The current proposal is just as regressive, albeit in a way that introduces more inefficiency.
A cap on Ubers/Lyfts + minimum pay will likely increase the price of Ubers/Lyfts. Rich people will be able to afford the new prices, but poor people will not.
> Kicking the can to "elect someone else" is just as naive as claiming that this decision respects the law on the books.
But...it does respect the law on the books. Your concern seems to be that the law is bad, and that the judiciary ought to change that law. I don't think there's a lot of disagreement about the former, it's the latter that's more controversial.
From an idealistic standpoint, enacting Federal law is necessarily onerous, owing to the requirement of a strong consensus so as to prevent a marginal majority from shoving Federal laws down the throat of a large minority.
> Okay sure. But don't lose track of reality in your quest for idealism though.
Okay sure, it sounds like you don't care much for the idealistic standpoint, so let's talk pragmatism. If we can't gather this consensus at the Federal level, we have the levers of state legislatures to pass those same laws at a more local level.
Liberal states have the political will, the systems, and (if we're being frank) the majority of businesses that would be affected by Federal law anyway. They just need to have the will and pragmatism to compromise and pass their desired law at the state level until such a time that there's Federal consensus for that law.
2. NRLA does not override anything in FAA due to it being overbroad and/or things in the FAA not being "common policy"
are false, and thus the law on the books is not being respected?
#1 appears to be false and #2 is based on their erroneous position in #1. NRLA is more targeted than FAA and came 10 years post-FAA, so the argument that things covered in the FAA were not "common policy" at the time NRLA became law and thus wouldn't be overridden by NRLA seem ridiculous to me
No, it absolutely does not. It completely makes up a reason why this should be considered any different than any other instance where things have changed since a law was enacted.
Can you explain what the law on the books currently is, and how the majority opinion "absolutely does not" respect it?
> It completely makes up a reason why this should be considered any different than any other instance where things have changed since a law was enacted.
Things have changed since a law was enacted by legislative fiat. The thesis behind those arguing the intended function of the judiciary is that any instance in the past where the judiciary has actually changed a law since it was enacted is considered abuse and not to be repeated.
> We have a system that operates at the pace of 1776. That served us well for a long time, but since the post-war proliferation of mass media, it's hard to argue that it's adequate anymore.
I'd argue the exact opposite. The pace of our system is just a reflection of the current ideological polarization. Enacting Federal law requires a strong consensus (to prevent abuse), and the more polarized we are, the more difficult it becomes to shove Federal laws down the throat of a narrow minority.
If we can't gather this consensus at the Federal level, we have the levers of state legislatures to pass those same laws at a more local level.
Liberal states have the political will, the systems, and (if we're being frank) the majority of businesses that would be affected by Federal law anyway. They just need to have the will to compromise and pass their desired law at the state level until such a time that there's Federal consensus for that law.
> Liberal states have the political will, the systems, and (if we're being frank) the majority of businesses that would be affected by Federal law anyway. They just need to have the will to compromise and pass their desired law at the state level until such a time that there's Federal consensus for that law.
That's a nice theory, but no. Federal law preempts state law in this scenario[1] so states are completely unable to do anything to reign in arbitration.
Which, effectively, means that state goverments cannot pass any kind of meaningful consumer protection law or worker protection law, because of how fundamentally structurally biased towards the bigger side forced arbitration is. It's doubtful that Congress ever intended to preempt state laws in this way or that the FAA would've made it through Congress if it attempted to do so; this was entirely the creation of the Supreme Court, with none of that pesky horsetrading and strong consensus that would be required to pass an actual law.
There is definitely something to be said for requiring broad consensus. I think many would argue that the systems were intentionally designed to be slow and convoluted because it meant that only the most important things would survive and get implemented, at least at the federal level. I don't necessarily disagree with that in principle, but "slow and convoluted" by 19th century standards is "worthless and disastrous" by 21st century standards.
