ToaKraka
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User ID: 108
I'm not a lawyer, but it is my impression that punishing the manufacturer for actions taken by the consumer is unconstitutional.
If you want to talk about the manufacturer's purpose in making certain manufacturing decisions, then you are on firmer ground. But, even then: Taking the seat case as an example, the manufacturer actually won on the first level of appeal, since the flimsy temporary seats were functional and standards-compliant despite being uncomfortable to actually use and removed (by the manufacturer, not by the consumer) immediately after importation, and it was only on the second level of appeal that the tariff was enforced. So closing these loopholes may be more difficult than it appears at first glance.
Beer, vodka, and kombucha already have detailed dictionary definitions that need no further clarification in law or regulation. You possibly could argue the same for flour. But the terms "rice", "oatmeal", "bread", and "pasta" definitely encompass a wide variety of different products on grocery shelves.
The grocery store sells different kinds of rice, oatmeal, flour, bread, and pasta, which have different nutritional values. If you try to promulgate a simple definition, companies eager for government money will soon manufacture new products designed to fit within your simple definition while still being unhealthily delicious, forcing you to issue a more complicated definition.
For example: Chapter 19 of the US Harmonized Tariff Schedule lists 19 different types of bread. A government must pick which ones it wants to make eligible for government handouts, and it must define those types as well. (I don't see any definitions in this document, but I assume that they exist somewhere. You may be aware of tariff shenanigans like coating sneakers in a layer of felt so that they count as slippers, adding flimsy temporary seats to cargo vans so that they count as passenger vans, and calling X-Men action figures nonhuman so that they don't count as dolls.)
I will quote the learned lawyer once again:
The issue is that disentangling all of this would result in regulations so byzantine that you couldn't possibly expect the average person to have an intuitive sense for it.
The existing exemption for "food and food ingredients" in Washington's sales tax takes up three pages of law and seven pages of regulation. Exemptions for specific kinds of food would be much longer.
ToaKraka
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7d ago
The issue is that disentangling all of this would result in regulations so byzantine that you couldn't possibly expect the average person to have an intuitive sense for it.
I can't wait to read the 50-page regulation in the Federal Register explaining exactly what kinds of "rice, oatmeal, flour", "bread, and pasta" are eligible.
ToaKraka
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7d ago
It would be pretty funny if you were to submit a pull request to make such a change on this very website.
ToaKraka
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7d ago
Do you deny that the DNC practices indirect messaging through proxies? That when certain people speak in public, despite not being the living embodiment of the DNC, they are speaking for the DNC?
I do not. But I deny that it is obvious that Whoopi Goldberg and especially Bernie Sanders are representatives of the DNC.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
7d ago
There is rarely such thing as "DNC messaging" in the manner you seem to be expecting. The DNC does not issue proclamations from heaven on DNC notarized stationary.
The DNC website literally has a webpage full of such proclamations.
Its constituent members directly, and frequently indirectly, launder their talking points through proxies.
In that case, linking to Chuck Schumer as I did, rather than to Whoopi Goldberg and Bernie Sanders, would have been much more convincing.
ToaKraka
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7d ago
You're the one who put the goalpost at "DNC" in the first place. If you had said "Democrat messaging" rather than "DNC messaging" in your original comment, it would have been accurate.
ToaKraka
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7d ago
You specifically said "DNC"—the Democratic National Committee—not Democrats in general. It is my understanding that the DNC expended significant effort on preventing Sanders from winning those primaries. Therefore, Sanders definitely does not represent the DNC.
ToaKraka
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8d ago
Sanders definitely doesn't represent the DNC.
On the other hand, Schumer possibly could be taken as representing the DNC, since he's listed on its "Leadership" webpage (though not as having any particular role in the organization). He has issued a speech in opposition to the capitulation.
ToaKraka
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8d ago
ToaKraka
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9d ago
Can anyone explain the government shutdown to me? If you consider yourself to be aligned with the Democrats, I'd especially like to hear your perspective.
