> FCC Commissioner Mike O’Rielly said the size of the penalty “is probably not significant enough to deter future behavior, but the negative press coverage is likely to prevent this company and others from attempting to do this again.”
To me, this reads like they're abdicating their responsibility. I'm sure their goal is to punish the company without destroying it. But if even the regulator doesn't believe the fine is going to serve as a deterrent, why do we even have a regulator for this arena?
I read that as "the financial penalty is not significant enough on a standalone basis to deter future violations, but that perhaps the fine combined with the press coverage may prevent it."
If you're a VC or company backer now, how willing are you to put your money behind some company that's liable to be the second intentional violator of these regulations?
I think there must be enough VCs out there who are willing to intentionally snub regulations, otherwise companies like Uber, Lyft and Lime would never exist.
Yes, I read this the same way you did, but I came to a different conclusion.
If the regulatory agency will tailor-make your fine to make sure that it's not too stiff, I don't see why any startup would follow the rules the first time around. Compliance has costs.
If you ignore compliance and your project doesn't work, then you spared yourself the time and money needed for compliance, and you won't care about the fine.
If you ignore compliance and your project does work, then the fine will not kill you, and you'll know it's worth coming into compliance.
I don't think I'm more "move fast and break things" than the average HN'er; this just seems like the logical outcome of fines that are intentionally too small. What am I overlooking?
I'm also working under the assumption that the fine has some statutory basis and that might be limiting the regulator (perhaps negatively from their point of view, positively from my point of view).
I wouldn't want the FCC to have arbitrary and unlimited power.
The assumption I'm making based on the press (that certain FCC commissioners disagreed with the original fine) is that the current GOP-controlled FCC commissioners like Ajit Pai intentionally reduced the fine because they want to be a "pro-Business" FCC. When your political agenda is intent upon removing any teeth that a regulatory body has so that you can recreate your perfect libertarian state, you see fines like this that are toothless.
I don't think you're overlooking anything, that sounds eminently reasonable.
New companies with new ideas can get their first projects off the ground cheaply. As they become established and do more projects, they abide by the rules. There's only a small number of "rule-breaking" projects, and plenty of scope for innovation.
Let's start a new LLC for every launch. After all, launches are expensive, and LLCs are cheap. FCC will only penalize us a little because it's always the first launch.
A little later: the FCC said we couldn't do that with LLCs that we own or are directed by people who work for us, so let's hire a series of unconnected LLCs, one per launch. We'll have to pay a bit more, but it's always the first launch. We just sell them satellites and connect them with buyers.
A little later: oops, Ajit Pai is doing community service for the rest of his life. Let's find a new loophole.
The problem is when the harmful consequences of that innovation that hits society is much larger than the value of the innovation.
A second, slightly less important problem is that this turns markets into government-sponsored winner takes all, even when the market conditions aren't pushing for that.
There was quite a bit of willful violation here involving not only the launches but also the balloon and satellite communications. The only significant thing I can think of you've not mentioned is the commission's political composition and the signal the small fine sends for multiple knowing, intentional violations is "go for it".
To me, this reads like “yea we know this is BS, the press coverage is actually likely to just communicate that you can get away with this type of thing with just a slap on the wrist, but our hands are tied in how we can penalize this.”
To the larger point, though, even an imperfect regulator is important. There will always be different types of businesses - those who intend to skirt the law and those who attempt to follow it whatever it may be - and regulators keep the second set from acting like the first set, reducing the quantity of bad behavior. They certainly wish they had the fangs to deter both, but at least this may deter the latter.
Yes, I think your interpretation is supported by the next line in the article, too: "O’Rielly said an initial fine negotiated by FCC staff was rejected by some commissioners, which led to reopening settlement talks."
I believe this will definitely be true. I'm sure that Swarm will have a very difficult time obtaining their next license for whatever they launch. It is already very difficult for a commercial company to get an FCC license. Especially when you are a small company with limited resources like Swarm.
I worked for a different smallsat company, including working on the FCC application and it was a nightmare dealing with them. We submitted our initial application for a license, got comments back from the FCC and then we provided them with more data in response to their questions. Then after 2 years of the FCC just sitting on our license application we got a 3 sentence letter saying out application had been denied with no explanation of why.
The hobbyist satellites still have to get licenses to communicate like everyone else. They are usually "dropped off" in low orbits, which are below the ISS and will decay in a few months so there isn't a concern with orbital debris.
Yes they get the license like everyone else. That undermines your complaint about how onerous it is. And OSCAR has lifetimes of more then a few months.
Sorry, I thought you were commenting based on the assumption that the amateur satellites didn't have to get licenses. More specifically my point is the difficulty for a commercial company to obtain a license for a desirable orbit from the FCC. For some background, to get an FCC ,or equivalent agency in another country, license you have to prove two things. One, that your satellite communications will not interfere with any others. Two, that your satellite will not be an orbital debris concern. The second part involves either proving that you will deorbit your satellite within 25 years after launch or that it will be placed in to a “disposal” orbit where it will not interfere with other satellites. For example, at the end of life geostationary satellites are boosted up in to a higher orbit above the geosynchronous belt.
There are quite a few OSCAR satellites in higher orbits that have longer lifetimes. But most of them are still low enough that they will meet the de-orbit requirements of 25 years without any propulsion or other de-orbit device [1]. De-orbit times depend on ballistic coefficient of the satellite, drag profile, and current atmospheric density. But generally speaking, satellites in orbits lower than 600 km will de-oribt within the 25 year requirement [2].
The 25 year disposal requirement is also only an issue if you are in a desirable or full orbital plane. The OSCAR satellites that have much longer lifetimes are above 1000 km altitude and will effectively stay up there forever. They are out of the way of most of the commercial and civil earth observation satellites which are in the 600 km to 750 km range. This is the range where the issue of orbital debris gets more difficult. And yes it is good that the FCC should require technical rationale as to why the de-orbit strategy is sufficient. However, in my experience this has been a terrible process with the FCC specifically. I have also worked with satellite operators in England getting approvals from the ITU and it is a much smoother process.
Fair enough, I did just see that in the article. Maybe more FCC oversight actually helps since my problem with FCC seemed to be that the application just sat on a shelf for two years with no one looking at it.
Aside from a massive fine, is there anything else they could have done? Could they have jailed the executives and investors? Could they have revoked their corporate charter?
If the goal was truly to discourage the action, the obvious thing to do would have been to require the company to de-orbit, or otherwise forfeit the use of, the satellites. If the company had sufficient funding the message received would have been 'well, we better not do that again'. If it didn't have sufficient funding, that would have been the message to all the companies that came after. The fine barely represents a speeding ticket and signals to anyone else that there will be effectively no action if they do the same thing in the future.
Thanks for the info... I wasn't aware that there was no means of propulsion on those. Oh well, it's not like that option would have been seriously considered if there was.
> Could they have revoked their corporate charter?
The Commission couldn't, no. Corporate entity revocation (dissolution) is more a thing that happens when the entity fails to pay fees to a state or territory than it is a punishment: It's intentionally trivially easy to create corporate entities.
I'm not well-informed on the topic, but why does the FCC regulate who's allowed to launch satellites? Shouldn't there be an international authority for this?
I too was confused by this but it actually makes sense: They did all their testing from the US (and it's a US-based company). Which means they used part of the radio spectrum which is regulated by the FCC which gives the them regulatory authority.
NASA (and other space agencies) are OK with their satellites. The FCC is not OK with their use of controlled spectrum in the US.
It's hard to co-ordinate that kind of thing, so we might see it in the future but I wouldn't hold my breath.
The FCC regulates the radio spectrum usage in the US, which means if you want to talk to your satellite you need to get permission from them. They use that to try and make sure everyone in space gets along and don't crash into each other.
If the company only ever used base stations not falling under FCC jurisdiction they might have been ok, but my guess is that as long as they were operating in the US they'd probably run into issues trying to get around the FCC.
As a US company, even launching an inert block of metal would've still made the US liable for any mishaps they caused (say, by running into another satellite or hitting someone on the ground with it) under the Outer Space Treaty and the Space Liability Convention.
Evade the FCC and someone with enforcement powers is still gonna be grumpy.
The FCC regulates the spectrum allocation for satellite communications. However, part of getting the approval process involves proving that your satellite will meet the deorbit/disposal requirements. So the FCC has also inherited some of the preventative measures for orbital debris.
On an international level, the ITU [1] sets guidelines for spectrum usage and de-orbit. But each country typically has their own regulatory agency depending on where the satellite was built.
Same way we have consortiums for things like radio waves (ITU and such). There is no binding international authority for ANYTHING. The United Nations and WTO don't have bite to match their bark.
So if Swarm wasn't a US-based company they wouldn't have gotten this fine? They launched the satellites from India and tested them from Georgia (the state in the US or the country? The article isn't clear).
Seems to me that future companies that want to do this sort of testing just need to do it in other countries or from off-shore platforms. Then apply for your FCC license so you can charge US customers without having to worry about getting sanctioned (and losing your ability to process credit cards and bank in the US).
When I started reading the article and read about all these international launches my first thought was, "why does the FCC have a say in any of this?" Now I'm thinking, "perhaps we need a better international framework for this sort of thing."
Correct, of course. The FCC can’t control what an Indian company does, but this was clearly a US-based company launching out of India because US regulators said “no.”
The international framework is that each country can authorise satellites by companies based there, this is regulated by the ITU. In the US, the FCC is the relevant regulator, other countries have their own regulators. In the UK it is Ofcom which unlike the FCC does not charge fees but it does require third party liability insurance which the FCC does not.
