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Small claims court became Meta's customer service hotline

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Re: Small claims court became Meta's customer service hotline

#291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you sue them, what kind of tort is it? I wouldn't think these sites are under any obligation to give you the name, as long as they aren't assisting someone else to use your name?

In my case I would file 2 claims: 1) trademark infringement, and 2) trademark dilution. However, I’ll take a look at these cases and see what claims they filed and maybe supplement if anything applies. Trademark infringement typically requires “likelihood of confusion”, except where the trademark is famous then there can be trademark dilution even when there is no “likelihood of confusion.” My trademark is famous, an…

Thank you.

How are you detecting the reservation? I have a couple of trademark names and on some platforms there are no users with those names, yet they won't allow registration. Is that the trademark reservation at work? Or are there other reasons the registration would be blocked? (assuming the trademarks are very normal and not something suitable for censorship)

Re: Small claims court became Meta's customer service hotline

#292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> most of modern Europe This is relatively recent, and has proven itself quite fragile. Democracies elect dictators. Dictators of powerful governments commit atrocities. There is no "don't elect dictators" solution. The only solution is to disempower the government. Also European nations are relatively small and relatively culturally homogenous. There is no functioning liberal democracy of a large multicultural state…

You can’t have it both ways. This:

> freedom to do whatever the hell you want > Yes!

Cannot be followed by this:

> My rights to wave my fists around end where your nose begins.

because the latter can only be prevented through either obligation or force.

> There is no functioning liberal democracy of a large multicultural state.

I won’t bother trying to argue against this, because it’s so vague that you will just change the definitions as we go along. But there are at least two very large countries that most widely-read people would consider to meet your definition.

> There is a vast difference between outlawing violent behaviour and mandating cooperation.

This is utter nonsense. Outlawing violent behaviour obviously requires cooperation, without which violence cannot be prevented. But of course, once again, you’re cherry-picking your obligations; the entire premise of your argument is flawed because your arguments are entirely subjective and internally inconsistent.

> The latter is indistinguishable from slavery.

You keep muttering this laughable nonsense as if it’s some kind of enlightenment, but all it does is trivialise slavery, and underscores how ridiculous your black-and-white views really are.

> 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQbei5JGiT8

I see your YouTube cartoon about consent and tea and raise you Knowledge Fight: https://knowledgefight.com/

Neither are relevant to the conversation, I just really like Knowledge Fight.

> freedom from fear? really?

You say it like it’s a bad thing.

Re: Small claims court became Meta's customer service hotline

#293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The idea that customer service can be 'automated away' is dangerous, and has been proven wrong again and again. Said like someone who hasn't run a customer service function ;) I will agree in the totality. You can't automated away 100% of customer support, just like you can't automated away 100% of most human tasks. You can automated away 90%+, and get most users answers faster than trying to staff enough humans in…

I have run a couple of support operations. Yes, you certainly can automate 90% of the support. It's the last 10% that you can't ignore. Those problems are not only more complicated to solve, they're also some of the more important problems to solve. If 10% of Facebook's users have a problem, and 90% of those can be automated away, that's 30 million support tickets that need human intervention. They've decided just to…

I will agree in the totality

Re: Small claims court became Meta's customer service hotline

#294
post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Public nuisance. Don't bother trying to explain why some statutory language you googled and skimmed doesn't apply.

Please provide a case law citation to show how state public nuisance laws would apply here. Or are you just making things up?

Sealioning is tedious bro. Why not try to actually contribute something yourself, spend your own time and effort to show us how it doesn’t apply.

Re: Small claims court became Meta's customer service hotline

#295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> most of modern Europe This is relatively recent, and has proven itself quite fragile. Democracies elect dictators. Dictators of powerful governments commit atrocities. There is no "don't elect dictators" solution. The only solution is to disempower the government. Also European nations are relatively small and relatively culturally homogenous. There is no functioning liberal democracy of a large multicultural state…

You can’t have it both ways. This: > freedom to do whatever the hell you want > Yes! Cannot be followed by this: > My rights to wave my fists around end where your nose begins. because the latter can only be prevented through either obligation or force. > There is no functioning liberal democracy of a large multicultural state. I won’t bother trying to argue against this, because it’s so vague that you will just chan…

Seizing 100% of a person's economic output is slavery right? The rest is just a matter of degree.

