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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • I actually read the 7 page opinion, because normally there is at least some shred of reasonableness in these crazy opinions. But this one … those 7 pages have nothing.

    I’ll just leave this little nugget from the end:

    The points we have made above provide some clarity about the legal standards and framework for this sensitive area of Texas law. The courts cannot go further by entering into the medical-judgment arena.

    The really telling part of all of this is that there was no reason for this to be a thing. The state attorney general chose to fight this specific case. Then chose to send a letter to every hospital saying the injunction did not actually protect them, and chose to appeal the decision to the state Supreme Court.

    None of that had to happen. He could have let the extreme cases go through while fighting to remove women’s rights on the more “controversial” cases, but instead chose to make a test case out the most extreme interpretation of his extremist ideology.

    Despite this, the court seems willfully blind to the fact that the reason for needing an injunction is that the state is acting in demonstorable bad faith.

    Side note. Remember when the US SC ruled that this law could not be challenged because the state was not going to be the one enforcing it?


  • This is a civil case, not a criminal one. His 5th amendment protections are much weaker. If he says that his testimony may support criminal charges, then he is allowed to take the 5th. However, in a civil trial, the fact finder is allowed to draw a negative inference from that.

    Having said that, none if this is relevent. He already testified during the State’s case, which is the only time he would need to invoke privilege. Since this is the defense case, they get to simply not call him.

    Unless one of his co-defendants subpoenaed him, which is also not the case.








  • In the US, the covid vaccine has a sticker price of about $120; which is already a meaningless and overinglated number, but puts an upper bound on the cost of the treatment.

    Suppose you are a healthy young adult, working a job earning $15/hour. You do not get vaccinated and end up catching covid. Nothing major, you just call in sick for a day and sleep it off. 8 hours of lost labor at $15/hour gives a lower bound of $120 in economic damages. Of course, your work produces more value then your wage: there is profit, per-employee overhead, non-wage benefits, cost of unplanned disruptions.

    Maybe you need 2 days to recover. Now the damages are large enough to have covered at least 2 vaccinations. Maybe you infected someone else, who proceeded to infect someone else. Maybe you value not getting sick at a rate above $0. And this is all just the cost associated with 1 sick day. Some young healthy adults will get even sicker, and there is no way to know ahead of time who they will be.











  • In theory, concurrent sentences are an acknowledgement that it is not fair to give multiple punishments for the same crime. However, it is often desirable to charge someone with multiple offences fir the same crime, as they might be found innocent of the more serious offense (or have some of the convuctions overturned on appeal).

    For example, in the case of a homicide, you often see the defendent charged with both murder and manslaughter for the same act. In such a case the defendent would likely get a concurrent sentence because they were only convicted of a single act.

    In many cases, the line between multiple convictions being a single “act” is blurry, the judge can exersise discretion.