Technology has brought us all much closer, and it requires us to re-evaluate many of our old ideas. Maybe it was easier to say "each state will handle things on its own" in the 1800s, when it could take days or weeks of walking just to get to the state line. Now, many of us would be able to get to our state's border and back over the course of a long lunch break -- to say nothing of boarding an airplane and traversing the entire continent in a single evening.
In the old days, the saying was that a lie can get around the world before the truth can pull its boots on. Now, massive knots of information, too intermingled to classify definitively as either truth or error, traverse the earth literally at the speed of light. Unfiltered recordings of many important events are now available across the planet a few seconds after they occur. When our political processes were designed, it would take months for highly-diluted summaries of information to percolate to the masses.
As a species, we are still coming to terms with our ridiculous new powers of instantaneous global mobility and communication, but it seems patently silly to me to insist that systems designed for the much slower and bigger world of the past will map onto today's world essentially without modification.
I don't think that this is a technology problem - it's a polarization problem. No amount of technology traveling at the speed of light will solve the simple problem that you belong to an ideological sub-group that ferociously disagrees with another sub-group about how things should be run. Indeed, we're a nation of 330 million people, this is to be expected. I'm amazed we've been able to get away with this level of centralization for this long.
This isn't all that different from the EU, a similar union of states with a similar population (500 million), where the vast majority of laws and regulations are passed at the member-state level and not at the EU level. Any American that argues "each state will handle things on its own" is just making the same argument that a European might make when saying "we should enact this healthcare system X, or that pension system Y, or that policy Z in Germany".
This was always the Framers' intent, Hamilton himself was well aware of the perils of the Tyranny of the Majority[1]. The prescription for this was to apply the subsidiarity principle and use concurrent majorities (i.e. "let the states decide"). Federalism was never about the logistics of walking to state lines.
> No amount of technology traveling at the speed of light will solve the simple problem that you belong to an ideological sub-group that ferociously disagrees with another sub-group about how things should be run.
Yeah, I'm not claiming that technology solves things. I'm claiming the opposite, at least as far as our current government processes are concerned. Those processes have effectively been "broken" by changes in communication and movement.
This is an example. Liberals are aghast that the court didn't overstep their constitutional function here. Conservatives are happy that the process was followed, but they're not really happy that companies can effectively force employees into kangaroo court.
From a state's rights perspective, there's no reason that the federal government should be dealing with any of this really, states should be plenty capable of handling employment law. The federal government exists to set tariffs, administer borders and national defense, and ratify treaties. But because people and information can now move so freely, we've spent the last 100 years, more or less, ignoring the on-paper purview of federal and state governments.
You can say "Get Congress to pass a law" all you want but it's little consolation (in part because Congress is paralyzed in this environment). I would guess that most Americans on both sides of aisle want employees to be able to sue their employers in these cases -- hardly an instance of "virulent polarization" -- but that message is getting obscured by pedantry and partisanship on the boundaries of judicial interpretation. There are many similar issues, where most people don't really disagree per se, but the media and politicians still make sure things are arranged for maximum loyalty exploitation.
> Any American that argues "each state will handle things on its own" is just making the same argument that a European might make
Yeah, I'm a conservative, I understand and support the argument for state's rights, and I know how it's supposed to work theoretically. And before you point at the EU too enthusiastically, ask yourself how a similar situation would've played out there.
> Federalism was never about the logistics of walking to state lines.
I mean, it may not have been about it, but it was much more practical in a pre-telecommunication, pre-automobile, pre-airplane world.
Because I support state's rights, I recognize that we need to be realistic about things and make reasonable adaptations. It's not reasonable to pretend that the massive changes in movement and communication don't impact the way our republic functions.
Dogmatically grasping to processes established 200 years ago is only convincing everyone else that conservatism and governance by ruthless, cold pedantry are inextricable. That's bad. Maintaining conservative principles is not necessarily the same as enslaving oneself to the heartless rehearsal of dead scripts.
