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Cake day: July 7th, 2023

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  • The US has a law to limit the liability of gun manufacturers.

    The Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA) is a U.S law, passed in 2005, that protects firearms manufacturers and dealers from being held liable when crimes have been committed with their products. Both arms manufacturers and dealers can still be held liable for damages resulting from defective products, breach of contract, criminal misconduct, and other actions for which they are directly responsible. However, they may be held liable for negligent entrustment if it is found that they had reason to believe a firearm was intended for use in a crime.




  • The link goes to the comments instead of the body of the post.

    Anyway, the decision comes with a huge catch:

    While the ruling means that coverage of preventive health care is no longer under threat, the ruling clarifies that the health secretary has direct authority over the USPSTF. The clarification raises concern that the current secretary, Kennedy, could remove task force members and/or undo recommendations to suit his personal ideology, as he is now doing with the vaccine advisory board at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

    Preventative care is covered, but RFK Jr. has control over the group that recommends which preventative care should be covered.







  • Current regulations allow digital music providers to pay a lower music royalty rate if their paid music subscription offering is bundled with other legitimate product offerings. Seeing an opportunity, Spotify has exploited this regulation by converting all Premium Plan music subscribers into a new, bundled subscription offering without consumers’ consent or any notice. Spotify’s intent seems clear—to slash the statutory royalties it pays to songwriters and music publishers.

    Spotify has priced its Audiobook Access plan with 15 hours of listening time per month from a limited catalog of 200,000 audiobooks at $9.99/month. In contrast, Spotify’s music-only Basic Plan—which includes unlimited hours of listening from a catalog of over 100 million songs—is priced only a dollar more. Under the regulations, the higher the Audiobooks Access plan is priced, the lower the music royalty Spotify must pay.




  • If you attack them the law is on their side even if they don’t identify themselves:

    [18 U.S. Code] Section 111 makes it a crime to “forcibly assault, resist, oppose, impede, intimidate, or interfere with” federal officials engaged in their duties. But here’s the problem: You don’t even need to know they’re federal officials. You can be convicted for shoving someone you think is just someone yelling in your face, even just placing them in “reasonable fear of harm” without physical contact—if they turn out to be a plainclothes agent. That’s not hypothetical. That’s precedent, courtesy of the Supreme Court over 50 years ago.

    Which means this: An undercover agent embedded in a protest, a public meeting, even a constituent town hall could claim to have been “impeded,” and the federal government can treat that moment as a federal crime. Under the current administration’s appetite for authoritarianism, that’s not a loophole, it’s a feature.






  • When President Donald Trump and Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred met at the White House last month, they discussed one of the president’s passion projects — reinstating baseball star Pete Rose to make him eligible for the Baseball Hall of Fame.

    This week, that’s exactly what Manfred did.

    When I heard Pete Rose was going to be eligible for the Baseball Hall of Fame my immediate reaction was to joke that “Somehow this is Donald Trump’s fault”. I didn’t think I’d be right.


  • Tesla is far from alone in flashing the “death cross.” The S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 both showed it as well on Monday, as the indexes continue to fluctuate in wild and somewhat unpredictable ways thanks to the endless uncertainty that the Trump administration has introduced to the market through its blanket tariffs and “will they, won’t they” exceptions that keep getting tacked on and taken off.

    An individual stock hitting this point doesn’t really seem like that big a deal when indexes are getting there.