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PaperclipPerfector
22hr ago
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Item 1 of 5
Article:
A New Jersey legislator has submitted a bill that would ban sex in state, county, and municipal "government facilities", with fines of up to 10 k$. (You may recall the controversy that took place a few years ago regarding the production of sexual videos in a building of the federal senate.) "Any person who engages in sexual activity in a government facility shall be subject to a civil penalty between $1,000 and $5,000 for a first offense and up to $10,000 for a second or subsequent offense."
However, according to a lawyer, the bill's definition of "government facility" is so poorly worded that it would include government-owned apartment buildings! "'Government facility' includes but is not limited to any State, county, or municipal government building or office; legislative office; court room; Board of Education facility; or other building or facility owned or leased by a State, county, or government entity."
Item 2 of 5
Humorous image (source): At what point does a character design become unreasonably overcomplicated?
The original image points to developer Mihoyo as a prime culprit for overcomplicated designs. An edited version popular on 4chan replaces "detailed" with "slop-adjacent" and "complex" with "Genshittification", referring to the popular Mihoyo game Genshin Impact. On the more historical side, I think I have seen at least one online comment pointing out that it would take a very long time for a belt-laden Final Fantasy character to get dressed in the morning.
Are you cool enough to wear an overcomplicated outfit casually? ;-)
See also criticism of overcomplicated mecha. Compare the Unicorn Gundam of year 2010 to the Gundam Mk-II of year 1985. (To be fair, though, 1985's Zeta Gundam also is rather complicated, to the point that its transformation sequence had to be simplified in order to be implemented in an early model kit.)
Item 3 of 5
Police dogs are not trained to recognize officers other than their handlers. Rather: First, the handler announces three times with a loudspeaker that, if the suspect does not surrender, then he will be bitten; then, non-handler officers evacuate the area; and, finally, the dog is let loose to find and bite the suspect.
Following that standard procedure, a dog-handling officer lets loose his 90-pound police dog to find a suspect hidden in a garage. However, upon stepping into the garage, the handler realizes that another officer failed to heed the warning to evacuate the area, and the dog is about to bite the other officer rather than finding the suspect. The dog is 25 feet away from the other officer, is charging forward at full speed of 25 miles per hour, and is not trained to heed verbal commands while on the verge of hitting the target. In order to save the other officer from possible severe injury (and to save the dog from possibly being shot by the other officer), the handler yanks hard on the dog's 15-foot leash, rather than leaving it slack. This maneuver stops the dog a few feet from the other officer, but also tears a tendon in the handler's elbow. (The dog does not have its neck broken, but is "confused and harmed", and "its apprehension intensity subsequently drops".)
The handler's elbow injury is career-ending, so he applies for accidental-disability retirement benefits (73 percent of salary). However, the retirement board finds that the injury was not "undesigned and unexpected". (1) Recalling a dog is specifically part of the handler's training. (2) The handler already knew that he was working with multiple departments of police officers in searching for this suspect, so he should have expected to see some of them in his path. The handler gets only ordinary-disability benefits (44 percent of salary).
The appeals panel reverses. (1) The handling officer is trained to recall his dog in completely different circumstances—with verbal commands in an open field while the dog is 75 feet from the target, not with a leash in a garage while the dog is 25 feet from the target. (2) After previously encountering other officers while searching for the same suspect, the handler gathered those officers together and explicitly reminded them that, for their own safety, they should not get ahead of him and his dog, so it was completely reasonable for him to not expect any officers to be in front of him.
Item 4 of 5
Funny footnote from a judicial opinion:
Item 5 of 5
The Volokh Conspiracy shines a light on some drama in the US checkers (draughts) community.
2002: ICAONA (International Checkers Association of North America) is the only major checkers organization in the US.
2005: ICAONA becomes a member of FMJD (Fédération Mondiale du Jeu de Dames, World Draughts Federation), which conducts global checkers tournaments.
2024: Alexander Rudnitsky, five-time US checkers champion and former vice president of ICAONA, sets up NDF (National Draughts Federation of the USA) as a separate organization.
2024, later: ICAONA claims that NDF forged the signature of ICAONA's president in applying for an NDF tournament to be FMJD-certified, and accuses NDF of trying to supplant ICAONA as the US member of FMJD. NDF denies both accusations. FMJD temporarily removes the NDF tournament from its calendar, but later adds it back after ICAONA withdraws its objection.
2025: Rudnitsky sues ICAONA on ten different counts. He alleges that, in addition to defaming him regarding the forgery, ICAONA conducted an illegal secret vote, changing its bylaws to force all US checkers players to be ICAONA members in order to be eligible for FMJD tournaments (which is a violation of FMJD bylaws).
2026: The judge dismisses one count (breach of contract), but says Rudnitsky wins summarily on six counts (including defamation, tortious interference, and antitrust)—not on the merits, but merely because ICAONA failed to substantively respond to them. Three counts (including infliction of emotional distress) remain to be decided at trial.
Re #3: Interesting that police dogs apparently function as biological missiles and are sufficiently dangerous that preventing a bite on fellow officer is worth messing up your arm. The realities of police work might call for that sort of training but its definitely not the warm and fuzzy image that gets sold to the public.
I've been watching a lot of bodycam videos, many of which involve police dogs, and yeah, the image we're given in the media is that they are extremely smart and obedient, but it seems quite different from that in application. You see the officer yelling at the suspect, seemingly getting the dog excited and riled up, releasing the dog after giving a verbal order to bite in another language (I've seen german often) and then once the dog bites the suspect the handler tries to get him to stop with varying degrees of success. At the very least it takes several seconds, a lot of pulling and repeated yelling in german. The dog almost always look too excited to listen or care about orders and in multiple videos I've seen it switch to biting nearby officers when they assist in securing the suspect.
Now I'm sure the distinction is not because no one thought of training obedient, smart police dogs, or that such dogs are impossible. Seeing eye dogs are capable of calmly completing rather complex (for a dog) tasks in a much more controlled way, but maybe there's something about the expected duty that makes excitable, chaos monster dogs more suited for the job, maybe they're less easily convinced or redirected by the suspect? Maybe the police likes the intimidation factor of a very eager dog vs one that seems completely tamed; they want the suspect to think of what damage the dog the cops barely seem to be able to control will do rather than think of the damage a dog that will immediately stop when asked to can do.
I think most of that is on purpose. The German (or in some cases Dutch) is deliberate as if you train the dog in English, the perp could easily give commands in English that the dog would understand. As a bonus it can’t be confused by other English chatter. The dog isn’t listening for the English words “no” “down” or “stop”, all of which a person might shout when a dog is running at them ready to attack. They listen for “nein” and “fuss”. And having the dog trained to obey anyone on scene is likewise a problem as you don’t want crooks to be able to simply Duolingo some German and tell your police dog to go away.
Yes, the talking in German I understand and it makes sense. It's the "dog isn't trained to be able to stop immediately on-command (in German by its handler)" part that is less straightforward and less true to the image of smart and obedient police dogs the public has.
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