#but this means I’m getting to work on enforcing ADA standards

[flounderish-lore-rambling]

Argo is OSHA now

[miammey]

What is the Hunting Dogs job?

We all keep talking about how the Hunting Dogs are just doing their job, and they are, but what exactly qualifies as their job?

Let’s start with what we know: they’re the strongest military unit available in the Japanese government, and probably one of the strongest globally, as they’re sent on international missions quite frequently, but we don’t have any other Ability User military unit to compare them to, if any exist.

They are stated to be a suppression unit, as well. This means that part of their job is to capture and take down possible threats to the people. The word just means “to forcibly put an end to.”

What kind of threats, however? Big ones.

It’s clear that the Hunting Dogs were physically reconstructed to have superhuman abilities, and that’s because they need to be stronger than their opponents in order to take them out. Teruko described them as an “ultimate violence” to crush any other violent criminals beneath their feet.

So part of their job is to take out incredibly strong Ability Users and other such threats, it would be a waste of their enhancements if they didn’t use them.

Essentially, they are used as weapons against their enemies.

Now, about other parts of their job.

While yes, they can do police work, and they are considered law enforcement, you’ll probably never see them catching someone for speeding, they aren’t your average police officers. Again, these guys were built to take out highly dangerous criminals.

Other parts include interrogation and investigation. Jouno and Teruko are both expert interrogators, albeit with different methods (mentally breaking down someones walls until they confess vs beating the shit out of them until they confess), and we’ve even seen Fukuchi interrogate Fukuzawa.

So far, the main part of their job is to be a weapon for the government, an attack dog, if you will. They are made to be incredibly strong specifically for that purpose. Along with capturing and taking out criminals, they also focus on interrogating them, getting information themselves. Other parts of their job include the ability to do standard police work, as well, but that is rarely seen, probably because they’re too important of a group for something like that.

Are there any other parts of the job? Probably, we don’t actually see them do much else, though a lot of things seem to be more individualized. For example, Fukuchi needs to do a lot of public speaking, he’s the voice of the group (knowing how things turned out, I’m not sure if that’s a good thing). Jouno and Teruko mainly focus on interrogation more than the others, and Tachihara is the only one with the known role as a spy (his enhancements were lessened because of that)

The Hunting Dogs also seem to have a lot of leeway with their jobs (probably to make up for the fact that their enhancements are shackling them to it), such as when Tecchou said he would let Lucy off scott free, and give the ADA a fair trial.

Jouno has also been shown to have the authority to mess with the heads of criminals and do what he wants with them, such as the bank robbery scene. There was no higher up to stop him because there probably aren’t many higher ups (besides Fukuchi and Teruko), and there certainly weren’t any present.

Tl:dr, the Hunting Dogs job is to be a weapon wielded by the government against strong threats to their nations, and are sent out as attack dogs, of sorts, hence the name Hunting Dogs. While there are definitely other parts of their job, they are literally built and designed to be strong fighters.

[jackrgaines]

What Legal Requirements Apply to Your Small Business Website and Online Store?

The post What Legal Requirements Apply to Your Small Business Website and Online Store? appeared first on HostGator Blog.

Are you ready to set up your online store or small business website? Make sure you’re clear on the laws you’ll need to follow.

We’ve written before about the permits or licenses your business may need to operate online. In this post, we focus on website-specific legal issues.

First, our disclaimer: I’m not an attorney, and you should check in with a business lawyer if you have questions.

The Fine Print: Terms of Services

Make sure your site complies with your web host’s terms of service (TOS) and acceptable use policy. For example, HostGator’s TOS requires—among other things–that site owners be at least 18 years old and not be in a country under sanction by the US government. The acceptable use policy, meanwhile, prohibits using the service for gambling, bitcoin mining, live sporting event broadcasts, and other  heavily regulated or resource-intensive businesses.

Next, it’s time to create some fine print of your own. Display your business terms and conditions about pricing, returns, shipping, and billing so customers know what to expect. This is especially important if you’re selling products or digital goods directly from your site.

Security and Data Privacy

Your customers want to know they can trust you with their information. Data breaches can wreck your business with financial losses, lost trust, and legal penalties. And with the EU’s far-reaching General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) now in effect, even the smallest businesses need to step up their security compliance.

