ToaKraka
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User ID: 108
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1mo ago
These files (many, many more are available at this link) always make me extremely angry. Why are people so obsessed with making them images rather than PDFs (or, even better, HTML files)? The 4000×4000 JPEG file linked above is literally four megabytes! Imagine how much smaller it would be if text were actually stored as text.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1mo ago
It's so dispiriting the possibility that all the problems in our community: crime, poverty, ignorance, are intransient. How are you supposed to deal with that without becoming utterly nihilistic?
The easy solution is to simply reject the idea of "our community". I happen to be an uppity big-lipped nigger myself. But I do my best to refrain from feeling any sense of community with the "urban youths". Rather, I exist primarily online, as a being with no face and no race. When I am forced to exist in meatspace, I think of myself primarily as a competent and diligent employee, not as a black person.
Individualism!
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1mo ago
This CSS should work: h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6{font-size:inherit;}
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1mo ago
Even courts of law have fun sometimes.
Because Judge Reinhardt was no longer a judge at the time when the en banc decision in this case was filed, the Ninth Circuit erred in counting him as a member of the majority. That practice effectively allowed a deceased judge to exercise the judicial power of the United States after his death. But federal judges are appointed for life, not for eternity.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1mo ago
You can have a situation where the Court splits 4–2–3 or the like on a given case, where the 4 and the 2 may agree on the outcome of a case (and the 3 disagrees), but they do not agree on a reasoning. The case would be resolved as a 6–3 decision as to the outcome, but with no reasoning, as no opinion carried a majority.
When a fragmented Court decides a case and no single rationale explaining the result enjoys the assent of five Justices, "the holding of the Court may be viewed as that position taken by the Members who concurred in the judgment on the narrowest grounds".
That generally would be the two-justice opinion.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1mo ago
Arabs are an odd group since they're officially classed as "white" in the US census
They actually got their own category last week.
OMB accepts the recommendation to create a new minimum reporting category for MENA separate and distinct from the White category, and to revise the White category definition accordingly.
Middle Eastern or North African. Individuals with origins in any of the original peoples of the Middle East or North Africa, including, for example, Lebanese, Iranian, Egyptian, Syrian, Iraqi, and Israeli.
White. Individuals with origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, including, for example, English, German, Irish, Italian, Polish, and Scottish.
Comment from a person who wrote a book on the topic
The most obvious problem is that "Middle East and North African" has never been treated in the United States as a race. Beyond that, while I support the notion of the government collecting more granular data about ethnic groups, the MENA classification will not do so.… Unfortunately, rather than addressing the problem, creating a new MENA classification will create a new arbitrary pseudo-race.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1mo ago
The US's nonprofit Uniform Law Commission has developed a Uniform Parentage Act, which many states have adopted in some form. You may want to use it as a starting point.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
2mo ago
I think he's referring to the official Dragon Ball Z Kai series.
court filings are public records, but they are often expensive and difficult to obtain. Tools like RECAP help, but I was lucky to have people around me willing to pay the $80 in PACER fees for a few of the documents.
And then he uploads the documents to a random Google Drive folder, rather than telling his "people around him" to install the RECAP extension in their browsers so that they will automatically upload the documents to RECAP. This makes me pretty angry.
I now have purchased document 139 (memorandum in support for motion for class certification) and all its exhibits, using the RECAP browser extension so that they have been added to RECAP for public viewing at this link.
If I could buy puts for countries, I think puts on Britain would have the most alpha.
Can't you just buy puts on a UK-focused index fund (Vanguard page)?
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
2mo ago
Adjusting for shrinkflation is done in the "quality adjustment" step.
Sources of direct quality adjustment information include observable factors such as size or weight, manufacturers’ cost data, and hedonic regression models.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1mo ago
The point of the comment is that not all immoral sexual acts should be called "rape". I can imagine a framework where the 30-year-old has sex with a "consenting" 9-year-old, and then is prosecuted, not for "statutory rape", but for fraud—because he falsely stated or implied that there was little or no chance that the sex would result in physical harm to the 9-year-old, and the 9-year-old was too ignorant to know otherwise.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
2mo ago
even Mitsubishi discontinued the Mirage
It's only a rumor that Mitsubishi plans to discontinue the Mirage in the US by 2025. Mitsubishi has not actually confirmed the news reports.
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
1mo ago
IIRC, black Aragorn was one of the most egregious instances. I think there have also been some complaints about ugly (overweight) women in the art, but I don't recall any specific examples.
On Friday, the USA's National Association of Realtors agreed to settle a big lawsuit (in which it lost a jury trial late last year). Starting in mid-July, sellers' agents will be permitted to list houses on NAR-controlled multiple-listing services (the databases from which Zillow and Redfin copy their information) without being forced to make a blanket offer to split their commissions with buyers' agents. This will make it much easier for buyers to hire their agents separately (rather than the current practice of having the buyer's agent hired by the seller), leading to lower buyer's-agent commissions. Alternatively, it will be much easier for buyers to imitate the standard practice in Britain and Australia, and hire real-estate attorneys for a flat fee rather than real-estate agents for a percentage commission. See these articles (1 2 3 4) for descriptions of how house buying works in Britain and Australia.
Bonus: Starting on page 106 of this PDF is the testimony of the plaintiffs' star witness, economist Craig Schulman. The meat is on pages 196–211. (Unfortunately, it seems that RECAP isn't set up to process trial transcripts.)
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
5mo 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.
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
1mo ago
Google Flights indicates that round-trip prices from Abilene, Lubbock, and El Paso to Newark still are around 300 or 400 dollars.
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
1mo ago
I did not find much in the way of documentation
I can very easily imagine a situation where the user wants to achieve the specific zoom level that will perfectly frame a certain set of items in a CAD workspace, but is too lazy to open the marquee-zoom tool to do so. In such a situation, achieving an irregular 93.75-percent zoom level by zooming in and out several times with the mousewheel perfectly serves the user's desire.
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