If Swarm had been based in India, it would have needed to seek authorisation there. Swarm requested FCC authorisation which was denied on the basis of collision safety.
They then received permission to launch a set of larger satellites with better radar visibility. Imagine the surprise of the FCC when they discovered that Swarm had lied to their launch provider (claiming that they had authorisation) and launched the original satellites anyway!
In the past this has never been an issue because satellites were so expensive that no-one in their right mind would try to launch one without authorisation. As a result, launch providers may not have been rigorous in actually checking the authorisations for their secondary payloads.
The whole model is still rooted in a world where only a few countries could launch satellites and only a small number of very large companies within them could afford to build and launch them. Within a cosy world like that, regulatory compliance is important but it is also assumed that everyone else is complying and actually checking that is rare. Certainly this case is going to change that.
No... this is pretty explicitly illegal. It's not like they took advantage of a loophole, or exploited some vaguery of the law that wasn't yet nailed down. They flat out lied about the payload they were launching and whether they had received authorization.
Dubious would have been seeking approval from a non-US regulator. That's abusing the framework but technically I think there's no reason you couldn't get the CIO of Vanuatu (the relevant ITU administrator) to approve your satellite and have that be legal. The FCC would be mighty sour about that but I think you could do it.
We do have an international framework, of sorts. It's that each country must regulate satellites launched by their companies. A US-based company must comply with US laws regarding satellite launches and get permission to launch them.
In this case, Swarm lied to the Indian government and said the US had approved it (which made sense as they are a US-based company), while trying to hide the existence of the satellites from the US Government. Frankly, I think a $900k fine is too small.
Yes 900k seems like for some companies that kind of fine would be worth it to get their stuff in space and even if you made it 5 times higher seems like you could account for all of that in your budget. I think a more severe penalty would be ground them from future launches for 6 months(or other number maybe 6 months is too short), and failure to do that would have them sanctioned from the US and it's allies. The article states they are hoping the negative exposure from this fine is enough to deter the company, it is not even about the money.
Yes, the actual judgment document just vaguely refers to it as "Georgia" but it's inferred that it's the state since FCC has no statutory authority outside of the U.S. However in the application it's clearly marked as state of Georgia.
"Swarm seeks narrow authority to transmit data from the SpaceBEE satellites in order to access tracking information. The SpaceBEE satellites will only transmit to enable downlinking of GPS data, and will be muted at all other times. GPS data will be downlinked during passes over Los Altos, California and Buford, Georgia. These passes Swarm Technologies will occur approximately four times per day. Each transmission will require approximately two seconds."
I can see a Sealand 2.0 spring up around the launching of rockets from international waters. It also looks as if the bulk of the regulatory reason here is the use of the radio spectrum and not the actual launch.
The UK basically rolled their eyes the same way they'd ignore a kid declaring their backyard tree fort to be sovereign territory. If they'd started launching rockets, that might've been different.
I think if HavenCo had been a success the eye rolling would have rapidly stopped and we'd have seen whether or not copyright will be enforced with guns if it comes to it.
Or just cut their network access. You can figurative be an island on the high seas but a business needs to ultimately interact with others in various ways and those interactions are vulnerable.
but who would be the customer? certainly not in any country that is signed on to the treaty or has financial interest in any country the US has influence in.
Then why is there not a single company doing that to get around any of the other thousands of laws and regulations, not to mention taxes?
Would that simple fact not incentive you to question your assumptions of either the burden of regulation, or the possibility of end-runs around the law with cheap stunts, before furthering this strange case of “jingoism with no nation”?
It feels to me as though the mantra of "move fast and break things" wasn't meant to apply to laws. Purposely ignoring laws, regulations, or seeing vague ones that didn't expect your crazy idea, and then hoping you can work it all out later after you've made lots of money- this is becoming more and more common in tech startups. And I personally don't like it.
Uber and AirBnB are the classic examples (and it's worked out wonderfully for them). In Toronto, Car2Go told customers to just park anywhere- don't worry about getting parking tickets, we'll handle it. (They didn't). Swarm was told that their satellites could not be launched, so they just did it anyways hoping no one would notice. (Someone did). RobinHood announced checking accounts without checking if there were laws around such things. (There are).
Governments would be better to be ready for disruptive ideas and have flexibility in regulations to try them out. And we should all be voting and supporting candidates who want to see such changes happen. But until they do, it seems wrong to purposely break laws in order to make money.
Indeed, Uber and AirBnB were evolutions of the marketplace. They aren’t going away (and shouldn’t go away) just because the laws were designed in a previous century for a different type of business.
The solution is for gov fix the laws to reflect society. Unfortunately modern governments are designed around protecting established market cartels and political special interest groups over evolving with the times.
I don’t see this as relevant to Swarm either. They aren’t an evolution AFAIK, besides maybe the rise of private rocket launches.
Airbnb has clearly been a win for travelers. As for the people who live in an apartment building next door to someone who illegally rents out their unit with Airbnb, their world has changed also, but not for the better.
People on vacation are much more likely to stay up late partying, not understand or follow local customs, and you can't build up a long term relationship with people who are only around for a week. It is definitely a real problem.
The solution is for gov fix the laws to reflect society.
You assume that because something is new that it is better. Hotel and taxi laws were put in place for a reason. Just because a new business comes along and doesn't want to play by the rules doesn't make that business right and the laws wrong.
In a civilization, it's up to the business to enumerate the reasons that the laws should be changed, and then go through the same legislative process as any other business or member of the public to have those laws changed.
Breaking the law and then blaming the law is like a five-year-old throwing a tantrum and expecting adults to feel bad for it.
Hotels are governed by laws. They cannot for example, agree to rent you a room, charge your credit card, AND THEN demand that you provide your facebook account, and if you don't have one, upload a video explaining why you want to stay in the room, before failing to provide a timely refund, literally saying "we want to refund you, but the bank just doesn't believe that we want to give you back your money".
I will skull fuck a dead pig with a chicken shitting on my face before I ever try to use AirBnB again.
As for Uber. People complain that taxis are all just greedy fuckers who act like pricks to the customers, and then they expect a private company paying less than minimum wage to people will give them a better outcome. Let me know how that works out when Uber stops subsidising all the rides with VC money.
This isn't all that much like alcohol prohibition, though.
This is about enabling fair access to and good stewardship of a scarce resource.
Prohibition was the imposition of one form of morality through law.
In my view, it's easier to argue that one is about personal freedom and so fair game to consider breaking, whereas the other is more about being a good neighbour.
Activists were (with different language) very much worried about negative externalities and effects on the commons when it came to Prohibition.
Remember, people were getting rampantly drunk, fighting in the streets, neglecting their families, becoming unemployable, and so on. Beer/wine/spirits sellers were more than happy to promote drinking even with all the social problems produced by it.
It certainly didn't feel like a private matter at the time, like praying in your bedroom each night.
So "someone making a fortune while leaving the alcoholism and broken homes in its wake" would look very much then like "someone making a fortune while raiding the available housing units and ruining neighborhoods" does today.
Edit: And, to be sure, that doesn't mean Prohibition was a good idea. But means the right solution wasn't "free for all for alcohol", but "okay, you can sell alcohol, but with these rules to contain that problem".
> "Laws are unlikely to change without a bit of violation"
The flaw with that argument is that something like 99 of 100 laws exist because, basically, they should. They benefit society, so essentially the whole population wants them.
Someone will disagree with almost every law, and some subset of them will violate it in protest. No single person knows which law is the 1 in 100 that shouldn't exist - even someone who thinks they know. Often, the people who so passionately think a law shouldn't exist that they're willing to break it are actually the least representative of society.
(I'm completely ignoring whether space launch access is or isn't a worthwhile law; it's moot.)
> The flaw with that argument is that something like 99 of 100 laws exist because, basically, they should. They benefit society, so essentially the whole population wants them.
That's very much debatable. It's not even clear how to count the number of laws, even if we are only considering Federal law in the US. (see https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R43056.pdf )
Certainly there is no one who knows all the laws, and unlike in coding, there's no commitment to DRY or modularization, which leads to very common unintended consequences.
You're arguing the 99/100 case, but I'm sure it would be easy to find someone to credibly argue the 1/100 case.
Disagreeing with the law just because it would personally financially benefit you to break it is pretty weak sauce. I think a much stronger argument could be made that many laws — and particularly regulations — fail even at their stated purpose.
There was an article on the front page last week [1] about the total cost to the economy from licensing “professional” work which can clearly be done safely and effectively without a license, for example, hair weaving.
While the direct cost of obtaining licenses and completing the educational requirires (which often provides no actual benefit in increased skill or earnings), is relatively low… If you factor in the cost to the economy of people who aren’t able to work at a more profitable profession because they are restricted from entering it due to the licensing, the cost was extraordinary.
I think any analysis which covers all the myriad misguided attempts government makes to micromanage our lives is going to blow far past 1/100 of laws and regulations being damaging rather than helpful, even when considering the general populace.
It seems though in some industries (not all), as you allude to in the floral industry, that licensing is just another manifestation of rent seeking and ever encroaching regulatory capture.
Would you concur? Curious to hear what you think there could (or should) be done about it in your opinion? In the case of selling floral products-caveat lector: I know nothing about flowers other than they are pretty and smell nice-would it make sense to replace licensing with some sort of rating system for businesses to aid consumers in deciding who they want to procure professional services from based on assessed expertise and past services rendered (not Yelp, an assessment from your industry peers)?
