Cases

I am a pediatric nurse at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, and I see this scenario every few months. A child with a chronic condition — maybe a tracheostomy-dependent infant or a kid with cystic fibrosis — needs home medical equipment to be discharged safely: a pulse oximeter, a suction machine, a feeding pump, an overnight ventilator. The parents have Medicaid or a bare-bones private plan. The equipment is coded as “not medically necessary” by the insurer, or it is denied because the family has not met the deductible, which they will never meet because they are already drowning in other bills. The child cannot go home without it, and the child cannot stay in the hospital indefinitely because the bed is needed. So the hospital discharges the child with a referral to a medical equipment charity or a payment plan the family cannot actually afford. The equipment shows up, the child goes home, and six months later the debt collector calls. On one side: hospitals have purchasing power that individual families do not. They buy these machines in bulk at rates far below retail. A pulse oximeter that costs a family $400 at the DME store costs the hospital maybe $120. The hospital also has a mission statement about community health. If the choice is between billing the family a price they cannot pay and getting the child the equipment at cost, the hospital should absorb the markup and provide it at what it actually pays. This is not charity — it is honest pricing. Anything else is profiting from a captive patient. On the other side: hospitals are not equipment suppliers. Their financial model is built on procedure revenue, insurance contracting, and philanthropy. If every denied claim for home equipment becomes the hospital’s expense, that cost gets passed back to every other patient through higher charges and longer wait times. There are existing channels for this — Medicaid waivers, children’s medical equipment loan closets, nonprofit foundations — and the hospital’s role is to connect families to those resources, not to act as an unlimited backup payer. Setting a precedent that the hospital absorbs every coverage gap removes the incentive for insurers and equipment vendors to fix a broken system. The question is structural, not sentimental: where should the financial obligation land when the discharge plan depends on equipment the system will not fund for a specific family?

An employee on a business trip asked her finance team whether a higher-grade hotel room was covered under a travel policy whose wording was genuinely unclear. She was told verbally, and by email, to book what she needed to be rested for a client meeting. She did, submitted the receipt, and the trip closed. Six weeks later, during the quarterly reconciliation, an auditor read the same clause strictly and disallowed the difference, which was then deducted from her next salary. She has the email chain but never obtained a written pre-authorisation against the policy line itself. The question is which record governs when a written policy and a documented approval from the people who administer it point in opposite directions. Should the company carry the cost of its own unclear drafting, or should the employee carry it for spending without written sign-off?

I have worked as a registered nurse in Atlanta for forty years, and I have seen a particular scene play out more times than I can count. A patient in their seventies or eighties is admitted, often with a chronic condition like heart disease or diabetes. They have Medicare, maybe a supplemental policy, but the bills for what Medicare does not cover — the deductibles, the copays, the ambulance rides, the medications not on the formulary — start to pile up. The patient cannot pay. The hospital sends the debt to collections. And then, sometimes, the hospital or the collection agency comes after the adult children. In Georgia and many other states, there are filial responsibility laws on the books that say adult children can be held liable for their parents' unpaid medical care under certain circumstances. These laws are rarely enforced, but they are not dead either. I have seen families plunged into financial chaos because a parent's nursing home bill or hospital stay became the child's debt by law. On one side, I understand the argument: someone has to pay for the care. Hospitals cannot absorb endless uncompensated care. And if an adult child has the resources, why should the taxpayer or the hospital eat the cost? But on the other side, this feels like punishing people for their parents' bad luck or poor planning. A twenty-five-year-old making minimum wage should not have their credit destroyed because their mother had a stroke without long-term care insurance. And in practice, these laws are often used selectively against families without the resources to fight back in court. I am asking this community: should a hospital or collection agency be able to hold an adult child legally responsible for their parent's unpaid medical bills? Not as a moral question about what good children should do, but as a matter of law and policy.

