ToaKraka
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User ID: 108
More comprehensive tl;dr (text of decision):
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A grand jury is led by the county prosecutor to indict Smollett on 16 counts of felony disorderly conduct (false police reports).
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The county prosecutor recuses herself and appoints an assistant county prosecutor to replace her in this case as "acting county prosecutor". The assistant county prosecutor decides to drop the case (nolle prosequi) in exchange for 10 k$ of restitution (less than 10 percent of the overtime pay spent by the Chicago police on investigating this case) and 15 hours of community service, all of which Smollett has already provided. Smollett will not even be required to admit guilt.
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A third party moves to disregard the assistant county prosecutor's actions and appoint a special prosecutor. The third party argues that, when the county prosecutor recused herself, she was required by law to appoint a special prosecutor in her stead, and had no authority to appoint an assistant county prosecutor to the nonexistent position of "acting county prosecutor". The trial judge agrees and appoints a special prosecutor.
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A new grand jury is led by the special prosecutor to indict Smollett on six counts of felony disorderly conduct. Smollett moves to dismiss the indictment, arguing that starting a new prosecution after entering into a nonprosecution agreement of which the defendant held up his end is a violation of the constitutional prohibition of double jeopardy. The trial judge denies the motion. A nolle prosequi is presumed to be a unilateral and non-final decision rather than a formal nonprosecution agreement (dismissal with prejudice) that triggers double jeopardy if reneged upon (like what Bill Cosby received in Pennsylvania), and in this case there is not enough evidence of a bilateral agreement to overcome that presumption. Smollett is convicted on five of the six counts, and is sentenced to 5 months of county jail, 25 months of probation, 25 k$ of fines, and 120 k$ of restitution (the aforementioned overtime pay). A majority of the appeals panel affirms the trial judge's analysis.
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The Illinois Supreme Court unanimously reverses. (1) In this case, from the wording that the assistant county prosecutor used, it is apparent that a bilateral agreement had been reached between the assistant county prosecutor and Smollett, and that the parties intended the agreement to be final. Under these circumstances, the fact that the charges technically were merely nolle prosequied rather than being dismissed with prejudice does not matter. Call it a "bilateral nolle prosequi". (2) Smollett himself never argued that the assistant county prosecutor's appointment was unlawful. Rather, he relied on the idea that the appointment was lawful in obtaining the bilateral nolle prosequi. Therefore, the third party was not entitled to suggest that the appointment was unlawful in order to cancel Smollett's bilateral nolle prosequi.
We are aware that this case has generated significant public interest and that many people were dissatisfied with the resolution of the original case and believed it to be unjust. Nevertheless, what would be more unjust than the resolution of any one criminal case would be a holding from this court that the State was not bound to honor agreements upon which people have detrimentally relied. As the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania recently stated [in the Bill Cosby case] when enforcing a prosecutorial promise not to prosecute:
It cannot be gainsaid that society holds a strong interest in the prosecution of crimes. It is also true that no such interest, however important, ever can eclipse society’s interest in ensuring that the constitutional rights of the people are vindicated. Society’s interest in prosecution does not displace the remedy due to constitutionally aggrieved persons.
That court further noted the consequences of failing to enforce prosecutorial promises when a defendant has relied on them to his detriment:
A contrary result would be patently untenable. It would violate long-cherished principles of fundamental fairness. It would be antithetical to, and corrosive of, the integrity and functionality of the criminal justice system that we strive to maintain.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
2d ago
In some parks, I have seen benches dedicated to dead people. Why not put one in your own backyard?
As a starting point, Uline offers various park benches and picnic tables for well under 1 k$. I don't know whether that counts as "heirloom quality".
ToaKraka
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3d ago
The installation instructions:
Installing Miniflux is straightforward if you have some basic system administration knowledge.
There actually aren't any instructions for installing on Windows.
& Tilde;test& Tilde; (without the spaces, case-sensitive) → ∼test∼
Also, & approx; → ≈
HTML named character references are supported by Markdown.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
6d ago
In the purest form of libertarianism, the child would decide everything for himself.
I feel obligated to point out that, according to one prominent libertarian, under an ideal libertarian framework (1) the parent would have absolute authority over the child, but (2) the child would have the option to assert self-ownership and emancipate himself at any time by leaving the parent's household.
ToaKraka
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6d ago
I think the previous commenter was specifically talking about "gravity" as a tip, not acceptance by a business.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
7d ago
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1/4-ounce platinum coin ≈ 250 $
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1/2-ounce platinum coin ≈ 500 $
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1-ounce platinum coin ≈ 1 k$
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1-ounce gold coin ≈ 2.5 k$
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
7d ago
There are degrees of "Ship of Theseus-ing".
