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How the DEA took a young man’s life savings without charging him with a crime

washingtonpost.com

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Re: How the DEA took a young man’s life savings without charging him with a crime

#341

Post by ohitsdom »

leap_ahead wrote: post #329
ohitsdom wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> What about this? That article was about the US treating a Muslim terribly. That happens, and unfortunately it seems to happen very often, and with little justifying evidence. What I'm saying is that I haven't heard it happening to a friend of a Muslim, which was the original scenario. >> Okay, thank you very much, I'm staying home then. My comment was made tongue in cheek. Secret prisons on US soil are near unhear…

>> Patent trolls have no political clout. Zero chance of police arresting someone on their behalf (let alone them calling police to request this). But they have rich guys behind them. What if they decide to make "an example" of me, to scare everyone in the US and abroad and convince them to give in and just pay extortion money to them? Right know every non-US company just ignores them and that's huge potential money…

This fear is completely irrational. There is no legal justification to allow for anyone to be arrested due to a patent violation, regardless of how powerful or rich the patent holder is. There is just no way this would or could happen.

To be fair, I'm sure I have a lot of assumptions about Russia that you would find equally ridiculous.

Re: How the DEA took a young man’s life savings without charging him with a crime

#342

Post by cbsmith »

random_rr wrote: post #260
cbsmith wrote: post #117

"Asset forfeiture is lucrative for the DEA. According to their latest notification of seized goods, updated Monday, agents have seized well over $38 million dollars' worth of cash and goods from people in the first few months of this year." Umm... $38 million in three months works out to about 5% of the DEA's operating budget. If your revenue is 5% of your burn rate, that's not exactly lucrative. This is money that,…

>Let's be careful with our use of "lucrative". Any business model that generates $38M/3 months ($152M/yr) could truthfully and emphatically be described as "lucrative." I don't think that's a fair argument.

> Any business model that generates $38M/3 months ($152M/yr) could truthfully and emphatically be described as "lucrative."

No, a business model that generates and $38M of profits in 3 months would likely be described as "lucrative". A business model that generates $38M of revenue with a cost of revenue that is more than an order of magnitude larger is anything but "lucrative".

Re: How the DEA took a young man’s life savings without charging him with a crime

#343

Post by diyorgasms »

harryh wrote: post #324
hinkley wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand the claim that people with money could just use it all to buy a one way ticket to nowhere and never be seen again. But it seems to me that there's a very very wide line between "Use your money to keep doing bad things" and "We don't know if you're guilty but we're going to take all your money anyway and good luck with those legal costs" Certainly putting all of their assets into escrow and only allowing…

A bank robber should be able to use the money they steal to defend themselves?

Someone accused of robbing a bank should not be able to use their own money to defend themselves against such an accusation?

You have a major problem with your presumption of guilt.

Re: How the DEA took a young man’s life savings without charging him with a crime

#344

Post by FireBeyond »

techlibertarian wrote: post #274
Frondo wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taxation isn't theft. The anti-tax crowd is just like the anti-vax crowd. They both want a free ride on the rest of our backs; the anti-vaxers want the benefit of herd immunity, and the anti-taxers want others to pay the cost of living in the modern world. (*edited to a missing word)

> the anti-taxers want others to pay the cost of living in the modern world This simply isn't true. Anti-taxers want to choose where their dollars go - each and every one.

But are they happy to ensure that they avail themselves of not a single benefit they didn't contribute to - that'll be the flip side.

Re: How the DEA took a young man’s life savings without charging him with a crime

#345

Post by bryondowd »

philh wrote: post #319
bryondowd wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I lean one way or the other, but that isn't a good analogy. There's no benefit to anybody from a baseball bat to the head. Now, if a certain number of baseball bats to heads is required to appease the gods and increase fertility, health, etc in a majority of the population, you've got a better comparison. Maybe not everybody needs all those benefits, but the options on the table are to let some people op…

I agree that those features would make the analogy more accurate wrt taxation, but if that was the only important thing about an analogy, we wouldn't use analogies at all. (And it's quite possible that I shouldn't have used an analogy in this case.) I don't think those features are particularly relevant to the mistake Frondo was making.

I'm not sure what point the original analogy was meant to make, and I apologize if I missed it.

Frondo claimed that "anti-taxers" were free riders, which models well with the modified analogy as those who opt-out of being hit in the head, at the expense of everyone else, yet still likely benefit, even if only indirectly, from living in a world where others take the hits to achieve the benefits.

Note that I'm not saying Frondo is correct, I was just showing that the analogy given didn't refute his claim in any way I could see.

Personally, I expect most people against taxes fall under my last category of people trying to find another way to get the needed benefits without being hit in the head, or at least want to get more bang for their buck or a more fair distribution of cost/benefit.

Re: How the DEA took a young man’s life savings without charging him with a crime

#346

Post by SixSigma »

ndespres wrote: post #291
SixSigma wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a person of color There's one of your problems. Am I a person of no colour? Your (and this isn't a direct attack on you) use of language contributes to the situation while it is trying to be softly softly.