GDPR applies to all businesses that offer goods and services to people in the EU, no matter where those businesses are located or how many people they employ. GDPR is a huge law, but the basics for small business owners are:

You must have clear consent to collect consumer data. For example, you can add a GDPR-compliant cookie consent banner to your site.

You must delete customer data on request.

You need to keep customer data safe or face fines. HostGator’s SSL certificates encrypt data to and from your site, making it compliant with privacy laws and PCI-DSS security standards. HostGator’s Security and Privacy Bundle protects your website from viruses, malware, hackers, and spam by automatically scanning your website to detect and remove threats.

You must report serious data breaches to law enforcement within 72 hours of discovery.

Anti-Spam Laws

No one likes spam emails, and lawmakers around the world are serious about stopping it. How serious depends on the region—US anti-spam laws have looser restrictions and lower penalties than those in Canada and the EU. If your new company will do cross-border business with Canadian and European customers, or if there’s a chance you will do so in the future, your best move is to follow the strictest anti-spam protocols.

In the US

The CAN-SPAM law, which stands for Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing, only deals with business-to-consumer marketing emails. CAN-SPAM requires recipients to opt out of messages they don’t want to get, and the unsubscribe process can be a multi-step hassle. CAN-SPAM violations can result in fines of as much as $40,000 per incident. This law doesn’t clearly address marketing emails sent to US residents from outside the country.

In Canada

Canada’s Anti-Spam Law (CASL) created an opt-in system, which means people must sign up to get your marketing emails (or texts, voicemails, and other direct marketing digital communications) unless they already have a recent business relationship with you. CASL applies to emails sent to Canadians from outside Canada. Unsubscribing must be easy and fast. CASL violations can result in fines up to $10 million.

One more potential penalty for CASL violations hasn’t taken effect yet: the right of individuals to sue companies that spam them for as much as $1 million per day. That part of the law is under review.

In the EU

GDPR covers spam, and its provisions are stricter than the US and Canadian laws. Not only does GDPR require recipients to opt in to marketing messages, there’s no implied consent by people who are already your customers. To add people, you need to make a separate, specific request, with no pre-checked boxes, and parental consent for anyone under the age of 16. GPDR fines are roughly $11 million per incident.

In Brazil

Brazil passed its own privacy law in August 2020. The law, which is called Lei Geral de Protecao de Dados (or the LGPD), is similar in scope and effect to the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Like the GDPR, the LGPD requires businesses handling personal data to be accountable for collecting, using and managing that information appropriately. It also provides individuals with new rights. You can learn more about the basics of the LGPD here.

Anti-Spam Best Practices to Follow

For your existing list, only send marketing messages to people you’ve done business with within the past two years. 

For all new sign-ups, create a separate opt-in form that includes a tick box for recipients to indicate whether they’re age 16 or older.

Identify your business clearly in all your marketing messages.

Include an easy-to-use opt-out tool with every message you send.

Comply with opt-out requests quickly.

Your Intellectual Property

Technically speaking, you hold the copyright to the stuff you create as soon as you create it, but a copyright notice on your site is always a good idea. It accomplishes the obvious goal of letting visitors know that the content on your site belongs to you.

If you have registered trademarks for your business name, products, or services, include a trademark notice on your site. We talk about trademarks in our article on small business permits and licenses.

Your Website’s Accessibility

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requires that most businesses make their websites accessible for people with vision, hearing, and other impairments. The ADA requirement may not apply to your business if you’re very small or just getting started. Businesses that operate at least 20 weeks each year *and* have 15 or more full-time employees must maintain accessible web sites. “Public accommodation” businesses like transportation and hotels must also comply.

Even if you’re not required to make your website accessible, it’s a good idea, because more than 12% of Americans have some form of disability. Not only that, accessible features like larger fonts, clear contrast between fonts and backgrounds, transcripts of videos, and written descriptions of images can be useful to everyone—think about how many people watch videos with the sound off and you’ll see why captions or transcripts are a smart move. UC Berkeley has a great guide to making your site accessible.

