ToaKraka
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User ID: 108
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
19d ago
In reading court opinions, it is routine to see sentences like "15 years with a 7.5-year parole bar", "16 years with the possibility of parole after 8 years", or "5 to 10 years".
Today, I was somewhat surprised to learn that parole is, not the exception, but the norm. According to federal statistics, the typical state prisoner serves only 44 percent of the sentence nominally imposed.
Do the illustrious lawyer denizens of this website have an opinion on this? Should a sentence of "16 years with the possibility of parole after 8 years of good behavior" be rephrased to "8 years with the possibility of extension to 16 years upon bad behavior", to avoid confusion?
ToaKraka
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19d ago
My mother has repeatedly told me and my brother that she wants us to cremate her cheaply rather than wasting thousands of dollars on an expensive burial and funeral. I see no reason to deviate from that course of action—though, really, it doesn't matter, since I'll be dead.
IMO, much more interesting than funeral plans are inheritance plans. I've been thinking that a cool way to divide up an inheritance would be to multiply each heir's share in proportion to the product of the square of his age and the square of his life expectancy. This would direct more money toward middle-aged heirs, in preference to (1) elderly heirs who already have enough money and will squander any new windfall and (2) child heirs whose money will be squandered by their parents.
My own will essentially follows the default for intestate succession, with a few changes:
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The idea described in the previous paragraph is implemented
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My brother is elevated to the same tier as my parents
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"Per capita at each generation" is reverted to "per stirpes", which IMO makes much more sense
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A parent or brother who has changed his name does not inherit (really just a backdoor way of ensuring that anyone so estranged that I don't even know his new name does not inherit)
ToaKraka
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22d ago
weird double-parens-looking symbols
Reuters: Diwali celebrations hit air quality in New Delhi
New Delhi topped charts on Friday as the world's most polluted city after revellers defying a ban on firecrackers to celebrate Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights, helped drive air quality to hazardous levels.
Thick smog wreathed the Indian capital, shrouding the presidential palace in the central district and the surrounding gardens popular with joggers and cyclists, after Thursday's celebrations.
Local government officials have banned use of firecrackers during Diwali and the winter over the last few years, in line with Supreme Court directives, but have had difficulty enforcing the measure despite the threat of jail.
In New Jersey, the posting of celebratory swastikas by Indian immigrants is causing some confusion.
After the Montville Township Police Department received a few phone calls about swastika sightings in October, it posted on Facebook to explain why.
The reason? Diwali.
"With Diwali coming up this October, I want the residents and citizens to be aware that a common symbol of this holiday is a Diwali swastika," the Oct. 16 post read. "...This post is in light of our police department already fielding calls regarding people seeing this symbol on cars and houses. We are trying to eliminate any unwarranted hostility toward any person displaying this for their religious purposes."
ToaKraka
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26d ago
Reuters article to flesh out this low-effort comment
Political leaders from both sides of the aisle and Puerto Rican celebrities bashed comments at a major Donald Trump event in New York by a comedian who called Puerto Rico a "floating island of garbage."
Speaking before the Republican presidential candidate at a rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday night, comedian and podcast host Tony Hinchcliffe added that Latinos "love making babies" and that they do not "pull out," comments that leaned into a racist trope that Latinos are preoccupied with childbearing and averse to birth control.
"There's literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now," Hinchcliffe said. "I think it's called Puerto Rico."
The presidential campaign of Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris, Democrats, several prominent Puerto Rican celebrities and some congressional Republicans denounced the comments, which were widely panned as racist.
The Trump campaign itself said the comments do not "reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign." Trump himself has not commented on Hinchcliffe's performance.
it's mostly relevant in the sense of highlighting retroreflectors
IIHS's rationale document (page 4) states that the intended target of illumination is low-contrast objects, not retroreflective objects.
ToaKraka
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27d ago
I personally rarely drive in places where I have 70+ meters of unlighted space in front of me
I personally drive in such conditions regularly. Two weeks ago, I only narrowly avoided hitting a deer that was calmly standing in the middle of a three-lane, nominally-50-mi/h (actually-60-mi/h) highway, which is what prompted me to investigate this topic in the first place.
ToaKraka
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27d ago
White people's homeland is not America
For how many years must a people inhabit a location before that location counts as that people's "homeland"? I'm thinking that a timespan of 200 years sounds quite reasonable. Even 100 years or 50 years could be argued for.
ToaKraka
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27d ago
Why are you driving with your brights on?
It is mentioned in the IIHS article linked above that high beams are supposed to be used on roads with hardly any traffic.
Researchers from IIHS and the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute found that drivers in and around Ann Arbor, Mich., didn’t use their high beams enough. Only 18% of drivers who were isolated enough to make use of their high beams did so.
you can't buy a non-lifted hatchback
*laughs in Mitsubishi Mirage*
But, seriously, there are tons of non-lifted hatchbacks on the market.
ToaKraka
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28d ago
TIL: According to IIHS (the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety), the stock headlights on many cars are inadequate. For example, the popular Honda Fit hatchback has headlights that are only "marginal" (2 stars out of 4) or "poor" (1 star), depending on trim. (Several different measurements go into the overall rating. Speaking very roughly, though, IIHS wants to see illumination of 5 lux out to a distance of 100 meters, while the Fit's headlights achieved that illumination only out to 72.4 meters.)
