> But what's the point of bringing a phone at this point?
I don't have much experience with protests, but I'd think people still need to commute to them. Either by their own car, public transport, or uber.
It would be nice to have your real phone for the commute to/from the protest, or in case of emergency, or if you leave the protest for some food or coffee.
A lot of cameras have built in wifi now, so when you leave the protest you could upload your camera's photos through your phone.
There's still a lot of utility of having a phone and selectively being able to prevent signals emanating from it.
It's kinda shocking to me how people are so willing to give tools to government agencies to track, spy, find, dox, and identify fellow citizens.
I guess I grew up drinking the 'American culture is one of mistrust of government' cool-aide, rather than 'American government has deep pockets' fruit punch.
I'm not sure if it's just an evolution of the times, or an actual erosion of principals (since when? 9/11?)
Started much earlier than 9/11. Probably the drug “war” that had things going towards the police state thing. Police departments buying military grade weapons and equipment to arm their swat teams. Then compounded by the fact US citizens are extremely armed themselves and use automatic rifles in their crime. So the police were outgunned. I think the North Hollywood shootout was pivotal in that regard, in the mid-late 90s.
You are not crazy, you make a valid point. But the truth is - the author (me) - was just lazy to upload it to something else and just wanted it published. I promise you I'm not trying to hack you :)
I ask ChatGPT all kinds of questions that could be considered potentially problematic. For example, I frequently ask about my dog’s medications. When my dog had a reaction to one of them, I asked ChatGPT about the symptoms, which ultimately prompted me to take her to the emergency vet.
A couple of weeks ago, I also asked about the symptoms of sodium overdose. I had eaten ramen and then pho within about twelve hours and developed a headache. After answering my question, ChatGPT cleared the screen and displayed a popup urging me to seek help if I was considering harming myself.
What has been genuinely transformative for me is getting actual answers—not just boilerplate responses like “consult your vet” or “consider talking to a medical professional.”
This case is different, though. ChatGPT reinforced someone’s delusions. My concern is that OpenAI may overreact by broadly restricting the model’s ability to give its best, most informative responses.
2. The ICC recognizes the Gaza Strip and the West Bank to be Palestinian territories
3. The ICC Article 12(2)(a): “The Court may exercise its jurisdiction if the crime in question is committed on the territory of a State Party to this Statute.”
4. Therefore, ICC argues it does have jurisdiction
So, according to the ICC, you don't need to be apart of the Rome Statute for the ICC to have jurisdiction
at least thats the argument for ICC's jurisdiction over Israeli nationals. IDK if the ICC ever tried that with the USA
I think the argument is subtley different (sorry if this is nitpicky)
1. Palestine is a state, whose territorial extent includes the gaza strip (the most controversial proposition)
2. Under international law, a soveriegn state has the right to prosecute any crime that takes place on their territory. In many ways this is kind of the definition of soveriegnty - the ability to control and make decisions in your territory (in the caee of war, subject to the restrictions imposed by the geneva convention)
3. Soverign states can delegate this power to anyone they chose
4. Palestine delegated this power to the ICC, subject to the provisions of the Rome statue.
> So, according to the ICC, you don't need to be apart of the Rome Statute for the ICC to have jurisdiction
The idea that courts have juridsiction over foreign nationals who commit crimes in their territory is very standard and is generally true for all courts.
E.g. if you are a tourist visiting another country and murder someone, you still get arrested by local authorities. There is no get out of jail free card because you are a foreigner. What is relavent is where the crime took place not who comitted it.
In the case of the ICC, the ICC is acting on behalf of Palestine. So its juridsiction would be the same as whatever Palestine's would be minus any additional restrictions imposed by the rome statue.
The fact that the Palestinian Authority has made no attempt at arresting the Hamas members also charged by the ICC, shows they do not have sovereignty in Gaza - they don’t have the ability to control and make decisions there.
I actually generally agree with this. How can the PA have sovereignty over an area they basically have never controlled? It seems pretty unprecedented to have a "state" that does not have control of its territory at time of recognition.
That said, it should be noted that the Hamas members publicly charged are all dead now and you can't arrest a dead person (the icc can also make warrants in secret so its possible there are secret warrants). But even if they weren't, it is clear they don't have the ability to enforce justice (or anything else) in Gaza, nor did they have that ability in the past.
IIRC, the prosecutor on the ICC responded to the sanctions by suggesting that they could charge individuals interfering with the court with obstruction. Which, as far as US sanctions are concerned, they definitely don't have the jurisdiction to do. I don't think anything legal came of it, but that is exactly the sort of threat that, from a prosecutor, sounds like abuse.
