The KMT has always had a very strong "one China" policy. To them, unifying China is the most important thing. In the '70s and even in to the '80s, they still believed they were going to "take back the mainland". But since then, the reality has set in that the PRC is here to stay. The KMT's response has been to shift towards closer alignment with the PRC. The DPP leans more towards eventual independence, but that would require the ROC's constitution to be rewritten.

And we all know that won't happen.

The thing with fines is that all the people ACTIVELY involved have interests that don't align with the public and taxpayers.

The shops are ok with fines if they happen rarely and in manageable amounts. Then they can just factor them in as costs of doing business.

The inspectors need occasional fines to justify their existance. So, counter-intuitively, they have absolutely no interest in the businesses they inspect to actually be compliant. Just compliant enough that the non-compliance doesn't make more headlines than their fines. So they'll come now and then, but not so often that the business actually feels pressured into changing things.

You misunderstand wealth.

Most wealth of the filthy rich is in assets. Musk OWNS stuff that is worth X billions. That doesn't mean he as 140 mio. in cash sitting in his bottom drawer.

Moreoever, much of the spending the filthy rich do is done on debt. They put up their wealth as a collateral and buy stuff with other people's (the banks) money. There's some tax trickery with this the exact details I forgot about.

So yes, coughing up $140 mio. is at least a nuissance, even if on paper it's a rounding error.

The actual story that got buried is that the filthy rich are now in full-blown "I rule the world" mode when their reaction to a fee is not "sorry, we fucked up, won't happen again", but "let's get rid of those rules, they bother me".

These automated tags are about $15-$20 each. If you buy a million you can probably get them for $10, but still. Oh yes, and their stated lifetime is 5 years. And you STILL need an employee to walk around updating because it's done via NFC.

In many cases, there are modern tech solutions, but pen-and-paper is still cheaper, easier and more reliable.

It's not necessarily malice. What I mean is: They are certainly malicious, but maybe not in this.

Now THAT is a rare example of an actually smart law.

No government funds needed to enforce the policy, while the stores have an incentive to post the right prices. Why the max $5 though?

My grandparents and parents sometimes talked about how mail used to work.

Delivery within the same city within a few hours. The mailman would come to your house several times during the same day. Every day.

Telephones changed that. With phones, if something is urgent but not so urgent you go yourself, you can make a call. So the demand for same-day-delivery disappeared. Visiting each house only once means a mailman can cover more houses in the same amount of hours.

Privatizing mail delivery is an astonishingly stupid idea, given that what is left in physical mail delivery is often important, official documents.

So, in order to protect against possible military applications(known for their cost-sensitivity...); we are making the sale legal as long as El Presidente gets his cut? That's in character, sure; but what's the paper-thin excuse for that being a cogent policy idea?

Got it. Thanks for the clarification.

Sure, whatever you say. The reality is that most studies show that, while the categories they spend most on differ from women, men tend to spend more than women on non-essential products based on emotion.

In other words, appeals to emotion.

Do you care to explain how I'm wrong? All you did was post a link to the article. I read the article and it does not say anywhere that I can find that I'm wrong. Maybe if you want to use a source to make an argument you should, you know, actually make the argument.

The article does say:

which agrees to what I said. It also explains that it took 7 months for the officer to be charged, whereas Waddy was charged immediately.

Now, as to the other charges against Waddy, they included assault charges, but it is very hard to find much about the precise nature of those charges. This case is cited in a number of places as a case where someone was charged for actions of non-accomplices that harmed bystanders, but it is hard to find precise confirmation. None of the news articles go into enough detail and the major search engines are steaming heaps of garbage that just regurgitate news articles now. I tried going back to news articles right around the time of the original arrest and shooting. Same problem of course with detail, plus all of the articles at the time seemed to be credulously repeating what later turned out to be pretty much outright lies from the police.

So, it is cited as an example, but it is unclear. What is clear is that there were assault charges. Now, it is possible that those were instead about the fist fight that the police were originally called about, but the only victims named by any of the articles are the ones who were shot. Basically, while it still seems likely that this was an example of what we were talking about, there are no reliable primary sources immediately available to demonstrate it. At one point I would have searched harder and looked for court filings, etc. but the return is just so low since you seem unlikely to accept even absolute proof.

There are plenty of other examples though of police shootings leading to the person the police were after being charged for the indirect killing, even though the killer was not an accomplice. Try looking up Donald Sahota in Washington. He was an off duty police officer from Vancouver who was chasing a burglary suspect with his gun out. He was shot and killed by a Sheriff's deputy who thought he was the burglar. The burglary suspect was charged for murder as a result. That one seems like a pretty clear cut example meeting the criteria. The person killed was killed by a police officer (unless we want to nitpick on the differences between a deputy and a police officer). They were not an accomplice to the suspect the police were responding to. The suspect who they were responding to was charged with the death of someone they did not directly kill and who was killed by police.

Not that it invalidates what you are saying, I just want to be clear the 30 miles deep is underground. No water to displace there. The deepest part of the ocean is about 7 miles deep.

That is true, but that is not the point. I was not responding specifically to that very specific example. I was responding to the part about:

Which was frankly surreal since that category or spectrum obviously already exists (not under their made up name, of course) and it is truly bizarre to encounter anyone who does not know that. It's like talking to someone who does not know that there are different kinds and severity and causes of diabetes and that people with diabetes just need to "stop eating like pigs". Or people who don't believe that allergies exist and intentionally put things into people's food that they say they're allergic to. Etc., etc. Those, and others, by the way are real examples. Actual people I have met in real life. They really think that allergies are made up. As in, they think there is literally no such thing and that they're entirely made up. It's basically right up there with flat Earthers and people who think the moon landings were faked. You just feel like, somehow, they're not living in the same universe as you.

Regarding Waddy. If the charges were dropped, that means that he was being prosecuted on those charges, so what I said is correct. Also, just worth noting that the officer shot 7 people and got probation whereas Waddy went to prison for 2 1/2 years on a firearms possession charge. This was after pleading guilty to the possession charge. In other words, a plea deal. The prosecution over assault charges for the shootings was not dropped because of the prosecution of the officer, it was dropped because he took a deal.

The very simple fact is that it is indeed the case that someone can be charged for shootings by a third party who is explicitly not their accomplice if they commit a crime that leads to the shooting. I am making no claim on whether this is right or wrong, or what a jury will decide in court, or how prosecutors might decide to handle it, or any other point. I am saying only that it can, and does happen and that my statement is demonstrably true due to recent court cases.

Certainly the data aggregation is a real one. In theory, it is a separate issue from people doing their own private filming and photography in public though. Now, modern technology and the relentless corporate push to make all data produced by everyone corporate property stored on public servers instead of kept privately certainly bridges those two issues. Regardless though, we should not conflate them.

Oof. You really seem to have it bad on this trying to pretend that you're actually politically neutral/both sides thing. I'm not a partisan. I have political leanings and preferences of course. I simply recognize the extreme limitations of the US system of elections. I am basically very much against one of the two major parties because of a pretty long list of the ways they are completely against the majority of my principles. Until the broken system is fixed (which does not seem likely any time soon, since the vast majority of people don't really seem to grasp the most severe problems with it), that means that I have to weigh the lesser evil. As it stands at the moment, there is, from my perspective, a clear greater evil, so the choice is pretty much a default. I am not some sort of fan or zealot. Frankly though, I think you know all this. I don't think you're calling me "partisan slime" because you believe it. I think you're doing it because you know that I am not, but you also think that calling me something I am not will trigger me, so it's just a cheap trick on your part.