• 11 Posts
  • 15 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • I definitely don’t like the obnoxious copyright system in the USA, but what the IA did seems obviously wrong.

    The publisher-plaintiffs did not prove the “obvious wrong” in this case, however US-based courts have a curious standard when it comes to the application of Fair Use doctrine. This case ultimately rested on the fourth, most significantly-weighted Fair Use standard in US-based courts: whether IA’s digital lending harmed publisher sales during the 3-month period of unlimited digital lending.

    Unfortunately, when it comes to this standard, the publisher-plaintiffs are not required to prove harm, rather only assert that harm has occurred. If they were required to prove harm they’d have to reveal sales figures for the 27 works under consideration–publishers will do anything to conceal this information and US-based courts defer to them. Therefore, IA was required to prove a negative claim–that digital lending did not hurt sales–without access to the empirical data (which in other legal contexts is shared during the discovery phase) required to prove this claim. IA offered the next best argument (see pp. 44-62 of the case document to check for yourself), but the data was deemed insufficient by the court.

    In other words, on the most important test of Fair Use doctrine, which this entire case ultimately pivoted upon, IA was expected to defend itself with one arm tied behind its back. That’s not ‘fair’ and the publishers did not prove ‘obvious’ harm, but the US-based courts are increasingly uninterested in these things.

    edited: page numbers on linked court document.













  • Holy shit, you’re the goverment. You can print money.

    Honestly (and unfortunately) our political leaders do not have the financial literacy or expertise to understand contemporary monetary policy or how our economy works. Frankly, most people do not understand this system because it is made to be intentionally complex and opaque. Nobody has the objective, overall view on all of the interrelated actors/factors that comprise this system. It’s hard for people to accept the fact that our own governments do not fully understand how our economies work, but it’s a fact. This is not just a Trudeau problem.

    For example, in a process that is both possible and maddeningly complicated (at least in my understanding, which is barely adequate enough to type out here), the Treasury can collaborate with the Bank of Canada to adjust its target reserve funds rate, mitigate the knock-on effects to its Tax and Loan accounts to protect its reserve positions, adopt a non-neutral monetary financing policy (and get the Feds to mitigate the consequences, if they can, to our foreign relations, which would be severe) or use other tricks, increase the monetary financing rate to pre-1982 rates (e.g., around 20-25%), get the BoC to ‘print’ what economists call ‘high-powered money’ and follow Canada’s somewhat unique process of indirectly funding government deficit spending (in this case to to build low-cost housing), all the while trying to balance out the liabilities and fighting like hell against run-away inflation.

    Do you understand those steps, the benefits/risks of each, how they relate to one another, and how to implement them? Again, I only barely understand the approach I’ve tried to summarize above, each aspect of which economists of various ideological stripes may/will reject as totally unworkable. I’m certain that I’ve missed critical steps/considerations; I’m just not smart enough to know what I don’t yet know. You can bet Chrystia Freeland, our Minister of Finance, doesn’t understand this process. I bet there isn’t a single member of the Conservative Party of Canada caucus who understands this process. I doubt there’s more than a handful of MPs in Parliament who could even credibly describe the relationship and interrelations between the government and the Bank of Canada, much less how to accomplish the above scenario.

    Our government simply does not have the technical expertise required to fix this problem.









  • “We have new people whose life experiences have been radically different than ours. And so for those of us who have been here for decades or a long time, it gives us an insight into how people lived in other parts of the world, and now they’re with us and we want to learn about them. So we are one united community.”

    This is such a positive take from someone in leadership re: new immigration to their community. It can be difficult to manage unexpected population growth and the federal/provincial governments offer poor support to growing communities across Canada. Mr. Morrison and his neighbours deserve lots of credit and respect for welcoming new neighbours who’ve been through a lot. They sound like good people.





  • “In my view, a lot of the general associations we have with drinking in public are negative, like drunkenness in public, drinking and driving, like drunken hoodlums, all of these things — which make the news, but aren’t necessarily the only way people consume alcohol in public.”

    Dr. Malleck quoted here gets close to the source of the problem, which is classism.

    Most mayors, city councilors, etc. are doing well financially and they own their own houses (as well as cottages, investment properties, etc.), so the idea of going to a public park to drink outside with friends seems unusual to them. They view public parks as community spaces, but only within their personal perspectives as homeowners, and therefore what is allowed in parks is restricted to class-based moral sensibilities. It’s easy for Councilor So-and-So to bring her laptop to her backyard garden patio for another Zoom meeting. The line worker who just wants to sit outside with her family after 12 hours inside sorting chicken meat for Councilor So-and-So’s BBQ that weekend… she was an afterthought when it comes to these kinds of public space bylaws.

    This disconnect between how municipal leaders and many apartment/condo-dwelling constituents live also explains the conflicts during the pandemic when people wanted to leave the isolation of their apartments for fresh air, but homeowner leaders (with their backyards, cottage retreats, ‘working’ holidays, etc.) told them to go back inside and threatened them with fines.

    We do we have these bylaws? Ignorance rooted in class.