Forty-five years of paralegal work in Manchester and I still get the same phone call. A worker has been doing the job for nine years, the company announces a restructure, and the choice offered is a new contract at lower pay, fewer hours or weaker sick pay, or a dismissal. The employer calls it a negotiation. The worker experiences it as a gun on the table, because a resignation would cost them redundancy pay and a refusal would cost them the job. In the UK the practice sits in an awkward legal space. An employer can lawfully dismiss an employee with notice and offer to re-engage them on new terms, provided the dismissal is for a potentially fair reason and a proper process is followed, and provided collective consultation duties are met where twenty or more jobs are affected. ACAS has published guidance warning that it should be a last resort, and the practice is politically contested in a way that few employment law questions are. Some argue the existing safeguards are adequate because unfair dismissal claims, consultation duties and tribunal scrutiny already punish the reckless. Others argue that a right you can only enforce after losing your income is not much of a right at all. The hard question is not whether coercion exists. It is whether the law should treat an offer made under threat of dismissal as a genuine agreement, and if not, what should replace it: an outright prohibition, a stricter test of business necessity, or nothing beyond the guidance that already exists.

As a board game designer with a BSc in Cognitive Psychology who now teaches iterative prototyping at Concordia University, I see a gap every semester in how we train new designers. Students arrive with brilliant ideas about theme and mechanics but no framework for understanding how players actually think, feel, and make decisions during a game. They design for themselves — for what feels intuitive to them — and are genuinely surprised when playtesters react differently. The gap is not one of talent but of literacy: we teach systems and materials but not the human operating system those systems run on. The case for making psychology core curriculum: game design is fundamentally about shaping human experience. A designer who understands cognitive load theory knows why a crowded player board frustrates rather than challenges. Someone familiar with decision-making heuristics can predict when a negotiation game will create analysis paralysis. A designer who has studied emotional regulation — which is exactly the work I am doing now with my current project on games for teen emotional wellbeing — can build mechanics that calm rather than overstimulate. We do not let architects graduate without structural engineering. We should not let game designers graduate without understanding the minds they are designing for. The counterargument: game design is a craft, not a science. Many celebrated designers came from mathematics, literature, or no relevant degree at all. Requiring psychology creates gatekeeping — it adds cost, prerequisites, and barriers that push out students from non-traditional backgrounds. Great design comes from iteration and playtesting, not from theory. And the best way to learn what works is to make games, not to study models of the mind. The field has thrived without this requirement; imposing it would shrink the pipeline of new voices. The question is not whether psychology is useful — it clearly is. The question is whether it should be a required, assessed part of a design degree or whether it should remain an elective for those who seek it out. I am genuinely wrestling with this in my own teaching practice and I want the community's wisdom.

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As a bookkeeper in Budapest, I have seen how money can strain even the closest relationships. A friend asks for a loan. You have the cash. You want to help. But a question hangs in the air: should you charge interest, or is that treating a friend like a customer? The easy answer is that friends should never charge interest. Friendship is built on generosity, not profit. Charging interest turns a personal favour into a financial transaction and introduces an uncomfortable power dynamic. If you truly care about someone, you lend without expecting anything back beyond the principal. The relationship matters more than the few forints interest would bring. But the easy answer is not always the wisest one. A no-interest loan blurs the boundary between gift and obligation. It creates an implicit expectation of indefinite patience, because demanding repayment with interest feels cruel even when the borrower is simply slow to pay. The lender carries the full cost of the time value of their money, and inflation quietly erodes what they get back. Over time, this can breed the same quiet resentment I see in unbalanced restaurant bills. A nominal interest rate, even a very low one, changes the terms of the conversation. It signals that this is a loan, not a gift, and that repayment matters. It professionalises the arrangement in a way that can actually protect the friendship, because both parties understand the rules from the start. Some microfinance models have shown that even small interest payments increase repayment rates and reduce the stigma of borrowing. The counterargument is real: in many cultures, charging a friend interest is seen as exploitative or greedy, and enforcing interest on a friend who is struggling financially feels morally wrong even if it is contractually valid. The question is whether the clarity of a formal arrangement outweighs the social cost of treating a friend like a counterparty. This is a case because the principle needs a ruling: when a friend borrows money, should the lender charge interest as a matter of principle, or should friendship mean interest-free lending?

