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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: December 9th, 2023

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  • The root of the problem is that you think of momentum as being defined to be the product of something’s mass and its velocity, but this is actually only an approximation that just so happens to work extremely well at our everyday scales; the actual definition of momentum is the spatial frequency of the wave function (which is like a special kind of distribution). Thus, because photons can have a spatial frequency, it follows simply that they therefore can have momentum.

    Something else that likely contributes to your confusion is that you probably think that where something is and how fast it is going are two completely independent things, but again this is actually only an approximation; in actuality there is only one thing, the wave function, which is essentially overloaded to contain information both about position and momentum. Because you cannot pack two independent pieces of information into a single degree of freedom, it is not possible for position and momentum to be perfectly well defined at the same time, which is where the Heisenberg uncertainty principle comes from.



  • If, as you say,

    I’m unconcerned with how it was intended since that’s totally irrelevant to what it actually is.

    Then why did you waste time describing what you believed was the intention behind it earlier when you said,

    I think of it as a rhetorical flourish to emphasize the importance they placed on representing states rather than people.

    Regardless, the other point that I made that you haven’t addressed still stands: they put that prohibition against banning the slave trade in there for a reason, and that reason was presumably not “as a rhetorical flourish”, so either the people who insisted that it be present were horribly incompetent at writing legal language that would preserve their own interests, or your personal opinion as to how Constitutional law works in this case is missing something important.



  • Indeed, the limitation in what can be amended is in practice totally powerless. I think of it as a rhetorical flourish to emphasize the importance they placed on representing states rather than people.

    It isn’t worded as a “rhetorical flourish”; it is worded incredibly clearly and explicitly as a prohibition:

    Provided that no Amendment which may be made prior to the Year One thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any Manner affect the first and fourth Clauses in the Ninth Section of the first Article; and that no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.

    In fact, taking your reasoning a step further: are you likewise arguing that when the prohibition against banning the slave trade prior to 1808 was included here, that it was also understood to be a “rhetorical flourish” with no teeth behind it? If so, then why did they go to so much trouble to put it in? It seems like a lot of wasted effort in that case.








  • Yes, of course they have complained to the courts. That’s not the point.

    That is moving the goalposts. In your other comment, you said, “What is the FTC going to do about it? Most likely do nothing, or issue a stern warning.” I have demonstrated that they are doing neither of these things but instead are going through the courts to get injunctive relief.

    This simply will go nowhere, or do you expect that the court will somehow separate Activision out of Microsofts hands again to fix this?

    If the appellate court decides that the lower court erred in its reasoning, then there is no reason why it could not issue such an order. It is not like this would be the first time that the government broke up a company.

    Or punish the managers at Microsoft and make them withdraw the execution plan to remove redundant jobs?

    There is no reason why the court could not issue an injunction preventing it from executing this plan until the proceeding concludes.

    At the end of it, Microsoft will eventually pay a small, symbolic sum which they consider “cost of conducting business”. Nothing more.

    If the FTC considered this to be a sufficient remedy then they probably would have settled with Microsoft by now rather than taking this to the courts.