It's a populist call to arms. You'll be seeing a lot more of it over the next few years, expanding ever more loudly toward the rich, wall street, bankers, and corporations, with calls for much higher tax levels and minimum wage. The Fed's asset bubble-based fake recovery did absolutely nothing for the bottom 50%, but has vastly increased the wealth of the top 10%, the future social consequences of that are obvious.
Indeed. If you take a populist rant like this, and replace keywords like '1%', 'rich', 'banker' with words like 'Jew','Semitic' and 'Zionists' - you start to get an appreciation for how ugly these latest movements really are through the lens of history.
Do I mean that some of the public policy choices of the last decade are beyond criticism? No, definitely not. 'Too big to fail' is a terrible phrase because it calcifies economies and entrenches bad practice.
But the latest meme of 'if you're rich you're a parasite and should be stripped of your property' is disturbing for me. It lumps a class of people into a 'generally bad' category without looking at specific problems. There are angry young people out there who have been fed a simplified story and are running around with 'eat the rich' style placards. That is worrying to any ordered society.
To be fair, the actions of many (not all) of the rich in this country have brought it on themselves. When the middle class is stagnant or declining, and the wealthy keep getting richer and richer, then the populist rhetoric will take root.
And who can blame them exactly? When wages are stagnant, income inequality is rising, most companies have little-to-no loyalty to their employees and discard them at will, and many of the rich and comfortable push relentlessly towards eliminating the safety net, then those at the bottom are going to feel more than a little resentful. They feel ignored and powerless, which is a correct assessment of their position.
While not all the rich are bad, it's very hard in the current climate to have the slightest bit of sympathy for them. They, as a class, have the power to change things and avoid the coming storms, but, they've already shown they're not the least bit interested in addressing the immense financial inequalities and the problems to an ordered society caused by such divisions.
If the rules of the game seem rigged against you, there is a great incentive to either stop playing or to cheat. Some people don't seem to realize that a gigantic portion of everybody's wealth in developed nations is the ability to go out in public without fearing for the loss of your life, liberty, or property.
When you intentionally cultivate a class of people with little to lose and much to gain by brutal and violent action practically on your own doorstep, you are very likely to be hoist by your own petard. If I were a billionaire, I would be quite certain to conspicuously make myself an obvious asset to the whole community, particularly with respect to the folks that might be thinking of me as they rescue mostly-edible food from garbage containers. Public relations are important, if you wish to be a man that is not an island unto himself.
You may want to consider re-reading this article as you seem to be misinterpreting it. The author:
a) is a wealth manager
b) is not advocating a populist eat-the-rich" revolution
c) doesn't use the keywords "1%", "rich", or "banker" as you imply (I fail to see why you want to bring Judaism into this?)
d) does not imply "if you're rich you're a parasite and should be stripped of your property's wealth"
Here, for your convenience, is the author's thesis:
"A bloated and out-of-control financial sector does not add any value to society. Society benefits when the financial sector is kept as small as possible."
The author is ranting on the size of financial institutions, not the rich. Hope this clarifies things for you.
Can this be done via a "click here to confirm" email, or does this require phone conversations with the registrar? I don't like registering domains using my real name.
Isn't there some rule that a domain must be registered with a real name, or it doesn't really belong to you (and all anonymization services for domains are therefore suspect)?
I got such an email from Namecheap yesterday, and confirmed it with one click.
And unlike the intended trigger for verification ("changes to contact information"), I didn't make any changes to my domain. Either a WHOIS cloak expired, or some other action by Namecheap triggered the verification step.
The email Namecheap sends out is very shady looking. I had to google around quite a bit before concluding it was genuine. The verification link leads to the domain raa.name-services.com and is not delivered over https. It looks exactly like I imagine a targeted phishing email to look.
That's the same domain they use in the e-mail you get asking you to review the accuracy of your WHOIS data. They send that e-mail for every domain you own, every year, as required by ICANN. For Namecheap customers, the domain should be familiar, after the first mail at least.
The subject line of those mails is: Important Notice Regarding Your Domain Name(s)
The new mails have a stronger subject line: IMMEDIATE VERIFICATION required for [domain]
It's not Namecheap sending those out: Namecheap is simply an eNom reseller and the email you received was likely directly from eNom, with some Namecheap branding attached. *.name-services.com is used for various eNom-related stuff.
It can also be triggered by using the same contact with another domain being registered. Registrars aren't required to verify any existing contacts, but the moment there's an update, they have to. That said, if they want to, they can.
Also, Namecheap is an eNom reseller, so you actually got that email from them, not Namecheap.
How's the Bill of Rights working out for you? Far as I can tell, the first, fourth and seventh have all been forgotten about.
What makes you think governments are going to respect a Bill of Rights for the virtual world when they don't even respect the one for the physical world!
A Bill of Anything won't do much without some enforcement... and enforcement in America suffers from a lot of problems including basic interpretation.
