We're not a big movies household, but we just watched and enjoyed Totally Killer, a time travel slasher... comedy?

I also just saw VelociPastor for the first time and it's honestly pretty inspired.

If you laughed uncomfortably at @brennanleemulligan.bsky.social's fantastic bit about how "laws are threats," this is a deeper dive into that very important pool.

I was going to say, it's hard to imagine any IT team not having *someone* on it who's autistic enough to hear all the wires.

"B+. These are all the right answers, but you clearly haven't read a word."

That's very much the vibe I get whenever I look at a piece of AI-generated writing. 🧵2/2

*That's* the kind of work that I feel good about billing for -- work where I'm getting a cut of value added rather than of loss averted. 🧵5/5

The nice thing about working with such small clients is that I can get very hands-on on these deals and help them find ways to align incentives, building more win-wins and more robust, more durable relationships into their agreements. 🧵4/5

Obviously risk management is a huge part of lawyering, but it just doesn't feel good to bill for, especially when so much of that risk is *created* by the legal system. As part of that system, it makes me feel like I'm to some extent setting fires and then charging to put them out. 🧵3/5

... if I didn't make myself so affordable.

And while the economics of paying to receive a good and paying to avert a bad might be roughly interchangeable, boy do they feel different, especially when you're at the margins of what you can afford. 🧵2/5

xkcd.com/552/

Even if we ignore the real harms these postures cause to real marginalized human beings... what a choice it is to intentionally live in a world with fewer colors! 3/3🧵

It's as if someone put on a movie in 4K Ultra-HD and they were like "No, stop, that's too many pixels! Anything except VHS is unnatural!" It's like looking at a painting and going "What's all this 'green' and 'orange' stuff? Everyone knows that red, blue, and yellow are the only real colors!" 2/3🧵

This latest boondoggle, meanwhile, approaches understanding as instrumental to the project of eradicating undesirable variation -- that is, to the project of eugenics.
🧵 4/4

other kinds of human variation. That good work approaches understanding as instrumental to making the world more hospitable and accommodating to a wider range of human beings.
🧵 3/4

(2) that we should endeavor to prevent autism -- and by extension people like me -- from existing.

Not all investigations into etiology are similarly burdened. There's plenty of perfectly good work out there investing the causes and mechanisms of autism, ADHD, and any number of
🧵 2/4

...getting money, by getting famous, whatever -- estoppel means you then have to stand by the thing you said, even if it later becomes uncomfortable or inconvenient.

Anyway, this has been a thread about empathy and Charlie Kirk. 9/9

...makes you commit tax fraud, the government can be estopped from prosecuting you for that, even if what you did is technically illegal.

If you tell someone something and they reasonably rely on what you said, and you benefit from that reliance -- by... 8/?

"Estoppel" is the name of a niche family of legal principles that basically boil down to "regardless of what the facts are, you can't *say* that or make that claim." For example, if an IRS agent incorrectly advises you such that following that advice... 7/?

...they had previously held the house out to the public as being haunted and had benefited from that notoriety. That's why as a matter of law, the house counts as haunted. 6/?