Letâ(TM)s not pretend that self serving interests were not all over the US Constitution.

We still havenâ(TM)t removed all the parts that protected slave owner interests above all others, like the US Senate and Electoral College.

US States with robust direct democracy options at least have a steam valve to bypass gerrymandered legislatures and corrupt Senators. A federal referendum process would be amazing.

Paul may be protected by the speech and debate clause but there are two big reasons why no social media should be helping this.

1. It is clearly intended to harass and threaten the whistleblower and anyone else who these trolls might choose to claim is the whistleblower.

2. What is known is that the whistleblower is an intelligence officer, that the source of the leaks of the person's name had to have come from a person who had signed an NDA to keep government secrets and vis a vis Valerie Plame, it is a Federal crime for someone with that knowledge to reveal the identity of the an intelligence officer in some situations.

Social media sites should not facilitate either of these crimes.

Plus, you could buy a new Japanese attack submarine and still have $200m for decorating.

Just give the FTC drone strike authority and problem solved.

Yes, I would imagine the idea is to make the administrative/orchestration interface look just like AWS while actually being on the classified network. That way they can hire engineers who have AWS experience and just have them spin up servers the same way. They can also take their orchestration tools and ansible script.

This could potentially increase security by limiting the obnoxious roadblocks that provide the frustration incentive to break the rules on these systems in the first place. If everything on the classified system works almost the same way it does in the rest of the IT world, you make hiring easier, you make government more efficient, you reduce job frustration.

The Obama administration did push through an update to the Federal overtime regulations to make the majority of blue collar workers, especially retail/restaurant managers eligible for OT again, because they mostly get salaries around $24k/yr whereas a $12/hr worker would get OT without question, but its been blocked in court and the Trump administration is trying to kill it.

Yes. This is the fundamental problem. The only way crypto-currency gains traction is if the transaction fees and other "friction" drops below other convenient methods. This is probably why a lot of companies are developing private block chain systems and consortiums for special purposes so they can make the transaction fees essentially at cost (of operating their computing hardware)

Its still just a ton of speculation until some killer apps arrive. IMHO the real blockchain value is in the distributed cryptographically secure ledger, not the "scrip" they want to call money.

Government doesn't actually have to set the price. They just cap the availability and an auction process sets the price. Cap and trade ends up being more flexible and responsive to market conditions than a flat rate pollution tax.

The government can manipulate the auction results via supply or reserve tranches of credits, (effectively at cheaper prices) for some nationally important industries or exempt small emitters (like you and your car) while requiring large emitters like an airline or rail conglomerate or a electrical utility to purchase the credits each year.

You are confusing voter fraud (voting multiple times or for other people) with election fraud (miscounting the votes or manipulating how inconvenient it is to vote) .

Realistically voter fraud is meaningless outside of the occasional small local off-year race where a few extra votes will matter.

What the EC does is make the votes of the vast majority of the country meaningless and hands it to a few voters in a few states. The EC is a relic that should have gone away decades ago.

This is now the second time in 5 cycles where this has happened. National Popular Vote will actually make the two (or more) candidates campaign for every vote instead of trying to strategize about what counties in swing states will matter.

There are several other structural changes we ought to consider but eliminating the EC is an easy one and would be broadly popular.

There is simply a completely different type of employment culture in India than in the US. In the US we are used to interacting with a self-selecting group of immigrants who work really hard and often put up with a lot of stuff under H1 or other visa programs that American citizens wouldn't tolerate from employers.

Back in India though, there is a culture of treating employees like shit, and consequently a culture among employees of working as little as possible. Employers also don't screen candidates well for off-shore call centers and the like because if they are working on a large contract, all the accountability is based on metrics that can be manipulated and the US based business that contracted them probably only cares about reducing their costs.

My Indian and other immigrant coworkers work their asses off. The support teams I deal with in India can't even be bothered to show up to a phone call and are usually incapable of anything more than opening up a ticket with the software/hardware vendor directly.

Not really. In the US, if you had a private letter ruling like this where the IRS blessed your tax avoidance scheme and a court later disagreed, you still owe the taxes and internet. You would probably be spared the penalties since you followed IRS guidance in good faith. The law firm you hired to work with the IRS, might owe you some kind of refund or indemnity from their insurer.

I believe the way this happens is similar to what in the US is called a "Private Letter Ruling"

Basically a business or individual wants to know if a particular tax or other business strategy, basically a loophole, is legal. So they hire a specialty law firm and pay them to document the plan and then send it to the IRS or another regulator. What they get back is an opinion by that regulator that what they are doing is legal or not. Its not binding in court though but it might protect you from penalties or criminal charges for tax evasion if a court later disagrees with the private letter ruling since you followed the best legal advice and regulator interpretations in good faith.

So what seems to have happened here is Apple had this complex tax avoidance scheme and was able to convince Irish tax officials to sign off that their interpretation is that this is legal. However what was really happening is that Apple was telling all the other EU tax authorities that revenue was being earned in Ireland and would be taxed there. Then they were being allowed to tell Irish tax authorities that most of it was being earned and taxed elsewhere simultaneously.

Fundamentally this is a dishonest deal and the EU is right to require that a corporation when filing its taxes is not allowed to create two alternate stories to document its revenue and profits whereby a large portion of it, $100B+ of profits in this case is not being taxed anywhere.

I doubt they reverse anytime soon. IIRC, Roberts wrote a policy paper on FAA expansion back in the Reagan years. It's among his personal projects and a long sought goal of his pro-corporate backers throughout his career.

A contract doesn't override the law. The government decides what contract terms are enforceable in court. Also most of the drivers started driving before the arbitration clause was added. You may have noticed about a year ago that virtually every company you do business with as a consumer sent out a notice with an arbitration clause because they found a wording that the Supreme Court agreed with even though the Federal Arbitration Act was never intended to cover consumer and employee disputes, but only business-to-business disputes. The expansion of FAA was basically a conservative project begun decades ago, long before some of the authors ended up on SCOTUS.