ToaKraka
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User ID: 108
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1d ago
See the recent controversy over Chinese billionaires who allegedly are buying literally hundreds of surrogate children in the US.
Some Chinese parents, inspired by Elon Musk’s 14 known children, pay millions in surrogacy fees to hire women in the U.S. to help them build families of jaw-dropping size. Xu calls himself “China’s first father” and is known in China as a vocal critic of feminism. On social media, his company said he has more than 100 children born through surrogacy in the U.S.
Another wealthy Chinese executive, Wang Huiwu, hired U.S. models and others as egg donors to have 10 girls, with the aim of one day marrying them off to powerful men, according to people close to the executive’s education company.
The market has grown so sophisticated, experts say, that at times Chinese parents have had U.S.-born children without stepping foot in the country. A thriving mini-industry of American surrogacy agencies, law firms, clinics, delivery agencies and nanny services—even to pick up the newborns from hospitals—has risen to accommodate the demand, permitting parents to ship their genetic material abroad and get a baby delivered back, at a cost of up to $200,000 per child.
One wealthy businessman in China, who like Wang is also in the education business, wanted more than 200 children at once using surrogates, envisioning a family enterprise, [Nathan] Zhang[, founder and CEO of IVF USA,] said. “I asked him directly, ‘How do you plan to raise all these children?’ He was speechless,” said Zhang, who said he refused him as a client.
Other surrogacy professionals described similarly head-spinning numbers. The owner of one agency in California said he had helped fill an order for a Chinese parent seeking 100 children in the past few years, a request spread over several agencies.
A Los Angeles surrogacy attorney said he had helped his client, a Chinese billionaire, have 20 children through surrogacy in recent years.
Amanda Troxler, a Los Angeles-based surrogacy lawyer, said her firm consulted with a hopeful Chinese parent who said she wanted eight or 10 surrogacies and asked for a discount. “I was like, ‘No, we’re not Costco,’” said Troxler, who didn’t take the client because she rejects those looking for more than two surrogacies at once.
Last month, Xu’s ex-girlfriend, Tang Jing, alleged in a post on Weibo that he had 300 children, living across numerous properties in multiple countries. Xu has previously accused Tang of theft and the two have ongoing lawsuits. Tang didn’t respond to requests for comment.
In a statement on Weibo at the time, [Xu's company] Duoyi Network said the 300 figure was wrong but confirmed a stunning fact: “After many years of effort” through surrogacy in the U.S., Xu has “only a little over 100” children.
Later in November, the [pseudonymous Weibo] user linked to Xu posted a video of more than a dozen toddler or early grade-school-age children playing on an outdoor patio in an unknown location. “What the truth is, everyone can see for themselves,” the user posted.
As the camera panned around the patio, the children—who appeared to be mostly boys—began running toward it. “Daddy!” they yelled. “Daddy!”
The appellant says the sentencing judge made legal errors by: failing to apply Gladue principles in a meaningful way; placing minimal weight on the recommendations of the Sentencing Circle [a special pre-sentence report from members of the defendant's tribe, in addition to the usual pre-sentence reports from the defendant and the prosecutor]; overemphasizing denunciation and deterrence, and underestimating the restraint provisions of the Criminal Code that specifically apply to Indigenous offenders; and failing to place adequate weight on the mental illness he was experiencing when he committed the offences. He seeks a new sentence of time served and “a period of residual probation with conditions that encourage rehabilitation”.
As these reasons explain, I agree the sentencing judge erred by not sufficiently accounting for the appellant’s serious mental health and addictions issues at the time of the offences. I find these factors, viewed in the context of the appellant’s Gladue factors, were underemphasized, which constituted an error in principle. The principle of restraint should have had more resonance in this case.
Anecdote: The unionized civil-engineering office in which I worked had a complement of around half a dozen surveyors. Most of them were industrious, but one was lazy and a troublemaker.
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The survey coordinator (engineer in charge of the surveyors) had to constantly check on this surveyor to make sure that she was actually doing her assigned work in an industrious manner.
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One of my engineer coworkers warned me that I should never trust this surveyor because the surveyor once told the coworker that getting in a minor crash with an office car was an easy way to get out of work.
