Deep technical adjudication is exactly what judges in higher courts are equipped to do. No matter the domain, they are presented with tortuous technical language and jargon about a specialized topic (the statute), a collection of nuanced facts, and two or more carefully organized logical arguments, prepared by the parties' capable lawyers, about why those facts activate or don't activate this or that clause of the statute.
Probably a lot? Judges are perfectly capable of learning technical topics and are pretty smart in general. The judge who presided over Google vs Oracle taught himself to program. Some may be old but don't forget the people who invented the internet are 70s+ right now.
That's a good question. Tech issues are tough, which is why you see lots of friend of the court briefs to explain it.
For FCC matters around net neutrality, there's generally two courts: the DC Circuit Court of Appeals and then the Supreme Court.
And, yes, they deal with it and have clerks to help.
For instance, in the biggest decision about net neutrality, the BrandX case, where the FCC was allowed to determine that Cable companies were Title I information services, DNS is mentioned 13 times in the majority decision.
And if you find that interesting, I recommend reading the Scalia dissent, where he said that it's totally clear that broadband is a Title II service, and letting the FCC say otherwise was wickedly wrong.
I would say yes, but I'm not sure I could articulate my argument very well. I don't think that they explicitly care about it, i.e. "control of our employee is $x which we accept as a cost of doing business". I think it's more indirect, more secondary, like it's a result of other more surface-level concerns. For example, "we need employees in the office so that we can make sure they are working so that we are ensuring we get our money's worth", which possibly has effects that mirror the 'nebulous notion of control' we're talking about. I think your comment is correct in a literal sense. Doubtful anyone is sitting at the top of a tower rubbing their hands together, scheming, trying to establish/maintain prison-like employment conditions.
I'm unsure what the disgruntlement is with these efforts. Job requirements can be modified to accommodate the desires and needs of a labor force. That is what regulation, laws, and unions are for.
Jobs that must be done in person will still be done in person, jobs that can be done remotely may be empowered to be done remotely. Employment is a negotiation, not edict from nobility. Maybe you have to prove the job can't be done remotely as an employer. That is a reasonable requirement.
I guess the first disgruntlement is with the the idea of that being the purpose of regulation, law, and unions.
Unions makes total sense, but not regulation or law.
If a company wants to pay a worker to stand idle in a building to drive up realestate value, that should not be a question of law or regulation.
>Jobs that must be done in person will still be done in person, jobs that can be done remotely may be empowered to be done remotely.
This is already reverting to the assumtion that the "job" is something different than what the employer dictates. Part of the job can be to meet in person.
Having to prove the job cant be done remotely is already redifinging "the job" as something other than what the employer wants. Who exactly is running the company here?
I don't mean "socializing the costs" in the sense that the public sector is paying for it, but the employees are. It's a common strategy to spread your externalities and costs among your customers, employees, and the general public (see: large multi-national banks and automakers getting bought out by governments).
> the point of the job ends up being to keep people employed and pay taxes
I don’t think this thesis holds any water. Companies don’t care about keeping people employed and paying taxes on such a micro scale that they’re willing to bite the bullet and hire people because they know it’s for some greater good of societal stability.
They do keep people employed in useless jobs though. Sometimes hiring shuts down, sometimes they do purges of useless jobs, but it's the larger population that shows the trend.
I think the notion that these jobs are useless is wrong. Most of the categories in bullshit jobs are just straight up not bullshit. Most jobs are useful.
Things like lawyers, secretaries, corporate compliance officers generally provide value.
Things like middle management are more dubious, but I think they generally do provide value.
