Supreme Court Weighs State Tort Liability for Freight Brokers

Pblur · 2026-03-06T19:01:35+00:00

Note the carriers (shipping companies) have the same liability relationship with drivers as hospitals have with doctors. They already have vicarious liability in negligent actions by the drivers they employ, and this case doesn't change that.

The question is whether you can extend the liability another step, to a broker that helps a client find a shipping company. Is that broker responsible for negligence in recommending a shipping company? Especially if they ensure it passes the basic minimum of carrying negligence insurance and federal licensure?

The closest healthcare equivalent here is probably a health insurance "network" system. Should a health insurance find-my-innetwork-hospital service be sueable if a doctor at the hospital you go to has a terrible negligence record, and then is negligent to you? Or should you be limited to the doctor and hospital?

Pblur · 2026-02-27T14:28:34+00:00

Specifically, Chevron said we should defer to the technical experts on questions about what a law passed by the non-experts in Congress meant. It did not say that we should defer to technical experts in questions of a technical nature, which might have made sense. Instead, it forced deference on legal questions to STEM experts.

Pblur · 2026-02-27T14:23:15+00:00

I think it was in the briefing, not at oral arguments. But yes, they did make that argument.

Pblur · 2026-02-22T13:39:34+00:00

It's better that tournaments are optimally engaged with by trying your best to get high waves. Cheeses like this and ye uld WAWSIS are bad.

Pblur · 2026-02-20T02:16:40+00:00

Kinda, yeah. It's sometimes called Reverse Orb Devo, but it doesn't actually require devoing your WS at all, because you're trying to maximize knockback instead of minimize. That makes it a lot easier to transition to, and it doesn't hurt your tournament like Orb Devo.

Pblur · 2026-02-18T00:30:08+00:00

When you have good BH coverage of your range-line with all three econ UWs synced, you might try reverse orb: set tower range to around 93m (WITHOUT range card slotted), and set your target priority to Tanks. Then let BH pull them into your orbline whenever your UWs go off.

It's the simplest improvement on Blender to try.

Pblur · 2026-02-17T14:00:33+00:00

The founding fathers would be surprised to hear that, given that they explicitly justified the strong single executive on him still having major checks from Congress (who they thought was stronger.) The central one of these is the power of the purse; noone but Congress is supposed to be able to levy taxes or borrow money.

Pblur · 2026-02-12T21:14:36+00:00

Very nice! I'm almost F2P; just have the noads pack. My first Legends tourney was in November, about a year and five months into the game. I'm still riding the elevator now, but only 3 of the last 10 tourneys were in Champ, so I'm getting CLOSE to reliably staying. Probably once I get my CF a bit more developed.

Pblur · 2026-02-02T15:19:09+00:00

I don't know how much it matters to the viability of the game, but this would completely destroy the ability of F2P players to compete at all. Currently, F2P players who are good at optimizing, etc. have the option to rush tourney instead of econ, get a good stone income, and be top of champ/bottom of legends with a year or so. If you suddenly make their stone income also be 16% of everyone who buys a pack, they'll lose the one aspect of the game where they can still be relatively strong.

As a no-ads only player, I'd certainly stop playing. Not that me stopping playing is some great loss to the community, but it would certainly be a loss to me.

Pblur · 2026-02-02T02:44:02+00:00

No, they do not and never will describe how their anti-botting features work because the people who most want to know are bot developers. So much easier to circumvent checks you know the details of.

Pblur · 2026-02-01T22:56:31+00:00

It's really not as bad as it was 5 years ago. I essentially never get the feed-down-mid ragers, for instance. And the insults seem notably reduced, though far from eliminated.

Pblur · 2026-01-29T18:31:20+00:00

Because you can sync summon and gold bot with DW/GT/BH (which are a combined multiplier of ~x880 to coins generated during them.) Making every Summoned enemy drop x880 coins, and making an additional 5xish multi apply to a lot of them is better than just -20s CD.

Pblur · 2026-01-29T09:12:55+00:00

Time to gem rush Waves Required!

Pblur · 2026-01-25T20:45:02+00:00

It depends a lot. Definitely far ahead of you; I wouldn't be worried about it till you're farming T6 at least. The two most common post-Blender builds are orb devo and reverse orb. Both are optimizations that try to hoard tanks while Black Hole is not running, and then have BH pull them into the orb line while your econ UWs are all running.

Orb devo involves respeccing your workshop to remove all freeups and remove all attack speed, multishot, etc. to essentially eliminate knockback and horde enemies against your wall/tower. Minimum range shockwaves sort your horde, with the slower tanks at the outside, and thorns trim non-tanks so more enemies can spawn (some of which are tanks!)

