#Legal Landscape

[maxli-catenby]

Because I've seen it up in the air, I can say that as of today it's possible to update gender marker with Social Security, though I had a passport with a corrected marker which might matter

Their website no longer says how, but you fill out a SS-5 form and then go to an office for them to process

[kamini-vidrawan-ras]

Legal and Regulatory Challenges: The legal landscape surrounding the production, sale, and use of sex robots.

The legal landscape surrounding sex robots is complex and evolving, reflecting various societal, ethical, and technological considerations. Here are some of the key legal and regulatory challenges associated with the production, sale, and use of sex robots:

1. Regulation of Production and Sale:

Classification of Sex Robots: One challenge is how to classify sex robots—whether they are considered toys, adult entertainment products, or something else entirely. This classification affects regulatory frameworks and taxation.

Safety Standards: Manufacturers may face legal requirements regarding safety and health standards, particularly concerning materials used in production and the safety of electrical components in robots.

2. Intellectual Property:

Patents and Copyrights: As technology advances, issues surrounding intellectual property rights may arise, including patenting designs and software used in sex robots, leading to potential legal disputes.

Trademark Concerns: Brands may seek to protect their identities in a crowded market, which can lead to legal challenges related to branding and marketing.

3. Consent and Agency:

Lack of Agency: Since sex robots do not possess consciousness or the ability to consent, questions arise about the ethical implications of their use. This can complicate discussions around legality and consumer rights.

Potential for Misuse: Legal frameworks may need to address concerns about users projecting harmful behaviors onto robots, including violent or abusive interactions, and whether there should be restrictions based on these risks.

4. Age Restrictions:

Regulations on Sales: Laws governing the sale of sex robots often involve age restrictions similar to those for adult films or sex toys. Determining appropriate age limits and enforcement can be a contentious issue.

Targeting of Minors: The potential for robots to be marketed to younger audiences poses legal and ethical challenges, necessitating clear regulations to prevent misuse.

5. Impact on Human Relationships:

Legal Definitions of Relationships: As the use of sex robots becomes more widespread, legal systems may need to address implications for marriage, partnerships, and family law, particularly regarding emotional attachments formed with robots.

Custody and Rights Issues: If relationships with robots become recognized in any legal context, questions about custody and rights could emerge, complicating traditional legal frameworks.

6. International Variations:

Cultural and Legal Differences: Different countries have varying attitudes toward sex robots, impacting the legal environment. Some nations may ban them outright, while others embrace their commercialization, leading to inconsistencies in regulation.

Export and Import Regulations: The legal status of sex robots may affect international trade, with some countries imposing strict import/export regulations that complicate the global market.

7. Ethical and Moral Considerations:

Regulatory Frameworks: Policymakers face challenges in balancing ethical considerations with the rights of consumers and manufacturers, often resulting in contentious debates over what constitutes acceptable use.

Public Health and Safety: Governments may need to consider public health implications, including the potential impact on sexual behavior and societal attitudes toward intimacy.

8. Future Legal Developments:

Evolving Legislation: As technology and societal norms evolve, legal frameworks surrounding sex robots are likely to change, necessitating ongoing dialogue between legislators, ethicists, and the public.

Need for Comprehensive Policy: There may be a push for comprehensive policies that address the multifaceted issues surrounding sex robots, including ethical guidelines, safety standards, and consumer protections.

(Click here to know about- Kamini Vidrawan Ras)

Conclusion:

The legal and regulatory challenges surrounding sex robots are complex and multifaceted, involving considerations of safety, consent, intellectual property, and societal implications. As technology continues to evolve and societal attitudes shift, lawmakers and regulators will need to navigate these challenges thoughtfully, balancing innovation with ethical and legal responsibilities. Ongoing dialogue and research will be essential in shaping a legal landscape that addresses the unique issues posed by sex robots.

[brewscoop]

Dive into the refreshing world of THC-infused beverages with our latest article, "THC-Infused Beverages: The New Wave of Craft Brewing | Brew Scoop." Discover how brewers are blending the art of craft brewing with cannabis innovation to create sociable, buzz-inducing drinks. Uncover the craftsmanship, the legal navigation, and why this trend is more than just a fad. 🍻🌿 Ready to taste the future of social consumption?

