ToaKraka
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User ID: 108
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
8d ago
Look closely at the comments. The moderator imposed a ban, not on BurdensomeCount, but on the poster of a filtered reply to BurdensomeCount that you can't read.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
20d ago
A friend of mine, who is a retired engineer from PennDOT, said of speed limits that "they aren't suggestions; they're requirements".
As a civil engineer: LOL.
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If a road has a posted speed of X mi/h (Y km/h), its actual design speed on which the civil engineers base all their designs is (X + 5) mi/h ((Y + 10) km/h).
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When a civil engineer designs a curve, he can't make the curve too tight, because the "side friction factor" between the pavement and a car's tires will be too small to provide the required centripetal force, resulting in skidding and loss of control. But the side friction factor that's used in design is based on poor weather conditions—ice, rain, et cetera. I don't have the AASHTO Policy on Design in front of me at the moment for the exact numbers, but friction obviously is a lot higher on a dry road than on a wet road, and therefore you can go a lot faster quite safely.
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A hill, or a roadside forest on a curve, may block your view of an upcoming intersection or crosswalk. You probably learned in your high-school driving class that your "stopping sight distance" increases with the square of speed, so you do want to slow down at these locations. But these claustrophobia-inducing segments don't really have anything to do with your speed on segments of the road that have good visibility.
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Obviously, at high speeds it's harder to keep your car going where you want it to go. I personally don't feel comfortable driving faster than 75 mi/h (120 km/h), or 80 mi/h (130 km/h) if I'm in the left lane of a three-lane freeway and there's somebody right behind me. But I don't bear much ill will toward people who flash past me at 90 mi/h (145 km/h) in the left lane when I'm in the middle lane (of three).
ToaKraka
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4d ago
Just leave your car out in the rain, rather than letting it get dusty in the garage.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
17d ago
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Some 14-year-old urban youths are hanging out on a Philadelphia sidewalk. As a 73-year-old man walks by, a boy and a girl decide to hit him in the head with a traffic cone. He is hit once by the boy and twice by the girl, and dies of the resulting brain injuries. The entire incident is captured on surveillance video. The boy and the girl are charged with murder and conspiracy to murder.
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The trial judge dismisses the charges against the boy. There is no evidence of conspiracy between him and the girl. Rather, after he delivered his blow and dropped the cone, she independently chose to pick up the traffic cone and deliver her own, totally separate blows. And the boy merely hit the old man once and then walked away, so there is no evidence of the "malice"—either intent to kill or reckless disregard for a high risk of killing—that murder requires (as opposed to the negligence that can support a charge of manslaughter).
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The appeals panel reverses and remands for trial. The surveillance video clearly shows that (1) the boy dealt his blow immediately after the girl handed the traffic cone directly to the boy, and (2) while the girl was delivering her blows the boy only walked away for a few seconds, and soon returned with a smile on his face. That is evidence of conspiracy. And hitting an old man in the head with a heavy traffic cone even once is evidence of reckless disregard for a high risk of killing.
ToaKraka
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10d ago
Particularly hilarious is that the father's three sentences were run concurrently, rather than consecutively—so he did not receive any extra penalty for the third pregnancy (or, indeed, for the second one).
ToaKraka
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12d ago
The transcript of the debate appears to support your uncharitable description. Antoniazzi:
Although abortion is available in England and Wales under conditions set by the Abortion Act 1967, the law underpinning it, which dates back to 1861—the Offences Against the Person Act—means that outside those conditions, abortion remains a criminal offence carrying a maximum life sentence. Originally passed by an all-male Parliament elected by men alone, this Victorian law is increasingly used against vulnerable women and girls. Since 2020, more than 100 women have been criminally investigated, six have faced court, and one has been sent to prison. The women affected are often acutely vulnerable. Victims of domestic abuse and violence, human trafficking and sexual exploitation; girls under the age of 18; and women who have suffered miscarriage or stillbirth, or have given birth prematurely, have faced invasive and prolonged criminal investigations that cause long-term harm.
