We are conflating 'law' and 'morals/ethics' in these arguments. If you act with strict adherence to the law, I'm assuming you've never jaywalked, committed piracy, ran a red light, etc.
Oh, these are 'victimless crimes?' What about sex after having a couple drinks? Technically neither of you can consent under the law... a person has probably committed rape if their consensual partner had a 0.08 BAC.
I think that our lack of a legal word other than 'rape' to describe 'statutory rape' does a disservice to those women are victims of forcible, violent sex acts.
Although technically correct in many US jurisdictions, I think you would have a VERY hard time arguing that an 'adult' having consensual sex with a 17 year old being described as 'raping minors' is morally equivalent to the things that 'rape' is typically used to describe.
I'm going to argue in good faith to try and derail this hate train. First, I'm a physician and I consider myself about a borderline expert in medical billing/insurance.
Let's disrupt some stuff here:
First, it is EXTREMELY rare for a physician to be paid a million dollars. You can easily look at most state's open records (California, Texas, Florida) and search the online databases and see that it's usually only several in an entire state and these are people of extreme qualification or unique talent. The Dean of a large/famous medical school (a CEO essentially), a very famous chair of a department (they helped invent some special technology or are well-known leaders in their field), or are simply prestigious to the institution because of notoriety (imagine an Atul Gawande or an Oliver Sacks).
Second, the costs of healthcare have been sliced and diced by countless experts and the numbers tell a different story than your theory--most analyses place physician payments at 10-20% of the total cost of healthcare depending on who is doing the study.
Third, there's no way you received ONE bill that wasn't itemized. Typically you receive two bills--one for the 'facility' and one for the 'professional.' It's usually obvious which is which because an ER might charge $1000 or more for that quick visit, while the physician probably would've charged in the $100-200 range. When you hear about those scary $50,000 bills for a night in the hospital and a $30 box of tissues... that's the hospital bill. It's extremely high because of many complicated reasons... most of which have to do with the fact that it NEEDS to be that high or insurance companies won't pay the negotiated rate of about 40% or less of that--it's an arms race that needs to stop.
I'll give you that there are complicated price gouging issues that come up on the physician side (out-of-network billing, surprise bills, etc) that may be unethical and some states are dealing with this... but it's usually a tenth or less of the total of what is coming from the facility in the same scenario.
So anyway, you could literally pay doctors nothing and you would save maybe 10-20% on all those bills. Does that sound like a viable setup?
You can Google some articles and read studies, but I'll save you the time and give you something to think about that should convince you that the physicians can't possibly be the primary problem:
Many (most?) physicians are now wage earners. They increasingly own less and less of the infrastructure (capital) of healthcare and are less independent than ever (consolidated, hospital owned groups, VC and publicly owned groups like Envision and MEDNAX).
In this kind of capitalist setting, where would your profits go? To your doctor workforce? No! It goes into C-level administration, shareholders/investors AND reinvestment/M&A.
Hospitals and Insurance companies, Drug companies, Device companies.... these are the real power players and their influence in seen all the time as they negotiate sweetheart deals (Medicare Part D for example), continue to consolidate ownership, and literally price gouge from consumers (EpiPen, insulin, etc, where a cheap drug is inflated in price for no reason).
I'm truly sorry for the state of the system in the US, but the fix has to come from Congress. If tomorrow every doctor was perfectly ethicall and paid 50% of what they earn today, all that savings would just end up as dividends for the capital owners and NOT as lower hospital bills.
I'm pretty disappointed by all the armchair lawyering in this thread that isn't defending the individual/citizen in this case.
.gov, .fr, etc were created for a reason. Trademark law is intended to protect people from intentionally misleading branding.
These two items taken together should make it obvious that France.gov is the only name the government of France 'should' be entitled to. If you are willing to say that France.com should be available to the French government... then it's a slippery slope. Are you going to give them to right to take down critical websites with titles like Francesucks.com or Francegenocide.com.
These lawsuits have played out before between private individuals like Madonna et al.
Why should a government be privileged to seize any .com that they deem to be in their interest? There is no evidence that France.com was not being used in a nefarious or misleading way.... in fact it sounds like the government had at least unofficially endorsed the site's usage and contributed. It was being used for a bonafide business.
I really think anyone defending a government's 'right' to seize this domain name is forgetting the underlying liberal democratic principles of the internet. Rights are for people, not governments. I don't see how France acting in this way serves its people constructively.
EDIT: It seems like all people care to comment on is the fact that they (and I) already know that .gov is for the US government, while other countries have their own TLDs.
Let me play Devil's Advocate for a moment to hopefully make you think more critically about this decision.
What if you owned a famous China (dishware, cups, etc) company and registered China.com back in 1994. Do you think China should be allowed to take that domain?
Or another, what if a new country were formed that were suddenly the same name as a pre-existing multinational corporation.... Government wins? Always?
Isn't this now (yet another) misuse of .com? That TLD is for COMmerce. And it appears they're ruining some guy's life just to redirect to france.fr - i.e. it's only there to catch when someone mistakenly types france.com. Someone who types france.com deserves to be taken to some kind of commercial entity. Such as france.com!
