It is weird to me that we got to a point where we are being literal about the law again, instead of the spirit.
I guess laws should no longer say:
A license plate should be attached to a car.
Instead it should say:
All vehicles that don't display their license plate for cameras of any kind are illegal, the spirit of this law is to make it so we can identify through the number assigned to the vehicle from the state that identifies it is obvious if a picture is taken of the vehicle from the front or the back.
Better yet, judges and legal experts should just stop playing these games with words and figure out a new way to make things that are supposed to be legal, legal.
> It is weird to me that we got to a point where we are being literal about the law again, instead of the spirit.
The "spirit" of any law requiring license plates on vehicles is that the license plate can be read under normal conditions. The letter of the law may have been more generic, although many countries define very precisely everything about the plate, its condition and legibility. So demanding visible plates is exactly in the spirit of the law. What's the point of a license plate that nobody can read?
People exploited the letter of the law by having a license that was illegible somehow. Covered, faded writing, flipped under the motorcycle seat, etc.
> vehicles that don't display their license plate for cameras of any kind are illegal
License plates predate traffic cameras and the requirement for readable plates has been in force in many countries since for almost all that time. The license needs to be visible first and foremost so humans can easily identify a car. It can be police or a witness when someone runs you over.
Cameras automate this so they make abuse far easier. But the need was always there for various legitimate reasons.
Almost no law would survive if everyone was allowed to just take some literal interpretation of their own choice. The attitude that "well technically the law says" is usually shot down by any judge for good reason. Someone could have a lot of fun with your right to "bear arms".
License plates have always been required to be legible; that's the whole point. Obscuring them is clearly against the spirit of the law, whether or not that particular method is specifically codified.
> All vehicles that don't display their license plate for cameras of any kind are illegal, the spirit of this law is to make it so we can identify through the number assigned to the vehicle from the state that identifies it is obvious if a picture is taken of the vehicle from the front or the back.
Quarter inch high license plates are now legal. It’s hardly the motorist’s fault if the camera is too low resolution :)
Regular license plates are illegal, because they’re unreadable to a type of camera - thermal cameras :)
No, no, you can't get away with saying "calling what we have now "capitalism" is quite a stretch, the meaning of that word is now so vague as to render it meaningless"
This is just simply not true. There are too many young people that want to be lawyers or ivory tower word architects, but the time for "winning arguments" because you're narrative is to make people believe untrue things, just does not work anymore.
"Capitalism" was a word coined by its critics just a few years before Marx wrote Das Kapital. People who actually like Capitalism tend to resist drawing some boundary around it and would rather have it be that thing that Maggie Thatcher and Angela Merkel and Hillary Clinton say "there is no alternative" to. In particularly they are loathe to even say it might be something that has some good aspects and some bad aspects and refusing to define it is necessary to keep that game going.
In particular it's hard to draw a line between many "communist" countries and capitalism. I mean, Stalin's great legacy was very rapid industrialization and technology development from 1920-1970 or so which was initially funded by starving farmers to buy machines from western industrialists to build factories. Post-Mao China has been out-capitalizing everybody else, which is the biggest problem people seem to have with them.
I'll argue that "capitalism" is about transforming society across time by deploying large amounts of capital so when somebody says "Facebook developed in a harmful direction because of capitalism" I'm going to argue that a system that wasn't fundamentally capitalist would never have made the investment to develop advanced microprocessors, the internet, social media, and all of that. You could have a different kind of capitalism which is kinder and gentler but if you didn't have capitalism you would not have 8 billion people on Earth because nobody would have made the investment to build all the fertilizer plants, etc.
First off, a great comment, I enjoyed reading it. Bringing some clearity to the meaning of "capitalism" is indeed a pressing necessity.
> I'll argue that "capitalism" is about transforming society across time by deploying large amounts of capital.
That definition of capitalism doesn't seem to clearly separate it from socialism though. If we combine it with this quote:
> Stalin's great legacy was very rapid industrialization and technology development ... Post-Mao China has been out-capitalizing everybody else
we reach the conclusion that capitalism can be practiced in socialists settings, indeed "deploying large amounts of capital" is quite normal for socialism. The only variables are the amount of capital available for deployment and the goals and professionalism of its managers.
So, the definition has to be augmented with something about the functioning of the market and the effects of that on distribution. I can't tell you what exactly because I don't burden myself with defining capitalism, or socialism for that matter, I view them more as points on a continuum, multiple points for each.