Why do you say they don't have jurisdiction in that case?
Article 70:
“It shall be a crime for any person to commit any of the following acts:
(a) giving false testimony;
(b) presenting false or forged evidence;
(c) corruptly influencing a witness, expert, or court official;
(d) interfering with or intimidating a witness, expert, or court official;
(e) committing any other act which perverts the course of justice in relation to proceedings before the Court.”
Article 70's jurisdiction is not tied to member states. It applies to anyone, anywhere that may affect the court's functioning.
edit: maybe you're saying the ICC cannot have jurisdiction over people/nations that never agreed to be apart of their jurisdiction, regardless of what the Rome Statue says?
Yes, just because the Rome statute claims jurisdiction doesn't make it true, if the jurisdiction in question didn't agree.
In the US, this has all the legal power of Joe Sixpack declaring legal power, or a Russian court. If the ICC tried, the US would tell them to pound sand (or more likely, increase sanctions).
Since the US is not a signatory, as far as they are concerned, the ICC is just a random organization claiming to hold powers it doesn't have.
If a foreign national threatened or tried to improperly influence a US judge, you better belueve the US courts would claim juridsiction.
Generally speaking courts usually claim juridsiction over actions that take affect in their territory even if comitted outside of it (e.g. someone running a scam call center specificly targeting americans would likely get in trouble with us courts even if they never step foot there. Someone hiring an assain to kill an american will still get charged even if they never step foot in america). The ICC is not unique in this regard. The limiting factors here are politics and power not traditional views of how juridsiction works.
There is a difference between juridsiction and actual ability to execute judgements/orders.
That's really not legally correct. Unless the case is specifically tied to terrorism, US federal courts don't claim jurisdiction over murders of private US citizens abroad.
In the giants legal overreach death match of USA vs ICC, I am betting on the USA as a force that can actually enforce out-of-jurisdiction law against the other
difficult to find the reasoning behind the 10% being considered "reasonable" from the article. It sounds like Edison has a lot of risk mitigation of wildfires, and is dealing wit a lot of litigation.
Is part of the 10% profit going to these costs? Or since they're an expense it's not apart of the 10% profit?
Seems like it's unfair to ask the public to foot the bill for problems they caused in part because they wanted to stuff their pockets with cash instead of investing money in keeping their services up.
Pussyfooting around this issue is the worst of both worlds.
Why on earth is a government-protected monopoly entitled to 10% margins? Or even 6% margins? It's risk-free money with a captive market.
What is the point of all this bullshit? Why not just call it a day, and run it as a crown corporation?
> The companies pointed to the January wildfires in Los Angeles County, saying they needed to provide their shareholders with more profit to get them to continue to invest in their stock because of the threat of utility-caused fires in California.
What utter nonsense. The shareholders need nothing. Take out a bloody loan.
The firm's entire concern, as reflected in the article - is it's stock price.
> Under the state’s system for setting electric rates, investors provide part of the money needed to build the infrastructure and then earn an annual return on that investment over the assets’ life, which can be 30 or 40 years.
Wait, why is this financed by investors and not lenders, like it is in the rest of the civilized world? Is this some kind of novel California-specific innovation, and if it is, what value has it produced for the world?
> Why on earth is a government-protected monopoly entitled to 10% margins?
Indeed, how do they pick any margin? If higher is better, why not pick 1000%? If lower is better, why not pick 0%? If we want something reasonable, why not make it market based to figure out what people think when they have to stump up real resources themselves? Once profit margins are set by committee decision there is little point trying to claim that the concern is profit motivated. The profits aren't doing much useful signalling. It just sounds stupid.
The point of all this is that PG&E sometimes needs to raise money. They do get money from customers paying their bills, but they often to raise money many years sooner than that. Selling bonds and selling stock are two ways of doing it, with different tradeoffs for investors. Stock might sometimes pay a higher dividend, but dividends aren’t guaranteed.
After the last bankruptcy, PG&E suspended dividends for six years, from 2018 to 2023.
No matter how good or bad management is, they’re still going to need to raise money. Bad management means more mistakes and then more money needs to be raised.
Bad management might get fired, but they’re not going to pay for their mistakes. The money needs to come from somewhere else.
Why should shareholders be taking on the risk of a city's power grid failing? Does packaging that risk as an investment opportunity somehow produce incentives to improve grid reliability and guide resources to be used efficiently?
