ToaKraka
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User ID: 108
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
3mo ago
Articles: Associated Press, Reuters
Based on priors, I am doubtful that they were meaningfully violating the law.
Reuters: Workers say Korea Inc was warned about questionable US visas before Hyundai raid
Many South Korean workers were sent to the U.S. on questionable documents despite their misgivings and warnings about stricter U.S. immigration enforcement before last week's raid on a Hyundai site, according to workers, officials and lawyers.
For years, South Korean companies have said they struggle to obtain short-term work visas for specialists needed in their high-tech plants in the United States, and had come to rely on a grey zone of looser interpretation of visa rules under previous American administrations.
When that changed in the early days of U.S. President Donald Trump's second term, some workers were denied entry to the United States under statuses that did not fully allow work, according to Reuters interviews with more than a dozen workers from various companies, government and company officials, and immigration lawyers.
Many of the people arrested were skilled workers who were sent to the U.S. to install equipment at the near-complete factory on a visa waiver programme, or B-1 business traveller visas, which largely did not allow work, three people said.
"It's extremely difficult to get an H-1B visa, which is needed for the battery engineers. That's why some people got B-1 visas or ESTA," said Park Tae-sung, vice chairman of Korea Battery Industry Association, referring to the Electronic System for Travel Authorization.
One person who works at the Georgia site told Reuters that this had long been a routine practice. "There was a red flag ... They bypass the law and come to work," the person said, asking not to be named because of the sensitivity of the matter.
LG Energy Solution is working with Hyundai to build the factory.
Officials at LGES were aware of the long-standing issues and some of the companies' employees and contractors were reluctant to travel to the United States for fear of being denied entry, two of the sources said.
ToaKraka
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3mo ago
The negotiations to release about 300 South Koreans who were detained have concluded and processing for their release from custody is ongoing, South Korea's presidential office said late on Sunday.
U.S. federal agents arrested about 475 workers at Hyundai's car battery plant in Ellabell, Georgia, on Thursday in the largest single-site enforcement operation in the history of the Department of Homeland Security's investigative operations.
More than 300 South Korean workers detained following a massive immigration raid at a Hyundai plant in Georgia will be released and brought home, the South Korean government announced Sunday.
U.S. immigration authorities said Friday they detained 475 people, most of them South Korean nationals, when hundreds of federal agents raided Hyundai’s sprawling manufacturing site in Georgia where the Korean automaker makes electric vehicles.
ToaKraka
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3mo ago
For me, it's the instrumental version published by Naxos in the album Swedish March Favorites, which was included in the soundtrack of Victoria 1.
ToaKraka
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3mo ago
According to my copy of ACCA Manual J (Abridged Edition), which specialists use to design HVAC systems:
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The target for comfort generally is dry-bulb temperature of 75 °F (24 °C) and relative humidity of 50 % (absolute humidity around 65 gr/lb or 0.93 %).
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Houses often have uncomfortably high humidity during the cooling season and uncomfortably low humidity during the heating season. What you are describing is the reverse of the typical situation.
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"Adding a humidifier to the heating system moderates [the problem of low humidity during the heating season], but if a humidifier is installed it must not produce a visible or concealed condensation problem. See section 27 [of the unabridged Manual J, which I do not have] for more information on this subject."
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
3mo ago
Do you have a good relationship with your parents? Do you think about failings they had, and try to orient your life toward avoiding those?
I resent my parents' making me join a zillion stupid extracurricular activities, and don't trust them too much. I had to pester my mother for months before she finally retired on the basis of my calculations showing that she had more than enough money to do so, and even now she whines about wanting to go back to work. I like to refer to my father as "Mr. Untrustworthy" (despite my mother's admonishments), after various escapades over the years:
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Using superglue on a model rocket when the instructions told us to use rubber cement
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Buying a telescope and using it approximately once
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Buying a motorcycle and selling it within a few months
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Failing to properly execute a quitclaim deed to a house for multiple years after divorcing my mother, to the point that she had to hire a lawyer
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Claiming that the word "blackmail" is racist
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Texting to me links with no explanation of why I should click on them
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Allegedly converting to Islam
But I can't say that my relationships with them are bad. Call them lukewarm instead.
Do you try to make them proud and live up to values they inculcated in you?
They told me to wear polo shirts rather than T-shirts, and I have maintained that fashion. While I was homeschooled (through seventh grade), they encouraged me when I developed cool hobbies (reading voraciously, translating English to Latin, folding origami, etc.), and I have continued to develop such hobbies. They speak good English, and I certainly am thankful for that. My father is (or at least was; I don't know his current status) a six-figure bigwig, and I also managed to attain similar exaltation.
ToaKraka
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3mo ago
Pretty sure it's a Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac thing, though.
A cursory search for "fannie mae closet" reveals no such requirement. (Having "limited closet or storage space" is mentioned in this document as one factor in appraising a house as "quality 6", the lowest possible rating. But it's only one of several factors.)
the Realtor straight up told me to pay someone for closets as otherwise the bedrooms could not be counted as such.
Obviously he failed to actually read the standards. Many such cases!
