That’s pretty hard to research accurately. In the past, a fair amount of today’s common problems were less common. But they had other problems that were more common then and less common now.
That wouldn’t surprise me because I generally don’t think adding more laws is the right approach. We already had most important laws long ago. When we add reasonable laws, they are often prohibiting something that was already illegal. Adding redundant laws because something is going wrong with existing laws doesn’t solve the problem that’s making existing laws not work well (e.g. there may be a problem with the police or courts, or the existing laws may need some adjustments).
Put another way, I don’t really believe in the government regulating industries one by one. I think general laws against force, fraud, etc., should be applied intelligently to all industries instead of a bunch of laws being created to micromanage each industry. This is a broad, conceptual opinion, not a concrete opinion about how to accomplish it and make all the details work.
They often pay small amounts relative to the profits they get from their bad behavior.
I think the problems with companies and law are closely related to the problems with rationality and debate.
The concept of “fraud is illegal” only works if you can have a debate and reach an objective conclusion about what is fraud. If a company does something and says “we don’t think it’s fraud”, then what do you do if you can’t settle the matter with an effective debate? Make a bunch of laws trying to micromanage what is and isn’t allowed, detail by detail, so that no debatable disagreements will come up? Maybe that is, on a deep level, what our society has been trying to do and is the reason we have so many laws. But that approach can never work great; you can’t write out all the details to avoid disagreements; you need functional courts/debates that can deal with laws that involve concepts not just concretes. And even with all the laws we have, tons of them do involve concepts (e.g. fair use law clearly involves concepts and requires judicial interpretation and courtroom debate); it’s just unavoidable because there’s too much complexity in reality, and in people’s ideas, to cover everything in advance as trillions of separate issues instead of as a much smaller number of general principles, patterns, and concepts. It’s related to, in Objectivist terms, trying to think without using integration.
Debates have to work really well to be predictable enough for conceptual laws to give enough guidance for people to know how to avoid breaking the law and to be able to predict in advance what is and isn’t illegal (what conclusions courts would reach). This is hard and our society struggles with it today; lots of court outcomes seem a bit random or arbitrary, and vary a lot based on which judge handles the case, rather than being predictable and objective. One thing that would help here is much better options to ask the courts whether something is illegal without having to do it first (and risk punishments if it’s illegal).
If similar multipliers operate in other areas, the tax’s hidden impact on the way we live and do business may amount to a $300 billion dollar annual levy on the American economy.
The tax goes by the name of tort liability.
Book was written in 1990.
The author considers tort liability, in part, a tax:
Unlike better-known taxes, this one was never put to a legislature or a public referendum, debated at any length in the usual
public arenas, or approved by the president or by any state governor. And although the tax ostensibly is collected for the public benefit, lawyers and other middlemen pocket more than half the take.
This is relatively new in our legal landscape:
For all practical purposes, the omnipresent tort tax we pay today was conceived
in the 1950s and set in place in the 1960s and 1970s by a new generation
of lawyers and judges.
and
Tort law as we know it is a peculiarly
American institution. No other country in the world administers anything remotely like it.
Definition of tort law:
Tort law is the law of accidents and personal injury.
According to the author people used to handle accidents by contract beforehand:
Most accidents were handled under the broad heading of contract —the realm of human cooperation—and comparatively few relegated to the dismal annex of tort, the realm of unchosen relationship and collision.
After all (this came before the part quoted immediately above):
More often than not, both parties to a transaction recognize there is some chance of misadventure, and prudently take steps to address it beforehand.
After I go through the book a bit more I’ll share more.
I agree. I also don’t have much of an idea on how to accomplish it. However, it has always bothered me how some lawyers talk about the law. Here’s an example of someone getting away with stealing because (at least from what I understand) of how our legal system is constructed: McBoyle v. United States - Wikipedia.
From the wikipedia article above:
McBoyle v. United States , 283 U.S. 25 (1931), was a United States Supreme Court case regarding whether the theft of an airplane was illegal under federal law, given that the law only criminalized theft of a “vehicle.”