PG&E emerged from their most recent bankruptcy with more debt than they entered with! This was largely because of the wildfire liabilities - $30 billion. In more direct terms, the lucky Californians are paying the unlucky Californians, and it was financed by bonds which used PG&E's existing assets as collateral (which for some reason weren't already collateralized.)
The best case for Californians overall would have been PG&E's debt and equity to go as close to 0 as possible, and all that extra debt have been used to actually upgrade the aging electricity infrastructure. Instead you are paying interest on past fire damage claims.
In 2018 PG&E had about $18b of long term debt, they now have just under $59b. Their outstanding shares also quadrupled. The bankruptcy didn't wipe out the equity, but investors got f'd hard if they thought they were acting conservatively. Would you accept a 1.25%ish dividend with the prospects of the stock going to 0 higher than it doubling in the next 10 years?
For all of the whiners about how utility investors shouldn't make any money, and possibly earn below their cost of capital, -- I spent some time looking at the utility industry over the last few years (including PG&E.) These are basically money pits which more money goes in than comes out over decades.
The other layer here is if the billions of dollars being borrowed are to build new infrastructure results in billions more in future liabilities to maintain everything. The first layer looked so bad I didn't go any further.
The petty dividend payouts utilities make just keep the equity investors from examining what they really own. Higher equity valuations let utilities borrow money cheaper than they really should be able to.
Functionally the whole thing looks like a ponzi scheme that perhaps could only happen with the 40 year run of ever shrinking interest rates. If the bond bull market is over then this utility ponzi scheme is going to blow too.
Bottom line, if investors were paying attention, your utility bills would be a lot higher. If utilities ever have a big problem getting Wall Street to keep funding their debt ponzi, they will be.
The alternative is the state owns the utility. Given how ugly the math is for utilities right now, I doubt it would be cheaper.
On the other hand, if the US is going 100% EV (AI datacenters or not), then there trillions of federal dollars are inbound and maybe utilities will be ok. One thing is for certain, the utilities, their investors (debt & equity) their customers, and the US states don't have the money to pay for all that has to be built.
Except that the state of California ended up on the hook for the first bankruptcy. The shareholders were the only ones who came out fine. The customers and the state got stuck with the bill.
Exactly what risk did they take on? A few missed dividends, and two years for the stock price to recover?
As for the second bankruptcy, the main result of that was that their customers ended up paying the bill for other customers whose houses were destroyed. But you are partially correct, the shareholders did take a haircut of a few percentage points from stock dilution. I wouldn't be too upset for them, the stock's now double what it was before the bankruptcy.[1]
California's cities wanted them to take a haircut of 100 percentage points, but that clearly didn't happen.
[1] For some reason, the wise stewardship of the shareholders and the board did nothing to mitigate the crisis that caused the company to get sued for 50 billion dollars. They were too busy squeezing dividends out of it to worry about liabilities. [2]
[2] And why should they? They aren't personally liable.
Just had to look this one up. PG&E's first bankruptcy was April 6, 2001. Based on the stock price decline prior to that, it looks like their shareholders thought everything was ok in November of 2000 and the stock was $27 (it bottomed out at $8.97 in April of 2001.) As of today, the stock is worth $15.97.
If we go back 30 years to 1995 -- and you invested $10,000 in PG&E and $10,000 in the S&P500, and reinvested the dividends -- today the PG&E investment would be worth $11,708. The S&P investment would be worth $201,420.
To put it in simpler terms, the PG&E investors look like gullible fools.
1. The stock recovered within 2 years and then shot to the moon.
2. You're not counting all the dividends they've siphoned out.
3. The reason it's at $16 today is because the company destroyed its own value... By prioritizing dividends over maintenance. Which killed a lot of people, destroyed a ton of property, with the damages exceeding the value of the firm. Yet, instead of being zeroed out, the shareholders are still there, still collecting dividends, and in a few years of guaranteed 10% margins, I'm sure the stock will recover.
They came out squeaky clean in 2001, keeping all their shares. (Major shout-out to the State of California for bailing them out, and shouldering all the subsequent liabilities from that adventure.)
The second one diluted them by 22%, by creating and giving new stock to the people who won lawsuits against the firm. The stock's up by more than 22% since the impact of the fires on the company was realized...
If they were zeroed out after either bankruptcy, I wouldn't be kvetching, but here we are...
> As for the second bankruptcy, the main result of that was that their customers ended up paying the bill for other customers whose houses were destroyed.
There's half of the major problems. If I walked around covered in gasoline every day and eventually walked past someone smoking, not a lot of people would blame the smoker for me getting engulfed in flames.