> beyond the strict minimum necessary to maintain liberty itself

You missed this part. Yes you can mandate cooperation (read: enslave) to protect fundamental liberty (police, courts, military, rights of way, etc). You can even literally enslave people by drafting them into the army if your liberal nation is under attack.

What you you can't do in a free society is enslave people to pay for healthcare, education, social security, or anything else unrelated to protecting fundamental liberty from a direct threat. The mandate of the federal government was thus limited until US v. Butler (1936). There are no contradictions here, this is literally how it used to work. This is what liberty used to mean. Being free to do anything that directly injures no one else.

> You say it like it’s a bad thing.

Fear is just as inevitable a part of life as joy. It's not escapable. Pretending you have a right not to feel it is absurd.

Re: Small claims court became Meta's customer service hotline

#296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can’t have it both ways. This: > freedom to do whatever the hell you want > Yes! Cannot be followed by this: > My rights to wave my fists around end where your nose begins. because the latter can only be prevented through either obligation or force. > There is no functioning liberal democracy of a large multicultural state. I won’t bother trying to argue against this, because it’s so vague that you will just chan…

Seizing 100% of a person's economic output is slavery right? The rest is just a matter of degree. > beyond the strict minimum necessary to maintain liberty itself You missed this part. Yes you can mandate cooperation (read: enslave) to protect fundamental liberty (police, courts, military, rights of way, etc). You can even literally enslave people by drafting them into the army if your liberal nation is under attack.…

> Seizing 100% of a person's economic output is slavery right?

This is a ridiculous argument. Just because the statement is true, doesn’t mean it follows that you can measure enslavement as a percentage of economic output or that any value greater than zero is “indistinguishable” from slavery. You’re just trolling.

I mean, if I have to spend 100% of my economic output supporting my sick partner because there is no healthcare safety net, by your own definition I am now enslaved by your kind of “liberty” - entirely because it is dogmatically closed to any kind of mandated cooperation.

What a world you dream to live in - a nightmare for all but the strongest.

> beyond the strict minimum necessary to maintain liberty itself

I ignored this because, conveniently, you also get to choose what constitutes “the strict minimum necessary to maintain liberty itself” - making your reasoning perfectly circular. “It is this way because it must be this way”.

> Fear is just as inevitable a part of life as joy

Society can work to reduce fear, and increase joy. But these are not the likely outcomes of the world of your fever dreams.

> US v. Butler (1936)

I am not familiar with US case law but my understanding is that this case reinforced the limitations on the federal government. In any case it reads like yet another cartoonish non-sequitur.

Here’s where I’m going to get of this bus of stupid.

Re: Small claims court became Meta's customer service hotline

#297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most US states have the concept of "Lemon Laws" that provide consumer protection when buy used cars. Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemon_law That said, this economic paper is pretty legendary at this point: > Summary: > Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

The Market for Lemons is legendary only as an example of economists ignoring reality to pursue their pet theories. Reality is closer to that explained in Mediations on Moloch . The theory that the removal of lemon laws would result in a more informed consumer base has no basis in reality--economists need to spend less time theorizing about how economies work and start looking at actual economies to figure out how the…

> The theory that the removal of lemon laws would result in a more informed consumer base has no basis in reality.

That's not what the paper says. It proposes government intervention and predates many lemon laws.

> Hoping consumers will educate themselves is a solution that doesn't scale; it is unrealistic to expect consumers to become experts on cars, computers, phones, medical devices, and every other complex product just so they can avoid being sold inferior, broken products.

This is the core claim of the original paper. When buyers have information asymmetry relative to sellers, they suffer.

> It is clear that the only solution that works is for experts on products, i.e. the sellers, be held accountable when they knowingly sell low quality products as if they were high quality.

This is literally what a lemon law is and what you're saying is on page 1 of the Market for Lemons paper.

