ToaKraka
Dislikes you
User ID: 108
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1hr ago
Quod licet Jovem non licet bovem? (This is a joke about verb objects.)
Having knowledge of another language that has a somewhat different structure can help one to understand one's own language. See also sentence diagramming.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1hr ago
In this case, the prosecutor characterized KC as "grabbing at his waistband and [blading] his body away from" the officer, but the trial judge "explicitly disagreed with this description of KC's actions after reviewing the body-camera footage".
However, I can't tell whether that disagreement is relevant here. The police officers initially stopped their car solely on the basis of the clothing worn by KC and the other juvenile, not on the basis of any suspicion of a gun. And it is unclear from the panel's summary of the officer's testimony whether the officer developed a separate suspicion that KC was carrying a gun before or after walking up and blocking his path.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
6hr ago
the court's 9–0 decision that held that the death penalty was unconstitutional becuase of disparate racial impact
The decision does not appear to be based on disparate impact. Rather, the justices relied on a report finding, with p-values of 4.8–11.1 percent, that race was a factor in the application of the death penalty. (In a footnote, they declined to use the common p-value of 5 percent as a "mechanical bright-line rule".)
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
9hr ago
As set forth in this court’s precedent, the seizure inquiry is an objective test in which the allegedly seized person has the burden to show that a seizure occurred. To aid courts in the application of this test, we now clarify that a person is seized for purposes of article I section 7 [of the state constitution] if, based on the totality of the circumstances, an objective observer could conclude that the person was not free to leave, to refuse a request, or to otherwise terminate the encounter due to law enforcement’s display of authority or use of physical force. For purposes of this analysis, an objective observer is aware that implicit, institutional, and unconscious biases, in addition to purposeful discrimination, have resulted in disproportionate police contacts, investigative seizures, and uses of force against Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color (BIPOC) in Washington. Finally, in accordance with our precedent, if the person shows there was a seizure, then the burden shifts to the State to prove that the seizure was lawfully justified by a warrant or an applicable exception to the warrant requirement.
Based on the totality of the circumstances presented in this case, we hold that petitioner Palla Sum was seized when a sheriff’s deputy requested Sum’s identification while implying that Sum was under investigation for car theft. As the State properly concedes, at that time, the deputy did not have a warrant, reasonable suspicion, or any other lawful authority to seize Sum. As a result, Sum was unlawfully seized, and the false name and birth date he gave to the deputy must be suppressed. We therefore reverse the Court of Appeals and remand to the trial court for further proceedings.
Finally, we consider whether the disturbance of Meredith’s private affairs in this case exceeded what was “reasonably necessary to further substantial governmental interests”. To make this determination, we consider “‘reasonableness…’ along with history, precedent, and common sense”. As a matter of both reasonableness and common sense, unless mass transit is offered for free, transit operators must be able to charge and collect fares from passengers. Therefore, as history and this court have long recognized, passengers using mass transit must pay their fares or they “may be ejected”. We do not question that premise.
However, in this case, Meredith was asked for proof of payment by law enforcement officers, who then identified and arrested him using resources that no civilian conducting fare enforcement could have accessed. Although we are not asked to opine on the constitutionality of these later actions, they could not have occurred without the initial seizure.
Moreover, as detailed above, the risk of such escalation would be acutely felt by reasonable transit passengers, who are more likely to be members of “historically marginalized groups”, including Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color. Members of such groups are already known to be “‘disproportionate victims’” of “police encounters without reasonable suspicion”. If allowed to continue, the high level of intrusion that occurred here would only exacerbate these disparities. The State has not shown such an outcome is reasonably necessary to further the governmental interest in fare enforcement on public transit.
To be fair, it appears that this ruling forbids only fare enforcement by police officers, not fare enforcement by transit employees who are backed up by police officers if they find a noncompliant passenger.
Yet, “[o]n this particular day [the officers] didn’t have any [transit employees] to work for [them,] so [the police officers] worked as a team of two deputies riding the bus fully outfitted in [their] patrol uniforms and then one deputy in a chase car in case [they] dealt with anybody.”
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
9hr ago
The suspect has reasonable methods to find out whether he's being detained.
Forcing someone to risk being accused of acting suspiciously by evading detention sounds unreasonable.
The officers could have just not blocked his path. The opinion gives two different examples where that was permitted: 1 2
I disagree it’s even rude to walk directly towards someone you want to talk to.
I said it's rude to block someone's path, not to walk directly toward someone.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
9hr ago
If I want to talk to someone, I walk directly at him in his path. That’s a completely normal interaction.
