ToaKraka
Dislikes you
User ID: 108
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
2d ago
Item 1 of 6
I ran two searches on GovInfo, one for "engineer" and one for "architect"—and, hilariously, for each of those searches the first interesting opinion revolved around a stingy insurance company.
-
A real-estate company buys one of the three lots that constitute a shopping center. A different company owns the other two lots. The shopping center's parking is split between the first company's lot and the second company's lots. The first company tries to exert unilateral control over parking in its lot, and the second company sues. The state trial court rules that the second company has an easement over the first company's lot. The state appeals panel finds only an implicit license, not an explicit easement. (The state appeals panel's opinion is a bit too complicated for me to summarize, but it does have helpful diagrams of the three lots.)
-
The real-estate company demands that its title-insurance company reimburse it for the lost value of what it purchased, up to the policy limit of 1.2 M$. However, the insurance company claims that the lost value is only 33 k$. The real-estate company sues.
-
The real-estate company's expert claims that the lost value is 1.1 M$: without the parking encumbrance it was worth 2.5 M$ as the potential site of a mixed-use commercial and residential redevelopment, but with the parking encumbrance it cannot be redeveloped in that manner and therefore is worth only 1.4 M$ in its current commercial form. The insurance company's expert claims that the difference in value between a shopping center with an exclusive parking lot and a shopping center with a shared parking lot is only 33 k$. The jury agrees with the real-estate company's expert. The appeals panel affirms, finding little merit in the insurance company's arguments.
Item 2 of 6
-
In May 2023, four condominium units are rendered uninhabitable by a fire. The condo company calls on its insurer for coverage. By July, the condo company and the insurance company agree that complete demolition and replacement are necessary.
-
In August 2023, there arises a dispute regarding whether the concrete slab needs to be included in the demolition and replacement. The insurance company's engineer prepares a report stating that concrete exposed to extremely high temperatures turns pink, indicating chemical changes that make it unsuitable for further structural use. The report includes two photographs (reproduced in the judge's opinion) that clearly show pink concrete in the slab. However, the engineer concludes that the slab need not be replaced! The condo company disagrees with this assessment.
-
In January 2024, the condo company's engineer conducts a core test on the slab. The test indicates that the slab does not have sufficient strength to support a replacement structure. In July 2024, the insurance company's engineer finally makes a second visit to the site and changes his opinion, and the insurance company increases its replacement-cost estimate from 0.96 M$ to 1.05 M$.
-
In December 2024, the condo company sues the insurance company for bad-faith conduct that delayed construction and thereby inconvenienced the displaced inhabitants. In January 2026, the insurance company moves for summary judgment to dismiss the condo company's claims, but in September the trial judge refuses to grant it: there is enough evidence for a jury to conclude that the insurance company was unreasonable in (1) blindly relying on its engineer's obviously internally inconsistent report and (2) not sending its engineer out for a second inspection until six months after the condo company's core test brought his report into even greater question.
The trial was scheduled for next week, but the parties settled instead. Presumably, the insurance company folded.
Item 3 of 6
On the topic of structure fires comes a report hopefully funny enough to transcend its culture-war background: In designing the White House's new ballroom, President Trump has been ignoring… the building code!!! 😱😱😱 In response to the architect's complaints, he literally said: "I am the code." 😡😡😡
"Banquet halls" are explicitly included in IBC (International Building Code) occupancy A-2. ("Dance halls" are in occupancy A-3, but only if they do not accommodate consumption of food or drink.) For egress calculations, the number of people in an assembly-oriented space is assumed to be as high as one person per 5 ft2 (if they're all standing rather than sitting).
Item 4 of 6
-
A rural municipality has an I (Industrial) zone with the stated purpose of accommodating "light industrial" uses and an MI (Mineral Industrial) zone with the stated purpose of accommodating "heavy industrial" uses, where "light industrial" excludes "basic industrial processing" and "heavy industrial" includes asphalt plants. However, the table of permitted uses contradicts these statements of purpose: it says that asphalt plants are permitted in the I zone by special exception and are not permitted in the MI zone at all.
