domain:anarchonomicon.com
Supah_Schmendrick
1hr ago
OJ Simpson was ordered to pay $33.5 million in damages. Adjusting for number of victims and inflation, our hypothetical Alex Jones would have been ordered to pay $922.41 million - far short of the $1.48 billion the real Alex Jones was ordered to pay.
That's not how this works. First, the civil suit divvied up damages in a non-intuitive manner. OJ was found liable for $8.5 million in compensatory damages to the parents of Ron Goodman, and for $12.5 million in punitive damages each to the estates of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson. (Rufo v. Simpson (2001) 86 Cal.App.4th 581, 614). The compensatory damages for a single victim's murder, adjusted for inflation, would be $16,717,408.10 today. Multiplied for the 26 Sandy Hook victims, that's $434,652,610.60 in compensatory damages in a hypothetical Sandy Hook case.
However, there's significant reason to think that the Sandy Hook per-victim compensatory damages would be significantly higher than the California damages awarded against OJ. compensatory damages, per the California standard at the time, reflected the "loss of love, companionship, comfort, affection, society, solace, or moral support suffered as a result of the death, but not for their grief or sorrow or for the decedent's pain and suffering." Notably, "pain and suffering" are two concepts which routinely factor hugely into the size of jury verdicts in tort cases. There also was no reference to "economic damages" like lost wages, which are also a large driver of compensatory damage awards. I'm not a CT lawyer, and none of this is legal advice, but a quick google turned up these civil jury instructions which, on page 121 (Instruction 3.4-7) lays out the types of damages permissible in wrongful death cases:
Wrongful Death Damages We have a statute that governs damages in cases such as this where there is a death. It allows for just damages which includes:
Economic damages of :
- the reasonable and necessary medical and funeral expenses and
- the value of the decedent's lost earning capacity less deductions for (his/her) necessary living expenses taking into consideration that a present cash payment will be made, and
Noneconomic damages of:
- compensation for the destruction of the decedent's capacity to carry on and enjoy life's activities in a way that (he/she) would have done had (he/she) lived and,
- compensation for the death itself, or
- pain and suffering.
The inclusion of pain and suffering and economic damages (if accurate) indicates to me that the per-victim award of compensatory damages would likely have been much higher in a hypothetical Sandy Hook wrongful death suit than in the OJ case, let alone the increased sympathy a jury would likely feel for the parents of murdered children versus the elderly parents of a middle-aged adult victim.
As regards the punitive damages, $12,500,000 in 1997 dollars is worth $24,584,423.68 today. Thus, a hypothetical Sandy Hook case awarding the same amount of per-victim punitive damages as the OJ case would have awarded $639,195,015.68. However, Connecticut handles punitive damages oddly, and in common law counts appears to restrict them to the prevailing party's attorney's fees, less taxable costs. (CT Jury Instruction 3.4-4). In other cases CT statute appears to mandate double or even treble damages. Frankly I'm too lazy to dig into what amount of punitive damages would have been available in this case, but this should demonstrate that calculating damages really is not as simple as just extrapolating from a different case in a different jurisdiction.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1hr ago
The Chinese state comes off as super-sanctimonious, it's all 'you're racist oppressive imperialists obstructing our peaceful multilateral world order with your provocations and cold war mindset'. But internally you see a wide-ranging hatred of many foreign countries, especially Japan (not an unreasonable grudge, all things considered). They made some drunk captain a national hero when he rammed into a Japanese coast guard ship and caused a diplomatic incident. They constantly bitch about Japan releasing mildly irradiated water from Fukushima.
If they ever get the upper hand, I'm very glad to not be Japanese.
WhiningCoil
1hr ago
I was thinking, gun to my head, I'd rather my daughter was molested by a catholic priest (unlikely as that is, being a girl and all) than fall in with your ilk. But that got me thinking... what if the Catholic Church leaned into LGBTQ+ shit 30 years earlier than they did?
