Bad Glacier

I’m not much of a link-and-comment blogger, but I’ll pretend tonight.

Over at the Volokh Conspiracy, David Bernstein is not happy. Specifically, he’s not a fan of civil juries, which we all know “serve as a completely lawless element that wreaks havoc with the rule of law.” They come up with “ridiculous civil jury verdict[s]” and it’s no wonder they “have been abolished just about . . . everywhere but the U.S.”

What brought this on, you ask? Well, one particular band of unprincipled brigands “blatantly disregarded the law (and common sense)” and “held that the Port Authority of New York was 68% responsible for the (first) bombing of the World Trade Center,” in order to “ensure that the PA would be found more than 51% responsible, and thus, under comparative negligence rules, would have to pay.”

Now, I’m confused. There are a lot of ridiculous things about that case (more than I know, I’m sure), and the verdict is probably one of them, but before I blame everything on the jury system, I would reconsider the rule that someone who is less than 51% responsible isn’t liable for damages. If juries think the law is so unfair they are willing to fudge numbers (which are somewhat arbitrary to begin with) to get around it, I would suppose the problem to be with contributory negligence, not with the juries.

Can someone explain to me either the reason why I should be calling for the foreman’s head on a stake or the logic behind the 51% rule? I mean, aren’t juries supposed to be one of the democratic elements in law, keeping verdicts in line with public opinion and all that? I assume the reason for the contributory negligence rule is something like, “only the party most responsible for damage should be liable for it,” but that doesn’t sound persuasive to me. The issue of who should pay and how much is a hard one, but this can’t be the best solution we’ve come up with.

I wrote something about LLMs, but I didn’t like it, so it’s gone now. Suffice it to say that they annoy me with their free time and their cooking skills, even though they are extremely nice people with interesting backgrounds and good stories. It balances out in the end, I think.

On a somewhat related note, why doesn’t English have gendered nouns? This seems like information I should know, but I don’t. Someone has to be able to help me. CM? Bueller? Anyone?

Ever since I started using Bloglines, my blog reading has been getting out of control. It’s just so easy to add a blog to the list, and then I feel I have to check a site whenever there’s a new post. I just can’t help myself. Does anyone else have this problem?

I guess the best solution would be to organize the links into groups based on how often I want to check them (weekly, daily, hourly, etc.) and then force myself to stick to my schedule. Unless someone else has a better solution to this problem.

Anyone?

Okay, I have a problem. I’m reading a ridiculous number of blogs nowadays. Everyone else seems to be using aggregators, so I’ve been playing around with a few different ones. All in all, I’ve been underwhelmed. I guess I was hoping for something more, considering the level of enthusiasm I’ve been seeing.

So I’m asking for help. Does anyone out there use aggregators, and if so, which one(s) do you use? Do you just use them to see when a blog has been updated or do you read the whole post from the aggregator? Any tips to help me have a better experience? Am I missing something great about these things?