It works but produces pdfs. That becomes a problem. More importantly, you spend FAR more time writing documents using latex than word. The friction is enough to make writing legal stuff with it not worth the pain.
Writing long documents in Word is painful to the point that people prefer to stick to old tools like FrameMaker.
It's also painful in a different way than LaTeX. While LaTeX is complex but deterministic, Word just eludes your efforts in a way that does not build a coherent mental model but rather a loose set of fuzzy rules learned via frustration.
I deeply believe that this was by design and is in general part of Microsoft culture, creating a separation between programmers and users to make them suffer in their own ways. No wonder Bill Gates became a philanthropist in his later years. He knows better than anyone that future historians will figure out all the evil he expertly inflicted on the world.
I'm a lawyer, though most of my writing is related to litigation, not contracts. I did this in my 30s. It worked just fine and made beautiful PDFs. However, judges got pissed, because they have their own software to automatically sign proposed orders. Colleagues got irritated bc they received only pdfs. Eventually I got fed up with it because latex is truly a PITA to draft legal citations and information.
Assuming, arguendo, that corruption is somehow not a factor in your scenario, it still doesn't account for ignorance. Consider that jurors in jury trials have one binary decision to make based on the facts and law given to them. They don't need to decide if the law is just (in fact that's explicitly NOT what they're supposed to do). They don't need (and are not supposed) to decide if the situation is fair. That happens elsewhere by folks trained to consider these things. Jurors in jury trials literally apply the law they are given to the evidence they are presented. That's it. Even this burden is often more than a lot of folks can wrap their head around.
The legislature, however, is not there just to nod its head when they think something is a good idea and voting no when it's not. Even if we were to create a space for exactly that, all we've done is push the fallibility to those who are doing the work to write and revise law--but now they're pitching to those off the streets who don't know anything about governance! If anything, lay congresspeople would magnify, not reduce, the problems we have with our current system.
I am definitely not going to argue with almost any of what you said. My main point is that democracy as we have it now clearly has flaws and maybe exploring ways to amend it to work better isn’t a terrible idea. Again, Ireland successfully used randomly selected assemblies to decide in major legislation. Perhaps a state like California that loves doing direct referendums and as a result has referendums decided in part by how successfully the campaign around the given issue is can benefit from a longer deliberation by people who are not known ahead of time.
As a prosecuting attorney who selects and works to convince the "average" juror 5+ times a year, this is not a good idea. You are vastly overestimating what the average level of competence is. Most people, when given unfamiliar knowledge work to do, are so hopelessly biased and ignorant that I definitely think the average congressperson is more qualified to do that kind of work. We are spoiled by selection bias when extrapolating what "average" means in the USA.
> I definitely think the average congressperson is more qualified to do that kind of work
My sense is that people who advocate for sortition find it attractive not because they believe that the average citizen is more intelligent or better informed than the average career politician, just less corrupt.
Setting aside whether that's even true, I'm not sure whether it would be better to live in a country run by honest idiots or corrupt experts.
Speaking of "average", every political debate moderator should ask the candidates where they shop and how much milk and eggs cost. Ask them how much it is to fill up their car's gas tank. I don't necessarily think sortition is the answer, but I have more faith that the so called "hopelessly biased and ignorant average person" would address issues that affect me than I do with hopelessly biased and ignorant people like Trump, Johnson, Thune, Schumer and Jefferies, because I know they're only looking out for themselves.
So if you are wealthy enough to have house staff to do all the shopping, cooking, and driving, then you are somehow less qualified to be a member of parliament?
You believe the top 60% of the nation skew in the upper income levels? Median pay is $61k a year for the entire country. The top 1% skews to the upper income levels. The rest are charged $30 for a dose of aspirin and can't afford it.
There are numbers on this, and their comment is probably directionally correct; the median household with private insurance earns more than 400% of household FPL (KFF). By subtracting Medicaid and fixed-income seniors from the picture, you are sharply biasing the median upwards.
I would say if you ignore the poorest 40% of the population, you've got quite the slim margin to go before you are no longer talking about "Most" Americans, which the OP was pretty explicitly talking about.
He was saying "Most people in the US" don't make 100-200k more, and that they probably don't even make 100k. This was in response to the generalization that "people from other countries ... underestimate how well paid people in the US often are".
Now there was talk of getting the political motivation to change things, so I guess everyone is assuming Medicaid/Medicare/VA recipients don't want to change the system, but that wasn't really established, nor was that really being refuted.