You aren't a police officer with the power to stop someone for questioning. Even for a normal person, intentionally blocking someone else's path is rude. For a police officer, it can rise to the level of implicit detention.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
10hr ago
In this instance it was a detention because the officer stepped in front of the youth and shined his flashlight upon him, and a "reasonable" youth wouldn't have felt free to leave?
Yes. According to the judges: "A reasonable person, with his path impeded by a police officer, the officer asking him investigative questions while another officer stood nearby, and the questioning officer training a flashlight on him, would not have felt free to simply leave the interaction."
It seems like the youth actually leaving would cut against that.
(1) The officers stop their car next to KC, get out, and start walking toward him while shining a flashlight at him. This may or may not count as a detention.
(2) KC starts walking away. You can call this evidence against the idea that item 1, standing alone, counts as a detention.
(3) One of the officers deliberately steps into KC's path, blocking him from walking away. At this point (with both item 1 and item 3), a detention definitely has taken place, considering the totality of the circumstances (say the judges).
(4) The officer asks KC what he has in his waistband. KC discards the object (a gun) and flees. If the stop had been lawful, then this would constitute probable cause for an arrest. However, the stop was not lawful.
7:30 on an October evening, I'd want a flashlight too.
According to the judges: "The body-camera footage shows that the street was well lit by various streetlights".
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
10hr ago
I'm not quite sure what you're asking.
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If you're pointing out that the standard in this case was reasonable suspicion rather than probable cause, then I clarified that here.
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If you're saying that the officers had reasonable suspicion for a stop and the suspect's discarding of the gun upon being stopped then gave them probable cause for an arrest, then the judges found otherwise: there was no reasonable suspicion for a stop.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
12hr ago
Stealing this from @ToaKraka in the FF thread:
Link to the full opinion
probable cause
Reasonable suspicion for a brief investigative stop is a lower standard than probable cause for a prolonged arrest. (The English word "detention" is a bit misleading here, as in colloquial use it implies a prolonged arrest.)
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
14hr ago
Item 1 of 6
I ran two searches on GovInfo, one for "engineer" and one for "architect"—and, hilariously, for each of those searches the first interesting opinion revolved around a stingy insurance company.
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A real-estate company buys one of the three lots that constitute a shopping center. A different company owns the other two lots. The shopping center's parking is split between the first company's lot and the second company's lots. The first company tries to exert unilateral control over parking in its lot, and the second company sues. The state trial court rules that the second company has an easement over the first company's lot. The state appeals panel finds only an implicit license, not an explicit easement. (The state appeals panel's opinion is a bit too complicated for me to summarize, but it does have helpful diagrams of the three lots.)
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The real-estate company demands that its title-insurance company reimburse it for the lost value of what it purchased, up to the policy limit of 1.2 M$. However, the insurance company claims that the lost value is only 33 k$. The real-estate company sues.
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The real-estate company's expert claims that the lost value is 1.1 M$: without the parking encumbrance it was worth 2.5 M$ as the potential site of a mixed-use commercial and residential redevelopment, but with the parking encumbrance it cannot be redeveloped in that manner and therefore is worth only 1.4 M$ in its current commercial form. The insurance company's expert claims that the difference in value between a shopping center with an exclusive parking lot and a shopping center with a shared parking lot is only 33 k$. The jury agrees with the real-estate company's expert. The appeals panel affirms, finding little merit in the insurance company's arguments.
Item 2 of 6
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In May 2023, four condominium units are rendered uninhabitable by a fire. The condo company calls on its insurer for coverage. By July, the condo company and the insurance company agree that complete demolition and replacement are necessary.
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In August 2023, there arises a dispute regarding whether the concrete slab needs to be included in the demolition and replacement. The insurance company's engineer prepares a report stating that concrete exposed to extremely high temperatures turns pink, indicating chemical changes that make it unsuitable for further structural use. The report includes two photographs (reproduced in the judge's opinion) that clearly show pink concrete in the slab. However, the engineer concludes that the slab need not be replaced! The condo company disagrees with this assessment.
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In January 2024, the condo company's engineer conducts a core test on the slab. The test indicates that the slab does not have sufficient strength to support a replacement structure. In July 2024, the insurance company's engineer finally makes a second visit to the site and changes his opinion, and the insurance company increases its replacement-cost estimate from 0.96 M$ to 1.05 M$.
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In December 2024, the condo company sues the insurance company for bad-faith conduct that delayed construction and thereby inconvenienced the displaced inhabitants. In January 2026, the insurance company moves for summary judgment to dismiss the condo company's claims, but in September the trial judge refuses to grant it: there is enough evidence for a jury to conclude that the insurance company was unreasonable in (1) blindly relying on its engineer's obviously internally inconsistent report and (2) not sending its engineer out for a second inspection until six months after the condo company's core test brought his report into even greater question.
