I consider this to be very similar to the Business Judgment Rule that protects CEOs and executives against lawsuits from shareholders for actions they did in their job, even if their actions turned out to be a mistake and lost the shareholders a bunch of money. To proceed with a lawsuit, the plaintiff has to demonstrate that the executive took unreasonable actions which directly resulted in harm to the plaintiff. Basically, their actions were out of the scope of their mandate, and they can be sued.
For example, the CEO hires their clueless spouse to a high paying job and the spouse loses the company a ton of money. That does not sound like the CEO was doing their job, but rather it sounds like they were putting their spouse ahead of the company. Here a lawsuit would certainly be allowed to go forward.
The argument is that the Constitution is the law which applies here. Specifically, the powers given to the executive to execute their role and enforce the acts of Congress.
Horses would often be swapped out at stations when a wealthy person would have to travel very quickly across a long distance. Maybe this is an average since the speed with which horsemen could travel would depend on the rate at which they exchanged their horses.
In an extreme example from the year 9 BC, the future emperor Tiberius traveled on the Roman Roads 330 miles (531 km) between northern Italy and modern day Mainz, Germany in 36 hours without sleep. He was rushing to the deathbed of his older brother Drusus after the latter suffered mortal injuries in a freak horse accident. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drususstein
Yes, for wealthy people who could swap out horses. If it was just a regular person like you or I with a horse, it wouldn’t increase your speed and even slow you down.
Horses were used for pulling or carrying loads, they are only faster on short high speeds, not long distances
Wouldn't Tesla leadership have an obligation to their shareholders to take any funds or grants that can financially help the business? Can not people who work at Tesla, including the CEO himself, practice their right to speech by publicly stating what policies they are for or against? This isn't really much of a story.
> Wouldn't Tesla leadership have an obligation to their shareholders to take any funds or grants that can financially help the business?
Wouldn't voters have an obligation to ourselves to prevent our tax dollars from being wasted from amoral conmen who have no intent to actually deliver on the promises associated to those tax dollars?
Our loyalties to USA should be above and beyond our loyalties to one company in our 401k.
No because that isn't the only factor that goes into deciding to take a grant or not. Some grants may be financially beneficial, but impact operations in a way that causes negative impact to the way the business is conducted.
A serious concern is how mining operations won't really be observed as much when they're working at the bottom of the sea. Blowing up a mountain may be subject to witnesses - at least satellite imagery for very rural areas. On the other hand, who can observe the actions of deep sea mining? There won't always be an enormous oil slick to let the public know that someone has been reckless down below.
> On the other hand, who can observe the actions of deep sea mining?
It should be trivial to observe drilling and excavation vessels loitering, and ore carriers leaving the site.
Not to mention that mining claims will have to be registered somewhere. (And if you don't, someone else will observe you excavating, and register their own claim on your site, and start digging alongside you. You may get a postcard and a thank-you note for the prospecting legwork you've done for your competitor.)
Mining has an incredible footprint of manpower and machinery. You can't keep it secret.
Western open pit mining operations will have environmental remediation plans that are likely bonded. Eventually, the ecology will go back to normal. Meanwhile, a monstrosity like Los Angeles will remain a massive concrete eye sore for centuries.
> Western open pit mining operations will have environmental remediation plans that are likely bonded.
New pits opened within the last two decades probably .. but possibly in ways that can be dodged.
Older pits nearing the end of 50 or 70 year life spans .. unlikey.
These are often "sold" to cut out companies that have no real assets to speak of and soon go bankrupt .. leaving the former owners in the clear.
Eg:
Once the largest open pit lead-zinc mine in the world, Faro Mine is now the site of one of the most complex abandoned mine remediation projects in Canada. The 25 square kilometre mine site located in south-central Yukon on traditional territory of KaskaNations was abandoned in 1998 and has since been in care and maintenance.
In 2022, we were contracted by Public Services and Procurement Canada on behalf of Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada to lead the team developing the remediation plan design and quality assurance support services.
ie. Private resource extraction and profits .. public (tax payer | indigenous communities) bears the cost of cleanup and toxins.
It's the same with offshore rigs in marine environs being abandoned for the public purse to deal with.
In theory it shouldn't be happening and bonds should have been held in escrow, in practice many western countries (New Zealand, Australia, elsewhere .. ) are seeing projects ending with no remediation.
Missed the edit window, apologies for the additional peer addendum.
There are hundreds of thousands of examples of abandoned mines in dire need of reclaimation, btw ... in one state of one single country:
Extensive mining has occurred in Western Australia since the mid-1800s resulting in tens of thousands of abandoned mine features across the Western Australia.
There's a program to very slowly deal with as many as possible using money taxed from current and future minesites .. but this is underfunded and overwhelmed.
It's a similar story in South Africa, other African states, China, Mongolia, Russia, former USSR satellites, Canada, USofA, etc.
Dunno whether S&P (peer link) still do abandoned mine GIS data .. we did before we sold that to them.
No, it won't. Remediation of these areas usually involve planting back a fraction of the biodiversity that was there before, and usually cloned from the same genetic stock, making the new plants more of a monoculture and susceptible to disease and less adaptable to environmental changes.
That's the plants.
In the meantime, all the animals were pushed out of that large area (I've never seen a small mine), and then either killed their neighbors in the (assumed) adjacent ecosystem, or were killed by them. Great.