I don't think I could be any clearer that I am (1) talking about Americans with private health insurance and (2) not making a normative judgement about which system is better, but rather a positive claim about the political challenge of changing the system (its large group of stakeholders who are better off under it).
Oh I'm clear about the demographic you are trying to discuss, my point was I'm not sure this all stemmed from a discussion about that specific demographic. It started at "people in US", then went to "most", then by the time you got involved in the thread you were defending a statement about people with private health insurance.
I could have made this comment at the level where it went off the rails, but I thought making it at the leaf level would help everyone involved see the deviation between what was said and what was being argued.
i think in this case, if you're at all familiar with what US hospitals charge for the small stuff, it's a safe assumption that when someone says aspirin costs $30 a dose, they're not talking about buying it at a CVS. of many folks on hacker news dot com i trust you to bridge that gap instead of nitpicking!
That's an odd argument to make in this thread, because whatever the drivers of burdensome consumer health spending are, they're not overpriced hospital aspirin.
I have used it now for almost 7 years running a law firm. It's worked great for exactly our use case: privileged emails, including attachments, can be time and passworded with legit TNO encryption. I initially used nextcloud/webDAV for our own calendar, but switched over recently to protonmail and it hasn't been an issue. Some storage space is useful. Haven't used the VPN. It's a boutique firm. We have only 4 employees. YMMV
No one is freeing up resources for a felony prosecutor by eliminating Driving Under Suspended cases, handled by a completely different prosecutor in a completely different courtroom.
No one's saving a felony docket by eliminating the need to prosecute niche crimes like aviation fraud or abortion or unlawful dog breeding.
No one can undisputedly connect bail reform with an increase or a decrease in crime or pre-trial recidivism.
No one can glean statistics from major cities only, conclude they are not harmful, and then imply reform must not be harmful for rural areas. There are usually more prosecutors elected in rural areas than populated ones.
Crime is tightly situational, geographically tied, culturally bound. Policies therefore must also be situational, geographically tied, and culturally bound. Some things might be universally bad. Those should be excised everywhere. But things that are not universally good should not be endorsed universally. I got the impression here that the writer wants some reforms to be endorsed universally.
I am a prosecutor. I used to be a criminal defense attorney. Crime comes from a complicated collection of sources and circumstances. Efforts to reduce crime, therefore, require an evaluation of the complications and circumstances in a given area. The causes of crime are geographically, economically, and culturally bound, and solutions probably should vary dramatically from area to area.
I know some people may not agree, but an oft-overlooked component of crime and law enforcement is culture. American crime, at least in part, is what it is today from our country's own defiant and ignorant understanding of what freedom is. "You can't tell me what to do with a gun." "You can't tell me to get out of my own car." Combine it with an unhealthy dose of American exceptionalism and social circumstances that contribute to crime and we get stupid like sovereign citizens, election denialism, and hilarious black-or-white efforts to villify law enforcement. Our country breeds criminals and idiocy in the classroom almost as much as bad parenting because we're told over and over that this is the best and most free place in the world and children in africa are starving. It's in our collective psychology. So every social pain is both a source of cognitive dissonance and King George III back from the dead to tax our freedoms. This is evident to me in the way the law in other countries is both written and enforced. Japan's violence is a far cry from ours. Canada isn't some paragon of legislation, yet their crime rates are very low. Interestingly enough, Canada's indigenous people make up a disproportionately HUGE amount of their incarcerated, but no one cares. But American cops were just born bad and are taught only to shoot the black people. As if law enforcement doesn't come out of the exact same pool of people who become office workers who screw around when they probably should be working, teachers who diddle their students, and negligent engineers who cheated their way through school. School shootings in America exist because they're a cultural touchstone for malignant attention and perverse notoriety, yet the issue is reduced to being either mental illness or guns. The fact that nobody can touch our guns is a symptom of the death caused, not the source of the issue.
Prosecutor's are little more than a reflection of the cultural expectations and demands of a given area. Articles like this are therefore both laughably myopic in their conclusions and a little dangerous in the way they perpetuate this tug of war we seem to be in. That said, I'm glad there are efforts from new prosecutors to reduce both disparity in treatment of people and legitimate efforts to eliminate waste and unneeded suffering in reducing crime. But the solution isn't a decision not to prosecute ABORTION, for which there are probably like 10 cases a year for. We'll never come up with consistent cause and effect relationships with this kind of whack a mole policy making. America needs to start thinking differently, starting with an admission that where there are people there will be criminals and understanding those criminals is more important than any other effort to reduce injustice for anyone.
