Rita just hit Category 5.

But my confusion, Wolfram is -- sure, they might have known they were going to cause her harm. But teensy little harm. Turns out she commits suicide instead of posting in LJ. Do the plaintiffs have to prove it was evident she was going to react over the threshold, if the defendants maintain there was no reason to expect it, since the stimulus would provoke reactions way below it in "normal" folks, and they couldn't tell she wasn't one of them.

eta: Never mind -- I think bon's cleared it up for me.

There's a rumor it's Sophia's birthday. Felicitations, Sophia!

oy. dumbass on craigslist posting about how credit checks are going to cause the downfall of society and credit card companies always lose his payments on purpose so they can get late fees and that is why he is going to be homeless and you people all suck for doing credit checks.

Dude. I know. The world is totally out to get you.

goes back to apartment hunting

That reminds me...I should have gotten my statement already. Guess I should look it up online and send in a check....

reminds me to go list things on craigslist.

eta: Never mind -- I think bon's cleared it up for me.

I think you're asking whether the level of harm must be foreseeable. IOW, if it was foreseeable that they'd hurt her feelings, does that meet the foreseeable requirement if she then goes ahead and offs herself. My gut is to say that the level of harm should be foreseeable, but in tort law if your plaintiff is Mr. Glass and you push him down and he breaks every bone in his body, you're liable even if that harm wasn't foreseeable. So, I'm not sure. Bon bon?

Perhaps in this case they hectored and goaded her mercilessly; perhaps it was obvious that she was mentally unstable. So it could be reasonably foreseeable that a mentally unstable woman would commit suicide if forced to do a horrible thing.

Hm. This would make the internets a most liable place to be. Someone should warn the good folks at Fandom Wank.

The barometric pressure inside Rita dropped from 934mb to 923mb in approximately an hour and forty minutes.

That's an impossible statistic to fathom, because no one remembers a hurricane shedding 11mb in 1:40, ever. Charley shed 10mb in two hours last year, right when it did the big bump from cat 1 to cat 4.

Time to start rooting for shear, or else the west side of Houston is going to be flattened.

Whether or not the harm suffered was foreseeable is at the crux of a tort case. It would be argued by the producers that they had no way of knowing that she would commit suicide. The plaintiffs would argue that you take your victim as you find him or her; the exact mechanism by which your harmful act results in injury is irrelevant as long as you could have foreseen that you would cause harm.

Long time since I've dealt with tort law, but I'd think that proving causation would be the hard part.

But how did the Jenny Jones case a few years back come out? I'm thinking of the one where the twist was that it was a man with a secret crush on the male guest, adn the crushee shot and killed the crusher a few days later. Didn't the show get found liable because they basically created the situation and then dumped the people involved back into daily life?