Imho, licenses should only be used in situations where (1) there are cost externalities to be considered that the free market doesn't expose+ or (2) it's better for society as a whole if supply is managed (e.g. capped licenses / quotas)
+ E.g. a cheap electrician using aluminum wiring that may short in 10 years and burn the house down. But of which the customer may not be aware / informed.
We have codes and laws about what wiring you are allowed to use, and independent inspections to ensure that things were done right. (even the best person makes a mistake). Adding a license doesn't really do much. I can teach a smart person how to write a house in a couple days (this includes looking up what size wire to use on the charts - the NEC is actually very readable once you figure out which section applies), from there on some experience will make you faster. Yet to become licensed requires years of experience, mostly to keep people out of the job.
Hypothetically we have code enforcement. In reality, the chance of getting caught on a non-obvious building defect is much lower than certain.
I see licensing as buying into the system and aligning interests. Suddenly, it's in a tradesperson's personal interest to follow regulations, as they otherwise risk their right to practice.
That said... as was mentioned upthread, there's a happy balance. If there's limited long term harm, it's probably not justifiable to require licensure.
Some hair weaving involve first relaxing the hair with chemicals that can cause severe burns if done incorrectly in order to ensure the weave and the natural hair blends properly. Some weaves are attached with adhesives that can also cause damage if used incorrectly. In both cases there is a potential for hair loss and disfigurement.
I think that's a good example of a field where lack of knowledge can be a very dangerous thing. I'd have thought like you until having seen first hand what some such hair products can do.
I'm sure there are unnecessary licensing. But I'm equally sure a lot of the licensing that seems pointless actually has reasonable justifications that are just not obvious if you don't know the field.
Your link to the Congressional Research Service report, was that included to highlight how difficult it is to enumerate the number of Federal laws?
Because if so, so far reading this, it seems the Federal government has a pretty solid, and measurable grip on that very activity, just from the text of the report, and it doesn't seem remarkably difficult for them since they've come up with seemingly multiple ways to delineate the different types of Federal rules from each other, and have been able to point to various methods used to come up with their final assessment totals.
None of it seemed overtly complicated or difficult, and I'm about as far removed from "well read" on government reports as a person can get.
This is not even a law, it's a regulation from an agency that tries to assert itself as a regulator of communication satellites. This has strategic implications for US and it's probably a good idea anyway from a space collision point of view - but nonetheless is a regulatory land grab from other international bodies.
As a general rule, these type of moves can only be controlled by breaking them and testing then in court. The agencies have a strong incentive to go for a maximal interpretation of the relevant statues and increase their influence and funding.
Governments have a mandate to regulate what happens in their own country. It’s how the entire world functions. And so it makes no sense that enforcement should be considered a land grab from other international bodies.
And we don’t control crimes like murder by allowing people to break the laws and then testing them in court.
Regulations are laws where the details were left to the bureaucrats by the politicians who drafted the laws - it allows for implementation flexibility.
But they are still backed by actual laws, and are not lessened by being regulations - if anything they are better because you can always apply to the implementing authority to change things without going the whole parliamentary route.
There's a downside in less well developed countries without a tradition of a non-political civil service (like the US) where an incoming politician installs their political flunkies can change the regulations to suit their donors
This is an interesting comment. My interpretation is that your reasoning rests on the intuition that the tens of thousands of laws you know nothing about and created by strangers whose motivations may or may not be shared by you must be just 99% of the time. Further, that this view is shared by the rest of society. Does either idea seem likely?
Should the violence of the state be brought to bear on citizens because it is known that "most" laws are good? Would we benefit from a higher standard? Could we instead renew and expire laws?
re: "The flaw with that argument is that something like 99 of 100 laws exist because, basically, they should. They benefit society, so essentially the whole population wants them."
Sometimes yes. But other times, the laws exists (and more than 1 of 100) to "protect" some industry (from competition from another industry) and not necessarily because it's a benefit to society / general public.
Not to get off topic, but this is the crux of the argument of (e.g.,) The Brothers Koch. That is, it's not gov they are against per se. But the fact that the gov leads to rules & reg that (too often) end up offering advantages to some and disadvantages to others - which is __not__ what should happen if benefit to society were the true goal. Put another way, they're not against gov per se. They're against the uneven playing field the gov is so fond of creating.
Note: I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with them. I only wanting to point out this finer-point is often lost when people scream "OMG...The Kochs...The Kochs...". The reality is, there's a fair amount of evidence / validity to their POV.
Can you clarify how assault is relevant in the context of the current thread? Private rocket launches, general biz, etc.? I think I'm missing your point and would feel better if you would clarify.
A better example would be laws that benefit the solar and wind energies, sometimes at the expense of the fossil fuel industry. Good governance to those who think a fossil fuel world is a dead end to nowhere, an example of picking winners and losers to the fossil fuel industry and its ideological allies.
Laws about solar and wind energy benefit producers of the equipment at the expense of the society. Solar energy wouldn’t be price competitive with fossil fuels if it wasn’t for tax breaks and other forms of government subsidies. Why won’t we just wait until technology advances enough so that solar wins on free market?
> The flaw with that argument is that something like 99 of 100 laws exist because, basically, they should.
This doesn't pass the smell test. You actually believe that over the history of the United States that legislatures had a 99% success rate at passing good legislation?
This United States has a history of civil disobedience for a reason and it's part of what makes the country great. The law isn't something to be venerated, it should be treated with respect up to a point and that point ends when the law ceases to be relevant.
Case in point look at how people from the migrant caravans are being treated, ICE and Border Patrol are following the law by the book, can you tell me that law is good?
99 out of 100 laws might have been a good idea at the moment of their conception, but a much larger proportion of laws are outdated or irrelevant or just completely wrong. FATCA is an example of such a law. The Patriot Act might be grouped in as well.
Laws and government programs should have expiration dates. Government can choose to renew said laws and programs, but an expiration date (aka Sunsetting) is good policy because it forces government to stay currently relevant.
This is super tangential, but regulation around space access is (ideally) there to prevent congestion, collision, and space debris. It's not hard to imagine a world where space access is abused and bad things end up downwind (Kessler syndrome[0] is a classic example).
To your original point, I'd say that yes, a lot of laws exist because they solved some problem at the time they were introduced (or because someone acted corruptly, but let's ignore that for now). I believe in questioning laws, but when the argument is "it'd make our private endeavors more effective," then I'd carefully consider why the laws were there in the first place.
Uber also wouldn't be a thing today if they didn't have billions in VC money buying them lawyers and lobbyists, and developing Greyball to help drivers avoid giving rides to people identified as regulators.
Please don't make it seem like Uber's law-breaking is some kind of brave sacrifice protecting mom-and-pop restaurants everywhere.
Startups in general seem to benefit just one category of people: investors, and it's usually to the detriment of Joe B. Average who happened to use their product/service.
I don't use taxis a lot. I have had a car and a licence basically since I was 17, but when I have had to use them, they've mostly been fine. Mostly to or from an airport/hotel.
One nearly killed me, but I don't judge all other drivers by his lack of sleep/attention/whatever prescription drugs he relies on to stay awake.
My issue with uber/etc is that they spend more money, campaigning against laws that would require background checks for their drivers, than it would cost for them to actually do the background checks. If that doesn't raise some questions for you, you may as well just look for vans with "free candy" spray painted on the side, I'm sure they'll be great.
"Taxis are terrible" is such a vague blanket statement its almost meaningless.
Uber/Lyft are great for getting between two points in an overcrowded city where you would neither be able to park your own car nor hail a taxi. Taxis are terrible because of the lack of convenience and lack of a rider rating system.
> Uber/Lyft are great for getting between two points in an overcrowded city where you would neither be able to park your own car nor hail a taxi
I've literally never "hailed" a taxi in my life - I've either gotten in one at a rank (i.e. at an airport) or called for one in advance (i.e. at a hotel). Even as someone who uses taxis very rarely, I'm well aware of taxi booking apps both here in Thailand and in Australia.
Your argument is essentially "American taxis are crap, therefore uber is good for breaking the law". Why exactly couldn't Uber have just operated as a better taxi company? Oh right. Because then they'd have to follow the laws, and pay the drivers an actual income.
I believe you're missing a few things, considering taxi medallions are basically impossible to come by, and that what taxi driving laws here in the US allow are not incredibly unlike what Uber does to its drivers.
> I believe you're missing a few things, considering taxi medallions are basically impossible to come by
You mean none of the existing holders will sell them? $22B. Twenty two billion fucking dollars. That's how much VC money has been pumped into this bullshit company. And you're saying they can't buy some taxi medallions?
The main reason for me to use Grab while on holiday in Thailand was the fact that not getting scammed by a taxi driver in Thailand was almost impossible for me. I'm not sure if this is an issue for everyone, but I dare to say that as much as 50% of all taxi drivers in Bangkok just drove away the moment we asked for 'on the meter'. And this is saying something because we have used taxis at least twice a day for 2 weeks.
The second reason was that not 1 of the non-Grab taxi drivers uses anything like Google Maps. So I was never sure if we actually ended up at our hotel or somewhere else. Also because our hotel (Aetas) had (at least) 2 locations in Bangkok it made it all worse. This is assuming that a taxi driver actually knows where to go, we've also encountered multiple times the situation where a taxi driver didn't know where to go.
Grab on the other hand always provided the amount upfront and every driver had Google Maps for navigation.
