ToaKraka
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User ID: 108
ToaKraka
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14hr ago
I consider both of these to be prime examples of how the multiple reporting chains of public accounting firms really messes everything up. Firstly, you report to so many people that when one person doesn’t get tied into what you’re doing due to some breakdown in internal communication it ends up causing issues.
I have lined up for the Friday Fun Thread an article on how many subordinates each manager should have. But it is silent on the topic of how many managers each subordinate should have.
ToaKraka
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14hr ago
a partition action where he might not even be the high bidder
I was assuming that such a partition would work like the procedure laid out in the Uniform Partition of Heirs' Property Act, in which the judge orders an appraisal and the majority owner can buy out the objector at that price without any bidding. But obviously I am misunderstanding how partitions work.
ToaKraka
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16hr ago
the law provides that a single parcel of land is only entitled to a single vote
It does not.
ToaKraka
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17hr ago
That isn't how tenancy in common works. You own a 1/10,000 share of the entire 10,000-ft2 property, not a single 1-ft2 piece of that property.
ToaKraka
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17hr ago
I'm imagining a situation where one person owns an outright majority of the property and each of the other 9999 owns only a minuscule proportion, so that the majority owner has more than enough wealth on his own to conduct maintenance unilaterally and to thwart a partition action by buying out the objector.
ToaKraka
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18hr ago
Nothing obvious. But what would stop a natural person from splitting a property between 10,000 natural people in the same manner?
Bloomberg link to opinion
Non-Bloomberg, official link (though it's still one of those infuriating "secured" PDFs that forbid copying text out of them)
The Elections Clause of the Delaware Constitution states, in its entirety: "All elections shall be free and equal." The clause is eloquent in its simplicity but lacks specific direction in application.
Under Delaware's Home Rule statute for municipalities, the State of Delaware defines "qualified voters" to mean "those persons who, under the terms of a municipal charter, shall be authorized to vote in elections within that municipal corporation".
Laws enacted by the Delaware General Assembly, such as Fenwick's Charter, are presumed to be constitutional. To overcome this presumption of constitutionality, Plaintiff must provide "clear and convincing evidence" that there is no set of circumstances under which the contested status could be constitutional. Plaintiff argues that I should subject Fenwick's Charter to "strict scrutiny" review. However, Plaintiff framed its Complaint not as an equal protection or due process claim, but rather as a declaratory judgment action. Under Delaware law, courts apply a "sliding scale" in voting rights cases. Where the state's alleged burden on voting is not severe, the state's intervention need only have served a legitimate interest. Indeed, Delaware courts have found a rational basis for expanding the voting franchise.36
36See Dupont v. Mills; see also Del. Op. Atty. Gen. 09-IB05 (finding the precedent of cases applying rational basis test to nonresident vote dilution cases to be "overwhelming").
The Delaware General Assembly has expressly authorized, by way of charter, voting on behalf of entity property owners in several jurisdictions other than Fenwick.37 [Ditto for special elections of annexation in Wilmington.] While this is not dispositive of this case, it does show that the General Assembly's treatment of Fenwick is not unique, different, or unusual.
37See, e. g., Town of Henlopen Acres, City of Rehoboth Beach, Town of Dewey Beach.
Plaintiff's ultimate argument appears to be that voters who are human beings are being deprived of their rights, or at least having the impact of those voting rights diluted, by the votes of artificial entities—or, put more bluntly, such artificial entities should not be entitled to vote. In its Answering Brief, Plaintiff devotes a significant amount of its argument to emphasizing the words person, people, humans, citizens, popular, and the like. In my view, even if those words as used in statutes and cases are acknowledged to be people-centric or person-centric, that does not support a legal argument that the Elections Clause of the Delaware Constitution supports Plaintiff's expansion of traditional vote dilution law to encompass what it calls the "debasement" of "the right of human voters" through "artificial entity voting".
Trusts, partnerships, limited liability companies, and corporations are expressly recognized as "persons" in the Delaware Code.…
I need not rule in this case as to whether entity property owners are constitutionally required to have their votes count or constitutionally precluded from doing so. Rather, I need only rule whether Plaintiff has met its burden of providing clear and convincing evidence that there is no set of circumstances under which Fenwick's Charter, as adopted and amended by the Delaware General Assembly, could be constitutional. It has not.
I appreciate that Plaintiff may disagree with Delaware's policy of authorizing certain municipalities to allow voting on behalf of entity property owners. Visions of faceless large corporations, or even HAL, controlling a small town are frightening and the stuff of science fiction. However, plaintiff has not demonstrated that this policy violates the principle of one person/entity, one vote. Plaintiff points to no other persuasive independent authority than the Elections Clause of the Delaware Constitution itself. And matters of policy are appropriately left to legislative bodies, not the courts.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
21hr ago
I'm just not sure how far the word "consent" should be stretched.
(1) When I grant my consent to sex, I mean that I understand that this woman wants me to repeatedly insert my penis into her vagina until I achieve orgasm.
