@rexxit
@lemmy.worldThat's a good way to put it - it's laziness. Maybe it's laziness though the burden of history where the structure of the system is cobbled together from hundreds of years of increasingly irrelevant procedures and precedent that can't be modernized with society. I'm not a legal scholar by any stretch, but the whole thing looks suspect to me.
I've heard from medical experts that appear not to be mercenaries, but my issue is that there's no way for the legal system to distinguish between a person who takes the job only when they're on the right side of an issue, and a person who will craft an argument to make their side seem right regardless of the facts. The process all seems very corrupt from the outside. It incentivizes financial conflict of interest.
That's the issue I have with the justice system - it's much too loose with facts because it's designed around persuading non experts (and arguably jury selection is designed to reject people with high education or relevant background knowledge). The adversarial process gives each side an equal go at persuasion even if one side doesn't have a leg to stand on scientifically. The judge isn't in a position to disallow something that would be considered bullshit to an expert, and any qualified expert is allowed to sell out and present a biased interpretation of facts, even if 99% of their peers would disagree. More often than not, your resources determine whether or not you're right in the eyes of the law. It's bullshit.
Edit: if you're a physician on trial for malpractice, "A jury of your peers" would consist entirely of physicians in your area of practice, as they are the only people with the relevant understanding and background knowledge to evaluate whether your actions followed the standard of care or constitute malpractice. The fact that courts don't operate this way means that findings of guilt or innocence are basically a popularity/debate contest with a veneer of authenticity.
Totally agree. We should have <1B people living like kings, not 10B people living like peasants. A lot of environmentally unsustainable things become perfectly sustainable if there are fewer people on the planet. Like, we shouldn't have to be worried about the impact of beef production or overfishing - the planet should be able to sustain the number of humans that want to eat those things. At 8-10B it obviously can't.
Capitalism and retirement is set up as a pyramid scheme. We shouldn't be looking at situations that were recklessly arranged assuming endless growth and saying "how do we prevent population contraction" - that's insanity. We need to figure out how to retool society for a post-growth world.
If the only way to prevent the music from stopping is a pyramid scheme, we're all fucked.
Believe me when I say I'm not on corporations' side and I think they get away with all kinds of immoral shit through craftiness in the legal system, but I think that the only intellectually honest answer is that suspicious linkages are not causality, and that it should be evaluated by someone wielding scientific impartiality and robust statistical and epidemiological methods, rather than a legal process. Unfortunately courts are a shit place to evaluate science or broadly reality.
PFOA and similar precursor chemicals are one of those areas where I think it should be easy to establish elevated risk of disease with epidemiology (they probably have, but it's not my field and I haven't looked), but there are a lot of other areas that are much less clear cut. I've seen firsthand the family's emotional response to cancer being to find a villain somewhere, and it was in a case where I think no villain ever existed. People behave irrationally with mortal disease, and unfortunately some of it is just bad luck.
I don't mean to seem disrespectful of the loss of your relative in any way, but how were you able to establish a causal relationship between the CPAP machine and a particular illness or death?
It's not a question based in some sort of absolvence-by-legal-technicality, but I often read accounts of grieving family members who "just know" that that MMR vaccine caused their son's autism, or that dad using a chemical occasionally in the garage "must have" caused his cancer - because it's less scary than the idea that bad health problems happen at random to people who didn't do anything to cause it.
Edit: rarely, some health condition leads to a smoking gun, but most do not. Mesothelioma is only caused by exposure to asbestos, which is why you see commercials for lawyers seeking plaintiffs for injury cases. The causal relationship is established.
Yeah I made an error there. I wasn't looking specifically at Tokyo population for some reason.
Doesn't that all seem a bit silly?
For sure. All of this is pretty silly.
Also, it seems you are willing to discount discussion out of hand because of your perception of the person on the other side instead of based on the merits of the argument.
Well, I mean, yes, but I'm basically trying to say that social media in it's various forms is full of armchair experts who have massive blind spots but argue passionately, and the pro-urban, "fuck cars" crowd comes off as particularly cranky in this way.
It's basically people who didn't get a driver's license, or couldn't afford a car, or lived in an urban traffic nightmare like LA trying to invalidate the personal freedom others experienced as a result of car ownership - and I'm certain it's a generational thing because boomers, Gen X and the older millennials grew up at a time when anyone could own a car, gas was cheap, and it was woven into the independence of early adulthood. You'll never convince me that it's not empowering to get 50-100 miles out of your small city and explore an unpopulated place that public transit could not service. It annoys me to no end that people on socal media hate on this without the lived experience to understand it.