Just finished my jury duty and it was a wild ride
Other jurors shocked me with how antaganostic they were to the plaintiff for asking for compensation and punishment for a nursing home’s negligence. We ended up awarding money for clear negligence- specifically for injuries (physical and financial) and pain, but it was a struggle to find agreement from them for clear facts that neither side disputed (and verbally acknowledged this nondispute). When it came time to answer if the doctor was negligent in not consulting a wound physician, they didnt agree because the nursing home policy said “do it if wound doesnt improve in 2-4 weeks”. Wound got worse over the 5-6 weeks they waited and by the time they did, she was so bad from not participating in therapy (due to being laid on the wound constantly and the ensuing pain) that she had had to be put on hospice and died from a lack of dialysis.
Because they didnt find the violation of her rights (violations were agreed to) to be reckless or willful (such as by understaffing or poor care), we could not award additional damages to punish the nursing home
I take solace in the fact that it gave the family closure for a 6 year lawsuit
That second part is surprising to me. “Facility policy” and/or signed paperwork don’t allow a provider to be negligent to someone under their care.
Hell, it wouldn’t even protect individual nurses’ licenses. Any licensed individual who provides care is responsible for following the law, even if “policy” contradicts it.
Thats what I was trying to argue but the other jurors were more concerned with not having to come back on Monday and a “that’s what it says” with no critical thinking. Esp when the plaintiff expert witnesses (an excellent nurse who has a practice investigating nursing homes for compliance with the federal regulations and an excellent doctor who worked for CMS writing the very regulations) outlined what care the law requires
As a postal worker I have an awesome tip:
Take all your mail, then rifle through it looking at the postage. Make a pile for Standard, a pile for First Class, and put everything else in a third pile (non-profit etc). Look through the pile of Standard. It’s literally all garbage. Look through the pile of first class, them’s the bills. Look through the non-profit pile and if you’re lucky you got return address labels from the Humane Society. If you didn’t get return address labels and you need return address labels, make a small donation to the ASCPA and give it a month
If I lived in the US I’d have liked to vote to make it illegal to deliver promotional / junk / “Standard” mail to mailboxes with a standardized and large “NO ADS” label in specified spots on the front and sides, with a small fine for the post worker and very large fines for the companies in the ads.
I would not be happy to sit and sort through piles of junk for the rest of my life, with it without knowing that “Standard” is all junk.
Man I’ve been giving the ASPCA $20 a month for years and not a single address label…
What’s an address label? (I’m not american)
Label you put in the corner of your outgoing mail that has your name and address preprinted on it so you don’t have to write it.
Try Heifer International
Well you see there’s your problem, you were supposed to be donating to the ASCPA
@The_Picard_Maneuver Here in the UK, sure we get Spam mail but there’s red labels and stuff for really important mail from the government and things and most of the time it’s just telling you to pay for a TV licence that you wouldn’t use as you don’t pay for live TV and just watch YouTube.
Similar in Germany. The “we are done playing, ignore this and go to jail” mail will be sent in a special yellow envelope most of the time.
You really need a license to watch TV? I always thought that was a joke.
@bizzle A TV licence is meant to pay for our public TV services (that you get through an Arial ‘for free’) You pay a subscription to pay for things such as the BBC and ITV both TV and Radio.
It is pretty much a joke at this point as they often try and come around and claim the lamest of reasons why you still need to pay for a TV Licence.
- “You have a TV”
- “It could still access the BBC”
- “Your phone could connect to the BBC”It is just a bullshit way of a company trying to take money.
Or their incredibly shitty way of collecting your taxes that should just be paid yearly to support BBC. Fuck I’m American and I’d pay taxes for BBC.
@MutilationWave why should I pay for something I don’t like support or use
Same as hospitals. The BBC, done well, is a great public asset. It is one of the most effective engines of British soft power. It has to be a reliable source of information. It innovates television by not prioritising a profit motive.
Laugh it up. Yes that’s all gone to shit now, but what we’ve got is still better than not having it (source: have lived long term in countries without state broadcasting), and hopefully it can excel at its core functions one day. Again: that’s what we hope for with our other public services that were wrecked by the Tories.
Let me go back to front in the queue. Why should you not use it and pay for it?
Community outreach. People living near or far from you would benefit from getting BBC news at their houses. Imagine a Ukrainian family took refuge in your country but they still just had a government tent or shack. But even if they’re on the border of nowhere they can get the BBC on satellite.
I’m a motherfucking American and the first thing I check in the morning is BBC
@MutilationWave Well I don’t often enough the BBC is spreading misinformation & hatred about people like me so i’m not interested.
If there was a way to highlight official government mail, spam mailers would use it to fool people into thinking it’s something important. I get tons of spam that looks like something official.
@Semi_Hemi_Demigod They have a few things such as a return address to a government building on the envelope along with the envelope actually being a certain type that I haven’t seen with any other mail.
Sorry, I meant that if such a policy were implemented in the USA it would be abused by spammers. There would be a Supreme Court case where the spammers win because they used a slightly different color and it would suck.