Make Your Small Business Website Legally Compliant

Creating a compliant site takes some work, but the payoff is a safer business web site, stronger customer trust, and a lower risk of privacy and security related fines and losses later on. If you’re a HostGator customer, contact us to add the Privacy and Security Bundle to your website now.

Find the post on the HostGator Blog

from HostGator Blog https://www.hostgator.com/blog/legal-requirements-small-business-websites/

[nofomoartworld]

Hyperallergic: A Trans Artist Breaks Down the Walls of Bathroom Stalls

Emmett Ramstad, “You’re Welcome” (2016) removed gender segregated bathroom signage, replaced bathroom signage, dimensions variable (photo by Erin Young)

MINNEAPOLIS — Public bathrooms are sites where private lives meet public space. Central to any space but never centered, bathrooms are incredibly necessary and tremendously fraught. Though seemingly banal and unobtrusive enough to be forgotten after use, bathrooms are simultaneously sites of danger for some. Bathrooms are also places to seek solace, take a break, have sex, do drugs. Because these activities deviate from the engineered purpose — the universal need to void — bathrooms are, more than ever, subject to monitoring and policing.

Artist Emmett Ramstad, a trans artist living in Minneapolis, sees public bathrooms as contested spaces emblematic of how the United States functions. Ramstad’s inquiry into the current politics surrounding bathrooms begins with their formal aspects — the stall “legs,” the space underneath, the ubiquitous beige color — to open a dialogue about privacy, vulnerability, mundanity, serviceability, shame and pleasure, segregation, and access. Ramstad’s sculpture, installations, and participatory actions unpack the architecture of social and moral codes that organize the physical space of the bathroom. He is currently working on an artist book called Quasi-Public, Semi-Private that will be released in November. When debates about bathrooms occupy the Texas legislature and tweets dictate the fates of transgender people in the military, Ramstad’s query is especially timely and relevant.

Emmett Ramstad, “Watching You Watching Me Watching You (Hunting Season)” (2017), hunting stand, ladder, bathroom stall wall, toilet paper cache, smoke alarms, near dead batteries, dimensions variable (photo by Rik Sferra)

Risa Puleo: In works like “Watching You Watching Me (Hunting Season)” (2017) you placed an elevated platform like the ones used as hunting blinds in front of a wall of standard bathroom partitions. While clearly about bathrooms, but not being overtly about trans people, you signal the power dynamics that occur at any policed boundary.

Emmett Ramstad: I built that sculpture in February 2017, right after the U.S. election when a lot of people I knew were talking about how vulnerable they felt, penned in and watched. I built my own wall from bathroom stall components to draw attention to how anti-transgender bathroom legislation distracts us from talking about the ongoing enforcement of exclusionary policies that create walls. Bathroom bills encourage people to police gender by monitoring public restrooms in the same ways that “respectable citizens” are called on to monitor their own neighborhoods for criminals or terrorists (read: people of color, Muslims, or people who look “different”). People are rewarded for exhibiting fear and making themselves monitors. But this is not specific to trans people; it’s a pattern of state securitization. When I built “Watching You Watching Me (Hunting Season),” I wanted to create tension between the position [of] the tower, and the area beyond the wall, the stall. Viewers can climb up into the platform and look over the wall to see what’s there. But they are vulnerable when they are standing alone on the platform. There is vulnerability in both watching and being watched.

RP: In another work, “Safe,” (2016) the open space above and below a freestanding bathroom stall has been filled in by a picket fence. The juxtaposition of the fencing with the bathroom made me think of gated communities and gender neutral, single stall bathrooms. Both models seem to be material manifestations of a neo-liberal agenda and the increasing privatization and isolation of body. Museums in particular like to signal that single stall bathrooms are gender neutral, but is a bathroom really gender neutral if one person at a time can use it?

