Encouraging Small Business

[MasterMischief]

Obama's Health Care Aid To Small Firms Disappoints

Looks like Obama is trying to fix the problem but the Republicans are more interested in killing the entire thing than actually helping small businesses.

[AndyZ]

The Upper Big Branch Mine disaster is not a direct example.  But it is enough to make me skeptical that employers always have employees' best interest in mind.  Sure, they were punished after the accident happened.  A lot of good that does for the dead miners.  Also, note that the government dropped the ball on this one too.  My distrust of big business does not mean I am any more trusting of the government.

I certainly see a reason to regulate when employees' lives are in danger.

obamacarewatch.org?

I do not know the particulars well enough to argue here, but paint me skeptical.  If I recall correctly, Boehner and Cantor have vested interest in healthcare companies.  We know the healthcare companies have it out for 'Obamacare'.  They have been screaming the sky is falling from the start.  Without reading the bill itself in its entirety, it is difficult to know how much fear is warranted and how much is just the industry trying to protect its profits.

The issue with politicians making money off of their pet projects falls on both sides.  I can easily point to various places where Obama, Pelosi and the like have shown some serious under the table deals as a result.  This is why I want to focus more on hypotheticals and how to handle issues than talking about how corrupt politicians are; we know how corrupt both parties are.

I think that a major issue here is the "ignorance is no excuse" nature of our law system mixed in with tens of thousands of pages of regulations and laws.  This is a similar issue with the tax code, where normal people aren't capable of going through the inordinate amount of text to understand everything, and have to turn to other people to explain it to them.

If big business is able to hire people to actually read through the text, and small business has to go by the translations given to them by others, then big business can exploit the loopholes and small business can't.  This is a problem.

I think it would encourage small business if laws were written with brevity in mind, or small business could at least know that they were completely unaffected by particular laws.

[MasterMischief]

If you have ever role played with a munchkin, you know why laws are so complicated.   

[AndyZ]

If you have ever role played with a munchkin, you know why laws are so complicated.   

What are lawyers really? To me a lawyer is basically the person that knows the rules of the country. We're all throwing the dice, playing the game, moving our pieces around the board, but if there's a problem, the lawyer is the only person that has actually read the inside of the top of the box.
Jerry Seinfeld, SeinLanguage (New York: Bantam, 1993), ISBN 0553096060, p. 90.

I remember this quote pretty diligently from one of my college law classes.  We've all played with the munchkin who read the top of the box in detail.  Crap, I've been the Munchkin at times, when I knew head and shoulders more than anyone else who played.  I could point to stuff where nobody else had heard of the splat of "Hexes and Blades" and could throw together a wizard in a game that was meant to be modern.  For a more concrete example, playing a Sidereal in an Exalted game.

When new GMs who have only read the Core book talk about these kinds of players and what to do, the solution that I often hear is to limit the game to core-only.  Simplify things so that the munchkins lose their advantage of knowing so much more.  In said example, only let them play Solars.

Having a huge and extensive set of laws doesn't help the layperson.  It helps the elite who know all the rules and can pick and choose what they want to do.

Now, that doesn't mean that being thorough doesn't have its place, but there needs to be some kind of a balance.  This gets into that whole "more isn't better" thing.

Maybe we can set something up where the person who writes the bills can also write up a lay version, using footnote markers so that any unclear wording can point to the part of the bill in question.

It doesn't mean that all laws can be minimized to a single page; the Constitution has some wording which could certainly be cleared up if you doubled it in size, but that would only be I think 8 or 12 pages (I forget).  When a bill is over a thousand pages, maybe we should start questioning how the little guy is supposed to read it.

[MasterMischief]

I am all for simple laws.  However...

Thou shall not kill

What if he tried to kill me?

O.k.  Thou shall not kill unless he tried to kill you first.

What if I instigated it and then he tried to kill me?

O.k.  Thou shall not kill unless, uninstigated, he tried to kill you first.

What if I instigated it because he killed my mother?

Oh for the love of god!

