which

If you read the settlements that come out of these lawsuits, you will pretty much always find an 8 to low 9 figure settlement (that the lawyers get a third of), maybe some superficial policy changes, and $12 checks to the supposed victims who only became victims when they randomly got an email telling them they should join the lawsuit. The only people who benefit are the lawyers.

Is there a widely used phrase which represents the 95-97% range? One did not come to my head.

Yes, I think you can make an argument that the jury verdict was in line with the law... if that's the case then I think the law here is ridiculous. I can read what the law is, we're having a discussion. If the story of the woman who was burned by McDonald's coffee was posted here you would have people arguing for and against whether people should be able to seek recourse in courts for harms of that nature.

The argument that research was suppressed and this is somehow damning is absurd on its face. The most obvious reason being that they obviously didn't do a very good job of suppressing it given that we hear this claim every day. The second being that they could have just not done this research at all and then there would have been nothing to "suppress" (this terminology is also very odd... if 3M analyzes different sticky notes and concludes that their competitors sticky notes are better than theirs but does not release the results, is that suppression?). The third is that studies with the same results have come out probably every year since 2010 and have been routinely cited in the mainstream press. Lastly, it ignores that many platforms have actually responded to research about potential harms of social media by implementing safeguards on teen accounts.

Look at the plaintiff in this case: it's a mentally unstable person who blames her life problems on social media. Never mind the fact that she had been diagnosed with mental illnesses as an early teen, or that an overwhelming majority of people who use social media don't develop eating disorders or other mental illnesses as a result of it (and in fact the incidence of say bulimia peaked 30 years ago in spite of almost universal social media adoption among young people). This is not at all like smoking where 15% of smokers will get lung cancer.

And due to some absurd legal reasoning the plaintiff was allowed to pseudonymously extort $3 million out of tech companies. Worst of all I see people on a technology forum applauding this out of some sort of resentment towards large companies!

The average park in America is only like 5-10 acres. And of that only certain areas may have playstructures / basketball courts / benches / other things that people can actually use. So sufficiently loud audio can ruin people's experience. It's obvious to anyone who's been outside in the past 10 years that "live and let live" doesn't work... if they were using heroin and nodding out would that just be another form of recreation?

Yes, and the crime spike of the 1960s started with boomers reaching 15-20. You can follow that to cookie monster pajamas in Walmart.

That same line of reasoning could apply to music on planes. No one really needs to use a particular airline at a particular time or use a public park at any given time. It ceases to be a public place if a small group of people can de facto monopolize it by making it unpleasant for most other people to be there.

James Q. Wilson talked about this problem a long time ago... and why standard neighborhood shaming cannot really police it. Maybe there is an increasingly different set of norms among different generations which is why you have a breakdown in manners and even high school kids from affluent areas hitting "devious licks."

    Because the sanctions employed are subtle, informal, and delicate, not everyone is equally vulnerable to everyone else’s discipline. Furthermore, if there is not a generally shared agreement as to appropriate standards of conduct, these sanctions will be inadequate to correct such deviations as occur. A slight departure from a norm is set right by a casual remark; a commitment to a different norm is very hard to alter, unless, of course, the deviant party is “eager to fit in,” in which case he is not committed to the different norm at all but simply looking for signs as to what the preferred norms may be.

The tax avoidance schemes used by most major US companies are to avoid US taxes on foreign income. Most developed countries have territorial tax systems so their companies do not even need to use these fancy legal maneuvers because the income is largely exempt anyways.

In any given year corporate income tax is like 6-10% of federal receipts so even if that was doubled there would not be a huge decline in income taxes needed. The way the US does corporate tax is really also not that great from an economic perspective because it is a form of double taxation. The Estonian model of only taxing distributions incentivizes investment and avoids many debates over depreciation etc.

Does Leslie Groves deserve (some) credit for the Manhattan Project? Obviously there were people under him doing the actual day to day physics and chemistry work, but if a less effective person was in charge, the whole thing could have failed.

How much worse could you get from a society where 80% of people are living in extreme poverty and where in a good year inflation is 250%? Maduro was not some great guarantor of stability who kept a divided society together. For instance about half the prisons are run under the so called pranato system which means they are literally run by the inmates. I think it's reasonable to say that almost anyone would be better than him.

Pretty much everyone who wasn't in on the CADIVI scam or the subsidized gasoline racket or selling $0.05 screws to PDVSA for $75 stands to benefit from a new government. Many corrupt dictators understand that stealing a small percentage of a bigger pie is a more stable arrangement that can ultimately be more profitable in the long run but the clan that ran Venezuela was so greedy they wanted to take everything as fast as possible.

Venezuela was not a society held together by a strongman unlike Iraq/Libya/Syria. It also does not have the religious or tribal divides those places did. The country was already on the brink of collapse from a combination of sanctions and truly astronomical levels of corruption. There has been a roughly 70% economic decline over the past decade and while there is no longer hyperinflation, inflation in 2025 was at least 200%. Panama would be a more appropriate reference point.

Sadly I am not in a position to hire anyone but just a heads up that if I click your resume link I get a Microsoft login page

It took 10 years for Madoff victims to get most of their money back and he was literally just depositing the money into his checking account. He also almost certainly had much fewer victims than this guy did. Based on the complaint I think there may be a large number of international victims as well. This case will really test whatever claims process the DOJ has but hopefully some measure of compensation can be reached quickly. I suspect there are tens of thousands of scam domains and different addresses used so even identifying who to notify will probably be extremely difficult.