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After the survey coordinator gave her a bad performance review, she filed an HR complaint accusing him of threatening her with violence during the performance review's closed-door face-to-face meeting. It was totally frivolous, since the boss of the office was in the same meeting and could vouch for the survey coordinator's innocence! But the investigation still dragged on for many months. IIRC, I once overheard the survey coordinator discussing with the office boss how the surveyor's union-assigned lawyer would even commiserate over the phone with the survey coordinator about how the surveyor couldn't even keep her story straight.
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She had a reputation for treating her two subordinate surveyors poorly. I wasn't too aware of the details, but I overheard the survey coordinator discussing with the office boss how he would look out the office window into the parking lot and see her subordinate surveyors running to the survey van in order to avoid being late.
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Once I even overheard her loudly joke in the office's coffee area, "I like my coffee like I like my men—hot and black", which I as a nigger easily could have reported her to HR for (and maybe should have).
She was finally forced to resign (not even fired!) when, during the pandemic, she coughed into her hand and intentionally used the same hand to smack one of her subordinate surveyors on the back, after which the subordinate (who IIRC had a wife with a compromised immune system of some kind) filed an HR complaint and threatened to report her assault to the police on top of that.
Scrolling back through my Amazon and Royal Road accounts for highlights:
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Thresholder ("rational" worldhopping; Royal Road, Amazon): 5 stars, very fun
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The Stubborn Skill-Grinder in a Time Loop (Chunin Exam Day, but progressing into xianxia power levels rather than regressing into a Sasuke poop incident; Royal Road, Amazon): 5 stars
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Tenebroum (evil genius loci happens to become a necromancer; Royal Road, Amazon): 4 stars, fun
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The Systemic Lands (Earthlings are dumped into an extremely harsh "system" world at regular intervals and struggle to form a civilized society; Royal Road review, Amazon): 5 stars for books 1 and 2, 4 stars for books 3–9, 3 stars for book 10 (see details at the linked review)
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Death After Death (Earthling is dumped into a world with multiple interlinked "levels" of history that must be "solved"): 5 stars, very fun
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The Years of Apocalypse (magic student is dragged into a time loop and must use it to save the world): 5 stars, very fun
Also, the first half of the acclaimed Worth the Candle (books 1–6 of the original AO3 version, now apparently reorganized into books 1–4) has been made available for purchase on Amazon if you want to support the author.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
7d ago
Can you check your default sound device?
It was the motherboard's RealTek audio chip, same as always. I even reinstalled the RealTek driver from the motherboard manufacturer's webpage, but that changed nothing. With my headphones attached to the 8BitDo controller, the default output device now is "Headphones (Xbox Controller)".
Very common problem where it defaults to HDMI or DisplayPort, especially when going to monitors without speakers or where the speakers default to no volume.
Actually, the Windows interface used to show audio outputs to my two monitors, but now those two outputs have disappeared. I don't know whether that happened when I reinstalled Windows 10 or when I added the PCIe-to-USB card.
But none of this matters, since I always use headphones anyway.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
7d ago
It's slim pickings sometimes. My normal procedure is to check the following listings in order on Thursday afternoon and try to find one or two interesting or funny cases.
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New Jersey: Supreme, published appellate, unpublished appellate, published tax, unpublished tax, published trial, unpublished trial
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Pennsylvania: Commonwealth appellate (includes zoning and workers' compensation stuff), superior appellate (includes most civil and criminal stuff)
For today's posting, I went through all of New Jersey's opinions for the last week and found nothing either interesting or funny, so the opinion that I ended up posting was a good way into Pennsylvania's Commonwealth Court. Twice in recent months, both New Jersey and Pennsylvania were totally barren, forcing me to post opinions from Ohio or the feds.
I installed a PCIe-to-USB adapter card, and the 8BitDo controller works when connected to it. But when I installed the card my motherboard's built-in sound chip stopped outputting sound, both directly through the motherboard's audio output and indirectly through the case's audio output! Sound still works when routed through the controller's audio output, so overall it's no problem. But it's just ridiculous how finicky computers can be.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
7d ago
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
7d ago
IIRC, some people complained about how that built-in NSFW mark (1) triggers an annoying pop-up for people who have not bothered to disable the pop-up in their account settings and (2) breaks third-party archiving and search indexing, so using the NSFW mark is frowned on.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
7d ago
I wonder if she left because she saw herself at an ethical or liability crux, and thought you were competent such that you'd end up next in line after she retired, and didn't want you to feel like she was abandoned/shoving it on you or for you to not be aware of the scope of the problem.
