At 1 PM on a Friday I get an email from my boss. I'm busy as hell so I don't check it immediately. Then I get a phone call from my boss, which has almost never happened before. I'm a white collar worker, a historian. There's never a 'historical emergency' requiring a phone call to kick me in the ass and get to work.
The request is so urgent my boss needs it by the end of the work week. Which, y'know, is 5 PM on a Friday. So I have four hours to do it.
It's a forwarded request. Somebody contacted a member of the donation team asking for help, "I need a map from the Vietnam War to use for a presentation." It's somebody she's trying to coax into giving a five figure donation to the museum.
The request was asked to the donation team member, who then emailed my boss, who then emailed and called me urgently.
This map required:
North and South Vietnam in it
All four areas that South Vietnam was divided into for military purposes ('Corps') clearly delineated
Four cities, all of them horrifically misspelled, and only identifiable because I know what battle the requester is asking about (it’s in III Corps on the border with Cambodia) (the requester danced around the battle but I’m knowledgeable enough to identify it)
Has Laos and Cambodia in it
Has the Ho Chi Minh Trail in it
So. I was mad about the 'you have literally four hours to find a map with a lot of requirements.'
I was then mad at myself about finding a copyright free map from Texas Tech University within half an hour, proving her right for asking me to do it.
Then, after I found a map that perfectly met the requirements, I was equally amazed, baffled, and horrified when I read further into the forwarded email chain.
The donation team team member they were speaking to used AI to generate a map.
The above put half of North Vietnam in South Vietnam, made the Ho Chi Minh Trail a country, made 60% of Cambodia part of South Vietnam, put the DMZ extremely high up in North Vietnam, completely disconnected the southern tip of Vietnam, misplaced all of the Corps zones, etc etc
At the very last second the donation team member had a moment of divine clarity, remembering there's three historians on payroll to ask for this kind of thing from. So she contacted my boss while saying, "I had fun with this, but I decided I should check for accuracy before I send it to the donor! I need a fact check by the end of the day, then I send it"
My boss, while not the most knowledgeable on the Vietnam War, does know her geography. She took one look, and knew it was so off she called me to tell me how urgent it is that I look at the email and respond
good fucking god, jesus tap dancing goddamn christ, I'm glad I was asked to look at it and then find a real map
My fear has never been that AI would replace human intelligence. My fear has been that the people who Know Things and the people who Make The Decisions are almost never the same people.
We’re throwing real intelligence out on the street to starve while worshipping the shambling Frankenstein-ed corpse of knowledge puppeteered by those who see us as disposable assets.
people in the notes suggesting it was "improper" for the juror to do this or that it "introduced bias" to the court proceeding 🙄 the ice agent in question accused a moc of assaulting him / resisting arrest. how is the agent being a white supremacist not relevant. what universe are you living in
A juror was held in criminal contempt and fined more than $11k for researching his case online. The man, named as Stephen Miele, told other
For anyone who wants to know how to fact check something you are told while on jury duty without getting fined:
First, you need to understand that the rule that jurors can’t just google things is coming from a good place. Like imagine that you are on a jury that’s considering, say, a medical malpractice lawsuit and one of your fellow jurors comes into the jury room and says to you, “I think the victim’s expert was lying because WebMD totally contradicts everything they said.”
And you might be like, “But WebMD is notoriously unreliable website and the expert you’re talking about is a researcher from Mayo Clinic.” But this person cannot be swayed.
Like, we can all agree that would be bad.
So even though these rules can contribute to unjust outcomes as in the case above (and seriously, the fact that the defense attorney didn’t fact check that is probably grounds for legal malpractice), they also prevent jurors from just looking up bullshit online and taking it more seriously than the actual experts the court has put on. And I think in the era of anti-vaxxers/QAnon/COVID denial/etc., we can all understand why it’s a bad idea to trust that people can tell fact from bullshit online.
So in light of this, how do you as a juror fact check something?
The key here is that you have to ask the court for information. Jurors can ask questions of the court during deliberations, so if something you said sounds off to you, you can ask for more information.
The key term you want to use here is “credibility.”
The job of a jury is to decide what are called “questions of fact.” Long before the trial even starts, lawyers will have hashed out all the “questions of law” --- like, what the statute of limitations is; what laws, exactly, were allegedly broken; whether the court you’re in even has jurisdiction; stuff like that. Jurors are responsible for deciding which side’s version of the facts has more credibility.
For instance, if the prosecution’s witness says X and the defense’s witness says Y, the jury is responsible for deciding which is true, X or Y. And you do this by weighing which one is more credible.
So in this case, if the juror had known to, he could have told the judge, “In order to properly assess the ICE agent’s credibility, I need more information about his tattoo. I have doubts about whether he was telling the truth about it, which would impact how credible I would find his testimony. Can the agent please provide evidence that it really is what he says it is?”
There are a lot of problems with our legal system, and I think one of the biggest is that jurors aren’t educated about what they can and can’t do. Juries have a lot of power, if (and only if) they know how to use it.
