It's basically old school double entry book keeping, except you've got ballots and votes cast instead of inventory and $.
You start with empty ballots and the electoral list. You record every ballot that's used (or damaged) and every voter that shows up and casts a vote. You end up with a paper trail of everything that happened as well as every ballot.
Every bit of the process is done by two employees+a polling station supervisor+party representatives (volunteers) making sure everything is done by the book. Everything should balance if there hasn't been fraud or mistakes. Counted ballots go in respective envelopes (for box 57 you'll have a liberal party, conservative party, green party, npd, invalid ballot, etc. envelop) allowing for swift recounting and making sure valid ballots for the right party are in every envelop.
My current tuition is under 500 CAD per class. The opportunity cost of not working full time is the real bulk of the cost of studying in places that have a functional government.
As someone living in a country with common law and having taking business law 101 (so certainly NAL) this sometimes ends up being a bit of a guessing game as to how a judge will interpret jurisprudence.
There's a lot of room for improvement in legal systems and they move extremely slow due to the political nature of things.
wouldn't you rather the 50/50 chance for some _seemingly_ impartial person to intepret a deal, than have to pay a lawyer more than somethings worth to enforce some complex 500 page word salad to keep a business run by a person whose dones this hundreds of times before?
There's always an opportunity cost to making art. Taking your argument to it's extreme people should never paint or make music but instead spend all their time growing food and building homes (and distributing those goods because that's a big crux, we could feed everyone on the planet if we got food to the right people).
The cool thing about freedom is that we don't have to be rational monks that are slave to economic utilitarism.
Indeed, back then there were headlines on Slashdot every day about the RIAA and Metallica band members suing random kids that downloaded music. Probably the only reason they don’t go after people often now is because people mostly use paid streaming instead of piracy, but that will surely change if piracy becomes more widespread again.
Didn't the RIAA completely ruin their reputation (along with the other AAs) by doing that? Now it seems like most people just equate them with a huge pile of lawyers in suits who care not about art.
I don't have it on hand at the moment, but I think I saw something about how the victims of those lawsuits didn't actually end up paying. Might have been related to bankruptcy, and certain things being non-enforceable. Basically the RIAA cottoned on to it not being worth their time and money to ruin their public image for little to no return.
Edit: Still can't find it, but did find this EFF article covering a bunch of people who apparently settled for some amount. Haven't followed up on the people who took things to court yet.
https://www.eff.org/wp/riaa-v-people-five-years-later
Edit 1: I think it might have just been a high-profile case or two that escaped paying, it seems there were oodles of people who did pay based on the EFF article.
The French revolution happened because real wealth was basically left untaxed, leaving an enormous tax burden on everyone that wasn't nobility. The situation was not unlike what Piketty described to win his nobel prize.
That is also one of the many causes of the French Revolution, but on its own isn't enough to explain why it went down exactly how and when it did.
Had the runway to bankruptcy been longer, a more decisive king than Louis 16th might have managed to successfully reform the state without it being shattered.
Perhaps the crisis wouldn't have landed at the same time as weather-driven economic downturn.
Maybe if it had been a few years later, different people would have gotten into power and Brissot wouldn't have started a disastrous war with Austria that spiraled everything out of anyone's control.
What will Donald Trump, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel's wealth look like when the us dollar isn't the main transfer currency, the world sees the biggest financial crisis in the last couple centuries and everyone wants to cash out on their US bonds because all of a sudden there's 0 trust in the US government?
That's what we're headed towards. The 'dark enlightenment' fascists think they can accelerate a switch of global banking moving towards cryptocurrency. Good fucking luck trading a bitcoin when normal finance is blowing up, grocery stores are going to struggle with stocking their shelves.
The thing that crypto correlated the most with so far has been tech stocks, the most exposed ones. So I don't think crypto will hold much longer than those and will crash earlier than the rest if your scenario was to be true.
Also, if crypto would be to become any money, then it would not produce any yield in average. So it would not be interesting to hold, the whole scenario makes no sense.
They don't have to care because there is so much wealth to acquire in the short term. Trump alone will enrich himself with billions in bribes from foreign companies. The DOGE/Project2025 annihilation of government programs will result in drastic privatization with all of the billionaire class benefitting immediately.