[techminsolutions]

Legal Precision Unveiled: Unraveling the Intricacies of Input Tax Credit Quandaries

Delving deeper into the intricate tapestry of Goods and Services Tax (GST) implications, the saga of Input Tax Credit (ITC) assumes greater complexity, offering a nuanced perspective on the petitioner-assessee’s odyssey. Embedded within the labyrinth of statutory constructs, the petitioner’s invocation of Input Tax Credit (ITC) rights under section 16 of the CGST Act unfolds against the backdrop…

[swartzlaw]

Aircraft Accidents: Navigating Liability and Compensation

Aircraft accidents, with their inherent severity, can thrust families into a realm of profound grief compounded by the daunting legal intricacies of seeking compensation for wrongful death. The catastrophic nature of such incidents intensifies the emotional toll on affected families, necessitating a comprehensive understanding of the legal landscape. 

[beardedmrbean]

Four years after launching a push for more diversity in its ranks, McDonald’s is ending some of its diversity practices, citing a U.S. Supreme Court decision that outlawed affirmative action in college admissions.

McDonald's is the latest big company to shift its tactics in the wake of the 2023 ruling and a conservative backlash against diversity, equity and inclusion programs. Walmart, John Deere, Harley-Davidson and others rolled back their DEI initiatives last year.

McDonald's said Monday it will retire specific goals for achieving diversity at senior leadership levels. It also intends to end a program that encourages its suppliers to develop diversity training and to increase the number of minority group members represented within their own leadership ranks.

McDonald's said it will also pause “external surveys." The burger giant didn't elaborate, but several other companies, including Lowe's and Ford Motor Co., suspended their participation in an annual survey by the Human Rights Campaign that measures workplace inclusion for LGBTQ+ employees.

McDonald's, which has its headquarters in Chicago, rolled out a series of diversity initiatives in 2021 after a spate of sexual harassment lawsuits filed by employees and a lawsuit alleging discrimination brought by a group of Black former McDonald's franchise owners.

“As a world-leading brand that considers inclusion one of our core values, we will accept nothing less than real, measurable progress in our efforts to lead with empathy, treat people with dignity and respect, and seek out diverse points of view to drive better decision-making,” McDonald's Chairman and CEO Chris Kempczinski wrote in a LinkedIn post at the time.

But McDonald’s said Monday that the “shifting legal landscape” after the Supreme Court decision and the actions of other corporations caused it to take a hard look at its own policies.

A shifting political landscape may also have played a role. President-elect Donald Trump is a vocal opponent of diversity, equity and inclusion programs. Trump tapped Stephen Miller, a former adviser who leads a group called America First Legal that has aggressively challenged corporate DEI policies,as his incoming deputy chief of policy.

Vice President-elect JD Vance introduced a bill in the Senate last summer to end such programs in the federal government.

Robby Starbuck, a conservative political commentator who has threatened consumer boycotts of prominent consumer brands that don't retreat from their diversity programs, said Monday on X that he recently told McDonald's he would be doing a story on its “woke policies.”

McDonald's said it had been considering updates to its policies for several months and planned to time the announcement to the start of this year.

In an open letter to employees and franchisees, McDonald's senior leadership team said it remains committed to inclusion and believes a diverse workforce is a competitive advantage. The company said 30% of its U.S. leaders are members of underrepresented groups, up from 29% in 2021. McDonald's previously committed to reaching 35% by the end of this year.

McDonald's said it has achieved one of the goals it announced in 2021: gender pay equity at all levels of the company. It also said it met three years early a goal of having 25% of total supplier spending go to diverse-owned businesses.

McDonald’s said it would continue to support efforts that ensure a diverse base of employees, suppliers and franchisees, but its diversity team will now be referred to as the Global Inclusion Team. The company said it would also continue to report its demographic information.

The McDonald's Hispanic Owner-Operators Association said it had no comment on the policy change Monday. A message seeking comment was left with the National Black McDonald's Operators Association.

[fatehbaz]

[T]he infamous Diable (Devil’s Island) [French prison in Guiana, South America] [...]. Seventy thousand convicts were sent to French Guiana between 1852 and 1938. [...] Alongside deportation of political prisoners [...], a [...] convict population [...] was sent to the bagne (common parlance for the penal colony) [...] as a utopian colonial project [...] via the contribution convict labour would make towards colonial development in French Guaina. However, [...] French Guiana [...] was predominantly used as a depository for the unwanted citizens of France and its colonies. The last remaining French and North African convicts were repatriated in 1953, whereas the last Vietnamese prisoners were not given passage home until 1954 [...].

