Recently (June 1, 2019), I participated in a conference on AI & Medicine called Machine M.D. The organizers at the University of Ottawa have posted video from the event, so here’s Panel #1 on “Regulating Safety and Quality“. I was the first speaker, early in the morning…
How to enable DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) in Firefox. Hope it plays nice with VPN…
‘No Vehicles in the Park’ is the basis of one of the great teaching texts for jurisprudence. HLA Hart famously asked,
A legal rule forbids you to take a vehicle into the public park. Plainly this forbids an automobile, but what about bicycles, roller skates, toy automobiles? What about airplanes? Are these, as we say, to be called “vehicles” for the purpose of the rule or not?’
Believe me, any law professor can fill two hours running hypotheticals off this. There us even the occasional real-life case.
Comes now, however, the Nevada Highway Patrol, in the person of Nevada Highway Patrol Trooper Travis Smaka, who pulled over a vehicle in an HOV lane (not a park) that appeared to have only one occupant — only to be told by the driver that there was in fact another “occupant” in the vehicle: the corpse he was transporting. Trooper Smaka was unpersuaded, but he let the driver off with a warning. (See Police: No, a corpse doesn’t count toward the HOV lane passenger minimum for details.)
So, if the HOV rule is “minimum two occupants in the vehicle,” should a corpse count? Or, as my wife says, how about a pregnant woman in Alabama? If a fetus is a ‘person’ for manslaughter purposes, it is a person for HOV occupancy purposes? Or what about a telepresence robot being operated by some third party? Could that count?
Update: ‘Pearls Before Swine’ weighs in.
Tips For Staying Civil While Debating Child Prisons.
A sample: “Avoid unkind generalizations like equating the jailing of ethnic minorities with some malevolent form of fascism.” And “Make sure any protests are peaceful, silent, and completely out of sight of anyone who could actually affect government policy.”
Previously: Yes, We Have Reached a New Low
That, apparently, is how long we’ve been married as of today. Caroline and I are going somewhere nice to celebrate.
…and I suspect we’ll go lower.
A lawyer from the US Department of Justice argued (with by all accounts a straight face and no embarrassment) to a federal court of appeals that the US has no obligation to give soap or toothbrushes to children being detained — in cages — in a federal facility while their asylum claims are pending.
Meanwhile the online crowds are debating what to call these places where kids sleep on concrete floors under foil blankets, and will no longer get English lessons or even playground access.
Is it wrong to call them “concentration camps”? That’s what the British authorities called the camps in which they imprisoned Afrikaners; the US called the WWII-era camps in which they put US citizens of Japanese origin “internment camps” but I’ve head people call them concentration camps. The terminology gets muddied when one brings in the Nazis. Historians distinguish between the Nazis’ “concentration camps” and the Nazis’ “death camps”, but I suspect a large part of the non-Jewish public today mostly doesn’t.
Personally, although I have no problem with the term “concentration camp” since it’s historically accurate, I think the best word is “atrocity”.
PS. Just to head off one common and inaccurate rejoinder, a recent study shows that “When families and unaccompanied children have access to legal representation, the rate ofcompliance with immigration court obligations is nearly 98 percent.”
And to anticipate a second rejoinder, Godwin’s Law does not apply here.
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