I would tentatively agree at least for the sake of argument that billable hours aren’t the primary design consideration, but imo there’s a symbiotic relationship here that can’t be ignored. It would be willfully obtuse on their part if by now they weren’t well aware
Yes exactly. All of those seem like foregone conclusions to me once they’re allowed to happen.
Yeah so let’s not claim that the lawyers don’t actually own the entire system. They’re some of the biggest beneficiaries lol. Take fraud for instance… white collar crime is basically legal, because if you sign a contract and receive payment for something, and then refuse to perform the service you were paid to do when the victim calls law enforcement they’ll be told ‘it’s a civil matter’ and they’ll have to decide whether to call a private attorney to deal with it. If you yourself are good at law you can write the contract in such a way that you can steal vastly more money with a briefcase than you ever could with a gun.
Welcome to America. If I hear someone tell me that I’ve been stolen from but ‘it’s a civil matter’ one more time I’m going to scream my lungs out. Just like I did the last time. Nothing will change and it will happen again.
Ugh, gf just got in a car accident, hit while backing out of a parking spot. All are fine, but the other driver was clearly speeding through the parking lot based on the damage to her car (see picture). However, we’re in a fault state and the officer determined the gf is at fault for “not looking for a clear road” while backing up–while the gf insists that she was looking the entire time and the lady came out of nowhere. Now her car insurance is gonna go way up, which she is not going to be able to afford. Great.
Edit: she was able to get the cop to revise it to no-fault or split-fault, not sure, but sounds like a much better result so phew.
I’ve been involved in drafting legislation and regulations. No attorney is thinking about how many billable hours a particular version of a law or reg would generate. Invariably it is to accomplish some goal the client wants. Often times (most of the time from what I’ve seen) the clients, especially the regulated industry, want flexibility, many times legislators want flexibility, too. That means in most cases you use language that is purposely vague. Vague language increases the likelihood that people will disagree with its meaning. Sometimes, people want very specific things added in to deal with specific issues, that can cause statutes and regulations to become dense as more and more specific things are tacked on, which also requires attorneys to navigate. Most of the time the problem is some specific or private interest. They are the people to get mad at, as well as the legislators.
This is not a good dodge of my larger point… and it doesn’t change the eventual impact of the process at all. Like I said it can be unintentional (and it does sound like a side effect) but the impact on smaller operators is that the minimum cost of operating in many sectors is raised considerably by intentionally vague rules that can be weaponized by larger competitors.
I’m sorry but if a law can’t be written at a level understandable to a fifth grader in ten pages or less it probably shouldn’t get done. Laws and regulations aren’t supposed to be to protect specific incumbents interests they are supposed to be to protect the public. The public would be better protected by having the rules be something they could actually follow (and crucially be able to tell when other parties were violating it) with a minimal amount of research.
The process you’re describing is inherently corrupt and benefits the people drafting it (including the lawyers) at the expense of every other citizen of our country. I hope you can see that.
Unless the other driver’s vehicle has a flux capacitor, she didn’t come “out of nowhere.”
This is why your gf is at fault.
Cars are more complicated than they were 50 years ago. People could do work on older cars much more easily than they used to. Now, there’s some stuff that you probably can’t do at home. It’s more complicated, but it’s more efficient. Cars are better than they were 50 years ago because of technological advances that are beyond the ken of the normal layperson.
The myth of America is based on this vision of Jeffersonian democracy with independent and self-sufficient yeoman farmers. Modern civilization moves towards a world where no one is self-sufficient and everyone playing their role creates a society where the sum is greater than its parts. At least some of our current social tension comes from the anomie due to the disconnect between the excessive value placed on individualism and the way the world works. Some people embrace guns, for example, because they are symbols of individualism, representing the ability to be self-sufficient when it comes to self-protection.
Why is the damage to the RF when GF was backing out of the spot? Seems like the GF had cleared the spot and then got [quote=“DrChesspain, post:5398, topic:319, full:true”]
Unless the other driver’s vehicle has a flux capacitor, she didn’t come “out of nowhere.”
This is why your gf is at fault.
[/quote]
No fucking way the GF is at fault here. She was backing out of the spot and the damage to her car is on the RF. She got hit, no question.
Edit: And my pony is slow.
Yeah no. Laws are definitely not like cars. Until there’s an AI that interprets the laws meaning in real time and tells you what you can and cannot do additional complexity in the law has negative marginal value and exists almost entirely to benefit the few at the expense of the many. Nice try though.
In real life attorneys greatly increase inequality by ensuring that only rich people have to be treated in a lawful way. They also insure that a great many businesses are completely inaccessible to people who aren’t already rich.
I gotta be honest your entire take is trash and just a spectacularly dumb defense of something that’s basically just authentically evil. You can tell the evil is authentic because it’s so utterly mundane.
The problem isn’t lawyers, the problem is politicians. The role of government in the economy should be consumer protection to balance against the power of corporations. It often fails in that role, which I think should be prioritized over things such as creating jobs.
The reason I back Warren in the primaries is because of her role in the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
The complexity in the legal code exists to protect those same corporate interests over the general public. There is nothing else being added by making the rules too complicated for laypeople to understand at even a surface level.
It’s the same reason the Catholic Church resisted having the bible translated out of Latin into local languages. They were aware that the practices of the Church and the Bible were in direct conflict in quite a few places… and the more cynical among them knew that the Bible didn’t do well when analyzed.
Most people would be utterly outraged by what the laws actually mean if they were translated out of legalese and into plain English. It would become instantly apparent who they were written to benefit.
You can’t write a legal code without using legalese.
Yeah it’s good that the cop left fault out of it, let the insurance companies sort it out.
I backed into a guy in an old Volvo as we were both backing out of angled parking spaces at the same time. He was in the opposite row - one space behind me. So my rear spare tire hit his car in the side and made a huge dent. (He had a perfect view of my car out his driver’s side window, and I was totally blocked from seeing him.)
Since I hit him, I assumed I was at fault. So I offered to pay to fix his car if we could leave insurance out of it. But the dumb old nit insisted on getting insurance involved. The insurance companies determined no one was at fault. So he’s out $700 for his car, while my damage was nothing, except my spare tire is at a different angle now.
Yeah that’s definitely not true. Let me demonstrate.
The level of lead in your Y product can’t be greater than X.
You may not deduct Z from workers paychecks for any reason.
See how easy that was?
How do lawyers write those requirements in a way that the average person can’t understand?
That’s not the reason. The dogma of the Catholic church was that you can only reach and comprehend god through his ordained vicars on earth. If everyone were able to read and understand the bible the priests and bishops are in danger of becoming obsolete.
This was a major catalyst for protestantism.
I’m not dodging your point, I’m saying your point is wrong. There are perfectly valid, non-corrupt reasons to draft laws in general language, too. It’s not simple and it’s certainly not black and white. The world is complicated and language is imprecise. If you are writing rules to govern conduct in society, you either write general language that can cover a lot of situations or you get very precise but write volumes to try to address as many specific scenarios as possible. Whichever strategy you choose, there will still be fights over what the law means because, again, the world is immensely complex and language can be only so precise. You should direct your energy toward the people hiring the attorneys. Getting mad at attorneys in this instance accomplishes nothing.