(2) …and subject me to a small but nonzero risk of disease, fatherhood, and child-support payments (as outlined by this stack of legal rulings).
(3) …and subject me to a small but nonzero risk of lasting psychological harm (as outlined by this stack of scientific studies).
(4) …and subject me to a small but nonzero risk of stigma as a statutory-rape victim.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
22hr ago
How did you manage to conclude that I didn't know what intercourse was?
You said:
In the moment, I didn't really know how to interpret anything and wasn't sure.
I wasn't fully sure about what was happening.
I was, mentally and spiritually, very much still a child who didn't exactly understand what was going on.
(posted before edit adding three additional sentences, but probably still partially a valid response)
ToaKraka
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23hr ago
Climate map of Washington State
There's a large amount of "cold semi-arid" in the vicinity of the Kennewick and Moses Lake urban areas, with a negligible patch of "cold desert" near the latter. However, satellite photographs indicate quite a lot of agriculture in that same area, so "cold semi-arid" possibly should not be considered to count as "desert".
It's hidden/removed. (IIRC, the moderators have said that all standalone posts are removed by default until approved.)
ToaKraka
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1d ago
To clarify, my mother used to make these boring-lump-of-dough dumplings, and she is from the hot Caribbean, where the houses need no central heating at all. So your theory does not explain the facts.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
2d ago
My Chinese coworker laughed at me when I told him about those.
But maybe if you have not started constructing your home yet you can widen the entire house just for the laundry door.
(1) Construction already is underway.
(2) The house already takes up the entire buildable width of the lot (34′2″ vs. 35′).
If you and your roommate live in the unit together, eventually someone will be exiting the laundry room at the same time someone is entering the home. Or someone will forget something in the house and step in quickly to retrieve it (keys, wallet, credit card, etc.) and not communicate the entry as normal to the other person, knocking him senseless in a rush.
I do not assign much probability to this hypothetical event. If you disagree, you can join the betting pool with @orthoxerox. (Come on! Are you people in the habit of opening opaque doors with all your strength? I certainly am not. People can be standing behind doors unbeknownst to you even if those doors don't swing into other doors.)
ToaKraka
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2d ago
"this spelling is wrong" (no, it's because I'm not American)
You can go into Word's spell-check settings and change it from American English to BritishNon-American English.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
2d ago
In this design, it is not intended that a bathroom will ever have both doors unlocked at the same time. Rather:
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99 percent of the time, each bathroom will be in "private mode", with the door to the living/dining room locked from the bathroom side.
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On the rare occasion that a guest is present, at least one bathroom will be in "guest mode", with the door to the bedroom locked from both sides.
Also, it's my understanding that sliding doors are very bad at blocking sounds and odors, so using them on bathrooms is ill-advised.
Regarding the laundry/utility-room door, I could have used a sliding door there, but I saw no reason to. IMO, having eight swinging doors is simpler than having seven swinging doors and one sliding door.
ToaKraka
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3d ago
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
3d ago
Q: We have the court file showing that your ill-fated high-school crush was on a girl, not on a boy.
A: If you have my court file, then you should know that that old crush was Indian as well, just like my husband.
A paper that I gave to an unrelated acquaintance (in which I fantasized about kidnapping the crush, trapping her in a cage of sonic stun guns, and making her play Scrabble with me) somehow fell into the hands of the school administration, was misinterpreted as a "terroristic threat" against the crush ("zero tolerance" for """guns""" even if they're nonlethal), and was reported to the police.
ToaKraka
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3d ago
I'm of the opinion that the current LLM hype is starting to hit the second knee of the S-curve, both financially and technically.
ToaKraka
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3d ago
My mother claims that I received a (now-technically-outdated) diagnosis of Asperger's syndrome at age 16 (as part of my defense against a frivolous criminal investigation). However, she doesn't actually have the records to back that claim up, and I personally do not recall being informed of any diagnosis at the time.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
4d ago
Flashback to ABC notation
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
5d ago
Someday, I will finally finish my bootleg HTML/EPUB version of For Want of a Nail (currently available for purchase only as a used physical book).
Mildly amusing spat between Greece and Turkey:
Convention Regarding the Regime of the Straits (1936-07-20)
Security Council, 10145th meeting (the safety and protection of waterways in the maritime domain), resumption 2 (2026-04-29)
Letter from the Permanent Representative of Türkiye to the United Nations addressed to the Secretary-General and the President of the Security Council (2026-05-08)
The minutes for resumption 1 (2026-04-27) and resumption 2 also contain a much less amusing back-and-forth between Japan and China regarding the East China Sea and the South China Sea.
Note: Video recordings of Security Council meetings are available for viewing (resumption 1, resumption 2). When an illustrious diplomatic figure embarrasses himself by speaking multiple paragraphs of barely-intelligible English in front of the highest deliberative body in the world, should we laugh or should we cry? I cannot say.
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