I've always felt it that it was wrong for a regulated utility to have so much influence in the Commonwealth. If I'm reading the article correctly, at least now their profits will reduce to the extent they are directly lobbying or donating, providing some counterpressure on their outsized influence.

Checks are negotiable instruments governed by UCC Article 3, which has been adopted in all or nearly all states in the US. The drawer of a check, in this case Paypal, is normally liable for when an impostor presents the check or when their employees forge indorsements in the name of the payee. The thinking is that the drawer is best positioned to protect against that kind of fraud.

Depending on your state, you can probably take them to small claims court over this on the theory of a fraudulently indorsed instrument. You might also have a claim for breach of contract for failure to return the balance on the account, although you'd need to show how their failure to give you your money breaches a contract or statute, and that might be hard to do without a lawyer. The claim for fraudulent indorsement of the check is probably cleaner and less fact intensive.

Small claims is really accessible to non-lawyers, and PayPal probably won't even show up. You could get a default judgment and then, if you really wanted to, execute that judgment against their bank, which you can probably see from the copy of the cancelled check.

Again, none of this is legal advice! It's going to be time consuming and maybe not worth $270 but if you have the time and will, I'd say go for it.

Looked at in a snapshot in time, it would be unrepresentative. After all, there are plenty of men and plenty of white people in this country. But are we trying to make the number of seats in an institution representative? Or are we trying to make the number of seat-years representative, i.e., integrate over the dimension of time as well as seats.

When you consider the temporal dimension, even a fully black Senate or all-woman Senate would be still fall far short of offering those demographics fair representation when optimizing for seat-years. It would take at least 50 years or so of domination by those demographics before things start to even out.

Personally, I find this framing helpful when considering what it means for public institutions to be representative, and why I am supportive of efforts to make it more so.

How do you reconcile that with democracy? Consider gender for example. My mom has a strong preference for male elected officials. She’s no bumpkin—she has a master’s degree in chemistry. She simply embraces that aspect of traditional gender roles. This isn’t an uncommon view—women make up the majority of voters nearly everywhere, but most legislators are still men.

Is it democratic to tell these women that they’re wrong, and to impose a scheme of gender balancing that overrides their individual voting preferences?

Also, isn’t there an underlying contradiction in your position? In your view, is an Asian person fungible with a white person? If not—if you think an Asian maybe might bring an “Asian perspective” to the job, or give special attention to “Asian issues”—why isn’t it appropriate for a white majority district to prefer a white person to represent them?

No, and I would not presume to do so. I am only expressing my view that, over time, these preferences would counterbalance each other in a way that results in a distribution in our institutions that broadly reflects the demographics of society.

You mom has a preference for male elected officials. But maybe my dad has a preference for female elected officials. My comment isn't intended to reflect negatively or positively on any of that, I hope you see. It's only a theory about population-level preferences as applied to our public institutions.

I'm not suggesting anything normative, just describing what an equitable society might look like and why an all-black Senate for some period would not be unrepresentative when representation is aggregated over years and not just seats or states.

> [W]hy isn’t it appropriate for a white majority district to prefer a white person to represent them?

I am not saying anything is not appropriate. I think my main point didn't get through.

The core of what I'm saying is that when looking at representation in a public institution, it's useful to take into account the history of that institution and how it has been constituted _over time_ rather than just in the present.

For example, if it is your position that the race of a legislator matters--that one can expect a black or asian senator to do something differently than a white senator--then it is entirely rational for individual voters to prefer representatives of their own race. And in a white-majority society like the U.S., where minorities are geographically distributed amongst a white majority, that means that almost all legislators will be white. Any effort to rebalance that racial distribution would be in tension with the will and self interest of the voters.

What does "racial and gender makeup of the country" even mean? Should use the idiotic government definition of "AAPI" that bundles Samoans with Japanese? Or that considers Afghanis white but Pakistanis Asian? It's idiotic.

Hispanic immigration to the U.S. has been relatively low human capital (mostly poorer, blue collar workers). The average NAEP and SAT scores of black Americans are over a standard deviation below Asians. You're willing to significantly hurt the productivity and efficiency of government because having racial representation gives you warm and fuzzies? If people like you were in charge of government, we would be South Africa in less than a year.

The non-custodial party can claim they never signed, and when the custodial party produces evidence of IP address and timestamp, the non-custodial party may have a credible argument that they are faked and the person asserting those authenticated details has the motive and means to fake them.

That argument is much harder to assert with something like DocuSign because it is unlikely DocuSign would put their business on the line to fake someone's signature.

