We had the same experience going ~800mi in a day (each way; so we did this twice). We also had 3 kids in the car, so 5 people total... or to put it another way, approximately 500% more people in our EV than the big SUVs driving next to us.
A guy at one stop in TX was in a huge Excursion and was walking his dog near the charger, laughed and said "you're going to be here a while." We were in and out before he was. The FUD is extremely strong still. Our drive (CO to North TX) has to be one of the least populated (and anti-EV) drives in America and there was still no range or charge speed anxiety.
My attorney friends tell me that the FTC doesn't really have the ability to do this, since contract law is part of state law. (My poor paraphrasing, not theirs.)
I've been surprised I haven't seen this mentioned on social media or in the news. Are my friends wrong, or are people celebrating because this is just a step in the right direction even if it may not do anything yet?
> FTC doesn't really have the ability to do this, since contract law is part of state law
The federal government can absolutely regulate both employment and contract law. (Merger agreements are contracts. The FTC was established to block bad mergers.)
Whether the FTC can do this is untested. But that’s more a Chevron issue than a federal powers one.
Relying on a Chevron argument is not particularly wise given the pending Supreme Court cases Relentless Inc. v. Department of Commerce and Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo where the Court is expected to overturn Chevron:
Yup, and the motivation is explicitly to go after unelected “administrative state” technocrats legislating by decree… such as through exactly what they’re doing here.
Unelected technocrats legislating by decree is the purview of the Supreme Court not the FTC, so sayeth the majority of current Supreme Court justices. I imagine a bunch of stuff is about to break since elected officials cannot pass jack shit in this hyper-partisan era.
> Where in Article I Section 8 does the Constitution grant that power?
The Commerce Clause, when interpreted expansively — as federal courts have largely done. (We'll see what happens with the 6-3 conservative majority of this SCOTUS incarnation.)
Generally federal law will preempt state law. See the Court's decisions regarding California's attempt to ban arbitration agreements in employment contracts.
Now, that doesn't mean the Supreme Court won't come up with their own hot take, but at some point appeals and district courts are just going to say no when they send a case back.
What is the Supreme Court going to do? Federal judges can only be removed by impeachment of the House and conviction of the Senate. The Supreme Court has no power to enforce its decisions.
Jackson was VERY vocal about his disapproval for the Marshall Supreme Court.
The obligations imposed by the ruling within Worcester v. Georgia was that states (specifically Georgia) could not enact and enforce regulations on Reservations and Native American land because of pre-existing treaties. It was never claimed that the quote is about what decisions were made with regards to Jackson; it was about what decisions were made for Georgia, and that Jackson had no intent to enforce them.
Jackson was very much complacent to Georgia's continued intent to regulate, and later remove, Native Americans from their designated land.
The odds of the conservative activism SCOTUS siding with employees and COTUS (bought off by corporate lobbyists) passing a worker-friendly prohibition on noncompetes are both zero. OTOH, it's not outside the realm of possibility that COTUS might pass a federal law superseding laws in California, Colorado, Illinois, Oregon, Nevada, Washington state, and Washington DC to roll back states rights favoring workers. Similar state bills in NY and NJ died in committee in 2022.
> There is widespread bipartisan support for noncompetes. NY, a bastion of liberal politics still overwhelmingly refuses to make noncompetes illegal.
NY Governor Hochul vetoed it because she is a hack politician and yielded to Wall Street pressure. Politicians with a spine (or constitution, if you prefer) are in short supply.
> But in recent months, the legislation had come under fierce attack by Wall Street and top business groups in New York. They argued the agreements are necessary to protect investment strategies and keep highly-paid workers from leaving their companies with prized inside information and working for an industry rival.
That's the rule rather than the exception in the US as politicians go. Campaign finance reform failed because most (not all) politicians are indeed crooks who accept gold bars from foreign governments, embezzle from their campaign to buy luxury goods, or pay hush money to porn stars.
At which level(s), or do you mean voters? Voter sentiment has essentially no bearing on public policy, and it was even proven with data in a Princeton study confirming what we already knew. [0]
If I might quote Gore Vidal: There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party … and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt — until recently … and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties.