Yet build a wood house in a forest maintained for thousands of years by American Indians with fire, require universal electricity supply, and suddenly it's not the homeowner's fault at all. Everyone else should bail them out over and over again.
Capping margins at a percentage also directly breeds inefficiencies. If you could spend $10M to fix a problem that costs you $4M/yr, you're effectively paying $10M now to lose $400k in annual profit potential.
I wonder what our founders would think about tools like Flock.
From what I understand these systems are legal because there is no expectation of privacy in public. Therefore any time you go in public you cannot expect NOT to be tracked, photographed, and entered into a database (which may now outlive us).
I think the argument comes from the 1st amendment.
Weaponizing the Bill of Rights (BoR) for the government against the people does not seem to align with my understanding of why the Bill of Rights was cemented into our constitution in the first place.
I wonder what Adams or Madison would make of it. I wonder if Benjamin Franklin would be appalled.
I wonder if they'd consider every license plate reading a violation of the 4th amendment.
> I wonder what our founders would think about tools like Flock.
I suspect they'd make a distinction between private individuals engaging in first amendment protected activity like public photography and corporations or the state doing the same in order to violate people's 4th amendment rights. We certainly don't have to allow for both cases.
They'd have not forced license plates to be displayed at all times to begin with, as they are a search of your papers without probable cause your vehicle is unregistered. Private ships in those days (probably the closest equivalent of something big and dangerous that could do tons of damage quickly on the public right of way) did not have required hull numbers or anything like that. Of course that doesn't totally solve the flock problem, but makes it a lot harder.
Ships then, and now, don’t really need numbers for identification. There are various unique numbers that they can and do use occasionally for specific purposes(IMO numbers and hull numbers). However, a ship’s name and home port were, and are, more than sufficient to identify a ship for legal purposes. You don’t need a registration number on a ship, and certainly wouldn’t have needed one then.
The authorities absolutely kept meticulous records of ships entry and exit from any harbour as well as what was on board, what was loaded and unloaded and frequently a list of all persons onboard.
Some flag states enforce uniqueness constraints on name and home port combinations. The US does not, but that really doesn’t matter much in the real world. There just aren’t that many conflicts.
More importantly, the founding fathers very much did not extend privacy rights to ships. Intentionally so. The very first congress passed a law in 1790 that exempted ships from the requirements of needing a warrant to be searched.
The ability to track and search ships without warrants has been an important capability of the federal government from day one.
Hell, the federal register of ships is published and always has been. I don’t know how they would have felt about private cars, but the founding fathers revealed preference is that shipping and ships are not private like your other “papers and effects” are.
Thanks for this level of detail. History is complex, which is why I tend to be skeptical of bare “what would the founders have thought about this” complaints.
The comparison to private ships doesn't quite land, IMO.
Ships
- ships big enough to do material damage would be very small in #
- ships big enough to do material damage would have a (somewhat?) professional crew
- whatever damage they could do would always be limited to tiny areas - only where water & land meet, only where substantial public or private investment had been made in docks/etc
- operators have strong financial incentive to avoid damaging ship or 3rd party property (public or private)
Cars
- in some countries the ratio of cars to people is approaching 1
- a vanishingly small portion of vehicles have professional drivers
- car operators expect to be able to operate at velocities fatal to others on nearly 100% of land in cities, excepting only land that already has a building on it, and sometimes not even that.
- car operators rarely held liable for damage to public property, injury, or death and there's strong political pressure to socialize damage and avoid realistic risk premiums
I don't love flock but IMO the only realistic way to get rid of license plates would be mandatory speed governors that keep vehicles from going more than like 15mph. I would be fine with that, but I suspect most would not. If we expect to operate cars at velocities fatal to people outside our vehicles, then there will always be pressure to have a way of identifying bad actors who put others at risk.
> I don't love flock but IMO the only realistic way to get rid of license plates would be mandatory speed governors that keep vehicles from going more than like 15mph.
I don't understand this reasoning. License plates don't stop speeding from happening. Removing license plates wouldn't prevent enforcement of speed limits either. A cop can pull over and ticket someone without a license plate just as easily as they do now.
At best they're good for a small number of situations where they help identify a car used in a crime (say a hit and run) but even then plenty of crimes are committed using cars that can't be linked back to the driver (stolen for example) or where the plates have been removed/obscured.
I’m not arguing that license plates solve the problem of the danger of cars, simply that as long as cars are dangerous to people not inside the car, there will be political pressure to have some way, however imperfect, of identifying them and their owners/operators.