Re: the helmet laws, they've been shown to do more harm than good[1]. Helmet laws suppress ridership, and riders tend to be safer when they're surrounded by more bicyclists. This is why cities like Amsterdam and Copenhagen are actually safer for riders despite having no helmet laws.
Yeah I'm with you on the helmet laws. I'm not ok with the selective enforcement. If they cause more harm than good we should repeal the law.
When I took the MSF class there was talk of repealing the motorcycle helmet law for similar reasons. Not sure how I feel about that. It apparently came with an automatic DNR provision if you crash without a helmet.
There are potential religious conflicts there so I assume it would defer to whatever the drivers license says. Not really sure. It seems strange to me that we will just let people die because of the way they injured themselves, seems arbitrary.
This is half true: European infrastructure construction is almost perfectly decentralized to the point that it's (for the most part) fully centralized at the level of each member state.
The US half tries to fund and administer infrastructure at the federal level, state level, as well as local level, depending on the state.
As an American, I find the EU to have phenomenally good infrastructure, but I think that's because decisions aren't being made in Brussels, they're being made concurrently in Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam, London, etc.
I feel that the US would do well to emulate the EU, and centralize the funding, regulation, and administration of its respective systems in each member state.
This is why I'm not entirely opposed to the Trump infrastructure philosophy of encouraging states and local governments to pay their own way. It also encourages more private investment in infrastructure which is something that has contributed to the success of the subways in Seoul, Hong Kong and Tokyo as well as the original builders of the NYC subway.
I'm not opposed to that idea, but for it to work, we would have to invert our funding structures, with the majority of our taxes going to states and cities, and not the federal government. And while he seems to be happy to cut taxes, he doesn't seem to be too keen on cutting actual spending, so we're all gonna have to pay for it sooner or later.
I have the iPhone 7. I've been using Bluetooth headphones since about 2014 (started with the JayBirds, but use the AirPods now). I use my headphones pretty much all day.
Not once have I noticed the absence of the headphone jack, nor have I felt the need for it.
> “Then why did he steal this stuff? That’s the story the jury’s going to want to know about,” Judge William Alsup retorted.
I find it alarming that the judge assumes a "guilty until proven innocent" position. Obviously outsiders like us would take a stance like this, but for a judge on the bench to operate in that manner sets off all kinds of red flags for me.
> I find it alarming that the judge assumes a "guilty until proven innocent" position
I find this more of a waymo provided enough information for a the judge to rule a `guilty` verdict. However the judge does not yet know who to apply the guilty verdict to, and how sever the punishment needs to be.
Also this is a civil suit not a criminal one. The same rules do not apply.
Maybe I'm wrong, but the whole point of this case is to prove this. I would find a more impartial adjudicator to take more of a "the motives contradict with the allegations of theft" view.
To outright say that the theft occurs before an official judgement was made seems in poor taste for, well, a judge.
Google has logs. Google made assertions with the logs backing them up. Uber (to my knowledge) has not denied the assertions. The employee in question (to my knowledge) has not denied the assertions.
The bar in civil cases is preponderance of the evidence, of which Google has plenty and Uber / Levandowski have shown very little. It seems beyond sufficient at this point anyway.
Worth noting that while I might otherwise agree with your position, the thing you're missing here is that this isn't a case as you're used to seeing them, and neither guilt nor innocence is being determined here. Preliminary injunctions function very differently from other legal proceedings.
What Waymo might do is offer proof that Lewandowski stole the documents. What Uber might do is offer proof that he didn't, or that even if he did, it doesn't matter for some other reason. In determining whether or not an injunction can proceed, the judge isn't being asked to determine guilt or innocence, but to determine, based on the strength of the evidence, whether or not they might later find something like guilt or innocence enough that an injunction should or should not be granted.