The fact is that new clause 1 would take women out of the criminal justice system, and that is what has to happen and has to change now. There is no way that these women should be facing what they are facing.
I implore colleagues not to lose sight of the moral imperative here: namely, vulnerable women being dragged from hospital bed to police cell on suspicion of ending their own pregnancies. This is urgent. We know that multiple women are still in the system awaiting a decision, accused of breaking this law. They cannot afford to wait.
We have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to put an end to this in a simple and secure manner. This is the right change at the right time, so I implore colleagues who want to protect women and abortion services to vote for new clause 1. Let us ensure that not a single desperate woman is ever again subject to traumatic criminal investigation at the worst moments of their lives.
ToaKraka
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18d ago
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Harassment = disparaging the target to his face, or intentionally disparaging the target in an area where he is likely to hear the disparagement
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"Talking shit" = disparaging the target without regard to whether he will see the discussion
As the 4chan comic goes: If you enter a thread about stuff you do not like, and now you are mad, then you have nobody to blame but yourself.
ToaKraka
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2d ago
Is 200 k$ the limit on the amount that Keith's insurance would cover?
No, it's the limit on the amount that Carlos's insurance would cover.
If not then Keith is entirely in the right here, and the bankruptcy judge should not have required the limit of 200 k$ in the first place.
To clarify: This situation arose solely because Keith was impatient. He asked the two judges to impose the 200-k$ limit because he wanted to get his money ASAP, without waiting for the bankruptcy proceedings to finish.
ToaKraka
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10d ago
Someone charged in my state with sex with two minors under 15 would be held without bond or with a million dollar cash bond.
New Jersey court rules appear to recommend bail of 150 to 300 k$ for this crime. I don't know what the judge's rationale was in not imposing bail.
Someone charged in my state with sex with two minors under 15 would be looking at life in prison with no parole.
Under New Jersey law, the maximum sentence for this crime (sex with a minor under 13, or with a minor between 13 and 15 by a parent/guardian/etc.) is life with the possibility of parole after 25 years. In this case, the criminal received the minimum sentence of 25 years without the possibility of parole, running concurrently for all three instances.
Astral Codex Ten's Non-Book Review Contest has one particularly interesting entry: Arbitraging Several Dozen Online Casinos. tl;dr:
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In most of the US, online casino gambling (labeled "iGaming" on this interactive map) is illegal. In order to circumvent this restriction, zillions of companies have seized on the same workaround that Japanese pachinko parlors exploit: users pay real money to buy "valueless" tokens that cannot be exchanged for real money (sweeps coins), and then use those tokens to gamble for tokens that can be exchanged for real money. These online casinos are known as "sweepstakes" or "sweeps" casinos.
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Recall that many traditional casino games have very low house edges. For example, "French roulette" (European single-zero roulette where you have only a 50-% chance of losing your money when you get the zero) has a house edge of only 1/74 (1.35 %).
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Apparently: (1) Just like gacha games, these sweeps casinos have daily log-in bonuses, averaging 0.5 $/d. So, if you sign up for 36 different casinos, and then use those free daily sweeps coins to play games with low house edges, you will make nearly 18 $/d for next to zero effort. (2) These sweeps casinos often have temporary sales for purchasing sweeps coins with real money. At 5 to 15 %, the discount rates for these sales usually vastly exceed the house edge. (3) If you exploit these sales, the casinos will see that you are spending a lot of money, assume that you are a gambling-addicted "whale", and give you even more bonuses. (4) At a normal casino, a credit-card purchase of chips counts as a cash advance, since those chips can be exchanged right back to real money. But, at a sweeps casino, a purchase of sweeps coins counts as a normal purchase of goods, since the sweeps coins cannot be cashed out before you gamble with them. So, at a sweeps casino, you can get your normal credit-card rewards of 2 % or more.
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According to the review, all these effects can be stacked to make 95 $/d by "working" for a single hour per day, which multiplies out to a very livable income of 35 k$/a—and that's assuming you don't use bots. (Some cursory searching indicates that the proper term for such strategies is "bonus hunting", not "arbitrage", and not to be confused with ban-worthy "bonus abuse" as defined in various online casinos' terms of service.)
