guajalote
12d ago
Lawyers are used in arbitration as well, and unlike a judge you have to pay the arbitrator. I'm not sure why you think that's a cheaper option that litigation.
Courts are mainly avenues of Justice. As in you want the person who screwed you over monetarily not just to pay you back but to suffer.
Where are you getting this idea? Usually courts are limited to awarding actual damages; punitive damages are the exception.
guajalote
12d ago
In cases of money or social interaction its a bad idea to have courts involved.
How would you have contract disputes resolved? Inheritance disputes?
guajalote
18d ago
I've met bears on a number of occasions while hiking, hunting, or berry picking in places like Tahoe, Colorado, and Minnesota. In my mind, meeting bears is a normal thing that happens from time to time, but I suppose that just shows how out of touch I am with normal peoples' lives. I think you're right that the bear is not "real" in the minds of most people answering the question.
Liability also doesn't come into play until the suit is underway. It's trivially true that anyone can file suit for anything, but the plaintiff isn't going to recover any money unless they have evidence of causation and damages.
Also, my thought experiment notwithstanding, it's already totally possible to sue self-driving car manufacturers for causing accidents, yet these companies are not only in business but doing better than ever.
guajalote
5d ago
There is plenty of undeveloped land on the edges of SF and LA. Between SF and Petaluma, for example, there's a ton of empty land. But more importantly "open land" is not a prerequisite for building housing, since you can build vertically. SF would have way more housing if it wasn't preventing people from tearing down "historic laundromats." Housing is affordable even in the densest parts of downtown Houston where there is no "open land" to develop. Conversely, the area of rural Northern California where I grew up has tons of open land, yet housing costs are much higher per square foot than downtown Houston.
guajalote
5d ago
Houston, TX is about 25% foreign born and has way cheaper housing than any major city in CA. There's plenty of space in CA to house everyone even if the population doubled or tripled. The problem is regulations that restrict supply.
guajalote
25d ago
It blows my mind how often smart people with STEM backgrounds assume the legal system can be hacked like a computer. Federal judges are smart people who have discretion over how they handle their docket. If the city has 60 similar laws, the judge is going to tell the city to pick the one (or maybe two or three if he's generous) laws that they believe to be on the strongest constitutional footing and treat that law as representative.
guajalote
13d ago
Anything that expands the scope of things that one individual can sue another for is laundering costs.
This statement is often not true. Lawsuits are often a more efficient and transparent way of allocating costs.
Let's say society is worried about accidents caused by self-driving cars and wants to allocate some amount of resources to fixing the problem. There are two straightforward ways to structure the resource allocation:
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Pass a law specifying that victims of accidents caused by self-driving cars can sue the manufacturer for damages, or;
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Pass a set of safety regulations that self driving car companies have to comply with, and if a compliant self-driving car nevertheless causes an accident, the government compensates the victim.
In scenario 1 we are causing the cost of accidents to be carried by the car company, who is in the best position to figure out how to prevent accidents. So we have given them a monetary incentive to devote a rational amount of resources to fixing or improving the problem. This is the opposite of a reverse lottery because the car company is in the best position out of anyone to try to predict and prevent accidents.
Scenario 2 creates a situation where car companies are only encouraged to comply with regulations, rather than try to figure out the best way to prevent accidents. The regulator is in a much worse position to know what regulations will actually be effective at preventing accidents, and the regulator has no direct monetary incentive to care about preventing accidents. Simultaneously, they also have no monetary incentive to care about over-preventing accidents either. So we will almost necessarily get an inefficient set of regulations that devote an incorrect amount of resources to the problem.
Robert Wright is not exactly in the ratsphere and isn't exactly "anti-Israel" per se, but he's the closest one that comes to mind.
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