Texas woman arrested for Facebook post about town water quality • Hacker News Board

Re: Texas woman arrested for Facebook post about town water quality

#241

Post by margalabargala » Sat, May 23, 2026, 9:59 PM UTC

Vaslo wrote: post #211

oooyay wrote: post #204

> The statute requires that a person knowingly circulate a false report. Combs says she was repeating what people told her. Gregory says she should have verified it with the hospitals first It would be a violation of HIPAA for a medical system to disclose that to a private individual. The State Health Services or TCEQ would need to conduct that investigation and ask those questions. Both of those are state level agen…

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What do you mean? Abbott and politicians like him are well known for disregarding the law for their own advancement/benefit. There's a long list of court cases they've lost if you want to look this up.

Your desire that more politicians behave this way doesn't make them not corrupt.

Re: Texas woman arrested for Facebook post about town water quality

#242

Post by stirfish » Sat, May 23, 2026, 10:04 PM UTC

aliasxneo wrote: post #126

cjkaminski wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's quite a claim. You need to cite your sources for this one, if you want to be taken seriously.

I'm not sitting on a precompiled list I can just drop into a comment. But I do have a pretty hard rule about investing more effort than someone else already has. So this would be an unequal trade for me to go spend the rest of my Saturday building a list for someone who wrote two sentences on the internet. To add slightly more flavoring, I think its a pretty reasonable view to assume that the massive fracturing happe…

I read somewhere that aliasxneo eats turds with a fork and knife. I'm not sitting on a precompiled list of sources, and it would be unfair to ask me to spend my Saturday building a list for someone whom I read eats turds with a fork and knife.

I won't say what aliasxneo does to add slightly more flavoring, but I think it's a pretty reasonable to assume it's gross and lazy.

Re: Texas woman arrested for Facebook post about town water quality

#243

Post by markoman » Sat, May 23, 2026, 10:05 PM UTC

dlubarov wrote: post #141

markoman wrote: post #43

This type of treatment of citizenry by the State of Texas, and its various (and especially red ) localities should be all one needs to see of where conservatives (and Christian Naitonalism) will take our country in the future -- should they get their way. Republicans hope to enable just such a future by scaring Americans with made-up visions of transsexuals 'grooming' their children, yet they cleverly hide what await…

> the U.S. makes excuses for Israel's attack on its own USS Liberty in 1967. It's strange how this 59-year-old incident keeps getting brought up. Friendly fire happens all the time, and Israel apologized and paid reparations ages ago.

Except they don't happen all the time, because this incident killed 34 Americans & wounded 171. Is that not remarkable enough for a 'blue-ribbon' commission of investigation? If one of our European allies had done this, wouldn't a commission be held to review all the evidence and make a determination as to cause?

One needn't dig too deep to see there isn't too much wiggle room for mere misunderstanding. The nearly defenseless ship suffered 2 hours of withering attack by both waves of jets and torpedo boats; this with an American flag and its hull number in open display as it operated in international waters. The context was that this ship was an intelligence ship bristling with antennas and recording everything it could from the combatants in the ongoing six-day-war in 1967.

If there's any conspiracy, its how for years afterward whenever a congressman sought an investigation as requested by one of the family of those killed, the effort was silently killed despite its impact, over and over.

There are a lot of details involved and many actions to be assessed on both sides, but it should merit more than a Navy Court of Inquiry. When the captain of the ship received his Medal of Honor for saving his ship while injured, it was awarded to him by the Secretary of the Navy quietly at the Washington Navy Yard. The usual procedure is that the MoH be presented by the president in the White House in a ceremony. So, there's that.

Re: Texas woman arrested for Facebook post about town water quality

#244

Post by kortex » Sat, May 23, 2026, 10:05 PM UTC

switchbak wrote: post #206

voidfunc wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good. The police do too much as it is. Every interaction with the police is a dice roll to see if someone lives or dies.

Hey I have plenty of reasons to distrust the police - more than most, but this statement is a bit over the top.

I agree with voidfunc. A lot of what police do could be offloaded to other occupations. A lot of needless deaths could be prevented if there were more rungs on the escalation ladder between "do nothing" and "folks with guns show up". Like the same vibe as firefighters and EMS but just like for mild social disruption.

Re: Texas woman arrested for Facebook post about town water quality

#245

Post by pfdietz » Sat, May 23, 2026, 10:05 PM UTC

infinite_spin wrote: post #62

I'm not a lawyer, but I think qualified immunity should not apply to constitutional violations. Giving an opt-out for those violations is antithetical to the very substance of our (US) constitution.

The problem with that is sometimes it's not clear if something is a constitutional violation. Here, it was clear, but in general you don't want to do that.

Something that should be exempt from qualified immunity are actions that go against court orders.

Re: Texas woman arrested for Facebook post about town water quality

#246

Post by 1659447091 » Sat, May 23, 2026, 10:05 PM UTC

snazypaparazzi wrote: post #71

smt88 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think “fails” means exactly? How does Texas fail in a way that doesn’t harm innocent people in both Texas and the rest of the country/world? Texas is larger (in both population and economy) than most countries in the world.

