drax1983

Husky recently sent over one of their adjustable height workbenches for review.

If you recall from my recent review of Husky’s 144-position ratchets, we are in a paid partnership with Husky and Home Depot, where they send over some tools for review consideration.

I was given a “menu” of several Husky tool suggestions, and on that list was Husky’s 72″ adjustable height workbench.

Benjamen posted about Husky’s similar workbench in the past when a new model came out, and while he seems to have had a very favorable opinion, I was still skeptical.

Where would I put a 72″ workbench? I asked about the 46″, and it turned out that the 52″ was in stock. With a please and a thank you, it was on the way.

I figure I’d set this up in the garage. No – the basement. Maybe it’ll be a nice compact workbench.

I finally decided it would go in the corner of the living room at least temporarily, until I cleaned up a proper workshop space for it.

It arrived in fantastic condition, protected with copious amounts of styrofoam, and with the components separated so as to not rattle around.

Assembly was pretty easy.

Actually, it went together way too easily. Surely I was doing something wrong? But no, it really was very nicely laid out and with great documentation.

I sat on the bench to see how stable it was when raised up a little, and my kids wanted a try too.

There are two things I don’t want to forget to mention – the bottom cross-brace can be positioned at the rear of the bench, or at the center. I like having options like that. Since I don’t intend to access it from both sides right now, I placed it at the rear.

The second thing – the bench comes with feet and casters. I opted for the leveling feet, but at some point if I move this to the garage, I’ll want it on its casters.

I typically work in my office, and then I have an older laptop for working in the living room. But, with everyone home, and no sign of that changing anytime soon, I put a computer in the living room.

Here I am now. I have an inexpensive leather desk pad I ordered at clearance pricing when buying a notebook cover, and plenty of space to work. This is far more comfortable than working on a laptop on the couch.

The desk is rock solid, and far more stable than I expected. I had anticipated some wobble, and was expecting to test it as a computer desk for a little bit before moving it to workshop duty.

I am one of those people that tend to notice everything. I bought a standing desk for my office last year, and the bamboo top has sharp corners all around. This table top? Smooth and nicely eased. It has been a pleasure to use so far.

The Husky workbench doesn’t shake when I type. It doesn’t wobble. It’s solid and excellent in every regard I could think of.

That standing desk I mentioned putting in my office? It replaced an Ikea desk that I’ve had for years. The table top that comes with this Husky workbench is thicker than both. Thicker means more mass and stability. Plus, I can modify (drill into) it more easily in the future if needed.

I haven’t raised it up and down too much yet, and I don’t plan to.

The big benefit of a height-adjustable workbench isn’t so much that you could raise and lower it all the time, but that you can dial in the height exactly where you want it, and easily.

My Gladiator workbenches adjust in 1″ increments. If you want to adjust it less than that, you need to play around with the casters.

I don’t know how, but this Husky bench feels sturdier than my Gladiator workbenches – both of the bamboo ones I bought and the hardwood samples they sent a while back.

If you need to make big adjustments with this Husky workbench, sone user reviews mention removing the knob and using a hex driver or the appropriate bit socket chucked into a drill.

The bench has a 300 lb weight capacity. Adjustment range is 26″ to 42″.

The quality of the work top is also nicer than I had expected.

This bench measures 52″ x 24″. I like this size. I put a 48″ desk in my office, replacing a massive 60″ long L-table. I think that 52″ is a nice size – large enough to not feel cramped, and small enough so as to not dominate a space.

I am extremely pleased with this Husky height-adjustable bench/table/desk, and am also glad I went with with the white color scheme.

It’s a solid-feeling workbench, but it doesn’t look like a workbench, and I am loving that.

I have been heavily considering buying another one, it’s that good.

The model shown here retails for $199. This table is available in 46″, 52″,62″, and 72″ sizes, in white and black finish options.

I have been trying to come up with a negative about the Husky table, but I’m still drawing a blank. You might argue “sure, it’s a good desk, but that’s less demanding than if it were used as a workbench,” and that might be true, but I am far less accepting of instabilities in this type of use. If it can handle my fidgeting as I type, and without bugging me – I’m easily distracted by things like a wobbling table – it can handle assembly tasks, precision work, or medium duty workshop tasks with ease.

Despite its 300 lb load rating, it feels far more stable than the larger and much higher-rated work tables I’ve used.

Oh, and the table top is supported about its center. This means that if or when it makes it to my garage workspace, I’ll be able to clamp things to it all-around.

I am loving it so far – thank you Husky!

Questions?

Buy Now: White via Home Depot
Buy Now: Black via Home Depot

As mentioned, this sample was provided as part of a paid partnership between ToolGuyd and Home Depot.

The doctor legally couldn’t tell him his son was in drug trouble. Nor could the college. Maybe time to rethink federal privacy laws? [Tony Christ, DelmarvaNow]

Tags: colleges and universities, HIPAA, privacy

When the family is the last to know is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

Everyone knows that things got bad in the Fallout universe when the bombs dropped. But even before that, it's been said that something... wrong was stirring. It all started with this book.

Read more...

First, there was bullying. Then, cyberbullying. Next up was revenge porn. Now, it’s street harassment. The common thread between these wrongs that have generated calls for criminalization is that the harm to be ended isn’t objectively observable, quantifiable, provable, but ephemeral and personal.  They seek redress for hurt feelings.

