ToaKraka
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User ID: 108
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
7mo 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.
I don't think he sees "car dependency" as a problem.
Every city in America is a 15-minute city if you take automobiles into account. Thanks to automobiles, the typical U.S. urban resident lives within 15 minutes of more than 100,000 jobs, several different supermarkets that compete hard for their business, one or two shopping malls, parks and other recreation facilities, a variety of health care facilities, friends and relatives, and many other potential destinations and activities. Even the densest cities in the world can’t provide that kind of variety and opportunity within 15 minutes on foot.
According to the 2000 census, Los Angeles is the densest urban area in the United States, and 89.5 percent of Los Angeles commuters usually drive to work. Just to the south, San Diego is only half as dense as L.A., and 90.9 percent of its commuters drive to work. Atlanta is only half as dense as San Diego, and 93.5 percent of its commuters drive to work. And Lompoc California is about half as dense as Atlanta, and 94.4 percent of its commuters drive to work. So doubling density might get a little more than 1 percent of commuters out of their cars. That’s not much.
Low densities, large parking lots, and other indicators of sprawl are effects of automotive technology. They don’t make people auto dependent; they enable people to be auto liberated. Density and various design features planners want to impose will have, at best, marginal effects on the amount of driving people do.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
8mo ago
Article from the Volokh Conspiracy (culture-war-adjacent, but IMO extremely funny):
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Under the "major questions doctrine", if Congress delegates power to an administrative agency, but fails to explicitly describe the limits of that power, then it is to be presumed that the delegated power has implicit limits. If Congress wants to delegate a lot of power (such as the ability to forgive 400 billion dollars of student loans), then it must explicitly say so.
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In a recent Supreme Court opinion, Justice Barrett used the following analogy to illustrate the doctrine: If a parent hands his credit card to the babysitter of his children and tells the babysitter to "make sure the kids have fun", then he implicitly is expecting the babysitter to do something minor like taking the children to a local ice-cream parlor or movie theater, and it would be a grave breach of the spirit of the instruction for the babysitter to do something major like taking his children to an out-of-town amusement park instead, even though technically that would not be a breach of the letter of the instruction.
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The author of this article (a law professor) agrees completely with Barrett's analogy, and so does his father. However, according to a survey that some researchers conducted on this topic, only 8 percent of Americans agree with the analogy! The respondents rated a multi-day amusement-park trip at 92 percent for adherence to instructions and 4.7 out of 7 for reasonableness. In comparison, they rated the "correct" option of buying pizza and ice cream and renting a movie for home viewing at 100 percent for adherence to instructions and 6.8 out of 7 for reasonableness. This result may cast doubt on the linguistic justification that has been put forth for the major-questions doctrine.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
5mo ago
What are some obscure job tasks that might make for fun video games? We all are aware of the zillions of programming, train-routing, and bridge-design games. But what about parking-lot design? Guide-rail design? Curb-ramp design? House design (as a game with targets to be met, rather than as a goal-free sandbox like The Sims)?
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
6d ago
(1) Buy an ordinary fuel-efficient hatchback
(2) Have a body shop cut out the back half of the passenger compartment and weld the rest of the car back together
(3) Get a super-fuel-efficient two-seat car
Real-life example (pre-modification fuel-economy comparison)
Would you do it?
A few months ago I mentioned at work that I drink a lot of grape juice with seltzer (carbonated) water as a kind of ersatz grape soda, and my coworkers gave me weird looks. Is this a strange use for seltzer water? My mother got me into the habit many years ago.
Now that I think of it, I have no idea what any other uses of seltzer water could be in the first place. It obviously doesn't taste particularly good if drunk straight. Wikipedia and Google seem to suggest that its primary use is for mixing alcoholic drinks (as seen in at least one Three Stooges film), with some alternative applications to cooking and cleaning, but that all seems too niche for Costco to be selling gigantic cases of it. What do you use seltzer water for?
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
14d 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
7mo ago
Using "exhorting" as an adjective is not typical usage anywhere that I can think of
No, that part is perfectly fine.
