catreadingabook

catreadingabook, 9 months ago

Wait, why? Not to complain, but it's essentially law that when federal courts have jurisdiction, a civil case may be 'removed' from state court and into federal (district) court upon the defendant's request -- and it seems pretty clear that federal courts have jurisdiction over civil cases arising under the Constitution. I guess the court technically has discretion in some cases, but that's pretty surprising.

catreadingabook, 9 months ago

That's actually hilarious. The legal consequence of not thinking about anyone other than himself.

catreadingabook, 9 months ago

We do have "food deserts" sometimes caused by grocery stores staying away due to security concerns, more common in high crime / low income areas.

...Which is where Walmart is allegedly known to swoop in, because everyone nearby tends to be desperate for a minimum-wage job and a place to buy food regardless of quality. Sort of predatory, but better than nothing I guess.

catreadingabook, 9 months ago

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.

catreadingabook, 9 months ago

Completely speculating btw:

Separate complaints are generally addressed separately, even within the same suit. It's unlikely one could have "tanked" the other.

I briefly looked over the original federal complaint vs desantis and the original state law countersuit vs the oversight district. The complaints in the other suit do point to different laws.

Since we all know these cases are going to get appealed no matter what, it's entirely possible Disney could be trying to entice the Supreme Court into taking on the federal case down the line by whittling it down to just one issue (free speech).

Single issue cases revolving around constitutional arguments are like crack to the Supreme Court, they love to take these so that they can announce new rules or reasoning before applying it to the case, which they get to do when """interpreting""" the Constitution.

Disney might suspect that the current Justices are drooling at the possibility of ruling expansively in favor of free speech.

catreadingabook, 9 months ago

Yes, but, what about those poor little multibillion dollar corporations who need their spam mail delivered RIGHT NOW? All these workers trying to, "not die," is getting in the way of their profits!! :(

catreadingabook, 9 months ago

It isn't commercial labor when an adult does their own chores (I think), as it's more related to the people in a household maintaining their own home. It likely wouldn't be labor for a child for the same reasons, though I'm not sure.

But it could start to look like labor when it's something that produces commercial value, for example, it's more like a 'chore' to water the vegetable garden in the backyard, but it's more like 'labor' to tend to 20 acres of farmland.

Excessive chores, though, could be prevented under child abuse law rather than child labor law, depending on how it's enforced. Doing all the household work voluntarily for no reason other than it's fun? Almost certainly legal. No video games until you clean the dishes? Probably legal. No food until you sweep, mop, dust, and shine every surface in the house? Probably abuse.

catreadingabook, 9 months ago

Hehe. It was low hanging fruit, I gotta hold myself up to higher standards. Glad you enjoyed it though :P

catreadingabook, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

(TW)

Yeah typically I'm not on board with the "guns don't kill people" argument but in this particular case, the adult in charge was already (allegedly, potentially) criminally abusive. If not a gun, it would have been 'teaching her to chop vegetables with a knife,' or 'teaching her to hold her breath underwater,' or so on.

catreadingabook, 9 months ago

?? We don't disagree on this.

catreadingabook, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

Without taking a stance myself - I doubt anyone disagrees with the principle, but rather on the implementation. How do we know who's responsible enough; can we write a law that accounts for:

• A 50-year-old woman who committed robbery in a moment of desperation as a 16-year-old and has since shown remorse, attended therapy, and held a stable job,

• A 40-year-old businessman who's never been convicted of anything, seemed okay when he saw a therapist once last year, but privately he gets into vicious screaming matches with his wife and has really inappropriate temper tantrums when he's drunk, and

• A 21-year-old college graduate who seems smart and stable enough, but their social media page is full of harsh criticisms of the government, projections of what would happen if various officials were theoretically assassinated, and more than a few references to "hoping for another civil war"?

While balancing that with the idea that the government isn't supposed to protect something as a "right" while also preemptively taking that right away from people they think might be dangerous, if they can't point to highly credible evidence. (Otherwise, it becomes possible to arrest people for 'thought crimes.')

