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Texas app store age verification law blocked by federal judge

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Re: Texas app store age verification law blocked by federal judge

#251

Post by monocularvision »

mothballed wrote: post #227
monocularvision wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could still be impeached by the legislative branch.

The thing authorizing that -- the constitution. So unless the legislative can ignore the "interpretation" for the purposes of impeachment, the court can simply "interpret" the part that you think authorizes impeachment to just mean something like "the meaning of life is 54."

To be honest I am not sure if you are even discussing this in good faith anymore. The idea that the Supreme Court could render impeachment of them null and void and the legislative and executive branches would just be :shrugging-emoji: is a little silly.

Yes, the court’s job is to interpret the law. But the Constitution is not code and the judges are not the CPU. Ultimately, the rule of law will always be dependent on people.

Re: Texas app store age verification law blocked by federal judge

#252

Post by triceratops »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #240
triceratops wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The clerk only visually inspects the ID document then enters the serial number into a web portal and hands it to you. No absolutely not. There's no need for it. We don't require Internet connected beer cans to phone home to a government server and recheck your driver's license when you're cracking them open. > When you go to "redeem" it the service relays the number back to the government server rather than your lo…

Entering the serial number is the equivalent of the gift card activation step. It prevents theft and black market resale of a giant stack of unissued tokens. As to the rest of what you wrote, isn't that exactly what I already described? The only notable difference is that your scheme permits non-government token providers.

Oh I see, sorry I misunderstood this comment

> The clerk only visually inspects the ID document then enters the serial number

I thought "the serial number" was the number on the ID document. You actually meant the number on the token scratch card. Makes sense.

> The only notable difference is that your scheme permits non-government token providers.

Right. More accurately it only permits non-government token providers.

Re: Texas app store age verification law blocked by federal judge

#253

Post by immibis »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #192
marcosdumay wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that not genuinely malicious behavior?

Look I'm just trying to distinguish "active circumvention of blocks" from pretty much everything else. Because the former is what destroys the usefulness of protocols while the vast majority of other things can be trivially resolved by blocking the offending party. Including { corporate service } that I don't use sending me { unwanted thing }. If a bot that sends a fixed set of headers and is behind a single static I…

99.9% of spam is not active circumvention of blocks. It comes from so many sources you can't block them, but they are true different sources and not a block circumvention technique. That's why we decided to come down with the biggest hammer on every single source.

Re: Texas app store age verification law blocked by federal judge

#254

Post by jfengel »

monocularvision wrote: post #251
mothballed wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing authorizing that -- the constitution. So unless the legislative can ignore the "interpretation" for the purposes of impeachment, the court can simply "interpret" the part that you think authorizes impeachment to just mean something like "the meaning of life is 54."

To be honest I am not sure if you are even discussing this in good faith anymore. The idea that the Supreme Court could render impeachment of them null and void and the legislative and executive branches would just be :shrugging-emoji: is a little silly. Yes, the court’s job is to interpret the law. But the Constitution is not code and the judges are not the CPU. Ultimately, the rule of law will always be dependent o…

The problem is that I don't believe that the court is arguing in good faith any more. In which case silly interpretations don't seem beyond the realm of possibility.

I'm assured by lawyers of both parties that this is not the case. And since I am not a lawyer their understanding is worth a lot more than mine. But as someone who does have significant credentials in philosophical and scientific reasoning, I can say that legal reasoning is not at all what I am familiar with.

Re: Texas app store age verification law blocked by federal judge

#255

Post by fc417fc802 »

immibis wrote: post #253
fc417fc802 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look I'm just trying to distinguish "active circumvention of blocks" from pretty much everything else. Because the former is what destroys the usefulness of protocols while the vast majority of other things can be trivially resolved by blocking the offending party. Including { corporate service } that I don't use sending me { unwanted thing }. If a bot that sends a fixed set of headers and is behind a single static I…

99.9% of spam is not active circumvention of blocks. It comes from so many sources you can't block them, but they are true different sources and not a block circumvention technique. That's why we decided to come down with the biggest hammer on every single source.

That doesn't match my experience at all. If I disable filtering what I see is a slew of ephemeral domains. Without DMARC I'm sure they would instead be official looking and fake.

> It comes from so many sources you can't block them,

Nonsense. If it were really countless fixed sources then a centralized domain blacklist would be sufficient. The issue is that the sources - both domain and IP - are aggressively rotated and even spoofed whenever possible.

Re: Texas app store age verification law blocked by federal judge

#257

Post by etchalon »

mothballed wrote: post #239
etchalon wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The executive cannot ignore the court's interpretation on their own. Christ, are you in high school? This shit is covered in like sophomore year social studies.