Edit: I'd rather use the official taxis, but the number of conveniences Grab added with a single app was worth it to me.
Not at all. Try reading what I wrote. Hint: look for the parts where it says:
> I've either gotten in one at a rank (i.e. at an airport) or called for one in advance (i.e. at a hotel)
But even when I have traveled, I generally don't use taxis much. I've only ever been to a few countries where I didn't end up driving - Hong Kong and Singapore, where public transport is beyond amazing, and a wedding (and thus spent the whole time at a resort) in Fiji years ago.
Would that be the customers whose private data is surreptitiously gathered and analysed and re-analysed, to show some kind of 'value' to investors, or would it be the customers who use a service, and then find it's cancelled with one months notice, because it turns out you can't just keep spending someone else's money and hope for it to become profitable by magic?
I'm not sure this is right. One of the very clever things Uber did was take advantage of a loophole in the hackney laws that allowed drivers to operate for hire without taxi medallions as long as they did not perform street hails. From the point of view of taxi operators who had long relied on this system to protect them from meaningful competition, this was a flouting of the intent of the law, if not the actual language of the law itself. They did not however, as far as I know, actually break the law.
Uber broke limousine chauffeur laws, not taxi laws. It varies from state to state, but generally you need a chauffeur license to pick someone up for hire. From what I understand there is generally no limit to how many might drive around but they are not allowed look for customers, the customer must find them.
The taxi industry was hurt the most, but it wasn't taxi laws that were broken it was chauffeur laws.
What? In the UK, private hire licensing is & always was a normal thing and the way Uber uses it is entirely normal too. It's not a loophole. They weren't even the first to allow booking without phoning.
Your comment seems to lack much in the way of fact.
They weren't banned in the UK. Or London. Their application for a license renewal was temporarily denied in London. They appealed, once.
They worked with TfL to resolve their concerns and were granted a new license - though slightly shorter term than normal. They're not entirely off the hook and will need to continue to show that they're behaving appropriately, but they're absolutely fine to operate now and that is not likely to change any time soon.
Not saying I agree with you, but most places frowned on lane splitting with motorcycles in the US, but people splitting caused California to eventually codify the legality of it.
Prohibition ended because people were sick of it and it was repealed not because people violated the law and the government decided not to enforce it after all.
It was repealed because the people who disagreed with a significant political force. Those who don't drink and wanted it didn't really change their mind at all.
Alcohol prohibition is an odd choice here, considering that its implementation is an example of a law that did change without anyone violating an existing law. And then it wasn't done away with just because people were violating it. People violated it because it was deeply unpopular. It was repealed as much because of the chaos it caused and the fact that legalizing alcohol would re-institute a much needed source of tax revenue.
The problem is not all laws are moral. Regulatory capture is a thing. Many different people (often paid by a corporation) have come up with scheme that greatly harm their competition for no gain, yet made them sound good.
There is a difference between law and morality and for good reason. There has never been massives groups of people that completely agree on right or wrong. Instead of trying to codify right and wrong, law is about defining how we can all get along despite those differences.
I'm not saying that regulatory capture is not a problem; that would be an absurd claim. But trying to make the law about right and wrong is not the solution.
The problem is if we rely on lobbying gov't for change, then we're going to get change written by corporate lobbyists (including by your employer, Amazon / Jeff Bezos - no offense). They tend to build up barriers to entry to competition and entrench themselves.
I wonder what Thoreau would think about all this. He wrote Civil Disobedience which grapples with these ideas, but I bet he didn't imagine them in this new market/corporate context.
>It feels to me as though the mantra of "move fast and break things" wasn't meant to apply to laws
Laws are just a contract. There are terms and penalties. If you weigh the consequences of breaking the contract and decide it’s worth the risk why not do it? Most people in America do it everyday (speeding in their cars).
Because often the consequences are paid for by other people. I'm specifically thinking about things like environmental regulations or regulations around accessibility.
What about strategic defaults on a home you've bought? Breaking a contract with a vendor because you'll save more with another one to more than make up the penalties? Not cleaning your apartment when you move out because you're willing to lose some/all of your security deposit?
First one sounds like fraud if premeditated but I don't know the details. 2nd one could work depending on the business but could also make future partnership impossible. Last one is just petty.
Speeding is also an anti-social thing to do. But, like most things, there are degrees, and exceptions of exingency, etc. I would not call it unpatriotic, as it only threatens the social order very indirectly, if at all.
Notice that with the global liberalism regime force feed on peoples, corporations have the right to sue governments when the later have laws preventing the corporations to make profit.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/jun/10/obscure-leg...
And when it's corporations that have revenues ten or hundreds of times greater than the sued state, the later stands no chance.
Reality is different than what you think. It's also probably different from what it should be. But who are you compared to Soros, Rockfeller and the bankers of the GAFAM?
Theranos was bad for both reasons. Even if you remove the fraud, they were skirting all sorts of regulations around patient safety and the operation of laboratories.
Not sure I agree. If you're skirting regulation but your product actually works, I don't personally think you've done anything morally wrong.
The law cares, but realistically those regulations are in place to prevent fraud or dysfunctional products. If Theranos' machine actually did what they said it could, it would've been a victimless crime and I wouldn't have a problem with it.
It was possible to make products which benefited humanity before those regulations existed, and it's possible to do the same while skirting those regulations.
A lot of the regulations around laboratories exist because people have died or been injured as a result of lab screwups. Theranos hid entire labs from inspectors, let uncertified people run laboratories, and a lot more that wasn't fraud, but definitely violated regulatory requirements.
I actually did read Bad Blood, and thought it was a very interesting book!
But again, I think it's morally fine for an uncertified person to run a laboratory as long as they are running it correctly. But the Theranos labs were not being run correctly, and they were lying about the results that their machines could deliver.
You can build a medical product that has a higher sensitivity and/or specificity than the other products on the market without regulatory oversight. But the Edison had neither of those and they were pretending it did. That was the problem.
> You can build a medical product that has a higher sensitivity and/or specificity than the other products on the market without regulatory oversight. But the Edison had neither of those and they were pretending it did. That was the problem.
Insert "faster" or "cheaper" as well, but that is my point. There are very clear ways to measure if your medical device is effective.
> Governments would be better to be ready for disruptive ideas and have flexibility in regulations to try them ou
What? No!
That's the equivalent of the mythical software rewrite that fixes all current issues: three are a lot of reason why we have customer and environmental protections and even if some are forgotten throwing them out without because "disruption is good" strikes me as quite naive.
> "move fast and break things" wasn't meant to apply to laws.
The law is a messy area. Many places are simply unresolved until a court gets to them, and often there is no incentive for that resolution to happen, so the question gets a lot more complicated.
Here's an example (In all of this I'm trying to focus on legality and not if I think it's a good thing. I'm also not a lawyer and likely have lots of details wrong). I get around to saying why this is relevant at the end of this wall of text.
In the world of tabletop RPGs (D&D and the like) there's a big grey area as to what is/isn't protected by copyright.
From general literature, we know (indeed, it was one of the big pushes for the creation of copyright) that translations and other "derivative works" are covered by copyright.
From boardgames, we know (have court cases saying) that _rules_ aren't copyrightable, while the exact expression of them are. I can make a Monopoly clone so long as I don't violate any trademarks (which are different than copyright) and use my own words to express the rules.
From comics and other literature, we know that characters and settings can be covered as "derivative works". I cannot write my own Superman take, nor have a story involving Superman and the Justice League even if I omit/replace the exact trademarked words. Three notes: (1) Parody is an allowed defense against copyright infringement and (2) A lot of stuff happened in the early years of comics that today would likely not fly today. (3) Given the universality of themes, there's lots of dispute about what creative works are or are not derivative, in both a legal and non-legal sense.
But a tabletop RPG lives in a weird place: it is rules...for telling a story. It may come with characters and a setting...with the intention that people use them. Is my use of the product creating a "derivative work"? If I make an adventure that assumes you are using the rules but doesn't include any of the text, is that a derivative work? Does that change if I refer to setting details?
For a long while, the expectation was that, no, if you avoided trademark infringement and didn't copy exact text, you weren't infringing. Several RPG magazines would buy (from freelance authors) and sell (as the magazine to subscribers) adventures for various different systems. [Notable exception: Palladium games, maker of Rifts, TMNT, and other (ahem) strangeness) were very prickly about this, so magazines simply skipped them and didn't offer adventures for them.] Heck, adventures were such a cost sink for game publishers and so requested (but unbought) by audiences, it was generally considered a SERVICE to the publisher to put out adventures for their material, as it would drive demand for their books.
Now, this was the genre-wide expectation (excluding Palladium), but it was never actually legally established. RPG companies were (and often still are) shoestring budget operations, and a bad judgement (and if I learned one thing from my lawyer friends, it's that initial court decisions are often bad judgements - it's why appellate courts are so important) would devastate many companies and the hobby that relies on them. Heck, just going to court would destroy most companies at the time, even if they'd eventually win. So the law in the area was allowed to continue undefined, with the few cases that cropped up almost always (always?) settling out of court.
Side note: Think games aren't terribly relevant to the law? Check out how the EFF came to be in relation to tabletop RPGs: http://www.sjgames.com/SS/
Then Wizards of the Coast (The Magic: The Gathering people) bought TSR (The Dungeons and Dragons people) and came out with D&D 3rd edition. This is when Linux was breaking free from the "you get what you pay for" stigma, ...
It feels to me as though the mantra of "move fast and break things" wasn't meant to apply to laws.