Since Berners-Lee's suggestion isn't backed by any political body at all (powerful or not), it seems like a completely useless suggestion.
Even if it were backed by a powerful political body, like, say... the US or the EU, I'm not sure how comforted I would be.
Edit: It's been a while since I've taken Latin, but "Magna Carta" essentially means "Big/Great Paper," so the tongue-in-cheek modern equivalent might be something like "Yotta Byte."
Creating a moral high ground isn't necessarily a "useless suggestion." Nation-states require the moral acquiescence of it's citizens. Something that is given tacitly can be taken away rather violently.
The Bill of Rights is working just fine for me, thanks. Implementation is imperfect, because the human beings who are tasked with implementing it are all imperfect, but I have lived elsewhere, and I can tell the different between having the Bill of Rights and lacking it. A culture of "rule by law rather than rule by men" is important to make laws meaningful, but where I live we largely have that culture. I speak and write freely, my personal possessions are safe from arbitrary seizure, and when I want a jury trial, I can get a jury trial. Many people around the world enjoy none of these freedoms.
> The Bill of Rights is working just fine for me, thanks.
First, saying "things are worse in [some] other places that do not have a Bill of Rights" does not negate OP's point that "Far as I can tell, the first, fourth and seventh have all been forgotten about [in the US]".
> I speak and write freely, my personal possessions are safe from arbitrary seizure, and when I want a jury trial, I can get a jury trial. Many people around the world enjoy none of these freedoms.
You may enjoy those freedoms. But not all US citizens enjoy these freedoms.
On paper the Bill of Rights protects all US citizens, and all US citizens equally. In practice, that is very much not the case. As the saying goes, freedom of speech exists to protect those whose words critics want to silence, not those whose uncontroversial words have no critics. More broadly, the litmus test for the Bill of Rights is not whether your freedoms are being upheld, but whether all others' freedoms are being upheld.
It's not enough to simply say that "the implementation is imperfect" when the exact ways in which the implementation is failing are the exact ways in which it needs to succeed.
There is a difference between an unsatisfactory enforcement of the Constitution, and its outright failure. Saying that "the first, fourth and seventh have all been forgotten about" sounds like the latter, but the reality is closer to the former.
Point of fact: the word "citizen" does not appear in any article of the Bill of Rights.
They are restrictions upon the US government. In practice, this usually protects US nationals to a greater extent than any other nationality, but in theory, it should protect everyone on the planet from just one (particularly powerful) government. People elsewhere have their own government nastiness to deal with; they don't need to worry about ours as well.
Our testers are always telling us that "it works on my machine" is not sufficient cause to close a bug as not reproducible.
So the Bill of Rights works for you. Good job! Your environment is configured correctly.
But it has to work for everybody. You really need to look in to what is happening to the people in your municipality, county, state, and country that have less money and political power than you have.
What I see is that poorer people are being imprisoned at an ever-increasing rate, and that richer people are getting away with murder, sometimes literally. What I am seeing is less "rule by law" than "rule by money". It isn't quite "rule by men", but it certainly isn't equal justice for all.
The Magna Carta was imposed on king John by his nobles, and went from being a statement of grievances more honoured in the exception to the law of the land. I think it's quite a good analogy for what needs to happen in the internet domain.
> does the US Bill of Rights only apply to US citizens in the US?
There's some conflict on that, but there's precedent that the fourth applies to all citizens and whomever happens to be on US Soil, whether they're a citizen or not.
Technically, much of the Bill of Rights applies to the federal government and all subordinate governments. If they are not allowed to do something, period, it hardly matters if the person they are doing it to is in a particular place or has a particular attribute.
Politicians, realizing that only the citizens may vote, may exempt those folks from their otherwise unconstitutional activities, because others have no effective means to seek redress. My reading of the 4th is that it is a restriction on the conduct of the government, such that it applies to every natural person on Earth.
It may well be that the Supreme Court has not ruled this way because it is overwhelmingly staffed by politically-connected lawyers, rather than linguists and logicians.
The government is not allowed to search anyone, anywhere, without a specific purpose. Drawing a dividing line between foreign and domestic spying is a distraction from the notion that Uncle Sam is breaking the law when he listens in to Joe Terrorist's phone calls from halfway across the world to about 45% of the way around via dragnets and data mining.
We are willing to tolerate some degree of law-breaking when it is clearly in our own interest to do so, but it has gone well beyond that by now. Someone's wrist out there is just aching for a good, light slap.
Completely agreed. The fourth has the more clear-cut 'bright-line' demarcation point, as you said, "the government may not randomly search people", whomever those persons are.
Clearly though, not all rights in the bill of rights can be held to the same standard... for instance, voting rights should not as clearly be extended to non-citizens who just happen to be on American soil, but one's right to life had very well ought to be.
Try "The Hitchhiker's Guide to Calculus" by Michael Spivak. After reading that, it all just made sense and at the same time made me angry that they didn't teach it like that to us in high school.