ToaKraka
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3mo ago
Many people think that a room cannot count as a bedroom if it does not have a closet. However, no such provision actually is contained in building codes.
According to the Architectural Graphic Standards for Residential Construction, the typical closet is 8 ft × 2 ft (2.4 m × 0.6 m) for an adult or 5 ft × 2 ft (2.4 m × 0.6 m) for a child, with 14-inch (36-cm) shelves affixed to the rear wall.
Do you like closets? Or do you prefer movable storage solutions, such as wardrobes and shelving units?
Would you ever consider living in a house that has no closets?
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
3mo ago
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While searching a drug dealer's house in accordance with a search warrant, police officers find the suspect's cell phone lying face up in his bedroom. The phone lights up by itself, displaying a text message from "Shana" in plain view of the officers. The officers know from their prior investigation that a person named Shana has been working with the suspect in his drug dealing, so they take a photograph of the text message and use it as the basis of a new warrant for a search of the phone.
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At trial, the defendant moves to suppress as the fruit of an illegal search all evidence obtained from the phone. He argues: The last notification received by the phone occurred six hours before the officers searched the house. Therefore, the phone cannot have "lit up by itself" while the officers were there. In reality, the officers must have activated the phone's screen themselves in an illegal warrantless search and then lied on the application for the second warrant. The trial judge agrees with the defendant's reasoning and suppresses the evidence obtained from the phone. The appeals panel affirms.
Note:
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There's a bunch of other evidence on which the defendant definitely still will be convicted of drug dealing.
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The author of the appeals panel's opinion autistically changed nearly every quoted instance of "cell phone" to "cell[ular tele]phone".
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A man is in jail, with pending criminal charges for abusing his romantic partner. In January 2024, the woman additionally requests a protection-from-abuse order, which is granted.
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In May 2024, the man is charged with criminal contempt for having contacted or attempted to contact the woman from jail 343 times in 24 days. In June, he is charged with another fifty instances of the same wrongdoing, circumventing the jail's efforts to prevent him from doing so. In August, he is charged with eight more instances.
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The trial judge finds the man guilty of all 401 counts of criminal contempt. Each count carries a jail term of two days (with the possibility of parole after one day) and a fine of one dollar, for a total of 802 days and 401 dollars. The appeals panel affirms.
ToaKraka
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3mo ago
For the third, one could in theory argue that it constitutes incitement to violence
Volokh Conspiracy on this topic
I don't know whether this is indeed punishable under English law; I have a hard enough time keeping track of the law of one country. But someone asked me whether this would be punishable even under US law, so I thought I'd post about it.
The incitement exception to the First Amendment wouldn't apply here. Consider Hess v. Indiana. The Tweet likewise appears to be, "at worst, nothing more than advocacy of illegal action at some indefinite future time", and it wasn't "intended to produce, and likely to produce, imminent disorder".
US law has also, since Brandenburg and Hess, recognized a solicitation exception. (The leading cases are US v. Williams and US v. Hansen.) I think that, under that exception, a Tweet saying "You should punch trans activist Pat Jones in the balls if you ever come across him" would likely be solicitation even in the absence of imminence (at least so long as Tweet is reasonably understood as serious rather than a joke or hyperbole). But here the advocacy appears not to target any particular person.
I also don't think this would be punishable under the "true threats" exception to the First Amendment. See Counterman v. Colorado and US v. Bagdasarian.
Ken White says that the Tweet is "within shouting distance of prosecutable in the US". Maybe; it's hard to know for sure. But if the question is whether, under modern First Amendment precedents, the Tweet would have been constitutionally protected in US courts, I think the answer is yes.
ToaKraka
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3mo ago
I don't know about "best", but I can say that I (not tall and skinny, but medium-height and fat) have felt very comfortable in the WorkPro 12000 that I bought for 415 $ four years ago. That specific product is no longer sold, but the WorkPro Momentum appears to offer basically the same features for 470 $, except that its seat is cloth rather than mesh. The FlexiSpot C7 (380 $), the RealSpace Radano (300 $), and an Alpha Home chair (normally 330 $, currently on sale for 187 $) also seem similar to the WorkPro 12000.
ToaKraka
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3mo ago
You accidentally posted this in the Wellness Wednesday thread rather than in the Small Questions Sunday thread.
ToaKraka
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3mo ago
This dissertation is concerned with an investigation of palatalization which covers a majority of the above-mentioned processes. I will refer to two types of palatalization: in one case the consonant shifts its primary place and often its manner of articulation while moving toward the palatal region of the vocal tract, as in (1), and in the other it is co-articulated with a following palatal offglide, as in (2).