Actually the related mantra of "Hey as long as it's just a fine you can reasonably pay -- or you don't think you'll get caught -- then sure, go ahead an break the law!" has been around the Valley for quite a while. In fact, we might say it's become something of a chant.
The problem with this statement is it worked, and gives me great hope in this company that they were smart enough to risk it. The FCC said no, you cannot launch the satellite you spent years developing for reasons that ended up being completely wrong. So, what is a company to do? Launch anyways and accept the backlash as they had no other option. Once the satellites launched, they were able to effectively track them and the company got approved for more launches but this time without the 900k fine.
As long as the regulations of the US don’t make sense, smart people will continue to break them in the spirit of innovation. Will this breaking of regulation always end in relatively little consequence? No, and soon the FCC or another regulatory body will feel obligated to make an example out of some company with serious charges and I will feel bad for the CEO and company that is used for an example
The problem with "don’t make sense" is that very often they do but the arrogance/mistrust is stronger. Reading the comments on /r/robinhood is very eye opening. There is a big disconnection between the regulators and the regulated.
I think r/robinhood is a particularly bad example, the naïveté in that subreddit is overpowering. In general financial regulations are probably more good than bad given how completely irrational people get when money is involved.
This could have gone an entirely different way. I am glad it worked out but I do not gain respect or hope in a company because they willingly ignored a very serious regulation and the consequences of a failure on their part could have caused a big problem up there. Feels very amateur and irresponsible.
As some clarification I am all for breaking laws that can really only hurt the individual doing the lawbreaking. The government shouldn't have the right to protect us from ourselves. However, that this could have affected the other items in the payload or existing satellites in orbit if something went wrong is why I am disappointed.
> for reasons that ended up being completely wrong
When we were young lots of rules didn't make sense. As we got older we realized many of these were to keep us safe from things we weren't old enough to understand yet.
The US has quite a number of spy satellites that we can't detect, even with our own detection methods. Some are covered in vantablack and radar absorbing shields, others hide behind giant mirrors that reflect the darkness of space back down towards the earth.
How would your opinion change if a Swarm microsat had crashed in to a 6 billion dollar satellite and disabled it? What if it threw that bird out of orbit and it hit the ISS, killing everyone on board?
You can track a swarm microsat. The government could even help them make sure they orbited correctly and wouldn't hit the ISS. That's what good governance is. Bad governance is telling everyone no you can't do something unless we deem you worthy of our time.
Laws are just contracts and have consequences if you get caught breaking them. People and businesses break contracts all the time.
I really have no problem with people or companies evaluating risk/reward and pursuing whatever goal they want... if you want to disincentivize behavior then increase the penalty and change the risk/reward calculation individuals and corporations make.
I think criminal law probably should not be looked at in this way. Murder? Best if people think of not murdering people as an absolute and not some contract that should be contemplated as breakable if risk/reward calculation is right. Most humans don't think on gradients and are much more comfortable with binary choices. And we would probably have to bring back torture to get the risk/reward appropriate on that law.
Breaking laws is normally not a good idea. But most of the time, the only way to change bad laws and regulations is to break them first.
Everything from slave laws to miscegenation laws to gay laws had to be broken first before they could be changed. The one of the central aspects of the civil rights movement was breaking laws - ie rosa parks.
Also, this is hacker news and the hacking community generally isn't fond of restrictive laws and regulations.
I think you're right that there are some laws that are worth breaking, but let's not conflate choosing to break laws as a matter of principle with breaking laws as a matter of sloppiness. There was no real reason for Swarm to break these laws beyond a fundamental unwillingness to follow basic standards that are there for good reason. Their law breaking a FCC investigation has almost certainly cost them more than it would've cost to engage with the FCC.
The fact is that all the examples in the grand parent post involved businesses that could have operated legally but chose not to because they could make the economic decision to break laws to profit from fast expansion. In my view laws should be written with penalties to prevent people from breaking them, not as some sort of toll booth.
What exactly would be a good alternative? Jail time is also not a good penalty. See: marijuana.
The fines, by contrast, seem to be working pretty well: how many other companies get busted by the FCC for violating satellite launching regulations? The fact that it is so rare is a testament to how effective the deterrent has been in regulating companies in this space.
I think the fact that Swarm consulted with the FCC, had their plan to launch satellites rejected and then decided to launch anyway indicates the fines weren't suitable. A simple 3 year ban on further launches would've changed that. I find the fact that Swarm did this knowingly particularly egregious. I'm also not sure the lack of violations is a good indicator that the FCC is working since I don't think there's a particularly big sample of companies doing this for other structural reasons.
I don’t think you can really equate slavery and Rosa Parks to wilfully encouraging drivers to get parking tickets and launching satellites without authorisation.
I’m all in favour of civil disobedience when laws are stupid but breaking laws just to make a fast buck isn’t the same as defying inequality.
Well if you launch your own army of satellites and they smash into and destroy someone else's - will you pay? Will you be able to pay? What if it was another government's spy satellite/military Comms/positioning system and you just caused a diplomatic incident?
There's a lot of space around earth but crashes aren't rare anymore (see how Iridium has backups already in space to ensure coverage once there's failures/crashes) - add more satellites and the issue gets worse.
Comparing regulations around financial instruments or satellite launches, no matter how onerous, to slavery is ridiculous.
One is clearly immoral and no one would question the validity of civil disobedience as a method to over throw immoral laws. The comparison here is not a good one at all, these are two different things.
> Governments would be better to be ready for disruptive ideas and have flexibility in regulations to try them out. And we should all be voting and supporting candidates who want to see such changes happen. But until they do, it seems wrong to purposely break laws in order to make money.
seems a foregone conclusion - aren't these laws designed around some situation in the first place? why not just not write them in the first place? except that would be negligent..
I am sure this is exactly how all the regulatory groups in congress that people hate so much feel when enacting things 'for our own good.' Meet the new boss (some millennial that feels superior because they know what gulpgruntwebpacknpm are), same as the old boss.
A more apt mantra here is "it's easier to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission".
After all, FCC Commissioner Mike O’Rielly said the size of the penalty “is probably not significant enough to deter future behavior". I'd guess that Swarm knew someone would notice and they knew the fine would be worth paying in lieu of dealing with the red tape needed to get the launch authorized.
Now the question is, what penalty is significant enough to deter this behavior and why isn't that the penalty presently?
negative press coverage? I can't believe people still don't get that there is almost never such a thing as negative publicity, especially for a new ventur ( with exceptions, within reason, of course )
I also think you’re misunderstanding the sentiment. It’s not so much about negative coverage serving as additional punishment in this case, but about the coverage putting future would-be offenders on notice, and effectively preventing any profession of ignorance to serve as a mitigating factor.
I feel bad for whoever ends up in this position. The FCC has required Swarm to designate someone to be responsible for regulatory compliance. That means someone with knowledge and experience with FCC regulatory compliance. Not an engineer who happens to be tasked with work an attorney should be doing. Whoever takes this role isn't going to be compensated nearly enough for the personal risk they're about to undertake and is being set up to fail. They need a lawyer, and they need to listen to the lawyer, not an engineer.
Yeah, definitely not a job I want. I am an engineer who has worked on an application for FCC license for a different smallsat company. It was already a terrible experience dealing with the FCC. I can't imagine trying to do it when the FCC is already pissed off at your company.
$900,000? I wonder how this was calculated. It doesn't sound like much of a deterrent. The next rouge satellite launching company can just work that into startup costs.
> FCC Commissioner Mike O’Rielly said the size of the penalty “is probably not significant enough to deter future behavior, but the negative press coverage is likely to prevent this company and others from attempting to do this again.”
It sounds like a pretty hefty fine for a small startup. It’s also a fine, not a tax. Meaning this does not establish a price that you can consciously factor in when breaking the law.
The next one would surly be treated much harder, considering it would be hard to claim ignorance. And fines would also rise proportional with the size of the offender, not to menation repeat offenders.
That sounds reasonable, but do you have anything to back up any of what you said? It's just as likely that $900k is the statutory limit for this infraction.
I would imagine if they were repeat offenders the FCC would just tell them to go f-off on future launches and there goes their whole business plan.
But the FCC already told them to go f-off, and they launched anyway.
"Swarm launched the satellites in India last January after the FCC rejected its application to deploy and operate them, citing concerns about the company’s tracking ability."
Was there an option to use an anti-satellite weapon to blow these things out of the sky? These rules have been pretty firm since the 1970s so pleading ignorance just looks bad.
The complaint by fcc was these objects were too small to be tracked (which was not true in the first place). How would turning them in to many more smaller pieces of debris in orbit help?
This article reads as sponsored content. The outcome was a $900k advertising bill with the FCC telling everyone that Swarm has got tech up and working and that they're moving forward with the approval of the FCC... "YOU WON'T BELIEVE WHAT WORKOUT SUPPLEMENT NEARLY LANDED THE ROCK IN JAIL"
"Earlier this month, SpaceX launched three more satellites for Swarm on a Falcon 9 rocket after winning FCC approval."
This feels like a pretty important point - Swarm got slapped for their mistakes with that launch, but they're already back on track if the FCC already granted permission (what must have been months ago) for their most recent satellites. I wonder if it was just down to confusion on Swarm's part on how the rules applied.
I am pretty sure that Swarm knew that they were breaking the rules. They submitted an FCC license, were notified that the license was rejected, and decided to launch anyways.