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
12d ago
You seem to imply in your first comment ("I have a suicide attempt from nearly a decade ago on my record"; "I tend to forget what abject misery feels like until I feel it again. If it's genetic, I don't want my kids to feel it") that you suffer from depression. As a person who contracted depression after around five and a half years of employment, I can say that my life ABSOLUTELY REVOLVES AROUND the promise of retirement and unlimited relaxation (just a year and a half away!!!), and "living a relatively normal life, passion be damned, just doing whatever I can tolerate" is impossible while my relaxation time is crippled by working.
Do the calculation! You may be pleasantly surprised at how quickly your retirement date is approaching.
ToaKraka
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17d ago
I find learning about random legal stuff like the necessary evidence for conspiracy and murder to be reasonably fun, personally.
ToaKraka
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6d ago
it's really annoying
I see that you forgot to disable the warning for 18+ content in your account settings.
ToaKraka
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6d ago
I was raised evangelical and converted to Orthodoxy and have never heard it suggested that swearing is somehow implicitly sinful.
Wikipedia cites Exodus 20:7 and Deuteronomy 5:11:
Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain; for the Lord will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain.
ToaKraka
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3d ago
I purchased them out of sheer amazement and thankfulness that they exist. I don't have any spare time/energy to play them, though.
ToaKraka
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7d ago
This is prompted by [this Matt Yglesias post] talking about abundance politics
You forgot to add the link.
ToaKraka
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6d ago
@ZorbaTHut, I've made two pull requests in the repository.
ToaKraka
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20d ago
what speed would you drive at in perfect conditions (straight, flat, sunny, minimal traffic), in a 70 mph interstate?
75 mi/h (120 km/h)
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
9d ago
This system is for transactions, not for savings. Sending money all the way to a European or Asian bank, and converting it to and from US dollars just so that it can cross a single border within Africa, adds a bunch of extra delay and extra fees.
Delay isn't mentioned in the news article, but an FAQ page on PAPSS's website says:
With Instant payment, participants no longer need to convert local currencies into hard currencies which then entailed the funds leaving Africa to be converted before being sent back again to the beneficiary bank—adding days to the transaction time. In addition, compliance, legal and sanctions checks are performed instantly within the system. Near-instant payments process within 120 seconds.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
21d ago
Personally, I don't even remotely enjoy juggling around a zillion different names (IRL, ToaKraka, a single-purpose name that needs to be active only on certain rare occasions, a single-purpose name that used to be active but now is inactive due to my lack of energy/willpower, a few single-purpose names that are inactive but can be used if necessary…), and I wish that I could just operate under a single unified identity. But I feel like your analysis goes too far. None of my pseudonyms tries to project a unique personality. They speak with exactly the same personality—just on different topics. Your analysis applies, not to "everyone", but only to those public figures who actually try to project unique personalities on social media.
Also, you forgot to link to the definition of "becoming a deranged parody of oneself", flanderization.
The ideal temperature for human comfort is around 20 °C (68 °F), which is why people set their thermostats around there. Anyone setting his thermostat to anything meaningfully distant from ~20 °C is doing it to save money.
According to my copy of ACCA Manual J (Abridged Edition), which is used by professionals to design HVAC systems: The target values used in design are 70 °F (21 °C) at 30 percent humidity for heating in winter, and 75 °F (24 °C) at 50 percent humidity for cooling in summer. The heating target actually is at the very edge of the "envelope of comfort" (presumably for energy savings), while the cooling target is right in the middle of the envelope, so only the cooling target should be considered the ideal temperature.
ToaKraka
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10d ago
It seems like a pretty obvious joke to me (leading in a straight line from Hoffmeister25's joke and No_one's getting wooshed).
Just released is a new house-design simulator, Architect Life. It actually uses lines like proper CAD software, rather than brown bricks like House Flipper and Minecraft. Design your dream house now! (Or just get QCAD for free.)
This, I think. But I'm not a lawyer.
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