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The original version: Hundreds of pieces are replaced one by one over many years, with physical continuity above 99 percent at each replacement
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The grandfather's-ax version: Just two or three pieces are replaced one at a time, with physical continuity of only one-half or two-thirds at each replacement
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This Japanese version: The entire edifice is destroyed and remade all at once, with no physical continuity at all
ToaKraka
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8d ago
ToaKraka
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11d ago
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
11d ago
I don't have any data to argue against you with, though
Several studies that argue against your viewpoint are cited in "Folk Economics and the Persistence of Political Opposition to New Housing".
Activists and local officials who oppose new market-rate housing projects in expensive cities often insist that such projects benefit only the rich and “Wall Street”1, notwithstanding compelling empirical evidence that new construction in expensive places opens up housing and dampens prices in more affordable segments of the regional market2,3,4,5,6. The anti-development elites may have chosen their rhetoric to appeal to beliefs that were already widely held. Several previous studies document a tendency toward “folk economic” thinking in the mass public: markets and politics alike are seen as venues in which groups jostle for advantage and try to cheat one another rather than trade or collaborate for mutual advantage7,8,9. It is not yet known whether the mass public actually believes that a substantial increase in housing supply would fail to make housing more affordable. But, if such beliefs were prevalent, they might well undermine support for pro-housing policies.
2Rosenthal, Stuart S. 2014. “Are Private Markets and Filtering a Viable Source of Low-Income Housing? Estimates From a 'Repeat Income' Model”. American Economic Review 104(2):687–706. [paywalled; non-paywalled preliminary version]
8Rubin, Paul H. 2003. “Folk Economics”. Southern Economic Journal 70(1):157–171.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
11d ago
I’m sure if Trump actually had a legally compelling case he would have already filed, but he hasn’t.
He actually did file two lawsuits recently.
In two complaints filed last week, Donald Trump contends that CBS and the Washington Post broke the law by covering the presidential election in ways he did not like. His arguments, which seek to punish the news outlets for constitutionally protected activity via legal theories that are fanciful at best, are consistent with Trump's long history of disregarding the First Amendment by treating speech that offends him as grounds for civil damages, regulatory sanctions, or even incarceration.
Trump's lawsuit against CBS seeks $10 billion in damages based on a 60 Minutes interview with Vice President Kamala Harris that he says was edited to make her seem smarter than she actually is. He claims the network's editing violated the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act (DTPA).
In another attempted end run around the First Amendment, Trump on Thursday filed with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) a complaint that accuses the Washington Post of making an illegal corporate campaign donation. The complaint cites a recent Semafor story about the Post's "paid advertising campaign" on social media, which it "aggressively ramped up" last Monday to promote "dozens of articles related to the election". Semafor noted that articles about Harris "were relatively neutral in tone," while the articles about Trump generally were more "critical".
ToaKraka
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12d ago
7 DEFEND OUR CONSTITUTION, OUR BILL OF RIGHTS, AND OUR FUNDAMENTAL FREEDOMS, INCLUDING FREEDOM OF SPEECH, FREEDOM OF RELIGION, AND THE RIGHT TO KEEP AND BEAR ARMS
95% chance, high confidence. I don't see freedoms/rights getting worse under Trump, personally.
Reason: "Neither Harris nor Trump Is a Friend of Free Speech"
If Trump had his way, flag burners would be jailed, purveyors of "fake news" would lose their broadcast licenses, and news outlets would have to pay him damages when their coverage strikes him as unfair.
ToaKraka
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12d ago
Prior to the trip, download the audio with yt-dlp and copy the files to your phone.
yt-dlp --format "bestaudio" --no-mtime --embed-thumbnail --embed-metadata --output "%(playlist_title)s (%(playlist_uploader)s)/%(playlist_index)s %(title)s.%(ext)s" --windows-filenames --prefer-free-formats [playlist URL]
I was imagining a CK2-ish game extending from the CK2 time period all the way through the V3 time period—like [insert one of the vaporware yet-to-be-released Paradox competitor games].
ToaKraka
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14d ago
CK2Wiki
The kingdoms of Bavaria and Austria as they existed in the Victoria 3 time period are more relevant for comparison to US states, IMO. I think those borders are essentially identical to today's borders.
population
But what about area? Personally, I feel that a useful statistic for comparing the "sizes" of geographic entities with significantly different population densities is the product of population and area.