Next you'll be telling us the remediated areas are actually better than what it was before (and in my anecdotal experience some mining companies not only say exactly this, but commission studies to prove it).
They might be better. This is opposed to say, any metropolitan area on earth, where there is no attempt to restore prior conditions at all. I think your argument is essentially an ad-hominem that asserts without evidence that mining companies are evil. I find this a bigotted point of view.
My point is that the permanent disturbance of urbanization should be much more concerning than temporary disturbances.
The article mentions a woman who wept with joy when she received a "steal" of a lease for a new government owned building, and the article mentions that certain political parties have made this program a priority. Perhaps this woman will support such political parties with her vote in future elections.
Yes, the British government was happy to sell it to Arizona businessman and developer Robert McCulloch. He had to actually make a slight deviation of the Colorado River in order for it to go under the bridge in its new location. To accomplish that feat he hired some Texas lawyers who personally knew President Johnson, and they all went to the White House to convince Johnson to approve the adjustment to the river course.
Johnson at first didn't want to do it, he said it wouldn't be right to deviate a major river for a real estate developer's project. One of the lawyers said that he wouldn't have to make such exceptions for anyone's sake, just for anytime that an American bought London Bridge and brought it to the US. Johnson was convinced and McCulloch got his way.
Last month, imagine my delight when I realized that the requirement I had to drive from Ehrenberg AZ to Las Vegas without crossing back into CA (for...paperwork reasons) meant that I'd drive right past the London Bridge.
But it was dark by the time I got there :( There's an In-n-Out burger at the east end though.
I think that future generations may forget most details of our way of life. However, as you said, it won't be due to lack of a historical record, but instead it will be due to a lack of interest in uneventful details combined with a plethora of information. I think with history we often have no clue about certain details even though the evidence is right in front of us; it's just not something we find interesting.
I've been reading the book Debt by David Graeber, and it went a lot of places I didn't expect. I suspect a lot of things we would take interest in are just not written down, or not commonly explored. For example, it was common for people to visit all their neighbors each day. It was also common for people to give each other gifts, not too large or too small or too equal to form a community.
> it was common for people to visit all their neighbors each day.
I am sure there is some regional variability, but at least in these parts you can still see that habit ingrained in those now around 80 years of age or older. But it seems to quickly taper off in anyone younger. By the time you get to my generation it is effectively unheard of.
As an example, think about how some alien visitors might try to piece together how we live day-to-day by watching TV shows and movies and reading whatever books they manage to dig up. The only way they'll even know we have bathrooms and take a crap there is if they find books or other archives detailing toilet diagrams, bathroom design, etc. If they just watch movies and TV, they'll think we somehow never have to expel waste, even though we obviously eat a lot as proven by how much screen time eating gets.
It would be a loss IMO if future generations never knew that we even engaged in doomscrolling (or to what extent). Of all things you’d want future generations to learn from, maladaptive behavior that’s so widespread as to be hardly noticed in daily life seem high on the list.
Caveat that doomscrolling specifically maybe isn’t a great example given that we are collecting a ton of data about it, we’re mostly just ignoring it.
This sounds like a significant refinement over KvH-E quadrants above, and indeed highlights the danger of the dumb and not-lazy. But it's probably not Napoleon..
Napoleon would more likely say something along the lines of..
"Know when to go for it and when to take it slow."
After all, he signalled his willingness to work hard with his bee emblem.
This reminds me of the legal marketing field, which is one in which I have some experience. Just look at the billboards along the highways in major US cities and you'll be reminded how horrendously competitive law is in the US (and it's becoming more and more competitive by the year - lawyers are everywhere and covid encouraged a bunch of college students to consider law school).
I believe the vast majority of marketing businesses for lawyers are legit, but if there are scams then the bad actors could be encouraged by the idea that lawyers are the last people in the world who want to be outed as having fallen for a scam. Lawyers must put forth an image of being intelligent, informed, and aggressive; being the victim of a shady business doesn't fit this model.
My (very naive) thinking would be that lawyers are the worst demographic to con, since they have the skills and resources to try and make themselves whole again (at the expense of the conman), maybe with a few NDAs throw in for good measure. Is this not the case?
My take is that lawyers will have to compare the damages they suffered to the potential harm their reputation will sustain if they become well known for being victims. Did they pay $1,000 for a subpar product? If so, they might not act beyond issuing some threats. However, if they lost $100,000 to a thief then they probably will act.
I have spoken with many lawyers who have threatened marketers with lawsuits, and in many cases the threat will help the lawyer. I have had a few lawyers tell me they WILL NOT file a lawsuit (why sue for $500 considering the time and court fees), but that it only costs about 60 cents to send a verbose letter using their firm's letterhead. They understand the old warning "if you sue for a cow, you may end up losing a cow".
Just as with a successful con against esteemed scientists, any skilled conman will know his target well and understand how he can fly just below the radar and probably avoid getting called out and destroyed.
My naive thinking would be that a given lawyer would be either impossible to con, or ripe for the taking because they believe they’re impossible to con. I’d also guess that if you could manage to con a lawyer, they’d rather fall on a sword than admit they were swindled.
For example, the CEO hires their clueless spouse to a high paying job and the spouse loses the company a ton of money. That does not sound like the CEO was doing their job, but rather it sounds like they were putting their spouse ahead of the company. Here a lawsuit would certainly be allowed to go forward.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/businessjudgmentrule.as...