Partisanship tribalism is a divide-and-conquer gambit that has been largely successful in keeping Americans fighting each other counterproductively and voting against their own interests.
Chances are extremely high that the current Supreme Court nullifies or greatly restricts Chevron. These kind of announcements are fuel for the fire and are likely to accelerate its demise.
They will kill this faster than they killed the COVID vaccine mandate. Govt. agencies can’t make laws, even if we may agree with them (I actually do in this case). However this isn’t the role of an unelected government agency.
This is an unfortunately common response that often misses the point: U.S. government agencies do indeed have the power to make decisions with the force of law. Rule-making is a valid authority (subject to legal review of course)
There are two cases in the Supreme Court right now that are expected to rule on this, overturning the ability for regulatory authorities to make rules covering things not explicitly stated in law.
I'm not familiar with those cases, but it seems to me that if such rules go in favor of "agencies only get to clarify where explicitly allowed" then there will a lot of undesirable consequences. Assuming legal ambiguities remain, with less administrative power, there will be less clarity! Less clarify on application, administration, and enforcement.
Perhaps the courts will have to step in clarify? But this won't solve the administrative issue. If agencies don't have "agency" to do their jobs well, that would be ironic.[1] Perhaps Congress will be motivated to write better laws?[2]
[1] I'm deeply suspicious of efforts to undermine agencies under the cover of "only Congress makes law"... I suspect is it often a guise of undermining the laws one party does not like. Or, sometimes, even as an effort to undermine the idea of regulation at all. The latter point is hardly hidden -- it is central to a lot of right-leaning rhetoric which seems to boil down to "regulation bad, freedom good". This level of reasoning would have Milton Friedman rolling in his grave, as some regulation _provably_ helps reduce market failures. (And even center-left people typically want markets to work well.) But I digress.
[2] Hah. The idea that we would give Congresspeople and their staff even more responsibility to specify laws _without_ an associated increase in their competence for those areas where the law applies strikes me as foolhardy.
It’s called Chevron deference / doctrine, and yes the consequences would be far reaching. Whether the net benefit is good or bad is largely a subjective matter of political opinion.
> Whether the net benefit is good or bad is largely a subjective matter of political opinion.
Without knowing the intention of the author above, when I see the phrase "subjective matter of political opinion", it makes me wonder if it serves as a "semantic stop sign" or "thought-terminating cliché"[2].
WRT net benefits... it is one thing to have differing predictions about what will happen and quite another to assess each possible scenario.
I recognize differences of opinion and want a society that protects the freedoms to have them. However, to me, opinions matter much less than reasonable claims based on evidence. Luckily, when reading [1], there are many testable claims embedded in the arguments of the various justices.
For example, in the cases of an ambiguous law, who is better suited to understand the ambiguity... agency experts or judges? Which groups have better knowledge of the domain? Which have experience in engaging in sustained discussions with the industries they are regulating? Agencies have an objective advantage for both.
Here is my point: say we go through the, say, top twenty arguments and we dig into the details. I predict that most opinions one hears at the outset from the public don't survive contact with reality. Those opinions have to get tossed. What remains? Nuanced assessments of better and worse scenarios. By making these assessments more nuanced, the hope is we find workable and sensible compromises.
We live in a representative democracy where the powers of the government are constrained by constitutional law to be specific and enumerated, and aside from common-law precedent derive from a mandate by the people. Yet it is increasingly the case that the actual rules which citizens and corporations are required to follow are being set not by elected representatives but by unelected bureaucrats of government agencies, in some cases where there isn't even relevant and specific congressional authorization for action. In the case of TFA, the abolition of non-competes is something I can be 100% behind... but where is the specific law passed by congress authorizing the FTC to make and enforce this determination?
One side will say with some justification that these rules make sense and are definitely a net benefit, and we should expect this to be the case because the agency is run by technocrat experts who evaluate these policy decisions for a living and do a far better job than we can expect of even the best congressional staffers.
The other side will point out that it's a very fine line between the current, mostly harmless rule-setting actions of benevolent agency experts, and an unelected deep state that can become a tool of fascist ideologues. Our freedom is dependent on safeguarding our democracy, and that means no rules that don't trace their core to laws passed by elected representatives. These people would point to the disastrous actions of the DEA and FDA, for example, which is currently waging war on ADHD patients via the artificial Adderall shortage, or Operation Choke Point (google it).