> There are many markets in which buyers use some market statistic to judge the quality of prospective purchases. In this case there is incentive for sellers to market poor quality merchandise, since the returns for good quality accrue mainly to the entire group whose statistic is affected rather than to the individual seller. As a result there tends to be a reduction in the average quality of goods and also in the size of the market. It should also be perceived that in these markets social and private returns differ, and therefore, in some cases, governmental intervention may increase the welfare of all parties

Re: Small claims court became Meta's customer service hotline

#298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> most of modern Europe This is relatively recent, and has proven itself quite fragile. Democracies elect dictators. Dictators of powerful governments commit atrocities. There is no "don't elect dictators" solution. The only solution is to disempower the government. Also European nations are relatively small and relatively culturally homogenous. There is no functioning liberal democracy of a large multicultural state…

> These aren't freedoms, they're obligations.

Civilization requires obligations. That's kinda the point.

Re: Small claims court became Meta's customer service hotline

#299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my case I would file 2 claims: 1) trademark infringement, and 2) trademark dilution. However, I’ll take a look at these cases and see what claims they filed and maybe supplement if anything applies. Trademark infringement typically requires “likelihood of confusion”, except where the trademark is famous then there can be trademark dilution even when there is no “likelihood of confusion.” My trademark is famous, an…

Thank you. How are you detecting the reservation? I have a couple of trademark names and on some platforms there are no users with those names, yet they won't allow registration. Is that the trademark reservation at work? Or are there other reasons the registration would be blocked? (assuming the trademarks are very normal and not something suitable for censorship)

Each platform has their own rules for names, off the top of my head I don’t think X will allow registration of 4 (maybe 3) characters or less any longer, even if it’s available. So without prying I couldn’t give you my opinion about your mark(s).

In the case of X, I can use wayback machine and show the username did exist for a month when the platform launched (2006 I think) and then was removed from that point to the present. YouTube handles are a new feature only about a year old, and I have been trying to register it from day 1, so I have personal knowledge the handle has never existed, and they also prevent registration of any variations @{trademark}001.

I also have evidence that the other major platforms (Meta/Instagram/Threads, GitHub, Reddit, Twitch, TikTok, etc…) were reserving this trademark and released it to me upon showing I’m the trademark owner.

It’s strong enough to bring a civil lawsuit where the standard is “more likely than not” anyway. Again I doubt they’d want any employee of consequence being deposed under oath and testifying why they reserved it and refuse to turn it over to the trademark owner as many others have done.

Re: Small claims court became Meta's customer service hotline

#300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes, most of the economy actually works by privatizing gains and externalizing losses. in your example it would probably be you abusing the court system for something that it is not intended for yet obligated to handle

> yes, most of the economy actually works by privatizing gains and externalizing losses. This is a recent trope; it's not really true. Gains are the only things that are taxed. Financially, we tax gains and let investors absorb losses.

This is really confident nonsense. Taxes are very much involved with gains and losses, whether they’re direct costs or things like depreciating assets, companies extract a great deal of tax value off of their losses. Entire industries are built upon the very notion that with a little engineered accounting of strategic losses, companies can get away with paying egregiously little in taxes. On the other side of that, they also extract value from tax dollars with things like nutritional assistance, Medicaid, financial aid, and other means-tested social programs that contribute towards the social safety gap that their poor compensation of hourly employees is partly responsible for. I’m not sure why, but your comments about this seem to be very contrarian, to the point of obtuse in places. Even if the framing device isn’t 100% literally consistent, the cause/effect it’s describing should be pretty clear from context. Some of the present rhetoric surrounding this kind of thing have been exaggerated or misrepresented, for example that stores that collect donations from rounding up customers’ totals are then using those donations for tax write-offs (they aren’t, it’s yours to write off). But the problem of the working poor in the United States receiving significant amounts of government assistance while their employers lobby for right-to-work labor laws and fight union efforts and minimum wage increases is a longstanding and well documented situation. Couple that with the deference given to their interests at every level and branch of government, as well as the grossly disproportionate distribution of wealth, and it’s a glaring symptom of a larger, deep-seated disease that is horribly corrosive to the fabric of a productive, free society.
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