If Waymo were to offer continuous video of Lewandowski stealing the documents and taking them to Uber, uploading it to their servers, and then implementing them in their self-driving cars, a judge would almost certainly find that guilt is probable enough to establish positive grounds for issuing an injunction, but that does not mean that Lewandowski is found guilty in the way that we usually associate guilt.
Neither party is contesting that the documents were stolen [1]. Everyone is basically assuming that he did it; Uber's defense in this preliminary-injunction hearing is that the stolen documents never made it to Uber.
Uber wants to have its cake and eat it too. It wants to not be stopped by an injunction from Waymo, but it also wants to keep Levandowski as the head of its self-driving car program. Probably those two desires are in conflict; probably Waymo will push in the right places to force them to be in conflict.
Neither Uber nor Levandowski have denied that he downloaded the documents, and apparently Waymo's evidence is pretty strong. The fact that they're arguing "we didn't use those documents" rather than "he never stole those documents before we acquired his company" basically amounts to admitting that he took them.
You're jumping to conclusions by assuming that a federal judge is jumping to conclusions. If you read that and the first thing you think is "that judge can't judge!", that's not good.
Anyways, the judge has made is very clear that the evidence against them is very strong, that the record is very strong, and that so far neither Uber nor Levandowski have denied that he stole the 14 000 documents.
I'm neither a lawyer nor a judge, but I'm just wondering if this is a typical type of thing to assert during a judgement. It just jumped out as impartial to me.
This has been going on for a fair amount of time, the judge has reproached Uber more than once, a lot of evidence has been submitted. It appears that the judge has decided that, at this point, there's enough evidence to say that it's a fact that he stole the documents. They had a chance to challenge the [apparently overwhelming] evidence Google has, and they failed [apparently, also overwhelmingly].
This is typical. Judges that refuse to say anything about arguments they aren't buying are insecure about being too transparent on appeal. More senior judges will tell you rather quickly if they think your argument doesn't hold any water or alternatively that even if your argument is right, you're not going to get the outcome that you're pleading for. They won't 'decide' then and there, but they'll often make it clear that absent some big reveals come discovery time that you're in big trouble.
Possibly, I think "impartial" means reserving the judgement until the judgement is to be made at the end of the trial as opposed to in the middle of the trial, which could very well be wrong - IANAL.
A trial like this is not a single giant evidence dump followed by a giant decision. It is a series of hearings. After each hearing something can be ruled on. You can issue a subpoena to collect more information about A, we have settled B as a fact, you are misreading the law so you have to drop that line of inquiry, etc.
Each hearing is impartial. But impartial decisions come at many points. In fact some points will be appealed to a higher court which will make a ruling and then send it to a lower court again with instructions about how to proceed.
And that's where you're very wrong. Large portions of a trial require judgements to have already been made, even if they've not been written down in a definitive 'judgement' yet. Alsup has made it clear that he's decided that it is a 'matter of fact' that Levandowski stole documents. Now they're arguing over who's responsible and liable.
> "He downloaded 14,000 files, he wiped clean the computer, and he took [them] with him. That's the record. He’s not denying it. You're not denying it. No one on your side is denying he has the 14,000 files."
So, "You've already said he stole the files, why" seems like a perfectly reasonable question for a judge to ask.
My (admittedly limited) understanding of the case so far is that neither Uber nor the former Google employee dispute that the theft did in fact take place.
No, you're wrong. Uber doesn't know if Levandowski stole the documents or not. But they are saying it doesn't matter, that any stolen documents are between the individual and Google, because none of those documents made it into Uber's code base or designs, and none of Google's designs are in their current research Lidar, which was developed by an entirely different company that was bought before Levandowski even left Google.
Forgive my ignorance, but can Uber dispute that the theft did in fact take place if ther former Google employee isn't saying anything? Could they not be as ignorant as you or I?
They could be as ignorant, but the fact that they haven't forced their employee to disclose anything appears to the judge that they're trying to have their cake and eat it too.
