catreadingabook

I’m against forced birth, but have to point out that there is the argument, whether realistic or not, that the parent can always give the baby to the foster care system once it’s born, so their obligation would be limited to 9 months total.

Personally what I take issue with is the inconsistency of forced-birth laws in the absence of comparable forced-labor laws. In a world of ideal policy, maybe we as a society might agree that a person should be obligated to sacrifice their time and health for the sake of preserving or creating human life. But then it shouldn’t be applied only to adult women who had consensual sex. Why shouldn’t non-pregnant people be forced to tend a farm for 9 months to produce food for those who are starving, or to spend 9 months working 80-hour weeks at an emergency call center with no pay?

I suspect the answer is that the rights themselves are not the issue here, but rather the motivation to punish women who have consensual sex.

In the academic sense of the term, negative rights include the right to not have things done to you (e.g., to not be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law).

Positive rights include the right for you to do something, generally as against others (e.g., the right to have food, healthcare, or education be provided to you by other people).

I’m not sure it is useful to try to categorize abortion rights, for similar reasons why it would be difficult to categorize the right to try and grab the only parachute on a crashing plane. Even if it causes injury or death to others, our general tendency is to treat positive acts of genuine self-preservation as a negative right, if only in the sense that we would never enforce a rule that prohibits the person from trying.

A funky brain teaser on the topic might be whose right of life prevails when a perfectly healthy person turns out to be the only match for 5 patients with failing organs, one needing a new heart, another needing a new intact liver, etc., who are each about to die if we don’t kill the healthy person and harvest their organs for transplant. And would the answer change if this wouldn’t kill the healthy person, but severely decrease their quality of life - such as involuntarily taking one of their lungs and one of their kidneys?

I hate to talk like a law student but that’s sort of the system we already have. When a person certifies that they have read a contract (such as terms and conditions), it does actually mean something. No one would want to do business if anyone could be released from a contract just because they were lying about whether they agreed to be bound by it.

You might be able to think of it like the safety presentation that happens before takeoff on every commercial flight in the US. If you look around at that time, very few people are ever paying attention to the video or flight attendant. Why is that, if everyone is supposed to be concerned about their own safety? Maybe they think this presentation will be the same as all the others, so they can safely ignore it. Does that make it the airline’s fault if a person doesn’t know where the emergency exits are when something does happen? No, the typical intuition - and a relatively necessary assumption on the airline’s part - is that each person is responsible for knowing the information given to them in that presentation.

Similarly, it does not necessarily change much if a person has to check off multiple boxes instead of just one, or if they have to wait a few minutes before they can sign off, etc. People will tune out whatever they want to tune out, but we can’t have a workable system if that’s what absolves them of responsibility.

--That being said, US contract law does take this to some extremes that should be carved out as unacceptable exceptions to the rule. The case of Carnival Cruise Lines, Inc. v. Shute comes to mind where passengers were bound by terms printed on the back of a cruise ticket that they only received after they already paid for it.

I’d like to enact a new law that says you’re allowed to walk past someone even if it means invading their personal space a little bit. Like it’s ok buddy, you actually don’t need to run 359 degrees around me just because I am standing near a corner.

I’ve just finished the game on normal difficulty after about 90 hours, probably because it was a ‘blind’ playthrough so I managed to just never encounter more than the first 5 companions.

Have to say the ending was stylistically great but very WTF in terms of closure, even after the patches to extend the epilogue. It feels a lot like the Mass Effect 3 ending before they added the director’s cut. And even then, the ROs are a lil buggy in terms of contradicting your previous conversations.

Everything leading up to that was really fun though. Maybe the real treasure was the magical artifacts we stole along the way.

Most people in first world countries will probably understand ‘L’ and ‘R’ anyway. But hypothetically, the problem could probably be solved by adding another letter, the same way we know that ‘T’ is for ‘Tuesday’ and ‘Th’ is for ‘Thursday.’

It’s a parody of an ancient meme (knowyourmeme link) where in the original, the rant above is instead “That’s my world without you bro.”