What if, instead of covering up the priest abuse scandals, they leaned into it. Claimed they were just protecting young gay boys. In fact they had a moral duty to keep these young boys sexual behavior a secret from their parents. They might not accept them after all. Furthermore, the Catholic Church should probably just take custody of them from those bigoted parents.
It's preposterous and totally insane. But that's what you sound like.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1hr ago
Playing that anecdote as an Uno Reverse card won’t work, as a sufficiently motivated counterparty will just respond with “He wasn’t fired, he was still in the academy and drawing a salary, therefore he wasn’t suffering discrimination”.
As a practicing academic myself I wish I’d be able to spend more time on my research by getting banned from my teaching workload, teaching fucking sucks.
AppleyOrange
1hr ago
That lists the 2020 election as an "open case" but not 2024.
AppleyOrange
1hr ago
Yes, that's the answer I understand.
But I also understand people here to still believe there was fraud in 2020. And that doesn't seem easily reconcilable woth what happened in 2024 and Trump's people being "on guard".
HaroldWilson
1hr ago
If we're going down that road of calling things stolen you can call any election stolen if you were so inclined. 2016 was stolen by Comey reopening the emails investigation, 2004 was stolen by the swiftboat lies (ok that one probably didn't tip the balance but probably neither did the Hunter Biden laptop), 1856 was stolen by Democrats claiming Fremont was a Catholic and would a lead a slave rebellion, etc. etc. 'Stolen' is a pretty extreme word that I think in common parlance would only apply if you thought there was something nefarious about the election/voting process itself.
TokenTransGirl
1hr ago
Rabies kills 70,000 people per year, with a 100% lethality rate. Does that make rabies worse than the black plague (a pathetic 30-50% lethality)? If you could trade rabies for a new black plague, do you think that would be a good deal? Would you rather 70 thousand people die of rabies, or 30 million people die of the black plague?
I do understand the difference between absolute lethality and lethality percent. But despite what you say, they are both valid measures. The really vicious stuff with 100% lethality tends to burn itself out. The lower the lethality, the higher the transmissibility, because dead people are terrible vectors. That means the most damage is done somewhere in the middle, where a disease has a bunch of hosts to help it spread
Governmental policies are supposed to pass a cost-benefit analysis.
And you don't find it all odd that your proposed policy is 100% benefit, 0% cost? Do you think I'm arguing that we should just leave money on the table?
NPIs probably prevented 0.2% of Covid deaths
Did you read the article you linked? It's really not that supportive of your case. The 0.2% is just lockdowns. They go on to say: "The study did give partial credit to policies that shut down “non-essential” businesses — which they concluded could bring down COVID death rates by as much as 10 per cent." Then there's the bit about which studies got excluded, etc.. Also the bit about it being done by economists with major political ties. But even if we take it at face value, it's saying there's easily a 10% difference to be made here.
To say nothing of, again, Australia: which managed a very clear 90% reduction in deaths the first two years.
This is such an obnoxious and emotionally manipulative way of phrasing a question.
I mean, it's pretty obnoxious having someone try to engage me in a cost-benefit analysis and then refuse to acknowledge the "cost" half of that equation. It's one thing to say "70 deaths is nothing to the 487 suicides" - we can have a conversation there. But if your stance is really "there is absolutely nothing anyone in the entire world could possibly have done that could have reduced Covid deaths in any way", then obviously I can't argue with that, because there is no argument for leaving free money on the table.
Heck, your link did a decent job convincing me that lockdowns were probably a bad policy: 0.2% is a real number, unlike zero. But again, the article also discusses how closing bars and restaurants probably cut deaths by 10%. That's an intervention worth talking about! How does the suicide rate compare to that? If we had just focused on the interventions that worked, wouldn't the suicide rate have been much lower?
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
Notably, there is no reason for including men. While men can be given drugs to cause lactation they cannot be mothers, even if they wear a dress and grow their hair out and insist on going by ‘she’. It is impossible for a man to give birth.