I really think this is disingenuous thinking. change over time is the original sin. The "market" is very much a real thing. It's the global fabric of everything in the entire world. It is definitely not a model.
Also let's not forget the original sin of communism - which is that everyone is a slave.
Everyone is a slave because you don't own your own labor. It is owned by the government. By definition the people are slaves in communism.
As real as any other legislation and as vulnerable to gaming, ignorance and malice.
> change over time is the original sin
Again, if change is a sin, so is evolution. The logical conclusion of your contention is going back to the trees and further to pre-life universe. And even that changes too much to qualify it as pure.
No. That's putting words in my mouth, I was agreeing to Paul in him saying that Capitalism's weakest point is that it can't account for the future. You're probably trying to be a wordsmith to win an argument, but your post is entirely meaningless.
In the US we have that whole ‘circular economy’ with NVIDIA, OpenAI, etc.
The the EU you have to convince some niggardly German bankers to make a loan that will certainly be repaid. So of course they will be left out of the AI future.
Here when Solyndra failed many politicians acted like it was a crime, in China they have had many solar ventures fail but others succeeded and thanks to that they won. On the other hand they’ve built whole cities nobody wants to live in.
In America nobody wants to be DJI, rather they want to cherry pick profitable opportunities. The truth in the low altitude sky over Ukraine is that DJI beats Lockheed Martin, so the F-35 vs DJI is like horses va tanks. You gotta do the mass market things if you want to defend the high end, see The Innovators Dilemma
> Capitalism's weakest point is that it can't account for the future.
That's different from "change as the original sin" and I'd address it differently, but first allow me to remove the poetry from your statement because it doesn't really contribute to clarity.
Basically you're saying "Capitalism allows unpredictable changes that can break things" as opposed to "Another system (e.g. socialism) plans the future and allows only planned changes".
Both of these may be true for some ideal models but aren't true in reality.
Macro changes under real capitalism can and are entirely predictable although you may not know how to predict them - that's a different issue. They can also be tightly controlled by methods different from socialism.
On the other hand, socialism allows only planned changes... until it doesn't, because of unintended consequences. However, I don't claim that the failure of the USSR's socialist model wasn't foreseen or planned at some level of their leadership, which brings the conversation into the realm of fundamental politics where real capitalism and socialism have a lot more in common than is assumed by their usual treatment as opposites.
> but your post is entirely meaningless
To you. Let's steer clear of wild generalizations, the devil is still in the details. I'd appreciate if you use a clear language instead of me trying to guess the details necessary for a meaningful conversation.
I wouldn't say that Democratic Socialism as practiced today plans the future and allows only planned changes. It does appear (I'm an American so my view on this matter could definitely be skewed) to be more risk averse - though I think that's an unintended consequence and not a feature.
Since my original assertion was that markets aren't actually real, it makes sense that fundamental politics plays a far greater role than many people suspect. I would say that Americans should be learning this lesson at this very moment.
> I wouldn't say that Democratic Socialism as practiced today plans the future and allows only planned changes.
In other words, Democratic Socialism can't account for the future either, maybe it can mitigate some risks a bit better but it's still capitalism with similar risks of disruption-inducing changes.
If we exclude planned socialism from consideration, there would be no reason to single out capitalism for its unpredictability because the rest aren't materially better and arguing about it wouldn't add any insights.
> fundamental politics plays a far greater role than many people suspect.
It does indeed.
> I would say that Americans should be learning this lesson at this very moment.
Popular understanding cannot increase itself, it can only follow education, media and academia but it's lacking there either.
Is Democratic Socialism better at handling or responding to disruption-inducing changes? Or is that what you meant by your statement that maybe it can mitigate some risks better?
I feel like people believe in either the capitalism or communism. The draw from both are interesting. On the one hand you have the ability to reach any peak you want - by creating something that people want. On the other, the focus is more on the laborer, a promise to make sure everyone has the basic needs.
I'm a free market person, but with guardrails. I think just because guardrails exist does not mean Capitalism is broken or does not work. I also believe that from a political perspective, one party (republicans) are afraid of adding guardrails because it might mean capitalism is weak compared to the alternative.
And on the other hand, the democrats are fully willing to bend the knee to the DSA and let the system collapse.
So what will actually happen? I don't think America will ever be a communistic society, but there may be severe pain in the coming years until everyone in congress is replaced with something else (maybe Forward Party comes back?)