We’re a young democracy and not very good at it.
It already is. Spammers use the tear-off style envelopes used for your checks or tax returns and many other ‘secure’ mail. The Republican party near me sent out mailers that looked like traffic bills saying how you may have to turn in your firearms (they were pretending it was from the local Democratic party). It’s already fucked here.
We have specially coloured envelopes for government mail in the Netherlands, I’ve never gotten any spam trying to imitate them (and we do accept spam mail, we could also put a sticker on the mailbox to reject it, but my partner likes them).
Come to think of it, that’s pretty much email, too.
75% automated notifications or stuff that isn’t quite spam but you don’t care about
23% spam
2% stuff that you better not miss
Kind of feel about that about software updates.
I used to have a personal project site that ran Drupal. I don’t know how things are now, but back then, every module could be updated automatically, except for the Drupal Core itself which had to be updated manually.
The one time I went “oh shit, a core update - nah, I can leave it after the weekend”, the site got hosed by malware.
(It’s a Jekyll site now. Drupal was a bit of overkill for it anyways.)
So you’re saying good advertisements should be a single sheet of typewritten thin cheap paper in a brown envelope?
(to be fair, some shitty “advertisers” [self-signed cert] already do that, to the point of impersonating the courts!)
As someone who rents so much of my mail is from past residents which I have told them do not live here, or local ads (literally several magazines per month) which I can’t opt out of cause it’s EDDM, that I straight up just stopped collecting it. Any small packages that would have gone in the box go on top of the cluster and any letters I received are stuffed into the box and I pick them out if I happen to notice I’m missing something.
Anyone that really needs my attention would call me or email me shrug
When I was renting I had a stamp “Return to sender. Addressee not known at this address”
I never bothered. Not my job if someone doesnt bother setting up mail forwarding and update their accounts when they move.
Yeah I work in a government department which among other things has to handle mail returned to it, and I know we mark addresses unreliable when mail comes back
I guess I just hope the electricity company and local government is as diligent
I’d wait until I had a few before making an effort to post the returns (Australia doesn’t have mail pickup from your home mailbox; we have post boxes at local shops)
I did that for a couple years, and now I still get junk from the previous owner. I’ve been here 10 years…
Then again, now I get invitations to retirement stuff, so I guess that’s cool (I’m nowhere near retirement, but the previous owner was about that age).
Yeah it took some 15 years for the letters for the people who lived in my house before me to stop
I do similar. Cross the name out with a Sharpie and write “MOVED”.
After owning the place for two years now I just throw it out.
Just so you know, throwing mail away that isn’t yours is a federal crime.
Watch out for jury duty summons.
My address on my license is still my parents house and I haven’t lived there permanently for 18 years. I move around a lot (hopefully I can finally stop that this year) so I wasn’t going to get a new driver’s license every year or two. Whenever I get a summons, I just reply with one of the exclusions (“I live more than 40 miles away”, “I don’t live in the state anymore”, etc…). I’ve never had to go 😂
In my state, you have to update your address on the license (but you dont need to be issued a new card, just update the file)
Mine made a clerical issue when I updated my address and decided there were two of me once. Only found out because both of me got jury duty. That was a fun one.
I’ve lived in two other states so far other than the one on my license, but I also haven’t driven in those states in those times (other than something like ZipCar or renting a car) that I’ve lived there. The time I did live in the same state, I lived at least 1.5 hours from that address/county so I could just claim “I’m too far away”.
If I’ve never been summoned for jury duty. Does this mean I don’t have any peers?
Same here. Like 90% of my mail is for previous residents. One guy apparently never updated his address so he keeps getting sent checks and I just throw them away. I’ve been living here for 9 months 🤷♂️
I check my mail like once every few weeks. I checked it a few days ago and most of it wasn’t for me. Three out of the 5 things that were for me were from TicketMaster, Rite-Aid, and Choice Healthcare and they were all “Sorry, we’ve been hacked and your personal info was probably leaked.”
My mailbox is near where I leave my garbage, so I only check it once a week. I immediately throw anything that’s clearly an ad directly into the garbage and never look at it.
I hate junk mail but sadly all those wasted resources are the only thing keeping the post office afloat.
US thing I’m guessing? Here in Sweden, we don’t get much spam mail in the first place but you simply put a “no ads” sign on your mailbox and then only get the stuff you need. The 8 years I’ve lived in my current apartment I’ve gotten like 3 things that weren’t bills and stuff I need.
The US’s junk post is mostly ADR (addressed direct advertising) just like Sweden, no?
put a “no ads” sign on your mailbox
holy shit a irl spam filter
Yeah they have to respect it by law, same in Norway
Everything important is by digital mail now though, not to be confused with email …
Now you’re just rubbing it in:
Most people might think that any e-mail provider is good enough, but a digital mailbox is a bit different from an e-mail. The Norwegian digital mailbox is tied to your identity, and much more secure than an e-mail inbox is.
Does Norway have a digital mailbox run by the government, or just lots of private options? No, I don’t want Kivra data mining all my mail… so I only have MinMyndighetsPost, but doesn’t cover anything except government mail.