McBoyle was accused of violating the National Motor Vehicle Theft Act on the premise that the plane was a type of “vehicle” covered by the act.[1][2] The petitioners claimed that since the act did not specifically mention aircraft, it should not apply to this case. Furthermore, Congress likely did not intend to criminalize the theft of aircraft when the law was passed, since airplanes barely existed at the time.[3]
The court held that, since other acts – such as the Tariff Act of 1930[4] – specifically excluded aircraft in its definition of a vehicle, the law must be interpreted narrowly. Justice Holmes stated:
Its the second thing I quoted that really bothers me. So Congress has to explicitly criminalize specific things that can’t be stolen.
It’s plausible to me that that particular law doesn’t cover stealing aircraft. But surely there is an older law against stealing in general that covers all theft including of aircraft…?
OK. You said “also” but I do have an idea of how to accomplish it: CF epistemology and CF debate methods. E.g. using decisive critical arguments to refute ideas, organizing arguments in debate trees, and stopping using weighted sums of indecisive argument strengths.
The thing is that he was charged and convicted of a violation of the National Motor Vehicle Theft Act. The appellate court reversed the decision. You can’t try him again because of the prohibition against double jeopardy
I guess that makes sense. Theres a bunch of legal discussion in there. However, no one seems to fully disagree that he could’ve been charged for just stealing or larceny or something.
I can color code it if you want. I don’t think the blue part with tree’ing the part after “not” is a clause. I just don’t know where to put it. As a modifier for “is”?
yeah. so “not a concrete opinion about how to” applies to the entire subtree “accomplish it and make all the details work”. The “and” means both/all of its children/descendants.
If someone says “I don’t know how to accomplish X and do Y” they haven’t said they don’t know how to accomplish X. They don’t know how to accomplish X and/or don’t know how to do Y. If this is unclear, look at the logical truth table for “and”.
“opinion” (second one) is an appositive modifier for “opinion” (first one).
Here’s a simpler example with fewer irrelevant words. In “I want a red toy, not a blue toy.”, the phrase “not a blue toy” modifies the first “toy” by providing more information about it. Something similar came up recently at Grammar tree practice [AM] - #5 by Elliot@ActiveMind
The things joined by an “and” need to all be the same type, e.g. “to accomplish” and “to make” or “accomplish” and “make”. It can’t be “to accomplish” and “make”.
Non-creative adversaries are basically problems that you can just solve once and then you’re done.
Creative adversaries look at your solutions/defenses and make adjustments.
However, non-violent creative adversaries can be dangerous despite being disadvantaged. They might come up with something clever to manipulate you or otherwise get their way. You might not even realize they’re an adversary if they’re sneaky.
Ok so from the tiktok:
new recipe was 14.25oz, new was 16.25 oz, they probably slowly rolled out the changes on the weight, they changed it until the change was noticeable, ok, they changed it in a manner where the wet ingrdients ratio wouldn’t need to change
Hmm. I’d say this is fraud. They didn’t disclose the change in weight. Also baking is somewhat exact, right? Yet they focused on, allegedly, getting a flavor that is close enough without having to change liquid measurements. I think that makes it fraudulent. Would it be fraudulent if they also changed the liquid measurements? Hmm. If they didn’t disclose it. Maybe? But also the change in liquid measurements would be noticeable to many people.
Hmm. Thats true. I guess I am? Something like “reduced contents” or something. To me its something like this: you grab the same cake mix every day, they change the weight without making it obvious, you pick it up thinking its the same cake mix. hmm. maybe thats more of a creative adversary thing since they technically didn’t lie or anything?
Egregious fraud, which the video directly calls out as “fraud”. And Honey is owned by a big company, PayPal. Before that, they Honey had venture capital funding.
I watched this video the other day on YouTube. Two things that stood out to me:
Linus Tech Tips company/group(?) had issues with honey and its model but didn’t feel the need/desire to spread that information more. Maybe they didn’t realize how bad it actually was? Maybe they didn’t want to deal with pissing off a big company? Maybe it’s because they had already taken a bunch in sponsorship money and didn’t want to come off as hypocritical? Maybe there’s actual contractual issues with doing that after taking all that money from honey? Maybe they thought this kind of thing was standard stuff and saw no reason to share?
Related to the above: how MegaLag’s investigation couldn’t find much stuff about what honey was doing. I guess this is a very new kind of bad thing.