Reblogging for that last post, because frankly, “what to do as a juror” is one of those things the schools should really be teaching us. Serving on a jury is one of the most powerful rights of citizenship and everyone should be educated in how to exercise it correctly.
Also remember that Jurors who know what to do are often systematically weeded out by the jury selection process. There aren't allowed to have the rules to look up during it either iirc.
Then they say if you're a bad boy daddy will punish you. But what's the punishment? More gay sex! You can't escape it. This whole damn place is in the pocket of Big Sex
fun fact one of the world champions in pepper-eating contests is a trans woman and she actually faced significant backlash because people somehow thought she had a biological advantage. to eating spicy pepper
update bc i went back and checked: her name is brianna “the chilli queen” skinner and she set a record in 2017 by slamming back 23 carolina reapers consecutively. she only stopped when told to by the referees, and the next year she stepped down out of boredom. queen
The championship, it should be noted, is unisex. Apparently being a trans woman gives you an innate biological advantage over both cis men and cis women.
“Who is the internet even for anymore?” is such a valid question. Companies are sanitizing the internet and stifling natural human expression in the name of child safety and being family friendly, but the kids such as fuck aren’t benefitting from this. The internet is becoming too childish for adults and yet still too adult for kids.
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Woah it's not even 5 in the morning im earrrlyyy (who cares its white nights here at this time of the year and the sun is almost up already). um, anyway-
made this for some people that keep asking these. Mostly in tiktok, but sometimes here as well.
was debating on the last page, if i even should add it. It had different text, and even different setting, but it was too similar to the previous page... and then i sketched this and people in discord were destroyed, ao i was like, okay im adding that in.
I... i honestly lost the logic of Alastor's time manipulation, but it's there trust, i'm just dumb, and i could grasp the logic of that plan only for a short time, that was enough to sketch everything out, and then i lost it.
But basically, Alastor cut out 2 days, so if Vox catches on the leap year thing, Al would still have one day for safety. Or if vox suspected that Alastor somehow messed with calendars (which he did) and decided to wait one more day. But basically Alastor was pretending the whole year that he's not planning to look for any ways out, and kept playing the docile boyfriend role, so Vox wouldn't be suspicious.
And he even found some random alcoholic to chellenge Vox and make him drink to blackout (Vox knows Alastor has higher Alcohol tolerance and if Alastor would suggest a challenge, he would be suspicious of it)
I even had a whole scene in my head with said alcoholic and Alastor hiring him, bit then i decided that the comic doesn't need 10 pages of backstory for this random guy, so it never made it even in the first draft. Basically it's all in the dialogue, but in case you didn't get it because of course someone didn't: his wife sold his child for some drugs, and he made a deal with Alastor that Alastor would put her on the broadcast for a favour in return.
Usually Alastor doesn't do "requests" or even "commissions" (lol) because like. First of, radio is his form of art, his hobby, and he knows better than anyone when you try to make a profit out of your hobby, it stops being a hobby. That's why i don't do commissions too, haha. But in this case he's really despearte, and doesn't have much to offer to a random alcoholic he doesn't know, and being the asking position isn't his style.
Also, at this point i realised that to most people in hell in the alvox relationships Alastor is the predator, taking advantage of this cute naive newby in hell (10 years being dead is nothing) (Alastor has been dead for just slightly over 30 years, and in scale of eternal suffering it's also nothing, but people tend to forget that because of his power).
Somewhere like 60 years later, on r/radiodemon someone asks "how bad of a person you should be for TRD call you a monster?". Theories, theories...
AU Masterpost
If you read from a reblog, check the original post/masterpost, there may be a link to a new part. Or may not.
Tag list under cut, if you want to be added/removed from the list, lmk in the comments! For tag to work you need to allow people tag you in your settings.
I can’t remember if I told you guys this but my grandpa paid a guy to put up a rock retaining wall in the backyard when my grandparents moved into their house in 1966. They live at the bottom of a mountain. The wall finally collapsed this year and my grandfather with dementia was PISSED OFFFFFF and he wanted so badly to call the guy who did it and chew him out for doing a bad job. My grandma is trying to explain that the wall lasted 60 years and the guy who did the work is probably dead and it TURNS OUT HE IS STILL ALIVE. Now we’re worried grandpa is going to get through to him (small town) and we’re going to see two 85 year old men come to blows over a rock wall that has been there since the mid-60s. My grandpa is a scrapper, he’s been to jail over a bar fight, the possibility that he WOULD fight this guy is high.
To top it off? The stone mason is the only person in town with one arm so grandpa would definitely recognize him if he saw him. If that is your grandpa, please protect him from my grandpa.
The definition of lifetime guarantee rarely means the lifetime of the original owner and the fine print is usually a either a set window, the lifetime of the company (if other grandpa didn't through a business that no longer exists this is irrelevant), or an average expected lifetime of the construction.
If it lasted 60 years it likely wasn't a craftsmanship issue and could've been a drainage issue or a slew of other things that could also have voided the warranty.
Grandpa probably has as much leg to stand on as the other one has arms to fight back with.
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