(1) She informed the whole office of the mentor program's shenanigans in a non-private manner months before resigning. In this private rendezvous she did nothing but inform me that she had sent her resignation email to the bigwigs a few minutes ago.
(2) I did not have an engineer's license, so I was not eligible to volunteer in the mentoring program, and I would not have been interested in volunteering even if I had been licensed. (In the absence of any salary incentives, and with my plans to retire early, I had no interest in obtaining a license.) Her mentoring volunteering was transferred to another licensed volunteer in a different office, and her non-mentoring work was transferred to a different person in our office (not to me).
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
7d ago
Apparently (Associated Press, Reuters), the civil war in Yemen now has three sides, as the UAE-backed Southern Transitional Council seeks to secede from the Saudi-backed internationally-recognized government.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
8d ago
Some weeks ago, I shared a court case regarding whether a firefighter's failure to resuscitate two dying babies with CPR counts as "abnormal working conditions" that give rise to a valid PTSD workers' compensation claim, rather than being merely part and parcel of working as a firefighter. This case presents a similar question: Does it count as "abnormal working conditions" for a police officer in a very peaceful municipality to shoot a suspect to death as part of an intense physical struggle?
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The administrative pseudo-judge expresses deep skepticism toward the claimant's argument.
On cross-examination, [Claimant's boss] acknowledged that the death of [the suspect] was the only occasion since he became Superintendent that a Township officer [in a municipality adjacent to Philadelphia] was forced to take someone's life. At that point in the cross-examination of [claimant's boss], [the trial judge] interrupted Claimant's counsel to make the following remark:
[Counsel,] are you going to argue that, when a police officer discharges a firearm in pursuit of a suspect, that's an unusual and abnormal working condition? Is that where you're going with this? Because I'm Philadelphia born and raised, I've been living out here for quite a while, and to me, that does not seem, in this area, to be unusual and abnormal.
Claimant's counsel responded that he was asking about the abnormality not of the need to discharge a firearm but of the need to kill a suspect.
The pseudo-judge rejects the claim. On administrative appeal, the workers' compensation board affirms by a vote of four to two.
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On judicial appeal, the appeals panel reverses by a vote of two to one.
[The pseudo-judge]'s finding that the incident "was a normal-type condition for a police officer who works in the Township" is erroneous for two main reasons. The first is that [the pseudo-judge] focuses on one aspect or another of the incident rather than the full convergence of events. For example, [the pseudo-judge] characterizes the incident as one in which Claimant "discharged his firearm". It has never been Claimant's contention in this case that the incident was abnormal strictly because of the necessity of using his firearm, or even strictly because of the necessity of taking someone's life. To frame it as such is to engage in the flawed reasoning that our Supreme Court cautioned against in Payes II [1 2: breaking the entire incident into component parts, "where each part, standing on its own, might be safely determined to be a 'normal' working condition for a police officer"], because it casts the full incident in a deceptively "normal" light.
The second reason that [the pseudo-judge]'s conclusion is erroneous is that it is not even supported by the testimony cited as its basis. [Claimant's boss]'s bare assertion that such incidents as [this one] can be normal for a Township police officer is belied by his acknowledgement that there has been no other fatal officer-involved shooting in the Township in the years since he became Superintendent, that Claimant has only discharged his service weapon on 3 or 4 occasions in the past, and that Superintendent has never discharged his own while on duty in his 27 years as a law enforcement officer. [In this incident], Claimant not only discharged his service weapon, but was forced into hand-to-hand combat with [the suspect], placed into a chokehold so aggressive that he was lifted off the ground, was nearly deprived of his duty belt when [the suspect] pulled it away with such force that Claimant's belt loops were torn, and nearly lost control of his service weapon, which placed him in reasonable fear that his own death was imminent. Once Claimant reasserted control of his service weapon, he had to shoot [the suspect] at such close range that he witnessed changes in [the suspect]'s facial expressions and movements in the fabric of his shirt; subsequently, Claimant tried (like the trooper in Payes II) to perform life-saving measures in an attempt to keep the bloodied [suspect] alive but did not succeed. Nowhere in [Claimant's boss]'s testimony is there support for the notion that this chain of events is of a kind that a Township police officer, or any police officer, may normally expect to encounter at the beginning of a workday; to the contrary, his testimony militates against such a conclusion.