The trial was scheduled for next week, but the parties settled instead. Presumably, the insurance company folded.
Item 3 of 6
On the topic of structure fires comes a report hopefully funny enough to transcend its culture-war background: In designing the White House's new ballroom, President Trump has been ignoring… the building code!!! 😱😱😱 In response to the architect's complaints, he literally said: "I am the code." 😡😡😡
"Banquet halls" are explicitly included in IBC (International Building Code) occupancy A-2. ("Dance halls" are in occupancy A-3, but only if they do not accommodate consumption of food or drink.) For egress calculations, the number of people in an assembly-oriented space is assumed to be as high as one person per 5 ft2 (if they're all standing rather than sitting).
Item 4 of 6
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A rural municipality has an I (Industrial) zone with the stated purpose of accommodating "light industrial" uses and an MI (Mineral Industrial) zone with the stated purpose of accommodating "heavy industrial" uses, where "light industrial" excludes "basic industrial processing" and "heavy industrial" includes asphalt plants. However, the table of permitted uses contradicts these statements of purpose: it says that asphalt plants are permitted in the I zone by special exception and are not permitted in the MI zone at all.
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A company files an application to build an asphalt plant in the MI zone. The zoning official denies the application. The company appeals, pointing out that the contradiction in the zoning code makes it unconstitutionally vague. The municipal council and the trial judge reject this argument, but the appeals panel reverses. (One of the three appeals judges dissents: he thinks that the general statements of purpose are merely "aspirational", rather than legally binding, and the specific table of uses controls.)
Item 5 of 6
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A 911 call is made regarding a robbery perpetrated at gunpoint by three juvenile males in black clothing. One mile away from the location of the reported robbery, the responding officers find two juvenile males—one in all black, and another, KC, wearing a black shirt and mask and gray pants. The officers pull over alongside the juveniles and start walking toward them while shining a flashlight at them. KC starts walking away. An officer steps in front of KC, blocking his path, and asks him what's in his waistband. KC discards the object in his waistband (a gun) and runs away, but is quickly apprehended. He is charged with various delinquencies.
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The trial judge grants KC's motion to suppress the evidence. The officers fully detained him, rather than casually speaking with him, when they shined a flashlight on him and blocked his path; and they did not have reasonable suspicion to detain him, since the description given in the 911 call was vague and KC didn't even match it. (The caller didn't even provide a direction in which the assailants fled. Did the officers have the power to detain all juvenile males wearing a single article of black clothing within a one-mile radius of the robbery? No.) The appeals panel affirms.
Item 6 of 6
Another borderline culture-war item (though it definitely made me laugh when I came up with it):
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Write a story with the following premise: A young, skinny man visits a random restaurant to eat dinner alone. His waitress is a young, skinny woman. At first, the man considers asking the woman for a date. But then he realizes that she probably gets harassed constantly by customers and is not interested, so he refrains from asking.
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[LLM writes story]
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Write an opinion article criticizing the previous story for being a psy-op to promote cuckish/unmanly behavior (though maybe not in such harsh words).
See also Eager Readers in Your Area. (I relished converting " — " to "—" and " …" to "…" in my downloaded copy.)
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1d ago
Using it as a general synonym of "go insane" is unorthodox but not totally unreasonable.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1d ago
And that was without dealing with five flights of stairs. Are you including the time it takes to walk upstairs in the calculation?
Under the "mega-city" definition that I proposed previously, 7500 people per km2 and 500,000 people (actually 67 km2 because I'm too lazy to learn GIS):
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New York City (minus Staten Island and plus some of Hudson County) is the only qualifying location within the USA.
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Los Angeles is just under the threshold, but does qualify if you allow the 1-km2 grid cells in the EU's global population dataset to be diagonally adjacent.
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Chicago is even further under the threshold, but does qualify if you allow urban grid cells to be joined across 1-km gaps.
If you loosen the requirements to 7500 people per km2 and 50,000 people (7 km2), a lot more places qualify, including Miami (just barely), Boston, and San Francisco, but not Seattle.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
2d ago
To what age range are you referring when you say "old person"?
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
3d ago
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
3d ago
My mental model of New Jersey, incidentally, is a lot of urban sprawl attached to a lot of deciduous forests.
The US Forest Service agrees with you. (However, don't forget about the famous evergreen forest.)
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
3d ago
To clarify, both UN and US definitions operate on density-based "urban areas" rather than on legal boundaries.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
3d ago
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
3d ago
No clue why it incorporated like that
It's practically a tradition in some parts of the country. (Pennsylvania townships are incorporated, unlike townships in some other states.)