Headlight bulbs that are much brighter than stock while still remaining in compliance with laws regarding off-center glare (unlike some LEDs) are available for a few dollars from various sources—e. g., RockAuto. Note that illumination distance increases with the square root of brightness: 1 lux of illumination is 1 lumen of brightness per meter squared. For example, multiplying brightness by 2.3 will multiply illumination distance by only 1.5—but that's enough to bring the Fit up to IIHS's standards (from 72.4 meters to 110 meters).
ToaKraka
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30d ago
A plumber whose work catastrophically fails in six months will be sued and will go out of business.
ToaKraka
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1mo ago
Typographical and English errors in judicial opinions can be somewhat funny to read—or, alternatively, somewhat worrying.
ToaKraka
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1mo ago
Personally, I always click once on the upvote button (turning it to a pale blue color that's barely distinguishable from the default gray) and then once on the comment itself (turning the upvote button from barely-visible pale blue to very-visible dark blue).
ToaKraka
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1mo ago
Misspelling of BDS (boycott, divest from, and sanction [Israel])
ToaKraka
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1mo ago
ToaKraka
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1mo ago
To format a poetic stanza properly in Markdown, you need to type two spaces at the end of each line.
This court opinion provides a very interesting summary of what liability a department of transportation has (at least in Pennsylvania) when a motorist is injured by a falling (not fallen) tree or tree branch.
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Snyder v. Harmon (1989): Adjacent to a state highway, outside the DOT's right of way, there is a deep mining pit. After getting into a crash on the highway, four motorists walk off of the highway, fall into the pit, and suffer severe injuries. Is the DOT liable for failing to install lighting, barriers, or guide rail in front of the pit? No, because the pit was not on DOT property, which is required by the state law that waives the default sovereign immunity in certain situations.
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Patton v. PennDOT (1996): Adjacent to a state highway, inside the DOT's right of way, there is a tree. A branch falls from the tree and kills a motorist. Is the DOT liable for failing to trim the branch? Yes, because the tree was on DOT property.
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Marker v. PennDOT (1996): Adjacent to a state highway, outside the DOT's right of way, there is a steep upward slope. A tree growing in the slope uproots itself, falls off of the slope, and kills a motorist. Is the DOT liable for building a highway underneath a steep slope? No, because neither the tree nor the slope was on DOT property.
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Clark v. PennDOT (2008): Adjacent to a state highway, outside the DOT's right of way, there is a tree. A branch of the tree overhangs the road. The tree—not just the branch, but the entire tree—falls onto the road, and a motorist is severely injured by the trunk. Is the DOT liable for failing to cut down the tree, especially when (1) the DOT's maintenance manual says that trees like this should be investigated and (2) the DOT was specifically informed of the branch by a concerned local before the injury? No, because the tree was not on DOT property. The existence of an overhanging branch is not relevant to this determination, since the motorist was injured by the trunk, not by the branch.
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Schmidt v. PennDOT (2024—the PDF linked above): Adjacent to a state highway, outside the DOT's right of way, there is a tree. A branch of the tree overhangs the road. The branch falls and kills a motorist. Is the DOT liable for failing to trim the branch? No, because the tree was not on DOT property. Under longstanding principles of property law, if a branch overhangs DOT property, then the DOT does gain the right to trim the branch, but does not gain actual ownership of the branch, so the injury was not caused by a dangerous condition of DOT property.
abortion views are relatively balanced between the two sexes (at least when compressed to one axis)
Source? According to Gallup, the pro-abortion side includes 63 percent of women but only 45 percent of men.
ToaKraka
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1mo ago
Day-to-day expenses are already about as low as they'll get
You may still want to double-check against the numbers published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics—specifically, the "gross income less than 15 k$/a" column in the "size of consumer unit by income before taxes" table. (Note that these numbers were gathered in the 2022–2023 period, so they should be multiplied by something like 5.2 percent to account for inflation from January 2023 to today.)
ToaKraka
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1mo ago
One example of the requirements is offered by New Jersey Statutes title 17 chapter 46B. (Different states will have different requirements.) Right at the top, there's a minimum capital requirement of 750 k$.
ToaKraka
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1mo ago
The tentative agreement is for a wage hike of around 62% over six years, Reuters was told by two sources familiar with the matter, including a worker on the picket line who heard the announcement. That would raise average wages from $39 an hour to about $63 an hour over the life of the contract.
The International Longshoremen's Association (ILA) workers union had been seeking a 77% raise while the employer group—United States Maritime Alliance (USMX)—had previously raised its offer to a nearly 50% hike.
ToaKraka
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1mo ago
In an ideal world, a strong President would use Taft-Hartley and break the union much like Reagan broke the aircraft traffic controllers.
Or the existing exemption of unions from antitrust laws (1 2) could be eliminated. (Or, if we're talking pie-in-the-sky, the antitrust laws could be eliminated entirely. But "your rules enforced fairly" would be quicker than "my rules".)
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.)
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