We should not define people in terms of what they are "not" or lump them into a group of who they are different from ("minority"). So no, if you are white you can be just that. Maybe it doesn't have as much play outside the U.S. but the term PoC seems to work well here. For the whole semantic argument I'll point to http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_of_color .

we're even more positive, blacks are called black. No messing about.

We also have IC codes

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IC_codes

    Code 	Ethnicity 
    IC1 	White - North European
    IC2 	White - South European
    IC3 	Black
    IC4 	Asian (in the UK Asian refers to people from the Indian subcontinent like India, Pakistan, Bangladesh,  Nepal)
    IC5 	Chinese, Japanese, or other South East Asian
    IC6 	Arabic or North African
    IC9 	Unknown
And, just to polish things off, the European Union has declared that there is no such thing as "race".

Re: How the DEA took a young man’s life savings without charging him with a crime

#347

Post by dba7dba »

Houshalter wrote: post #155
itistoday2 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am concerned that by calling it "civil forfeiture" this article is using language to mask a very basic crime. What was described in this article is called stealing or theft. To call it anything else is to mask and downplay what was done to this man. It is to enable the very act that was committed. George Carlin observed this as a dangerous trend in our language: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuEQixrBKCc Call it "…

George Orwell wrote a fantastic essay on this that is worth reading: >In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the profes…

dropping of the atom bombs on Japan

I respectfully disagree that it's indefensible. It was either 100,000 Japanese civilians in those 2 cities OR million or more American casualties. AND if the invasion had taken place, millions and millions of Japanese civilians would've died also.

I agree, with proper PR language, anything can be made look half decent and therefore tolerable.

Re: How the DEA took a young man’s life savings without charging him with a crime

#348

Post by leap_ahead »

ohitsdom wrote: post #341
leap_ahead wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Patent trolls have no political clout. Zero chance of police arresting someone on their behalf (let alone them calling police to request this). But they have rich guys behind them. What if they decide to make "an example" of me, to scare everyone in the US and abroad and convince them to give in and just pay extortion money to them? Right know every non-US company just ignores them and that's huge potential money…

This fear is completely irrational. There is no legal justification to allow for anyone to be arrested due to a patent violation, regardless of how powerful or rich the patent holder is. There is just no way this would or could happen. To be fair, I'm sure I have a lot of assumptions about Russia that you would find equally ridiculous.

You might be right that I'm being irrational. But I've really developed some apprehensive attitude towards the US over the last few years. And the worst thing is, any new day brings some new information that reinforces this fear. Things are objectively getting worse, not better. Somehow I'll have to live with it. But at least I'm not doing any business in the US, so this is not a practical problem for me.

Re: How the DEA took a young man’s life savings without charging him with a crime

#349

Post by wavefunction »

leap_ahead wrote: post #313
marcosdumay wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brazilian citizen here. Do you realize that the news report thing out of proportion, right?

Of course. But the thing is, they actually reported what really happened. Conversely, do you realize this sort of things shouldn't be really happening in what claims to be the most advanced and civilized country on this planet? I'm not hearing of this crap happening in central Europe for instance. You can expect these things from some forgotten African country, but not really from one of the so called first-world cou…

>>claims to be the most advanced and civilized country on this planet?

You seem to have fallen for American propaganda harder than any American I've ever met. We are taught in our schools about the evils our government has conducted throughout our history to the indigenous pre-Columbus populations, women, ethnic and sexual minorities. There has never been a period in American history where some evil was not being visited on either our own people by the rich and powerful or our Government, or evil visited on people of other countries.

I do think it's a country with a lot of positive qualities and the majority of Americans are decent people but with 300,000,000 people some of them are going to be evil or misguided in their attempts to transform the US and the world in ways they think should happen.

The "War on Drugs," which began with alcohol prohibition in the early 1900s and was shifted to other narcotics as time went by is one of those examples. Some Americans think that other Americans should be prevented from taking drugs for a variety of reasons, and so laws attempting to prohibit the trade and usage of narcotics are passed. Civil forfeiture was added as a "tool" to make trade in narcotics more painful as just locking up or fining people was not having the desired effect.

Rather than admit that some people will take drugs whether they are legal or not, these people who want no one to take drugs would rather push further and further in their misguided quest.

Re: How the DEA took a young man’s life savings without charging him with a crime

#350

Post by philh »

bryondowd wrote: post #345
philh wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that those features would make the analogy more accurate wrt taxation, but if that was the only important thing about an analogy, we wouldn't use analogies at all. (And it's quite possible that I shouldn't have used an analogy in this case.) I don't think those features are particularly relevant to the mistake Frondo was making.

I'm not sure what point the original analogy was meant to make, and I apologize if I missed it. Frondo claimed that "anti-taxers" were free riders, which models well with the modified analogy as those who opt-out of being hit in the head, at the expense of everyone else, yet still likely benefit, even if only indirectly, from living in a world where others take the hits to achieve the benefits. Note that I'm not sayi…

Analogies don't refute things, they just make other things easier to understand. My refutation of Frondo's original claim amounts to: "you're just plain wrong". (Anti-taxers are not free riders. They don't want other people to pay for them.) The analogy was: "here's a similar mistake".
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