ToaKraka
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User ID: 108
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
9d ago
Yes, at age 31 I have fucked exactly zero hawt gurls. Unfortunately, the rumors of magical wizard powers are greatly exaggerated. (I may spend five kilodollars on a trip to the brothels of Australia after I retire two years from now, but I probably will not be able to justify that expense.)
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
9d ago
I think his account is perfectly reasonable. I personally was not aware of the huge strength differences between men and women until around age 25, when I stumbled across this transcript of a Senate hearing on the topic of adding women to combat units in the US armed forces. I watched exactly zero sports on television.
Did his school never do the Presidential fitness tests?
I don't think my high school did.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
11d ago
Associated Press: UN judge from Uganda is convicted in the UK of forcing a woman into slavery
A British jury on Thursday convicted a United Nations judge of forcing a young woman to work as a slave after tricking her into coming to the U.K.
Prosecutors said Lydia Mugambe made the Ugandan woman work as her maid and provide childcare for free.
Mugambe, who is also a high court judge in Uganda, was studying for a doctorate in law at the University of Oxford when the offenses occurred. According to her United Nations profile page, she was appointed to one of the global body’s international courts in May 2023.
Prosecution lawyer Caroline Haughey told jurors during the trial that Mugambe “exploited and abused” the victim, deceiving her into coming to the U.K. and taking advantage of her lack of understanding of her rights.
Prosecutors said Mugambe arranged for a contact in the Ugandan High Commission in London to get the woman a visa, under the guise that she would be working in the household and office of the diplomat. Once she arrived in Britain, she was taken to Mugambe’s home and made to work as an unpaid nanny. Her passport and visa document were taken away from her.
The victim eventually sought help from a friend, which led to police becoming involved.
Mugambe, 49, denied the charges. Jurors at Oxford Crown Court convicted her on all four charges she faced, including an immigration offense, forcing someone to work and conspiracy to intimidate a witness.
There were gasps from the public gallery as the verdicts were read out, and the court was cleared after Mugambe appeared unwell. She is due to be sentenced on May 2.
“Lydia Mugambe used her position to exploit a vulnerable young woman, controlling her freedom and making her work without payment,” said Eran Cutliffe of the Crown Prosecution Service’s Special Crime Division. “Thanks to the victim’s courage in coming forward it has been possible to bring Ms. Mugambe to justice and be held accountable for her actions.”
Reuters: Ugandan UN judge convicted in Britain after 'slavery' trial
Lydia Mugambe was appointed in 2023 to be a judge of the U.N. International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals, which performs functions of previous tribunals relating to war crimes committed in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
13d ago
The Canadian territories are too small in terms of population to be reasonable states. The three Canadian territories combined have only 130,000 people, despite their huge land area. That's significantly fewer than the least populous Canadian province's 180,000 people, and far fewer than the least populous US state's 590,000 people.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
13d ago
Prosecutorial discretion is a bad thing. If all laws were enforced to the hilt 100 percent of the time, then legislators would be very quickly incentivized by public outcry to make the definitions and the penalties for those crimes more reasonable.
ToaKraka
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14d ago
Crystal Cafe is the female (femcel?) equivalent to 4chan's /r9k/ (incel?) board.
ToaKraka
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14d ago
So am I. You don't need to be a lawyer in order to find interesting court opinions.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
14d ago
an outsider like me
Feel free to post opinions from your own country's judicial system.
ToaKraka
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14d ago
Some renewed life has also been breathed into the idea of a CANZUK confederation.
The leader of the UK Liberal Democrats, Ed Davey, has publicly endorsed CANZUK in a recent newspaper column.
Following the resignation of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, four candidates have emerged to become the next leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, with two of the candidates [Carney and Baylis] resoundingly endorsing CANZUK during a televised leadership debate.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
14d ago
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Elizabeth is driving a 2016 Honda CR-V at 50 miles per hour on a two-lane undivided road. She drifts over the centerline and hits an oncoming car, driven by Ann. Both Elizabeth and Ann are killed in the crash. Ann's estate sues Elizabeth's estate, and presumably extracts a large settlement.
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Ann's estate also sues Honda. The estate's theory is that the CR-V counts as an unsafe vehicle, making Honda liable for the crash, because Honda failed to make "lane-departure warning" and "lane-keeping assist" technologies standard rather than optional in that vehicle.
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The trial judge rejects this argument and dismisses the case, and the appeals panel affirms. A manufacturer does not have a duty to install every available safety-enhancing technology. The base 2016 CR-V has a steering system sufficient to enable the motorist to keep the vehicle in its lane, so it counts as "safe".
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
15d ago
According to Wikipedia, this decentralization was instituted by Deng Xiaoping back in the 1980s. Quoting various books published since 2008:
The governance of China is characterized by a high degree of political centralization but significant economic decentralization. Policy instruments or processes are often tested locally before being applied more widely, resulting in a policy that involves experimentation and feedback. Generally, central government leadership refrains from drafting specific policies, instead using the informal networks and site visits to affirm or suggest changes to the direction of local policy experiments or pilot programs. The typical approach is that central government leadership begins drafting formal policies, law, or regulations after policy has been developed at local levels.
After [Deng's] economic reform, China has been characterized by a high degree of political centralization but significant economic decentralization. The central government sets the strategic direction while local officials carry it out, including developing the details of policy.
Laboratories of <del>democracy</del> <ins>socialism with Chinese characteristics</ins>
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
15d ago
They do not automatically see all comments. Click the "report" button and wait (at least several hours) for them to show up.