I'm not saying repudiation based on custody of the e-signature platform is a winning argument, but it's something to consider before self-hosting if you are going to use the platform to sign your own contracts.

The fundamental challenge here is that there's no way to tell, based on a the signature alone, which signatures are "valid" and which are "forged"; they're not cryptographic signatures. And getting cryptographic signatures for lay people is apparently too hard to do, outside of Estonia's digital citizenship initiatives.

It might be neat if the big guys agreed on an OIDC extension that let you piggyback text to be affirmed by the user. Cryptographic proof that jane.doe@gmail.com saw text with hash H at time T and chose "Accept".

To cheat, the party hosting it would probably have to forge signatures for everyone after the disputed signature.

Severance clauses say that if any part of the terms are struck down for any reason, the rest of the agreement stays in effect.

By banning severance clauses, companies would be forced to provide reasonable terms. Because if they put anything unconscionable anywhere in the agreement, the entire agreement will be struck down on the grounds of unconscionability.

But when terms are imposed on someone who is never represented by counsel when accepting them, I cannot see even a theoretical reason to not void them, especially when another part of the contract is struck down for unconscionability.

I stand behind my proposal, but I'll re-frame it: severance clauses should be unenforceable against an unrepresented party when any part of the contract was struck down on the grounds of unconscionability.

This policy, which I promise I have considered in some detail over the last decade, would go a long way to making contracts between parties of uneven bargaining power more fair overall.

1. Computer programming, although I was very young. I learned by checking out a book on BASIC from my public library in the '90s. Thankfully, my parents noticed and sent me to computer camp after that.

2. Parliamentary procedure. I learned through active participation in student government when I was in college. There really is no other way to learn it well without being a part of an assembly that uses (and often misuses) it.

3. More recently, accounting, bookkeeping, and basic federal income taxation to support my parents' small business. I learned through books I purchased. One was called "Bookkeeping made easy" and another was something like "Accounting in 100 pages or less". Tax I learned through this book published under the name JK Lasser that goes into detail on taxation. I used to go to Barnes & Noble and read the JK Lasser book to escape from my graduate school studies... which should tell you something about how much I enjoyed grad school.

I haven't published anything in a couple years, but I plan for that to change!

You can go the SPA route and use something like Django Rest Framework with React, but then you need to build API endpoints for basic plumbing like authentication that often doesn't warrant an API. And you lose the use of a lot of the batteries-included features of frameworks like Django.

If there were an ergonomic way to integrate React components into specific areas of the DOM tree rendered by Django templates and a sensible way to pass information into props from Django, I'd love to use a mature framework like React over things like htmx.

In the PHP world, you can get a simplest of servers from any host, upload the files and you are up and running. With P/D, well, it's a lot of work.

I have developed this opinion that, while useful, Django's SQLite and runserver approach for getting up and running quickly actually is detrimental. To run a real site you have to break all of that, deal with static content, etc., etc. I could also argue that the default directory structure, while simple, it is also detrimental when moving to production.

In other words, sometimes I feel it would be far better if P/D initial setup was closer to a canonical installation that could be run on any server with something as close as possible to a simple FTP file transfer (just like PHP).

One can always make things more complex (multiple servers, load balancers, etc.). However, I truly believe the P/D ecosystem is seriously missing the point when not delivering a 5-minute install that actually is a basic production-ready install on any server.

Have things changed at all in this regard over the last couple of years?

But, at least to me, ease of deployment is less of a concern once it's going. And since I stick to one hosting provider and only have a handful of applications I maintain, its not something that crosses my mind until I spin up a new Django application which happens only rarely.

I was hoping Vercel would be their spiritual successor, back when they were known as Zeit and allowed running arbitrary containers at the edge, but alas they pivoted to focus only on the JS platform. That said, IMO Next.js is the closest thing to modern day PHP in terms of filesystem-based routing and "write code on a page, render it at the same URL."

For Python, we run our services in containers using some custom images, and build the code from a monorepo using a combination of Pants and Poetry. For smaller or more focused projects, I think Google Cloud Run is quite nice, since it supports the Buildpack Spec and is in many ways a successor to Google AppEngine.

And everyone is panicking.

Your words are almost the same as what the CEO of SVB said, and then immediately the VCs panicked, telling their portfolio companies to withdraw from SVB.

> Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group and Evolve Bank & Trust®; Members FDIC.

This is something I've noted in a number of different situations --- not just business or financial situations, though those would be among them.