(1) Full Palatalization
k, t → tʃ /dont ju/ → [dontʃju] 'don't you' (English)
(2) Secondary palatalization
t, d → tj, dj
/yamati/ → [yamatji] 'a person' (Watjarri, W. Pama Nyungan; Douglas 1981)
Finally in (5c) we see a change that has been adopted into the English lexicon, thimble, where the lip closure for [m] and the velic opening for [l] overlap and cause the perception of a voiced bilabial stop. This is a case of 'stop intrusion' between a nasal and a fricative/continuant that has been proposed as the transitional element between the two distinct sounds (Clements 1987). Another well known example from English where stop intrusion occurs is in the pronunciation of prince, where a [t] is perceived between the nasal and [s], [prɪnts]. The release of the alveolar nasal [n] and the transition into the [s] gesture produce the acoustic effect of an alveolar stop [t] (see also Yoo & Blankenship 2003). Arvaniti, Kilpatrick and Shosted (submitted) tested the perception of epenthetic and underlying [t] in the same [n_s] context as in prince vs. prints, and found that American English speakers could not distinguish reliably between epenthetic and underlying [t], which suggests that the [nts] and [ns] alternation is moving toward complete neutralization.
Further support for perceptual epenthesis is provided by Davidson (2004) who presents experimental evidence showing that native speakers of English do not repair illegal onset clusters such as [zb], [zd], and [zg] by epenthesizing schwa, as is typically assumed. Davidson claims that the English speakers, not having experience coordinating the gestures of the consonants in these clusters, instead pull them apart, mistiming the gestures, which leads to the perception of an epenthesized schwa. This schwa, however, is qualitatively different from other schwa sounds that are normally produced during speech (lexical schwas; see Hall (2006) for additional evidence of perceived schwas resulting from gestural overlap).
i_know_some_of_these_words.gif
ToaKraka
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3mo ago
It seems like a pretty reasonable reaction to being accused of racism by two different moderators for absolutely zero reason that I can see.
ToaKraka
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3mo ago
I think this is the first time I have ever been utterly confused and disgusted by a moderation action on this forum.
ToaKraka
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3mo ago
tl;dr: 4.5 stars for books 1 and 2, 4 stars for books 3 to 9, 3.5 stars for book 10
Several other reviews say that the story falls off after the first antagonist is introduced in book 3, and I'm inclined to agree with them. For me, the first tipping point is in chapter 122 (halfway through book 3), when the protagonist, who previously made a big deal of keeping his word, rather egregiously breaks a promise.
Specifically: In chapter 121, he promises a reward of 100,000 points to whoever snitches on a traitor. But in chapter 122 he decides to pay only the first installment of that reward before having the snitch secretly killed. In chapter 128, it is confirmed that the snitch has been killed. Compare that to chapter 70 in book 2 ("I don't lie. My word is my currency.") and chapter 46 in book 1 ("A deal is a deal. I always keep my word. I may be a murdering asshole, but I don't lie.").The second tipping point occurs in chapter 463 (early in book 10), when the protagonist imposes a "Kafkaesque" punishment on an antagonist who cannot be killed. Maybe I'm overreacting, but it reminds me too much of the Sasuke poop incident in Chunin Exam Day, which was a definite marker of that story's downturn. So I've stopped reading there.
(As part of the English problems, I guess I should also mention that the protagonist's dialog is written rather weirdly. My mental image of him always is a bearded Russian in his 40s, rather than the clean-shaven American in his 30s that he's supposed to be. But that's a minor issue.)
ToaKraka
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3mo ago
You accidentally posted this in the Sunday Small Questions Thread rather than in the Friday Fun Thread.
ToaKraka
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3mo ago
Not New York! Not Philadelphia! """Proud""" to be New J*rsey! (electronic riff) New J*rsey One-Oh-One Point Five!
ToaKraka
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3mo ago
Checking IRS Publication 334, I see a section called De Minimis Safe Harbor for Tangible Property that indicates a limit of 5 k$ per item for such write-offs in the US.
ToaKraka
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3mo ago
the Army's newest multibillion-dollar boondoggle
I feel obligated to draw your attention to the Billion-Dollar Boondoggle Act.
The bill requires OMB (the Office of Management and Budget) to issue guidance directing federal agencies to annually submit specified information to OMB regarding certain federally funded projects that (1) are more than five years behind schedule, or (2) have expenditures that are at least $1 billion more than the original cost estimate for the project.
The bill also requires OMB to submit an annual report to Congress containing the information submitted by the agencies and post the report on the OMB website.
It was reported out of committee a month ago, so it actually has a chance of becoming law.
ToaKraka
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3mo ago
Without knowing anything about the relevant law
The text of the law is what makes the difference. The text of Pennsylvania's abuse-of-corpse law criminalizes only "treatment" of a corpse, which a layman would interpret as applying only to acts, not to omissions of acts.
Except as authorized by law, a person who treats a corpse in a way that he knows would outrage ordinary family sensibilities commits a misdemeanor of the second degree.
This stands in stark contrast to the definition of child abuse, which specifically criminalizes omissions of acts.
Child abuse.—The term "child abuse" shall mean intentionally, knowingly or recklessly doing any of the following:
(1) Causing bodily injury to a child through any recent act or failure to act.
(7) Causing serious physical neglect of a child.
"Serious physical neglect." Any of the following when committed by a perpetrator that endangers a child's life or health, threatens a child's well-being, causes bodily injury or impairs a child's health, development or functioning:
(1) A repeated, prolonged or egregious failure to supervise a child in a manner that is appropriate considering the child's developmental age and abilities.
(2) The failure to provide a child with adequate essentials of life, including food, shelter or medical care.
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