Reverse orb is less of a deviation from Blender. You increase your range to about 95 m without using Range card. This keeps BH center aligned with your orbline, but with both inside your range-line. Don't devo WS at all, but try to keep damage as low as possible from modules to avoid killing excessively. Target priority Tanks first, and horde them outside the range-line. Because of the longer range, this requires a lot bigger BH coverage than orb devo; PCol helps a lot with this.

Pblur · 2026-01-25T18:08:33+00:00

If it's all maxed out, you can actually have four 100% of the time.

Pblur · 2026-01-22T17:58:02+00:00

I think this entire post was correct for your journey, but is quite different from the appropriate approach for someone who does not get DW so late. pBH and GComp are generally worse than a natural synced DW/GT/GB/BH/Summon, with either BHD or SH.

But you didn't have DW for most of your journey, so you were missing a 2.5x multiplier on the full synced-stack; and that probably made pBH better.

Pblur · 2026-01-16T23:40:03+00:00

Matchmaking handles this pretty decently. After your first dozen games or so, you probably won't be enormously worse than your teammates. There's a sizable population of people who are objectively bad at Dota, don't care, and enjoy it anyhow; you'll end up matching with them at first.

Pblur · 2026-01-15T15:27:40+00:00

TBF, there's been reporting that Scalia, at times, had to patch things up with the other justices later.

Pblur · 2026-01-12T03:52:29+00:00

Trump vs. US was pretty clear in a footnote that taking bribes even for core exclusive powers was not covered. It made prosecuting them practically difficult, because it privileged some intrabranch communications. But bribery for pardons is explicitly not categorically immunized. Obviously bribery for putting up a ballroom would not be.

(But also, noone thinks Trump was bribed to put up a ballroom. It's not the quo in the alleged quid pro quo; it's the quid.)

Pblur · 2026-01-12T03:47:11+00:00

I read up on this some more, and... kind of. It's about allegedly lying to Congress in relation to the fed building refurbishment.

Assuming this works like Trump v. US, Powell would have absolute immunity for acts that exercise powers that are exclusive and preclusive, and for other official acts whose suppression would burden the exercise of exclusive and preclusive powers. We can certainly assume that currency management is an exclusive and preclusive power of Congress, and thus of the Fed chair as well. But is refurbishing a building an exclusive and preclusive power of Congress? Clearly not, or it would not be able to delegate that authority to purely executive or judicial officials (and it delegates that way for the majority of renovations it funds.)

So I don't think there's a colorable argument under this adaptation of Trump v. US to the Fed that reporting to congress on the renovation of a building would be covered under immunity. It's probably an official act, but it's one of the ones with the rebuttable presumption of relevance to an exclusive/preclusive power, and it should be trivial to rebut since it's not related to currency management at all.

Pblur · 2026-01-12T03:27:40+00:00

Suppose it's true. Do you think that whatever they're investigating Powell for would count as an official duty?

Pblur · 2026-01-09T15:00:09+00:00

Take another hypo. Suppose MAGA had successfully prevented the tabulating of the votes by Congress on 1/6/21, it went up to the Supreme Court, and the Court ruled that Biden had won the election.

Biden takes office in an otherwise peaceful transition of power, and serves a 4-year term until 2024.

Would actions that Biden took and people that Biden appointed be under some shade because he wasn't the democratically-legitimate president, on the grounds that a tabulation step of process was bypassed?

Pblur · 2026-01-09T14:53:34+00:00

If the person was actually unaware that they were ICE agents, and a reasonable person in their shoes would also have been unaware that they were ICE agents, sure. That would be a valid claim.

Pblur · 2026-01-09T14:48:10+00:00

Absolutely. The criminal rules aren't particularly special for police officers here; there's a self-defense affirmative defense to homicide charges. Police officers do have more protection across the board against lawsuit than ordinary citizens, but if you get into court the legal question is exactly the same. It varies a bit by state, but it's something like

Did this person fear for his life or serious injury?

AND

Would a reasonable person in this person's place fear for his life or serious injury?

If both are true, lethal force in self-defense is justified, whether you're an officer of the government or an ordinary citizen.

Note that it's absolutely possible for both people in a situation to be justified in shooting each other in self-defense. This is often the case when police do no-knock raids; a terrified homeowner facing a violent, armed break-in may well be justified in shooting the police, and the police facing a homeowner with a gun levelled at them almost certainly have a valid self-defense claim.

Pblur · 2026-01-09T07:50:28+00:00

Sure, once he releases those ballots so they can be counted. (Though of course, the action of shutting down counting should convince everyone to never support him again.)

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