I have designed three commercially published board games and taught iterative prototyping at Concordia University for years, and this question follows me into every studio session and every classroom. Accessibility in board games has made enormous strides in the past five years: colourblind-friendly component choices are now standard for most reputable publishers, rulebooks are increasingly available in large-print and digital formats, and several manufacturers offer tactile tokens or Braille inserts on request. But almost without exception, these arrive as add-ons — a separate deck of high-contrast cards, a PDF of enlarged text, a variant rule tucked into the back of the manual. The core game, the one that ships in the box, was designed without those players in mind. This is not a question of intent. The designers I know care deeply about inclusion. The structural question is harder: should accessibility be treated as an optimisation layer applied after the game is functionally complete, or should it be embedded in the core mechanical loop from the very first prototype? When a designer builds variable turn-timing into the central action system, or makes visual information redundant through shape and texture, or structures bluffing mechanics to accommodate players who read social cues differently — those are not patches. They are design decisions that reshape the game itself. The counterargument is real: board games are material objects with real production constraints, and not every mechanic can be made universally accessible without losing what makes it distinctive. A real-time dexterity game, by its nature, excludes players with certain motor disabilities, and no amount of core integration changes that. The question is about the principle that governs the design process, not the outcome of every individual title. I want the community to weigh in on whether the design norm itself should shift: should accessibility be part of the core loop from prototype one, or is it properly handled as an add-on layer during production and publishing?

I was in a refugee camp in Greece in 2017 when a young woman was denied medical care because she could not 'prove' she existed. Her documents had been lost crossing the Mediterranean. She had a phone with a mobile wallet containing a verifiable credential issued by a grassroots aid organization — but the camp clinic's policy required 'government-issued ID or UNHCR registration card.' The credential was real, the attestations were valid, and the issuing organization was recognized by every NGO in the camp. The clinic's protocol simply had no provision for it. That moment changed the direction of my career. I left Mozilla the year before to work on decentralized identifiers, but that field visit crystallized the question: are we building self-sovereign identity for the people who need it most, or for the people who already have documents? This trial asks the community to weigh in on whether humanitarian aid organizations — camp clinics, food distribution points, education programs, legal aid desks — should update their intake protocols to accept cryptographically verifiable credentials (DID-based, VC-standard) as primary proof of identity, alongside or in place of state-issued documents and UNHCR registration cards. The practical stakes are enormous. Verifiable credentials can survive conditions that destroy paper: water, fire, flight, theft. They can be issued by community organizations without state backing. They travel with the person, not the bureaucracy. They can encode educational credentials, vaccination records, professional certifications, and family relationships — none of which fit on a registration card. But the objections are real and must be addressed. Critics argue that accepting decentralized credentials in humanitarian contexts could fragment the identity landscape, creating a two-tier system where the documented have state IDs and the undocumented have 'lesser' digital credentials. They warn about exclusion of people without phones, about digital literacy barriers, about the risk of surveillance if the credential system is not truly self-sovereign. They point out that a corrupt or coerced aid worker can issue false credentials just as easily as a corrupt state official can forge papers — decentralization alone does not solve trust. I believe the answer is not to reject decentralized credentials but to build better threat models around their use: offline-capable verification, privacy-preserving selective disclosure, transparent governance of trusted issuer registries, and parallel paper-based workflows for those who cannot or will not use digital tools. But the first step is a community decision on whether the principle is sound. This trial asks: should humanitarian organizations accept self-sovereign identity credentials as primary proof of identity in displacement and refugee contexts?

In 1995 former NFL star O.J. Simpson was tried in Los Angeles for the June 1994 murders of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman. The eight-month televised trial was watched by an estimated 150 million people when the verdict came on October 3, 1995: not guilty on both counts, after under four hours of deliberation. In 1997 a civil jury, applying the lower "preponderance of evidence" standard, found him liable for both deaths and awarded $33.5 million. Simpson died in April 2024. The question is whether the criminal jury reached the right verdict on the standard it had to apply — proof beyond a reasonable doubt — not simply whether you think he did it. The prosecution case: DNA evidence linking Simpson to the scene and the victims' blood in his Bronco and at his home, a history of domestic violence against Nicole, a matching shoe-print size, the bloody gloves, and his flight in the Bronco chase. The defence case: lead detective Mark Fuhrman was shown to have used racial slurs and later invoked the Fifth Amendment when asked if he planted evidence; the LAPD crime lab's handling of samples was sloppy; a criminalist carried a vial of Simpson's blood around for hours; and the bloody glove appeared not to fit ("If it doesn't fit, you must acquit"). Against the background of the 1992 Rodney King riots, many saw the verdict as a referendum on the LAPD as much as on Simpson.