Not so helpful protection

I recently started a new job. It's pretty time intensive - 60 hours a week is a norm, on average. More when necessary. The work is interesting, well (or even extremely well paid, depending on your criteria), colleagues are smart and the whole atmosphere is friendly (so far, as far as I can tell). So the hours seem acceptable.
Sometimes, there is just too much work and the workload increases to unreasonable levels. In the US, the firm asks you to measure true hours working. You report truthfully (there is really not reason not to - if there is not enough work, you are expected to be home, "on the beach". And if you get to insane levels, somebody will come and help you (seriously, man).
The great socialist left (and right) in Europe, probably at the end of the industrial revolution, decided that working about 50 hours a week a year should be illegal. Why the rule might make sense if you work in a factory for minimum wage, it does not make much sense for highly qualified jobs, when you actually want to work more, but should not. Nobody can tell how much you actually work, of course, but you have to report the hours and such reports have to be archived.
This idea of protection is actually harmful. Instead of truthful reports, you have to lie, otherwise your employer (and thus also you) would have a problem. It may be ok to lie to the government (it is not for me, but so what), but it is really stupid that you have to lie to the company that wants to know, but legally cannot (should not) for its own protection.
If I may ask, I don't want any more protection like this. Thank you.

Law and Order

I have always preferred Law and Order to CSI because of more realistic stories and script. However, after watching season finale of SVU, I can't stop thinking how lame the script is. Imagine a no-lawyer self-defending himself who questions basics of standard techniques police uses or a cop, who goes to get his partner who was kidnapped and DOES NOT TELL anyone. More stupidities keep coming, as the story unravels. I guess 18 years is 18 years. But it seems more acceptable that Maggie did not age during that same time.

Louis Vuitton

I always consider LV as a firm which existence I have to accept, but will never be really happy about. I could not articulate why, but this is one of the good reasons:

An artist named Nadia Plesner recently put together a project to try to raise money for the victims of genocide in Darfur. As part of the campaign, she created a t-shirt with a drawn image of a Darfur victim "pimped" out to look like Paris Hilton -- that is, carrying a designer handbag and a small dressed up dog. The entire profits from the t-shirts are going to help the victims. The handbag drawn in the image is not specifically a Louis Vuitton bag, but the design firm seems to have gone ballistic, claiming all sorts of intellectual property rights it simply does not possess. First, it sent a (admittedly friendly) cease-and-desist, which Plesner wrote about on the site, while responding and telling the company that she would not take down the t-shirt or the image. In response, LV went from friendly to nasty. It sued, demanding $7,500 for each day she keeps selling the product, $7,500 for each day she displays its original cease-and-desist letter and (my favorite) $7,500 for each day she mentions the name "Louis Vuitton" on her website.

Cynicism

Coming from highly cynical country, I don't expect law to be followed, I expect them to be circumvent. Thus, I found this funny:

Sen. John McCain's campaign has announced that it is asking individuals to donate as much as about $70,000 to accounts that could help his campaign. The cap on donations to presidential candidates is $4,600 per election campaign.

Wall Street Journal

Sweet deals

Sweet deals at Wal-Mart suddenly turned bitter. For those in a hurry

JACKSON, Mo. -- A collision with a semi-trailer truck seven years ago left 52-year-old Deborah Shank permanently brain-damaged and in a wheelchair. Her husband, Jim, and three sons found a small source of solace: a $700,000 accident settlement from the trucking company involved. After legal fees and other expenses, the remaining $417,000 was put in a special trust. It was to be used for Mrs. Shank's care.

Instead, all of it is now slated to go to Mrs. Shank's former employer, Wal-Mart Stores Inc.

The rule of law is such a wonderful thing.

Litigation

The USA is infamously known for its love of litigation. The reason obviously is that there is no rule "the loser pays" which we have in Czech Republic (probably EU in general). Moreover, if you are poor enough and cannot afford a lawyer in a civil suit, well, bad luck, you lost. It is easy for a corporation to threaten you, because they can have 15 lawyers for a few hundred thousand of dollars. Your only "protection" is that there is no reason why they should do it.

It reaches levels I could not possibly ever imagine. Read this:

"Voting machine manufacturer Sequoia has sent well-known Princeton professor Ed Felten and his colleague Andrew Appel a letter threatening to sue if New Jersey sends them a machine to evaluate. It's not clear from the letter Sequoia sent whether they intend to sue the professors or the state — presumably that ambiguity was deliberate on Sequoia's part. Put another clipping in your scrapbook of cases of companies invoking 'intellectual property rights' for bogus reasons." Sequoia seems to be claiming that no one can make a "report" regarding their "software" without their permission.

What's wrong with these people?

There is an interesting story going on here (in NY, to be precise), where a long-time fighter against prostitution was proved (and he eventually admitted) to have a sex with a prostitute. (See summary and a nice comment here.) Of course, this starts the (usual) debate whether the prostitution should be illegal (it is in the USA) and whether it is a private matter of a politician who fights against it (not). What is much more fascinating to me is the need to use a prostitute in the first place. He has a wife, he is not eighteen (or twenty something), he could probably get a date or something, so why does he need to pay couple of thousand dollars for a girl, several times? I could understand him watching porn (that's legal anyway), or have an extra-marital affair. But I don't understand getting a prostitute - the gap between these things seems so huge to me.

Freedom and laws

Lawyers and some people like to play the game of "freedom". It works like this - you compare the legal systems in two different countries (say Czech Republic and the USA) and decide which of them gives more freedom to its citizens. Most of the people and some economists, however, realize that the actual freedom depends on how the laws are actually enforced.

Say, for example, taking pictures on the public property (e.g. street in front of the railway station). If you make a picture in the CR, chances are that people will think that you are nuts to take picture of this old and ugly building but that's pretty much everything that can happen. In the US., the policeman comes and you have a conversation that goes somewhat like this.

Policeman:"Sir, what are you doing?"

You:"I'm taking the picture of this building, because I like it."

Policeman:"Sir, you can't take picture of this building, because of security reasons. Please erase it."

You:"Officer, I'm on a public property, so I have a right to make this picture"

Policeman:"Sir, unless you erase that picture, I will have to take you to the station."

The thought of habeas corpus, Guantanamo and/or a day spent in the police station goes through your head in a quick succession.

You:"OK, OK"

Policeman:"Thank you and have safe day"

In fact, you do have a right to take the picture. You also have the right to make a phone call that is not wire-tapped without court approval. But nobody really cares. So you in fact do not have this right. In contrast, there is a plenty of stupid rules in the Czech Republic that nobody really cares about, and nobody even knows about. Still, I doubt that we have as stupid rules as this one that are enforced very much.

It seems pretty obvious that the US walked a long way under GWB (but it's not just him. US Army was censoring letters of US citizens as documented by RP Feynman in this book "Surely you are joking, Mr. Feynman", during second world war). It will be very hard to get back the freedom and it might actually never happen. There are still some constraints that will hopefully prevent complete walk-away from democracy, but I'm not so sure.

In fact, after about 400 hundred years for which people from around the world immigrated to the US, I would expect some US citizens to emigrate in this century. Like this famous science fiction writer. Freedom may not mean much to many people, but it means a lot to some of them.

Progress

If you really believe that our modern civilization has made a significant progress in terms of law & justice, read this.