Posts by Tapeador 417 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Dec 2011
agreed. i actually got a new sony xperia z1 compact (4.5 inch screen approx, 801 processor, 2g ram, 20mp camera with image stabilisation) for £170 new a few months ago, have a look, it still beats the 410 and 601 series processors. and it's waterproof. it and the z3c are afaik the only flagship phones in a compact size.
"The economy that is giving the wealthiest an ever-increasing proportion of the country's wealth. Yes, you can be poor and have a flat-screen telly giving better picture quality than your grandparents ever dreamed of, but you're still living from hand to mouth and lurching from one zero-hours job to another with barely a pause sufficient to put money in the bank for a really rainy day."
That's all fine but why do we need Corbynite policies? People lived alright under Labour post-97. I remember before the minimum wage and tax credits. It is true workers broadly live better now than they've lived ever before in the UK's history. Unless you can show me otherwise. And absent large debts they refuse to default on, or other unusual circumstances, nobody in work lives hand-to-mouth unless they're refusing to claim the benefits to which they're entitled. Yes, even zero-hours workers.
Do the maths: housing benefit, tax credits, JSA, CTB, wages, it adds up.
Nicely spotted! There's so much law on this issue - there had to be as people were literally killing other people accidentally and then saying "oh sorry you agreed I wouldn't be liable". For your delectation:
s 4 Unfair Contract Terms Act 1977
4 Unreasonable indemnity clauses.
(1) A person dealing as consumer cannot by reference to any contract term be made to indemnify another person (whether a party to the contract or not) in respect of liability that may be incurred by the other for negligence or breach of contract, except in so far as the contract term satisfies the requirement of reasonableness.
.....
s 5 Unfair Terms in Consumer Contract Regulations 1999
Unfair Terms
5.—(1) A contractual term which has not been individually negotiated shall be regarded as unfair if, contrary to the requirement of good faith, it causes a significant imbalance in the parties' rights and obligations arising under the contract, to the detriment of the consumer.
...
I think there are also important rules about incorporation of onerous terms in consumer contracts - so if they're not flagged up prominently they may not get incorporated into the contract. The famous 'red hand rule' - I'm not actually 100% sure it's good law but it's a good idea.
There's no such thing as profit share. There's profit margin. There's no such thing as 'profit available across the market' because it's a function of the difference between revenues vs costs within each single company, and neither are fixed.
What there is probably a fixed quantity of is dufuses who are too easily parted with their money. In some contexts we'd call them victims of fraud. Apple calls them customers!
But how socially useful is it to supply people's wants whatever? Some wants ought not be satisfied. I think a vast proportion of illegal drug users didn't (before they started, and afterwards) satisfy the requirements for informedness, impulse-control, judgement, awareness of consequences, brain development, personal responsibility, and optimal-decision-making-capacity which make up any sensible definition of autonomy required for the idea of total free choice to make moral or logical sense. This gives society and the state a moral duty to steward people away from things which will harm them - for the sake of more valuable freedoms, i.e. for the sake of their freedom to make the good life for themselves.
Because drugs also basically fuck lots of people's minds for good. Nobody can be said to freely choose to destroy their choices like that. It's absurd. And helping them do it is not socially useful, it's socially destructive.
3-5kg for a motor, 1-2kg for a hub, were those at the lighter end they'd weigh 4kg, which leaves 19kg for the bike - 16kg if the components are all super heavy. I think the bike is basically a POS vanity nonsense machine. For a grand you could get a 10kg carbon monster or an 11kg top top hybrid and still have good money to buy a top, top 6-8kg ebike conversion kit from Oxygen, Panda, Woosh, Ezee, Cyclotricity, or Eclipse, and have the £100 it costs to get it fitted and still have hundreds left over. 16-19kg is how much a £79 Argos bike weighs...after it's eaten a few too many Christmas dinners.
And how much do you think his recording rights, in fact any recording rights, will be worth if freetards have their way? And how much would they have been worth if copyright was enforced? And how much do you think the fact it isn't will bear on what artists get paid? I'll tell you - a lot.
Len owns what is essentially an artists' agency. It represents artists. They choose - as sovereign agents - it to represent them. They could choose another agency. But no. It acts on behalf of the artists - it *is* them in a sense. Undermine the agency and you undermine the artists.
have no powers in relation to this at all. Their legal ambit covers a discreet set of commercial practices among which this isn't one.
The real route of recourse is a claim in defamation against Amazon. However this would be extremely expensive. I'm talking hundreds of thousands of pounds.
As a matter of law, there is simply no grounds for it. Facebook as a company is based in the USA, the US govt is entitled, for the purpose of national defence, and proportionately, to have access to all the data they require. This isn't a matter of unfair contract terms, it's a matter of the overriding and prior matter of state, prior to politics and popular sovereignty, of physically protecting the public!