Emmett Ramstad, “Safe” (2016) Bathroom stall partitions, bathroom doors, peepholes, cedar fencing, welcome mat with daisy, 6’x3’x5’ (photo by Sean Smuda)

ER: That is an interesting question, what is neutrality? Is gender ever neutral? Perhaps these so called neutral ones are actually the segregated ones? I think about how the common bathroom stall colors are variations of “neutral” beige, the same tones that are popular Home Depot carpet colors, siding on homes in the suburbs, khaki uniforms — these product colors are being sold as neutral or customizable but are so industrialized. Stores and commercial buildings buy these steel bathroom partitions so that they are the same, recognizable across different kinds of spaces. Neutral is produced as something you can really see difference against. And, yes, the fence is emblematic of this neoliberal agenda in the United States and the idea that one can purchase safety, privacy, and freedom if you have the means. Single stall “gender neutral” bathrooms awkwardly reflect the institutions that make them. “Just buy those trans people a bathroom so that they stop trying to come into ours; that will fix it. Keep them separate so that we don’t have to feel confused.” I’m not sure this strategy will ever fix the problem, which is so much about segregation, othering.

RP: Of course, we use bathrooms for more than voiding bowels. There is also a banality to the bathroom, and the potential for encounter — sexual, aggressive, congenial, it’s a place to take a break, gossip, cry, talk on the phone. You and I talk on the phone in that bathroom a lot, even for this interview. The phone in the installation “Stall” reminds me that both toilets and phones are two types of portal spaces.

Emmett Ramstad, “Stall” (2016) Bathroom stall, functioning telephone, toilet, sign “If the phone rings, please answer,” 3’x5’x6’ (photo by Erin Young)

ER: Yes, they are portal spaces! I was interested in the ways that phones and bathrooms are similar; they are this way to get away from the present moment. “Hold on, I have to take this call” or  “I’ll be right back, I just have to dot dot dot.” But bathrooms and telephones are also sites for potential connection. In “Stall,” there is a sign that says “If the phone rings, please answer.” I’d call the stall at random times and talk to visitors who choose to enter the bathroom stall to answer the phone. There is a kind of thrill when an art piece is calling you, but also a thrill about doing the illicit act of talking on the phone while you are peeing or taking a poop. This piece was a jumping off point for my next series of participatory works called “Calling Stations” which consist of bathroom stall partitions laid on the floor with a birch wheelchair access ramp, a chair and a phone number handwritten on the wall. The phone numbers in the two companion installations connect participants to each other or to my cell phone. I was answering strangers’ calls all the time, doing any number of mundane things, including going to the bathroom. Encounters now with cell phones feel very different because you can screen every call.

RP: During your exhibitions, you also change the signage of the art space’s bathroom —often in an ad hoc way like marker on printer paper. The form speaks to bathroom graffiti but also shifts the state of sex-segregated bathrooms to gender neutral. Can you speak to the potential of the artist and institutional critique to intervene in public space and legislation?

Emmett Ramstad, “Calling Station II” (2016) ADA sanctioned bathroom stall door, maple flooring, foam, cedar awning, landline princess telephones, telephone numbers, 6’x 8’x 5’ (photo by Rik Sferra)

ER: I realized I was making work about the intimacy of daily life, including materials found in bathrooms like toothbrushes and soap, but I wasn’t addressing the intimacies of the spaces where I was exhibiting. The Rochester Art Center had sex-segregated bathrooms next to where my work was being exhibited. So I proposed to do a piece “You’re Welcome” (2016) which involved replacing the gendered signage with circular mirrors on which I wrote the words “You’re Welcome” in permanent marker. The text addresses the bathroom user. YOU are welcome, as in please come in, or colloquially you’re welcome to the person who says thank you for the unmarked bathroom. I was exerting some rare art privilege by making a piece that alters the institution’s design. Rochester Art Center permanently converted one of their bathrooms to all-gender after my show, as they didn’t have any before my exhibit. I decided to continue variations of this piece everywhere I exhibit now. I have made one at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. I’ve also made super temporary signs that say “the bathroom” that have been torn down. Unlike the move to make single stall bathrooms “gender neutral,” I am making these multi-stall bathrooms “gender together.”

RP: Can you talk about scale in your work? Right now you are working on a miniature model of a line of bathroom partitions? This dramatic shift in scale seems to shift the conversation to access and disablement.