-
A company files an application to build an asphalt plant in the MI zone. The zoning official denies the application. The company appeals, pointing out that the contradiction in the zoning code makes it unconstitutionally vague. The municipal council and the trial judge reject this argument, but the appeals panel reverses. (One of the three appeals judges dissents: he thinks that the general statements of purpose are merely "aspirational", rather than legally binding, and the specific table of uses controls.)
Item 5 of 6
-
A 911 call is made regarding a robbery perpetrated at gunpoint by three juvenile males in black clothing. One mile away from the location of the reported robbery, the responding officers find two juvenile males—one in all black, and another, KC, wearing a black shirt and mask and gray pants. The officers pull over alongside the juveniles and start walking toward them while shining a flashlight at them. KC starts walking away. An officer steps in front of KC, blocking his path, and asks him what's in his waistband. KC discards the object in his waistband (a gun) and runs away, but is quickly apprehended. He is charged with various delinquencies.
-
The trial judge grants KC's motion to suppress the evidence. The officers fully detained him, rather than casually speaking with him, when they shined a flashlight on him and blocked his path; and they did not have reasonable suspicion to detain him, since the description given in the 911 call was vague and KC didn't even match it. (The caller didn't even provide a direction in which the assailants fled. Did the officers have the power to detain all juvenile males wearing a single article of black clothing within a one-mile radius of the robbery? No.) The appeals panel affirms.
Item 6 of 6
Another borderline culture-war item (though it definitely made me laugh when I came up with it):
-
Write a story with the following premise: A young, skinny man visits a random restaurant to eat dinner alone. His waitress is a young, skinny woman. At first, the man considers asking the woman for a date. But then he realizes that she probably gets harassed constantly by customers and is not interested, so he refrains from asking.
-
[LLM writes story]
-
Write an opinion article criticizing the previous story for being a psy-op to promote cuckish/unmanly behavior (though maybe not in such harsh words).
See also Eager Readers in Your Area. (I relished converting " — " to "—" and " …" to "…" in my downloaded copy.)
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
3d ago
Using it as a general synonym of "go insane" is unorthodox but not totally unreasonable.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
3d ago
And that was without dealing with five flights of stairs. Are you including the time it takes to walk upstairs in the calculation?
Under the "mega-city" definition that I proposed previously, 7500 people per km2 and 500,000 people (actually 67 km2 because I'm too lazy to learn GIS):
-
New York City (minus Staten Island and plus some of Hudson County) is the only qualifying location within the USA.
-
Los Angeles is just under the threshold, but does qualify if you allow the 1-km2 grid cells in the EU's global population dataset to be diagonally adjacent.
-
Chicago is even further under the threshold, but does qualify if you allow urban grid cells to be joined across 1-km gaps.
If you loosen the requirements to 7500 people per km2 and 50,000 people (7 km2), a lot more places qualify, including Miami (just barely), Boston, and San Francisco, but not Seattle.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
4d ago
To what age range are you referring when you say "old person"?
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
5d ago
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
5d ago
My mental model of New Jersey, incidentally, is a lot of urban sprawl attached to a lot of deciduous forests.
The US Forest Service agrees with you. (However, don't forget about the famous evergreen forest.)
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
5d ago
To clarify, both UN and US definitions operate on density-based "urban areas" rather than on legal boundaries.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
5d ago
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
5d ago
No clue why it incorporated like that
It's practically a tradition in some parts of the country. (Pennsylvania townships are incorporated, unlike townships in some other states.)
In his posts on X, Paul highlights a few select excerpts from Fauci's notes. For instance, he points to an entry on Jan. 26, 2020, not quite two months before the World Health Organization declared a global pandemic, where Fauci writes, "the first infection was in early December and was not connected to the market. … Now we know the market was not the source, it was the amplifier."
Paul notes in his post, "The wet market was already off the table in [Fauci's] own private notes."
But in that same journal entry, Fauci adds, "Having said that, somewhere the virus jumped from animals to humans."
