neekburm's comments

"We have no moat, and Congress should give us one by law"

Companies are welcome to stop increasing prices, but I'm not going to fall on my sword re salary negotiation to make a tiny contribution to stopping inflation.

I haven't tried it. The existing app works pretty well for my purposes, but I'll keep this in mind if that changes. I also have a Kindle, and the ReMarkable app is a much easier way to get content onto the device than the process you have to use to get non-Amazon content onto a Kindle. Just drag an drop, then it syncs.

I have one, thus far their cloud service is free and hopefully will continue to be so. Every ReMarkable comes with an 8gb cloud account, which is the same amount of storage on the device.

Hopefully this doesn't change, because it's really a pain to put things on the tablet without using their app.

This is not how rational basis review works.

"You're not wrong, Walter, you're just an asshole."

Thanks for this, it's really useful.

It reminds me of this:

https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...

Net neutrality is more about nondiscrimination in routing content from a provider to a user, rather than forcing content providers to serve everyone regardless of conduct. It's entirely reasonable for a site to discriminate who they wish to allow to access their data (whether technically their copyright or data they caretake).

That being said, if you provide data to the public, you don't get to invoke the CFAA to plug the holes your content discrimination code doesn't fill.

One thing I really like about audiobooks is that it works really well when trying to get through dense texts. Thanks to audiobooks, I've "read" Capital in the Twenty-First Century, which I attempted in text form but got bored.

Also, they work great for a commute.

You might consider the Sinclair Method. https://cthreefoundation.org/the-sinclair-method

You take an opioid antagonist, like naltrexone, 1 hour prior to drinking. Since drinking produces endorphins, which are blocked by the antagonist, the brain stops associating drinking with pleasure, which results in a lower desire to drink.

The downside being that if you drink without the antagonist, your brain returns to its old patterns.

Anecdotally, my personal experience was after trying the method was that I no longer wanted to drink, and when I did, with or without the naltrexone, my problematic drinking behaviors mostly went away. I mostly abstain now.

This is the course that set me on the path to my new career from a failed legal career. I can't be thankful enough.

It is exceedingly rare for a fine to be struck down as a violation of the Eighth Amendment. The standard as articulated by Waters-Pierce Oil Co. v. Texas, 212 U.S. 86 (1909) is that the fine must be "so grossly excessive as to amount to a deprivation of property without due process of law."

That case was about a $5000 a day antitrust fine, which had accumulated to $1.6 million, but had not forced compliance with the law. The Supremes concluded that the fine was not excessive, because the business was doing well enough not to comply despite the fines.

The fine would have to be grossly in excess of what it would take to force compliance by a reasonable business. A fine that amounts to a doubling of the property tax would almost certainly not be a violation of the Eighth amendment.

I'd be worried that Newton would be spending an even higher percentage of his time on alchemy research than he already did, and using his reputation to push promising scientists to do the same.

Pharmaceutical markets don't exist without government-enforced patent monopolies. The entire market is state-created, so the state should probably regulate that market to maximize benefits to the citizens of that state.

I've given this one a lot of thought. Ordinarily, you're supposed to pay tax on the fair market value of goods and services received in return for your labor in barter transactions.

However, East Wind is incorporated as a 501(d) organization, which is what monasteries use. For more info on 501(d) orgs: https://www.irs.gov/irm/part7/irm_07-025-023

I can't find anything specific, but I think that since they share their income and produce as a collective, they're only liable for taxes on their share of the income that the collective produces. Monks don't have to pay taxes on the value they get from the monastery vegetable garden.

Tax avoidance is a time-honored American tradition. This is one way to do so. It sounds like they've done their legal homework if they've managed to survive 30 years without IRS trouble.

I think the court neatly avoided that question by relying on fair use rather than extinguishment of copyright as a basis for allowing the copying of the standards.

A "taking" generally requires the government to deprive the owner of all reasonable use of the property. If the government places reasonable limitations on the use of property but doesn't actually deprive the owner of the property, it's not a taking. See Penn Central Transportation Co. v. New York City, 438 U.S. 104 (1978).

This is pretty much the basis of the common law system. We write laws defining general principles, and then let the courts sort out the specifics. We don't really know what the law is until we have some court cases about it. The court cases use precedent to keep things consistent.

The alternative is to have really, really detailed laws, like in civil law systems that don't use stare decisis.

I think this was a tactic by the defenders of IPR, rather than some deeply-held belief. We have at least four self-styled originalists (but see https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1422048) on the Court, and they want to hear arguments about what 18th Century politicians thought about patent rights.

This was the crux of state regulators' arguments in Granholm v. Heald, and it failed there.

From Wikipedia: "The context of the 21st Amendment, they wrote, was to return to the status quo that existed before Prohibition, making it clear that the states had the power to regulate alcohol however they wished, including banning alcoholic beverages entirely within the state if desired. Before Prohibition, the states did not have the power to violate the Dormant Commerce Clause, and the 21st Amendment was not intended to grant them this power."