ToaKraka
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User ID: 108
ToaKraka
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9mo ago
ToaKraka
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9mo ago
In the culture-war thread, @Gdanning says:
According to this, "Median household income in 2021 was $69,880[.]"
Note the placement of square brackets around the period that was inserted at the end of the quote. As a person who semi-regularly glances through court opinions during idle time at work, I feel like this practice was only recently adopted by jurists, as a replacement for the previous style (which misleadingly implies that the period is native to the quote):
According to this, "Median household income in 2021 was $69,880."
And I feel very annoyed that it was chosen by those jurists over the obvious alternative:
According to this, "Median household income in 2021 was $69,880".
ToaKraka
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9mo ago
ToaKraka
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9mo ago
You don't need any fancy third-party software. Folder-sharing functionality is built into Windows and Mac OS.
ToaKraka
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9mo ago
Unverified secondhand quote seen on /r/kotakuinaction2:
So how did he lose? Looks like he won 4 out of 6, or 67%.
Ngo sued six people. One settled, three refused to put on a case and will have default judgements entered against them, and two were found not liable.
I hope that the three that refused to put on a case have the sense to stay out of the State of Oregon, since they will owe Ngo a lot of money.
ToaKraka
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9mo ago
In the FedEx case, the judge's order says that the damages were:
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120 k$ in compensation for past damages;
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1.06 M$ in compensation for future damages; and
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365 M$ extra as punishment (not compensation).
Other court documents for that case are available here.
ToaKraka
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9mo ago
In the FedEx case, the judge's instructions to the jury (page 15 of the PDF) include a two-page explanation of the rationale underlying punitive damages.
The purpose of punitive damages is to punish and deter, not to compensate.
If you decide to award punitive damages, the following factors may guide you in fixing the proper amount:
- The reprehensibility of the defendant's conduct, including but not limited to whether there was deceit, cover-up, insult, intended [injury,] or reckless injury, and whether the defendant's conduct was motivated by a desire to increase profits or punish the plaintiff;
- The ratio between the punitive damages you are considering awarding and the amount of harm that was suffered by the plaintiff or with which the plaintiff was threatened;
- The possible civil sanctions for comparable conduct.
(Bonus: During deliberation, the jury asks for a calculator)
ToaKraka
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9mo ago
ToaKraka
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9mo ago
I believe almost every libertarian thinks a smart poor kid should be provided with an education.
There are methods of obtaining education that do not depend on property taxes. For example, income-based repayment income-share agreements (selling a share of all your future earnings to the school [note: link changed]) presumably could be extended all the way down to kindergarten.
ToaKraka
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9mo ago
An income-share agreement (or ISA) is a financial structure in which an individual or organization provides something of value (often a fixed amount of money) to a recipient who, in exchange, agrees to pay back a percentage of his income for a fixed number of years.
ToaKraka
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9mo ago
A parent is the trustee/owner of his child. Therefore, he is empowered to sell to the kindergarten a share of that trusteeship/ownership.
In the unlikely event that the child disavows the contract with the kindergarten when the trusteeship is terminated (whether at adulthood or at some earlier date), the parent is obligated by the same contract to repay to the kindergarten the lost expected value of the child's future earnings.
ToaKraka
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9mo ago
To be clear, I provided the first link only because I couldn't remember what the real-life version was called. I'll remove it now. Just ignore it and focus on the second link.
ToaKraka
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9mo ago
Under the International Zoning Code, that would be 6,000 square feet (0.14 acre, 560 square meters; a 78-foot (24-meter) square).
Yes, zoning codes often are devised without regard to existing "grandfathered" practices. And I see that New York City allows single-family lots as small as 2,850 square feet (0.066 acre, 270 square meters; a 54-foot (17-meter) square). But the IZC is the closest thing to an authoritative zoning code of which I am aware.
ToaKraka
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9mo ago
Baen has a DRM-free collection of Poul Anderson science-fiction stories on sale. I'm reading The High Crusade, an entertaining book where a pack of medieval Englishmen preparing to fight in the Crusades happen to catch a landed alien spacecraft by surprise, fly it back to the aliens' nearest colony, and defeat the entire alien civilization.
They think they’re smarter than everyone else, so the rules don’t apply to them.
They think they're smarter than the government. One would expect a (house-repair seems to be implied in your comment) contractor, who deals with onerous permit requirements on a daily basis, to be intimately familiar with how stupid the government is.
It also may be worth pointing out which specific parts of government schooling you object to. He may be thinking of the stereotypical religious homeschooler, who sees no fault in the government's teaching process but has disagreements with the government's curriculum, for mostly subjective reasons. You could present yourself as a more reasonable person who would more or less adhere to the government's curriculum but avoid the dysfunction of the government's teaching process, which you can demonstrate to be objectively bad.
ToaKraka
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8mo ago
ToaKraka
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8mo ago
realtor
The word "realtor" is a trademark of a specific organization. In order to avoid encouraging that organization's market dominance, one should instead say "real-estate agent".
ToaKraka
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8mo ago
Do you really think that if Fruck's father came out of his coma and found out that his son had kissed him on the forehead during his coma, he'd be outraged and feel that his son had violated his personal boundaries?
"Outraged" is a strong word. I would expect him to be somewhat uncomfortable with his child's touching his unconscious body, but I would also expect him to consider this violation of personal boundaries to be extremely minor and easily forgiven, given the obvious depths of the child's love and grief from which it sprang.
Imagine a graph with the linguistic dominance of "realtor" vs. "real-estate agent" on the x axis and the enhancement of the market dominance of Realtors vs. real-estate agents (not the market dominance itself) on the y axis.
When x = 0, Realtors are just an eccentric group of real-estate agents that insist on using their trademarked name even though everybody just calls them real-estate agents. y = 0, or even a negative number because people are annoyed by their behavior.
When x = 0.75, most people incorrectly call real-estate agents realtors. The typical person who wants to sell a house will type "realtor" into Google and will hire a Realtor rather than a non-Realtor real-estate agent. Therefore, the market dominance of the Realtors is enhanced by the linguistic situation: y = 0.75.
When x = 1, as you say, the trademark becomes genericized by a court ruling. It now is legitimate for all real-estate agents to call themselves realtors, the official Realtors no longer get extra traffic funneled to them by Google, and y = 0.
If, IRL, x = 0.5, then I think pushing it down to 0.25 is more palatable then pushing it up to 0.75 and hoping that it overshoots to 1.
ToaKraka
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8mo ago
The government stops them from raising prices.
Insurance companies are just like us: They buy insurance! When insurance companies buy it, it’s called “reinsurance.”
The cost of reinsurance has risen dramatically, and State Farm cited “a challenging reinsurance market” as one of the reasons it decided to stop selling new home insurance policies in California.
When insurance companies explain their costs to the insurance department as part of the process for justifying their prices, they aren’t allowed to include the cost of reinsurance. The department hasn’t historically permitted it, Soller said, because it doesn’t regulate reinsurance.
“What are insurers supposed to do when, on the one hand, the Department of Insurance is telling them ‘maintain your solvency’ and then, on the other hand, when their costs go up, you can’t charge for it?” said Frazier.
If you're in the US, weather.gov includes the dew point in its hourly forecasts (example).
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