You’re right. I’m sorry for taking my frustration with the forum out on you.

Yes, if you throw democracy in the trash, ignore the rights of the unpopular, and pass any law that appeals to today’s public morality, then you’ll have lots of options. I just don’t want to hear you guys complain after this idealism gets spun to fuck you over by corporate lawyers more skillful than your populist politicians. But fuck me for pointing out the logical inconsistencies in the useless seething groupthink machine, I guess. Apparently I only have rights if the public likes me.

We’re talking about criminal law. Can you clearly, objectively, without arbitrary valuation of goods or services, define a legal principle which identifies the point at which a health plan cut becomes a crime?

What’s your point? That people organize themselves to commit crimes? That risky behavior is more dangerous when it’s amplified by concentrated capital? None of this justifies the phenomenal leap you made to say that an employer is responsible for the lives of their employees. None of this is precedent for the further corruption of the justice system into subjectivity and emotional bias.

Can’t you see that you’re actually making it worse? You go after organizations whose bread and butter is legal entanglement, using legal entanglement as your only weapon. You make the regulatory environment more difficult for startups and SMBs to compete in, and you do nothing but give your (supposed) worst enemies more political tokens with which to negotiate advantageous positions in that environment. Why do you think these corporate elites flush hundreds of millions of dollars sponsoring progressive media outlets? Do you think they’re stupid?

I’m going to ignore the insane part of your point where you equated layoffs with murder.

Greed, like hate, is subjective. It is therefore, like hate, a terrible prerequisite for the activation of the criminal justice system. The idea that motivations for crimes should change the definition and/or penalty of those crimes has fostered popular corruption of the justice system since its inception. Industrialization has accelerated the adoption of human fears into that justice system, to the point where we can no longer even count the number of infractions under the law.

Adding more subjective emotional consideration to a punitive system which is already weighed down beyond the ability to enact swift justice is the opposite of helpful.

That’s a good thing. Discord is chugging its way through the last half of the Web 2.0 service to social media pipeline. It’s a VC-funded multimedia enterprise extended around a novel technology core optimized for its original service offering, real-time voice/text. Nobody is immune to bloat, but because Matrix is a protocol standard, not an app, users have the option of sticking with minimal clients and servers that won’t (necessarily) get destroyed by feature creep.

If you’ve tried Element and thought “ah, slow Discord,” maybe have a scroll through https://matrix.org/ecosystem/clients/. I don’t want to get off topic but all my favorite software is standard/specification-based.

Looks to me like some karma farmers figured out the Lemmy API

Is this a screenshot of a Reddit post of a screenshot of a Twitter thread about people who want you to know they’re involved in literature? I’m just checking. You guys see the same thing, right? This isn’t some kind of software bug or dimensional rift?

Home slice I respect the grind but I gotta be real with you I haven’t bought a GPU since the Obama administration

Oh my God! That’s awful! Which ones?! Which sites, specifically, though?! You know, so I can call for bans.

It’s also not clear how the law will be enforced or to what extent.

No shit. Isn’t that the point? Use outrage to justify the growth of an impenetrable body of law addressing all social and economic behavior, then selectively enforce subjective interpretations to satisfy powerful groups and remain in power. So it goes for any population center whose rapid growth creates the illusion of independence.

Can we sell NYC to Canada yet? We’d make a bundle, they wouldn’t even be mad, and I’d sleep a lot better with the border of a superpower between me and a stack of nine million people who think privacy is a sin.

This might be effective in institutions wherein expression is already strictly restrained and your opponent doesn’t have the option of ignoring your request for information, but when people pull this shit on me I just say “comedy’s subjective.” It happens to be true. The list of topics that are “inappropriate” is also extremely subjective. I make jokes to cope with stress and add value. If you don’t like my joke, you can say so, but when you try to use social structures to manipulate others’ capacity for expression, you out yourself as a Machiavellian control freak which, in fairness, puts you on good terms with all the other manipulative, power hungry, institution worshiping demagogues that create stressful situations in the first place.

People have been getting mad at me for making jokes for literally as long as I can remember. One of my oldest memories is about getting in trouble for joking about a teacher’s contradiction. She didn’t like how it made her feel, so she made me sit in the corner in front of the class. She used her leverage in the social structure to try to prevent herself from feeling that way again. I remember it for two reasons: first, because I think it was the first time I felt humiliation, and second, because my friends turned on her. The girl beside me, who I now realize I was trying to impress, didn’t like my joke. She hit me. Then, after the teacher overreacted, she switched teams. After class, we went and peed on the teacher’s flowers together. We were 6, by the way. Yeah, sorry Rachel, I’m going public with the scandal. DM me if you read this, I’m way funnier now.

Free speech is not hip or trendy at the moment, and that’s fine. That’s actually how it’s been for most of history as far as I can tell. The reason we should defend it is the subjectivity I mentioned earlier. The basic idea is that different things make different people upset. To make rules about what you’re allowed to say is to defend a subset of emotional responses ─ to put some people above others ─ to deny the universal fraternity and equality of people. You may have the best of intentions, but you won’t get any feedback when those people decide to pee on your stuff.

The issue isn’t the composition of the object but rather property and contract. The prosthetic limb comparison isn’t bad in my opinion, except this would be an experimental prosthetic limb that patients agreed to test with full knowledge and consent that it could be removed without their permission.

Again, I would hate to be in that position, but if I agreed to it, I understand my legal options would be limited. Again, this isn’t a company ruining someone’s life over a little money, this is a corporation unable to continue operating. Again, please consider the fact that a corporation which can treat epilepsy went backrupt because it couldn’t afford to do business in the regulatory environment of the health industry. I don’t understand how adding more subjective laws with hand-waved economic foundations is supposed to help this situation.

I can’t imagine what it’s like to live with epilepsy, nor to have a debilitating disease reenter your life after you’d become accustomed to its management. In her position, I imagine I would be doing everything I could to regain access to life-changing technology. Sympathy for Rita Leggett doesn’t make this story “dystopian,” nor is it a violation of anyone’s rights.

It was a trial! All participants agreed to have the device removed. If they didn’t, they’d be walking around with unsupported hardware in their brains, because the system that hardware was connected to was dissolved. Representing this legal outcome as a human rights violation is a predictable dilution of human rights.

Ienca likens it to the forced removal of organs, which is forbidden in international law.

There’s a vital difference between the removal of a body part and the removal of a tool you agreed to host, on condition of its release, before changing your mind. NeuroVista used novel technology to make meaningful progress in the treatment of epilepsy! Our response to this should be to encourage others like them, not to build bureaucratic restrictions hindering new innovators.

Companies should have insurance that covers the maintenance of devices should volunteers need to keep them beyond the end of a clinical trial, for example.

Who would insure this requirement?! Indefinite support of novel technology? Be serious. This article absolutely breezes over NeuroVista’s bankruptcy like it’s a little inclement weather. The fact is that biotech research is nearly illegal by default. Try to restrain your distaste for industrialization long enough to imagine starting and running this company:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6763675/