I don't think the question is really whether the judge can order such a thing. I think it's more of a question of whether it is justified in this case.
We lack the data to second-guess the judge's judgment. I'm elated by this story, personally. There was a judge; there was a warrant; that's amazing progress for email!
You seem blind to the fact that your arguments only make sense when viewed through the "only Americans matter" lens, but are obviously false otherwise. How else do you explain it?
I almost went with "It's Mega Maid. She's gone from suck to blow." But that doesn't quite fit the question.
On human timescales, let's say a maximum lifetime of an average building, on most places climate would be stable.
Well, assuming you mean a few hundred years, like a European building, then not so much. Look at the Vostok Ice Core Data, if you haven't already. The past 10k years or relative climate stability is a stark anomaly compared to the previous 400k (apparently the previous 800k years are much the same).
Based on the data, the warming spike to current conditions should have been over very quickly, and the glaciers should have been on the march by now. No one knows why the last 10k years is odd. Heck, we don't even know that much. Is the Quaternary Ice Age coming to an end after ~100 M years? If so, human actions mean nothing on the scale of that, but it seems a bit non-Copernican to suppose it's so. (OTOH, the past 10k years of anomalous climate stability were key to humans emerging as a technological species, so it wouldn't be entirely coincidence.) What mechanism causes the abrupt temperature spike every 100k years? What brings it down again so sharply? What's different this time? The science here is in its infancy.
With human influence, in particular their massive release of CO2 and it's feedback effects, it looks like climate can and indeed will change so fast, that buildings close to oceans may get submerged in massive scale, farmland may become unarable faster than it's economical to create new farmland with all the food production infrastructure that goes with it etc.
Don't watch so many disaster movies. America grows enough food to feed itself on a small fraction of the land it needed even 100 years ago, and there's plenty of land to the North of current farm belts. This stuff won't change in a handful of years, not by and order of magnitude or two, and a handful of years is all it would take for modern agri-industry to move farming north.
Basically, the bad case for warming is that cities would have to move over generations to higher land. There's certainly an economic cost one could assess for that. If the climate models ever get to the point where they're useful, we could even put a dollar figure per year on it. But I expect heavy dependence on fossil fuels is just a passing phase in technological progress anyhow, and we'll be largely beyond it before it really matters.
The thing is if employers want the duty to just pay you for services, then they should get out of everything that does not involve work.
I couldn't agree more. And that goes double for the government. Heck, even the concept of health "insurance" as we have it today seems broken - does my car insurance pay for tune-ups? I'd like nothing more than being able to buy catastrophic care insurance (what was once called "major medical") like I buy car insurance (including the government-mandated high-risk pool so that no one gets priced out - we made that work for car insurance after all), and let all the day-to-day medical stuff be a cash transaction no different from an oil change.
It's an imperfect world.
BTW, on the QA side, Microsoft did in fact give people a few months to apply internally for dev jobs (it wasn't official that the rest would face lay-offs, but the writing was on the wall). About half of them made that jump. That's not re-training, of course, but it's nicer than most corporate layoffs.
I know plenty of people at MS. Several months ago, they announced the end of SDT (QA) as a thing. About half the SDT guys found internal transfers to the development teams. The other half were clearly looking for seats before the music stopped. Well, the music stopped.
That's the thing about software - whatever your technical skills, they have a half-life. You have to keep on top of that, or you'll find that what you know how to do simply isn't valuable any more. SDT was supposed to be a "developer, but writing test code" job all along. Now that MS is following the herd in making all test automation part of dev's job, those who had the talent and inclination to become normal devs had plenty of time to make that transfer. And about half of them did.
Your employer's duty is to give you money, not hold your hand and guide you through life.
Microsoft had a very generous severance package for engineers. They're on the payroll for 2 months after "being layed off", they get 2 weeks pay per 6 months tenure up to some high cap, from what I've heard.
When I got layed off in the dot-bust, my employer gave me a check and a shove out the door, but not having to work for 6 months gave me plenty of time brush up my skill set and to place myself with another company.
A free man doesn't expect his employer to be his mommy too - that's how a serf thinks. A company who wants to hire professionals ever again, after laying some of them off, will make sure to have a decent severance package - and MS did that. Most big companies that aren't in a death spiral do.
They must take out more value (than they could possibly even theoretically add) or else they would be broke.
Ahh, liberals, forever convinced economics is a zero-sum game.
Market spreads and brokerage prices had been coming down way before HFT were inserted into the system. It's like all the efficiencies of the last couple decades have been so great that you don't even notice when HFT quietly slip in a new tax on everyone.
It's all the same trend. HFT isn't some cliff we fell off - trade frequency and market maker participation has been increasing steadily for 20 years as technological advance made it more and more practical. Spreads fell steadily during this time as a result.
"How do we race towards middle class standards for all by cutting middle class jobs for white people, simultaneously concentrating white people wealth in fewer hands"
By creating many more jobs for other people, which clearly you don't even see as people in your moral equation.
Microsoft layed off a bunch of v\factory workers and QA guys while complaining how hard I is to hire developers. Seems legit to me.
But is so much more fun to shout "big companies are evil!" "rich guys are evil!". than to think about issues. Here's a thought for you: if you think rich is bad, you won't get rich.
Well, maybe I don't know what you mean by "shop around". There may be multiple exchanges selling the same thing (though not for stocks), and you usually aren't even aware if which one your broker deals with, as arbitrage keeps prices the same on all of them at faster than human scale these days - another example of making markets efficient.
The market makers simply trade on the exchange, filling orders at better prices than the bid/ask would be without them there. Because they trade so frequently, they can make good money off of quite a small price difference between what they buy and sell at.
You seem worried about these "losses for everyone else", but the market makers aren't siphoning off a % of each trade or anything like that. The only ones hurt are real parasites on the system: those who would profit from inattentive traders, by taking advantage of a thin market for price gouging.
It really seems like you're trying to argue "they add no value, because they must be taking money form someone, because they add no value."
Me too, but sorry, that's not an option. Stable climate isn't really a thing, and merely removing human influence won't get you a stable climate. Maybe with a century of research we might attempt "climate engineering" to deliberately mess with the system to achieve a desired result, but that's SciFi today.
Well, these are exchanges, so "shop around for a better price" isn't really a thing. What you can't do is profit from someone not paying much attention - profit from the inefficiency of the market. And that's a good thing: there should be no game to play, no skill at haggling required, nor deep understanding of market mechanics, simply to execute a trade. Deciding what price you're willing to buy or sell at is where the smarts belong, but if you buy something by mistake, and turn around and sell it 2 minutes later, that should cost you as little as possible.
Never forget Poe's Law. Not only is there no statement so absurd that it can't be taken seriously by someone, it will be. Even TimeCube.
Any circuit design must contain at least one part which is obsolete, two parts which are unobtainable, and three parts which are still under development.