I think part of the reason that they were able to still get licenses approved is that they agreed to more oversight from the FCC. Also, after launching the satellites Swarm was able to show the FCC that they were able to track the satellites, which was the original reason that FCC denied the license. So it seems like the FCC had to say "we were wrong, but you still broke the law so here is a fine and then we will continue on with life."
I go back and forth on government regulation in the domains of the FCC. On the one hand, you have the BBC, which seems to produce interesting TV when compared to all the fluff on US TV, however, it also banned airing certain things back in the day. The BBC does well here where it can be chosen, but the Brits didn't have much choice. I remember visiting my cousins in Ireland and England in 1984, and my cousin in England only had three or four channels. Some could argue that FCC regulation led to what we have today (not Netflix and other variants) on broadcast television. I found this podcast interesting on the subject of the FCC:
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If you're a VC or company backer now, how willing are you to put your money behind some company that's liable to be the second intentional violator of these regulations?
If the regulatory agency will tailor-make your fine to make sure that it's not too stiff, I don't see why any startup would follow the rules the first time around. Compliance has costs.
If you ignore compliance and your project doesn't work, then you spared yourself the time and money needed for compliance, and you won't care about the fine.
If you ignore compliance and your project does work, then the fine will not kill you, and you'll know it's worth coming into compliance.
I don't think I'm more "move fast and break things" than the average HN'er; this just seems like the logical outcome of fines that are intentionally too small. What am I overlooking?
I wouldn't want the FCC to have arbitrary and unlimited power.
New companies with new ideas can get their first projects off the ground cheaply. As they become established and do more projects, they abide by the rules. There's only a small number of "rule-breaking" projects, and plenty of scope for innovation.
Where's the problem?
A little later: the FCC said we couldn't do that with LLCs that we own or are directed by people who work for us, so let's hire a series of unconnected LLCs, one per launch. We'll have to pay a bit more, but it's always the first launch. We just sell them satellites and connect them with buyers.
A little later: oops, Ajit Pai is doing community service for the rest of his life. Let's find a new loophole.
A second, slightly less important problem is that this turns markets into government-sponsored winner takes all, even when the market conditions aren't pushing for that.
To the larger point, though, even an imperfect regulator is important. There will always be different types of businesses - those who intend to skirt the law and those who attempt to follow it whatever it may be - and regulators keep the second set from acting like the first set, reducing the quantity of bad behavior. They certainly wish they had the fangs to deter both, but at least this may deter the latter.
It's a lot harder to say "we thought it was OK" now.
I worked for a different smallsat company, including working on the FCC application and it was a nightmare dealing with them. We submitted our initial application for a license, got comments back from the FCC and then we provided them with more data in response to their questions. Then after 2 years of the FCC just sitting on our license application we got a 3 sentence letter saying out application had been denied with no explanation of why.
There are quite a few OSCAR satellites in higher orbits that have longer lifetimes. But most of them are still low enough that they will meet the de-orbit requirements of 25 years without any propulsion or other de-orbit device [1]. De-orbit times depend on ballistic coefficient of the satellite, drag profile, and current atmospheric density. But generally speaking, satellites in orbits lower than 600 km will de-oribt within the 25 year requirement [2].
The 25 year disposal requirement is also only an issue if you are in a desirable or full orbital plane. The OSCAR satellites that have much longer lifetimes are above 1000 km altitude and will effectively stay up there forever. They are out of the way of most of the commercial and civil earth observation satellites which are in the 600 km to 750 km range. This is the range where the issue of orbital debris gets more difficult. And yes it is good that the FCC should require technical rationale as to why the de-orbit strategy is sufficient. However, in my experience this has been a terrible process with the FCC specifically. I have also worked with satellite operators in England getting approvals from the ITU and it is a much smoother process.
[1] https://www.n2yo.com/satellites/?c=18&srt=3&dir=0 [2] https://aiaa.kavi.com/apps/group_public/download.php/3172/IS...
Aside from a massive fine, is there anything else they could have done? Could they have jailed the executives and investors? Could they have revoked their corporate charter?
Probably not. https://www.justice.gov/jm/criminal-resource-manual-1068-vio...
> and investors?
Passive investors? No
> Could they have revoked their corporate charter?
The Commission couldn't, no. Corporate entity revocation (dissolution) is more a thing that happens when the entity fails to pay fees to a state or territory than it is a punishment: It's intentionally trivially easy to create corporate entities.
NASA (and other space agencies) are OK with their satellites. The FCC is not OK with their use of controlled spectrum in the US.
The FCC regulates the radio spectrum usage in the US, which means if you want to talk to your satellite you need to get permission from them. They use that to try and make sure everyone in space gets along and don't crash into each other.
If the company only ever used base stations not falling under FCC jurisdiction they might have been ok, but my guess is that as long as they were operating in the US they'd probably run into issues trying to get around the FCC.
Evade the FCC and someone with enforcement powers is still gonna be grumpy.
For space there are UN agencies that are responsible and there are several international treaties, agreements and conventions:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_law
On an international level, the ITU [1] sets guidelines for spectrum usage and de-orbit. But each country typically has their own regulatory agency depending on where the satellite was built.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Telecommunicatio...
Seems to me that future companies that want to do this sort of testing just need to do it in other countries or from off-shore platforms. Then apply for your FCC license so you can charge US customers without having to worry about getting sanctioned (and losing your ability to process credit cards and bank in the US).
When I started reading the article and read about all these international launches my first thought was, "why does the FCC have a say in any of this?" Now I'm thinking, "perhaps we need a better international framework for this sort of thing."
If Swarm had been based in India, it would have needed to seek authorisation there. Swarm requested FCC authorisation which was denied on the basis of collision safety.
They then received permission to launch a set of larger satellites with better radar visibility. Imagine the surprise of the FCC when they discovered that Swarm had lied to their launch provider (claiming that they had authorisation) and launched the original satellites anyway!
In the past this has never been an issue because satellites were so expensive that no-one in their right mind would try to launch one without authorisation. As a result, launch providers may not have been rigorous in actually checking the authorisations for their secondary payloads.
The whole model is still rooted in a world where only a few countries could launch satellites and only a small number of very large companies within them could afford to build and launch them. Within a cosy world like that, regulatory compliance is important but it is also assumed that everyone else is complying and actually checking that is rare. Certainly this case is going to change that.
This is just straight-up illegal.
In this case, Swarm lied to the Indian government and said the US had approved it (which made sense as they are a US-based company), while trying to hide the existence of the satellites from the US Government. Frankly, I think a $900k fine is too small.
Yes, the actual judgment document just vaguely refers to it as "Georgia" but it's inferred that it's the state since FCC has no statutory authority outside of the U.S. However in the application it's clearly marked as state of Georgia.
"Swarm seeks narrow authority to transmit data from the SpaceBEE satellites in order to access tracking information. The SpaceBEE satellites will only transmit to enable downlinking of GPS data, and will be muted at all other times. GPS data will be downlinked during passes over Los Altos, California and Buford, Georgia. These passes Swarm Technologies will occur approximately four times per day. Each transmission will require approximately two seconds."
[1] https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/FCC-18-184A1.pdf
[2] https://apps.fcc.gov/els/GetAtt.html?id=212398&x=.
The UK basically rolled their eyes the same way they'd ignore a kid declaring their backyard tree fort to be sovereign territory. If they'd started launching rockets, that might've been different.
Would that simple fact not incentive you to question your assumptions of either the burden of regulation, or the possibility of end-runs around the law with cheap stunts, before furthering this strange case of “jingoism with no nation”?
Uber and AirBnB are the classic examples (and it's worked out wonderfully for them). In Toronto, Car2Go told customers to just park anywhere- don't worry about getting parking tickets, we'll handle it. (They didn't). Swarm was told that their satellites could not be launched, so they just did it anyways hoping no one would notice. (Someone did). RobinHood announced checking accounts without checking if there were laws around such things. (There are).
Governments would be better to be ready for disruptive ideas and have flexibility in regulations to try them out. And we should all be voting and supporting candidates who want to see such changes happen. But until they do, it seems wrong to purposely break laws in order to make money.
Alcohol prohibition in the US didn't end because everyone stayed good and sober.
The solution is for gov fix the laws to reflect society. Unfortunately modern governments are designed around protecting established market cartels and political special interest groups over evolving with the times.
I don’t see this as relevant to Swarm either. They aren’t an evolution AFAIK, besides maybe the rise of private rocket launches.
You assume that because something is new that it is better. Hotel and taxi laws were put in place for a reason. Just because a new business comes along and doesn't want to play by the rules doesn't make that business right and the laws wrong.
In a civilization, it's up to the business to enumerate the reasons that the laws should be changed, and then go through the same legislative process as any other business or member of the public to have those laws changed.
Breaking the law and then blaming the law is like a five-year-old throwing a tantrum and expecting adults to feel bad for it.
That reason being to entrench the incumbent players by raising the barrier to competition.
And having laws requiring particular fare structures and payment methods is certainly meant to keep companies from competing with taxis.
What color is the sky in your world?
Should fire safety not apply to all large residential buildings? Why just hotels? Would generally applicable regulation not be better?
> And having laws requiring particular fare structures and payment methods is certainly meant to keep companies from competing with taxis.
At least in part.
Hotels have more strict fire safety laws because of the way they’re constructed and because there are more potential victims in a smaller space.
I will skull fuck a dead pig with a chicken shitting on my face before I ever try to use AirBnB again.