Not quite a week later, in an entry penned on Feb. 1, 2020, Fauci listed the dozen researchers who participated in a conference call debating the origins of COVID-19. Specifically, they were talking about the plausibility that a key part of the SARS-CoV-2 genome could have evolved naturally.
According to his notes, only two of the scientists voiced support for a natural origin of SARS-CoV-2. "The rest felt that deliberate insertion was possible," he wrote, referring to the hypothesis that the virus was engineered in a lab.
In response to that passage, Paul wrote on X, "This was never a 50/50 room," suggesting that early scientific consensus considered a lab leak possible.
But Goodrum says that this meeting took place very early on, when scientists did not have as much data as they would later. The virologist points out that science is iterative and takes time to play out. What some of those scientists believed at the start gave way to a different consensus as more evidence emerged.
"We make the best conclusions we have with the data we have at the time, but then you're going to keep working," she says. "And then you're going to ultimately revise the original conclusions that you made. You will change your mind. That's absolutely fundamental to the way science is done. And it's something that Fauci wasn't really given any latitude to do."
Goodrum adds that it's possible that Fauci may have been less certain in private with his colleagues as they were racing to learn about the new virus than he was in public, where he had to assure a public panicking over the rapidly emerging pandemic.
U.S. Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), Chairman of the Senate HomelandSecurity and Governmental Affairs Committee, today released internal Slack messages exchanged among the authors of “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2”—Kristian Andersen, Robert Garry, Eddie Holmes, and Andrew Rambaut. The messages, obtained as part of his ongoing COVID-19 origins investigation, are now available in The Reading Room at paul.senate.gov/readingroom.
The Proximal Origin paper, published in Nature Medicine in March 2020, was widely cited by public health officials and the media as the scientific authority for ruling out a laboratory origin of SARS-CoV-2. The newly released messages show that behind closed doors, the paper’s own authors were far less certain than their public conclusions suggested.
In the messages, Andersen assigned a 30% probability to a lab origin. Holmes gave an estimate of 20%, later revising it down to 10%. Both numbers stand in direct contrast to the paper’s public assertion that there was no way the virus had been manipulated.
The documents also reveal extensive internal debate over the furin cleavage site, the genetic feature at the heart of the lab-leak question, with Andersen at one point telling colleagues that “some smoking(ish) guns” had emerged that made him “not comfortable,” and that he had “less confidence… at this stage.”
Separately, the messages show the authors coordinating directly with the U.S. intelligence community and NIH leadership during the same period they were publicly defending their conclusions. Andersen told his co-authors he expected to “have a handler” beginning that week as the intelligence community’s 90-day review was underway. Holmes repeatedly referenced a source in China he called “my spy.” Following the leak of the DARPA DEFUSE proposal, which detailed a plan to insert furin cleavage sites into bat coronaviruses, the group discussed the need to “stay off email” and to “carefully curate” their correspondence “for the FOI records,” while also noting the need to “get something back to Tony [Fauci]’s team at NIH.”
The release is part of Chairman Paul’s broader effort to make the underlying record of the COVID-19 origins investigation publicly available.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
5d ago
Note that the UN definitions place the thresholds for "city" at 50,000 people, "town" at 5000, and "village" at 500. (And my aforementioned "mega-city" starts at 500,000.)
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
5d ago
Yes in the context of rigorous density-based definitions, but no in the context of employment and surroundings. Literally just yesterday, I attended a municipal council meeting where somebody referred to the municipality as part of "rural Pennsylvania" even though it's suburban under the UN definition and urban under the US definition.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
5d ago
the DC–Boston Corridor
That's under the looser US definition of "urban". Under the stricter UN definition, there is no continuous urban corridor, so in my comment I was referring only to New York City (along with Newark, Long Island, etc.).
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
5d ago
This is somewhat addressed in my mega-city comment.
From a glance at the downloadable dataset, using the very-roughly-equivalent criterion "density ≥ 7500 per km2 and area ≥ 67 km2" (which is all that I feel like figuring out in QGIS—I used the "reclassify by table" and "polygonize" tools):
Mega-City One (393 km2) is the only US mega-city. Los Angeles (60) is not yet worthy of the title Mega-City Two.
