Being sent to jail actually can be financially ruinous. You'd be gone from your job for a few months and chances are wouldn't have a job when you got out. Then, as you applied for a new job, prospective employers would find out that you were in jail which would dissuade them from hiring you. There's a huge stigma towards people who have been sent to jail which makes it harder for them to find legitimate work even if they're trying to go straight.

That's because copyright laws were written for an age when copyright infringement meant commercial infringement, not home infringement without a profit motive. If I was copying hundreds of DVDs to sell on street corners for $1 each, then the fines involved would make sense. They would be designed to bankrupt my operation and to make similar illegal operations think twice before launching. The problem was that these same laws were deployed against people who downloaded software they thought would give them free music and which also shared out their entire music collection. (Remember, it's uploads that are being prosecuted, not downloading. Downloading is also technically illegal, but much harder to prove.)

I've long been an advocate for reforming the penalties. Yes, they should still be large enough to make one think twice before infringing copyright, but they shouldn't be so high that they would bankrupt a person. Say we made the fine 10x the market value of the shared property. If you shared a music file, you would be on the hook for $10 since those usually go for $1 each. Share 100 music files and you owe $1,000. That's a decent financial hit, but shouldn't cause most people to go bankrupt. Yes, a major uploader might be sharing thousands of music files and they would likely still get bankrupt inducing fines, but they would be the exceptions - not the rule.

Also, the mRNA doesn't enter the cell nucleus. It doesn't tamper with our genetic code. Instead, it enters the outer area of the cell and gets the cell to pump out spike proteins in the same way the COVID-19 virus would get our cells to pump out new versions of itself. Once the mRNA's job is done, it's broken down. The only "trace" of the mRNA vaccine in your body after a few weeks are the immune system's memory cells which are now primed to recognize the COVID-19 virus (or, more accurately, its spike proteins). Our genome isn't altered and we don't pass any changes to our children.

And to give an example of what the vaccine's reaction could be: So far I and many people in my family have had it. Most of our reactions are arm pain to feeling tired for a day. My wife had the worst reaction to the vaccine. She had a fever, was shaking (so bad she couldn't hold an Ibuprofen pill), had chills, etc. This lasted for 2-3 days and then she felt better. And yet she'd still rather get the vaccine all over again than get COVID. The worst of the common reactions to the COVID vaccines are still better than getting COVID. Apart from rare medical conditions, there's really no reason why people shouldn't get vaccinated.

In January 2020, Biontech and Moderna had been working on mRNA technology for years and the technology was just on the cusp of being ready for prime time. Moderna had its vaccine design ready literally hours after the virus's genome was published. There's no trial and error with this kind of vaccine, it's less like an immunological shotgun blast and more like a molecular sniper's bullet.

This is why I'm really excited about the future of mRNA vaccines. We can design a mRNA sequence quickly and easily. You could start seeing vaccine candidates for many different illnesses appearing rapid fire. Yes, they will need to go through the normal approval process which will take awhile, but there are a lot of illnesses that could be prevented using mRNA vaccines. (As a side note, the COVID vaccines went through the normal approval process, but the path was sped up for them. Mostly through expedited paperwork and allowing the phases to run at the same time instead of one at a time. Think of it as the COVID vaccine process running in a multi-threaded manner instead of single-thread.)

My son has Asperger's Syndrome (yes, diagnosed by a medical professional) and he knows he has it. He was in an autism support group with other kids that had Asperger's Syndrome and they all knew they had it. Lack of self awareness isn't a sign of Asperger's Syndrome.

Except that the diagnosis helps with supports. My son was diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome/High Functioning Autism when he was young. (This was around the time that Asperger's was being merged back into the overall Autism diagnosis in the DSM.) The school district didn't want to provide any supports to help my son - who was excelling academically but flailing socially and emotionally. The diagnosis helped open doors to supports though. With them, my son learned how to deal with situations that he wasn't able to deal with before. Now, he's in the top 10 in his class and going to be heading off to college. I doubt he'd have gotten this far without any supports at all.

People with Asperger's Syndrome can and do get married. I have Asperger's and will be celebrating my 20th anniversary with my wife next month. Our oldest son has Asperger's and will be going to college soon. Asperger's Syndrome doesn't mean that a person can't live a fulfilling life.

Also, if children still pass COVID-19 amongst themselves - even if all adults were vaccinated - then more variants can arise. Some of these variants might target children with worse symptoms and more lethality. Other variants might be able to render the vaccine useless, bypassing the protection and putting us back to square 1 in our battle against this disease. By vaccinating children, even if they aren't likely to die, we deny the virus any safe harbor and (hopefully) speed it towards extinction.