The Federal government enforces a few rules and then leaves things to the state and people. Obviously that means the state and people have no nanny to protect them from consequences of their decisions. If they drain their budgets fighting the civil rights of their population instead of fixing a problem then they might look like a lot of bankrupt municipalities. The US is obligated to let that happen.

> If they drain their budgets

If Texas seceded from the US (which there is an actual movement here that gets loud with Democrat presidents) it would be the 8th or 9th largest economy in the world. The oil propping up the US while the US admin is/was grifting large paychecks for friends and family with the Iran thing -- comes from Texas. No one posting words online then getting payouts is going to bankrupt them.

Re: Texas woman arrested for Facebook post about town water quality

#247

Post by daheza » Sat, May 23, 2026, 10:07 PM UTC

cebert wrote: post #169

fc417fc802 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would being arrested for memeing be a black mark? It would be a hilarious talking point that I would be more than happy to chat with a landlord, employer, or literally anyone else about. Anyone who would hold that against you is pretty much a textbook example of a bad person (banal evil or some such).

I could see firms doing background checks not caring about those nuances or taking the time to consider why the individual was arrested.

Especially if it’s just an AI review

Re: Texas woman arrested for Facebook post about town water quality

#248

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft » Sat, May 23, 2026, 10:11 PM UTC

jazzypants wrote: post #223

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The doctor's own fees just rise. You, the patient pays for it. There's this 10-20% of revenue parasite on the entire industry, and you're paying that while complaining that prices are too high. Now you'll do the same thing with police, as if police wages and salaries won't increase proportionally, but 20 years from now you'll wonder why that costs so much. It's bizarre how economically imperceptive everyone is.

No, the people who can't afford their insurance wouldn't be able to work as policemen. Ideally, they would also eventually lose a license of some sort-- just like the doctors who commit malpractice. We are already paying increased taxes to deal with all the lawsuits we already incur because these people know they are above the law and they think it isn't their problem.

I explained the problem in very simple terms. But your rebuttal is "nuh uh, here are all the details that irrelevant that I think are really cool".

The people still pay for it. They pay for all the settlements, plus they pay another big slice on top for the insurance industry (since they do nothing for free). Then cops do the same thing, and lobbyists push on the insurance industry to allow them to keep breaking heads because "you can't do this job without breaking heads once in awhile". And nothing changes, except to get worse.

I'm sure the idea seems really clever to you. I mean, you invented it. Or maybe just read a blurb about it on reddit once.

In the medical world, insurance premiums have never forced an incompetent quack out of the field. They have their licenses pulled by the board (but only after some small number of tragedies). And you can't use that model on police either, because there's a big difference between a professional/academic who must study and train over a decade to even be able to operate independently, and grunts that you need in large numbers to go insert themselves into fights, troubles, and disputes. It's very likely that if there is a sophisticated, intelligent solution to our problems with police you wouldn't even like the proposal upon hearing it. I will search the rest of this thread for things you criticize, since that might be a good signal that it's worth reading.

Re: Texas woman arrested for Facebook post about town water quality

#249

Post by dylan604 » Sat, May 23, 2026, 10:16 PM UTC

wokkel wrote: post #221

dylan604 wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You left out the word legally. You can legally be arrested for simply saying something online. This was not a legal arrest. Small difference

Semantics. The result is the same. The cause: no repercussions for missing the system that is in place is a bigger fallacy imho

How is it semantics? If someone posts something in a land that has laws preventing it, then they know the possible repercussions. Someone posting something where it is legal gets arrested, they have recourse for the violations done to them.

It's so not the same, I'm straining to understand what you think the point you are making is.

Re: Texas woman arrested for Facebook post about town water quality

#250

Post by owenversteeg » Sat, May 23, 2026, 10:16 PM UTC

lysace wrote: post #196

owenversteeg wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US is a huge country. In general it has excellent water; the US averages better than the EU. The Environmental Performance Index is a report that measures many things, and they have a handy section where they measure DALYs lost from sanitation and drinking water. For this section the US scores 96, within a few points of Switzerland (100), Sweden (97), Austria (96), Denmark (94), Belgium (93) and comfortably above…

On the other hand the US often relies on relatively crude chlorination to reach those levels, which those 'top' European countries don't. They instead put a strong emphasis on protecting the source water and then treating it via ozone, UV, biofiltration and slow sand filtration. The taste of chlorinated water generally isn't tolerated.

The US isn't a monolith and neither is Europe. Overall, yes, the US uses more chlorine than Europe, but Spain and France both have _minimum_ water chlorination levels (about 0.2-0.3 mg/L depending on the regional situation) and France has no cap on max chlorine, which is very different from the US, where you can drink completely unchlorinated water in countless places around the country and there is a nationwide cap of 4 mg/L. For example NYC (average 0.5 mg/L and many places with zero.)