30% jokes, 30% attempts at academic discussions, 40% spewing my opinions uninvited to find out what might be missing from my perspective.

I’ll usually reiterate this in my posts, but I never give legal advice online. I can describe how the law generally tends to be, analyze a public case from an academic perspective, and explain how courts normally treat an issue. But hell no am I even going to try to apply the law to your specific situation.

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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • 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.



  • 🎶 oh, I can so just sit here and cry 🎶

    but fr what worked well for me was blocking, deleting, getting rid of (or stuffing into a rarely used closet) anything that reminded me of them, then distracting myself 24/7 long enough to later process my emotions with a little bit of distance from the event itself - not to block out the feelings but to just avoid ruminating on them.

    Mostly the point was buying time to provide my monkey brain with hard proof that I can survive without that person, that way it stops shooting me up with the Bad Chemicals every time I think of them.




  • Advice against phishing emails can be reduced to, “1: Never click on a link, call a phone number, download an attachment, or follow instructions you found in an email unless you were already expecting this exact email from this exact sender. 2: If you really want to do those things, search up the organization’s website directly and use the contact info they provide there instead.”

    imo it’s the ad-hungry articles stretching everything into 10+ pages that’s making advice so inaccessible to people. Super annoying because it dilutes the real, simple message that’s already there, it’s just locked behind an adwall.


  • I would really really recommend not underestimating the importance of medical treatment. It took me 4 tries to find the right medication (turns out an NDRI, not an SSRI, did the trick) to discover that actually, “normal” people are basically happy by default?? Like instead of it being this elusive reward that I had to work hard for, it’s like I can consciously hold on to my positive emotions and let go of the negative ones. Also, basic tasks that were endless nightmares before (laundry, cooking, phone calls) are now stress-free and even kind of satisfying?

    I had the right tools before, like supportive friends, enough education about radical acceptance and coping skills, and a physically healthy routine, but it didn’t seem to help. And that makes sense now because it turns out, it barely matters how much happy chemicals your brain makes if it’s going to immediately throw them away. Not trying to tell you what to do (am neither a doctor nor a therapist) but I’m wondering if that’s what’s going on with you too.



  • catreadingabook@kbin.socialtoMemes@lemmy.mlToxic
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    1 year 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.



  • 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.



  • 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.)



  • 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.