Alternatively, if there is a grounding, then it's vital to note the CJEU jurisprudence always recognised that the treaties could be breached if it was in service of the mandatory requirements of running a viable country. In fact the protection of public safety is everywhere explicitly in the treaties. The Charter requires a balancing exercise and it will always come down in favour of proportionate state action to protect the public - and that need not be EU states only, but states anywhere.
Let's be absolutely clear. The wrongs we're talking about are publishing, i.e. sharing photos where a) there was a relationship of trust and confidence that the photos wouldn't be shared, and/or b) in any case the person concerned has a reasonable expectation of privacy, which in turn is protected by any decent constitution. If the person in the photo is naked, and doesn't look like a porn star, then that should put you on notice that it was confidential information.
You would not, should not, and must not share your neighbour's burglar alarm pin code with Twitter, when she has trusted you to keep it totally private. The only difference of moral substance between that and sharing someone's private naked photos is that the photos situation is even worse in some ways, because being able to have a private life is essential for the development of your personality, an interest which is arguably more vital to your ability to have a decent life, than the possessions in your flat.
Let me get this right. You're interested in spooks not being able to even scan everyone's telephone records or emails for evidence of terrorism, thus protecting somehow some ideal of absolute privacy against electronic intrusion, but you're not interested in them protecting your safety thereby.
At some point you're going to have to accept that a certain number of deaths through terrorism are unacceptable and require a surrender of part of your inviolable shield of privacy. It seems like you haven't reached that moment yet. How many deaths a year? 50? 100? 1000?
That's fine but that's a form of highly bounded freedom you describe, you're talking about the limited application of bounded market mechanisms in select fields where it would be beneficial to do so, not free markets. "Free markets" means the free play of all factors of production and market determination of the conditions surrounding markets. It's an Austrian-school economist's paradise and a nightmare for the real world.
"Price determined by supply and demand" describes non-interference in markets by non-market actors, which is impossible unless non-market actors cease to exist or act. I think you really mean "price not fixed by the state". Which itself is (respectfully) a nonsense, because the state MUST intervene whenever supply and demand levels generate morally/politically unacceptable outcomes/prices.
Er, Moore's law related to chips whose major leaps occurred during a contract for a state aerospace project. That's not free market capitalism. It's barely even capitalism. And I have no idea what it means for a market to be free. Surely you just mean a legal, regulatory, peaceful sandbox in which people transact with a greater or lesser degree of state interference in their transactions - and in which the state is everywhere in any case in facilitating the conditions for those transactions. So this 'free markets' idea seems absurd.
I think what you're describing is the sense of being asked to evaluate Tim's claim, without the doctrinal tools, i.e. the teaching, to do so. The answer is to find a well-written introductory economics textbook which covers micro- and macro-economics, and read it thoughtfully, thinking about each formula and how they might and might not manifest in business, and making a note of each one and any phenomena you can think of yourself as being associated with it. And read the FT or business pages at least a little until you're satisfied with your understanding of how things work. Then when someone makes an economic argument, or claim, you can evaluate it from the standpoint of someone who has considered and is aware of the fundamental bases, upon which the discipline rests, and which inform the fundamental ideological or doctrinal commitments, which underpin different schools of economic thought.
Thumbs up for admitting you don't know.
Article 21 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union:
Non-discrimination
1. Any discrimination based on any ground such as sex, race, colour, ethnic or social origin, genetic features, language, religion or belief, political or any other opinion, membership of a national minority, property, birth, disability, age or sexual orientation shall be prohibited.
...........
This doesn't actually creates freestanding duties or powers for Member States, but a) applies when Member States are applying EU law, and b) reflects existing EU caselaw: non-discrimination between private parties in economic relationships is at the core of such EU law caselaw, have a look at e.g. Defrenne v Sabena or Kukukdeveci or Stauder. I think the Commission would be the ones who would take it forward because it involves transnational issues, which consumers can't afford to litigate (and anyway there's no money in consumer law). Although anyone who's done conflict of laws may correct me here.
"no government can be trusted and to suggest by inference the 'west' is any better than Russia is laughable"
Get a grip. No government can be trusted to do what? There is unlawfulness and there is not recognising law. Russia is an absolute stranger to the rule of law, domestically and internationally. Good luck finding judicial or Parliamentary disagreement with the executive in Russia.
The moral basis for western interventions in recent years has been of an entirely different order than Russia's which amounts simply to "HULK STRONG, HULK TAKE".
Now you're just being silly. There are plenty of moral rights. All legal rights are founded on moral rights. And I'm talking about legal rights. And yes saying "I'm right", and why, will - if one is right - do plenty against everyone who disagrees with me, if said to the judiciary. Remember we're not living in a state of nature anymore.
