New law in Texas will make drunk drivers who murder parent or guardian to pay child support to the child of the deceased until the child is 18 years old.

  • DreamButt
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    1910 months ago

    Surprised in a /c like this that no one is talking about how you can prevent this on a systemic level with public transportation and mixed zoning.

    I live 600 feet from a pub. If I went out of my area I can take one of several different busses to get back within walking distance to my apartment. Don’t have to worry about getting home if you can walk there.

    The biggest issue with American solutions is they always look at problem solving backwards. You want to fix society level issues on the society level. Expecting people to fix it themselves never works or we wouldn’t already be in this mess

    • @valkyre09@lemmy.world
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      810 months ago

      In a weird way, it seems to only punish the rich. This law seems off brand from our ruling class, something fishy’s going on.

      • nik0
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        210 months ago

        even more so that it’s occuring in texas of all places.

  • @atnqty@lemmy.world
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    910 months ago

    Doesn’t China have a similar law? iirc if someone is injured or disabled the driver is liable to the person’s expense for the rest of the life or something, so people just straight up run them over if they hit someone and they are still alive. I worried if that might be what is gonna happen to the child if this law passed

  • @baseless_discourse@mander.xyz
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    610 months ago

    Um… Why is not this law in effect like everywhere? Like otherwise you just ruin a etire family and just like “ooooops, too bad”?

      • @baseless_discourse@mander.xyz
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        10 months ago

        I think I have two question about this:

        First, in this hyper capitalistic society, isn’t everything bad for the poor, from the legal system to democracy itself. For example you can argue the poor lacks the time and resource to properly understand the policy, hence more likely to be misled by the candidate.

        And in this specific cases, the public can pay for it if the person is poor enough, like declaring bankrupt. I am not so familiar with the procedure and loopholes related to bankrupt, so feel free to educate me on that.

        On the other hand, I don’t think rich people should be able to get away from jail time simply because they have paid money. Unfortunately this is seen through out our legal system. So I am definitely not supporting that. But I imagine the law can be easily changed to add the child care/medicare cost to the existing manslaughter sentence, instead of replacing the manslaughter sentence?

      • @wheeldawg@sh.itjust.works
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        110 months ago

        I honestly don’t care if a poor person is worse than “beggared” by the sentence.

        Thing is, the rich person should be, too. Make it scale based on available resources.

        I think around 90% of all available money on the poor end to 99.999% on the rich end is fair. Or I’m the case of Bezos-level richies, leave them with about $5 a year to live on.

        This mistake should essentially completely ruin the drunk’s entire life permanently. No reason to spare them any misery. There’s no other way to make it a law not worth breaking into you make it absolutely impossible to live with doing it.

        There are issues to work on about who receives the money to prevent further problems, but it’s a start.

    • @j4k3@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      Yup. That should be everywhere. It shouldn’t be just kids either. If you disable someone you should be paying similar support for the rest of your life.

  • @skymtf
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    10 months ago

    I support this, but I think that we really need a better alt than cars, especially at night.