.
Universities and other research institutes routinely let employees spin off companies, usually in exchange for some share (although, anecdotally, it seems that universities that are new to the game often ask for more than universities that already have strong spin-off cultures).