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PaperclipPerfector  12hr ago (text post)   557 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for September 11, 2026

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  • A person has been convicted of "sexual battery". He is on the sex-offender list, and is required to register his "place of employment" with the county sheriff's office. His employer is a janitorial service: every day he shows up at a central location and is transported by the company to an assigned jobsite. He registers the central location as his place of employment.

  • The service assigns him to work at a children's camp in a different county. After several weeks of being transported to that location every day, he is charged with the felony of failing to update his registered workplace. He argues that (1) the law is unconstitutionally vague, and (2) it defies common sense for the law to require him to update his registered place of employment every time his employer changes his jobsite. But the trial judge rejects his arguments, and he pleads no contest and is sentenced to three years of probation. The appeals panel and the state supreme court affirm.

Originally published in year 1727, recently uploaded to Project Gutenberg:

The BENEFIT of FARTING EXPLAIN'D:
OR, THE FUNDAMENT-all CAUSE of the Distempers incident to the Fair Sex Inquir'd into:
Proving à Posteriori most of the Disordures in-tail'd on them are owing to Flatulencies not seasonably vented.
Wrote in Spanish, by Don Fart-in hando Puff-indorst Professor of Bumbast in the University of Craccow.
AND Translated into English at the Request and for the Use of the Lady Damp-Fart, of Her-fart-shire.
The Thirteenth Edition, with Additions, revis'd by a College of Phyzz-icians, and approved by several Ladies of Quality.
To which is added, a Certificate of its Virtues, from the Court of the Princess ARSEMINI.
Together with some Verses on a Lady's Fart, in the Philippic strain.
ALSO a Meditation on T——d, wrote in a Place of EASE.

(It appears that "T——d" stands for "Turd".)

  • 1967: A railroad company acquires a railroad line, including a tunnel. (I can't figure out the tunnel's exact location, but it's somewhere in this rectangle.)

  • 2000–2001: The company asks the federal STB (Surface Transportation Board) for permission to abandon service on the line. The STB grants permission.

  • 2001–2002: The company asks the state PUC (Public Utility Commission) for permission to "abolish" 29 rail crossings, including the tunnel. However, the PUC grants permission to abolish only 27 crossings. The two remaining crossings, including the tunnel, cannot be abolished because negotiations between the company and the state DOT (Dept. of Transportation) for "final disposition" are ongoing.

  • 2002, later: Despite lacking the PUC's permission, the company sells to a third party a large property that contains the tunnel.

  • 2012: The PUC erroneously assumes that all 29 crossings have been abolished by now, and closes the case.

  • 2019–2025: The PUC opens a new investigation of the tunnel, which has fallen into disrepair. It finds that the company cannot weasel out of responsibility just because it sold the tunnel (without govt. permission) back in 2002. It assigns to the company 2.8 M$ of repair costs, as well as future maintenance costs.

  • 2026: The appeals panel affirms.

Weird anecdote:

>Be me
>Visit 85-year-old grandfather
>He complains that he hasn't been feeling very motivated to do stuff lately
>Ramble at him regarding how designing code-compliant houses and subdivisions is a fun retirement hobby
>He mentions that his uncle gave him two vacant lots in Florida a while ago (he lives in New J⁎rsey), but he doesn't want to give them to anybody else because the property tax would be a burden
>Look up the county property records later
>Somebody (presumably grandfather's uncle) bought the lots for 4 k$ in 1977, and gave them to grandfather for free in 1984
>For each lot, assessed value is 30 k$, and "burdensome" property tax is 300 dollars per year
>This fogey has been letting perfectly good land sit overgrown, 900 miles away from him, for literally 40 years without either building something on it or selling it
>MFW
>Send him an email explaining that the lots are buildable under the municipality's zoning code (minimum house size 1200 ft2—example design is attached), but I would just sell them since they're so far away

Sex offender case is interesting. I am not sure how burdensome registering is, but my first instinct was that it's pretty unfair to have to register where you are when that changes daily. If anyone should be managing the sex offender registration for an employee that works in various places, it should be the cleaning service or the criminal-employee NGO that's facilitating the work. And either of those entities shouldn't be sending sex offenders to clean up children's camps.

For those curious, the sexual battery charge was probably a plea deal from raping 2 kids under 10: https://sanduskyregister.com/news/31340/man-accused-of-raping-2-children-arrested/

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