Oh so now you say that they're just words on pieces of paper and lots of people agree with them AND they don't exist? I'm a bit confused - what DOES exist for you, apart from physical objects? It seems to me these rights not only exist but are entitlements inherent in the nature of law itself, in moderate republican and monarchical forms of government alike.
As for your argument that all civil authority stems from the means to commit violence, that's not true, you're confusing the means with the ends. Civil authority stems from political obligation.
In a very real sense your point is accurate, from a constitutional point of view. Indeed in a system with an all-powerful sovereign we do indeed have what rights the ruling power permit us. However that ruling power is the people. The parties you speak of put to the country at election time, precisely the issues it thinks concern you. That's why the Labour party in 1996/97 campaigned on their white paper "bringing rights home", which promised to entrench the European Convention on Human Rights within the British legal system, so that all branches of government would be strongly bound by it, except for Parliament which chooses to honour it and also chooses to honour the procedure whereby all legislation must be certified compliant with the Human Rights Act.
Why should it be a privilege granted by society, and not a moral right, that one should be safe from cruel treatment by the state? What is it do you think that makes the authority of that society's leadership and rules legitimate, if not protecting its members from cruel treatment?
You're talking about rights as against your fellow citizens (that they not murder you). Do you not think you should have any rights against the state? E.g. that it not pass laws excessively restricting your freedom of religion, association, private life, expression; that you never be tortured or executed by the state, or detained or punished without pre-existing legal grounds, or deprived of a fair trial, or discriminated against in the enjoyment of these liberties against the state, because of your gender/sexuality/ethnicity, etc?
Or do you believe all states should be allowed to pass whatever laws they like? Because it sounds like that's what you're arguing.
Haven't got the hang of this whole business thing yet - of creating things that sell for little enough that people want to buy them in significant enough numbers to cover your costs. Although the country has quite a few brain-dead folk who'll happily pay tends of thousands for diamond-encrusted Nokias, maybe that's the target market.
Oh well, back to selling oil instead of running an industrial economy. Oh wait...
I think the analogy is the policeman and the thief. The thief breaks into someone's house, the policeman turns up, and says "freeze or I'll shoot". The thief tries to run out of the back door.
When the police officer shoots the fleeing thief, who caused the thief's injury, the police officer or the thief?
My point is that I'm not sure if it's these sanctions ultimately causing harm to Russians. I think the ultimate cause is Putin's unacceptable seizure of Crimea and East Ukraine.
I like your point about wearing reflective stuff a lot - I actually had no idea my lights might not be nearly as visible as reflectors, but that makes perfect sense. Do you think a high-vis vest counts?
However I was very concerned about your other point. It doesn't surprise me that drivers didn't think you'd be cycling at 30mph. I think you (and we all) will find that, always, simply because 1) a bike is small and you notice it much later therefore than cars and thus don't see it moving for a period and can misjudge its speed, and 2) because for reasons of strength and safety (see 1) most cyclists simply don't cycle that fast, so it's extremely unexpected that someone will be, contributing to the misjudgement.
It winds me up as much as anyone else when a driver pulls out in front of me but I think for the reasons I gave, 30mph is too fast to ride in many if not perhaps almost all circumstances, for your own safety, and possibly that of pedestrians, to whom you/we are just as un-visible as drivers, and who are not so visible to you yourself in fact, and yet who have even less protective padding than you.
Agree agree agree. But - the un-ISIS-enhanced version of Sharia law wouldn't prohibit scientific knowledge, in fact I'm pretty sure scholars in the Islamic world were pretty great with science and maths, the first to systematize algebra, decimals, the decimal point, they preserved for us the works of the classical Greek and Roman canon (although I honestly don't know what they were thinking when they allowed Ovid's Ars Amoris to be transcribed...).
Hahaha excellent :-)
Just a note for newbies to the small claims process, you have to do a couple of things before going to the moneyclaim process. 1) ask the retailer to fulfil their obligations. 2) if they refuse 1), write to retailer recorded delivery (possibly with just certificate of posting but not sure), informing them that you're going to make a small claim against them, and saying why, unless they fulfil their obligations in a reasonable period e.g. 2 weeks. 3) then you're good to go with moneyclaim/small claim.
Note though that if your purchase is over £100 and you paid (even a penny of it) by UK credit card, then under s 75 of the Consumer Credit Act 1975 the credit card company is jointly liable under the Sale of Goods Act 1979, for the goods (e.g. including their being of reasonable quality and durability considering all factors including the price). In the English language this means if the retailer turns you down, rather than going through moneyclaim, if you want you can just ring up your credit card co and tell them what's happened, and invite them to see you right.