Idk the solution personally. Seems impossible to balance unless gun access legally becomes a privilege to qualify for, rather than a right to be restricted from. But that would put the power into states' hands, and then states would have the power to decide that no one can have guns except the police.

catreadingabook, 9 months ago

This has been a thing in the US for a while unfortunately. We acknowledge that food, shelter, clean water, and reasonable healthcare are basic human rights for prisoners, but when it comes to regular poor people? Suddenly we're a nanny state and they're abusing the system by... being alive, I guess.

catreadingabook, 9 months ago

If true, it actually makes some sense. An older generation with poor eyesight seems likely to fall for legit-looking scam texts with links to copycat domains like "arnazon" and "UPS.gov.co".

catreadingabook, 9 months ago

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

catreadingabook, 9 months ago

"... 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?)

catreadingabook, 9 months ago

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

catreadingabook, 9 months ago

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

catreadingabook, 9 months ago

If you're good at coping with your anxiety, there's probably a market for you to help other people do the same! You could run a tea shop, train therapy dogs, report on uplifting news, be a professional gardener, compile self-affirmation booklets,...

Not so much of a (legal) market for the unhealthy coping mechanisms. Run a liquor store?

catreadingabook, 9 months ago

Hell yeah. Props to you for making the fediverse a more accessible space.

catreadingabook, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

Umm the actual court order the article refers to is super generous to the plaintiffs lol. Whoever's representing them made such basic mistakes that I'm not even sure how they passed the bar exam:

The Plaintiffs' first cause of action lists--in a single paragraph that spans four pages--fifty
different state (and DC) consumer-protection statutes.

(This is a no-no in every federal court in every state.)

In either event, the Plaintiffs concede that they've failed to meet the requirements of Mississippi and Ohio law--even as they ask us not to dismiss those claims.

(Wtf? lol)

we agree with Burger King that a reasonable person wouldn't have interpreted Burger King's TV and online ads as binding offers.

(This is well-settled law and taught to most first-year law students.)

catreadingabook, 9 months ago

This is kind of amusing actually. Imagine a program that gives you a ton of bookmarks to legally questionable websites, like how that other website (used to?) automatically spam incriminating Google searches into your search history. Then watch the auto-bookmark-moderator suck it all up like a roomba.

catreadingabook, 9 months ago

Completely speculating, because I don't know many courts that have been willing to decide either way, but maybe:

If it causes harm in a way that was reasonably foreseeable, the person who turned it on and/or the person "operating" it might be generally liable on a theory of negligence (but not always).

If the harm was unpredictable, it might be on the manufacturer and the retailer under a theory of products liability (but not always).

Or it could be treated as "ferae naturae," where owners are liable for their 'dangerous animal' pets because they knew the pets were dangerous and still decided to keep them (but not always).

If it's an AI not associated with a physical device, maybe the programmer who "authored" the lines of code could be criminally liable for criminal "speech" (writing an AI) that incites and enables crime, even as a conspirator -- that's reeeaaally doubtful on Due Process grounds, but it would definitely light a fire under every developer's chair to make sure their algorithms are explicitly trained against criminal behavior. (but still not always.)

catreadingabook, 9 months ago

No way they don't force you to agree to some "terms and conditions" along the lines of, "You accept full responsibility of all risk and if we get sued, you agree to pay on our behalf. And because we know you won't read this, here's all the risks so we can say you gave informed consent: ..."

catreadingabook, 9 months ago

That's true, but thinking about AI that is made to generate speech, processing power is still expensive enough that developers are careful with it. But what happens as memory gets cheaper and calculations get faster, and ordinary developers are able to train their own generative AI?

For example, what happens when a developer decides to train a LLM extensively on scam emails, and spammers love to buy copies of it - but the developer markets it as just "a helpful generative AI"? Or, what if a person trains their LLM on an extremist forum full of hate speech and disinformation, then offers it to a suicide prevention center as a 24/7 alternative to human labor? (Treating these as hypotheticals, where we assume the difference isn't immediately obvious. Perhaps they also used some legitimate training data, so that most outputs seem innocent enough.)

To me it sounds more involved than selling just a word processor with autocorrect, but less involved than selling an instruction manual for committing crimes.

catreadingabook, 9 months ago

Ok, let me be more specific so that it's not open to uncharitable interpretation.

What happens when it becomes easy to make something as reliable and complete as, e.g., ChatGPT-4 without the hardware costs and other costs currently associated with it?