Judges often roll this line out, but in criminal court I've seen some defendants get epic deals by going without a lawyer [0] since absolutely nobody in the justice system wants to deal with the guy who has no idea what he's doing and is going to make the most bizarre arguments about being a sovereign citizen. So they give them a really low offer and get them on their way as quickly as possible.
[0] I don't like to say "represent yourself." I once angered a judge by pointing out that you can't "represent yourself, you are yourself."
Yakult is a Japanese company? I always assumed from the name it came from mainland Europe somewhere. They did a Häagen-Dazs on me. Especially as the Japanese often come up with Western names like this that aren't even spellable in kana.
> Yakult (ヤクルト, Yakuruto) is a Japanese sweetened probiotic milk beverage fermented with the bacteria strain Lacticaseibacillus casei Shirota. It is sold by Yakult Honsha based in Tokyo.
I don't know. I've communicated with Alex a few times over the last decade or so and he's always seemed one of the most rational, smart and pragmatic jail reformers I've ever know. He has always followed the legal path through the courts, even though it is often broken, trying to make it less broken for those coming behind.
You can't see inside anyone's mind. What caused him to commit his original offense that got him locked up for a decade? It wasn't a crime of necessity, I'm sure. Most crimes aren't. A lot of people commit crimes because some untreated mental health issue which lowers their self control. Then followed by ten years he was locked up, who knows what damage that did to his psyche which lay undiscovered?
edit: I've now read the rest of the article, and I knew nothing of the extensive mental health issues Alex suffers from
Most county jails don't do any identity checks as they release detainees (except ask their ID number and birth date), they are usually small enough for the staff to know all the prisoners.
I remember one incident at the Cook County Jail where two prisoners "swapped identity":
There are US states that are very deep into multi-stream recycling with 5 or 6 different bins. (Most of them are on the West Coast.)
There's an interesting debate on single-stream versus multi-stream recycling and its perverse incentives. Multi-stream recycling is more labor efficient, so in some cases more profitable, pushing labor to the unpaid consumer so that fewer laborers are needed at the recycling plants. Multi-stream recycling is often less efficient at overall recycling. Improperly sorted items are more likely to end up in landfills when the specialized recycling plant is an entirely different company with its own delivery schedule and process, versus a single-stream company that has to sort everything anyway.
In a somewhat surprising twist, some of the most efficient recyclers are the landfill companies themselves. Landfills take up space and don't produce income on their own. Finding any things that are recyclable and resellable is sometimes big profit. Sorting work is thus incentivized as profit growth. There are cities investigating going truly "single stream" again for all trash and continuing to incentivize the landfill companies to grow their recycling sorting processes.
Not only is that itself an illustration that companies need to be incentivized to do the right thing more than people need to be incentivized to do extra labor that result in less efficient outcomes, but it is also another example of how certain corporation's propaganda pushed the narrative from corporate action to consumer action.
The original lesson plan in the 1990s designed by some smart teachers was the Three R's: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. They were put in this order specifically because they are in order of importance. Debates on if we are doing enough our own individual parts for Recycling have already lost the battle on how much corporations are helping us to Reuse things rather than recycle them, and better yet, to Reduce the number of things we need to even consider reusing or recycling or trashing. Both reduce and reuse require more collective action. They require companies to work outside of the "single use" box. Single use is more profitable, because it sells more single use things.
FedEx, I believe, have stated they will refund all consumers who paid them the tariffs, which they then paid to the gov. Nothing yet about the fees also incurred by consumers to pay the tariffs, but there are at least two class actions filed already on this subject, IIRC.
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