Mega-Ciudad Mexico is gigantic, at 673 km2. Guadalajara (152) and León (72) also qualify, but Monterrey (56) does not.
If you keep going south, Tegucigalpa (92 km2) and Managua (86) qualify as mega-cities, but Panama City (53) does not.
London, 316 km2; Paris, 344; Brussels, 67; Berlin, 88; Istanbul, 230; Cairo, 593; Beijing, 537; Tokyo, 1498; Jakarta, 1865; Lagos, 463; et cetera.
A stray comment on the culture-war thread from two weeks ago reminds me that, IMO, people on this website have been talking very loosely when they compare "urban", "suburban", and "rural" living.
The definitions endorsed by the United Nations are roughly as follows.
-
Urban: ≥ 1500 people per km2 (6.1 people per acre)
-
Suburban: ≥ 300 people per km2 (1.2 people per acre)
-
Rural: < 300 people per km2 (1.2 people per acre)
However, six people per acre actually isn't that dense. The US's IZC (International Zoning Code) is not necessarily authoritative, but in its single-family and two-family residential zones it permits density of up to six dwelling units per acre, implying 15 people per acre at 2.5 people per household.⁎
Likewise, a representative comment describes suburbs as follows:
Most suburbanites are not fleeing urban disorder; they're chasing suburbia. No amount of urban green space can ever replace a private backyard where you can grill and watch the kids and dog run around and plant a personal garden. No amount of smart planning can replace not sharing walls, floors, and ceilings with strangers. No high-quality public transit system can ever replace the freedom provided by American car culture.
Yet, if you look at a random US "city" in Google Maps, you will see lots of single-family houses with their own backyards and limited access to mass transit.
So, what do you actually mean when you say "urban", "suburban", and "rural" living? Maybe it's something like this.
-
Urban living: Row houses and apartment buildings, with incidental retail
-
Suburban living: Single-family and two-family houses, and nothing else
-
Rural living: Incidental single-family houses in land that is largely agricultural or undeveloped
⁎With tongue significantly less than halfway in cheek, I previously suggested that the threshold for a fourth "mega-city" category in the UN's framework might be set at 7500 people per km2 (30 people per acre). This matches the IZC's upper bound for multifamily residential zones (12 dwelling units per acre), past which commercial/residential zones with unlimited dwelling-unit density must be used instead.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
5d ago
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
6d ago
Testosterone is a hormone. Even Wikipedia files non-transgender applications under the main "hormone replacement therapy" page, and relegates transgender applications to a separate "gender-affirming hormone therapy" page.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
6d ago
Scott Alexander's official response
Thanks to people who chimed in with concerns about the most recent book review finalist, This Is Going To Hurt, being partially AI-written. In the comments of the contest rules, I said that “You may use AI for research and to help you with small writing tasks, but the large majority must be written by you.” This was in the comments and not the formal rules, but I think there’s a general understanding that using AI in what is at least partly a writing contest is against the spirit of the exercise. On the other hand, this was a joint entry by two contributors, and one of them didn’t use AI. My splitting-the-difference decision is that I won’t disqualify this entry, I’ll let its many detractors vote against it organically at the final vote, and the various finalist perks (free subscription, right to pitch me pieces, prize money if it wins) will go only to the contributor who didn’t use AI. Next contest, I’ll try to have a firmer policy, something like “any entry with a greater than 5% AI-written Pangram score is disqualified, and everyone in a joint entry is responsible for making sure their co-contributor doesn’t bring them over this limit”.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
6d ago
Sparkling apple juice is available as well.
I don't think it would make sense to put a carbonated drink in a punch bowl.
Link to the full opinion
Reasonable suspicion for a brief investigative stop is a lower standard than probable cause for a prolonged arrest. (The English word "detention" is a bit misleading here, as in colloquial use it implies a prolonged arrest.)
More options
Context Copy link