This video linked in the article (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XBzV0bDZdQ) makes me want to donate to Institute for Justice to maybe help stop this practice. But a bit of Googling shows that IfJ were also one of the legal forces behind the Citizens United decision, which is something I really don't want to support.
The "Citizens United" ruling simply said that citizens who pool money to pay for political media do not lose their first amendment rights by doing so in the form of a corporation. (or other entity). In this case it was a group who funded a documentary critical of Hillary Clinton.
That's it.
Citizens United was a fundamentally pro-first amendment, pro-human rights ruling.
I wonder if you can mount a defense of the idea that government has the right to ban people from making videos that criticize political candidates without government approval?
The counterargument is that allowing the very rich to spend unlimited amounts of money to influence elections, without even full transparency as to where the money is coming from, makes our nation far worse.
You can tell that’s an opinion held by most of the people in this country by the fact that we had a set of campaign finance laws that were gutted or basically made moot by various recent developments like Citizens United. We have those adorable quaint little limits (4 figures) that a person can give to a campaign per election cycle. The point of that is that as a person, there probably ought to be a limit for how much money you can give a campaign.
And entities other than people, just like they aren’t entitled to votes, aren’t entitled to be able to stuff money into campaigns. Even if they pretend they’re independent.
None of the campaign finance laws we have mean anything when you can use these loopholes big enough to drive an oil tanker through. Also, I think we’re the only ones among advanced democracies who have this stuff. I don’t think it’s making our democracy healthier.
It's disingenuous to frame it as being simply about "making videos"
The ruling barred restrictions on corporations, unions, and nonprofit organizations from independent expenditures, allowing groups to independently support political candidates with financial resources.
In a dissenting opinion, Justice John Paul Stevens argued that the court's ruling represented "a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self government"
The people collectively have not submitted a constitutional amendment
and I’m going to be selling ad space to SuperPACs every 2 years until they do. I really thought for sure that one would provoke a tweak to the constitution, but nope!
Technically true, but irrelevant in this case. The supreme court decided that people working together have the same first amendment rights that they do working individually. I think it was the correct decision, even if the fallout from it isn’t good.
That's a different argument. And one profoundly flawed in its own way.
A corporate entity (that is, any entity comprised of two or more people) might have a need for legal rights, but there's no reason acceptable to me that it has to be on a notion of equivalence to "personhood", equivalent to human rights. And calling it that merely compounds both error and confusion.
Courts are not infallible. And the Santa Clara v. SPRR US origin is its own ball of bullshit.
At Google almost 20 years ago, a bunch of our machines (possibly with slightly bespoke CPUs?) were behaving oddly. These machines were mostly in use for serving Google's web index, so almost the entire RAM was devoted to index data; the indexserver processes were designed to be robust against hardware failure, and if they noticed any kind of corruption they'd dump and reload their data. We noticed that they were dumping/reloading massively more often than they'd expect.
Eventually the cause was narrowed down to that, randomly when the machine was stressed, the second half (actually, the final 2052 bytes) of some physical page in memory would get zeroed out. This wasn't great for the indexservers but they survived due to the defensive way that they accessed their data. But when we tried to use these new machines for Gmail, it was disastrous - random zeroing of general process code/data or even kernel data meant things were crashing hard.
We noticed from the kernel panic dumps (Google had a feature that sent kernel panics over the network to a central collector, which got a lot of use around this time) that a small number of pages were showing up in crash dump registers far more often than would statistically be expected. This suggested that the zeroing wasn't completely random. So we added a list of "bad pages" that would be forcefully removed from the kernel's allocator at boot time, so those pages would never be allocated for the kernel or any process. Any time we saw more than a few instances of some page address in a kernel panic dump, we added it to the list for the next kernel build. Like magic, this dropped the rate of crashes down into the noise level.
The root cause of the problem was never really determined (probably some kind of chipset bug) and those machines are long obsolete now. But it was somehow discovered that if you reset the machine via poking some register in the northbridge rather than via the normal reset mechanism, the problem went away entirely. So for years the Google bootup scripts included a check for this kind of CPU/chipset, followed by a check of how the last reset had been performed (via a marker file) and if it wasn't the special hard reset, adding the marker file and poking the northbridge to reset again. These machines took far far longer than any other machines in the fleet to reboot due to these extra checks and the double reboot, but it worked.