Even the least sophisticated criminals know that you should buy a stolen Kia or Hyundai for ~$100 and use that to commit your crime. I suspect most of the crime these Flock cameras are catching is red-light runners and maybe hit and runs if it happens to be caught on camera.
A hit and runner hit me in front of such camera and totalled my truck. Police refused to investigate, they're not interested in using camera for such reasons nor is there much incentive that's in it for the police to do so.
Often, the same people crying about Flock will decry private arms ownership through mental gymnastics.
These very same ships you speak of that could do "tons of damage" had actual cannonry - with no registration or restrictions on ownership or purchase, either.
You can still buy and bear a cannon with no background check or registration or any of the like, FWIW. Very easy to order on the internet and have shipped straight to your door[].
You can, but be aware that an exploding cannonball (widely available in 1776) is considered a destructive device, so each shell must have an NFA stamp. Solid shot is not considered a destructive device.
> because there is no expectation of privacy in public
Funny enough thats actually not true. Legally speaking. It's often claimed but it is an over simplification.
I think maybe the worst part is that the more we buy into this belief the more self fulfilling it becomes (see third link). But I don't expect anyone to believe me so here's several links. And I'd encourage people to push back against this misnomer. In the most obvious of cases I hope we all expect to have privacy in a public restroom. But remember that this extends beyond that. And remember that privacy is not binary. It's not a thing you have complete privacy or none (public restrooms again being an obvious example). So that level of privacy that we expect is ultimately decided by us. By acting as if it is binary only enables those who wish to take those rights from us. They want you to be nihilistic
Your founding fathers would become feasible perpetual energy sources as they roll in their graves seeing what your country has turned into. Not that you guys are alone - a lot of countries would benefit from such energy sources too.
The only acceptable opinion today should be that slavery of all stripes, practiced both before the emancipation proclamation, as well as today in both prison settings and trafficking, is abhorrent.
I'd bet many of the founders would've been amazed at the technology and insist on wide scale adoption. It could've further cemented the power of slaveholders over their slaves. It could've helped to track the movements of native groups. It could've helped to root out loyalists still dangerous to American independence.
> From what I understand these systems are legal because there is no expectation of privacy in public.
This is a common line of phrasing parroted by Flock and their supporters to no end but it's a myth. The SC, as much of a joke as they are now, established that a person has a reasonable expectation to privacy in their long term movements in Carpenter v. United States (2018). To date there is NO precedent carved out in the constitution or ANY Supreme Court case stating that people have zero expectation to privacy in public.
Defendants trying to exclude ALPR evidence often invoke Carpenter v. U.S. (or U.S. v. Jones, but that’s questionable because the majority decision is based on the trespass interpretation of the 4th Amendment rather than the Katz test). Judges have not generally agreed with defendants that ALPR (either the license plate capture itself or the database lookup) resembles the CSLI in Carpenter or the GPS tracker in Jones. A high enough density of Flock cameras may make the Carpenter-like arguments more compelling, though.
Yeah, I don't think capturing your license plate at a light falls afoul of Carpenter, but aggregating timestamped records of your license plate all over town to build a complete picture of your movements probably does.
idk that the government had first amendment rights… like any private citizen can record, but 1a doesn’t immediately mean the government can do anything, right?
If that was the case then you should wonder what Descartes would think. What Derrida or Baudrillard would think. We both know it’s not about that though.
Wondering what the people who created the government think of the current government is massively different than wondering what either of two French philosophers who never participated in statecraft born 150 years later thinks.
It is perfectly normal to wonder what the architect of a system thinks of the current system, and entirely separate from wondering what a pair of unrelated Frenchman think of that system. Even if they are just “some ancient dead old dudes”.
These guys made a constitution that says all men are free, except for slaves and women because they’re obviously not men. This led to a civil war just a couple decades later. I think it’s pretty clear that they didn’t really know what they were doing. In fact, that’s why they gave you the tools to change the laws of the country.
I’ve done both those things! Your obsession with what some half dead geezers from 300 years ago is a huge part of what makes the country a horrible place to live and a horrible influence on the world
I don't have much experience with protests, but I'd think people still need to commute to them. Either by their own car, public transport, or uber.
It would be nice to have your real phone for the commute to/from the protest, or in case of emergency, or if you leave the protest for some food or coffee.
A lot of cameras have built in wifi now, so when you leave the protest you could upload your camera's photos through your phone.
There's still a lot of utility of having a phone and selectively being able to prevent signals emanating from it.
reply