ToaKraka
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User ID: 108
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1mo ago
"the seller's agent" (in theory both parties' agent)
This practice, called "dual agency", is outright illegal in several US states due to the conflict of interest.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
8mo ago
Not an effortpost, just a casual summary of a court case in which people may be interested:
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Audrey Stone was a Southwest flight attendant, and also the president of the flight attendants' union. In her capacity as union president, she attended an pro-abortion protest and at that rally implicitly represented all the flight attendants at Southwest. Specifically, she carried signs with the Southwest logo on them, and the expenses of union members who attended the protest were paid for using union funds.
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Charlene Carter was another Southwest flight attendant, who had left the union several years prior and was in active opposition to the union (including leading a recall campaign against Stone). She was opposed to abortion, and therefore was angered by Stone's implicit representation that all of Southwest's flight attendants were in favor of abortion. On Facebook, she sent to Stone various anti-abortion messages, including graphic videos of aborted fetuses.
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Stone complained to Southwest, which fired Carter for "representing our company in a manner that is disparaging to Southwest Flight Attendants". An arbitrator confirmed that the firing was supported by "just cause" under the applicable collective-bargaining agreement.
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Carter (1) sued the union for failing to properly represent her in the complaint process, (2) sued both the union and Southwest for retaliating against her due to her protected speech (both union-related and religion-related), and (3) sued both the union and Southwest for discriminating against her due to her religious beliefs. A jury agreed that all of these charges were valid, and awarded to her millions of dollars in damages. Due to federal law, the judge capped the damages at 600 k$ in compensatory and punitive damages, 150 k$ in backpay, and 60 k$ in pre-judgment interest.
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On the basis of the jury verdict, Carter also asked for an injunction (1) reinstating her to her former position, (2) forbidding Southwest from violating its flight attendants' rights to religious speech and union-related speech in the future, and (3) requiring Southwest to inform all its flight attendants of item 2, including an explicit mention of Title VII (which protects religious speech). The judge granted the request. Southwest apparently asked for some parts of the ruling to be stayed pending appeal, but it did not ask for part 3 to be stayed.
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Southwest then openly defied part 3 of the judge's ruling, and instead sent to all its flight attendants a message (1) stating that Southwest would continue to enforce its policies and (2) failing to mention Title VII. Accordingly, Carter moved that Southwest be held in contempt of court.
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The judge investigated, and found that the memo circulated to the flight attendants was drafted by one of Southwest's in-house lawyers (Kevin Minchey), who obviously should know better than to willfully defy the judge in this manner.
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Therefore the judge: (1) told Southwest to distribute a specific message verbatim, without edits, in order to comply with part 3 of the ruling; and (2), as sanction for this willful disobedience of the court's order, required three of Southwest's in-house lawyers (including Minchey), as representatives of Southwest itself, to undergo at least eight hours of religious-liberty training conducted by a representative of the Alliance Defending Freedom, since the lawyers obviously don't understand religious-liberty law properly.
Relevant court documents:
The Washington Post complains that "Southwest had a constitutional right to issue a memo expressing its disagreement with the jury verdict". The judge's response to this argument is: Speech can be compelled by the government as long as it is narrowly tailored to serve a compelling government interest. Making sure that Southwest's flight attendants are aware of their rights under Title VII is a compelling government interest, and the message that the judge is forcing Southwest to send is as narrowly tailored to that interest as possible. Also, the message ordered by the judge is significantly less objectionable than the longer notice (including an apology) that Carter originally asked the judge to force Southwest to send.
The Washington Post complains that "subjecting lawyers to training by an ideological advocacy group such as ADF", rather than "by accredited law schools", is "ludicrous". But the judge points out that ADF has won multiple Supreme Court cases on the topic of religious liberty in recent years, so it obviously is well-qualified to conduct a training session on that topic.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
25d ago
Zero to sixty in 18 seconds sounds inadequate for merging onto a highway with posted speed of 65 mi/h. Even the unmodified Mirage can manage an 11-second time.