Technically speaking, there is liability in the law for doing this. Practically speaking, though, this would mean small companies taking on a giant, multi-national company over an issue that's "been resolved." They just don't have the resources to do this so the big companies know they can issue bad DMCAs with impunity.

And most of the time the DMCA recipient doesn't take the sender to court because the sender is a giant corporation and the recipient is a small company. Suppose you made an indie game with your team of 4 people. Your sales are moderate for a game from such a small group. Then SEGA comes along and issues a DMCA. After some back and forth, the DMCA is retracted and you're good to continue selling your game.

At this point, do you sue SEGA? You're a small company with minimal revenue. Spending the time and money suing SEGA could bankrupt you. Alternatively, you can just forget the whole thing and move forward with your game sales, trying to pull in what little money your small team can get.

Chances are, you'd go the latter route. It just makes sense for a small company NOT to sue a larger company for a bad DMCA request. The time and resources to spend just aren't there. Unfortunately, this means that the large companies see that they can file DMCA requests on the flimsiest of evidence, retract them if they get too much pushback, and have zero consequences.

I was very interested when he said "proportional to platform size" for this very reason. I run a small forum. We could definitely be held liable for violations if Section 230 were repealed. A spam post that evaded moderation could lead to a lawsuit that, even if we won, would bankrupt us. However, we're also too small and have too tiny a budget to invest in automated content detection systems. We don't have millions of dollars to make sure that any user generated content is fine to post. Our budget is closer to five hundred dollars. (It's a very small forum.)

Any "practices defined by a third party" would need to take the small players into account. If the third party is stocked with big companies, it could require expensive content moderation tools that only the big companies can afford. This would force the smaller sites to decide whether to shut down or run the risk of getting sued. Either way, a third party of this composition might ensure that the smaller sites (especially startups that might not have the funding to take on the big fish yet, but are growing fast) might be cleared out so that the bigger companies don't face competition.

The problem is that this would impact the entire Internet, not just social media sites. Before Section 230, the rule was set by the Prodigy and CompuServe rulings. At the time, they were two of the biggest ISPs around and they were both sued (separately) for unwanted/indecent content on their platforms. CompuServe advertised their Internet offering as unfiltered and the court ruled that CompuServe couldn't be held responsible for what someone else posted. Prodigy, however, billed their Internet as "family friendly" and tried to filter out "bad content." A piece of content slipped by their filters, though, and they were ruled liable.

Section 230 was written because the precedents set would mean that any site or service that accepted user generated content would be liable for that content if they did any filtering at all. To use Slashdot as an example, if I posted a defamatory comment about a person on Slashdot then, under Section 230 they wouldn't be liable. However, under the Prodigy/CompuServe precedent, they would be if they did any filtering at all. This includes removing spam/scam posts, death threats, etc. So Slashdot (and every other site/service) would have to choose between no filtering at all - letting their service turn into a wasteland of spam, scam, and the worst that the Internet has to offer - or filtering their content and risking a lawsuit over any piece of content that evaded their filters.

An Internet without Section 230 would either be an Internet overrun by spam/scam/etc or an Internet without any user generated content at all (basically a glorified "online TV" service).

The problem is: How do you address it when individual freedoms collide? If you have the freedom to swing your fists and I have the freedom to not be hit in the face, then what happens when your fist-swinging freedom impacts my face? That's why individual freedoms need to be curtailed at times.

To give another example, Typhoid Mary. She was a carrier of Typhoid and worked in a restaurant. She didn't wash her hands after she went to the bathroom and wound up passing Typhoid to many people. Some died. The outbreaks were traced back to her and she was ordered not to work in the food service industry again. This was a restriction of her individual liberties, but people getting sick and dying was in infringement of their liberties. She changed her name to avoid detection and went back to working in the food service industry. More people got sick and more died. She was eventually forcibly quarantined for the rest of her life. This was a severe infringement of her liberties, but then again so was making people sick/killing people after a judge told her NOT to work in the food service industry.

The point of all of this is that individual liberties are important, but when an individual uses their liberties to engage in actions that injure or kill other people, those liberties need to be scaled back.

Those custom glass shapes are going to mean higher maintenance costs as well. If you're in a normal building and a window breaks, you buy a new window from any of a dozen different companies and replace it. In this building if part of the glass cracks they will need a whole new custom part created and installed.

Then there's the reuse issue. If the owners of a normal building decide they don't want the building anymore, dozens of other companies can buy the place and set up their businesses inside. With this thing, who is going to do business there if Amazon decides they don't want to be in there anymore? Will anyone take it on even with high maintenance costs and odd work setup due to the curved sides and smaller rooms at the top? Or will it be left to slowly crumble becoming even more of a poop-shaped eye sore?