ToaKraka
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User ID: 108
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
19d 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
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
4mo 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.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
7mo ago
Note that Carter also won on several union-related counts, not just on religion-related counts.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
9mo ago
From the introduction:
This case is about the Free Speech Clause in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. The explosion of social-media platforms has resulted in unique free speech issues—this is especially true in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. If the allegations made by Plaintiffs are true, the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history. In their attempts to suppress alleged disinformation, the Federal Government, and particularly the Defendants named here, are alleged to have blatantly ignored the First Amendment’s right to free speech.
From the conclusion:
The Plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits in establishing that the Government has used its power to silence the opposition. Opposition to COVID-19 vaccines; opposition to COVID-19 masking and lockdowns; opposition to the lab-leak theory of COVID-19; opposition to the validity of the 2020 election; opposition to President Biden’s policies; statements that the Hunter Biden laptop story was true; and opposition to policies of the government officials in power. All were suppressed. It is quite telling that each example or category of suppressed speech was conservative in nature. This targeted suppression of conservative ideas is a perfect example of viewpoint discrimination of political speech. American citizens have the right to engage in free debate about the significant issues affecting the country.
Although this case is still relatively young, and at this stage the Court is only examining it in terms of Plaintiffs’ likelihood of success on the merits, the evidence produced thus far depicts an almost dystopian scenario. During the COVID-19 pandemic, a period perhaps best characterized by widespread doubt and uncertainty, the United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian “Ministry of Truth”.
The Plaintiffs have presented substantial evidence in support of their claims that they were the victims of a far-reaching and widespread censorship campaign. This court finds that they are likely to succeed on the merits of their First Amendment free speech claim against the Defendants. Therefore, a preliminary injunction should issue immediately against the Defendants as set out herein. The Plaintiffs Motion for Preliminary Injunction [Doc. No. 10] is GRANTED IN PART and DENIED IN PART.
The Plaintiffs’ request to certify this matter as a class action pursuant to Fed. R. Civ. P. Article 23(b)(2) is DENIED.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
7mo 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.
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.
I think the whole discourse has been poisoned by Zionists who regard criticism of Israel as a state as criticism of Jews as a people, which is an absurd notion.
Note that the House of Representatives has now passed a resolution endorsing this interpretation, by a vote of 311 yeas (69 % Republicans) to 14 nays (93 % Democrats), with 92 abstentions (all Democrats).
Resolved, That the House of Representatives—
(4) clearly and firmly states that anti-Zionism is antisemitism
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.
A US appeals court has ruled that, if a copyrighted standards document (ASTM, ASHRAE, NFPA, APA, etc.) is incorporated by reference into a law, then it is legal to post a DRM-free copy of that document online.
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.
I still find it hard to believe that what is being reported is even possible
Back in 2021, one person said that he had filed 1,000 complaints (with no timeframe given) regarding violations of Title IX and Title VI at 330 different colleges. In 2022 he said the total was 1,200 complaints against "almost 300" colleges over three years. 7,300 complaints in a single year is a big number, but I hesitate to call it unbelievable that somebody could be more dedicated than the linked person.
the actual decision
Unfortunately, the actual decision is very long and full of legal details about things like establishing standing
Standing is important, though.
Anyway, it may be easier to understand the decision if you have a table of contents open in another window.
- Background
- Legal Standard
- Analysis
- A. Plaintiffs Have Standing
- 1. Plaintiff Medical Associations Have Associational Standing
- 2. Plaintiff Medical Associations Have Organizational Standing
- 3. Plaintiffs' Alleged Injuries are Concrete and Redressable
- 4. Plaintiffs Are Within the "Zone of Interests"
- B. Plaintiffs' Claims Are Reviewable
- 1. FDA "Reopened" Its Decision in 2016 and 2021
- 2. FDA's April 2021 Decision on In-Person Dispensing Requirements Is Not "Committed to Agency Discretion by Law"
- 3. Plaintiffs' Failure to Exhaust Certain Claims Is Excusable
- a. Contrary to Public Policy
- b. Individual Injustice and Irreparable Injury
- c. Administrative Procedures Are Inadequate
- d. Exhaustion Would Be Futile
- e. The Comstock Act Was Raised with Sufficient Clarity
- C. Plaintiffs' Challenges to FDA's 2021 Actions Have a Substantial Likelihood of Success on the Merits
- 1. The Comstock Act Prohibits the Mailing of Chemical-Abortion Drugs
- 2. FDA's 2021 Actions Violate the Administrative Procedure Act
- D. Plaintiffs' Challenges to FDA's Pre-2021 Actions Have a Substantial Likelihood of Success on the Merits
- 1. FDA's 2000 Approval Violated Subpart H
- a. Pregnancy Is Not an "Illness"
- b. Defendants Are Not Entitled to Auer Deference
- c. Chemical-Abortion Drugs Do Not Provide a "Meaningful Therapeutic Benefit"
- d. Defendants' Misapplication of Subpart H Has Not Been Cured by Congress
- 2. FDA's Pre-2021 Actions Were Arbitrary and Capricious
- a. The 2000 Approval
- b. The 2016 Changes
- c. The 2019 Generic Approval
- E. There Is a Substantial Threat of Irreparable Harm
- F. Preliminary Injunction Would Serve the Public Interest
- G. A Stay under Section 705 of the APA Is More Appropriate Than Ordering Withdrawal or Suspension of FDA's Approval
- Conclusion
And here's an article from a law professor who criticizes both this decision and an almost-simultaneous decision in the other direction from a different district court.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
8mo 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
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
11mo ago
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
2mo ago
Normally, whenever you download a document from the federal government's official PACER website, you must pay ten cents per page downloaded, capped at thirty pages (three dollars). If you have installed the RECAP extension in your browser, then the extension automatically uploads to the third-party website RECAP whatever you download from PACER. (You can create an account on PACER and download stuff from it even if you aren't a lawyer.)
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
2mo ago
Document 146 on this page
The Court hereby certifies the following class:
All non-African American CTI graduates who:
(1) By February 10, 2014, (a) graduated from a CTI program at one of the 36 FAA-partnered CTI Institutions between 2009–13 and (b) passed the AT-SAT;
(2) Applied to be an ATCS trainee through the 2014 all sources vacancy announcement but failed the Biographical Questionnaire that was incorporated into the 2014 ATCS hiring process and was therefore not hired;
(3) Have never been offered employment as an FAA ATCS.
Excluded from the class are CTI graduates:
(1) Who were not US citizens as of February 10, 2014;
(2) Who by February 21, 2014 had reached 31 years of age (or 35 if they had 52 consecutive weeks of prior air traffic control experience);
(3) Whose academic records as of February 21, 2014 explicitly stated that they were ineligible to receive a letter of recommendation from their CTI school;
(4) Whose AT-SAT scores had expired as of February 21, 2014.
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.
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
26d 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.
Not an effortpost, just a casual summary of a court case in which people may be interested:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
232 (denial of summary judgment)
374 (confirmation of jury verdict)
467 (grant of sanctions)
483 (denial of stay of sanctions)
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.
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