[T]he same form of built environment and carceral technology [...] structures found on Con Dao [French prison in Vietnam] and [the French prison in Guiana] [were] built at almost the same time [...] to house the same convict populations (Vietnamese implicated in anticolonial struggles) [...]. Old world colonialism is thus displaced by new world imperialism. Both rely on the prison island and its cellblocks. [...]

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The carceral continuities [...] throughout France’s penal colonies are supplemented by legal exceptionalism which works to redefine colonial subjects within shifting political contexts. [...] Many of the Indochinois convicts transported to the forest camps of French Guiana in 1931, including the Bagne des annamites, had originally been classed as political prisoners. The transfer was intended in part [...] to remove a number of anticolonial actors from Indochina. [...]

As political deportees sent to French Guiana were usually exempt from labour according to the political decree of 1850, this status had to be revoked to ensure the maximum labour force possible.

Consequently, those arrested on suspicion of specific acts of violence or property damage were reclassed as common criminals. Described by Dedebant and Frémaux (2012, 7) as “little arrangements between governors,” this was not simply a sleight of hand but written into legal codes. [...]

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[M]any of the Vietnamese sent to French Guiana had to wait until the 1960s to be repatriated. [...] After their sentences were completed, convicts were not simply repatriated to France or other colonies.

A system of “doublage” intended to shore up colonial development meant they had to serve the same length of their sentence again on the colony. For those condemned to eight years or more, this became life. Opportunities for sustainable livelihood were limited in a territory possessing swathes of free convict labour. Worn out and sick from their time in the bagne, most of these men were unfit to work and relied on charity to survive. [...]

[T]he last living convict [of the Guiana penal colony] [...] died in Algeria in 2007 after being repatriated to Annaba. In an interview given in 2005, he claims that every night he dreams he is back in Cayenne: “when I think about it, I get vertigo, I spent my life there” [...].

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All text above by: Sophie Fuggle. "From Green Hell to Grey Heritage: Ecologies of Colour in the Penal Colony". Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Volume 24 (2022), Issue 6, pages 897-916. Published online 8 April 2021. At: doi dot org slash 10.1080/1369801X.2021.1892507 [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism purposes.]

[jcmarchi]

Insights into political outsiders

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/insights-into-political-outsiders/

Insights into political outsiders

As the old saw has it, 90 percent of politics is just showing up. Which is fine for people who are already engaged in the political system and expect to influence it. What about everyone else? The U.S. has millions and millions of people who typically do not vote or participate in politics. Is there a way into political life for those who are normally disconnected from it?

This is a topic MIT political scientist Ariel White has been studying closely over the last decade. White conducts careful empirical research on typically overlooked subjects, such as the relationship between incarceration and political participation; the way people interact with government administrators; and how a variety of factors, from media coverage to income inequality, influence engagement with politics.

While the media heavily cover the views of frequent voters in certain areas, there is very little attention paid to citizens who do not vote regularly but could. To grasp U.S. politics, it might help us to better understand such people.

“I think there is a much broader story to be told here,” says White, an associate professor in MIT’s Department of Political Science.

Study by study, her research has been telling that story. Even short, misdemeanor-linked jail terms, White has found, reduce the likelihood that people will vote — and lower the propensity of family members to vote as well. When people are convicted of felonies, they often lose their right to vote, but they also vote at low rates when eligible. Other studies by White also suggest that an 8 percent minimum wage increase leads to an increase in turnout of about one-third of 1 percent, and that those receiving public benefits are far less likely to vote than those who do not.

These issues are often viewed in partisan terms, although the reality, White thinks, is considerably more complex. When evaluating infrequent or disconnected voters, we do not know enough to make assumptions about these matters.

“Getting people with past criminal convictions registered and voting, when they are eligible, is not a surefire partisan advantage for anybody,” White says. “There’s a lot of heterogeneity in this group, which is not what people assume. Legislators tend to treat this as a partisan issue, but at the mass public level you see less polarization, and more people are willing to support a path for others back into daily life.”

Experiences matter

White grew up near Rochester, New York, and majored in economics and government at Cornell University. She says that initially she never considered entering academia, and tried her hand at a few jobs after graduation. One of them, working as an Americorps-funded paralegal in a legal services office, had a lasting influence; she started thinking more about the nature of government-citizen interactions in these settings.