At the outset, we point out that even a strict construction of the Act militates in favor of reversing [the pseudo-judge]'s deeply flawed decision. Thus, while it is true that we have gravitated toward a liberal construction of the Act in order to favor the compensation of workers injured on the job, that principle has no bearing on our holding here. However, we take this opportunity to register our grave concern with [the pseudo-judge]'s cavalier treatment of the facts in this case. This is displayed not only in her written decision but in her interruption of Claimant's counsel at the hearing to editorialize that the discharge of an officer's weapon did not seem to her like an abnormal working condition, based on the utterly irrelevant fact that she is a native of Philadelphia.
We find [the pseudo-judge]'s outburst to be of particular concern for two key reasons. The first is that the Act's regulations are crystal clear that a [pseudo-judge] is to "conduct fair and impartial hearings" and to "maintain order". [The pseudo-judge] failed to carry out these duties when she disrupted the examination of a witness on a highly sensitive matter in order to provide her own arguments on the Township's behalf. The second reason is that, by focusing on the narrow question of whether the discharge of an officer's weapon is abnormal, [the pseudo-judge] was, again, exhibiting exactly the kind of myopic and distorted view of the incident that our Supreme Court warned against in Payes II.
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One appeals judge dissents from this conclusion.
I cannot agree with the Majority that the incident here qualifies as an abnormal working condition sufficient to support benefits under the mental/mental theory of recovery for psychological injuries. I do not discount the facts here or seek to improperly break the event into component parts, "where each part, standing on its own, might be safely determined to be a 'normal' working condition for a police officer", an approach that our Supreme Court denounced in Payes II.
Acknowledging that this inquiry is both fact-sensitive and a question of law, I believe that this incident, replete with terrible facts that cannot be minimized, remains within the type of event that law enforcement officers unfortunately encounter in the performance of his or her duties. Police officers face the possibility of life-and-death situations every day as a necessary part of their work. Indeed, it is the nature of the danger and trauma inherent in their work that engenders our deep respect for police and other first responders.
Unlike in Payes II, where the accident [running over a mentally ill jaywalker on an Interstate highway wearing dark clothing at night, and unsuccessfully attempting to resuscitate her while simultaneously directing traffic around the crash site] could have happened to any driver on the highway at that moment, this incident would be highly unlikely in a work context had Claimant not been a law enforcement officer. The cases collected in Payes II bear out this approach. Law enforcement officers have been awarded compensation where "a street gang, in retaliation for the officer killing a gang member in a shootout, placed a bounty on the life or health of the officer and his family" and where an officer was "subjected to false accusations by the chief of police, public airing of those accusations, suspension, termination, and stripping of his duties and authority upon reinstatement and deliberate ostracism instigated by the chief". These were truly abnormal working conditions for a law enforcement officer, not events that were, as the Supreme Court stated in Payes II, "inherent in police work".
By contrast, the more numerous cases collected in Payes II where benefits have been denied to law enforcement officers all entailed incidents occurring while the claimants were engaged in their law enforcement duties: responding to a call to assist officers who had been shot and seriously injured; involvement in a physical altercation arising from an attempt to serve a domestic violence arrest warrant; fatal shooting of an unarmed suspect followed by a grand jury investigation, indictment, trial and media attention; and involvement in an eighthour standoff involving the officer, other officers, and a barricaded gunman. The facts here fit more within the latter category rather than the former and convince me that this case does not present abnormal working conditions for a police officer in [this municipality].
In a footnote, the appeals-panel majority points out that the state legislature has "fortunately" recently passed a law making further court cases in this vein unnecessary: "A post-traumatic stress injury, when claimed by a first responder, 'shall not be required to be the result of an abnormal working condition to be a compensable injury under this Act'."