The other commenter's opinion is that all "universal injunctions" issued by district judges are insane. See Justice Gorsuch's views on the topic.
It has become increasingly apparent that this Court must, at some point, confront these important objections to this increasingly widespread practice. As the brief and furious history of the regulation before us illustrates, the routine issuance of universal injunctions is patently unworkable, sowing chaos for litigants, the government, courts, and all those affected by these conflicting decisions. Rather than spending their time methodically developing arguments and evidence in cases limited to the parties at hand, both sides have been forced to rush from one preliminary injunction hearing to another, leaping from one emergency stay application to the next, each with potentially nationwide stakes, and all based on expedited briefing and little opportunity for the adversarial testing of evidence.
Sure they’re not a state in the sense of a flag, national anthem, and Olympic team, but on the other hand by such a measure neither is Palestine, Islamic State, Tibet, or Transnistria.
Definition of "state" under the Montevideo Convention:
The state as a person of international law should possess the following qualifications: (a) a permanent population; (b) a defined territory; (c) government; and (d) capacity to enter into relations with the other states.
Using that definition, Wikipedia includes Palestine and Transnistria in its list of sovereign states. The Islamic State and the cartels fail item b, while Tibet fails item d. (On the same page, Wikipedia does explicitly note that Palestine "has no agreed territorial borders", so one could argue that it fails item b as well.)
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
19d ago
The original version of the first link pointed to an unintended location (which apparently varied depending on who clicked on it) because it included multiple tildes, which were misinterpreted as strikethrough formatting by this website's broken formatter.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
19d ago
I figured it out. The first link points to an unintended location because it includes multiple tildes, which are misinterpreted as strikethrough formatting by this website's broken formatter.
tfw your fellow forum-dweller posts a road that you have walked down multiple times as a "pretty good example" of an "ugly" "'stroad'"
On a serious note, I think you mixed up your links, as the first one and the second one are not in the same area.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
21d ago
I am waiting for somebody to make a video game in which the player designs a country's mail-distribution system, including the placement of sorting facilities.
ToaKraka
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21d ago
Srpska is trying to secede from Bosnia.
The parliament of the autonomous Serb Republic was discussing on Thursday the draft of a new constitution that would equip the region with sovereign authority. It also provides for the creation of a separate Serb army and judiciary, as well as the right to self-determination and to join other state unions. [Srpska president] Dodik favours joining neighbouring Serbia.
Bosnia has been made up of the Bosniak–Croat Federation and the Serb Republic since the end of the 1992–95 war, in which 100,000 people were killed. They are linked by a weak central government in a state supervised by an international envoy whose role is to prevent the country slipping back into conflict.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
21d ago
General Tso's chicken/orange chicken is one of my favorite meals.
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A person is charged with felony drunk driving. Since he was also convicted of drunk driving within the past five years, his driving license is immediately suspended pending trial, and hardship reinstatement of that license is unavailable.
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Two months later, the defendant is scheduled to have a hearing. As the judge is walking into the courthouse, he personally observes the defendant drive his car into the courthouse's parking lot, get out, and walk into the courthouse.
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Accordingly, at the hearing a few minutes later, the judge finds the defendant to be in contempt of court. The defendant's complaint that he has already spent more than a kilodollar on ride-hailing services is unavailing. (The penalty will be deternined later.)
You probably are aware that the typical address in the United States consists of a street and a number on that street, with the numbers ascending as you progress along the street, and with odd numbers on one side of the street and even numbers on the other side. A typical address might be "123 Main Street". In contrast, Japan uses a different system, in which most streets have no names, and municipalities instead are recursively subdivided into smaller areas. Wikipedia's example is "2-7-2 Marunouchi, Chiyoda-ku", or in big-endian format "ward Chiyoda area Marunouchi district 2 block 7 address 2". (Compare the programming concept of recursively subdividing an area into ever-smaller pieces as a quadtree.)
Unlike the rest of the US, the US Virgin Islands (a former Danish possession in the Caribbean, inhabited by just 87,000 people as of 2020) uses a simple version of the Japan-style address system! Most streets have no names, and instead the three islands are divided into districts called "estates". A typical address might be "123 Richmond Estate".
Since around 2009, the USVI government has been executing a "Street Addressing Initiative", which will assign names to all the streets and convert the islands to the normal US system of street-based addressing. According to the 2-M$ contract for the "final phase", the project will finally be completed in March 2028.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
22d ago
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
23d ago
Report of the Isthmian Canal Commission for 1899–1901 pp. 69–70:
The Tehuantepec summit is in the neighborhood of 700 feet above tide water. It is, moreover, a broad summit which cannot be materially lowered by any excavation of practicable dimensions. It is doubtful whether a water supply can be found for a summit level. It would require 20 locks of an average lift of nearly 35 feet on each side of the summit. The cost of these locks alone, on the basis of the estimates considered in another chapter of this report, would be about $200,000,000, while the canal would probably at least double this estimate. Attractive as the Tehuantepec route is from its geographical location, it must be discarded as impracticable for a canal.
That's 400 M$ for the Tehuantepec route, versus 190 M$ for the Nicaragua route and 180 M$ for the Panama route (pages 261–262). (To convert to 2025 dollars, multiply by 37—so, 15 G$ vs. 7.0 G$ and 6.7 G$.)
Note: Waltz (Michael) ≠ Walz (Timothy)
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