Corvos
1hr ago
Oh, I’m sure the backstage can be pretty grim, I’ve heard bad things about VCs.
Regardless, it's strange to raise 100s of millions without a working prototype for a single valuable feature for a firm that existed for close to a decade.
They had a prototype that seemed to work (with faked results) and legitimately did work for a few tests. Holmes’ genius was getting stuffy septuagenarians into such a bidding war that they overruled their own analysts who said the prototypes were insufficient and urged caution.
Were there shenanigans behind that? I don’t know. Possibly. But I think it would have come up in the investigation along with all the other criminal stuff that was going on. Did you read Bad Blood? It’s a fantastic book.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
AOC has just generally been on the ‘serious soul searching’ end of the election postmortem, and while I don’t give the lion’s share of the blame to democrats being the party of retarded gender shit, it’s pretty easy to see how AOC can overweight that factor. Like it’s very unpopular and doesn’t entail asking serious questions about the party’s stance on immigration, why abortion isn’t a magic bullet, or whether government economic statistics are fully trustworthy. Plus- disclaimer I am not a progressive and don’t move in very progressive spaces- it seems like trans activists are …difficult allies on a good day.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1hr ago
I dunno about the monitor lizard but there sure does seem to be a lot of it: https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/almost-5-lakh-animals-became-victims-of-crimes-in-last-10-years-in-india-report-1770190-2021-02-17
Pakistan certainly doesn't cover itself in glory either, on the rape front.
Rov_Scam
1hr ago
Those cases aren't really comparable, but even using the OJ verdict as a guide you still get pretty close and possibly higher if you take the right factors into consideration. the Sandy Hook kids had 25–30 years of life expectancy on the OJ victims, which greatly increases the verdict potential. And while I don't know if Connecticut allows parental loss of consortium claims, the nature of the relationship increases the value of the case. The 8.5 million in compensatory damages awarded to the Goldmans for the loss of their son would cover emotional distress and loss of companionship. The loss of companionship damages would be higher in the case of a small child who lives with the parents, as opposed to an adult child who moves out, so a Sandy Hook parent can expect more in that respect.
The other technical thing that I wouldn't expect you to know about is that the jury didn't award any significant compensatory damages for Nicole. Their are two kinds of cases filed on behalf of deceased Plaintiffs: Wrongful Death cases and survivor actions. Wrongful death cases compensate the heirs of the deceased person for their loss, and are usually associated with deaths that occur fairly quickly after the incident. Survivor actions compensate the actual decedent for his own damages, and usually occur either when a Plaintiff dies after the lawsuit has been filed or when the Plaintiff survives for a significant time after the injury. In a straightforward murder case, a survivor action is of limited value because there are no medical bills and only a few minutes of pain and suffering (as opposed to, say, a car accident victim who survives for a few years after the accident and racks up a ton of medical bills and is confined to a nursing home the whole time).
Since a wrongful death action is for the heirs, it requires the heirs to testify as damage witnesses. Nicole Brown Simpson's heirs were her children, and the family did not want to subject them to testimony concerning their mother's death and how they were affected by it. In turn, they waived the wrongful death claim and only filed a survival action, leaving significant compensatory damages on the table. The compensatory damages for the survival action were de minimus, and only served to set up the punitive damage claim. The Sandy Hook parents don't have this problem, so we can expect every Plaintiff to have a wrongful death claim. It should also be noted that Ron Goldman's mother didn't ask for punitive damages, though she was entitled to them.
Corvos
1hr ago
Quite possibly! It’s actually a quote from Scott’s web novel ‘Unsong’, which I recommend if you haven’t read it. It’s a bit clever-clever in places but pretty good and genuinely intelligent for the most part.
Sounds nice but in practice it doesn’t produce good results:
- Reversion to the mean - just as geniuses tend not to produce genius children, the disposition of your cohort is a better predictor of your lineage’s behaviour than your personal values. Especially when that cohort forms ethnic enclaves on arrival.