Where you fall on this debate is a subjective matter of political opinion. There are pros and cons to both sides.
> Our freedom is dependent on safeguarding our democracy, …
Yes, I agree.
> and that means no rules that don't trace their core to laws passed by elected representatives.
I think this is too strong of a claim. Why?
We live under many rules that don’t trace back to laws elected by elected representatives. Many of our laws descend from common law which predates representative democracy.
Not to mention that there are tremendous sources of power outside one’s governmental sphere that constrain our options, such as culture, corporations, and other governments. Whether one calls these “rules” or “constraints” is sort of beside the point when you focus on a society’s ability to respond to undesirable forces. This leads to how I would restate your claim…
Perhaps a more accurate statement would be this: freedom depends on mechanisms such that the people can drive policy.
Sorry for the typo. I meant "War means something, and it is not that". By "that" I mean the above claim that what the FDA is doing (or not doing) is some kind of war.
I don't mean to split hairs nor imply that I alone get to decide what words mean. But I do have good reasons to suggest that words matter and that we should pay attention to them.
I am saying that rational people seeking truth strive not to use phrases "waging war" in a spirit of rationally discussing an issue. The way it is used above doesn't shine light on the core issue. The phrase invites tribalism and gut reactions rather than reason.
At the very least, such a phrase (1) presumes intention; and (2) assigns blame. These are two additional claims beyond the claim of harm to people with ADHD. I think one can make a decent argument about how agencies with too much authority can cause harm without invoking the war metaphor. Invoking that metaphor makes it harder to discuss the issues that seems to be driving this (interesting) discussion. I would frame that issue broadly as: (A) To what degree do agencies have legal and rational authority to clarify ambiguous laws? (B) Given what we know about human nature and organizations, what are some possible downstream outcomes?
Again, I'm making the case that a sentence like "But people have different opinions", when offered in the sense of e.g. "and that's all we can really say about that" is a disservice to understanding. As I see it, we have much necessary work to do that has nothing to do with pointing to differences of opinion. I think we need more substantive truth-seeking. If we engage in that fully, yes, differences of opinion will remain, but they will likely be applied to more nuanced aspects of the issue. This would be a good thing. It would help us talk in clearer ways.
I hope you can see that I am not dismissing rational claims of harm. I am instead expressing concern about the rhetoric used.
If you find yourself disagreeing with me, it might help to know that (i) I generally push back against moral relativism. Also (ii) I don't assign moral worth to mere opinions. I assign moral worth to people and their well-being, not merely to any and all electrochemical fluctuations that we call thoughts and beliefs. To summarize, I respect the ability of people to have opinions, but I don't give those opinions some kind of fundamental moral weight.
Why? Many such opinions are unconnected with reality. Sometimes, they don't even make sense _for them_; i.e. for their own self-interest! Moreover, enlightened people who pay attention to their own thoughts can notice this -- it is not something I have to impose on them.
Stepping back (hopefully to clear the air), I hope you can see this: it is hard for others to tell when you are using a phrase sarcastically to criticize some other party's usage of the same phrase.
Aside: unfortunately, the use of "war" as in "war on drugs" often corresponds with armed conflict... though to my knowledge, this is not a recognized problem with amphetamine mixed salts.
I’m aware. I am hoping to persuade it is better to not abuse the word as well. How we choose to frame things can help promote useful conversation or hinder it.
I’m detecting an argument that “other people muddle words, so I can too”. Yikes. Can ain’t the same thing as should.
Maybe I should be more specific: The words you wrote can be easily read as a crackpot suggestion that the FDA is seeking to actively harm people with ADHD. (I write this now after having reread the source comment.)
Cancer doesn’t know we are at war with it; neither does poverty. There is no one we can kill to solve these problems. Instead, hopefully, we are seeking understanding of science and human nature so that we can reduce these problems.
Anyhow, I can’t tell if any of my main logical arguments have gotten through, which is a symptom of a bad conversation in my eyes at least. I don’t view this as a debate —- rather as a process of understanding.
