The TPP agreement on line

OK, I’ll try this again, with some gross oversimplifications. If you have no money and no job, you have a certain set of (unpleasant) choices.

The easiest choice is to keep doing whatever you did yesterday, thereby ensuring that you have no money and no job tomorrow. Another choice, if you have kids, is to tell them “don’t do what I did. Don’t piss your life down the toilet. Study hard. Make something of yourself”. Another one is to say to one’s oppressors, real or imagined: fuck you, I’m not going to take this anymore. And you pull yourselves up by your fingernails. All of those choices are hard. But for 90% of poor people, they do exist.

Poor people exist in a grey zone largely ignored by the law (exactly how much they’re ignored depends on the country). They actually have fewer “oppressors” than the middle classes. The things keeping them down are mostly in their own heads.

If you’ve never walked that path you’ll dismiss the above as Hollywood bullshit. I’m just painting a picture for you here. If you want to scribble all over it with a black board-marker, that’s up to you.

I said they have two choices. Sometimes they have more. I said that the proper choice, the moral choice, is to comply with the law, even if they think the law is faulty, even if they know compliance will result in great harm, short-term. That’s because we believe in Rule of Law as a cornerstone of civilisation.

In countries where they don’t believe that, they just subvert the government. Problem solved.

I doubt they were even aware of its existence or content. Like I said, you can’t legislate smarts.

I’m sure lawyers and activists do want to do the right thing. However, unlike the businessmen they target, they usually have zero expertise in the field that they’re agitating about - they have no idea how to weigh the many variables involved in ‘wrong’ and ‘right’. So they end up doing the wrong thing out of a combination of ignorance and hubris. A lawyer who used to work for Facebook taking on Facebook would have my respect.

Even a lawyer going after them for sham contracting? :astonished:

No refutation, then?

You’re tripping over your own terminology again.

I personally believe that laws interfering with freedom of contract are counterproductive and/or have unintended consequences. That doesn’t mean I don’t believe in The Law: that is, the process whereby we codify behaviour and appoint a judiciary to create and maintain statutes, hand out sanctions, etc. Much as I poke fun at lawyers, I don’t think they should be made illegal (and how would that work, exactly, anyway?).

I didn’t say I’d agree with him. I just said I’d recognise that, most likely, he’d know what he’s talking about.

If I’m tripping over my terminology, what do you call your yes-it’s-legal-no-it’s-illegal-but-the-law-is-an-ass paradox in the Uber thread?

Ah, your mural makes a bit more sense to me now. :slight_smile:

Interesting you mention Facebook and AT&T. Obama is said to be for Internet privacy somehow, when what he did was apply that for AT&T and Verizon, yet excluding Facebook and Google from that restriction because they are major Democrat donors (which accounts for some of their success). This is what I mean by cronyism and government choosing some companies over others.

Trump recently leveled the playing field and let AT&T and Verizon do the same thing that Obama have always allowed Facebook and Google to do, and the media spin on this is that Trump is against Internet privacy :astonished:

This could be big, especially if it kickstarts other agreements.
http://m.focustaiwan.tw/news/aipl/201902140007.aspx

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Domo arigato! Do the roboto!