Note though that there are around 6 times as many White people in the US, so Black people are about twice as likely to be arrested. That any given arrest is slightly safer for them is probably not really very reassuring to them.
Crime means something to us Americans when we have actually harmed someone and not simply offended some behavioral code. Where police and the "justice system" get a bad rap is they [typically] act like Cartman anytime their authority isn't immediately respected. A great example is the police chase: Trying to pull someone over for a broken tail light or for running an intersection and they take off? Cool, let 'em go and catch up with the registered owner later because you have the plate. You don't see anyone dying in the car, there is no emergency where you have to interact RIGHT NOW GODDAMNIT OR I'LL PIT- YOU I SWEAR!!! Another set of problems come from the absolute involuntary nature of it combined with the straight gaslighting about The Social Contract (yeah produce it with my ink signature) we received as school children. If we were customers to government the same way we were to Albertson's or BestBuy, I would have zero to do with them for sticking me in a mancage for a few days because I broke corporate policy X.YZ. Yet somehow religiously, it's OK for a special group which wears the abstract armor of god to? My neighbors have no more right to determine that my cooking and use of methamphetamine should put me in a cage, anymore than I have the right to steal back in value my time taken from me in the form of property they own.
Until governments wall off large sections of their land to form "free zones" similar to nature preserves, so that temporary or permanent expatriations become viable options in lieu of man cages or executions, this is not an actual justice system but a war-machine. The War on Crime has been the most abused and bastardized excuse for expanded state-gang power, feeding on peoples fears of a little bad guy so they need big bad guy to protect them (for a small tax, or you get the cage... no third choice other than be killed in a shooting fight). Criminal justice should not be about revenge but instead safety and rehabilitation. Caging a human animal involuntarily instead of merely excluding it from the rest is still barbaric. When someone going in for decades says he'd rather be dumped at the international border for equally long (or permanent) expatriation, you and taxpayers should be excitedly jumping with joy that $50,000/yr is going to be saved. If you feel bad because he did a no-no against you and now he's in Mexico sipping malgaritas? Grow up, or get a gun to go down there and fix it yourself! Quit giving power to religious institutions (the State is a religious institution, or homomorphic to it).
The impulse to "Take nice things away" from someone to make them miserable for something which I am sure they never agreed to in the first place needs to be stricken and actively prosecuted as prisoner abuse. A non-abusive SHU would have the victi... err prisoner, move his belongings which can keep him occupied into that solo cell. When a prisoner refuses to work, you do not take away his private entertainment devices from his room. That is abusive behavior, if he had the choice he would run away from you or shoot you for assaulting him in taking his TV and locking him in a SHU with nothing but his cloths for weeks.
I swear on the fabric of the universe itself that, if I end up on a jury trial for someone accused of assaulting law enforcement, I will most likely jury nullify unless it was literally a patrol man saying hi and instantly getting punched, or something. We don't have the institutional power to put you in cages similar to the ones you use, so we have to hack the system other ways and since a juror does not need to justify himself in being unconvinced a single juror can stop your human mulcher dead.
Finally, go lock yourself up for a few months, tell me how anyone slighly brain-broken is going to be helped by that (let alone recover for many).
All these games we play, are to attempt to supercede natural law: you attempt to predate me, I attempt to kill you in self defense. I don't mean legal defense, according to Criminal Code X.YZ, but natural defense like the gazelle getting lucky impailing the lioness. This only works so long as people in general have something to lose at the end of your gun, give some a 6-mo terminal diagnosis or the possibility of life in a cage if caught and they may opt to naturally defend themselves (and like the French I agree with this sentiment, and reserve jury nullification for it).
I’ll start by saying I’m a lawyer, not ever a professional coder. Years ago, I wanted to help a friend translate a Japanese video game and release a fan translation. I had some experience in assembler a long time before it, but I had forgotten most. I had little experience in disassembly. I also had never learned anything about compression algorithms or theory.
Turns out this particular game company (Falcom) had a habit of implementing their own compression on their assets. So I had to painstakingly read the disassembly. It got to the point that I had notebooks of hand written disassembly so I could read and think about the code when not at a computer. Eventually I figured out how to both decompress images and text and then save the decompressed assets in a way that bypass the compression. I wrote the hack and patch and was super happy. Of course it blew up the size of the game assets for translated materials, but it worked.