No, they have not. Each country can manage country-code top level donains, but that's just it: a specific top-level domain they are free to use. That doesn't negate them the right of using other domains, just like if you buy a domain name you don't lose the right of using a second or a third one.
It boggles the mind how anyone in their right mind can believe that a cyber-squatter shoud somehow have the right to hold the domain name of a sovereign nation for ransom.
germany.com isn't in the same class as the other examples; France's claim on france.com is arguably more similar to Germany's hypothetical claim on deutschland.com . Why assume that what governments really care about is the English name for their country?
"It boggles the mind how anyone in their right mind can believe that a cyber-squatter shoud somehow have the right to hold the domain name of a sovereign nation for ransom."
I... just don't know how to respond to this. Do you have any proof that it was 'being held for ransom'? It sounds like it wasn't for sale at any price... it was hosting the man's business.
And I definitely don't agree with cyber-squatting... in fact I personally think that 'parked' domains should be returned to the public domain after some X years. I hate that there are people holding vast numbers of potentially useful domain names and not using them for anything.
I just don't understand how you drew that conclusion in this particular case... it sounds like the opposite actually.
Really? The negative is that they didn't act in the best interests of humanity--the very people that make up their shareholders, employees, customers, etc.
For example, it's well documented that DuPont fought to continue using CFCs until they had secured patents on replacement products and suffered public humiliation by our government.
Companies will not generally act in the best interests of the citizens, which is why we have a government which should be independent of influence by leaders of companies.
Seriously? This is an industry that is actively undermining climate policy. So yes, we are going to use this video against them and other oil companies until an actual (aka substantial) positive change happens.
Lastly, warning labels do not absolve a company of all responsibility.
They tried to act in the best interest of humanity, but humanity didnt care about best interest of humanity. Companies will never act in the best interest of humanity if humanity dont care. Governments also dont care of the best interest if humanity, if their citizens dont care about humanity, they care about the best interest of their citizens.
Also people dont care about the best interest of humanity, if it doesnt line up with their personal interest (ex: car sales, car usage etc)
This is a great comment and I have to add a shady tactic that I have noticed hosts doing in competitive cities during peak times... I travel to a particular city yearly for a large conference and every time I've tried to use AirBnB for a stay, it always ends with me sticking to a hotel.
The host posts a bunch of very desirable locations and then when you try to book it, they message you with 'this one is unavailable, but how about these other entirely different units I have?' which is clearly a 'bait and switch' tactic.
I even booked one successfully and I know they had accidentally underpriced that week--similar to their other week costs, not raised for this conference like a lot of other hosts--and instead of just honoring my reservation, they cancelled it saying, 'oh, it turns out the prior guest will be leaving late on your first day.' Of course, this was a total lie because I offered to come even later, give up the first day, etc to no further response. Well, guess what... they re-posted the same dates at a much higher rate.
I honestly think a host should not be able to turn down a verified guest reservation under any circumstance or perhaps be unable to relist for those dates if they deny a person's request.
I emailed their customer service about these clear 'scams' and heard no significant reply.... they offered me a coupon.
Wow. I'm really trying to understand this house price. I just can't imagine who would think 1.3 million is a reasonable price for this house? I mean that's like a $10,000 mortgage. That's the same amount of money as a $333/night hotel room. A quick search of the area reveals $100/night hotels--typical across the country. So... how is this market priced housing? I mean I could have housekeeping and free breakfast every morning plus two or three 'bedrooms and bathrooms' in a secure, maintained property for the same price as this house. Sure, I am not building home equity... but I'm assuming a house rented in this area would not be a lot cheaper than that.
So your choices are rent or live in a hotel if you don't want to buy a home this expensive?
I would be making some tough choices if I had to move out there.
To be honest though, that one is an outlier. It's in a crap location (next to the highway) and looks pretty awful. I wouldn't be surprised if this is a house that the realtors can point to in order to make other houses in SV look "inexpensive" in comparison.
Actually, the ease of getting to Central, Arques, Fair Oaks, and Wolfe makes that location extremely compelling for a lot of people, me included. From Central eastbound you would take the Fair Oaks exit, keep left onto America, and boop, you're home. That's actually pretty good, unless you're expecting Sunnyvale to behave like San Francisco and be anti-car.
This isn't theoretical, either. I know someone who specifically looked in those dozen or so blocks between Maude and Arques once his employer dug in about a mile away, and he ended up buying on Morse. He walks now. It's a cute little neighborhood, and I'd consider it if I were in the market.
It's also been on the market for what appears to be 70 days. Houses in SV normally don't take that long to sell. That being said, it might be teardown material and the land alone would be worth $800k+
If you read the part that talks about criminal prosecutions, many top executives were put to death or received life imprisonment.
It's up for debate whether this is 'good' or 'justice' because the economic causes that led to the problem are complex, but babies were literally being killed because of this.
They found scapegoats for sure, but not many are really confident the real crooks were caught, and more importantly, faith was never restored in the Chinese milk industry.
An example paper you can read if you are curious:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5894321/