[AndyZ]

Thou shalt not kill is a mistranslation.  It's more properly rendered "Thou shalt not murder."

Trying to find a good definition of murder that doesn't circle back to the law definition, but with limited success.

Murder is the unlawful killing, with malice aforethought, of another human, and generally this state of mind distinguishes murder from other forms of unlawful homicide (such as manslaughter).

Malice aforethought is the "premeditation" or "predetermination" that was required as an element of some crimes in some jurisdictions,

If someone's trying to kill you, it's not murder to defend yourself, even if you kill them.

Now, loopholes to this do pop up.  In the Old West, for example, the shootout duels at high noon took advantage of that if someone drew on you first, you could retaliate and kill them.

From what I've heard about many of the sheriffs of the day, though, they weren't interested in getting involved when both people willingly went out into the street.  If the guy who actually drew first managed to shoot and kill the other, then technically the sheriff would have to step in, but was it really as bad as when a guy just walks up and shoots someone else without warning?

It reminds me of a story I heard about recently where a man found his 4 year old daughter being molested and beat the molester to death.  This wouldn't be murder, because you don't premeditate to find someone in this kind of horrible situation.  However, this is definitely a case of exceptions where the laws need to be clearly written.

According to the story, no arrests have been made so far, and it's going to take a grand jury to decide whether they're going to prosecute him at all.  A grand jury seems arbitrary, but how else would you even decide this kind of thing?  Do we really want to have every law written out to the point where these extreme circumstances are explained in ink?

I'm not sure I'd want it spelled out when you're allowed to kill someone, other than to save your own life.  I see a clear argument for both letting this man go and for punishing him, and wouldn't want the task of judging him.

[MasterMischief]

That is kind of my point.  If we could trust people to live up to the spirit of the law, they could be short and sweet.  But munchkins prove otherwise.

[AndyZ]

I guess it really comes down to the question of whether things can be abbreviated to any degree.  I'll agree that we don't want them to be three or four pages long in total, but can we have a summary, or some way for laypeople to understand?  Are thousands of years added every year truly necessary, or can we set something up so that a small business owner can read a single book and be caught up on all the laws they need to know about?

We may have to agree to disagree on this, which is fine.  If so, I'm not sorry you posted ^_^

[TheGlyphstone]

That is kind of my point.  If we could trust people to live up to the spirit of the law, they could be short and sweet.  But munchkins prove otherwise.

Remember that munchkins are the dark side of rules-lawyering, the ones who 'forget' penalties against them but always remember the bonuses for them and argue in their favor for every questionable precedent. It's good to have an actual rules-lawyer around for the rare circumstance when you need to know what Page 456, Paragraph 7, Subsection B, Subclause B.III says; if no one can agree on the spirit of the law, the only recourse is to default to its letter.

[MasterMischief]

It's good to have an actual rules-lawyer around for the rare circumstance when you need to know what Page 456, Paragraph 7, Subsection B, Subclause B.III says; if no one can agree on the spirit of the law, the only recourse is to default to its letter.

I've never need to.  If I do not remember a rule, I make a judgement call and move on.  If you do not trust your GM to do that, I have to wonder why you would play with them.

But then, my gaming started with free form where everything is adjudicated by the GM.  Keeping the game going and fun is more important to me.  That is not to say I completely ignore the rules.

[TheGlyphstone]

I've never need to.  If I do not remember a rule, I make a judgement call and move on.  If you do not trust your GM to do that, I have to wonder why you would play with them.

But then, my gaming started with free form where everything is adjudicated by the GM.  Keeping the game going and fun is more important to me.  That is not to say I completely ignore the rules.

I guess if you come from a freeform background. I didn't, so I'm equally baffled why you would ever even consider playing with a GM who didn't even know the ruleset he was running. The only reason to make a judgement call is if taking the time to look up the rule in question would slow the game down too much; if you have someone handy who knows said rule of the top of their head, why not use that knowledge to your advantage? You can always ignore the rule if you don't like it.