Not even Roe v. Wade authorized third trimester abortions. It set the line at 26 weeks, which at the time was the limit of fetal viability outside the womb. That has since been pushed back a couple of weeks, because medicine has advanced. The whole point of Roe was to try to determine when a fetus is primarily part of the woman, and when it is primarily an independent being. There's no conclusive answer to that question, but fetal viability seems to me to be as good a line as can be drawn.

The article in the New York Times said it was a cash bar - $13 for a beer

I wonder what kind of deal Priceline gave Shatner for the trip

Markets don't work unless prospective buyers and sellers can both walk away if they don't like the deal on offer. That isn't the case if you're sick.

Actual international corporate tax planner here, with 38 years experience.

While I agree with most of what you say, the obvious tell in the original story is that ViacomCBS is using companies in Barbados, the Bahamas, and Luxembourg to shelter their profits. It's highly unlikely that anyone in those countries had anything to do with creating the IP, other than pushing paper. The only reason those countries would be involved is to avoid taxes.

And while the Netherlands and the UK do have economies based upon more than shell companies and tourism, their tax laws are also very useful in hiding profits from any tax man anywhere in the world.

Even if the current proposals before the OECD to create a minimum global corporate tax rate isn't going to help much here, since even if that is agreed it will be decades before places like the Bahamas adopt it.

In my mind, the best answer would be to take the combined income of the worldwide corporate group, and apportion it between the countries where it operates based upon economic activity such as the percent of sales in each country. That's the way US corporate groups divide up their tax income for state income tax purposes, and that system is simpler and much less subject to abuse. Unfortunately, putting that type of system in place would take agreement between all the economically significant countries in the world, something that is very unlikely to happen.

Yes, but the reason the tax laws are written with so many loopholes is that the large corporations and their owners fund the legislators who write the laws. That's basically bribery, but its legal for the same reasons the tax laws have so many loopholes.

For tax purposes, multinational companies are supposed to allocate their profits between countries as if each subsidiary was dealing with the others as if they weren't controlled by the same people. That leads to all kinds of abuses, especially with tech and pharma companies whose profits are mainly based on their technology. It isn't difficult to say that the technology is owned by a company in a tax haven like Bermuda or Luxembourg, so that all the profits are allocated away from the countries where they actually earn their revenues.

For US state tax purposes, the multinational group's profits are allocated between states based upon the percentage of their sales (and sometimes tangible property and payroll) in each state. This ensures that the company pays tax on its profits in the states where it earns them. If this approach were adopted internationally, it would eliminate most of the current abuses, as well as greatly simplifying the international tax system. Unfortunately, adopting it would require all economically significant countries to agree, something that is highly unlike to occur in the foreseeable future. Instead, many countries are adopting a deemed profits tax on sales from their countries, to try to impose some tax on companies like Amazon, Google and Facebook. That has many downsides, including threating to provoke a trade war with countries which don't like that approach, like the US

Not only was the Tribune never owned by Hearst, it's biggest rival was the Hearst owned Chicago American. They even had a gangster style shooting war in the early 1900s, resulting in at least 20 deaths. See the Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... If the Tribune was tilting its review because Hearst didn't like Citizen Kane, they would have given it a rave!

I have an earned Juris Doctor degree, as do essentially all lawyers in the US. While we are called many things, Doctor isn't one of them. However, my German counterparts often do use the title "Doctor".

No, its the sampling frequency that determines what filtering is required. Going from 44.1kHz to 48kHz sampling only pushes up where you need the output filtering from 22kHz to 24kHz, a trivial difference. It requires going up to a higher sampling rate like 88.2kHz or 96kHz to allow a more gradual output filter

I went through a move of the US HQ of my prior employer from Chicago to Houston, a decision made by the world HQ in London. Within 5 years, 85% of the folks in my department who were moved (at great expense to the company) were gone, a majority to move back to Chicago (including me). Houston was more cosmopolitan than I expected, with lots of Asian immigrants (although not the European ones you find in northern cities). And the weather is probably no worse on the whole than Chicago - it's just a different time of year you want to avoid going outside (although I managed to avoid any hurricanes in the 4 1/2 years I was down there). If you want a very suburban lifestyle you might like it. But if you want to live in a real city, rather than an overgrown suburb, it's very lacking.

Glass-Steagal was repealed in 1999 by the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act, which was named after its 3 main congressional sponsors, all Republicans, and passed by both houses of Congress, both with Republican majorities at the time. It was hardly passed by "the Democrats". Bill Clinton did sign it, but he wasn't much of a Democrat. Although he would have been a worse Republican, since he was generally competent, unlike both his Republican successors.

When I bought my first car, 35 years ago, I asked my dad what company I should use for insurance. He was a lawyer, and dealt with car accident claims as part of his practice. His advice was "stay away from Allstate - they're the worst company to deal with if you have a claim." I'm not surprised that they'd jerk around their customers any way they can.

While that might be true for most decks, the best ones (top end Nakamichis, Revoxes, etc) could get into the low 20KHz range with metal tape. That was at -20dB recording levels, of course, but they could do it. They would roll off like you describe or worse at 0dB recording levels, though.

While political speech is the most protected, it's still not completely exempt from challenge. The Supreme Court case which set out the rules in this area, New York Times v. Sullivan, basically says that speech about a politician or other public figure is protected unless the speaker knows it to be false, or speaks with reckless disregard for the truth (basically, makes it up and doesn't bother to check one way or the other). So opinions are protected, but not out and out lies.