- Passing a civics test != sharing your values. Trying to prevent an ethical project from being infiltrated by people who make the right mouth noises is an ancient problem faced by religions, charities, and NGOs, and it’s almost unsolvable. The two most reliable ways are requiring personal recommendations for membership, or limiting it to a specific ancestral group like the Hasidics or the Amish. I assume that neither appeal to you.
Seriously, I’m not trying to gotcha you with clever arguments. One of the reasons I moved towards an ancestral-based understanding of Britishness was watching all the immigrants who’d taken the mandatory civics test on ‘British values’ turn around and condemn those values the moment they got their visa. We wanted skilled immigrants who would uphold our values too, who doesn’t? But in general that’s not what we got, and the children are worse.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2hr ago
How exactly do men wanting to breastfeed cause a problem here?
The League was founded in part on specific concern for infant and maternal health and development. Men don't lactate without hormonal intervention (or, in some cases, cancer) and studies on the health impact of such choices are... not nonexistent, I suspect, but almost certainly some combination of weak, bad, or politically motivated. The difficulties a new mother might have with breastfeeding may have some overlap with the difficulties a lactating man might have, but there are no clear health or infant development reasons to help men who lactate, the way there definitely are with new mothers.
The article just assumes this is Clearly A Bad Thing because Men, but it never actually articulates any specific objections.
When you create an organization specifically to address women's issues with a natural feminine process, then "Men" clearly articulates a pretty damn specific objection. I assume there would also be frustration with women who present as masculine, if they keep trying to police the language of breastfeeding with absurd neologisms like "chestfeeding." If you make an organization dedicated to breastfeeding and a bunch of entryists show up to tell you to use a different word, failure to address that swiftly and unapologetically will probably result in, well, pretty much what the article describes.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
2hr ago
Do you think parents who love their children and will not disown them, but refuse to go along with either social or medical transitioning, should lose their parental rights? Do you think they should not be allowed to veto the school facilitating transition, without their knowledge or approval?
chooky
2hr ago
I dont think that was supposed to be Rov_scam's voice; rather, they were telling the hypothetical story of how AOC would sell the position shift.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
2hr ago
Apparently, Jones should have just claimed that being a kooky conspiracy theorist is a status.
ControlsFreak
2hr ago
Does the guy you watched the Pens game with last night lack any sense of compassion whatsoever and dehumanize immigrants almost completely?
ThisIsSin
The boob tube emits harmful XXX-rays
2hr ago
The problem with that, naturally, is that one’s genitals are an unusually effective predictor of certain undesirable behaviors when they introduce themselves into places where the opposite genitals congregate, especially when they insist upon a certain kind of obvious lie.
Now, of course the same argument naturally applies to racism too. But for racism we sacrifice that predictive knowledge on the pyre of “so that maybe advantaging the people of race X that don’t act as predicted eventually changes the circumstances”, and that’s very emphatically not what’s meant to happen in the genital cases (because it’s pushed with the intention of bullying everyone else by proxy).
TokenTransGirl
2hr ago
Some schools secretly socially transition children.
Can you provide a source for the claim that schools are forcing uninterested, non-consenting children into transition? Or are you just searching for the maximally inflammatory way to say "some kids don't trust their parents not to disown them"?
Some locales will take children out of parents' custody if they fail to support transition.
Really? "Fail to support" transition, or "try to block their kid from accessing the relevant medical treatments"?
This is not all right wing paranoia.
Neither of those is an example of "mutilation"
DirtyWaterHotDog
2hr ago
Damn, Post partum is rough. So easy for it to sneak in.
We humans really aren't made for nuclear existence huh. Can't imagine how women do it without a more traditionally-sized community.
An odd criticism to make on here of all places. Pots, kettles etc. Not that there isn't lots of disagreement on here, but you'll find that on places like /r/neoliberal too - but in both places it tends to occur within pretty narrow confines.
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