For what it is worth, in my comments I am attempting to put aside any subjective assessment of the noncompete ban being good or bad. I am very interested in the rational basis for the FTC having the authority to do it (or not).
>For example, in the cases of an ambiguous law, who is better suited to understand the ambiguity...
"Understanding the ambiguity" is fine if we are talking about trying to figure out what was intended by the people who put the ambiguous phrases in. But the issue isn't about who can "understand" the ambiguity, it's about who's going to be making things up and giving the ambiguity as an excuse. Asking whether bureaucrats or judges are better at "understanding the ambiguity" is the wrong question--understanding something and doing it are very different things. They'd just understand that the law is supposed to be X, and give a spurious justification about it being Y instead anyway.
Your use of phrases like "thought-terminating cliche" makes you sound like a rationalist. In which case I hope you know what a quokka is. (For the uninitiated, a quokka is an animal that can't understand that someone might want to hurt it.) If someone has an agenda that is against your interests, having "better knowledge" and being "better suited to understand" and "having experience" just makes it easier for them to harm you.
Yes, I agree. Understanding the ambiguity is not the only criteria.
My comment two levels up was not a comprehensive assessment of the pros and cons of this policy issue. My goal was to highlight that while I recognize subjective opinions, I care about them relatively less until we fully pursue rational means of understanding.
It is wise to look at an argument with extra caution when you see the phrase “unelected government agency”.
There are (of course) valid powers available to agencies. The question is what powers are valid.
Beware the dark arts of rhetoric. I’m familiar with spotting this one because my constitutional law professor used it often. He helped us to see right through it.
Logic and argumentation should win, not words designed to scare or muddle.
Intellectually honest comments reveal their fundamental guiding moral and political philosophies, rather than painting a one sided picture.
Indeed. Government agencies are overseen by officers of the United States, appointed by the president with the advice and consent of the senate, typically to terms greater than the length of either a presidential to senate term.
Just like Judges.
The idea that courts are the only delegates of the elected representatives of the people who are allowed to figure out the nuances of how to carry out the democratically legislated responsibilities of government is a bit of a brainworm that has infected US politics and makes the Supreme Court a little too important.
The Supreme Court often dismisses cases for the entire reason that constitutionally it can't make laws. That's Congress's job. It's fair to be critical of how much Congress can punt its responsibility to a 4th branch of government with little oversight.
Kicking back a law because it's constitutionally not the business of government to have laws that say that, is very different than kicking back a law because while it is something upon which legislation could constitutionally be had, and the executive is acting in accordance with the law as written, the judiciary doesn't like the way in which the legislature chose to phrase how it delegated authority... that's a different story.
Executive agencies aren't a "fourth branch of government with little oversight", they're article II section 2 'departments' of the executive, established by law, and controlled by the president and appointed officers, with as much oversight as congress legislates to require, plus accountability to the courts for remaining within the bounds of their legal and constitutional authority.
The FTC is not an executive department. It is an independent agency. Though nominally considered part of the executive branch, it has been delegated Congress's authority while also been given intentionally limited executive oversight/control.
Personally, I feel Congress giving its authority to the executive branch breaks constitutional separation of powers period. Could Congress grant the President autocratic authority? SCOTUS says it has to give sufficient standards to delegate authority and inconsistently says yes or no to different attempts, but really what congressional standard did the FTC use to arrive at this (admittedly good) rule?
It’s not really a brainworm, it’s the fact that people see the government in radically different ways.
My view is that as long as there’s genuine consent, two parties agree to something, no one is coerced, both are of sound mind, two human beings should be able to enter into any contract you can imagine. It doesn’t matter if that’s Gay Marriage or a firearms transaction.
The role of government should only be to ensure that that both parties engaged fairly. The minute you want to start using the government to ban one thing or another based on some moral imperative, is the minute you stopped respecting the autonomy of other people and decided to force your morality on another through collective force.
How do you square that up though with the power differential in employer / employee relations? The employee has to work or be destitute. That gives employers a tremendous amount of power in any contract negotiation.