You can just read the statements and speeches issued by the politicians themselves.
After months of making life harder and more expensive, Donald Trump and Republicans have now shut down the federal government because they do not want to protect the healthcare of the American people. Democrats remain ready to find a bipartisan path forward to reopen the government in a way that lowers costs and addresses the Republican healthcare crisis. But we need a credible partner.
Over the last few days, President Trump’s behavior has become more erratic and unhinged. Instead of negotiating a bipartisan agreement in good faith, he is obsessively posting crazed deepfake videos.
The country is in desperate need of an intervention to get out of another Trump shutdown
Instead of negotiating with Democrats to lower costs, Republicans would rather let air traffic controllers go unpaid. Instead of negotiating with Democrats to reopen the government, they’d rather ground flights. Instead of negotiating with Democrats to help families, they’re punishing travelers. Instead of governing, Republicans are playing games with people’s livelihoods. And they have the ability to pay the air traffic controllers, the same way Trump sent money to Argentina, $20 billion. If they wanted to find the money they could, absolutely.
So, why? Why have Republicans dragged this shutdown on for so, so long? Because they don’t want to lower healthcare costs. Because they seem happy to let 24 million Americans see their premiums double on average.
Yesterday, we offered Republicans a perfectly reasonable compromise to get out of this horrible shutdown that they installed on the American people. We offered three things: we all vote to reopen the government, we all approve a one-time, temporary extension of current ACA premium tax credits, and then after we reopen, we will negotiate, as Republicans say they want, for longer-term fixes to ACA affordability.
I know many Republicans stormed out the gate to dismiss this offer, but that is a terrible mistake. Our offer is not new policy. This is not negotiating in a shutdown, it is simply agreeing to maintain current funding levels. A one-year extension is something many Republicans themselves have said they want. It’s something a great majority of Americans support—55% of Trump supporters support it, after all. So, it is alarming that Republicans refuse to even acknowledge that we have an immediate crisis right now that needs fixing.
The Democrat caucus here in town, in the Senate, has chosen to shut down the government over a clean, nonpartisan funding bill. That’s right – a clean, nonpartisan funding bill. We didn’t ask Democrats to swallow any new Republican policies. We didn’t add partisan riders. We simply asked Democrats to extend existing funding levels to allow the Senate to continue the bipartisan appropriations work that we started. And Senate Democrats said no. Why? Because far-left interest groups and far-left Democrat members wanted a showdown with the president. And so Senate Democrats have sacrificed the American people to Democrats’ partisan interests.
We are now in the 35th day of the shutdown. The longest shutdown on record and the most severe shutdown on record—something that was totally unnecessary in the first place, obviously. But we’re hoping this will be the week when the Democrats come to their senses and decide to reopen the government. Of course, if you look at why we are here in the first place, it’s hard to explain… I still don’t know exactly what it is they want. We have accommodated a lot of their questions and concerns. They want to have a discussion about health care, we offered that up a long time ago. And, you know, clearly, we’ve talked, I’ve talked repeatedly about having a normal appropriations process where we put bills on the floor, open it up to the amendment process, and allow people to have their voices heard in how we fund the government the old-fashioned way. But so I’m still at a loss as to what it is exactly they’re trying to get out of this.
ToaKraka
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11d ago
It irks me a tiny little bit that literally everyone uses the hyphen-minus (-) rather than the actual hyphen (‐), which Unicode did expend the effort to disunify.
Because of its prevalence in legacy encodings, U+002D - HYPHEN-MINUS is the most common of the dash characters used to represent a hyphen. It has ambiguous semantic value and is rendered with an average width. U+2010 ‐ HYPHEN represents the hyphen as found in words such as “left-to-right”. It is rendered with a narrow width. When typesetting text, U+2010 HYPHEN is preferred over U+002D HYPHEN-MINUS.
The Arial font doesn't even have a hyphen character!
On the other hand, though, the two characters seem visually indistinguishable—far from the significant difference between hyphen-minus (-) and minus (−).