Also not that it justifies the pay disparity but do people really think there is zero labor involved in management? Cause even then, it comes with a crapton of liability risk under respondeat superior. Not sure everyone wants to be personally sued for every negligent mistake their coworkers make.

Judge Albright is kind of a (controversial) celebrity among intellectual property lawyers. Until the district started randomizing case assignments, everyone used to try to file in Albright’s court because he’s so plaintiff-friendly. The plaintiffs here got lucky with this judge assignment, too bad the Circuit Court is not amused lol.

P2W games are like, “You got 2 free skips! Let’s try using one now on this 5-minute timer.” & You know I’m waiting the full 5 minutes because after the tutorial every cooldown is like 8+ hours.

As with most social media, I think the voting system makes it worse. There is always an element of “playing to the audience,” in that the easiest way to get validation (votes, boosts, replies) is to make sure everyone thinks you’re morally or intellectually superior over the person you’re talking to, whereas an actual normal conversation would be focused on the exchange of new ideas and perspectives.

Stronger moderation could help, and filtering the less civil communities could help, but I suspect it’s just a natural consequence of having a built-in validation system that applies to every post and comment everywhere. As engagement in the fediverse grows overall, I could see it getting worse mainly because of more ‘vote-seeking’ behavior.

Unfortunate. We’re the boiling frog fable all over again.

Sorry, Zoning Violation is my brother. I’m xXG4M3R_G0D_420Xx. Easy mistake to make though.

“… over the next century,” continues the article after the catchy headline.

Not that people dying is a good thing, but I was kind of hoping they’d be people alive right now. If 1/8th of the world treated climate change like it was personally going to kill them, we might still have a chance of turning things around. (As a bonus, can oil giants really keep their execs safe from 1 in 8 highly motivated people?)

Lmao imagine getting referred to a doctor for surgery, you look them up, and their professional webpage is like. “i wen’t 2 harverd”

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I’m not a lawyer (yet) as I haven’t taken the bar exam, but I remember learning this in law school.

I can’t find the original court filing that all these news articles are reporting, but presumably, this is a special kind of suit seeking a “declaratory judgment” - a suit asking the court to prevent a harm before it happens.

Cornell Law School discusses it in a somewhat lengthy read but put “simply”, for standing in this kind of case, the court would want to see:

a concrete controversy (as opposed to a hypothetical one, e.g. you can’t seek a declaratory judgment “in case my neighbor decides to hit me”),

between adverse parties (some random citizen can’t sue you for breaking a promise you made to your grandma),

that is ripe (where enough has already happened that a decision right now wouldn’t require much speculation),

not moot (has to be able to affect the current case, for example, declaratory judgment isn’t appropriate to determine “should he have done that?”), and

the court’s decision is needed to prevent imminent harm (has to be relatively certain that a party would be adversely affected if the court doesn’t prevent it from happening).

Here there could be issues of ripeness: the court might not want to act on the mere possibility that Trump will be found guilty of insurrection etc. Courts don’t like to tell people what they can and can’t do unless a real situation makes it necessary, otherwise the court would risk encroaching on powers that belong to the other branches of government.

Almost certainly, or else the suit could be dismissed on Double Jeopardy grounds. Even then, he would probably just appeal to the Supreme Court and get them to make up some reason to rule in his favor.

Granted. Unfortunately, it only works when you send yourself hate mail.

As much of a Trump as he is, my tinfoil hat theory is that we really, really need to keep this guy from getting Epstein’d. Have extra windows and livestream cameras if necessary. Cause if it happens, dems are 100% getting blamed and a few riots would be the best case scenario.

(No, I’m not advocating for it, just predicting it would happen in my rando crackpot theory.)

Dreams are at least somewhat influenced by your recent thoughts and experiences. For example, many studies found that people dreamed more about disease and confinement during the pandemic (here’s a medical journal article about it). You probably have a higher chance of influencing the subject of your dreams if you focus on the desired subject enough during the day.