Agreed, a few states (4-5?) have been able to fully eliminate the biggest issue with civil asset forfeiture (including removing the loophole that allows their state employees from working with the federal govt. to get around those restrictions).
Over half the states have started to do something about it. But as long as that loophole remains and as long as the federal govt. itself can continue to abuse civil asset forfeiture, we'll continue to see problems.
Alright, I'm still new to all this federated stuff, but I heard there was a way that users could post across platforms including places like Mastodon.
So if I wanted to "like" or comment on that awesome video with this account, how would I do that?
Unanimous Supreme Court ruling protects website owners from liability of user posts
The justices ruled in one case that a law allowing suits for aiding terrorism did not apply to the ordinary activities of social media companies.
An excellent decision. If it had gone the other way we likely would have seen social media websites shutdown entirely and comments disabled from YouTube. This also would have directly affected anyone in the U.S. that wanted to run an instance of Lemmy (or any federated instance that users could post content on).
The rulings were in regards to Section 230 which was a law passed in 1996 aimed at protecting services which allow users to post their own content.
The supreme court tackled 2 different cases concerning this:
- Whether social media platforms can be held liable for what their users have said.
- This was very specific to whether algorithms that refer tailored content to individual users can cause companies to be considered as knowingly aiding and abetting terrorists (if their pro-terrorist content is referred to other users).
This is much easier said than done. Around large parts of the United States you can't reliably commute by public transit. For me personally, without a car, a one way 40 mile trip to the major city near me would take 5 hours. That's 2 different trains and 2 different busses.
Add that to the fact that the station closest to me only has a few trains a day and my options are very limited.
Even if we ignore the current train schedule and assume that trains come by every 5 min, it would still be a 2 hour trip that costs me $20 for one way. I could then bike the rest of the way and avoid the last 2 buses.
There are rail passes I could get, but those would cost $477/month. It's cheaper to lease a Tesla at that point.
Owning a car is pretty much the only reasonable way of getting around for many parts of the U.S.
Interesting, I didn't realize that Russia was already renting out the base pre-2014. Thank you for that context.
Hmm you raise an interesting point. I do agree that it's helpful to explain to someone why they're being downvoted.
An experimental feature might be to allow downvotes only if you reply, or else you can choose to down vote a comment if you also upvote a response to the downvoted comment.
Perhaps an option could be that Ukraine gets their land back, but there's some agreement that Russia can rent out the land around the port at Sevastopol.
Ukraine gets paid for the use of their land (and ultimately they still own it), and Russia gets exclusive access to that part of the port where they can do whatever they need.
Beehaw just removes the downvote button entirely, so there is a community for that.
Unanimous ruling in supreme court fixes problem where the government was allowed to sell someone's home and keep everything even if they only owed $1k in debt.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday curbed state and local governments from seizing and selling the homes of people with unpaid property taxes and keeping the proceeds beyond the amount owed, deeming the practice unconstitutional in a ruling in favor of a 94-year-old woman who battled tax authorities...
This specific case revolved around a 94 yr old woman in Minnesota who owed $15k in taxes. Her home was taken away and sold for $40k and the government kept everything from the auction.
It's hard to believe that this was ever legal, this is a major win for common sense rulings.