Also, it's my understanding that obtaining parts for imported cars often is difficult and expensive. That goes double for imported cars that are 25 years old.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
25d ago
(1) Buy an ordinary fuel-efficient hatchback
(2) Have a body shop cut out the back half of the passenger compartment and weld the rest of the car back together
(3) Get a super-fuel-efficient two-seat car
Real-life example (pre-modification fuel-economy comparison)
Would you do it?
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1mo ago
In sports leagues, promotion and relegation is a process where teams can move up and down between multiple divisions arranged in a hierarchical structure, based on their performance over a season. Leagues that use promotion and relegation systems are often called open leagues. In a system of promotion and relegation, the best-ranked team(s) in a lower division are promoted to a higher division for the next season, and the worst-ranked team(s) in the higher division are relegated to the lower division for the next season. During the season, teams that are high enough in the league table that they would qualify for promotion are sometimes said to be in the promotion zone, and those at the bottom are in the relegation zone (colloquially the drop zone or facing the drop).
An alternate system of league organization, used primarily in Australia, Canada, Singapore, and the United States, is a closed model based on licensing or franchises. This maintains the same teams from year to year, with occasional admission of expansion teams and relocation of existing teams, and with no team movement between the major league and minor leagues.
Slave plantations are less efficient than small farmers. Slavery is just a way of giving the rich a larger share of the wealth at the cost of stifling economic growth.
Time on the Cross chapter 6:
Both southern farms using free labor and southern farms using slave labor were more efficient than northern farms. Compared with each other, however, southern slave farms were 28 percent more efficient than southern free farms. Compared with northern farms, southern free farms were 9 percent more efficient, while slave farms were 40 percent more efficient.
Chapter 5:
Over the balance of the life cycle the accumulated or present value of the expropriation mounted, on average, to a total of $32. This last figure is 12 percent of the average present value of the income earned by slaves over their lifetimes. In other words, on average, 12 percent of the value of the income produced by slaves was expropriated by their masters.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
4mo ago
43% of the under 29 age group believe the Holocaust is a myth or heavily exaggerated.
No, 20 % think it's a myth and 23 % think it's exaggerated. They were separate questions on the poll, and probably have a lot of overlap.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
21d ago
You need to escape the underscores. https://twitter.com/_Escapekey_/status/1748317807006118335
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1mo ago
If you are capable of inflicting an incapacitating wound (including a temporary stun) from a longer distance, then you are more likely to win. That seems pretty obvious to me.
Once again appears the age-old question: What would the ideal conversation platform look like?
Ideally, the edit history of a comment should be visible, as it is on Wikipedia or Github.
I can imagine a system where each user has his own Git repository, in which each post or comment is represented as a single file. I think submitting pull requests to fix another user's typos would be extremely funny, but also much less disruptive than pointing out typos in a separate comment.
<article data-inreplyto="meiklwuw/169 ajubeaox/foobar">
<p>Both of you are completely wrong. Rather, the correct answer is <span data-inreferenceto="kowupize/203406141409">Kowupize's</span>.</p>
</article>
Normally, whenever you download a document from the federal government's official PACER website, you must pay ten cents per page downloaded, capped at thirty pages (three dollars). If you have installed the RECAP extension in your browser, then the extension automatically uploads to the third-party website RECAP whatever you download from PACER. (You can create an account on PACER and download stuff from it even if you aren't a lawyer.)
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
25d ago
There are many very small cars to choose from, without any of the extra hassle and just as fuel-efficient as the end result of that hack-job.
Maybe in Europe, but not really in the US, I think.
And if all you want is to drive around yourself, no passengers and no cargo, then you may as well get a motorcycle or one of those scooter-sized cars that barely have an enclosed cabin.