Coercion doesn't have to be a gun to your head. Every person in the workforce is under a pretty coercive force which is that without gainful employment you are going to go without housing, medicine, transportation, etc. Without any collusion on the part of the employers, the market works to select those employers who can create the contract conditions most favorable to profit production. We shouldn't be surprised that "favorable to profit production" and "disadvantaging the worker" are often closely aligned, every company would like to pay as little as possible for their input and get as much profit as possible out of their outputs. Labor, or Human Resource, as corporations like to call it, is an input and so there's a tremendous systemic pressure to craft contracts in the way that will get the maximum profit out of every employee.
Sure the employee didn't have to sign that unfair employment contract, they could have elected to sign one of hundreds of unfair employment contracts. The fact that they have a large variety of unfair contracts to select from doesn't on its own increase the fairness of the contract. The "collective force" of "you need money to operate in society" means that all workers are coerced to sign "the best deal they can get" which doesn't mean it's going to be a good deal or a fair deal for the worker, just the best that the market has.
The world consists of more than two people. It isn't just about them. Am I misunderstanding your point?
Many individuals care about society as a useful construct -- a construct that is not easily calculable from individual utilities. [1] This would suggest that even utilitarians should care about society -- unless they think they get to define what matters to their precious individuals. [2]
[1] Sure, one can say society is _causally_ derived from individual actions, but... (1) the derivation of what society looks like is not predictable enough for the time scales we care about; (2) individuals are influenced by society, as a matter of perception
[2] If I may attempt some satire, I wouldn't at all be surprised if some utilitarians are a sort of "mini-autocrat" at heart -- in the sense they get to decide what counts in every individual's utility function. e.g. "I value you, individuals!, yes I do!... but I get to tell you what really matters for your happiness! and after I do that I decree that the summation operator is how we put it all together!"
There’s not a better, more compact way to explain the problem. Congress, when they delegated powers to the FTC, did not envision them banning private non-compete agreements. It’s a non-trivial issue. Lawmakers weren’t stupid, non-competes existed at the time they formed the FTC. They had the power, the knowledge, and the intelligence to draft a law. They did not.
The burden of proof is on the Government to prove that Congress explicitly intended the agency to regulate this part of contract law. Like I said before, I personally support banning non-competes. But it has to be done legally. It has to be done within the constraints of a system of laws.
Ask your attorney friends if a farmer growing food on their own land to feed to their own animals is "interstate commerce", and ask them to explain that to you.
What I'm referring to here is Wickard v Filburn in which the Supreme Court ruled that a farmer growing food on his own land to feed to his own animals was participating in "interstate commerce" and could thus be regulated by the federal government.
This is a big part of why the federal government can control things like which plants you are allowed to grow in your home.
But when the FTC tries to regulate something like non-competes and protect average workers the corporate attorneys come out of the woodwork, "oh no, the federal government can't do that!"
Is it the same people? It seems like the current Supreme Court is very much against decisions like the weird farmer one and likely to roll such things back.
During the Federalist Revolution period of the the 90s, before Scalia got spooked by drug legalization, the court was definitely heading in the direction of reversing Wickard. Perhaps now that the court is willing to reverse big cases like Roe and Chevron (so it seems) it will also be willing to reverse Wickard.
The SCOTUS likes to decide things on the narrowest possible grounds. That means that if it wanted to reverse this rule it would want to find grounds relating to (3), which as you note it probably could not.
The court could still decide that this rule is a "major powers question" and so belongs to Congress. This would allow the court to not have to reach any question of whether the FTC has broad powers, whether the act that created the FTC is constitutional, or whether Wickard was correctly decided. Therefore it seems more likely that the court would do that -again, if it wanted to reverse the FTC here- than anything else.
Can you imagine if the court ruled the FTC to be unconstitutionally created? They wouldn't risk that chaos.
Congress established many parts of the executive branch. Nevertheless they remain part of the executive branch, a separate branch of government from Congress, and this distinction is legally important.
Your friend may recall that the FTC occasionally acts against "deceptive" conduct in the marketplace. If you read the relevant law, it also can act against "unfair" conduct.[1] Sometimes people forget there are two words there separated by "or".
This would be an example of an "unfair" practice, which mostly are about predation in the context of unequal bargaining position when litigated under "Little FTC Acts"[2]. I don't know offhand whether these similar laws have been used to achieve the same thing state-by-state, but the FTC rule meets the straight face test for sure. So, regardless of what happens next at the Federal level, this is about to become a white-hot area of litigation under state "Little FTC Acts".