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Good: "I overheard Akpu exhorting Babulal to use ChatGPT"
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Good: "I heard Akpu extolling the virtues of ChatGPT to Babulal"
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Bad: "I heard Akpu exhorting the virtues of ChatGPT to Babulal"
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
6mo ago
>mother approvingly emails Washington Post editorial to me
>read the relevant court filings and send back an explanation of the background and the judge's reasoning
>decide to crosspost it here for some extra upboats at near-zero marginal cost
>explicitly mark it as "not an effortpost, just a casual summary"
>tfw it still gets inducted as a "quality contribution"
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
7mo ago
It's being used as a verb in your first example
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
7mo ago
That's a different construction with a different meaning.
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"I saw Akpu exhorting Babulal": "exhorting" is unambiguously an adjective(+verb).
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"I saw [that] Akpu was exhorting Babulal": I'm not a linguist, but I would still call "exhorting" an adjective+verb here (acting alongside the verb "was"), even though it also can be considered part of the "was exhorting" verb construction. But that may be breaking things down too far.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1yr ago
How many different instruments/parts do you prefer to hear in a piece of music?
I am inclined to feel that anything in excess of three, or maybe four, is overkill/bloat. But maybe I just listen to too much chiptune/MIDI stuff.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
4mo ago
Coincidentally, Randal O'Toole just published an article on the same topic. He thinks the lack of low-density housing is a contributing factor.
South Korea’s high-rise housing and low birthrates are closely related. People don’t have children if they don’t have room for them. High rises are expensive to build so living space is at a premium. Birth rates are declining throughout the developed world, but they have declined the most in countries like South Korea, Russia, and China that have tried to house most of their people in high rises.
South Korea became a high rise country when it rapidly industrialized after the end of the Korean War. People moving from rural areas to the cities to get jobs created a housing crisis, and then-current urban planning theories held that high-rise housing was the best way to house people. Remember that, even though South Korea was the “good guys” in the Korean war, the country was still a dictatorship until about 1990, which meant the leadership could direct the country into one style of housing even if residents might have preferred otherwise.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
8mo 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
Dislikes you
7mo ago
Adjectives modify nouns. Adverbs modify verbs and adjectives.
Here, "exhorting" modifies "Akpu".
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1yr 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
Dislikes you
1yr ago
That issue was addressed in item 3 of the comment to which you replied. Likewise, the official FAQ says:
How does the FAIRtax protect low-income families and individuals and retirees on fixed incomes?
Under the FairTax Plan, poor people pay no net FairTax at all up to the poverty level! Every household receives a rebate that is equal to the FairTax paid on essential goods and services, and wage earners are no longer subject to the most regressive and burdensome tax of all, the payroll tax. Those spending at twice the poverty level pay a tax of only 11.5 percent — a rate much lower than the income and payroll tax burden they bear today.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
20d ago
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
7mo ago
As I said previously, "exhorting" is simultaneously an adjective and a verb. In its capacity as an adjective, it modifies "Akpu"; and, in its capacity as a verb, it takes "Akpu" as a subject.
Again, I am not a linguist, but that's how I model this situation.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1yr ago
A grid is two-dimensional, not one-dimensional. The number of walkable destinations still increases with the second power of distance, not with the first power.
(The abstraction could break down if the city's blocks are gigantic—but Wikipedia suggests that a typical block size is 1/8 mile × 1/16 mile, which is much smaller than the distance of 1/2 mile that ASTM uses as the limit of walkability, so I think the abstraction remains valid.)
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
13d ago
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Guy seeks to buy a gun
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Background check is still pending, but he's allowed to take the gun home anyway
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The background check eventually fails, so an ATF agent is dispatched to retrieve the gun
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The gun buyer isn't at home, and his wife (with limited command of English) thinks the ATF agent is a robber and calls 911
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Two local police officers arrive and tell the ATF agent to put his hands up
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The ATF agent's response: "I'm a federal fucking agent!"
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The police officers tase and handcuff him, and detain him for twenty minutes before verifying his identity
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The ATF agent sues the officers, and the trial judge denies qualified immunity to them
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.
YIMBY sentiment on this forum has (I think) been mostly focused on increasing the density of existing residential zones. However, it may be worth noting that there is an alternative: converting existing agricultural or unused land to low-density residential use (i. e., continuing to "sprawl"). In this article, a former employee of the libertarian Cato Institute accuses that organization of focusing exclusively on high-density housing, and of smearing as racist people who are not interested in long-term high-density living and clamor for more single-family houses. (In his view, upzoning imposed from the top down is not libertarian, because the existing owners have a sort of property right in the zoning of their neighborhood as a substitute for deed restrictions that could or should have been used instead of zoning codes.)
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