A very interesting exchange in the culture-war thread:
I haven't consumed commercial pornography in like a decade now. I would like to pretend that I quit watching porn for moral reasons, but I actually just found that while I was aroused by porn, the actual moment of orgasm when I was masturbating inevitably happened while I was looking away from the screen and remembering/remixing memories of partners I had. I realized that porn wasn't really serving any purpose for me.
If we don't want porn stars to make money, if we don't want their names to be common bywords, men need to stop consuming porn. I'm not even asking you to stop masturbating! Just use your imagination and your memories! Think about that time in the back of the car after Kaylee's graduation party, or that girl in the bookshop who never wears a bra.
Typical-mind fallacy. Maybe you have a wealth of experience and a great imagination, but I have only about three IRL-based sexy situations that I can imagine well enough to fap to (available upon request), in comparison to the dozens of text, hundreds of video, and thousands of image situations that I have compiled on my computer.
How good is your imagination in this arena? Do you have a "mental spank bank" that surpasses the one on your hard drive?
The three IRL-based sexy situations that I can imagine are as follows.
(1) IRL, for a dancing unit in high-school gym class I was paired with a hot, somewhat acne-afflicted (Indian) girl. In the fantasy, she has obtained from a genie a wish to be super-hot, but as a tradeoff for the wish she has been cursed with overwhelming horniness, so after gym class she drags me somewhere private and begs me to fuck her.
(2) IRL, in high-school physics class (I don't remember which one—maybe honors, maybe AP, maybe both) a hot, skinny, cargo-pants-wearing (Chinese) girl was included in one of my laboratory groups, and for around a year during college she was a pseudo-friend of mine—not Pseudo-Friend One, whose list of questions is linked above, but Pseudo-Friend Six (1 2 3). In the fantasy, she comes to my house wearing a sundress and invites me to fuck her.
(3) IRL: In my civil-engineering office there was a hot (white) woman just a few years older than I was. At the end of one workday, just after sending a resignation email to upper management*, she pulled me into the office's plan room (filled primarily with dozens of stacked metal cabinets containing hundreds of decades-old as-built plans** and survey field books) to tell me privately that she was resigning.*** In the fantasy, she invites me to fuck her in the plan room before she leaves.
*She was extremely frustrated with upper management. As one example: She was a licensed engineer. Licensed engineers (and licensed surveyors) are as rare as hen's teeth in this particular government employer, because for obtaining a license this employer offers tuition reimbursements but not the salary or promotion incentives that can be found in some other states. A few years ago, instead of instituting a salary incentive, the employer set up a program allowing licensed-engineer employees to volunteer as mentors to help other employees gain licenses (fulfilling the license requirement of several years of experience under a licensed boss), and my coworker volunteered in that program. The program consisted mostly of designing solutions for work orders provided by the operations people. But she discovered that, whenever she told the operations people that a particular work order could not be fulfilled in a standards-compliant manner within the scope of a quick maintenance work order (rather than being put off until it could be included in whichever full-blown "capital program" construction project was scheduled to pass through the area several years in the future), they would just shop the same work order around to different mentors until they found one willing to condone the drawing up of a substandard design that would expose the employer to liability if discovered later. (If a motorist hits a piece of guide rail, is injured, and files a lawsuit, the installing authority has immunity only if the guide rail was designed in accordance with the authority's standards.) She raised this issue in emails with the bigwigs and even in a full meeting with them, but I guess she wasn't satisfied with their response.
**Now that I've retired (since depression made me incapable of tolerating work, even with the medication described in the linked comment), I guess there's no reason for my throwaway account @throwaway20230125 to exist separately from @ToaKraka. (Was there ever a reason? Maybe I'm just paranoid.) So now I can claim the prestige of membership in the AAQC-writers club. Look on my work (singular), ye mighty, and despair.
***I don't know why she felt it necessary to give me special notice in this manner. I don't think we were very close, though we were both acclaimed by others as highly effective employees. In response to her revelation, I just (very nervously, due to the dangerously-secluded situation) said something like: "Okay. If you find resignation necessary, then it's necessary. It's your decision."