As for Uber. People complain that taxis are all just greedy fuckers who act like pricks to the customers, and then they expect a private company paying less than minimum wage to people will give them a better outcome. Let me know how that works out when Uber stops subsidising all the rides with VC money.
This is about enabling fair access to and good stewardship of a scarce resource.
Prohibition was the imposition of one form of morality through law.
In my view, it's easier to argue that one is about personal freedom and so fair game to consider breaking, whereas the other is more about being a good neighbour.
Activists were (with different language) very much worried about negative externalities and effects on the commons when it came to Prohibition.
Remember, people were getting rampantly drunk, fighting in the streets, neglecting their families, becoming unemployable, and so on. Beer/wine/spirits sellers were more than happy to promote drinking even with all the social problems produced by it.
It certainly didn't feel like a private matter at the time, like praying in your bedroom each night.
So "someone making a fortune while leaving the alcoholism and broken homes in its wake" would look very much then like "someone making a fortune while raiding the available housing units and ruining neighborhoods" does today.
Edit: And, to be sure, that doesn't mean Prohibition was a good idea. But means the right solution wasn't "free for all for alcohol", but "okay, you can sell alcohol, but with these rules to contain that problem".
The flaw with that argument is that something like 99 of 100 laws exist because, basically, they should. They benefit society, so essentially the whole population wants them.
Someone will disagree with almost every law, and some subset of them will violate it in protest. No single person knows which law is the 1 in 100 that shouldn't exist - even someone who thinks they know. Often, the people who so passionately think a law shouldn't exist that they're willing to break it are actually the least representative of society.
(I'm completely ignoring whether space launch access is or isn't a worthwhile law; it's moot.)
That's very much debatable. It's not even clear how to count the number of laws, even if we are only considering Federal law in the US. (see https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R43056.pdf )
Certainly there is no one who knows all the laws, and unlike in coding, there's no commitment to DRY or modularization, which leads to very common unintended consequences.
You're arguing the 99/100 case, but I'm sure it would be easy to find someone to credibly argue the 1/100 case.
Where every person would individually benefit from breaking them, but the community as a whole would be worse off.
E.g. environmental regulations
There was an article on the front page last week [1] about the total cost to the economy from licensing “professional” work which can clearly be done safely and effectively without a license, for example, hair weaving.
While the direct cost of obtaining licenses and completing the educational requirires (which often provides no actual benefit in increased skill or earnings), is relatively low… If you factor in the cost to the economy of people who aren’t able to work at a more profitable profession because they are restricted from entering it due to the licensing, the cost was extraordinary.
I think any analysis which covers all the myriad misguided attempts government makes to micromanage our lives is going to blow far past 1/100 of laws and regulations being damaging rather than helpful, even when considering the general populace.
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18682946
You have to pass a written and practical test (aka subjective test) - administered by other licensed florists (aka your competitors).
Licenses should be about public safety. There's no reason to have a subjective test when it comes to this.
It seems though in some industries (not all), as you allude to in the floral industry, that licensing is just another manifestation of rent seeking and ever encroaching regulatory capture.
Would you concur? Curious to hear what you think there could (or should) be done about it in your opinion? In the case of selling floral products-caveat lector: I know nothing about flowers other than they are pretty and smell nice-would it make sense to replace licensing with some sort of rating system for businesses to aid consumers in deciding who they want to procure professional services from based on assessed expertise and past services rendered (not Yelp, an assessment from your industry peers)?
+ E.g. a cheap electrician using aluminum wiring that may short in 10 years and burn the house down. But of which the customer may not be aware / informed.
I see licensing as buying into the system and aligning interests. Suddenly, it's in a tradesperson's personal interest to follow regulations, as they otherwise risk their right to practice.
That said... as was mentioned upthread, there's a happy balance. If there's limited long term harm, it's probably not justifiable to require licensure.
I think that's a good example of a field where lack of knowledge can be a very dangerous thing. I'd have thought like you until having seen first hand what some such hair products can do.
I'm sure there are unnecessary licensing. But I'm equally sure a lot of the licensing that seems pointless actually has reasonable justifications that are just not obvious if you don't know the field.
Because if so, so far reading this, it seems the Federal government has a pretty solid, and measurable grip on that very activity, just from the text of the report, and it doesn't seem remarkably difficult for them since they've come up with seemingly multiple ways to delineate the different types of Federal rules from each other, and have been able to point to various methods used to come up with their final assessment totals.
None of it seemed overtly complicated or difficult, and I'm about as far removed from "well read" on government reports as a person can get.
As a general rule, these type of moves can only be controlled by breaking them and testing then in court. The agencies have a strong incentive to go for a maximal interpretation of the relevant statues and increase their influence and funding.
And we don’t control crimes like murder by allowing people to break the laws and then testing them in court.
I usually err on the side of constructive conversation, but I have to say that is a ridiculous straw-man - and you know it.
But they are still backed by actual laws, and are not lessened by being regulations - if anything they are better because you can always apply to the implementing authority to change things without going the whole parliamentary route.
There's a downside in less well developed countries without a tradition of a non-political civil service (like the US) where an incoming politician installs their political flunkies can change the regulations to suit their donors
Should the violence of the state be brought to bear on citizens because it is known that "most" laws are good? Would we benefit from a higher standard? Could we instead renew and expire laws?
Sometimes yes. But other times, the laws exists (and more than 1 of 100) to "protect" some industry (from competition from another industry) and not necessarily because it's a benefit to society / general public.
Not to get off topic, but this is the crux of the argument of (e.g.,) The Brothers Koch. That is, it's not gov they are against per se. But the fact that the gov leads to rules & reg that (too often) end up offering advantages to some and disadvantages to others - which is __not__ what should happen if benefit to society were the true goal. Put another way, they're not against gov per se. They're against the uneven playing field the gov is so fond of creating.
Note: I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with them. I only wanting to point out this finer-point is often lost when people scream "OMG...The Kochs...The Kochs...". The reality is, there's a fair amount of evidence / validity to their POV.
Personally, I'm reasonably happy laws against assault create disadvantages to some people.
This doesn't pass the smell test. You actually believe that over the history of the United States that legislatures had a 99% success rate at passing good legislation?
This United States has a history of civil disobedience for a reason and it's part of what makes the country great. The law isn't something to be venerated, it should be treated with respect up to a point and that point ends when the law ceases to be relevant.
Case in point look at how people from the migrant caravans are being treated, ICE and Border Patrol are following the law by the book, can you tell me that law is good?
Everyone has a different definition of which laws are “relevant”.
> ICE and Border Patrol are following the law by the book
Are they? I was under the impression that most of the outrage was around officers circumventing Constitutional checks and abusing their power.
Laws and government programs should have expiration dates. Government can choose to renew said laws and programs, but an expiration date (aka Sunsetting) is good policy because it forces government to stay currently relevant.
To your original point, I'd say that yes, a lot of laws exist because they solved some problem at the time they were introduced (or because someone acted corruptly, but let's ignore that for now). I believe in questioning laws, but when the argument is "it'd make our private endeavors more effective," then I'd carefully consider why the laws were there in the first place.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome
And even if it is 99 of of 100, does that mean we should ignore the 100th, which could be causing untold harm?
Please don't make it seem like Uber's law-breaking is some kind of brave sacrifice protecting mom-and-pop restaurants everywhere.
Startups in general seem to benefit just one category of people: investors, and it's usually to the detriment of Joe B. Average who happened to use their product/service.
One nearly killed me, but I don't judge all other drivers by his lack of sleep/attention/whatever prescription drugs he relies on to stay awake.
My issue with uber/etc is that they spend more money, campaigning against laws that would require background checks for their drivers, than it would cost for them to actually do the background checks. If that doesn't raise some questions for you, you may as well just look for vans with "free candy" spray painted on the side, I'm sure they'll be great.
"Taxis are terrible" is such a vague blanket statement its almost meaningless.
I've literally never "hailed" a taxi in my life - I've either gotten in one at a rank (i.e. at an airport) or called for one in advance (i.e. at a hotel). Even as someone who uses taxis very rarely, I'm well aware of taxi booking apps both here in Thailand and in Australia.
Your argument is essentially "American taxis are crap, therefore uber is good for breaking the law". Why exactly couldn't Uber have just operated as a better taxi company? Oh right. Because then they'd have to follow the laws, and pay the drivers an actual income.
You mean none of the existing holders will sell them? $22B. Twenty two billion fucking dollars. That's how much VC money has been pumped into this bullshit company. And you're saying they can't buy some taxi medallions?
The second reason was that not 1 of the non-Grab taxi drivers uses anything like Google Maps. So I was never sure if we actually ended up at our hotel or somewhere else. Also because our hotel (Aetas) had (at least) 2 locations in Bangkok it made it all worse. This is assuming that a taxi driver actually knows where to go, we've also encountered multiple times the situation where a taxi driver didn't know where to go.
Grab on the other hand always provided the amount upfront and every driver had Google Maps for navigation.
Edit: I'd rather use the official taxis, but the number of conveniences Grab added with a single app was worth it to me.
> I've either gotten in one at a rank (i.e. at an airport) or called for one in advance (i.e. at a hotel)
But even when I have traveled, I generally don't use taxis much. I've only ever been to a few countries where I didn't end up driving - Hong Kong and Singapore, where public transport is beyond amazing, and a wedding (and thus spent the whole time at a resort) in Fiji years ago.
The taxi industry was hurt the most, but it wasn't taxi laws that were broken it was chauffeur laws.
