If it went to court, no sane judge should allow it to stand and the person should be able to claim they signed it under duress as there is no other logical reason someone would sign something like that.

Why, if you don't intend to break the contract, you'll never have to pay the $537M. So a sane person with no intention to break the contract could sign it without voiding their sanity certificate.

Heck, if an employer agrees to pay me $1M/month, I'll gladly live with a two-year noncompete clause and a $537M fine for breaking it. Where do I sign?

Surely such an amendment would be unconstitutional, in that the wording mislead the people...?

Which constitution explicitly bans misleading the people?

whether you signed a non-compete or not, how would your old company even know what you were doing after you left?

You suddenly show up in a customer-facing role at another company.

Your name pops up in patent applications filed by another company.

Your job is high-profile enough that your name can be found on the other companys website.

Your old employment contract also contains clauses about you having to report your employment status for the duration of the non-compete.

There are lots of ways.

But it deprives the parties of the freedom to meaningfully enter into such contracts,

Just word it differently. "For up to x months after the end of the employment contract, employer will pay employee x% of their last salary if they are not working in field Y".

Basically, a "carrot" noncompete instead of a "stick" noncompete.

But of course employers wouldn't want to pay for having their business model protected.

A non-compete contract is more akin to a contract that says if you quit, you have to give us back your bonus or a prenumpt agreement.

So how about an obligation to commit suicide after the employment contract ends? That would be the ultimate form of non-compete.

I would be curious what the penalty is for a non-compete.

It's usually a ridiculous amount of money. Of course, if the skills of the employee in question are in really high demand, the new employer might just consider to fork over defined penalty to the new employee so he can pay off his former employer.

Basically, I would be in favor of specific penalties for non-compete

Great. "The penalty for violating the non-compete clause is $537 million payable in small bills."

Specific enough?

In a truly free market your only loss if you violated a contract would be loss of trust, making it more costly for you to bargain with others.

Without the major government intervention called "penal law", your loss for violating a contract would amount to whatever the other party of the contract tells their hired thugs to do to you.

If you use a Stingray to catch a criminal, then can't the criminal simply request how the device works and once that is denied, the evidence used to catch the criminal is simply thrown out.

That's why law enforcement uses parallel construction to conceal how they actually got the evidence.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...

Hydrogen peroxide, sodium hypochlorite, etc ...

... should be great if your heat sink temperature is well below zero degrees (you can pick Celsius or Fahrenheit here).

If you think you are an atheist and not scared of death

Why should you be scared of nonexistence? You already know what it feels like. Just try to remember the time before you were conceived. That's what it feels like to not exist.

Not very scary, is it?

I don't think that word means what you think it means. If it can kill, it is pretty toxic

If you take all proteins out of your food, it's not the remaining nutritents that kills you, but the lack of protein.

You don't need a gun at your nightstand, it's never going to be a matter of seconds that saves you.

If you're paranoid and don't lock every single door in your house, including the bedroom door, before you go to sleep, you're doing it wrong.

One sad aspect of suicide, out of many, is that a suicide victim never gets to see for themselves that life does in fact get better.

In the long run, everyone dies.

... people will start throwing themselves in front of trains. Which traumatizes train drivers and at least inconveniences everyone else on the train.

Suicide is a cultural problem, not one of availability (or unavailability) of certain means. The suicide rate of, say, the US and Germany is pretty much the same, despite guns being much more accessible in the former than the latter. However, the train network is much more developed in the latter.

People should, however, be educated about really shitty ways of killing yourself, like overdosing on acetaminophen and the like.

The banks in countries with FATCA treaties will ask for US person status whenever you try to open an account, and you don't want to get caught make false statements. Also, the banks are usually obliged to look for more and less obvious signs of US persons among their customers, like frequent money transfers to or from the US. Lastly, the banks customer representatives must report any customers of which they know that they are US persons.

Also, have a look at the possible fines for violating FBAR requirements. It's crazy stuff.