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K. of Bavaria: 9.4⋅1011 people⋅km2
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K. of Austria: 7.6⋅1011 people⋅km2
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K. of Pennsylvania: 1.6⋅1012 people⋅km2
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K. of Virginia: 6.3⋅1011 people⋅km2
Also, what really matters is the inherent prestige of the title, not what the title actually controls. The ERE was an empire even when reduced to one province.
I think the US was a Kingdom-tier title at the time of the founding (given that it was plausible for the British Empire to vassalize it) and became an Empire in the usual way once it de facto controlled 80% of its de jure territory.
Well, we can imagine that the de jure map changes as population density skyrockets with the colonization of virgin land. Start with the sparsely-populated colonies as duchies, the Dominion of New England as a failed kingdom, and the USA as a successful kingdom. Then at some point (between EU4 and V3) population density becomes high enough that the states now are important enough to be considered kingdoms. The sea-to-shining-sea USA can be a hegemony, encompassing the empires of New England, the Mid-Atlantic, the South, the Midwest, Louisiana, and the West. (Or something vaguely similar to that.)
ToaKraka
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15d ago
It is worth pointing out that the Kingdom of Canada is still technically a vassal of the British Empire, so pressing the claim would mean with war with the top liege and all his vassals, which probably include nuclear Gandhi.
(1) It is somewhat interesting to note that Victoria 3 has introduced a new tier above empire, called "hegemony". (It reminds me of my abortive attempt to make a Crusader Kings 2 mod with all the titles shifted down by a step, so that "mega-empires" like India and Rome could be on their own tier separate from regular empires like Bengal and Italy.) In-game, India is a hegemony, Britain is an empire, and Canada is a kingdom. Personally, though, I think it makes more sense to call Canada an empire, with each province afforded the dignity of kingdom status in the federation. (The USA's states, with their tradition of "dual sovereignty", definitely should count as kingdoms.)
(2) Canada is not a vassal of Britain. Rather, the title is still personally held by Charles himself, though he has delegated the administrative minutiae to local steward Trudeau. Call it a personal union. (India does count as a vassal.)
Eight of nine high-quality studies examining other cognitive or neurodevelopmental outcomes reported associations with estimated fluoride exposure. Seventy-two studies assessed the association between fluoride exposure and IQ in children. Nineteen of those studies were considered to be high quality; of these, 18 reported an inverse association between estimated fluoride exposure and IQ in children. The 18 studies, which include 3 prospective cohort studies and 15 cross-sectional studies, were conducted in 5 different countries. Forty-six of the 53 low-quality studies in children also found evidence of an inverse association between estimated fluoride exposure and IQ in children.
Existing animal studies provide little insight into the question of whether fluoride exposure affects IQ. In addition, studies that evaluated fluoride exposure and mechanistic data in humans were too heterogenous and limited in number to make any determination on biological plausibility. The body of evidence from studies in adults is also limited and provides low confidence that fluoride exposure is associated with adverse effects on adult cognition. There is, however, a large body of evidence on associations between fluoride exposure and IQ in children. There is also some evidence that fluoride exposure is associated with other neurodevelopmental and cognitive effects in children; although, because of the heterogeneity of the outcomes, there is low confidence in the literature for these other effects. This review finds, with moderate confidence, that higher estimated fluoride exposures (e.g., as in approximations of exposure such as drinking water fluoride concentrations that exceed the World Health Organization Guidelines for Drinking-water Quality of 1.5 mg/L of fluoride) are consistently associated with lower IQ in children. More studies are needed to fully understand the potential for lower fluoride exposure to affect children’s IQ.
ToaKraka
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16d ago
ToaKraka
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16d ago
ToaKraka
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18d ago
According to the Uniform Probate Code's commentary, a survey showed that 71 percent of people prefer "per capita at each generation", while only 19 percent prefer "per stirpes". (9 percent prefer a third system that was used in older versions of the Uniform Probate Code but is not explained in the current code's commentary. I guess the remaining 1 percent prefer something else entirely.)
Which indentation style do you prefer?
IMO, Ratliff makes the most sense, because it's the only style that reduces the number of tabs after typing the closing brace, rather than before.
I find it disconcerting and nonsensical for the IDE to automatically delete a tab before the cursor when the user types a closing brace in non-Ratliff styles. Also, I'm not much of a programmer, but I imagine that writing a program to pretty-print code in non-Ratliff styles must be a major hassle, because it would force you to move the cursor backward and then forward again after finding every closing brace.
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