iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Chris Greene @christophergreene.bsky.social · 12/05/2026

Drivers often lie about how they came to strike a cyclist. Sometimes their insurer credits those lies, and threatens victims by suggesting they committed insurance fraud (see below). Three years after this threat, guess who just offered to settle our suit for every cent of its policy limits?

A question exists whether there has been a material misrepresentation in the presentation of the claim.

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Chris Greene @christophergreene.bsky.social · 29/04/2026

This guy? nyc.streetsblog.org/2026/04/02/h...

“I would let you rot in Staten Island,” Chell allegedly told Schwartz during an internal affairs interview.

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Chris Greene @christophergreene.bsky.social · 24/04/2026

Even the democrats on Staten Island don't know how to handle a story where the obvious villain doing reckless things that endanger constituents is a member of law enforcement.

Council Member Kamilla Hanks (D): No response
Council Member David Carr (R): No response
Assembly Member Michael Tannousis (R): No response
Assembly Member Michael Reilly (R): No response
Assembly Member Sam Pirozzolo (R): No response
Assembly Member Charles Fall (D): No response
State Sen. Andrew Lanza (R): No response
State Sen. Jessica Scarcella-Spanton (R): No response
District Attorney Michael McMahon (D): No response
Borough President Vito Fossella (R): No response
Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R): No response

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Chris Greene @christophergreene.bsky.social · 17/04/2026

::Cookie Monster Voice:: One of These Things (Is Not Like the Other Things)

A list of law firms you've never heard of, and Sullivan & Cromwell.

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Chris Greene @christophergreene.bsky.social · 16/04/2026

An interesting (and depressing) dynamic apparently driving some road deaths in the U.S.: Poor folks are being forced from costly cities (where there is non-car infrastructure) to the burbs (where it's assumed you have a car). Another reason for urban YIMBYism.

Also, there is a lot of evidence pointing to suburbanization of poverty being an important factor. Historically, poverty in the US was centralized in the urban core, but over the last couple of decades it has expanded to the suburbs, where around half of all poor people now live. But many suburbs are not built for walking, biking and public transportation; they’re built assuming everybody is going to drive. So now you have lower-income populations living there who might not have motor vehicles. They need to walk, and they’re doing it in a suburban setting that is not designed to accommodate them.

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Chris Greene @christophergreene.bsky.social · 08/04/2026

Yes but can we talk about how the chairman of Toyota (formerly the CEO) Akio Toyoda is actually an avid racecar driver and in fact helped test drive the GR Yaris (IYKYK).

Master driver "Morizo"
As an avid auto racing fan and driver himself, Toyoda has participated in several auto races under the pseudonym Morizo Kinoshita.[15] At the 2009 24 Hours of Nürburgring, he finished 81st overall and third in class in a Lexus IS F, and 87th overall and fourth in class with a Lexus LF-A.[16][17] At the 2014 24 Hours of Nürburgring, he finished 13th overall and first in class with a Lexus LF-A.[18] At the 2019 24 Hours of Nürburgring, he finished 40th overall and third in class with a Toyota GR Supra GT4.

In 2016, Toyoda approved the project that would result in the GR Yaris; during the development of that car, Toyoda (as Morizo) served as a test driver. Morizo crashed the first test car during a mid-winter test drive at a Hokkaido track; after exiting the car on his own, he remarked that he did not "like the feel of it". As Morizo, Toyoda continued to drive development prototypes, and since the car's release, has campaigned the car in races.[19]

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Chris Greene @christophergreene.bsky.social · 07/04/2026

I will say it's helpful that the article details Uber's astroturfing, including the fact that many emails purportedly sent on behalf of supporters of the Uber/Hochul plan apparently did NOT know they had done so. Uber offered no explanation to the Times.

Much of Uber’s millions in spending have gone into television advertising. Uber has also blanketed its drivers and passengers in New York with prompts to keep rides affordable by rejecting “the crash tax” — an allusion to the rising cost of auto insurance. Assemblyman Patrick Chludzinski, a Republican from Buffalo, said he was receiving hundreds of form letters emailed from ride-share patrons in his district.

Mr. Chludzinski followed up with several of his constituents whose names were on the emails but who told him they’d not sent them.

Josh Gold, a spokesman for Uber, said that more than 72,000 letters from drivers and riders had been sent to state legislators, and that a majority of New Yorkers support the reforms. He did not comment on whether any of the letters had been unwittingly sent.

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Chris Greene @christophergreene.bsky.social · 07/04/2026

I genuinely want the journalist who wrote this to explain how the trial lawyers association (trade group for PI lawyers in NY) and Uber (market cap $146B) have "equally deep pockets."

For at least a half-century, one of the most powerful and enduring outside forces in New York State politics has been the Trial Lawyers Association.

The organization — which argues for expanding the right to sue and opposes most efforts that may curtail the legal fees of its members — has plowed millions of dollars into the campaigns of state lawmakers, and spent millions more on lobbyists close to leaders of both the Senate and Assembly.

Its latest fight is against a proposal by Gov. Kathy Hochul to lower the cost of auto insurance for New York drivers, who pay some of the highest rates in the country. The proposal would also limit payouts in cases where motorists were mostly at fault or impaired.

