solidsnack9000

That is true; but that is also something fundamentally different.

There are plenty of protections against private entities in the US legal system -- other people, corporations and organizations. Those were not the issues the founders were trying to address, though -- the common law offered many such protections.

Yes, there is a separate, harder procedure for changing the Constitution of the United States -- but that procedure is also a vote.

The page you link contains many interesting examples; but many of them are simply cases of making the vote harder -- requiring unanimous consent to change English-French bilingualism in Canada, for example -- rather than cases where the law simply can not ever be changed by a vote.

With regards to Germany, the page says:

...if a constitution provides for a mechanism of its own abolition or replacement, like the German Basic Law does in Article 146, this by necessity provides a "back door" for getting rid of the "eternity clause", too.

It's really hard to have a legal system that literally can not be changed by any legitimate vote -- only by revolution -- because what sits at the bottom of most of them (all of them?) is that the consent of some body politic is necessary and sufficient to legitimate a law.

Everything in the US Constitution is amendable, though -- in other words, the whole Constitution can be changed with a vote.

The US is founded on certain ideas about natural rights -- hence not granted, per se -- but that's somewhat orthogonal to this whole issue. Even if there were an unwritten constitution, a country could base its institutions, philosophy of lawmaking, jurisprudence, &c, on natural rights doctrine (and for a time, the British did exactly that).

The earlier post mentions "That's why you have a constitution with rights that are not up for vote." but if what they mean is natural rights, that goes well beyond any procedural issue around the basic law.

I don't understand how it is that the EU Parliaments votes to reject legislation. Presumably, this is not the default for most rules. Is this some special class of rule -- put together by a special committee, for example -- that has to be voted down rather than up?

I'm not sure any country actually has a Constitution with rights that are not up for a vote. There is generally a separate, harder procedure for changing the "basic law" or Constitution of a country -- for example, 2/3 of delegates or a 2/3 of states or something of that nature -- but I'd be surprised if there's a country where they have literally no way to change it at all.

It can be in their interest if their model assumes certain revenue from sales and service.

Most brands of cars can be repaired by independent technicians. Toyotas are more valuable because they are reliable -- because they are repaired less often.

Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin#1750s

It's time to reconsider some of what we bought.

It seems like you're saying, that PE, landlords, &c, are in a market where a landowner can hold on to property, not rent it out or put it to other productive use, and still make money. That is a problem, but not a problem with wealth or wealthy people per se.

I interpreted it to mean, it was much harder than something else -- than another approach. But I couldn't figure out what other approach they had in mind.

Host-to-VM communication uses vsock . Conceptually simple but In practice, much harder to implement.

Much harder than what?

Most of Europe post-war was very poor. I'm not sure the trend could go back as far as that.

How are you weighing the trend you highlight relative to overall long run success of private ordering, stock companies, readily available credit, strong private property protections, &c, &c, in raising people's standard of living?

Because a PE can have longer time horizons than a landlord or a real estate company?

Nothing -- but the crazy thing is that people vote for it, not that landlords support it.

Consumption is a kind of voting in the economy, I suppose; but the economy is heavily geared towards making things that regular people want. How many Corollas are there for every Bugatti?

If what you're saying is true, would it be unfair of me to say that the government is not using their power over the economy to fix any of the deep fundamental problems we are facing?

Is it good policy to take people's money because they aren't doing what we think they should be doing with it?

When a PE fund buys an apartment building, isn't that really competing with landlords, not renters? The PE fund is not living in the apartment -- they have to try to rent it out, after all.

This is potentially a long conversation; but why would you start with rankings like this, which only go back a relatively short time?

Broadly speaking, human welfare got a lot better in the last three hundred years, due to productivity improvements that were tied to things like property rights, joint stock companies, availability of credit, &c.

We haven't really found a good alternative to it. It may seem to you that countries like Austria, &c, are doing the right thing by taking very large amounts of GDP out of the hands of private enterprise and using it "for good" instead of "for growth"; but that is just eating the seed corn. It looks good in the short term.

Wealthy people pay a lot of taxes in the USA. If they aren't routinely avoiding paying income tax and taxes in general, how could that be the point?

