I suspect trying to quantify this in a way both sides will agree on is a fool's errand, but I'll offer a couple of thoughts anyway.

Firstly, I wouldn't trust the LLMs on this. I've found the ones I've interacted with, which admittedly is mainly Claude, to be rather biased on politically charged questions like this. 

Secondly, if we want to examine how often the Trump admin violates court orders as compared to previous administrations, we might look at whether judges have made formal findings that administration officials violated an order, contempt findings or something like that. I'm actually rather curious whether there has been a notable uptick under Trump.

The argument that that post makes is very specifically about institutions involved in selecting the president - the media, some subset of nonprofits, the people who administer elections. It does not apply to bureaucrats not involved in selecting the next president. And the last time I checked, the fed chair as fed chair had no role in selecting the next president.

Sorry, to clarify, the part of Eric's comment that I agree with is that if we want a Democrat to win the 2028 election, it is much better to nominate someone from his first list than his second. Whether I actually want the Democrat to win is a question I don't yet have a position on and don't expect to form a position on until I know who the nominees are.

I'm coming at this as someone who has voted for members of both parties in recent elections and who is extremely confident that there will be a 2028 election and that Trump will not be the republican nominee in that election. And yea, this sounds right to me. If there were an election tomorrow between Vance and any of Newsom, Harris, Waltz, or AOC, I'd easily vote for Vance. If there were a Vance v Shapiro election tomorrow, it would feel much closer and I'd want to do more research, but I think I would be inclined to go for Shapiro.

Even outside of food, if there is a regulation that targets the product irrespective of what text is printed on it, printing text on it will not defeat the regulation.

I'm not sure what point you are trying to make. Are you suggesting that printing text of some kind on cigarettes would have created some kind of Free Speech Clause barrier to regulations on cigarettes? Because I don't think that's true.

Infinite scroll could be illegal. Autoplaying videos could be illegal. Black-box algorithms that end up promoting outrage just to keep eyeballs on the screen could be illegal. Ad-funded platforms could be illegal

Seems like this would have massive free speech implications. The obvious difference between tobacco and digital content is that digital content is speech, tobacco is not, and legal restrictions on speech have a rather unpleasant history. 

I'm definitely more open to your community level interventions, though I don't think I can go to no wifi and one desktop computer in the house, and I'm not sure if that is what you mean by "digital intentionality" or if you have some lesser standard that you would want everyone to pledge to? Like, I could definitely benefit from less youtube in my life.

I'm not trying to make a legal claim here, just using the word "stealing" in its colloquial sense, sorry for the confusion on that.

I think I want to taboo the phrase "price discrimination". It could refer to normal ok things like a price changing over time, or to things I want to call stealing. You seem to use it in both ways, and so I don't think it is carving reality at a joint that is useful for this conversation. I'll instead try to address the things airlines do that you pointed to individually.

The same product often does change price over time, for just about any product imaginable. So charging different prices for the same ticket based on when it is purchased seems fine.

There are also often economic reasons to sell things in bulk and charge a lower per-unit price for bulk purchases. That's all a frequent flier program is, so again, that is probably fine.

I'm honestly not sure what you are referring to by different payment methods.

But I would absolutely call charging different prices of different IP addresses stealing, and I think most people would agree that it is not ethical to do so. And when airlines are caught doing things like that, they sometimes are forced by public pressure to stop. This notion that you don't charge different people different prices for the same product is central to a fair and honest economy, and I think it is fair and important to call out violations of it as stealing.

Here's another thing airlines sometimes do: they charge more money for the ticket from city A to city B than for the ticket from city A to city C with a layover in city B. I'm not sure what the airlines think they are doing there, but it's clearly not a legitimate market transaction, as the second thing is just the first thing plus an extra things. So I have no qualms about buying the A->B->C ticket when I really just want to go from A to B. (For anyone else who wants to exploit this dishonest airline pricing, see skiplagged.com).

I agree that some things function as gifts rather than economic transactions, and some relationships have elements of both. Mixing the two can cause issues which are maybe out of scope for this conversation but are worth flagging as a reason to be hesitant to mix them. And when they are mixed, that seems like a point where it is especially important to explicitly demarcate how much money is market-based and how much is gift-based. But I think even in a gift economy, gifts are expected to be roughly proportional to other gifts, not to the giver's means. We don't expect the $500k software engineer to give gifts 10x the size of the $50k teacher. 

No real community is going to be perfectly bimodal like that, but in the hypothetical I think that is maybe fine? The events I am thinking of where this sort of thing has really bothered me had a ticket marked as "software engineer making $200k/yr" or something like that that cost hundreds of dollars, while other tickets that get you the same seats cost tens of dollars. When price differences are that dramatic, it becomes very obviously exploitation, not a student subsidy. 


I also think it is fine to do as bay solstice is doing, having a $2000k ticket marked as "patron" or something to that effect, because that makes it clear that nobody, no matter how rich, is expected to pay that, it is just an opportunity to making a charitable donation on top of the ticket price conveniently packaged in the same transaction. I don't know if they are sending such people letters documenting a $1965 tax deductible donation or not, but they probably should.

I want to strongly push back against calling this stealing from the SWE. My central example of stealing is if Bob sneaks into Carla's house, riffles through her wallet, and takes some cash from it without permission. If instead Dean honestly offers a trade like "you give me money and I give you a seat at a concert" and Eve accepts the trade, gives Dean the money, and gets the seat at the concert she wanted, that's not stealing. Eve has a real choice, she can really decide not to go to the concert. 

That is certainly the most central example of stealing, but we use the word to describe a lot of things that don't look too much like that in the specifics. We have words for whole categories of crime that we will colloquially call stealing, because they prompt the exact same moral revulsion for the same kinds of reasons, even though the specifics are rather different. I'm thinking of things like fraud, extortion, blackmail, and embezzlement. None of us would hesitate to call was SBF did stealing, for example. And what I'm trying to point at there is that charging higher rates based on income for the same product, even if enforced only by social pressure, falls into that same category.

With price discrimination, I think you are equating some rather different things under that label. Where a genuinely different product is being sold, and the customer can choose which product to buy, I don't think of that as price discrimination, at least not of the wrongful sort. The first class seat on an airplane is actually bigger and nicer than the economy seat. And when I was a software engineer I continued to fly economy and personal item only, and while the airlines may have tried to entice me with the luxuries of a more expensive ticket, they never once suggested that I ought to pay them more because I was making more. So I don't see anything wrong there. 


Another situation where I see a similar wrong occurring is haggling. The whole point of a haggling economy is to try to exploit people who have more money just because they have more money, by charging them more for the same product. That, to my mind, is theft too, and I would not participate in a space where it was practiced.


In the context of organizing a community event, I don't think we need to be as ruthlessly profit maximizing as a stereotypical for-profit corporation, but I also don't see anything wrong with paying organizers and aiming for some profit to build up the organization. I think that is what good organizers do when the community can support it. I don't know why you seem to want to treat it as something shameful. When I buy a ticket to an event at Lighthaven, I know very well that a fraction of that is going to pay the half dozen staff of Lightcone, and that is fine. Nobody seems to object to this.

I don't have any particular inside knowledge of the finances of bay area solstice either. (I do know that the after party is not included, that is a separate ticket). But if you are right that the $35 per person is not enough to pay for the venue and the equipment and such (I think the musicians might be volunteers?), then I think the organizers messed up and should have marked a higher price as the default price.