Crosspost from >>>/diy/2959736:
>Be me, mid-Atlantic USA
>Hire a homebuilding contractor to build a small custom house (860 ft2; 220 k$ plus permit and utility fees) in a town of 10,000 people
>Project manager sends me a zoning permit application to be signed
>Whoever filled out the PDF didn't write in what zone the lot is in, and didn't include the second page of the permit application. I point this out
>Project manager responds: "It's a minor oversight. I'll finish filling out the form after you sign it. Just trust us! I've got ten years of experience doing this!"
>I again ask for the second page
>The permit application gets sent over again, now with the first page complete and the second page included
>But whoever filled out the second page didn't write in the lot's ID number. I point this out
>Project manager now says there's been a misunderstanding: the contractor helps me fill out permits as a courtesy, but in the end it's my responsibility to complete and file them
>Okay, whatever. I'm an early-retired civil engineer, so I can do it myself if I really need to
>Fill out the applications for zoning, driveway, and fence permits, use QCAD to draft a fully dimensioned copy of the homebuilder's site plan (with the driveway shown—it wasn't in the site plan that the contractor sent to me), and send all four files to the municipalityAm I about to get fucked up the ass by a shitty contractor? Or is it just normal procedure for clients to sign incomplete forms?
Responses from 4channers:
Everyone is a shitty contractor. It balances out because the city inspectors and permit departments are also shitty and don't care what you're doing as long as they get their beak wet.
bingo. its hilarious when you pull property maps and tax docs from them county and half the info is obviously wrong or completely missing yet the county engineer round stamped it
My folks applied for a permit to add a fourth room to our house. The permit got held up cause our houses 'already had 4 rooms'. After reviewing the details it seems the original builder submitted plans, got them approved, and then built a completely different house. After twenty years no one had noticed.
My girlfriends house was built back when no one gave a shit about anything. The septic tank leach lines were basically stubby little nothings because the lot didn't have much of a back yard. It was a wide lot but not deep. The house was a two bed/one bath and they wanted to double that. The county building code put limits on the number of bedrooms based on septic capacity. They said the limit was two based on the septic tank. The system would need a full replacement to bring it up to code. They found another county code that stated that a room was not a bedroom unless it had a closet. They built two 'dens' and a bathroom addition and the county updated their codes the next year to fix that loophole.
I live in a city. We wanted to add an office/bonus building to the back of our lot. The permit and inspection costs were a huge issue. Code said that anything 120 square feet or less was an outbuilding and exempt from permitting, inspections, and even building codes. Ended up building three 120 square foot 'sheds' in a U-shape around a central deck. Code says decks require a permit... if attached to a structure. If they are free standing they don't require one. Power required a permit but that was much less hassle.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
8d ago
Based
t. keeps his mother's-basement bedroom at 78 degrees and wears one layer while his insane mother keeps the rest of the house at 68 degrees and wears two or three layers (including a hat)
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
8d ago
Attempt? Under Supreme Court precedent, basically everything is interstate commerce.
Sorry, I misread the relevant page. The UN's actual definition of "urban" is 1500 people per km2 (3900 per mi2).
This page provides writeups for specific cities.
The United Nations uses the following general definitions:
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Urban: At least
5000<ins>1500</ins>people per km2 (13,000<ins>3900</ins>per mi2) -
Suburban: At least 300 people per km2 (780 per mi2), but fewer than
5000<ins>1500</ins>(13,000<ins>3900</ins>) -
Rural: Fewer than 300 people per km2 (780 per mi2)
The linked page also includes an interactive map of the world and more detailed documentation.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
9d ago
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
11d ago
I haven’t consumed commercial pornography in like a decade now. I would like to pretend that I quit watching porn for moral reasons, but I actually just found that while I was aroused by porn, the actual moment of orgasm when I was masturbating inevitably happened while I was looking away from the screen and remembering/remixing memories of partners I had. I realized that porn wasn’t really serving any purpose for me.
If we don’t want porn stars to make money, if we don’t want their names to be common bywords, men need to stop consuming porn. I’m not even asking you to stop masturbating! Just use your imagination and your memories! Think about that time in the back of the car after Kaylee’s graduation party, or that girl in the bookshop who never wears a bra.