Emmett Ramstad, “Everybody’s Bathroom” (2016) removed gender segregated bathroom signage, replaced bathroom signage, waterfall soundtrack, dimensions variable (Photo by Rik Sferra)

ER: As well as social and sexual spaces, bathrooms are also where trans and disability issues meet. I am curious about how tall or long or big a wall has to be to keep someone in or out. The standard stall size keeps lots of people out, disabled people in particular but also fat people for whom “standard” is always too small. Restroom architecture calculates how much of the population will need an “accessible” stall and how to provide the minimum necessary while maintaining an idea of the “normal” person who can squeeze into a tiny stall. The yet-to-materialize border wall boasts so much strength in length or height, yet it ends at some point. It is symbolic as much as functional. So I thought if I made a miniature wall that looked like bathroom stall components I could have a conversation about these issues together. The miniature wall hangs out on the floor, barely visible: you would trip over it if you didn’t think it was an art piece. I have played with the idea of building a full scale ramp to go over the wall, but also full size ladders–playing with scale, but also ideas of access. I’m thinking about calling the piece “To: Texas,” a gift of an easily built, maintained, and surveyed joint border and bathroom wall. If artists were paid to build the wall, like a WPA project, and we each did it in our medium, this would be mine: easily dismantled, traversed over/thru, knocked-down, comical, demi-bathroom wall.

The post A Trans Artist Breaks Down the Walls of Bathroom Stalls appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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[type2diabetestreatments-blog]

What the Supreme Court Ruling Means for People With Diabetes

New Post has been published on http://type2diabetestreatment.net/diabetes-mellitus/what-the-supreme-court-ruling-means-for-people-with-diabetes/

What the Supreme Court Ruling Means for People With Diabetes

All eyes are on the U.S. Supreme Court, which just ruled today on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

Everyone's talking about this, and it's apparently the most widely anticipated Court decision in memory, according to those in the know.

This is about insurance and our society's desire to pay for well-being. Just one example of why this is so important comes from a study released in mid-June stating more than 26,000 working-age adults die every year because they don't have health insurance. That's 72 deaths per day and three per hour!

We've been watching for that court decision here at the 'Mine, and I like to think my six years of legal reporting before starting here helps me interpret what this may mean for those of us living with diabetes.

You know, beyond the general media headlines and legalese that are all basically saying the same thing but not telling us People With Diabetes what this really means for us.

Besides, why should YOU have to read through almost 200 pages of boring legal documents when that's what I'm here for, right?

And as I'm sure everyone who's been watching any form of news know the court upheld the healthcare law, something I'm very pleased about (I actually did a little dance in my living room once I heard it was confirmed!)

An initial snapshot of the 193-page ruling:

Essentially, the justices were ruling on whether it's unconstitutional for Congress to require all Americans to obtain health insurance by 2014 or pay a penalty?

Most folks thought and expected the court to decide whether the controversial individual mandate was allowed under the U.S. Constitution's Commerce Clause, but the court majority actually went a different way.

By a close vote of 5-4, the court upheld the constitutionality of the act and ruled that Americans must buy health insurance or be taxed if they don't.

The 9-member court voted that the law could be sustained because Congress has the power to tax individuals. A deciding vote came from Chief Justice John Roberts, Jr., who's a more conservative voice on the court but in this case sided with the liberal wing — Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan, and Sotomayor. The four dissenting justices opposing the mandate in any form were Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy and Clarence Thomas.

With that aspect upheld, this means popular provisions that have already taken effect — such as stopping insurers from denying coverage to those people who get "sick" and allowing parents to keep their children on family policies to the age of 26 — can stand.

(As a PWD, I'm again dancing because of this great news!!)

A quick search of the ruling found that "diabetes" wasn't specifically mentioned once, nor was the term "chronic condition." And I was a little bummed that Justice Sonia Sotomayor, a fellow PWD diagnosed with type 1 at age 7, didn't specifically write anything herself. Still, as a person with a "pre-existing condition," she's one of "our" voices on the court and voted to uphold the law!! (smile)

While most are still processing the decision and gaining an understanding of what it means, the initial reaction from some legal beagles in the D-Community was extremely positive:

Donna Hill, VP of legal for Siemens Healthcare Diagnostics and the new chair of the Diabetes Hands Foundation, summed up her feelings with a quick exclamation-point heavy email: "UPHELD!!!!" Describing herself as a moderate, Donna said she's thrilled. The law isn't perfect, but it keeps affordable healthcare out there and can be tinkered with and made better over time.

"Had they ruled any part of it to be invalid, we would have been so far back in the need for healthcare reform in this country," she said.

