Viewing profile — mrbabbage

Corporate law is overwhelmingly state law. Every federally tax exempt entity is a state (or foreign) corporation or other kind of entity, and states (or foreign governments) impose…

this is correct. the main advantage of a VAT is incentive alignment. every intermediary producer must collect and remit VAT if they want to claim their VAT refunds for inputs. i.e.…

When you're driving the highway from the international airport at Keflavík to Reykjavík, the first big building you see is a massive Rio Tinto aluminum smelter: https://maps.app.go…

bcrypt has a built-in 72 byte limit, which helps with the DOS issue

Here's another link, from a source that's less personally invested in the ongoing controversy: https://www.reuters.com/technology/musk-challenges-brazils-o...

> We can see this in-action already. Places like California have effectively de-criminalized most/all drug use if you are part of the homeless population. Surprise again - there's …

For what it's worth—the Library of Congress published a DMCA exemption for video games that require a use of a no-longer-available verification server. https://www.eff.org/deeplink…

I realize the headline is designed to be attention-grabbing, but "lie" is pretty strong given the warning's actual text. Could the warning be better phrased? Almost certainly—it's …

How does distracted driving explain increasing pedestrian death rates in America while death rates are flat or down [1] in other industrialized countries? Unless there's a reason w…

I totally agree that it's not obvious that an ML model is a derivative work. the language of the Copyright Act uses "recast, transformed, or adapted" to describe derivative works, …

the font size isn't ideal, but I find the line width to be a far larger problem. a traditional book will have around 70 characters per line [1]. by contrast, on my screen (13" M1 m…

Federal law protects whistleblowers who confidentially disclose trade secrets to law enforcement: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1833

That turns off the animation but leaves the time delay in place. E.g. if you have a text field selected in the target window, any typing you do won't register until the fade in—fad…

No, the joke is on us MacOS users who insist on its terrible Alt-Tab behavior instead of leaning into the gesture support. But I do believe the gesture support has fundamental limi…

It's always been here. Different places get to the epiphany at different times -- places like the Netherlands figured this out in the 1980s, in the wake of the oil crisis. [1] The …

The primary purpose of an NDA is to allow the company to enforce trade secrets: the existence of the NDA is proof that the company took steps to maintain the secrets' secrecy. Noth…

As someone who came out at 18 (technically an adult), both: - younger—I had a vastly accelerated "social puberty" bc I started so much later than most folks. - older—for the reason…

Corporations are creatures of the state; they are legal fictions with no existence outside law. Why do you think they have boards? Because the state requires them to. If the state …

They feel like Churchill's quip about democracy: self-evals are the worst system, except all the others that have been tried. Ultimately, employers and employees need a way to ensu…

Should have (2015) in the title, but I absolutely love stories like this. Even wilder is the detail at the end: they recorded interest payments on the original goat skin until 1944…

Thanks Simon! I can indeed confirm that this script managed to saturate the database's hardware capacity (I recall CPU being the bottleneck, and I had to dial down the parallelism …

Exact strategy to be determined—we're looking at various data layers at the moment. I wish we could do something simple like a rotating log file, but we want to be able to query it…

The second bullet point is underway! Getting audit events out of the main database will be a major headache saver. The first bullet point is on our radar for the near term. We have…

To be determined!