In terms of legality Megaupload messed up by directly participating in copyright infringement. They paid people to upload copyrighted movies. Cox doesn't reward people for copyright infringement. The lawsuit against them argued they failed to take enough precautions (for example cutting off subscribers upon receiving an accusation from a third party) and that should make them liable.
In practice Megaupload is not an established company. Other consumer file storage services such as Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, Apple iCloud are trillion dollar companies with deep legal benches and lobbying muscle. YouTube seeded the service with pirated content and Google helped fight off a copyright lawsuit by finding evidence that one rights holder uploaded their own video and then claimed infringement.
There is an express lane, it's reserved for the government appealing cases, in which any and all injunctions are halted because the court has unilaterally decided to interpret "not being able to do illegal shit" as "great harm" while there is no harm in sending people to torture prisons abroad on the flimsiest of evidence.
This is a silly point. Courts aren't sitting around umming and ahhing about whether they should issue an arrest warrant to get x violent criminal off the streets, the system wastes minimal time in apprehending them and putting them in jail. At THAT point things slow to a crawl - because there's no longer the urgent incentive to act to prevent further harm.
Whereas in these cases the government is potentially harming the entire public every single day that the courts don't act.
Section 122 is only supposed to be applied to address balance of payments deficits, which are essentially zero with floating currency exchange rates (since the 70s). They're also limited to 15% and 150 days. (Judges will not look favorably on Trump trying to just restart the same tariff for another 150 days after the first expire.)
> I thought those were on very solid ground commonly used by past administrations
No, Section 122 tariffs have never been used prior to Trump turning to them after the Supreme Court decision striking down the IEEPA tariffs, and, the states suing the Administration argue, the explicit sole statutory purpose for which they were allowed in the 1974 law creating the power can only possible to exist under a fixed-exchange-rate monetary system, which the US has not had since 1976.
Also, implicit in the government's requirements is that they require mass domestic surveillance capabilities. Imagine a large government tool that for each citizen there is an antagonist OpenClaw-like set of agents surveilling and potentially acting against every public interaction and occasionally hallucinating.
In my metro area it irks me to see the churches with large empty parking lots empty most of the week. We have a housing shortage and they seem to have no little incentive to convert their parking to more productive use.
I agree, the whole ruse that these 501s meaningfully does charitable work for our communities is laughable and their tax exemption should be revoked, at least with regard to land taxes.
There are almost no places where a housing shortage is due to a lack of land. Housing shortages have all sorts of reasons, from constructions cost, to zoning, to restrictions on what can be built, but it's virtually never a lack of land.
And parking is a productive use - they have services once a week, and parking means people can come to the service. That's the definition of productive use. Something does not need to be used 24/7 to be productive.
Church goers using parking lots like this is a use, but I doubt it's a productive charitable use that should to be subsidized by localities.
Every other contemporary development in my area that faces real economic reality is ground floor retail, commercial/residential on top, and optionally underground parking.
There are certainly productive religious charitable efforts using facilities like this: homeless shelters, community low-cost/free clinics, soup kitchens. I think these uses should be tax subsidized, but other mystical efforts should not be whether they generate a profit or not.
I think a good reform to the 501c3 system would be to make non-profits like these churches and hospitals classify their actual charitable activity and separate it from their other activity, just like individuals with a mix of personal/small business income/expenses are required to do.
Why should churches get great real estate in central locations but not housing? If people only come to church once a week, surely they can spend the extra time driving further.
The 1.5M number includes non-corporate employees (warehouse). They likely included this number to soften the message. The corporate workforce is ~300K so this is actually ~4% of their workforce.
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