OK so the court can then simply declare an "interpretation" of impeachment that makes it impossible, or meaningless then, or perhaps also interprets any such jailing by the executive as illegal. Since they are the ones that get to decide what the text written in the constitution actually is interpreted to mean and apparently their "interpretation" cannot be ignored.

The court can say whatever they want, but they'd be saying it from jail.

Re: Texas app store age verification law blocked by federal judge

#258

Post by ben_w »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #245
TeMPOraL wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, laws aren't merely abstract tools of oppression, they're what binds groups larger than ~100 people into societies. And the true fabric laws are made of, is one of mutually-recursive belief, everyone's expectation that everyone else expects they're subject to them. Threaten that belief, the system stops working. The system stops working, everyone starves, or worse .

The way you're supposed to do that is by having laws that are actually reasonable and uniformly applied. Having laws that tilt the playing field and then punishing anyone who admits the emperor has no clothes is just censorship. People still figure it out. Only then they get rewarded for knowing about it and not saying anything, which causes the corruption to spread instead of being opposed, until the rot reaches the…

> And that's what causes "everyone starves, or worse."

I disagree. What you've described is certainly bad for much of society, but it represents a change from full participatory democracy to narrower and ultimately aristocratic governance. Many nations moved away from aristocracy and embraced democracy, but the difference in failure mode between "good for the people" and "good for the nation" does nevertheless exist (even when you can avoid the other problem democracy has, that "good for the people" and "popular" are also sometimes different).

When nobody can even "get rewarded for knowing about it and not saying anything", then you get all the examples of groupthink failure. Usually even this is limited to lots of people, rather than everyone, starving, but given the human response to mass starvation is to leave the area, I think this should count as "everyone starves" even if it's not literally everyone.

When everyone knows the rules are optional, or when they think facts and opinions are indistinguishable, then things like speed limits, red lights, which side of the road you're supposed to be on, purchasing goods and services rather than stealing them, all these things become mere suggestions. This is found in anarchies, or a prelude to/consequence of a civil war. There can be colossal losses, large scale displacement of the population to avoid starvation, though I think it would be fair to categorise this as "everyone starves" even if not literally for the same reason as the previous case.

Re: Texas app store age verification law blocked by federal judge

#259

Post by AnthonyMouse »

ben_w wrote: post #258
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way you're supposed to do that is by having laws that are actually reasonable and uniformly applied. Having laws that tilt the playing field and then punishing anyone who admits the emperor has no clothes is just censorship. People still figure it out. Only then they get rewarded for knowing about it and not saying anything, which causes the corruption to spread instead of being opposed, until the rot reaches the…

> And that's what causes "everyone starves, or worse." I disagree. What you've described is certainly bad for much of society, but it represents a change from full participatory democracy to narrower and ultimately aristocratic governance. Many nations moved away from aristocracy and embraced democracy, but the difference in failure mode between "good for the people" and "good for the nation" does nevertheless exist…

> it represents a change from full participatory democracy to narrower and ultimately aristocratic governance.

I don't think that's the relevant distinction. "Benevolent dictatorship" is still one of the most efficient forms of governance, if you actually have a benevolent dictator.

The real problem is perverse incentives. If you have a situation where 0.1% of people can get 100 times as many resources as the median person through some minimal-overhead transfer mechanism, that's maybe not ideal, but it's a lot better than the thing where 0.1% of people can get 100 times as many resources as the median person by imposing a 90% efficiency cost. In the first case you lost ~10% of your resources so someone else could have 100 times as much, but in the second case you lost >90% of your resources only so that someone else could have 10 times as much as they'd have had to begin with, because now the pie is only 1/10th as big.

But the latter is what happens when corruption is tolerated but not acknowledged, because then someone can't just come out and say "I'm taking this because I can get away with it and if you don't like it then change the law" and instead has to make fanciful excuses for inefficiently blocking off alternative paths in order to herd everyone through their toll booth, at which point they not only get away with it but destroy massive amounts of value in the process.

Re: Texas app store age verification law blocked by federal judge

#260

Post by immibis »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #255
immibis wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

99.9% of spam is not active circumvention of blocks. It comes from so many sources you can't block them, but they are true different sources and not a block circumvention technique. That's why we decided to come down with the biggest hammer on every single source.

That doesn't match my experience at all. If I disable filtering what I see is a slew of ephemeral domains. Without DMARC I'm sure they would instead be official looking and fake. > It comes from so many sources you can't block them, Nonsense. If it were really countless fixed sources then a centralized domain blacklist would be sufficient. The issue is that the sources - both domain and IP - are aggressively rotated…

That's how it looks now, in a world of ubiquitous spam blockers. Originally, it was each company sending you a few pieces of spam from a legitimate address.
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