Reddit could offer a premium membership that allows add-free and API access, and require the third-party apps to log in on behalf of the user. The fee might still turn a lot of people off (although the lack of ads would make it so much nicer), but it at least wouldn't be a technical hurdle. That model seems to work for YouTube.
Or they could just continue having their current premium model that doesn't involve the third-party apps they so despise. Reddit premium is a thing already, too bad both the official app and website sucks.
I coined the term "Xenoserver" back in 1999, for a paper in IEEE HotOS proposing an architecture for allowing systems in core networks to safely accept and execute code from untrusted users (for a fee, of course!): https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/srg/netos/papers/1999-hoto...
I was inspired by the word "xenos" (meaning both stranger and guest, or in combination a stranger who you invited into your home) rather than the word "xenia" for the general concept of hospitality extended to such a stranger [EDIT: since I wasn't familiar with the word "xenia"].
The Xenoserver project at Cambridge University developed this idea, and eventually focused around the hypervisor, which took on the name Xen.
But cross-contamination in a shared production facility can happen fairly easily (and is important for folks who are sensitive to a few parts-per-million of gluten), hence why lots of packets have that warning in the small print. An obvious "gluten-free" label means that the producer is asserting that this cross-contamination hasn't occurred and you don't have to search the small print.
From what I understand gluten intolerance (including Celiac disease) is not at all like allergies where even a small amount of cross contamination can be harmful (or even deadly). Gluten intolerance really needs a solid amount (which many foods provide) to trigger problems, and the worry is really the long-term damage that can be done.
So I think that the "gluten-free" labels on things that obviously would not have gluten in them (e.g.: bottled water) is absolutely about advertisement to people who have been trained to think that "gluten-free" is always a good thing.
Celiac disease and Non-Celiac Gluten Sensitivity are very different beasts in terms of their effects. The latter is more likely to triggered in the presence of (as you say) non-trivial amounts of gluten; Celiac disease is an auto-immune disease that, while not normally at the level of anaphylactic shock, can have very unpleasant effects in tiny amounts.
And even within Celiac disease there are a lot of variations. My mother has been diagnosed as Celiac for 50 years (back before most doctors had heard of it, and she almost died from malnutrition pre-diagnosis). She obviously avoids anything that has any mention of wheat, or has been cooked in the same oil as glutenous food; she generally avoids anything that mentions "possible cross-contamination" on the label but doesn't have to be a total stickler. I don't think she's had a serious attack in many years. A friend of mine was diagnosed as Celiac maybe 10 years ago, and is incredibly sensitive - despite his best efforts he seems to end up with horrible symptoms every couple of months or so just through tiny amounts of contamination.
The FDA limit for claiming something is "gluten-free" is 20 ppm; I believe that level exists partly because it's very hard to detect anything less than that anyway, but it also fits in well with what most Celiac sufferers can tolerate.
That's not true. As I discovered when my COBRA ran out recently, finding individual plans that match the coverage of employer plans is very hard or impossible, regardless of how much you're willing to pay.
You’re telling me a mega-corp buying coverage for 10000+ employees might have an advantage in negotiating price that a single “rugged individual” doesn’t?! But that sort of thinking could burst the whole “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” thinking that fuels the American dream! Clearly all individuals (both single citizens and corporate entities)are the same other the law!
I’ve always been able to find the same or similar BCBS plan my employers offer on healthcare.gov. If it has the same metal level (platinum/gold/silver/bronze), it should be the same actuarial value.
In terms of general benefits, maybe. In terms of provider coverage - I couldn't find an individual plan at coveredca.com that was accepted by doctors at Stanford Hospital.
This association with the French word that happens to be my surname is something that I've encountered more since moving from the UK to the US. Possibly due to the proximity to France resulting in a lot more UK people learning French in school than those who grow up in the US?