All of the dark outcomes you describe are possible while a certain class has profitted already so much they don't care and will happily retreat into their bunker.
Most first nations at first contact had 0 conception of ownership, rather seeing it as some sort of stewardship (or if you put it in modern terms you could use the marxist notion of personal property where it's 'use it or lose it') as well as low enough populations that they figured there was enough to go around to share the land with settlers.
Some of the nations were large, such as the Aztec. And at least a few of them understood right by conquest. They also had extensive trade routes across the continent, seeming to disprove the lack of ownership.
You seem to be confusing the concept of "ownership" with that of "private property" (on immovables, especially). The "Marxist notion" of personal property still requires the concept of ownership.
And if there happened to be people on the land they “wanted” well then there’s guns and smallpox blankets to take care of those pesky details.
“The people there didn’t have the concept of ownership” but some pioneers sure as hell made sure to enlighten them by laying claim to that same land and then threatening anyone for encroaching on it.
genocide is an intentional act. Smallpox did 90% of the work and nobody lifted a finger, at the time nobody could have forseen the effect of smallpox on the native population.
After smallpox when the population of the Americas had been reduced by something like 90% they most certainly didn't need all the land.
If the settlers had done what the first thousand or so invading cultures did and just exterminated the natives, they would have been able to cast them in whatever light they chose. Instead they gave them rather a lot of autonomous territory relative to their population, along with legal monopolies designed to prevent them from being forced into wage slavery.
> at the time nobody could have forseen the effect of smallpox on the native population
Are you really unaware that the colonials intentionally spread smallpox to the natives? This is not some obscure detail - it's in approximately all of the history textbooks in a fair bit of detail.
The few references to potentially intentionally spreading disease, all well after they were spreading in the Americas, are unlikely to be the cause of more than a tiny sliver of deaths due to disease. The timelines simply do not match.
I can't say I fully agree with the premise, but suppose we run with it.
If someone acted with clear intent to commit genocide, but the mass deaths would have happened anyway, does that clear them of the charge?
Put another way, if I stab someone, the knife goes in and all, but as I'm doing it a car also runs over him, am I no longer guilty of murder? Seems pretty questionable to me.
The people who committed genocide (or simply murder without cause) are clearly to blame for those they killed, directly and in many cases, indirectly.
As for your example, that's a bit convoluted. Perhaps clearer would be if you intend to genocide say, a town and meteor hits killing everyone before you get there as well as the neighboring town, it would be difficult to argue you're to blame for their deaths. That doesn't mean you're a nice person and we'd generally still lock you up for attempted genocide of the town you attempted to murder, but not of the town you didn't.
The meteor in real life was disease. By some estimates, 90% of the population in the Americas died from diseases the Spanish accidentally introduced by 1600, most the Spanish did not know existed.
It was an intentional act. They wrote about it being an intentional act. The violence was not an accidental nor rare event either, it was an intentional act too.
The east expansion took a lot of time, involved quite a few massacres and invonluntary relocations.
American debt is lucrative as long as you don't alienate the whole world by behaving completely irrationally. The USD being the world's transfer currency means that you can finance debt at the lowest interest rate on the planet and use that debt on more productive investments, which is what the USA's government is doing. There's a reason why the US still has a stellar credit rating.
American debt is lucrative and you morons are fucking up your cash cow because you don't understand banking and are willing to let a handful of crypto bros try to accelerate the international monetary system's downfall so that they can try to replace it by some bullshit rug pull coin that doesn't even have the technology to function as global currency.
You start with empty ballots and the electoral list. You record every ballot that's used (or damaged) and every voter that shows up and casts a vote. You end up with a paper trail of everything that happened as well as every ballot.
Every bit of the process is done by two employees+a polling station supervisor+party representatives (volunteers) making sure everything is done by the book. Everything should balance if there hasn't been fraud or mistakes. Counted ballots go in respective envelopes (for box 57 you'll have a liberal party, conservative party, green party, npd, invalid ballot, etc. envelop) allowing for swift recounting and making sure valid ballots for the right party are in every envelop.