Gross simplification, as there are loads of things that, via common law, statutory law, or public policy, that you can't contract around. So, for example, you can't create a contract term that would oblige someone to engage in or excuse someone from criminal behavior.

There's also a rule of interpretation that in adhesion contracts, i.e., ones where one side is significantly disadvantaged in setting the terms through relative levels of bargaining power, or expertise, that any disputed terms will be construed as favorably as possible toward the disadvantaged party.

Yet the Bialetti "espresso" makers that so many coffee snobs swear by are ... percolators. And very primitive ones at that.

Yet the Bialetti "espresso" makers that so many coffee snobs swear by are ... percolators.

They "othered" themselves.

Pretty hilarious that people who will fight tooth and nail against the idea that sexual orientation is anything other than a choice can't seem to wrap their head around the fact that it's pretty fucking easy to choose not to be a billionaire.

Wrong, yet again.

In Anglo-American property law, property taxes have historically been levied at the prerogative of the sovereign (in Britain, the Crown, and in U.S., the elected government of the states) from whom property rights in land ultimately flow and were historically used for things like municipal improvements and civil defense. Nothing to do with church tithes.

William the Conqueror's famous Domesday Book was compiled as part of an effort to regularize the recording of land holdings in order to establish taxation to fund defense efforts against a threatened Danish invasion.

No, Trump decided he was going to play chicken with the FISA renewal by nominating a completely unqualified partisan hack (Bill Pulte) as acting Director of National Intelligence over the objections of basically all the Democrats, as well as a significant contingent of his own party.

He lost.

While organisms exist that don't require, or are even harmed by free oxygen (O2), ALL known anaerobic life still requires chemical compounds containing oxygen, most notably water. You know, the compound the study is actually interested in...

Look at who you are responding to.
Valgrus thinks anyone to the left of Attila the Hun is a dirty commie out to make your son into your daughter.

When I was a kid, our bus was rear ended by a small sedan moving at a fairly decent clip. The car was totaled, and its owner badly injured, since the car partially went under the bus.

We on the bus barely felt a thing.

That's what happens when a 1 ton sedan hits a 15 ton bus carrying another couple of tons of students inside it.

It's not a Band Aid. It's a Breathe Right strip. Which makes even less sense.

You watch too much SVU.

The "white slavery" scenario you suggest with American girls being kidnapped and being trafficked to Mexico is so rare as to be essentially non-existent. It's straight up fiction.

The international trafficking that does exist goes almost entirely in the opposite direction, and, frankly, most law enforcement doesn't give a damn about what happens to the women trafficked in those scenarios. To the extent that this has changed in the current political climate, it stems entirely from increased interest in deporting them, not helping them.

It's the inevitable result of a system that treats procurement contracts primarily as opportunities for handing out corporate welfare or redirecting taxpayer money into your cronies'/family's/biggest donors' pockets.

While you may occasionally luck into a quality deliverable, actual meeting of requirements is definitely not at the top of the list when it comes to deciding whom to hire.

In my experience around both courtrooms and university professors from a variety of fields, they tend to fall all over themselves leaping at the chance to be expert witnesses.

It's a LOT of money for very little work, typically way more than they'd make on even a typical Ivy League full professor's salary or an academic book deal. And yes, I am including putting together a fully researched report on those findings as part of that work. Even in highly-compensated fields like CS, law, or business, the number of folks, even "titans in the field," whose salary calculus would make it sensible to pass up $2M, or even a tenth of that, for a week's part time work is so scant as to be non-existent as a practical matter.

The places where they don't tend to be willing to play ball are where they are asked to testify in a way that obviously undercuts their own research, but most experts are savvy enough to couch and qualify their testimony in ways that avoids this pitfall.

Dead company? Shows what you know. eBay's market cap is higher now than it has been in over a decade, and they are making money hand over fist. No, they are not in the league of Amazon or AliBaba in terms of revenues, but they are way, way ahead of competitors like Etsy and Wayfair.

Any school that allows students to even have their phones on their person, let alone out, during regular school hours isn't doing its job.

Collect them in a bin/cubbies at the start of class or require them to be put in a closed compartment under their seat, and problem solved - you can satisfy the no-risk-assesment-skills kobs panicking that they won't be able to reach their children on the miniscule chance that there is a school shooting without permanently wrecking the quality of the kids' education.

If kids take the phone out during class time, send them to the principal's/give them detention (again, with no phone access) just like you would for any other major class disruption.