Typical-mind fallacy. Maybe you have a wealth of experience and a great imagination, but I have only about three IRL-based sexy situations that I can imagine well enough to fap to (available upon request), in comparison to the dozens of text, hundreds of video, and thousands of image situations that I have compiled on my computer.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
11d ago
What's "real" 4k versus not?
People have been complaining about the quality of Netflix's "4K" offerings for a while now. But judging the quality of a video is much more complicated than just looking at the bitrate (1 2).
The Guardian: Brussels goes record-breaking 542 days without a government
The Brussels Capital Region, which governs the Belgian capital of 1.25 million people [roughly comparable to Philadelphia in both population and area], has not had a government since elections in June 2024.
The city has now surpassed the record of the country as a whole, which made headlines around the world in 2010-11 when it took 541 days to form a government, the longest period to form an administration in peacetime.
it is unlikely Brussels will have a government anytime soon. Rancorous divisions, sometimes descending into personal insults, continue among the 14 parties that won places in the 89-seat parliament.
This means deadlock in the self-styled capital of Europe, which hosts the EU institutions and Nato, amid a growing budget crisis, rising levels of drug-related violence, and homelessness as city authorities struggle to manage irregular migrants seeking a place to stay.
An open letter signed by nearly 200 business, academic and cultural figures published on Monday lamented “541 days of seeing Brussels slide into an unprecedented institutional void and funding crisis”. The letter, published in Belgium’s major newspapers, Le Soir and De Standaard, says “political inaction is now affecting our daily lives” and that the “immense challenges that Brussels needs to tackle – economic, social, climatic and institutional – can no longer wait”.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
13d ago
Court opinion:
<del>Adam and Steve</del><ins>Richard and Michael</ins>become romantically involved in year 1991, and exchange rings in year 1992. However, they live in Nevada, which neither permits in-state same-sex marriages nor recognizes out-of-state same-sex marriages. In year 2008, California legalizes same-sex marriage, and the two men get married there. But Nevada does not recognize the marriage until the federal supreme court forces it to do so in year 2015.In year 2020, Michael files for divorce. However, there is a snag. For purposes of determining what property is community property gained during the marriage and subject to division in the divorce, when did the marriage begin—1992 (when the men would have married if Nevada had permitted it), 2008 (when the parties entered into a marriage that was recognized in California but not in Nevada), or 2015 (when Nevada started recognizing their marriage)?
The state supreme court finds that (1) the federal supreme court's decision does require Nevada to retroactively recognize the 2008 California marriage, but (2) Nevada's courts are not authorized to create out of thin air a 1992 common-law marriage for these same-sex romantic partners when Nevada's legislature has explicitly refused to recognize common-law marriages even for opposite-sex romantic partners since 1943.
Court opinion:
A person is pulled over for driving an unregistered car. He immediately starts shouting (among other things) "I'll fuck you up" at the two police officers, repeatedly tries to get out of the car while the officers tell him to stay in the car and physically hold his car door shut, and eventually successfully exits the car, fights with the officers, and has to be restrained. He is acquitted of assault, but is convicted of making terroristic threats.
The defendant argues that the conviction is not supported by the evidence. He points to a case where a person arrested for public drunkenness told police officers he was going to kill them, but his conviction for making terroristic threats was vacated because, in his "obviously inebriated" status and "agitated and angry state of mind", he merely "expressed transitory anger rather than a settled purpose to carry out the threat or to terrorize the other person".
The trial judge rejects the defendant's argument. In this case, defendant actively engaged in a fistfight with the officers, showing that he indeed was willing to carry out his threats to harm them. The trial judge imposes a total sentence of four years (with the possibility of parole after two years) for the two threats. The appeals panel affirms.
ISO 1496-1:2013 (Series 1 Freight Containers—Specification and Testing): 200 dollars (160 Swiss francs)
Master Grade Ex-S Gundam/S Gundam plastic model kit: 160 dollars
Three weeks of food at home: 170 dollars
60 minutes with a jade-like beauty: 160 dollars (240 Australian dollars)
The market (ﷺ) has determined that these vastly different items have roughly equivalent values. Isn't money wonderful?
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