I hear you. I've avoided doing child protection myself, I'm just not sure I can handle that kind of case. The bar here is pretty good, but it's all legal aid work, and there's never enough money to do the job right.

Meh, most of the family law clients I have are not terribly vindictive at all. They're hurt, but if you don't egg them on they get to a reasonable place reasonably quickly. The vindictive ones mostly don't last long that way; vindictiveness is very expensive.

I believe you meant to say "kill".

There's a lot of truth to this. I practice family law, and I'd say the biggest part of my job is managing the client's expectations. More often than not, the judge and both lawyers already know how the case is going to end from the beginning; the clients have to be carefully brought around to agreement, with lots of time for them to work through their feelings.

I wonder if I could put legal techno-mage on my cv....

The problem with arbitration isn't arbitration, it's the fact that in the private sector, where one party is disproportionately more powerful than the other, then the little guy is always going to lose. Private arbitrations between equally-powerful parties are fine.

Now that it's mature, it can be replicated as many times as we need to, in reasonably short order. Can you be replicated even once?

2 x 0 is still 0.

It's not just people happy to talk. the interrogators are trained to catch certain signs that the interviewee is telling the truth. But if the cops miss those signs or choose to ignore them, the interrogation can go on for hours and hours, plenty long enough for people to be "brainwashed" into remembering crimes they never committed in great detail. It's kinda scary how far they can take someone with stress, sleep deprivation and hunger, in only a relatively few hours.

Later Reid courses actually show a tape of an interrogation where someone rewrote their own memories.

If that roller-coaster ride can be made to start in LA or London and end in Melbourne or Beijing, I can think of a few interesting uses for it...sub-orbital global transportation, anyone?

Funny thing is, I could almost see this being a legitimate patent, if the tarp had some rfid and chipware embedded that communicated with the car (ie, tarp is still on, some clown is uncovering your car, tarp is blowing down the highway you forgot to take it off you idiot)

Yeah, I'm not familiar with the distinction you're drawing. Verbal and oral are basically the same thing, both terms mean a contract spoken but not written down (at least, that was the case when I went to law school, and I've never encountered anything in practice that says otherwise), and Musk's blog post is not verbal or oral. It's written, but it's not a contract. There is only one party, it's not a meeting of the minds. Essentially it's a gift.

For what it's worth, I've never heard that definition of "verbal" contract at all, either in law school or in my practice. As far as I'm concerned, a verbal and an oral contract are the same thing. You might be able to quibble and say that a contract made in American Sign Language is verbal but not oral, I guess.

I'll concede the point on personal taxes, for the most simple solutions, but once you start adding in business income, corporate taxes, and the like, the complexity level goes way up. And if you happen to run a business in an HST jurisdiction? Forget about it. Many tax lawyers haven't yet figured that shit out.

Actually, governments federal and provincial have streamlined a lot of the services they provide. In fact, in at least one case I can think of, major inefficiencies are starting to crop up because they've trimmed too much fat. Employment Insurance (including sick leave and parental leave), for example, takes a month or more to get not because of the process, but because they don't have enough operators answering the phones.

Ahahahahahah! I have an annotated 2010 Canadian Tax Act book weighing down my bookshelf that would beg to differ.