Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
What I have seen in crypto is the SEC creating legally unjustifiable rules that make life impossible for productive people until they're struck down by the courts. The SEC wants existing laws to apply to crypto when they don't, and will bend them to the breaking point to pretend that the laws say what they want them to say. Meanwhile Congress isn't super supportive of crypto but it's just not a top priority to make clear rules about it.
The point isn't actually to create something so complex a judge won't understand it. I'm not sure that's possible anyway; they can bring in experts to simplify or whatever. Ideally you force them to rely on experts rather than government cronies. A good expert is reluctant to oversimplify and, if you've done this correctly, probably sympathetic to your side by nature of the field he's chosen. A judge's job is to interpret existing law, not rewrite it to apply to new things.
In the end, unless you are literally hidden you can't really overpower the state, only force it to expend political capital that might be better spent elsewhere. That's the strategy. It's worked well for Uber and Starlink; you just have to build capital (in whatever form that takes--maybe gaining powerful allies, a sympathetic narrative, or just being fully "established" so that their crackdown looks more like eviction than prevention) faster than your enemies build a cohesive resistance.
Hiding is a good option if you have a very aligned group of people, but as soon as someone defects the jig is up.
Starlink is very much a traditional "ask permission first so you don't have to ask forgiveness later" project, and they didn't start making the big asks (of the FCC) until they were already in good with NASA. IIRC the worst incident I can think of where SpaceX strained its sympathy was a Starship hop test years ago, where the FAA claimed (albeit vaguely) that SpaceX had exceeded what was allowed by its launch license, but the fallout only delayed their next test launch by like 5 days.
Uber is a really good point. Start an axitay abcay service instead of a taxi cab service, then grow it fast enough that people will scream bloody murder if you take it away based on taxi cab regulations, and you're fine? (mostly; Austin kicked out Uber and Lyft for a year at one point) But Uber bought "grow fast enough" with $30 billion in investor cash; gaining power and sympathy more affordably might be a lot harder.
I could have sworn I heard about traditional internet companies lobbying against Starlink recently, but I can't find it anywhere. What I did find [1, 2] is somewhat unfavorable treatment by the government but as far as I can tell (which is not very far) not egregious.
Anyways, I do think there's naturally more sympathy for charter cities than for Big Business. People live in them. They're In in Silicon Valley. Going against them means potentially evicting thousands of people, angering just about everyone. You'd have to be ready to fight but I think it might be possible, especially if you're in Texas and federal action against you becomes a states' rights issue too.
Within a decade or two, if things continue as they have been, I expect a soft nullification crisis. No state will come out and directly nullify a law, but instead they will not only refuse to enforce the law, but do everything in their power to hamper federal enforcement. We saw this in Texas when they took border enforcement into their own hands; from what I can tell the feds backed off because it was a bad fight to pick. Kicking thousands out of their city has worse optics than that so I think there's a good chance a big enough city can survive the inevitable legal battles.
Traditional cell phone companies lobbied against the Starlink+T-Mobile service recently, if that's what you're thinking of?
I don't think "going after" a charter city means evicting everybody. It just means outnumbering the cops who want to enforce the charter city's laws with cops who want to enforce state/federal laws instead. The optics of that are going to very much depend on the specifics of the laws being enforced against nullification or rendered null against local enforcement, and are to some extent going to depend on surrounding culture and random chance. The Short Creek raid and the YFZ Ranch raid were superficially pretty similar, but the latter was a lot more effective long-term, in part because the wider culture had turned further against polygamy and much further against underage marriage and sexism in the interim. If your idea of local laws is (peeks back up thread) "intelligent peers, an actually challenging primary school system" then (assuming you can't fix every demographic gap yourselves) you're fine until/unless the surrounding culture turns much harder against the typical disparate impact of academic challenge. If it's "no danger of state abduction if they say the wrong thing to a school therapist" then you're fine until/unless the culture turns much harder ... in favor of childhood gender transition against parental wishes, I'm assuming?
And then on the other side, you have to worry about whether the culture is going to turn in the other direction and make your efforts moot. Are the "Wobblies" going to turn your current residence communist any time soon? (I read about them in now-70-year-old books!) Wouldn't you feel silly if you'd gone to found a new city in the middle of nowhere to avoid that, with a bunch of equally anti-communist fellows, to wait out a particular End of the World that never came? The other trouble with selecting for the most radically anti-anything people around is that radicals (including reactionaries - at least some other forms of radicals haven't already seen how their ideals fail...) tend to get weird in ways you don't like just as much as in ways you do. I respect the kids-must-have-intelligent peers crowd, but if you get the ones who are so extreme about it that they don't consider e.g. "move to Los Alamos" a solution (23 AP classes offered, because "kids in a small town full of nuclear physicists" is a sweet peer group), well, let's just say that I'm not sure they're going to be able to keep up with the nuclear physicists' kids even in that specific desideratum.
Good points.
Well, I don't think you'd really have cops enforcing your laws, or "laws" at all. There would just be a set of criteria determining citizen eligibility for housing, employment, etc. Your only enforcement mechanism is keeping people out (and maybe fining them for smaller infractions). Laws can be struck down easily as unconstitutional, tenancy rules and employment rules are different. Basically a parallel legal system not necessarily quite as beholden to the prevailing interpretation of the constitution.
For example, as far as I know i's not legal for towns to have immigration laws at all, but it is legal for them to restrict new housing, de facto ensuring that only rich people can live there. It's not legal to hire based on IQ, but it is (or at least, was until recently) legal to hire based on criminal record. If you own all the land you can legally create rules that mimic good law.
I don't have time to respond to the rest right now, sorry. It's a pretty half-baked idea to be sure. I would be extremely surprised to see some kind of conservative resurgence at this point. The best we can hope for is a national divorce.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link