It may be more realistic to view this in terms of elite power struggle. There are some constituencies that have found their way into positions of some power -- in government and public service -- that are in conflict with other elites, who have found some power in private enterprise. These groups battle for control of things. One strategy in the battle is managing the other group's access to money.

It's not clear from any kind of first principles, that we are better off with government allocation of a large portion of the society's capital. That hasn't historically been a big winner. Private ordering seems to net out a higher quality of life overall, even with income inequality.

If those with assets keep accruing more assets the median person will suffer.

How will they suffer? The people with assets, to realize a benefit from them, have to spend money. If they don't spend the money, then what's the problem?

I'm not sure how there is a societal problem with "run-away levels of wealth".

We have societal problems around food costs, housing costs, healthcare costs, &c; but people with extreme wealth are not bidding up sandwiches, studio apartments, &c, &c. If we "solve" their wealth by taking it from them and giving it to the government, what does that help? What good is the government going to do with that? Allocating money through the government has not been a particularly successful strategy for improving the overall standard of living.

Thank you for offering this take -- it is the only forward looking one.

The anonymous internet is going away -- it is too supportive of crime and various kinds of gray area misconduct, and governments and large corporations were eventually going to do something about that.

Such a degree of anonymity is desirable, but it is not a requirement for a free society. What were things like before the internet? You couldn't anonymously browse billions of pages of information in 1960.

Wow!

https://seeingmachines.com/understanding-driver-drowsiness-a...

Since July 2022, Driver Drowsiness and Attention Warning (DDAW) systems have been required in all new vehicle types within the European Union (EU). They will be mandatory for all newly registered vehicles from July 2024.

The old, open web is too easy to attack and that is part of what has led sites to adopt technologies like this. I hope there are better solutions than everyone-is-their-GoogleID, but how realistic is it that people just trying to run a bakery, a bicycle ride, &c, will find them? They have other things to do.

You have written quite a bit, here. It would be hard to address all of it in one reply and do it justice.

You write:

Maybe Ars is being too rosy-viewed about the causality there, idk. I have no partic feeling one way or the other though I do want to take whatever comfort I can in the notion that the "system of checks and balances" is working.

They are not being rosy about it but you are inferring the wrong lesson from this. There wasn't a judgment or some other finding that the FAA had exceeded their authority and this kind of rule is too broad to be legal: the FAA just decided it was too much trouble to deal with this right now. In the absence of a legal finding about it, they can bring the same rule back next year if they want. This isn't the system of checks and balances working -- the system didn't even get going.

You write:

...there is a price to pay in vigilance, of having to challenge the legality of agency actions if the particular implementation of regulations infringes on constitutional rights.

Is there a constitutional right implicated here? The right to fly planes? It is certainly not a press freedom issue in an obvious way, since it does not target journalism per se -- it has no impact on journalism on foot, on bicycles, &c.

They are free to do it but don't. That's exactly the problem. They also don't respond to overreach in rulemaking by revising the grants they have made, so it has been a cumulative process.

Not really. The FAA revised the rule, but that was their choice, not the result of a ruling or even the reasoned application of a general principle.

The very broad power of administrative rulemaking held by that agency is unchanged -- and the power of agencies generally, to make law without legislating, without accountability to the electorate, actually has nothing to do with this administration, does it? It actually has nothing to do with any of them. It's something the legislature has allowed to grow and grow over successive administrations, whether Democrats or Republicans are in power.

I would like to better understand the reasoning behind what the author says here:

A balanced 16-cavity mold costs 3-4x more than a single-cavity mold but only produces 16x the parts, which is why they only make economic sense above 500,000 units.

Well, it doesn't make sense to treat a local branch of a foreign company like a foreign company for tariff reasons -- one role of tariffs is to encourage local branches.

For example, Toyota builds cars in the USA; and rigorously controls how Toyota USA builds cars in the USA. That's actually kind of the point -- from an industrial policy standpoint, it is valuable and useful if companies bring their technology and approaches here and administer them with their knowhow.

Regarding government contracts, it could probably come down to some percentage of ownership or the way control is administered; but many defense companies are publicly traded and that means they can be owned in part by foreign entities (people or corporations).

It's not just forking "...a bit of itself elsewhere..." -- corporations in different jurisdictions are taxed differently. That's the whole thing.

The relationship between companies can be a complex matter. Do they have to be wholly owned subsidiaries, really?