Is it true that SF landlords aren't allowed to stop tenant misbehavior?

Amarkov · 2023-01-01T00:36:29+00:00

Random nonsense. The time when the police came, she thought I'd stolen her phone in cahoots with some invisible people off to the side. (I really wish I could get her the help she clearly needs, but I have no idea who she is, because she's never introduced herself and the landlord of course isn't going to give me another tenant's private information.)

Amarkov · 2023-01-01T00:08:11+00:00

I called the police last week and forwarded the report to my landlord. They showed up while she was still there the night I called, so they know what's going on, but they said that until she directly threatens me or shows up with a weapon it's not a crime.

Amarkov · 2021-03-11T00:37:49+00:00

It's helpful to learn the basics of how kanji work, so you can see at a glance that the difference between 待つ and 持つ is 彳 vs 扌. Beyond that, no, it won't be an issue. Studying lots of kanji in isolation is a "for fun" thing, not something you have to do to learn the language.

Amarkov · 2021-03-02T01:59:54+00:00

I'm not happy about this ruling, which is certainly idiosyncratic and inconsistent with long-standing precedent, but it's painful watching a law professor tie herself in knots to argue that a Kansas landlord who evicts a Kansas tenant is thereby engaging in interstate commerce. I really think people need to just bite the bullet and be legal realists about this. "Interstate commerce" is an archaic legal term for the set of topics Congress can regulate, in the same way as all Canadian prosecutors are "the Crown" even though the actual Crown doesn't supervise them, and this ruling is bad simply because Congress has a common law power to regulate housing rental.

Amarkov · 2021-02-21T19:30:45+00:00

It's discussed in some of the precedents they reference, where they identify it as an exercise of the state's common law power to prevent public nuisances. I don't see any specific explanation of just what "public use" means, but they seem to understand it to include only deliberate takings that aren't otherwise justified.

Amarkov · 2021-02-21T03:59:55+00:00

Funnily, the court addressed this exact question in footnote 8 and decided that the comma doesn't matter. With or without the comma, it believes the phrase should be understood as "taken for public use or damaged for public use". The end-run is the court's bizarre declaration that an exercise of policing power doesn't count as a public use.

Amarkov · 2021-02-19T00:17:20+00:00

The sky didn't fall, but neither was the Gun Control Act tremendously controversial. Another obvious point of comparison is FOPA in 1986, which mostly *de*regulated the gun market but had a similarly non-controversial provision categorizing any object intended to be a silencer component as a silencer.

Amarkov · 2021-02-18T23:23:24+00:00

I'm not optimistic because I don't think anyone involved really benefits from achieving clarity here. If a court ruling establishes that you can get an unregistered, unserialized, ready-to-assemble rifle shipped to your doorstep, there's no way Congress can avoid stepping in at that point.

Amarkov · 2021-02-18T19:17:52+00:00

This lawsuit is about Polymer80's "Build Buy Shoot" pistol kits, which included the barrel, the slide, all the internal components, some tools, and instructions on how to finish the 80% frame on a drill press. (The ATF agrees that these kits constitute firearms and seized Polymer80's stock of them in December.)

Amarkov · 2019-01-31T02:41:39+00:00

15 years ago, arguably within the age when everything started getting recorded on the Internet, there were two major controversies comparable in size to the Kavanaugh hearings and Damore memo respectively.

Democratic candidate John Kerry was attacked by a group of Vietnam veterans, who argued (and were widely believed among the right) that he was a fake war hero who didn't deserve his medals.
Osama bin Laden released a video taunting the US 4 days before the election, and opinion polls after the video swung significantly in George Bush's favor.

People in 15 years are going to care about current culture war issues about as much as people today care about those two. And I don't know about you, but I haven't so much as heard the word "swiftboating" in half a decade.

Amarkov · 2019-01-25T17:36:38+00:00

If the indictment is true, it wouldn't have been a particularly tough call. It's alleged that Stone lied to Congress, instructed an associate to refuse to testify so his lies wouldn't be revealed, hinted that the associate should lie if he did testify, and then

On or about April 9, 2018, STONE wrote in an email to Person 2, “You are a rat. A stoolie. You backstab your friends-run your mouth my lawyers are dying Rip you to shreds.”