Before anyone blows a gasket, this isn’t to say that hurt feelings aren’t real, or that they can’t also produce objective cognizable harms, such as public ridicule or loss of employment opportunity.  And some people whose feelings are deeply hurt harm themselves, to the point of committing suicide. This is a tragedy, as is any needless taking of life.

But the sticking point isn’t so much about whether hurt feelings are sufficiently serious as to warrant a criminal law, but rather how a law, an expression of elements of an offense in words, can be drawn in such a way as to clarify what is prohibited so that it is limited to the offensive conduct without giving rise to ambiguity.  It’s the ambiguity that opens the door to unconstitutional impacts, whether facial or as applied.

Non-lawyers, understandably, have a difficult time understanding why this is so.  They read the words of proposed laws and clearly understand what is intended. They lack the experience with the law, with the execution of the law, to see beyond their certainty that they know what a law means.  The problem isn’t what they are certain it means; the problem is what it says.

I’ve invoked the Rule of Lenity here in the past, often to be met with a certain amount of confusion.  Walter Olson at Overlawyered posts about it, offering a far more detailed explanation of why it exists and its critical importance. He starts with a quote from the beloved Nino Scalia:

Justice Scalia on the rule of lenity in U.S. v. Santos, 2008:

This venerable rule not only vindicates the fundamental principle that no citizen should be held accountable for a violation of a statute whose commands are uncertain, or subjected to punishment that is not clearly prescribed. It also places the weight of inertia upon the party that can best induce Congress to speak more clearly and keeps courts from making criminal law in Congress’s stead.

Putting aside the whole activist aspect, the Rule of Lenity is a rule of statutory construction, that ambiguity in a law is resolved in favor of the defendant, as “no citizen should be held accountable for a violation of a statute whose commands are uncertain, or subjected to punishment that is not clearly prescribed.”  In other words, before anyone can be held accountable for a crime, he must know with certainty what conduct is prohibited.

When laws are crafted to prohibit conduct that produces the outcome of hurt feelings, the nature of the hurt becomes an element of the offense.  It’s hard, if not impossible, to assess in advance the feelings that conduct will produce in another person. The delicate flower will be hurt by almost anything.  The indelicate will not be hurt by much of anything.  Each of us assumes that our level of hurt-iosity is the normal level that normal people would find hurtful.  It’s a facile self-delusion, but we believe it, and so it must be.

There is a secondary, constitutional dimension aspect to this problem, that has been discussed here at great length, about the right to say things that hurt other people’s feelings.  If someone says something you think is stupid, you have a right to tell them that what they said is stupid. And they have a right to respond that you’re stupid too, plus you suck.

The issues of statutory construction and constitutional impairment are separate, but dovetail. Courts could narrow the application of a statute that says it prohibits constitutionally protected speech by holding that it can’t and doesn’t, but is otherwise fine as to the conduct it is intended to prohibit.  Yes, this is the activism that Scalia derides, but it appears from legislative sloppiness and compromise, lawmakers figure the courts will clean up their mess when the times comes, saving them from the hard work of crafting clear laws.

But more likely is the push of advocates to pander to their interest groups that the inability to craft unambiguous laws is less important than their need to end the horror of hurt and criminalize the conduct they hate.  It’s not that they figure a court will clean up the mess later, but that they couldn’t care less how badly a law is crafted, or the unintended consequences of their cries for justice.  Take one for the team is the rallying cry of those who demand that no feelings ever be hurt again.  The feelings of those who are expected to take one for the team, well, never quite get the same concern.

Vikrant Reddy has written a thoughtful homage to the importance of the Rule of Lenity at Texas Policy, noting that the rule is eroding.

Although this understanding should be perfectly ordinary, the application of the rule of lenity has in fact begun to erode dramatically in recent years. This has happened in concert with a troubling phenomenon: the dramatic growth of criminal law in a variety of non-traditional arenas, generally involving freely agreed-upon exchanges between adults.

He writes in the context of regulatory crimes, malum prohibitum, as a means of enforcing conduct through criminal sanction that is otherwise wholly lacking in any moral culpability.  As the disconnect between wrongs that should be stopped and the ability to express them with sufficient clarity that criminal laws say exactly, and only, what they mean, without reliance on the vague Potter Stewart punt, the Rule of Lenity dies a little bit.

Whenever someone says “there ought to be a law,” the response should be “prohibiting what?”  What any honest person will grasp is that crafting a law that only criminalizes the evil they think needs eradicating, without impinging on other conduct or rights, is very hard.  And when an aspect of the law is the harm done to someone else’s feelings, it’s essentially impossible.

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Columbia lawprof Philip Hamburger is out with a book of high importance on the administrative state and the legality of its actions, and Cato had him in to speak earlier this month, with D.C. Circuit Judge Stephen Williams commenting and Cato’s Roger Pilon moderating (video, podcast links). The event description:

When law in America can be made by executive “pen and phone” alone — indeed, by a White House press release — we’re faced starkly with a fundamental constitutional question: Is administrative law unlawful? Answering in the affirmative in this far-reaching, erudite new treatise, Philip Hamburger traces resistance to rule by administrative edict from the Middle Ages to the present. Far from a novel response to modern society and its complexities, executive prerogative has deep roots. It was beaten back by English constitutional ideas in the 17th century and even more decisively by American constitutions in the 18th century, but it reemerged during the Progressive Era and has grown ever since, regardless of the party in power.

Earlier here, etc.

Tags: administrative law, Barack Obama

“Is Administrative Law Unlawful?” is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system