ToaKraka
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User ID: 108
ToaKraka
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4mo ago
Some users primarily browse this website, not by clicking on posts and reading the comments below those posts, but by reading the page that lists all comments in chronological order regardless of post, sometimes called the "firehose" view.
ToaKraka
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4mo ago
Are there any rationalist discords/meetups etc in NYC?
The semiannual Astral Codex Ten meetup list has just been posted. It indicates that there are meetups in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Long Island, and Newark.
@Southkraut: Are there any in southern Germany?
There are meetups in Erlangen, Freiburg, Mannheim, München, and Stuttgart.
ToaKraka
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4mo ago
I was specifically thinking of this New Jersey case, which actually doesn't fit your pattern.
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A man lets his friend do drugs in the passenger seat of his work van while he delivers mattresses.
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The friend overdoses on fentanyl-laced heroin and dies. Rather than calling 911, the man finishes his workday with the corpse in the passenger seat, and then dumps the corpse on the side of "a dark, rural road", where it is found a few hours later.
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The man is convicted of desecration of human remains and is sentenced to eight years in prison. The appeals panel affirms.
ToaKraka
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4mo ago
I post cases that are interesting and cases that are funny. This case is interesting for the following reasons.
(1) It is highly likely that a person will deal with a funeral home at least once in his life. It's worth knowing how a funeral home—even one led by the president of the <del>state</del><ins>county</ins> funeral directors' association—can be derelict in its duty.
(2) The legal issue of whether a person can be guilty of abuse of a corpse by simply leaving it alone (rather than a more typical situation of fucking a corpse or dumping a corpse out of the back of a van) is unintuitive. I would not have expected it to come out this way after reading the statute.
Over the past week I saw only three cases worth posting (two interesting and one funny), and this is the best one.
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On August 31: A person dies; his brother contacts a funeral home and requests a direct cremation, with no embalming; and the corpse is brought to the funeral home. On September 2, the brother signs a contract for cremation at a price of 3.4 k$, and the corpse is transferred to a crematory.
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On September 7: The brother signs a contract with a different funeral home for cremation at a price of just 1 k$. The corpse is transported from the crematory back to the first funeral home. When the second funeral director arrives at the first funeral home to pick up the corpse, she is astonished to discover that the first funeral home failed to refrigerate the corpse because its corpse refrigerator was out of order! After sitting at 56 °F (11 °C) for three days before being transferred to the crematory, the corpse has generated "fluid seepage, maggot infestation, and unbearable decay and stench". Since then the broken fridge has been replaced, but the damage already has been done. The second funeral director reports the situation to the brother.
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On September 10, the second funeral home has the corpse cremated. However, before cremation, the brother insists on seeing the corpse one last time. He is appalled at its condition, and reports the situation to the police. The first funeral director—who also is the president of the
<del>state</del><ins>county</del>funeral directors' association!—is charged with abuse of a corpse, is convicted, and is sentenced to a year of probation. "If the President of the Funeral Directors' Association conducts business in this manner, who is to say what is happening at any other funeral home behind a family's back?" -
The convicted funeral director appeals. He argues that the crime of abuse of a corpse is reserved for (1) acts, while he only omitted an act, and (2) treatment that the actor "knows would outrage ordinary family sensibilities", while he had no such knowledge. But the appeals panel affirms. (1) "The purpose of drafting the abuse-of-corpse statute in very broad and general language was to ensure that offenses such as concealing a corpse came under the purview of the statute." It is precedent that failing to notify authorities of a person's death and allowing that person's corpse to rot counts as abuse of a corpse, even though it is merely the omission of an act rather than an act in itself. (2) "Even if there were no initial expectation that the family would ever see Decedent's body again, any person, funeral director or otherwise, would understand that family sensibilities would be offended if a corpse were allowed to decompose for days."
ToaKraka
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4mo ago
ToaKraka
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4mo ago
Sports betting, OnlyFans (etc.), and addiction level of marijuana use are, to me, the three horsemen of tolerated social degeneration.
Can anyone comment on the status of prostitution as a fourth horseman in places where it's legal (Germany, Australia, the UK, etc.)?
ToaKraka
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4mo ago
When my parents made me go on a trip to Chile in the summer after my freshman year of college, approximately my only enjoyable experience was looking down on the container port of Valparaíso from the hills above it.
ToaKraka
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4mo ago
the Babylon Bee
More specifically (to avoid confusion), its non-satire branch Not the Bee.
ToaKraka
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4mo ago
Any advice on what to do?
The huge container ports on the New Jersey side of the Hudson River are fairly cool. (Read The Box to learn about their history.)
ToaKraka
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4mo ago
Nobody wants to live in Antarctica. I would rather raise kids on a container ship.
Wikipedia indicates that British Antartica is only a little colder than Greenland, and actually warmer than Nunavut and Siberia. So it really isn't the most outlandish place to live, assuming that services are available.
ToaKraka
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4mo ago
There were lots of hot Indian girls in my New Jersey high school. But Indians aren't very popular on 4chan's /gif/ and /s/ boards, so I haven't seen many hot ones since leaving high school.
Checking Pornhub, I am somewhat astonished to see that, if I search for "bikini" and filter by the Indian category, there are only 89 matching videos on the entire site (versus 1712 in the Asian category), and most of them are not particularly appealing.
Searching for "india pageant" on YouTube reveals Miss Universe India 2025 Grand Finale, which is five hours long. You could use that as a guide for what the subcontinent's exemplars of beauty look like.
ToaKraka
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4mo ago
A quick search indicates that this forum saw its first use of "glaze" in this sense 11 months ago.