Where I am, I know people who are under noncompetes that have a geographical clause. You can’t leave to join a competitor within X miles. In my part of the country, that would include at least three states (maybe more), but other locations would include many more.
So, yeah, seems like at least those non-competes impacts interstate commerce.
The reason those geographical clauses are in those contracts is because many states have ruled that non-competes are illegal unless they are limited in some ways to be "reasonable", and one common way states courts measure this is by ensuring that they are limited to something that might be a reasonable 'business area' that the company competes in. Corporate lawyers typically write in the exact radius that state courts have historically enforced into their non-competes to avoid them being disqualified for being too broad.
"Interstate commerce" on the other hand, just means any sort of business activity that crosses state lines. Basically every business engages in interstate commerce, just because commerce requires many interstate activities, like using the internet, or accepting electronic payments, or ordering supplies made in a different state.
No, I’m not conflating them. I do appreciate why they are written with geographical clauses, but I have always found it odd (and probably unenforceable).
I’m just saying that non-competes like this should be regulated under Federal authority because they explicitly cover geographic areas that include multiple states. That’s in addition to the impacts on “interstate commerce” proper (which as you said is basically all commerce).
Said another way: I find the argument that non-competes should be allowed or disallowed under the authority of only state laws to be lacking. If a contract in state A dictates what you can do in state B, it’s an interstate issue and Federal law could (should?) be involved.
I think you're putting the cart before the horse. First of all, basically any company with a noncompete clause is already doing significant interstate commerce. And if a company is arguing that a neighboring state is within their area of competition, they're implying the same.
And regardless, federal power to regulate commerce hinges on actual interstate commerce taking place. A contract between two entities in one state, under the laws of that one state, that merely mentions another state, isn't interstate commerce.
If a noncompete agreement between a former employer, and a person who resides in a particular state, purports to prevent that person from taking up an employment contract with another employer - including by one who is located in a different state… well that seems like that could be an unfair restraint on interstate commerce.
The federal government has the constitutional right to regulate interstate commerce, and 100 years ago it discovered that all commerce is now interstate commerce, followed by the supremacy clause which is selectively applied (ie. not for scheduled drugs, but for everything else)
This Supreme Court could be friendly to invalidating that expansive interpretation though
so, big mismatch from the executive branch / agencies with the judicial branch which could completely warp our relationship with the Federal Government and what we find familiar in our way of life
But I dont think its as simple as saying “contract law is part of state law”
The Supreme Court doesn't have any power to enforce its decisions. District and Appeals Courts could just say no to their decisions and there isn't much they can do.
When district and appeals courts do what they like, the SCOTUS can reverse every one of their decisions. The inferior courts can then go on a spree of incorrectly deciding every relevant case and delay the final judgement by years, but then the SCOTUS could just speed up its process of reversing every such decision by the inferior courts. The SCOTUS also has options for removing judges from certain types of cases, IIRC. It's a game that the SCOTUS invariably wins in the end -- unless it gets packed.
There has been times in the past where the other branches ignored the Supreme Courts rulings. They cannot call out troops. The only people that give them power are the other branches that enforce those rulings, but they could decide not to.
I think if we got to the point that we could not rely on Supreme Court rulings being upheld without the mobilization of troops, we will already be in a situation of fundamental institutional collapse anyway, and questions of constitutionality and legality of anything will become moot as we descend into a raw state of nature.
I’m not a constitutional scholar, but I’ll say this —- there’s a reason this one is debated. It seems to me (with around 70% probability) that there are many possible constructions that could emerge which would more or less conform to the (rather contingent) bar for Supreme Court decisions.
I say contingent because the history of the Supreme Court is far from a deductive process of pure interpretation.
I recognize the utility of the Supreme Court while dismissing any grandiose claims of objective morality or obvious legality. It is a body of people after all.
I was charitably hoping they were referring to employee stock options where their existence is primarily due to tax regulations of granting RSUs of illiquid company shares, hence IRS
but yes, not at all relevant
its hard for me to understand why people get the agency acronyms mixed up and interchanged. I can sort of see it, but I’ve just never seen people be so confidently wrong outside of perhaps the eastern medicine crowd.
