In rejecting Hogan’s conclusion that the mandatory minimum was unconstitutional as applied to the Hammonds, the 9th Circuit noted that the Supreme Court “has upheld far tougher sentences for less serious or, at the very least, comparable offenses.” The examples it cited included “a sentence of fifty years to life under California’s three-strikes law for stealing nine videotapes,” “a sentence of twenty-five years to life under California’s three-strikes law for the theft of three golf clubs,” “a forty-year sentence for possession of nine ounces of marijuana with the intent to distribute,” and “a life sentence under Texas’s recidivist statute for obtaining $120.75 by false pretenses.” If those penalties did not qualify as “grossly disproportionate,” the appeals court reasoned, five years for accidentally setting fire to federal land cannot possibly exceed the limits imposed by the Eighth Amendment.
In other words, since even worse miscarriages of justice have passed constitutional muster, this one must be OK too.
.. The blogger Scott Alexander once argued with more detail than I can quote here that “if you’re part of the Blue Tribe, then your outgroup isn’t al-Qaeda, or Muslims, or blacks, or gays, or transpeople, or Jews, or atheists—it’s the Red Tribe.”
.. We’d all do better to focus on forging red-blue alliances to address injustices of common concern rather than behaving as if it is either useful or morally righteous to denounce, demonize, and dehumanize the members of opposing ideological tribes.
This Land Is Your Land. Or Is It?
John Locke — one of the main philosophers to set out a theory of property entitlement — agrees that the finders-keepers rule is too loose. However, he claims that if a person finds an unowned resource, mixes his labor with that resource, and leaves enough and “as good” (“as good” meaning enough of the same quality) of the resource for others, then the person is entitled to that resource.
.. But we should be honest about the intellectual bankruptcy of a prominent explanation for private property. We need a theory of private property that makes sense if we are to make any progress on answering fundamental political questions about the disparity of wealth, taxation and the government control of land.
Uber’s No-Holds-Barred Expansion Strategy Fizzles in Germany
With a thriving financial center and cosmopolitan population, the city seemed like an ideal place for the ride-hailing service to operate and grow. Yet Uber was forced out by a mix of cultural and legal missteps. Specifically, it miscalculated how best to win over skeptical locals unaccustomed to its win-at-all-costs tactics, and it underestimated the regulatory hurdles of doing business in Europe’s largest economy.
“If you want to be successful in Germany, you have to understand the regulation,” said Martin Fassnacht, a professor at the Otto Beisheim School of Management in Vallendar, Germany. “Uber should have taken that more seriously.”
The Tax Sleuth Who Took Down a Drug Lord
Within the I.R.S., Mr. Alford had heard tales of his agency being ignored and overshadowed by more prominent organizations like the F.B.I. The story that resonated with Mr. Alford most strongly was that of the tax agent Frank J. Wilson, who brought down the gangster Al Capone, but who was forgotten in the movie versions of the investigation, which tended to focus on Eliot Ness, the flashier Bureau of Prohibition agent.
“They don’t write movies about Frank Wilson building the tax case ..
.. “I’m not high-tech, but I’m like, ‘This isn’t that complicated. This is just some guy behind a computer,’” he recalled saying to himself. “In these technical investigations, people think they are too good to do the stupid old-school stuff. But I’m like, ‘Well, that stuff still works.’ ”
Mr. Alford’s preferred tool was Google. He used the advanced search option to look for material posted within specific date ranges. That brought him, during the last weekend of May 2013, to a chat room posting made just before Silk Road had gone online, in early 2011, by someone with the screen name “altoid.”