What would you do for $100,000?

So I was reading Least I Could Do today, and it actually made me think about a few things…

1) It is, in fact, a part of some people’s jobs to extract semen from animals.
2) It’s legal to pay people to extract semen from animals.
3) It’s not legal to pay people to extract semen from yourself.
4) Because it’s not legal to pay for sex.
5) But sex with animals is also illegal.

So: What makes an act sexual? Would you suddenly be in danger of going to jail simply for enjoying extracting semen from the pig? What if you extracted semen from a pig while naked or dressed in lingerie? Would it be OK to pay somebody to extract semen from a human so long as they did it while wearing work clothes and as long as they didn’t enjoy it?

Maybe we should just do away with moralistic legislature and let people do whatever they are willing to do for $100,000.

Just mummify your kids with bubble wrap and stick them in the corner.

This is disgusting. Absolutely repulsive, on the part of the parents, their lawyer, and the Michigan Court of Appeals.

The Woodmans contracted with “Bounce Party” to use their inflatable play equipment facilities for their son’s fifth birthday party. Before the party, Mr. Woodman signed a waiver on behalf of his son, releasing Bounce Party from any liability for personal injury, property damage, or wrongful death caused by playing on the play equipment, an activity Bounce Party characterized as containing “some element of personal risk.”

During the party, the Woodmans’ son jumped from the top of a slide and broke his leg. The Woodmans sued, alleging among other things, negligence on the part of Bounce Party.

Sounds like an open and shut case to me… They were made aware that the activity contained risk of injury (possibly even death), they signed a waiver, the kid stupidly jumped off the top of the slide, which Bounce Party couldn’t possibly have stopped him from doing…

And when the case went to court, the judge agreed with me. Unfortunately, the family and/or lawyer decided to appeal. The Michigan Court of Appeals reversed the decision.

a parent “has no authority merely by virtue of the parental relation to waive, release, or compromise claims of his or her child.” The court opined that public policy dictated that the need to protect the rights of a minor child is greater than the rights of a child’s parent to take action on behalf of the child. In so finding, the Michigan Court of Appeals held that “pre-injury waivers effectuated by parents on behalf of their minor children are not presumptively enforceable.”

So what’s this, then? If a child ever gets hurt, the child can sue. Which means nobody in their right mind will ever let a child do something potentially harmful, such as get on a swing set, monkey bars, or bouncey castle. Children can’t sign waivers because they aren’t of legal age, and now parents can’t sign them either. I’m getting real tired of our society’s tendency to “protect the children, at all costs”. The human race has gotten along fine for centuries without this kind of insanity.

(edited to insert link to source)

Trial and error

So let me get this straight…
If 12 people say you’re guilty, you go to prison, but if 13 people say you’re guilty, you’re not convicted? How does that make sense?

Long on emotion, short on sense

I hate seat belt laws.
Do seat belts, in the big picture, save lives? Yes.
Do they always save lives? No.
Are they sometimes actually harmful? Yes.

But people are emotional, and it skews their view.
If you are in an accident and you were wearing your seatbelt, chances are you were thankful you were wearing your seatbelt, or “it could have been worse”.
If you are in an accident and not wearing your seatbelt, chances are you are thankful it wasn’t worse, and vow to wear your seatbelt.
If somebody dies in an accident while wearing a seatbelt, nobody says or thinks anything regarding seatbelts at all.
If somebody dies in an accident while not wearing a seatbelt, people go way overboard exclaiming the importance of wearing your seatbelt.

Instead of holding a vigil to promote seatbelt safety, why not hold a vigil to promote safe driving habits? The best way to avoid dying in an accident is to avoid the accident altogether….

For the record, I’ve never been wearing a seatbelt during any of the accidents I’ve ever been in, including two totaled vehicles (one side impact and one head-on). The only serious injury I’ve sustained was a fractured rib or two, and that was in a side-impact collision where wearing the seatbelt would have caused more damage to me than not wearing it.

I’m also not advocating that you shouldn’t wear a seatbelt. I’m just saying that people overstate the importance of it, and it shouldn’t be mandated by the government.

Note to defense attorney:

Allowing your defendant to plead “I thought they’d get out of my way.” when she is charged with 2nd degree murder for running people down with her car just makes the both of you look stupid.

Valentine’s Day approaches

I thought it was hard just picking out a decent card. I’ve got it easy compared to the Saudis.

State of Mississippi to legally mandate discrimination?

I found out from a friend of mine late last night that there is a bill (pdf) proposed in the MS state legislature that would prevent restaurants from serving food to obese people. Now the first thing that springs to my mind is the phrase, “I’m sorry sir, but you obviously love food too much. We can’t give you any.”
Humor aside, this is very troubling in that the state is not only considering allowing businesses to discriminate against overweight people, but actually forcing them to do so.

OK, back to the humor… let’s look at the bill:

…shall apply to any food establishment that … has five (5) 13 or more seats for customers.

So I can still pig out at Diary Queen or Hot’N'Now. That’s a relief.

The State Department of Health shall prepare written materials that describe and explain the criteria for determining whether a person is obese

So the law itself doesn’t define the criteria, or how they are to be applied. I’m desperately curious what methods will be used. Will restaurants have to weigh people, and measure their height? Just how ridiculous will this be?

may revoke the permit of any food establishment that repeatedly violates the provisions of this section.

Penalty for serving food to a fatty: you’re out of business.
This is slated to go into effect on July 1st of this year, although it’s not clear to me whether or not the bill has already been voted on. That’s just the effective date listed within the bill itself.

The 3 laws of robotics

They seem to have changed a bit since Asimov’s time…

Quick quiz

What do the United States, Thailand, Taiwan, Singapore, Russia, China, and Malaysia all have in common? Abysmal privacy safeguards. The UK and England/Wales are also in that proud band. Of the countries surveyed, only Greece gets a good mark. Germany and Canada used to be the best countries for privacy, but they both slipped two grades in the past year. Probably due to the heavy U.S. influence in those countries. It’s depressing. Happy New Year.

Why people have no respect for the law

“Piracy” is rampant (and by piracy here, we mean copyright infringement, not the actual killing of people and stealing of material goods, which is what real piracy is and always has been), and the mega-corps are pushing for more laws, but laws don’t matter because people have no regard for the laws. And why not? Well, I think this hits it on the head:

By the end of the day, John has infringed the copyrights of twenty emails, three legal articles, an architectural rendering, a poem, five photographs, an animated character, a musical composition, a painting, and fifty notes and drawings. All told, he has committed at least eighty-three acts of infringement and faces liability in the amount of $12.45 million (to say nothing of potential criminal charges).50 There is nothing particularly extraordinary about John’s activities. Yet if copyright holders were inclined to enforce their rights to the maximum extent allowed by law, he would be indisputably liable for a mind-boggling $4.544 billion in potential damages each year. And, surprisingly, he has not even committed a single act of infringement through P2P file sharing.

When an average person on an average day breaks the law so many times, it has a numbing effect. It becomes apparent that the law is broken. Yet our politicians, firmly in the clutches of big business, don’t do anything to make the laws reasonable to the point where people will comply. They instead pass stricter laws which increase the likelihood/amount of our violating the law, which only serves to increase our disdain for the law.