Not agreeing, but just posting the other side of the argument from the US Chamber of Commerce. Not a fan of legislation by fiat, maybe this will prompt Congress to do something. USCoC said they will sue...
>The Chamber and its membership are strongly opposed to the Proposed Rule. It would categorically ban nearly all noncompete agreements—regardless of individual circumstances, such as a worker’s skill, job responsibilities, access to competitively sensitive and proprietary information, bargaining power, or compensation—and require that organizations rescind all existing agreements and provide notice to affected workers of such rescission. Such a proposal fails to recognize that noncompete agreements can serve vital procompetitive business and individual interests—such as protecting investments in research and development, promoting workforce training, and reducing free-riding—that cannot be adequately protected through other mechanisms such as trade-secret suits or nondisclosure agreements. For centuries, courts have recognized the procompetitive benefits of noncompete agreements and balanced those benefits against any negative costs imposed by particular noncompete agreements. As perhaps acknowledged by the Commission’s request for comments on narrower alternatives, the Commission’s categorical ban would sweep in millions of noncompete agreements that pose no harm to competition, and in fact benefit the U.S. business community, economy, workers, and consumers.
> Because they would then trade those like carbon offsets or find away to ignore them/workaround them for a market advantage.
Isn't that the point?
I'm not arguing (or not arguing) for this solution, but charging people the cost of cleanup and allowing them to "ignore them/workaround them for a market advantage" seems like an improvement on the status quo? Because the local government collecting the tax would now have funds to put toward the solution. This is classic internalizing of what were externalities.
tinyssh is great. One use case for it that people may not know about: using it during Linux boot so you can remotely unlock encrypted drives. I have a headless NAS server that uses dm-crypt/LUKS under ZFS. When I update my kernel/ZFS I remotely reboot the server, wait a few seconds, and then ssh into a tinyssh powered encryption key prompt to unlock the drives. (I am immediately booted from ssh, as tinyssh exits.) I can then ssh again a few seconds later and I'm hitting openssh on a fully booted machine that wasn't able to open the drives without my intervention.
All fair, I guess I just landed on mkinitcpio-tinyssh first and it was my introduction to the idea, and only took a few seconds to setup. I'll switch to openssh if I ever have issues, but this has been working fine for many years, so I'm no rush.
Question: when remotely unlock the boot disk via ssh, how do you make sure the boot has not been compromised and that you are not just sending the password to the bad guys?
At some point I wanted to do something with utrablue [1], to work over network rather than Bluetooth, but then it was in go and I got lazy suddenly :)
> how do you make sure the boot has not been compromised and that you are not just sending the password to the bad guys?
In my case, I can't. This is a NAS in my house and this is mostly to prevent me from having to go to another room and plug in a monitor and keyboard. (Also, I've done this from across the country after a power outage.)
The threat vectors I'm protecting against are I guess mostly theft of the entire machine, or forgetting to wipe the drives when I eventually toss them out. Mostly, it's just fun practice because I'm a nerd and every drive should be encrypted.
For my use-case, the auto-unlock-by-polling-a-specific-LAN-IP linked in this thread would probably be fine, for example.
Well you can always drill holes in the platter, or hit them with a strong magnet, or just separate them and toss them in the trash. Unless you're fighting the NSA, you can probably get away with enough physical destruction to make recovery challenging.
In theory this should be a perfect match for TPM-powered secure booting: your machine starts every time with a clean TPM, which validates the BIOS into it, which validates the bootloader into it, which validates the kernel into it, which derives an RSA private key from the resulting TPM state. If an attacker compromises it, it'll present the wrong host key and you get a big fat error message.
Mandos tries to mitigate this problem by periodically checking that the rebooting server is still up. Exactly how this is done is configurable, but by default it uses ssh-keyscan to check if the server is up and using the SSH server key from its normal encrypted root file system. If a server is ever down too long (configurable, default 5 minutes), the Mandos server will “disable” that server in its server list, and not provide the password to that server anymore.
