On Mon, 12 Nov 2018, Aris Merchant wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 12, 2018 at 5:08 PM Kerim Aydin <ke...@u.washington.edu> wrote:
> > On Mon, 12 Nov 2018, Aris Merchant wrote:
> > > The sentence that you're quoting doesn't "allow" Agora to do
> > > anything, it just ensures that those conditions always return true if
> > > Agora is the Auctioneer.
> >
> > This doesn't make sense at all to me. Agora is the Auctioneer, and if
> > it's this statement that makes it "return TRUE" that Agora CAN transfer
> > something, then it's what makes it TRUE that Agora CAN transfer
> > something. It's a tautology. You can't "return TRUE" without making
> > something true.
>
> If the sentence said that "Agora CAN do anything", then that would be
> correct. That's not what it says though. It says "For this purpose, a
> contract CAN do whatever it could do if it were a person in addition
> to what it can do as a contract, and Agora CAN do anything." What does
> the "for this purpose" mean? I think it means that the "if the
> auctioneer CAN transfer the items in that lot to that winner at will"
> is ignored when Agora is the Auctioneer. It's almost as if it were
> changed to say "if Agora is the Auctioneer, or if the auctioneer CAN
> transfer the items in that lot to that winner at will". So Agora is
> exempt from the requirement.
I read it as "for this purpose" meaning "for the purpose of transferring
the items to the winner" so if you say that Agora CAN do anything for
that purpose, you're saying that Agora CAN transfer items to the winner.
So that's a point of disagreement I suppose.
> It's almost as if it were
> changed to say "if Agora is the Auctioneer, or if the auctioneer CAN
> transfer the items in that lot to that winner at will".
I disagree that this is an equivalent parsing to the actual text. But
in any case, we're both agreeing that that clause in particular does not
confer transferrability onto zombies (me because it's power-1, you because
you don't read is as being enabling at all). So this point is a bit
moot.