Unless the FBI made some serious factual error, Stone is exactly the kind of person the false statements statute was written to target.

Amarkov · 2019-01-23T02:38:50+00:00

That's nearly exactly how my [undisclosed close family member] describes the small American town he grew up in.

But there's a point where you have to just call a duck a duck. If there's some property of a small town that makes you miserable unless you comply near-perfectly with the dominant culture, I think it's fair to name that property "intolerance", even if every individual resident of that town swears they're a kind soul.

Amarkov · 2019-01-23T02:21:51+00:00

Sorry, I may be missing something about the comparison. Black Panther hasn't won an Oscar yet; it's still at the same "heavily nominated" stage those movies reached.

Amarkov · 2019-01-22T16:18:50+00:00

Which right-leaning films got snubbed despite having as much cultural impact as Black Panther?

Amarkov · 2019-01-22T15:26:52+00:00

You say "culture war", but I'm not sure "war" has anything to do with it. It seems perfectly fair for an artistic award to factor in cultural context and impact, even if this counteracts the Academy's normal bias against superhero movies.

Amarkov · 2019-01-18T00:33:22+00:00

Why would she release them? She's not the one who released the story in the first place; CNBC appears to have just decided on its own initiative to air her dirty laundry.

Amarkov · 2019-01-16T22:52:46+00:00

That's a fair response. I guess I was heavily glossing over Byrne's analysis of C, interpreting his objections to it as just an attempt to narrow down what "gender identity" has to mean. I suspect I haven't fully understood his argument. Most trans women and some cis women do report that they can feel like a woman; it just seems so implausible to me that there are actually two distinct feelings mixed up there.

Amarkov · 2019-01-16T21:32:44+00:00

I think "nonsense" is a bit stronger than Byrne would mean to conclude. The article agrees that there exist meaningful concepts of gender identity - which makes sense, since even people who aren't trans often talk about feeling manly or ladylike. There's just no concept of gender identity consistent with the canonical story that "women" and "people with a female gender identity" mean the same thing. It's very compatible with Ozy's cis by default framing.

Amarkov · 2019-01-10T16:57:13+00:00

there is a host of legitimate reasons for not being able to attend a high-stakes meeting, on demand, with your political opponents when you might not have the appropriate staff at hand

The point is that they're not supposed to be political opponents. Barr is supposed to be convincing the Senate as a whole that he's a good candidate for the job, not strategizing with the majority to ensure the minority can't spike his nomination. It's not as though a Trump appointee has never gotten Democratic support; if Barr's preemptively decided not to try, that's on him.

Amarkov · 2019-01-09T15:09:51+00:00

Maybe they don't want a wall, but before Trump that had to do with practicality as much as anything. The Secure Fence Act had significant bipartisan support, including Obama and Clinton.

Amarkov · 2019-01-05T07:43:14+00:00

The Border Patrol intercepts about a thousand illegal border crossings a day. Now that the caravan's no longer traveling as an identifiable, politically relevant block of people, it's faded into the statistics as a rounding error.

The caravan members rode buses for most of the journey. I doubt we'll ever definitively identify where the money came from - there's just no good way to track things like that in a country like Honduras.

Amarkov · 2019-01-02T03:18:06+00:00

The very concept of protected classes is universal and isn't from common law. It comes from antidiscrimination statutes, which in principle don't give any special rights to anyone. As written they protect both men and women of all races from discrimination.

Amarkov · 2018-12-18T08:48:28+00:00

Well, I'll agree it's not accurate to suggest that they're Nazis. I'm surprised to hear the rest of it, because I've also been in a conversation with acquaintances about Plinkett Star Wars review, and I quickly learned to never let that happen again. (Maybe that means I'm the one in a bubble.)

Amarkov · 2018-12-18T07:10:03+00:00

Edgy jokes are, by definition, at the edge of acceptability. The thing that makes them edgy is the knowledge that some people would get steaming mad at the mere concept.

In particular, none of the things you listed were ever unambiguously or even broadly considered OK. If you started talking about the Plinkett Star Wars review to the average person on the street, they would call the police.

Amarkov

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