Vincent

The licensing fee you mention is purposely fuzzy

I mean, depending on what you mean by "purposely", I just think there's no good way in general to determine the exact worth of the use of a trademark.

The restricted assets remain the same as last year: a “tax reserve fund” established in 2005 for a portion of the revenue the Mozilla Foundation received that year from the search engine providers. As noted last year, the IRS has opened an audit of the Mozilla Foundation.

Since the Corporation was founded on August 3, 2005 - this might've been the reason? Before the Corporation existed, the Foundation had to receive the money from the search engine providers directly (and the "tax reserve fund" sounds like creative accounting to hold on to that money, potentially leading to the audit), whereas later, the Corporation could hold on to it and pay taxes over it like a regular corporation does.

I’m a Mozilla fan, but I’m not a fan of income inequality, and Mozilla is contributing to it.

I'm with you here, and I'm not saying that the ratio CEO pay:employee pay is a good one. All I'm saying is that the money used to fund the CEO pay could not have been used to fund Foundation projects like Common Voice, as far as I'm aware.

AFAIK the only way money flows from the Corporation to the Foundation is by the Co paying royalties to the Foundation for the use of the Firefox trademark. Obviously exactly how that number is determined is a little fuzzy, but I don't think it (legally) can be just any number - it has to be justified somewhat. In any case, the Corporation is not short of money, so if the Foundation wanted more money to flow from it to the Foundation, a shortage of money due to CEO pay is not the reason.

(You are definitely right in the sense that Co money could be used to fund more Co projects. Those are not the same initiatives that would be funded by donations to the Foundation though, as money doesn't flow from it to the Co. Think Common Voice, MozFest, lobbying, Privacy Not Included...)

They wouldn't. The Corporation is a separate entity, I believe for tax reasons, allowing them to hold more money. I don't think that it's allowed to use it as a loophole to avoid regulations that apply to foundations, while still using that money to fund Foundation projects.

Hehe, I can be more explicit: why would Chromium "resist" MV3 when the Chromium developers are the ones pushing it?

The spirit of Christmas future.

Yeah the latter definitely sounds excessive. As for "no argument needed", I can tell you that even if no argument is needed, that doesn't mean that students won't go for one :P

Slovakia, I don't know, but the Netherlands not really. The one party that might want to veto it, while the biggest in parliament, only ("only") got 20% of the votes. If they get to govern (which is not set in stone yet), they'll have to do so in a coalition with other parties who would not let that happen.

Identifying the breach requires unanimity (excluding the state concerned), but sanctions require only a qualified majority.

Wait, how does this work? Can sanctions be instated without identifying a country as being in breach? Or is unanimity first required, and only after that, the majority can decide what the sanction is?

Phones now are a way more important part of people's (and especially teenagers') lives than they were back then. And they're often also used to support lessons.

the rules for the 100% shouldn’t be made because 10% can’t self regulate.

Unfortunately that's hard to avoid, because those 10% will disturb lessons and take up the teacher's attention, thereby negatively affecting the other students.

Are the teachers supposed to do extra work to ensure no teen had a cell phone?

It's way easier for a teacher to take away a phone that disturbs a lesson when there are not supposed to be phones in the first place, than have to argue about exceptions and limits to the rules every time.

I agree and sympathise with your overall philosophy, but I'm also conscious of the practical limits, unfortunately.

I guess the point of my argument isn't about whether you should or shouldn't condemn the specific action, but whether it should or should not be legal and, if not, what the punishment should be. That, at least, should be consistent, because the government response should be proportionate to the inconvenience, so if you believe your cause outweighs the inconvenience, then it should also outweight a proportionate response.

One especially helpful mental trick is to imagine you actually believe what someone you disagree with says that they believe. For example, I don't believe that actual lizards control the country and systematically rape children, but if I did... Well, obviously that belief would justify quite a lot.