Freight rail is still alive in my area–and that means commuter rail could be. But like a lot of places, the public has been duped into voting against their own interests. I don’t want to hijack the thread, but it’s an issue that–if you care about it, you should be voting for Amtrak Joe. Public transportation needs to be part of the nation’s climate agenda, and the Criminal Cheetoh wants to sacrifice us all on the altar of petrol.

The problem is that the infrastructure doesn’t exist, and introducing it is cost-prohibitive for large parts of the US. I would love to be able to take a train from my small town to the nearest metro area 30 miles away and then take a tube to a block away from my destination–but that’s just not going to happen in my lifetime, because the city can’t afford to install a subway, and the auto lobby won the war against commuter rail before I was born.

Could it be better? Sure. Might it become better? Maybe, but probably not in my lifetime.

In the meantime, people are de facto dependent on cars. Destroying infrastructure necessary to support the reality of how people must, through no fault of their own, travel punishes the traveling public without addressing the actual problem.

If we’re going to transition to better transit infrastructure, we first have to build the better infrastructure–and pay for it by eliminating unseating political opposition. Only then can we dismantle these kinds of monstrosities without disenfranchising the people who depend on them.

But that wasn’t the question, was it? United international action works and also doesn’t really exist. You think billionaires are going to just throw up their hands and give governments their tax dollars if enough nations agree they should. Doesn’t work that way.

Read the article you linked. Who’s going to jail in Panama? A few bankers–maybe. Panama changed its rules, and the billionaires just moved all their money elsewhere–exactly as predicted.

The solution to tax evasion isn’t more tax law. That’s like saying that if only everyone agreed rapists should go to jail, people would stop committing rape.

I’m in favor of a wealth tax just because any action beats no action, but it is absolutely a half measure. The real solution to this problem is not financial. It’s personal.

Tell us then. Where are they currently hiding their money?

Eh… this is kind of nothing. Jurists quote religious texts all the time. Judge Ho–the topic of the article–doesn’t quote the Bible in a particularly eloquent fashion, but he’s far from the first US judge to use a biblical quote to make a point.

And yes, they quote the Quran too–just not as much since not as many of them are familiar with it. Law is a reasoning profession, and people who practice it like finding analogies and drawing distinctions. If they see that a set of facts is like or unlike something from ancient history, they’re likely to bring it up. They’ll bring up song lyrics, mythology, popular proverbs, ancient legal texts, moral fables–anything with any reasoning or legal thinking in it.

Trump appointees are deserving of criticism for horrible jurisprudence, terrible judgment and insight, and piss-poor qualifications. There are plenty of things to hate about lots of them, but “they quote the Bible sometimes” isn’t one.

So you’re not running then? Amidst the rampant, unchecked political corruption you claim to observe in every direction, the solution you in your wisdom have found most powerful is to complain about it on the internet.

Easy to complain. Which district are you running in?

Not a big fan of the clickbait title either, but this video actually contains a substantive overview of the S4 changes. I’d rather have the clickbait title than ask the submitter to editorialize it to take the question out. [We’re not really in a position to muscle content creators into moving away from clickbait, and I’d rather have the content here than not.]

The Democrats need to immediately trumpet this thing from the rooftops. The GOP wants to take away Social Security and Medicare. 170 of them put their names on this budget, if NBC is to be believed.

The Republicans want you to never be able to retire, and they want you to never have the healthcare that your parents and grandparents had or that they themselves enjoy. They want you to be poor and stay poor, and they want the same for your children.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting to step away. I’m not playing any Diablos at the moment either. But many of us were also done with D3 before it course corrected.

Outright shuttering the community would be short-sighted. If you’re absolutely 100% sure you’re done, then you may want to step down, but I also feel like that might be something you eventually come to regret. The future is uncertain.

Put’em up. Got statistics? Show statistics. I don’t care one whit about this argument (I homeschool my kid because I don’t want him to get shot), but if you say your allegation is supported by evidence, provide the evidence. Which ones?: Yes. Let’s see’em.

This is good news. But you know, just to be on the safe side, let’s all go vote for Joe anyway.

What on earth are you talking about? Joe Biden tried to give 20k to each of them who went to college. And he would have if the–let me check my notes here: oh, right–Nazis in the other party hadn’t sued to prevent him from giving away money.

I appreciate that Biden might not be some folks’ first choice, but if you think young people believe another four years of Grampa Joe is just barely more tolerable than the deliberate annihilation of the Republic by fascist traitors, you might need to meet one.

Not the person to whom you replied, but there are many stories behind that paragraph. The problem is that a dog bred to be strong is likely to be strong enough to ignore a leash when it wants to. A few minutes on your search engine of choice can give you headlines of pits and other powerful breeds getting away from their handlers even when leashed.

The resulting advocacy is that criminal culpability should still lie even in the absence of negligence on the part of the owner. In many states, tort liability will lie on a strict liability basis (i.e., the owner is liable for damages incurred by the victim of an animal attack even if the animal exhibited no prior dangerous behavior)–in other states, the owner must be aware of the danger of the animal, for instance from prior bites, before liability will attach. That’s generally not true in criminal cases, however, where theories usually require a finding of negligence due to the higher burden of proof and the higher stakes (i.e., incarceration).

The best analogy I can think of would be statutory rape–you can be guilty and incarcerated even if you consented, the victim consented, and you genuinely had no idea that the victim was below the statutory age. The position would be that we should adopt the same for animal attacks: You can (and should, advocates would argue) be incarcerated even if your animal injured someone through no fault of your own and you had no previous reason to believe the animal would become dangerous.

Reading about some of the attacks in which the owner exercised their best efforts to control the animal and failed, I can see the argument: Merely owning the animal at all is accepting responsibility for its actions, full stop. Personally, I think current negligence theory is basically sufficient for this (i.e., if the dog can get away from you, you have a duty to know that and prevent it), but the benefit of this kind of strict liability legislation would be that all the bickering in these threads about which breed is good, which breed is bad, and who knows and doesn’t know dogs would evaporate. Put your money where your mouth is. The dog you can count on never to kill someone is the dog that can’t.

Love, the owner of a small yappy type dog who is harmless because he’s tiny and trivially easy to overpower.