In California, Kriss Halpern, an attorney who's a fellow type 1 and specializes in D-related legal issues, was pretty happy about the way the decision came out.

"The nation is going forward with the law and those of us with diabetes can plan on being covered in ways never before possible for us," he wrote in an email. "It will take time to see if my options are as good as I think they are, but I am very, very pleased and believe they can only be far better than they are now and that this is true for all of us."

Kriss also mentioned another issue that isn't being highlighted in the mainstream media just yet: What this opinion means in terms of the U.S. expanding healthcare more in line with what most other advanced economies have done worldwide? He isn't sure yet if this ruling moves us closer to one day having a nationalized healthcare plan, which many of us PWDs said they'd prefer when this issue was being debated in the DOC several years ago.

"It will take years for this to be clear...but I am wondering what I can learn and predict from reading this ruling," Kriss wrote.

For those PWDs without insurance currently? This means you have to buy it (at least in theory) or face a tax: $95 in the first year 2014; $325 for 2015; and $695 in 2016. Kriss notes that the tax is "pretty small" in comparison to other taxes and it's not nearly as readily-enforceable as those now in place.

So, the government can't do things like put you in jail or put a lien on your income or garnish wages. He says: "Some people will be pleased to hear that, but it also carries some concerns. Will it make the ACA harder to enforce and pay for over time? I have no idea, I only know that it is an issue that will become clearer over the next five years or so."

Interestingly, a footnote on Page 44 of the ruling mentions how people can't legally avoid paying taxes...

Aside from the big "mandate" issue, there was also the matter of the federal government being able to withhold Medicaid funding (for low-income folks) from states that refused to set up new programs expanding access to Medicaid. That's where the states won.

Justice Roberts wrote that Congress cannot "penalize states that choose not to participate in that new program by taking away their existing Medicaid funding."

At the American Diabetes Association, the lawyers and advocates were closely watching the ruling and began analyzing it as soon as the court handed it down. CEO Larry Hausner had a prepared statement, and we got a few minutes by phone with the ADA's managing director of public policy, LaShawn McIver. She said everyone there was on the edge of their seats in anticipation, and as soon as word went out officially about the court's ruling cheers went up in the office.

"This is monumental," she said. "From the ADA perspective, today was a great win for people with diabetes. Who's it going to benefit most? People with chronic conditions, as far as how much these conditions play into your life and what that means when you're determining if you get to have insurance or not."

States are at various stages of implementing insurance exchanges, which LaShawn said will provide more options for people trying to find affordable insurance. That creates a market place for insurance options and will have minimum standards on what essentially must be covered, and hopefully that will motivate private insurers to offer more competitive and affordable healthcare coverage, she said.

The ADA has an online Q&A that's been updated to provide information on the court's ruling and what this means for PWDs and the D-Community.

Obviously, not everyone in the diabetes or broader community of those with chronic conditions will be happy with this ruling, but it seems at least these voices advocating for PWDs are pleased.Interestingly, a survey published just before the court's decision showed most Americans oppose the overall health care law but strongly support some provisions of it.Is any of this set in stone? Absolutely not. Besides unraveling the legalese of this court ruling, the upcoming election means the end-result is up in the air; a Republican victory and potential for repeal means nothing is certain right now. And really, it's (not surprisingly) going to be a hot political campaign issue.

So, it continues.

We're reaching out to more legal experts in the Diabetes Community to get their thoughts on what this means for us PWDs. We'll provide more updates at the 'Mine and on our twitter feed and Facebook page as warranted, once we hear more.

Being the nerd that I am, as the court decision was being handed down, I did a blood glucose test - to mark history. The result? 235 mg/dL, likely haywire because of the anticipation ...

What about you? Does this court ruling make your blood sugar rise or fall in happiness or worry? What impact do you see this having on the D-Community and overall on the healthcare system we have in this country?

Disclaimer: Content created by the Diabetes Mine team. For more details click here.

Disclaimer

This content is created for Diabetes Mine, a consumer health blog focused on the diabetes community. The content is not medically reviewed and doesn't adhere to Healthline's editorial guidelines. For more information about Healthline's partnership with Diabetes Mine, please click here.

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