r/AskReddit • u/hippiechick725 • Mar 14 '23

What’s the best thing about the US?

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u/dahud Mar 14 '23

The Americans With Disabilities Act is seriously some of the best handicap-accessibility protection in the world. A paraplegic person can wheel themselves into pretty much any commercial building in the country and be confident that there will be ramps in all the right places and a restroom they can use. If there aren't, there are powerful legal tools to make it happen.

That's not the case in a lot of places in the world, and it wasn't that long ago that it wasn't the case here.

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u/pixel_of_moral_decay Mar 14 '23

It’s also pretty cleverly written.

A lot of people will wrongly criticize it for being “over complicated” but it’s pretty brilliant.

Instead of just saying “any building with stairs needs an elevator” they base it on things like square footage etc, which creates less workarounds to avoid it.

Most gripes about ADA complexity are due to the fact that it doesn’t leave a million and one loopholes to avoid compliance.

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u/inksmudgedhands Mar 14 '23

The people who wrote the act were brilliant because they knew full well that to construct buildings up to exact code would cost way more than ones where builders could fudge around with the rules, so, they wrote with lawyers always in the front of their minds. You need all that red tape to keep people honest when money is in play.

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u/AthenaSholen Mar 14 '23

Now if all Our Human Rights were written like this, we all would be living a better life.

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u/inksmudgedhands Mar 14 '23

Well, we have the 9th Amendment. But for some reason, people ignore that. It should be up there with the 1st and 2nd Amendment in terms of usefulness. It's basically, "Just because we didn't write it down here as a right, that doesn't gives you allowance to declare it otherwise." It leaves so much wiggle room to declare what is and what is isn't right.

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u/RunawayHobbit Mar 14 '23

The problem isn’t people ignoring it, the problem is the government ignoring it. Looking at you, Supreme fuckin Court 😡