badgers

"We want to be clear what’s at stake here: the government is suggesting that FedEx assume criminal responsibility for the legality of the contents of the millions of packages that we pick up and deliver every day. We are a transportation company – we are not law enforcement. We have no interest in violating the privacy of our customers. We continue to stand ready and willing to support and assist law enforcement. We cannot, however, do the job of law enforcement ourselves." [1]

Ultimately two years later the DOJ dropped the charges against Fedex.

"In court on Friday, [U.S. District Court Judge Charles] Breyer said FedEx was 'factually innocent.' He said the company repeatedly asked the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration to give it the name of a customer that was shipping illegal drugs so it could stop working with the person, but the agency was either unwilling or unable to do so." [2]

If this plays out similarly, FedEx will use a similar blacklist mechanism to comply with the law, but is suing right now to prevent any backlash that will inevitably occur when the blacklist doesn't contain an illegal entity and it's discovered there was a shipment that slipped through the cracks.

"Export restriction rules “essentially deputize FedEx to police the contents of the millions of packages it ships daily even though doing so is a virtually impossible task, logistically, economically, and in many cases, legally,” it said in a filing. ... FedEx responded by saying publicly that it would deliver all products made by Huawei to addresses other than those of Huawei and affiliates placed on the U.S. national security blacklist." (from the main article in this thread)

In 1995 there were fears of a recession due to the Fed increasing rates further: "Indeed, if there is a risk to what is generally seen as a solid if not glowing outlook for the stock market this year, it is that in its effort to rein in growth, the Fed might push interest rates too high, forcing the economy into recession." [1]

The Fed put the brakes on raising the Fed Funds rate in 1995 [2]. Subsequently from 1995 - 2001 the S&P 500 index went from 465 to 1425 [3]. I wonder what made 1995 different than 2018. Being in tech, one obvious thing leaps out which is increased investment in capital related to the commercialization of the Internet, the dot com boom and bubble [4]. In 2018, is there a new opportunity to spur growth again, or will 2018 be another 2006, 2000, 1989, etc?

> I have a few qualms with this app: > 1. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.