“It really stuck in my mind the way people’s experiences, one-on-one with a person who is representing government, when trying to get benefits, really shapes people’s views about how government is going to operate and see them, and what they can expect from the state,” White says. “People’s experiences with government matter for what they do politically.”

Before long, White was accepted into the doctoral program at Harvard University, where she earned an MA in 2012 and her PhD in 2016. White then joined the MIT faculty, also in 2016, and has remained at the Institute ever since.

White’s first published paper, in 2015, co-authored with Julie Faller and Noah Nathan, found that government officials tended to have different levels of responsiveness when providing voting information to people of apparently different ethnicities. It won an award from the American Political Science Association. (Nathan is now also a faculty member at MIT.)

Since then, White has published a string of papers examining how many factors interact with voting propensities. In one study focused in Pennsylvania, she found that public benefits recipients made up 20 percent of eligible voters in 2020 but just 12 percent of those who voted. When examining the criminal justice system, White has found that even short-term jail time leads to a turnout drop of several percentage points among the incarcerated. Family members of those serving even short jail sentences are less likely to vote in the near term too, although their participation rebounds over time.

“People don’t often think of incarceration as a thing they connect with politics,” White says. “Descriptively, with many people who have had the experience of incarceration or criminal convictions, or who are living in families or neighborhoods with a lot of it, we don’t see a lot of political action, and we see low levels of voting. Given how widespread incarceration is in the U.S., it seems like one of the most common and impactful things the government can do. But for a long time it was left to sociology to study.”

How to reach people?

Having determined that citizens are less likely to vote in many circumstances, White’s research is now evolving toward a related question: What are the most viable ways of changing that? To be sure, nothing is likely to create a tsunami of new voters. Even where people convicted of felonies can vote from prison, she found in still another study, they do so at single-digit rates. People who are used to not voting are not going to start voting at high rates, on aggregate.

Still, this fall, White led a new field experiment about getting unregistered voters to both register and vote. In this case, she and some colleagues created a study designed to see if friends of unregistered voters might be especially able to get their networks to join the voter rolls. The results are still under review. But for White, it is a new area where many kinds of experiments and studies seem possible.

“Political science in general and the world of actual practicing political campaigns knows an awful lot about how to get registered voters to turn out to vote,” White says. “There’s so much work on get-out-the-vote activities, mailers and calls and texts. We know way, way less about the 1-in-4 or so eligible voters who are simply not registered at all, and are in a very real sense invisible in the political landscape. Overwhelmingly, the people I’m curious about fall into that category.”

It is also a subject that she hopes will sustain the interest of her students. White’s classes tend to be filled by students with many different registered majors but an abiding interest in civic life. White wants them to come away with a more informed sense of their civic landscape, as well as new tools for conducting clean empirical studies. And, who knows? Like White herself, some of her students may end up making a career out of political engagement, even if they don’t know it yet.

“I really like working with MIT students,” White says. “I do hope my students gain some key understandings about what we know about political life, and how we can know about it, which I think are likely to be helpful to them in a variety of realms. My hope is they take a fundamental understanding of social science research, and some big questions, and some big concepts, out into the world.”

[mariocki]

New Scotland Yard: Fire in a Honey Pot (1.8, LWT, 1972)

"You make it sound very convincing."

"I beg your pardon?"

"Your Mr. Logan was seen at the club on the afternoon before it burnt."

"Oh, now, don't ask me what could have taken him there, to a place like that."

"You mean you've never heard of the protection business?"

"Isn't that what you're in?"

[ajudameaviver]

[theyloy]

[faheemkhan882]

[shadowthestoryteller]

Ah yes. Grad school

Or, as I like to call it

"Elloquintly bullshitting your way to the wordcount while running on fumes because you expired from burnout five weeks ago"

[landscaping-your-mind]

Also another thing that’s fucked up is that my parents told me to not be outwardly angry at school because then someone would call like the equivalent of CPS in Canada, genuinely don’t know what it’s called, and take me away. I being like. 12. thought “yeah no seems legit” or more accurately, “i don’t want to get taken away from my family.”

And then, and then, this other time, when my dad just fucking left, we were talked to by a person from I guess the Canadian equivalent of CPS and I, even though I knew it was wrong at that point, kept my mouth shut. My mom told us to keep our mouths shut. And my sister didn’t, she told them and they did nothing.

Thinking thoughts. Having feelings. Idk.