Holy crap. I have Tidal on my phone and Plex at home. I didnt know I could connect them. Thank you!

I said “option” to retreat not “duty” which is an important distinction I think. And there’s also the option of other reasonable force. I don’t think killing to protect my TV is reasonable, but fighting back possibly even causing injury might be. If I lived in a place where the intruder wasn’t likely to be armed, I’d probably whack his hand with broom handle, and I wouldn’t even feel bad if I broke his wrist because some use of force to keep a stranger from entering my house is warranted. When it comes to lethal force though the standard should be higher, which is why I prefer the self-defense/defense of others test. Did the guy have good reason to think the person breaking in was an imminent danger, that he might be armed and therefore escalation to firing a gun was reasonable? I don’t pretend to know, but I think that’s the test that should be used. That test should take into account that it was his house being broken in to, and that there was another person present he might have wanted to protect, because that definitely affects your perception of danger. We don’t need a set of principles that say you automatically get a pass when it’s your house, I think it’s better to look at each case individually.

Do Renaults often figure into your thinking? ;)

No disagreement. I’m a commie pinko by American standards, which is to say slightly left by European standards. I support gun regulation but it won’t solve the proliferation until we face up to this weird fetishization of guns we have.

I do not agree with the castle doctrine. It’s too easily used to justify lethal force when retreat is an option, however self-defense is a valid justification and from the description given I think that’s completely plausible. An unknown person breaking the glass and potentially armed could be a threat. It sucks that a guy who possibly did nothing wrong has to defend himself in an investigation, but we should have a high bar on lethal actions for civilians and cops (the standard should be higher for cops).

Of course. They’re patient. They chipped away at abortion for decades before finally getting it overturned in Dobbs.

Similarly they went from Masterpiece Cake Shop to the Creative LLC case which widened the exception further because it’s a “creative endeavor”. Don’t for a minute think they’re not queing up a case to deny medical services based on a “sincerely held religious beliefs”.

“against your Christian religion”. Fixed that for you.

Of course. And if the parents dress them in that and keep them isolated the kids will pass that on to the next generation. If the kids go to school and see there are other options, maybe they’ll choose to be different when they’re independent or raise their kids differently. This is why cults always seek to isolate their members – exposure to diversity breaks the cycle.

I don’t know the law in France, but I’d worry it’ll cause religious parents to just keep their kids out of state school and do some form of private religious education, causing a greater divide. The best counter to these attitudes is exposure to diversity and other viewpoints. Maybe the kids going to school and seeing that there are other ways is better.

The drunk driver, and sometimes the bartender who overserved: https://www.scribd.com/document/627785752/Press-Release-4

Humans are good decision makers, we’re just not good at paying attention for long periods of time. Which is why I think self-driving cars will eventually be better, but they aren’t yet. And those are expert systems (I refuse to call them AI) trained on a well-curated and limited set of data for a limited and specific purpose. Which is an important difference over the generalized generative models. More data does not make systems, especially more unsorted data.

But here’s another important difference: I can grab the wheel at any time and take over. If we are going to give these systems decision making authority there needs to be an obvious and intuitive override.

The current stuff is smoke and mirrors and not intelligent in any meaningful sense, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t dangerous. It doesn’t have to be robots with guns to screw over people. Just imagine trying to get PharmaGPT to let you refill your meds, or having to deal with BankGPT trying to figure out why it transfered your rent payment twice. And companies are sure as hell thinking about using this stuff to get rid of human decisionmakers.

Luck, car engineering, and medical science. She was seriously injured. Was she trying to kill herself, I have no idea. Clearly needs mental health treatment which she’s not likely to get in prison. Not that I think she should be free either.

Well that sounds like socialism! /s

I happen to be one of those Americans that think despite their many flaws, the authors of the Constitution had some fundamentally good ideas. And we used the Constitution as intended to expand individual rights after the Civil War with the 14th Amendment. Shamefully we never got around to the Equal Rights Amendment to include women.

What most Americans don’t realize is that the vast majority of what we consider foundational principles are not actually in the Constitution but are instead case law, and how recent much of that is. It wasn’t until 15 years after the Civil War that there was a Supreme Court case which established the idea that corporations are persons under the law and deserving of many of the rights granted under the Constitution using (or mis-using in my opinion) that same 14th Amendment.

Why does that matter? Because it gave corporations an “equal” seat at the table when it comes to disputes. The problem, as you point out, is that our civil dispute resolution system DOES depend on the resources of the “person” and corporations will ALWAYS have more resources. Lots and lots of cases have given corporations more rights and the result is the corportacracy we have now. In other words we went fundamentally the wrong direction diluting the power of the individual. And because corporations have such disproportionate influence on the laws and administrative procedures, we diluted the power of government to represent the people. This has been going on for ~120 years but it kicked into high gear in the 80s (Reagan era).

I’m glad that you guys are still somewhat rational about this, but unfortunately the anti-democratic trend in the US is replicating in the rest of the world. I worry that future histories will compare the rise of this garbage in the US to the start of fascism in Italy in the 1930s.

Sorry, went off on a tangent deep in the comments, but I spend too much time thinking and worrying.

Not the cars themselves but I think it’ll happen like this: self driving cars will eventually get good enough that they will have a lower accident rate in certain conditions, like highways. Insurance companies will push for self-driving-only lanes on the highway, while not lowering your rates but charging you extra for manual driving. Then it will be segments of highways, then certain surface streets, etc. Eventually you’ll only be driving the “last mile” if it’s a personal car or relying on a service that sends self-driving cars and drops you off on the corner. Manual driving on public streets will mostly disappear.

Somewhat paid attention. The jury awarded two days of coffee revenue. The judge cut it to 3x the compensatory damages, about a half day of coffee revenue. I don’t recall if there was a law on the books about that. Some states have “tort reform” laws that limit punitive damages.

Disclaimer that I have not followed this case and I’m not a lawyer.

In the US civil cases can have both compensatory and punitive damages. Compensatory is meant to “right the wrong” where you get reimbursed for financial losses, lost time, things you had to pay for as a result of the incident, etc. Punitive is meant to punish the offender if the case finds they acted with some negligence, and ultimately get them and others to change their behavior.

Take the infamous McDonald’s coffee case. The woman who was injured originally only asked for McDonald’s to pay for her medical treatment. She required skin grafts. The jury found that McDonald’s knowing let this circumstance exist where someone was going to get a serious injury and added on punitive damages. Which the judge cut back.

We can and should as long as it’s based on relevant behavior not religious affiliation. If you don’t believe in using proscribed antibiotics you should not be caring for kids, for example. I don’t care if it’s because your god told you they were evil or because you think your healing crystals are better.

Musk told him. I guarantee it.

I don’t think it was that meta. I think they had it in planning for PG-13 but decided to go for PG.