Those aren't very convenient in winter.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
25d ago
Beyond financial considerations (depending on your lifestyle): You get the satisfaction of no longer being forced to lug around three extra seats that you literally never use. Parallel parking on city streets becomes easier. And you may be able to fit more cars into your house's driveway.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1mo ago
I don't think this is typical in America.
It's effectively mandatory under the NAR's current rules that the buyer's agent be compensated out of the 6-percent commission that nominally is paid to the seller's agent by the seller. But the NAR has encouraged buyers' agents to misleadingly state to buyers that their services are free.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
3mo ago
Document 146 on this page
The Court hereby certifies the following class:
All non-African American CTI graduates who:
(1) By February 10, 2014, (a) graduated from a CTI program at one of the 36 FAA-partnered CTI Institutions between 2009–13 and (b) passed the AT-SAT;
(2) Applied to be an ATCS trainee through the 2014 all sources vacancy announcement but failed the Biographical Questionnaire that was incorporated into the 2014 ATCS hiring process and was therefore not hired;
(3) Have never been offered employment as an FAA ATCS.
Excluded from the class are CTI graduates:
(1) Who were not US citizens as of February 10, 2014;
(2) Who by February 21, 2014 had reached 31 years of age (or 35 if they had 52 consecutive weeks of prior air traffic control experience);
(3) Whose academic records as of February 21, 2014 explicitly stated that they were ineligible to receive a letter of recommendation from their CTI school;
(4) Whose AT-SAT scores had expired as of February 21, 2014.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1mo ago
I can't easily find a reference for it, but I think Scott asked for his full comments to be inlined his deal for moving his blog there.
Possible source (after holding the "end" key on my keyboard for five minutes to overcome the infinite scroll on the "archive" page)
I know some of you are skeptical. I was too at first, but Substack has gone above and beyond in allaying my concerns. They've let me test out a "no popup telling you to subscribe" feature. They've changed the comment section to be more like WordPress. We've agreed I'm here for a year, but if it goes badly I can leave in 2022 with no hard feelings.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
3mo ago
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A telecom company wants to build a 150-foot cellular tower in a municipality of 6,500 people. Three of its permit applications to build a cell tower on govt. land have already been rejected, so now it's trying to build on privately-owned land—in a commercial zone, but adjacent to a residential zone.
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February 2018: The municipal govt. rejects the application because of the negative impact on the value of nearby residential properties.
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August 2019: A judge vacates and remands because the govt. did not properly assess the factors underlying its decision.
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November 2019: The govt.'s expert says that the cell tower would cause the value of nearby residential property to fall by 10 to 20 percent. The govt. accepts this testimony, and on that basis rejects the application.
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February 2021: The judge vacates and remands because the govt.'s expert did not base his estimate of 10 to 20 percent on any actual data.
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Unspecified date: The telecom company's expert testifies that, though it's anecdotally true that higher-end house buyers are "more discerning" and less likely to buy houses near cell towers, the data show that any drop in house prices near the cell tower would be less than one percent. The govt. rejects the expert's evidence-based testimony because the dataset is not representative of the site in question, but accepts his non-evidence-based anecdote about higher-end buyers, and on that basis denies the application.
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June 2022: The judge reverses the govt.'s decision and approves the application outright, with no remand. The govt.'s treatment of the testimony of the plaintiff's expert was arbitrary and capricious.
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February 2024: The appeals panel affirms the trial judge's decision in all respects.
Six years later, maybe the cellular tower can finally be built!
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1mo ago
One fun and cheap pastime is converting books from print or PDF to HTML+CSS (using Markdown as an intermediary if you don't care enough to learn HTML+CSS). Imagine Distributed Proofreading (the input for Project Gutenberg), but entirely on your own terms, modifying the original text to suit your personal preferences.
If you care about providing a meaningful service to other people, then making illegal high-quality digital versions of older works that (1) still are under copyright but (2) have not been made legally available in electronic form by their publishers (examples: 1 2 3) may fit that criterion.
A search for "Burk ATF video" appears to turn up several relevant results.
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