The idea is that you should configure the timeout to be long enough to allow for a normal kernel panic and reboot, but hopefully short enough that it would be hard for anyone to compromise the server in that time. It’s not a perfect solution, but it’s the best anyone has come up with as far as I know.
The server itself may have been physically breached, and if so you can’t trust anything. But, if your host key matches, you should be confident that at least you’re logging into the correct machine (there was no IP takeover).
True, but in that case, I think it would still be difficult to swap in a completely new system into the network (with your IP) with your old private host key.
(Without a physical breach... if that happens, all bets are off).
What are the best options to solve this problem? It’s a hard problem imho for most threat models.
If the booting machine has been compromised and i use my usb connected keyboard to enter the full disk encryption key I would run into the exact same issues, no?
The ultrablue project I linked to solve exactly this problem, with TPM and a smartphone, but it's targeted at unlocking your laptop and uses Bluetooth to communicate with the smartphone for unlocking - and I don't want to have Bluetooth on my NAS ^^
Theoretically you could use secure boot with custom keys to ensure that your boot chain is not modified and you could use TPM for SSH host keys storage to ensure that it's not possible to copy them.
I have disk encryption on a remote server on cheap low-asssurance hosting, and I do it so I don't have to worry about what happens when the disks are recycled. If I could (easily) automate entering the key on boot, I would (but I'm running FreeBSD, so Linux solutions don't help). But I don't need to reboot often and the hardware is fairly reliable, so eh.
This is for my personal hosting which if someone wants to take over, I guess I'd be more curious than upset.
Usually I use DropBear for this. Do you know if one is necessarily better than the other? DropBear I think is what RHEL docs recommend for remote boot disk decryption.
IIUC whether that is secure depends on your threat model. For example, how good is automated unlocking compared to unencrypted drives in a homelab setup?
I guess it depends on your use case. If you rent a bunch of bare-metal servers at a remote location and you want restarts after updates to be fully automated, Clevis seems like a way to do. The whole idea is that once you cancel the server, you just remove it from Tang's list and the next customer who gets those hard drives cannot read them.
AFAICT, systemd-cryptenroll requires that you have a USB key plugged into the machine, so someone with physical access would have to insert them at the start and remove when you're done with the server. With Clevis+Tang everything is software.
The documentation for Cryptsetup SSH unlocker states “To further limit the attack possibility, you should use monitoring and possibly disable SSH unlocker in the case of unexpected behavior.” Mandos has a built-in feature to deal with this, enabled by default.
(Again, disclosure: I am the co-author of Mandos.)
To maybe help defuse: it looks to me like dntrkv was actually agreeing with you (and talking about dereg's post), but it seems like you misunderstood, and then alex_young probably misread you as being dereg given your reply.
This is a great list. I'm going to ride your coat tails with some of my favorites. I'm a father of 3 little ones, FWIW.
- Take all parenting advice with a grain of salt, everyone's sample size is too low.
- (Related) Each kid is very different. It's kind of wild how different they are and mine are still very little.
- By default you're likely to raise your kids as the average of how you and your spouse were raised. If either of you didn't like your upbringing you probably want to consider some kind of outside help to change your course sooner rather than later.
- OP said "It hasn't really sunk in yet" -- I just wanted to say this was the same for me. For all three kids! I was aware my wife was pregnant but it never really clicked until the baby was there.
- Months 1-3 were my least favorite. A tiny infant is a sort of alien, and very fragile. Somewhere around 3-6 months they'll look at you and smile and your heart will melt.
^ Take all parenting advice with a grain of salt, everyone's sample size is too low.
100% concur and well said!
^ Months 1-3 were my least favorite. A tiny infant is a sort of alien, and very fragile. Somewhere around 3-6 months they'll look at you and smile and your heart will melt.
Can't remember if it was 3, 6, 9 or 12 months but yeah. I've always told soon-to-be parents not to be surprised that it doesn't feel like a real person on day 1. And that the first 6-12 months are largely janitorial.
A guy at one stop in TX was in a huge Excursion and was walking his dog near the charger, laughed and said "you're going to be here a while." We were in and out before he was. The FUD is extremely strong still. Our drive (CO to North TX) has to be one of the least populated (and anti-EV) drives in America and there was still no range or charge speed anxiety.