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PaperclipPerfector
2hr ago
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Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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Notes -
Video Game Thread
What are you playing? Did you pick up anything great in the Steam summer sale?
I'm working my way through Half-Life (1998) and its expansions. It's pretty great even beyond the nostalgia, and I like the general feel of the engine and how you move around in it. Even the much-criticized Blue Shift is kinda fun. The engine was always one of the main strengths of HL and played a large part in its many mods' successes too, IMO. I'm playing with the 'original models' because I prefer how those weapons look and sound. I tried Black Mesa again briefly but I don't really like many of the changes they made. It's not a faithful remake.
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Item 1 of 6
Steve Jackson, leader of Steve Jackson Games and the Generic Universal RolePlaying System (which just celebrated its 40th anniversary):
Item 2 of 6
In a residential zone, a municipal ordinance permits only single-family detached dwellings, where a “dwelling” is used by one or more families and does not include “hotels, motels, rooming houses, or other tourist homes”, and a “family” is “one or more persons related by blood, marriage, or adoption, living together as a single housekeeping unit”.
A real-estate investor buys a six-bedroom house capable of holding 17 people, and uses it as a short-term rental. The municipal govt. issues a violation to him, on the basis that the house counts as “hotel or other type of transient lodging” rather than “single-family dwelling”. The municipal zoning board and the trial judge agree with the municipal govt.
The appeals panel reverses (two to one). Since the ordinance fails to define “transient lodging”, it is ambiguous, and ambiguities are to be interpreted in favor of the owner. “Enterprises such as AirBnB have expanded the possible uses of single-family dwellings, and a township can address such uses in the zoning ordinance. However, amendments ‘cannot be effected by shoe-horning a use that involves renting an entire single-family home to vacationers into the definition of a “tourist home”’.”
The state supreme court reverses (unanimously). “While ‘single housekeeping unit’ is undefined in the ordinance, it is a term of art that is widely used in zoning ordinances. This court has adopted the common definition, used by courts throughout the country, as requiring the person or persons residing in the home to function as a family and to be ‘sufficiently stable and permanent’ and not ‘purely transient’. Thus, by defining ‘family’ by requiring ‘a single housekeeping unit’, the ordinance clearly and unambiguously excluded purely transient uses of property.” “The [appeals court]'s decisions have slowly eroded our decision in Albert [where we adopted this interpretation], from Marchenko (allowing some transient use) to Shvekh (allowing mostly transient use) and now in the case at bar (allowing purely transient use), differentiating Albert on less and less convincing grounds.”
Item 3 of 6
Excerpt from Wikipedia's Manual of Style:
But practices vary. Some publishers (such as the aforementioned Steve Jackson Games) use italics for shorter works and bold+italics for longer works.
Reminder: In any of these situations, it technically is bad practice to just hit Ctrl-I or Ctrl-B on your keyboard. Rather, you are supposed to use semantic markup (such as the cite element in HTML⁎ or a custom style in Word) and apply styling based on the semantics. (Using CSS to generate quotation marks that do not exist in the original HTML is possible. However, I personally dislike that practice, since characters that do not exist in the HTML are invisible to copying-and-pasting. So just type those quotation marks manually.)
⁎Historically, the cite element has been badly misused by some software.
Item 4 of 6
A food manufacturer experiences salmonella contamination at a peanut-butter factory. It is targeted by thousands of lawsuits, and calls on its insurer for coverage, since it expects to incur total damages in excess of its policy's deductible of 250 k$ per “occurrence”, defined as “an accident, including continuous or repeated exposure to substantially the same general harmful conditions”. However, the insurer points out that a later section of the same policy redefines “occurrence” as “any ‘bodily injury’ or ‘property damage’ that arises out of any one ‘lot’ of ‘your product’ that is prepared or acquired by you”—i. e., each 24-hour lot of peanut-butter production counts as a separate occurrence. The contaminated peanut butter was distributed over 225 lots, so the 250-k$ deductible must be reached on the basis of a single lot—not all the contaminated lots combined—before the insurer will provide coverage on that single lot. The manufacturer sues the insurer in order to get a clarification of which definition of “occurrence” controls.
The trial judge rejects the insurer's interpretation and adopts the manufacturer's, and the appeals panel affirms. The later section of the policy is ambiguous as to whether it is intended to redefine “occurrence”, especially when compared with other sections that do explicitly specify that they are redefining previously-defined terms. Even when considered in a vacuum, the second definition is ambiguous in itself: it is not clear whether, under the second definition, multiple injuries caused by a single lot are one occurrence or multiple occurrences. And it is circuit precedent that any ambiguity in an insurance policy is to be construed against the insurer that wrote that policy.
Item 5 of 6
Found via the YouTube algorithm: Mildly interesting video using popular Japanese Twitter posts to illustrate LLM stereotypes in that language (akin to em dashes in English)
Item 6 of 6
As part of a road widening, the state DOT (department of transportation) condemns a 13-foot-wide strip of land at the front of a person's residential property. The person's house would overlap this strip, but the DOT has modified the strip with a rectangular cutout in order to eliminate the overlap. Years later (presumably while the construction is ongoing), the person hires a surveyor to double-check the DOT's plan. Whoops! The DOT's survey fails to show a large concrete porch at the side of the house⁎, so the cutout failed to exclude that area from the DOT's taking.⁎⁎ (Disclaimer: Past this point I am far from certain that I understand what's going on in this lawsuit. But, IMO, this one paragraph is quite interesting on its own.)
The person sues for compensation—not just for the de jure taking of the land under the porch as shown in the DOT's plans, but also for the de facto taking of the porch itself as not shown in the DOT's plans. The trial judge allows the de jure claim to proceed, but rejects the de facto claim, reasoning that the de jure claim already includes any economic damages incurred by the DOT's misstatement.
The appeals panel reverses and remands for further proceedings. The economic damages have nothing to do with this question. This lawsuit may seem like double-dipping, but it is perfectly reasonable for the taking of the land+porch to be composed of de jure and de facto portions that must be considered separately.
⁎Google Street View indicates that this “porch” is large enough that “patio” may be a more appropriate word.
⁎⁎Can we pour out a drink for the hapless low-level civil engineer who was tasked with drawing the “survey” from old as-built plans and/or Google Earth screenshots, and now doubtless is being excoriated for this mistake?
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