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
11d ago
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A particular business has been operating since year 1902, first as a fruit-and-dairy farm, later as only a dairy farm, and now as a timber farm. It consists of 1100 acres (1.7 mi2, 450 ha, 4.5 km2).
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In year 2018, the business pays 112 k$ for a used Mercedes-Benz G-Class SUV. It claims a sales-tax exemption since the vehicle will be used in farming. But in year 2020 the department of taxation disagrees and imposes a penalty. (1) The exemption requires that the business be engaged in farming. However, despite claiming to be a timber farm, this business has never actually sold any timber, and indeed has reported no sales, income, or labor expenses since year 2011. (2) The exemption requires that the vehicle be used directly in farming. However, this vehicle is used merely to transport people and equipment through the forest, not for a farming activity like plowing. (3) The exemption requires that the vehicle be used primarily in farming. However, the business failed to keep mileage logs as proof of how the vehicle was used, and even involved the vehicle in a minor crash outside a post office outside the forest. In year 2024, the board of tax appeals affirms.
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In year 2025, the state supreme court reverses. (1) The business has implemented a forest-management plan and has spent thousands of dollars on hiring contractors to remove invasive species that can damage the trees. Since trees take decades to mature into harvestable timber, this is enough to show that appellant is engaged in farming even in the absence of much activity at the moment. (2) "Property may qualify as being used in farming even though it is used to perform an intermediate step in the process of producing crops." "Just as a tractor provides the means for conveying a plow through a field where it can act upon the ground, the vehicle in this case provides the means for conveying chainsaws, marking tools, herbicides, and workers through [appellant's] forest." And the word "directly" is not in the statute. (Wikipedia describes the G-Class as a luxury vehicle, but the business in this case testified that it combined the off-road capability of a Jeep Wrangler with the cargo capacity of a Chevrolet Silverado, and both of those properties were needed in the forest.) (3) Mileage logs are not required by the statute. The business testified that farm-related use of the vehicle was around 95 percent, and that testimony was not rebutted by the department of taxation, so it stands.
ToaKraka
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14d ago
Don't forget that Imgur has blocked the UKGBNI for legal reasons. You may want to start hosting images somewhere else—e. g., on your own personal website.
ToaKraka
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16d ago
This scientific article on wolf species and subspecies spends several paragraphs discussing this issue. tl;dr: In modern taxonomy, ability to interbreed is only one of several factors that inform the definition of a species.
This is an eclectic approach that seeks to identify species as separate lineages supported by concordant data from various classes of genetic markers, morphometric analysis, behavior, and ecology.
ToaKraka
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17d ago
We have licenses and background checks and rules about straw purchases because the idea is to control who has firearms. If someone buys a gun and then gives it to his cousin none of that makes sense.
Buying a gun for another person is illegal only if the other person (1) is ineligible to buy a gun on his own, (2) intends to use the gun in a felony, or (3) intends to give it to a third person who meets criterion 1 or 2. NB did nothing illegal here.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
18d ago
To clarify: Many US houses do not have basements, and instead use crawlspaces or slab-on-ground floors. But such houses still have their footings placed several feet underground, rather than using frost-protected shallow foundations in order to dig down only 12 or 16 inches (30 or 41 centimeters).
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
18d ago
we like strategy games
Among video games, Crusader Kings 2 and 3, Europa Universalis 5, and Victoria 3 can be played cooperatively.
Our number one game together is Gloomhaven
Among board games, Bios: Origins (play first as a subspecies of humanity, then as a language, then as a religion, and finally as an ideology, from 4 million BCE to the present) and High Frontier (play as a spacefaring country) can be played cooperatively.
Is anything stopping you from moving to the contiguous US? Official numbers compiled by the Department of Justice (looking only at urban counties, not at rural counties):
Anchorage, Alaska: 2367 $/mo for housing and utilities
Fairbanks, Alaska: 2160
Juneau, Alaska: 2345
Soldotna, Alaska: 1902
In comparison:
Lewiston, Idaho: 1702
Emmett, Idaho: 1544
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