I had someone win my car on an eBay auction, and the day they'd arranged to pick it up they emailed and said "my brother hijacked my account so I won't be buying the car" - after I'd made the journey 30 miles to meet them. So he then offered me 65% of the price agreed. I took it because it was only £40 loss and they seemed too scary to risk suing, and they knew my mum's address. But if it was anyone else I would resell the car and sue the buyer for the difference. Suing is good.
You could do a breach of contract claim in the small claims court, on behalf of yourself and your neighbours, on grounds that provision of the service has not been carried out with reasonable care and skill. Sounds pretty slam dunk to me. http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1982/29/section/13 Unless you go for fibre, there's no guarantee any other provider will take the problem seriously.
You're right - a directive gives choice of how to implement.
And in principle, smart grids actually ought to make for cheaper energy and thus less returns to foreign extractive industries and more to higher-monetary-velocity industries (which seems to me a decent enough policy for co-ordination among the member states, assuming this objective wasn't in one of the treaties signed from time to time, which it probably was anyway).
You may be right with some or all of the negative results of intervening in Libya, but the intention was to stop the large-scale massacre by hired mercenaries of Libyan citizens, and it seemed to have succeeded. Even if we take a completely results-led view of the morality of that intervention (and ignore the intentions and feelings at the time about the awfulness of the massacre, which I think is a pure hindsight-based approach and not sound), then alongside the disorder which now plagues Libya, you have to place the lives of the people who seem likely to have been killed had the US not intervened. So, morally speaking, there are goods and harms there to weigh, and intentions and results.
Afghanistan you're right about, but I don't see how that particular unforeseen result of an action taken to stop Soviet global expansion, bears on the morality of training people to defeat the Soviets. And I said post-Clinton anyway.
As for Maidan, I'm sorry but I completely disagree about it installing the West's man. There was a popular uprising against Moscow's puppet Yuschenko, who fled, and the Ukrainian parliament (who appoints the government) appointed a new one, and the people elected a president who was more acceptable to them, one who had not Russia's nor the West's interests at heart but Ukraine's. I see nothing constitutionally controversial about that.
WMDs were indeed problematic and I did indeed say Bush II argued poorly and provocatively for a war which we may today not even properly understand.
The US today, since Clinton and with the exception I mentioned of some of Bush II's public claims, is not at all "no better than any other country that interferes with the politics abd sovereignty of another." That's nonsense. Moscow invaded half of Europe and Asia and kept it militarily subjugated for 70 years, and now it's doing it again with Ukraine. It's in that context that you have to view the US actions in trying to forestall socialism and Soviet dependency in Lat Am - although I agree it was unacceptable - but it was a long time ago, and America, unlike Russia, is not in the business of militarily expanding its territory.
After Rwanda, people like Michael Ignatieff developed the "R2P" or Right To Protect doctrine, which held that where atrocity were to occur on a grand scale without military intervention, military intervention in a sovereign territory was permissible. This was the principle which for the US permitted Bosnia, Libya, and Kosovo, although it was more problematic in Afghanistan, and so Afghanistan turned on a self-defence/averting-failed-state-harbouring-terrorists rationale (the "they won't educate women" wasn't enough imho), and to this day I don't fully understand Iraq II - although think we should take an open view and disregard the less persuasive rhetoric used at the time to justify it.
Grenada, Panama, contra etc were pre-Clinton and indeed they were pretty dubious. And yes I agree perhaps outside the military realm, countries aren't good to each other. But there ought to be some minimum standard for prohibiting military expansion of your territory, and I think it's largely obtained, between legally recognised states, since the fall of the Soviet Union, at least until Crimea/East Ukraine.
So Chile - whatever other empirical differences obtain (including fighting a seemingly life-or-death strategic battle against actual soviet military expansion following its then ongoing and now revived military subjugation of sovereign European states) - whatever other empirical differences obtain, there's a pretty obvious one you should note, and it's this:
Chile was then. This is now. We live in a different world, sustained not merely or even necessarily by the ability to enforce our wishes, but actual moral principles of state-to-state behaviour. To claim that someone perpetrated an apparent evil long ago (even if it is a comparable case), does not to my mind make an argument that an "anything goes" doctrine should today be permissible. In fact it's an argument against. It's saying "we can do evil because you did evil". That's still a claim about evil. And one itself based on largely false premises: if you look at all US military actions since Clinton, you see overwhelming moral justifications for each (with the exception of some aspects of Bush II exceptionalism, a tragic era, but one characterised by a style of rhetoric targeted at appeasing domestic bigots, as much as anything else).
Yes that is an acknowledged problem among legal theorists who deal with legal punishment. The problem is thought to be that you equally condemn greater and lesser harms. However in the age of the internet perhaps we don't tend to physically harm one another so much, and our reputation and mental wellbeing maybe count for much more than they used to, compared with physical wellbeing, so maybe the sentences are proportionate.
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