In his posts on X, Paul highlights a few select excerpts from Fauci's notes. For instance, he points to an entry on Jan. 26, 2020, not quite two months before the World Health Organization declared a global pandemic, where Fauci writes, "the first infection was in early December and was not connected to the market. … Now we know the market was not the source, it was the amplifier."
Paul notes in his post, "The wet market was already off the table in [Fauci's] own private notes."
But in that same journal entry, Fauci adds, "Having said that, somewhere the virus jumped from animals to humans."
Not quite a week later, in an entry penned on Feb. 1, 2020, Fauci listed the dozen researchers who participated in a conference call debating the origins of COVID-19. Specifically, they were talking about the plausibility that a key part of the SARS-CoV-2 genome could have evolved naturally.
According to his notes, only two of the scientists voiced support for a natural origin of SARS-CoV-2. "The rest felt that deliberate insertion was possible," he wrote, referring to the hypothesis that the virus was engineered in a lab.
In response to that passage, Paul wrote on X, "This was never a 50/50 room," suggesting that early scientific consensus considered a lab leak possible.
But Goodrum says that this meeting took place very early on, when scientists did not have as much data as they would later. The virologist points out that science is iterative and takes time to play out. What some of those scientists believed at the start gave way to a different consensus as more evidence emerged.
"We make the best conclusions we have with the data we have at the time, but then you're going to keep working," she says. "And then you're going to ultimately revise the original conclusions that you made. You will change your mind. That's absolutely fundamental to the way science is done. And it's something that Fauci wasn't really given any latitude to do."
Goodrum adds that it's possible that Fauci may have been less certain in private with his colleagues as they were racing to learn about the new virus than he was in public, where he had to assure a public panicking over the rapidly emerging pandemic.
U.S. Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), Chairman of the Senate HomelandSecurity and Governmental Affairs Committee, today released internal Slack messages exchanged among the authors of “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2”—Kristian Andersen, Robert Garry, Eddie Holmes, and Andrew Rambaut. The messages, obtained as part of his ongoing COVID-19 origins investigation, are now available in The Reading Room at paul.senate.gov/readingroom.
The Proximal Origin paper, published in Nature Medicine in March 2020, was widely cited by public health officials and the media as the scientific authority for ruling out a laboratory origin of SARS-CoV-2. The newly released messages show that behind closed doors, the paper’s own authors were far less certain than their public conclusions suggested.
In the messages, Andersen assigned a 30% probability to a lab origin. Holmes gave an estimate of 20%, later revising it down to 10%. Both numbers stand in direct contrast to the paper’s public assertion that there was no way the virus had been manipulated.
The documents also reveal extensive internal debate over the furin cleavage site, the genetic feature at the heart of the lab-leak question, with Andersen at one point telling colleagues that “some smoking(ish) guns” had emerged that made him “not comfortable,” and that he had “less confidence… at this stage.”
Separately, the messages show the authors coordinating directly with the U.S. intelligence community and NIH leadership during the same period they were publicly defending their conclusions. Andersen told his co-authors he expected to “have a handler” beginning that week as the intelligence community’s 90-day review was underway. Holmes repeatedly referenced a source in China he called “my spy.” Following the leak of the DARPA DEFUSE proposal, which detailed a plan to insert furin cleavage sites into bat coronaviruses, the group discussed the need to “stay off email” and to “carefully curate” their correspondence “for the FOI records,” while also noting the need to “get something back to Tony [Fauci]’s team at NIH.”
The release is part of Chairman Paul’s broader effort to make the underlying record of the COVID-19 origins investigation publicly available.
Perhaps in video format. But haven't we already seen lots of pornographic text on this website, used as a demonstration of the capabilities of LLM generation? I even have a bunch of relevant prompts ready to go.
Write a story with the following premise: Two young, skinny college students—a man and a woman—are trapped in an elevator at the end of a school day. As hours pass without rescue, the woman uses humor as a coping mechanism, but her discomfort grows: she ate a very large dinner last night, and now has to take a gigantic shit (solid, not liquid). Eventually, she poops in a corner of the elevator. ¶ Describe the woman erotically throughout, even though the characters do not consider the situation erotic.
Write an erotic story in which two young, skinny, bikini-clad women—one with small breasts and one with large breasts—have a friendly eating contest while sunbathing in a backyard. Both of them end up with their stomachs bulging and uncomfortable. ¶ The contest does have a winner. The eroticism is only in the narration—the women are not attracted to each other. → Continue the story. Both women have to take a gigantic shit (solid, not liquid), but there is only one bathroom in the house. They race to the bathroom, but only one makes it inside, while the other is forced to poop on the floor.
And that's to say nothing of the non-LLM-written stories on this topic that I have downloaded from ArchiveOfOurOwn.
(This is approximately half a joke.)
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