Ran by the post office.
Important mail from the government usually just comes in the government portal.
In the US, conservative lawmakers have been waging a quiet war against our postal system for a while now.
Highlights: They forced it to be self-sustaining (cut federal funding), then when that didn’t kill it they forced it to, in a very short time frame, pre-fund retirement benefits ahead of time for all current and former employees.
The postal system is more or less dependent on the funds it gets from spam mailers.
It’s one of the only things in the constitution they are required to have. I don’t understand how privatizing it was ever constitutional.
The Constitution hasn’t mattered for a while, only the parts of it the Court likes… Which is increasingly little of it.
I recently got denied for a public housing program in the US.
I did not find out about this until I was at the local public assistance office for another reason, where I just randomly happened to be told that I was denied by the person who was apparently my case manager.
She said she mailed it a few days ago and was surprised I didn’t get it.
2 weeks later and the actual denial letter never arrived.
…
Keep in mind, almost all government assistance programs in most of the US will correspond by you via mail only. If they email or phone call you, well you still need to show up in person or mail them for most important applications.
And… if they mail you something, they’ll often give you maybe 10 days (not business days, even though everything they do takes business days) to respond and have your response be received by, or they’ll permanently bar you from whatever you are applying for and file it as ‘refused to provide documentation.’
So if your shit gets lost in the mail, fuck you, nobody cares!
…
I have said this in various places on lemmy at other times and people seem to think I am joking, but I am not: If anyone from a functioning country wants to do a sham marriage for tax benefits and I can immigrate there, please let me know. Living off of disability payments alone fucking sucks here.
would be so cool if the government did cryptography
Canada as well. There’s been pushes to privatize the postal service so they can race to the bottom for profit.
It’s very saddening that people fall for this and delude themselves into thinking companies will compete to provide a better service.
Yep, look at phone companies, healthcare, prisons and ISP’s in the US to see how privatizing these things shakes out. It’s not pretty.
I mean… We’ve always had just as much spam mail.
Where’d all the funding go previously then if it’s now all used to support themselves?
Previously I assume it worked like any government program worked - they get a budget set by Congress and they collect fees which function as taxes, and the whole system may-or-may-not be balanced.
Nowadays USPS makes its real money on packages for online commerce. Junk mail is kind of a relic that hasn’t gone away.
That’s it, start the bidding
Surely this will have a real impact instead of just making low-paid workers jobs much harder.
Even if this became common the net result would be that companies stop using pre paid envelopes and you’d have to use your own stamp to apply for stuff.
Oh noooooo
Ya all can expect me to be internationally wanted on tv for not reading my mail. A dangerous suspect was seen on the border of Mexico with a bag full of unread mail. It is advised to not approach that person and inform post office immediately.
I let it overflow out my mailbox for years
my neighbor thought I was a squatter
No regrets
I’ve just put a “no ads” sticker on my mailslot and it has cut down on 90% of the stuff
For me it’s 99 spam things and one Manila folder. It’s always the VA noticing I exist again and deciding I haven’t been fucked with enough recently.
Since we’re talking about mail:
What do I do with my old bills/insurance statements/etc? I have executive dysfunction and I just can’t find a simple method that works for me. It all ends up in a pile and every few months I pitch the whole thing and promise myself to do better next time. Perhaps there’s an app, website, or program I should just digitize them into?
I was in the same boat and wound up buying a scanner and installing Paperless. Scanner sends the files to my network drop box, Paperless picks them up from the drop box and digitizes them. I finally got rid of like an entire garbage bag of old pay stubs and stuff that I had been hoarding.
I have a filing cabinet with one drawer for hanging folders. Everything gets sorted and put in there. When a folder gets too fluffy I will pull it out and shred old stuff.
I could probably get rid of a lot but this method does come in handy occasionally. Most recently were my 2023 taxes which I filed in July (I had an extension). I yanked the 2023 file and immediately had 90% of my donations and medical expenses.
You’re super likely to not need them yourself, the companies you’ve dealt with will likely have their records digitized for the 7 required years (or more)
Keep them for 1-6 months to make sure no funny business happens (I’ve caught my ISP pulling bullshit and proved it with my last 6 bills kept) and then shred them and you’ll be fine
Oh, and try to get anything you can sent to an email with privacy, then they come digitized and can be kept forever with no real effort
In the US you just shoot the people that try to put ads in your mailbox. Not a lawyer tho so idk. shrug
LPT: probably shouldn’t do this
LPT: If you aren’t caught it isn’t a crime
ILPT: probably should do this
Thanks for the warning, i almost shot the mailman.
No, don’t shoot the mailman, shoot the machine sorting the mail.
How does this nonsense comment even have upvotes?
Yeah idk man, my brain just produces things and sometimes they just happen to turn into typed text.
Jokes are funny
Weird, unrelated comment, but yeah—jokes are indeed funny.
🤣
Nonsense is a fun reprieve when the topic is fuggen bills/junk mail?
Hate is for bitches. You’re not a bitch, right?
This post was written by a dog with a gun.