ToaKraka
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4mo ago
I said significant bodily injury, not serious bodily injury. Purposeful infliction of significant bodily injury still is aggravated assault in New Jersey, though a lower degree.
b. Aggravated assault. A person is guilty of aggravated assault if the person:
(1) Attempts to cause serious bodily injury to another, or causes injury purposely or knowingly or under circumstances manifesting extreme indifference to the value of human life recklessly causes such injury.
(7) Attempts to cause significant bodily injury to another or causes significant bodily injury purposely or knowingly or, under circumstances manifesting extreme indifference to the value of human life recklessly causes such significant bodily injury.
Aggravated assault under paragraphs (1) and (6) of subsection b. of this section is a crime of the second degree; and under paragraphs (2), (7), (9), and (10) of subsection b. of this section is a crime of the third degree.
I guess my sense of US sentencing practices has been skewed by reading too many cases that feature offenders with voluminous criminal histories. Still, in New Jersey, aggravated sexual assault (sexual penetration (of any orifice) during the commission of aggravated assault (purposeful infliction of significant bodily injury)) carries a sentence of 10–20 years—a bit harsher than the 0–20 years that Pennsylvania prescribes for involuntary deviate sexual intercourse (deviate sexual intercourse by forcible compulsion).
ToaKraka
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4mo ago
I believe the standard advice nowadays is to ignore the traditional publishing process, and instead publish for free in serial format (possibly with a Patreon) to drum up interest, before depublishing that preliminary version and publishing a final version on Amazon.
>>>/lit/wng says:
>Why write web novels?
Ease of access & potential for Patreon earnings. Many successful authors gain an audience on their website of choice and funnel their readers into a Patreon. See graphtreon.com/top-patreon-creators/writing for an idea of what some are earning.
Also, once an author has earned a fanbase, transitioning into an Amazon self-publishing career is several orders of magnitude easier than starting 'dry'.
>>>/lit/wg says:
Traditional Publishing
Pros:
- you get to focus mostly on writing
- you must write a proposal to the publishers and sell your story to them
- you make 10-15% profit max, but they also eat all the risk and the costs
- self publishing is basically like running your own company
- you only need to do some simple marketing and reach out to readers
Cons:
- you make 10-15% profit max
- self publishing you make 70%+
- they’ll still require you to do all the leg work of a self published author anyways
Self Publishing How-To
- risky, but much more profitable
- you must pay for everything yourself
- if you do, you will spend more time on running a business than writing, but can be worth it
I can say that, over the past few years, I have purchased several books through this pathway.
ToaKraka
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4mo ago
Quote from the opinion:
As is often true of common-law principles, the reasons for the rule are less sure and less uniform than the rule itself. One explanation is that the execution of an insane person simply offends humanity; another, that it provides no example to others and thus contributes nothing to whatever deterrence value is intended to be served by capital punishment.* Other commentators postulate religious underpinnings: that it is uncharitable to dispatch an offender "into another world, when he is not of a capacity to fit himself for it". It is also said that execution serves no purpose in these cases because madness is its own punishment: furiosus solo furore punitur. More recent commentators opine that the community's quest for "retribution"—the need to offset a criminal act by a punishment of equivalent "moral quality"—is not served by execution of an insane person, which has a "lesser value" than that of the crime for which he is to be punished. Unanimity of rationale, therefore, we do not find. "But whatever the reason of the law is, it is plain the law is so." We know of virtually no authority condoning the execution of the insane at English common law.[1]
[1]At one point, Henry VIII enacted a law requiring that if a man convicted of treason fell mad, he should nevertheless be executed. This law was uniformly condemned. The "cruel and inhumane Law lived not long, but was repealed, for in that point also it was against the Common Law...."
*Citing Lord Coke:
By intendment of law the execution of the offender is for example, ut poena ad paucos, metus ad omnes perveniat**, as before is laid: but so it is not when a mad man is executed, but should be a miserable spectacle, both against Law, and of extream inhumanity and cruelty, and can be no example to others.
**Latin: "So that punishment may come to few, [but] fear to all."
ToaKraka
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4mo ago
ToaKraka
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4mo ago
Article going into detail on this topic
AMENDMENT XXXI: There shall be not less than one Representative for every thirty thousand persons, and not more than one Representative for every twenty-five thousand persons.
ToaKraka
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4mo ago
It's a meme from 4chan's /biz/ board. The most common phrasings are "He sold? Pump it." and "He bought? Dump it.", superimposed on an image of a Bogdanoff holding a cell phone to his ear. The implication is that there is a Bogdanoff-led conspiracy to ensure that your investments do poorly by manipulating stock prices. (Note the French accent in this version—"ze" for "the". The Bogdanoffs were French.)
Under US law, sentencing serves four specific purposes: deterrence, incapacitation, retribution (or just punishment), and rehabilitation.
In the context of the death penalty, the US Supreme Court has held that mentally disabled offenders <del>are not smart enough to understand deterrence</del><ins>do not provide deterrence in being executed</ins> and are inherently less morally culpable as regards retribution. These rationales date back at least to English common law.
I can't comment on non-Anglo countries' sentencing systems.
ToaKraka
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4mo ago
The trial judge convicted Trump of fraud, and on that basis imposed on Trump two separate punishments—disgorgement of several hundred megadollars, and disqualification from serving as an officer or director of any New York business for several years. Disgorgement is, not really punitive, but compensatory, meant to undo any damages that were done. The appeals panel ruled that the prosecutor failed to prove the quantity of damages caused by Trump's fraud, so the disgorgement had no basis. But the punitive disqualification still stands.
I have no opinion on what effect this will have on the prosecutor's reputation.
Trial-judge mistakes strike again.More options
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