They weren't banned in the UK. Or London. Their application for a license renewal was temporarily denied in London. They appealed, once.
They worked with TfL to resolve their concerns and were granted a new license - though slightly shorter term than normal. They're not entirely off the hook and will need to continue to show that they're behaving appropriately, but they're absolutely fine to operate now and that is not likely to change any time soon.
In my observation, startups aren't just breaking unjust laws.
Sometimes it does take a little pressure.
Make it too easy to repeal laws, and anti-corporate interest laws that were difficult to pass find themselves quietly unwritten soon after.
A difficult game theory problem.
I'm not saying that regulatory capture is not a problem; that would be an absurd claim. But trying to make the law about right and wrong is not the solution.
I wonder what Thoreau would think about all this. He wrote Civil Disobedience which grapples with these ideas, but I bet he didn't imagine them in this new market/corporate context.
Laws are just a contract. There are terms and penalties. If you weigh the consequences of breaking the contract and decide it’s worth the risk why not do it? Most people in America do it everyday (speeding in their cars).
Textbook example of how a career criminal thinks.
A part of being an entrepreneur is that you have take risks from time to time, and under term "risk" I don't mean business risks.
The law cares, but realistically those regulations are in place to prevent fraud or dysfunctional products. If Theranos' machine actually did what they said it could, it would've been a victimless crime and I wouldn't have a problem with it.
It was possible to make products which benefited humanity before those regulations existed, and it's possible to do the same while skirting those regulations.
A lot of the regulations around laboratories exist because people have died or been injured as a result of lab screwups. Theranos hid entire labs from inspectors, let uncertified people run laboratories, and a lot more that wasn't fraud, but definitely violated regulatory requirements.
But again, I think it's morally fine for an uncertified person to run a laboratory as long as they are running it correctly. But the Theranos labs were not being run correctly, and they were lying about the results that their machines could deliver.
You can build a medical product that has a higher sensitivity and/or specificity than the other products on the market without regulatory oversight. But the Edison had neither of those and they were pretending it did. That was the problem.
How do you determine if they're "running it correctly"?
The whole point of certification is to require a minimum set of skills/knowledge to do so.
Insert "faster" or "cheaper" as well, but that is my point. There are very clear ways to measure if your medical device is effective.
What? No!
That's the equivalent of the mythical software rewrite that fixes all current issues: three are a lot of reason why we have customer and environmental protections and even if some are forgotten throwing them out without because "disruption is good" strikes me as quite naive.
The law is a messy area. Many places are simply unresolved until a court gets to them, and often there is no incentive for that resolution to happen, so the question gets a lot more complicated.
Here's an example (In all of this I'm trying to focus on legality and not if I think it's a good thing. I'm also not a lawyer and likely have lots of details wrong). I get around to saying why this is relevant at the end of this wall of text.
In the world of tabletop RPGs (D&D and the like) there's a big grey area as to what is/isn't protected by copyright.
From general literature, we know (indeed, it was one of the big pushes for the creation of copyright) that translations and other "derivative works" are covered by copyright.
From boardgames, we know (have court cases saying) that _rules_ aren't copyrightable, while the exact expression of them are. I can make a Monopoly clone so long as I don't violate any trademarks (which are different than copyright) and use my own words to express the rules.
From comics and other literature, we know that characters and settings can be covered as "derivative works". I cannot write my own Superman take, nor have a story involving Superman and the Justice League even if I omit/replace the exact trademarked words. Three notes: (1) Parody is an allowed defense against copyright infringement and (2) A lot of stuff happened in the early years of comics that today would likely not fly today. (3) Given the universality of themes, there's lots of dispute about what creative works are or are not derivative, in both a legal and non-legal sense.
But a tabletop RPG lives in a weird place: it is rules...for telling a story. It may come with characters and a setting...with the intention that people use them. Is my use of the product creating a "derivative work"? If I make an adventure that assumes you are using the rules but doesn't include any of the text, is that a derivative work? Does that change if I refer to setting details?
For a long while, the expectation was that, no, if you avoided trademark infringement and didn't copy exact text, you weren't infringing. Several RPG magazines would buy (from freelance authors) and sell (as the magazine to subscribers) adventures for various different systems. [Notable exception: Palladium games, maker of Rifts, TMNT, and other (ahem) strangeness) were very prickly about this, so magazines simply skipped them and didn't offer adventures for them.] Heck, adventures were such a cost sink for game publishers and so requested (but unbought) by audiences, it was generally considered a SERVICE to the publisher to put out adventures for their material, as it would drive demand for their books.
Now, this was the genre-wide expectation (excluding Palladium), but it was never actually legally established. RPG companies were (and often still are) shoestring budget operations, and a bad judgement (and if I learned one thing from my lawyer friends, it's that initial court decisions are often bad judgements - it's why appellate courts are so important) would devastate many companies and the hobby that relies on them. Heck, just going to court would destroy most companies at the time, even if they'd eventually win. So the law in the area was allowed to continue undefined, with the few cases that cropped up almost always (always?) settling out of court.
Side note: Think games aren't terribly relevant to the law? Check out how the EFF came to be in relation to tabletop RPGs: http://www.sjgames.com/SS/
Then Wizards of the Coast (The Magic: The Gathering people) bought TSR (The Dungeons and Dragons people) and came out with D&D 3rd edition. This is when Linux was breaking free from the "you get what you pay for" stigma, ...
Actually the related mantra of "Hey as long as it's just a fine you can reasonably pay -- or you don't think you'll get caught -- then sure, go ahead an break the law!" has been around the Valley for quite a while. In fact, we might say it's become something of a chant.
I think some need to be made an example of.
As long as the regulations of the US don’t make sense, smart people will continue to break them in the spirit of innovation. Will this breaking of regulation always end in relatively little consequence? No, and soon the FCC or another regulatory body will feel obligated to make an example out of some company with serious charges and I will feel bad for the CEO and company that is used for an example
When we were young lots of rules didn't make sense. As we got older we realized many of these were to keep us safe from things we weren't old enough to understand yet.
The US has quite a number of spy satellites that we can't detect, even with our own detection methods. Some are covered in vantablack and radar absorbing shields, others hide behind giant mirrors that reflect the darkness of space back down towards the earth.
How would your opinion change if a Swarm microsat had crashed in to a 6 billion dollar satellite and disabled it? What if it threw that bird out of orbit and it hit the ISS, killing everyone on board?
I really have no problem with people or companies evaluating risk/reward and pursuing whatever goal they want... if you want to disincentivize behavior then increase the penalty and change the risk/reward calculation individuals and corporations make.
Everything from slave laws to miscegenation laws to gay laws had to be broken first before they could be changed. The one of the central aspects of the civil rights movement was breaking laws - ie rosa parks.
Also, this is hacker news and the hacking community generally isn't fond of restrictive laws and regulations.
The fact is that all the examples in the grand parent post involved businesses that could have operated legally but chose not to because they could make the economic decision to break laws to profit from fast expansion. In my view laws should be written with penalties to prevent people from breaking them, not as some sort of toll booth.
The fines, by contrast, seem to be working pretty well: how many other companies get busted by the FCC for violating satellite launching regulations? The fact that it is so rare is a testament to how effective the deterrent has been in regulating companies in this space.
I’m all in favour of civil disobedience when laws are stupid but breaking laws just to make a fast buck isn’t the same as defying inequality.
One is clearly immoral and no one would question the validity of civil disobedience as a method to over throw immoral laws. The comparison here is not a good one at all, these are two different things.
seems a foregone conclusion - aren't these laws designed around some situation in the first place? why not just not write them in the first place? except that would be negligent..
After all, FCC Commissioner Mike O’Rielly said the size of the penalty “is probably not significant enough to deter future behavior". I'd guess that Swarm knew someone would notice and they knew the fine would be worth paying in lieu of dealing with the red tape needed to get the launch authorized.
Now the question is, what penalty is significant enough to deter this behavior and why isn't that the penalty presently?
Well, how about applying those, then?
I also think you’re misunderstanding the sentiment. It’s not so much about negative coverage serving as additional punishment in this case, but about the coverage putting future would-be offenders on notice, and effectively preventing any profession of ignorance to serve as a mitigating factor.
https://jobs.lever.co/swarm-technologies/437b187b-26f9-4da7-...
This isn't a deterrant, it can be framed as the cost of doing business.
The fine is far too small.
> FCC Commissioner Mike O’Rielly said the size of the penalty “is probably not significant enough to deter future behavior, but the negative press coverage is likely to prevent this company and others from attempting to do this again.”
The next one would surly be treated much harder, considering it would be hard to claim ignorance. And fines would also rise proportional with the size of the offender, not to menation repeat offenders.
But the FCC already told them to go f-off, and they launched anyway.
"Swarm launched the satellites in India last January after the FCC rejected its application to deploy and operate them, citing concerns about the company’s tracking ability."
good advice Mr Genachowski..
This feels like a pretty important point - Swarm got slapped for their mistakes with that launch, but they're already back on track if the FCC already granted permission (what must have been months ago) for their most recent satellites. I wonder if it was just down to confusion on Swarm's part on how the rules applied.
I think part of the reason that they were able to still get licenses approved is that they agreed to more oversight from the FCC. Also, after launching the satellites Swarm was able to show the FCC that they were able to track the satellites, which was the original reason that FCC denied the license. So it seems like the FCC had to say "we were wrong, but you still broke the law so here is a fine and then we will continue on with life."
https://www.libertarianism.org/podcasts/free-thoughts/sad-hi...