In addition to what everyone else here has mentioned, note that this case is not against Levandowski. Google is suing Uber, and even if Alsup thinks that Levandowski is guilty as sin, this won't send him to jail or even render a civil judgment against him.
>I find it alarming that the judge assumes a "guilty until proven innocent" position.
No, we are in the pre-trial phase. What has been happening is that Judge Alsup ordered Uber several weeks ago to do discovery, and Uber has been resisting doing it as ordered. Alsup has been getting more upset, and is now threatening an injunction if Uber doesn't comply.
At this session Uber argued, in effect, "We don't need to do discovery correctly because we are innocent." It is quite unlikely Alsup will be persuaded by this argument.
He downloaded the documents 6 months before leaving the company. Have you ever downloaded a git repository to do some work at home, 6 months before leaving a company? Google hasn't proven that Levandowski actually did anything with those documents, besides downloading them onto a work computer, months before leaving Google. They don't even know if he copied those files off his laptop. Could it be conceivable that he was actually just working on those files?
Google does not allow source code on non-Google managed devices, or even laptops that are Google managed. You have to be constantly behind Google's firewall to access and develop code, which makes working from home rather difficult.
Waymo claims (and Uber has not refuted) that "he downloaded 9.7 GB of Waymo’s highly confidential files and trade secrets, including blueprints, design files and testing documentation. Then he connected an external drive to the laptop. Mr. Levandowski then wiped and reformatted the laptop in an attempt to erase forensic fingerprints." [0]
That sort of shoots a hole in the "downloaded to work on at home argument", much like if you go into a bank with a gun, a stocking over your head, and a friend waiting outside in a running car would tend to make your story about just wanting to make a withdrawal pretty suspect.
EDIT: One thing I got wrong is that it was 6 weeks, not 6 months in my original post.
He connected an external drive to the laptop. That's all they know. They didn't say he copied the files onto the external drive. If he did copy them onto the external drive, they would have said this. So now we have to parse their statements.
Do they know he copied those files onto the external drive? No. Did he have a movie on there that he viewed? They don't know, apparently.
And he wiped and reformatted his laptop. When did he do this? Did he do this immediately? Or did he do it weeks later? They didn't specify this either. I would love more information about this, if he did this all in one night. If they explicitly say he downloaded a repo, he copied it to an external usb drive, and then wiped his laptop all in the course of an hour, that's certainly suspicious. But that's not what they said.
Based on what they said, he could have downloaded the repo, worked on it for many days or weeks, attached a usb drive at any point, and wiped the laptop clean before he handed the laptop back to them 6 weeks later. I would love for them to clarify this, because right now they are the purveyors of this information.
There were two points, both addressing "working on files from home"
The general point, disregarding the way in which he downloaded the files and then wiped his computer, is that Google generally has a policy where you're just not allowed to have local copies of source files to work on a remote machine.
That's something that you'd have to go through quite a bit of effort to circumvent, as the only machines that are allowed to access repos are physically wired to the network.
If you're working remotely, you're accessing a desktop computer through SSH or RDP and working that way. The files (except as caches and network traffic) never really live on your remote machine.
Of course, this only applies to source code and other such files. If you're somebody working on a powerpoint or a design document, you're allowed to download that. And maybe there's a huge exception for Google X (although I doubt that).
But working on source files at home while disconnected to a Google server is not common, encouraged, and by itself, might be a fireable offense and is definitely a violation of IT policies.
Because he's taking the fifth amendment privilege against self-incrimination, for civil court purposes they assume his testimony would be as incriminating as possible. Or so waymo is arguing anyway.
Relative to that culture? Yes absolutely. Not being a "culture fit" can be a boon for the candidate if they are not compatible with a culture in which they would be miserable.
A cap on Ubers/Lyfts + minimum pay will likely increase the price of Ubers/Lyfts. Rich people will be able to afford the new prices, but poor people will not.