But this time, the trial lawyers have an equally deep-pocketed foe.

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Chris Greene @christophergreene.bsky.social · 31/03/2026

Maybe we'll get another season of my favorite show (with thanks to AI for the below).

A promotional image for the BBC show The Thick of It, but the characters have been replaced by Kristi Noem, Jeanine Pirro, Pete Hegseth, Stephen Miller, and a guy that is supposed to be Scott Bessent.

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Chris Greene @christophergreene.bsky.social · 27/03/2026

It strikes me as odd that the Times claims that they haven't received a correction request from the AMA when this is what the Board Chair of the AMA said:

In recent days, AMA communications to the New York Times have requested a correction on their part to reflect the actual language the AMA used in response to their inquiry. Additionally, a letter to the editor has been submitted requesting a public correction—this was neither a policy change nor was it an endorsement of a position taken by another medical society. In addition, during Congressional testimony in mid-March, I had the opportunity to set the record straight stating to the Subcommittee on Health of the House Energy and Commerce Committee that there has been no change in AMA policy with respect to access to and provision of gender-affirming care. This will appear in the Congressional Record.

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Chris Greene @christophergreene.bsky.social · 25/03/2026

Scam culture is just the culture now.

I've heard all the arguments both for and against legalizing online gambling. What I think is missing from that conversation is the fact that it's not really just gambling online that has been legalized. What has been legalized is extraction, and the new methods of extraction that are possible using the internet and mobile devices. These companies have identified a group of people with a monetizable compulsion, and we have legalized the tools needed to industrially harvest money from them.

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Chris Greene @christophergreene.bsky.social · 17/03/2026

I had assumed that the harm from DOGE cuts would fall hardest on non white men but this is astonishing. Read the rest for profiles of hardworking women who just wanted to help the public, and who were hastily fired by presumably a white adolescent empowered by Musk/DJT.

Black women have been fired from the federal work force since Elon Musk’s rampage more than any other group, says Katica Roy, a gender economist who crunched the numbers. They comprise 6 percent of the overall U.S. labor force and 12 percent of the federal labor force. But of the almost 300,000 federal jobs slashed in 2025, Black women were a stunning 33 percent of those cuts.

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Chris Greene @christophergreene.bsky.social · 02/03/2026

Renting a bike should not cost the same as hiring a human being to chauffer you in a motor vehicle through the densest city in America.

Norman Rockwell painting "Freedom of Speech" in which a man in a plaid shirt and suede jacket stands to address a community meeting.

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Chris Greene @christophergreene.bsky.social · 10/02/2026

The contract has an entire section devoted to "liquidated damages" (essentially pre-ordained penalty amounts for breach of the contract):

Appendix A of agreement between City and Lyft with five rows of categories of performance metrics and specified damages for failures to meet those metrics.

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Chris Greene @christophergreene.bsky.social · 08/01/2026

This whole piece is worth a read. Victims of traffic violence are nearly comprehensively undercompensated for the harm they experience. But as someone who has repped (frightened, sometimes non-citizen) CYCLISTS sent to CRIMINAL COURT for failure to yield, this nugget is particularly enraging:

At the same time, it's exceptionally rare that a state "failure to yield" charge ends up in a criminal court rather than a traffic court — it happened just five times citywide over the past five years, according to OCA. Only one of those resulted in a jail sentence.

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Chris Greene @christophergreene.bsky.social · 08/12/2025

I mean come on. There is apparently a sidewalk riding crisis on the south shore of Staten Island, but not a single criminal summons has been issued. Because that's not how we deal with white kids riding on the sidewalk (the southern third of SI is very white, and largely well off).

A map of NYC reflecting where 311 complaints about sidewalk riding come from. Below the chart appears the following:

For instance, the NYPD received 120 complaints of sidewalk riding in the southernmost part of Staten Island, yet wrote no tickets there. And in Community Board 8 in Eastern Queens, the agency received 42 complaints of sidewalk riding and, again, wrote no tickets. And in the Community Board that covers Canarsie, the public made all of nine complaints — yet the NYPD precinct in that area wrote 369 tickets.

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Chris Greene @christophergreene.bsky.social · 12/11/2025

Was this email among those on Pam's desk? Was it handed to one of the influencers who got invited to the White House for the big Epstein disclosure party? (It tickles me that one of my law school classmates was among the marks handed the "Epstein files" and he ate it up.)

Rogan O'Handley, aka DC Draino, holding up a binder of Epstein documents.

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Chris Greene @christophergreene.bsky.social · 31/10/2025

To wit, a Staten Island Republican saying out loud what the rest of the party cannot admit: That Vito doesn't show up, while Mike works his tail off to meet the voters where they are.

“I’ve said publicly that Mike Colombo is a nice guy and a hard worker, because he is. He’s attended every single candidate forum I’ve been to, no matter how big or small the crowd. Vito hasn’t shown up to one. Recognizing someone’s work ethic isn’t ‘endorsing’ them, it’s called being polite,” Morano said in a written statement.

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Chris Greene @christophergreene.bsky.social · 24/10/2025

Fix the City has a link on its front page to "Follow the Money," except the link is subtly wrong (NVC.gov is not a city website; NYC.gov is). It's the kind of thing you'd assume was a mistake were it not an organization affiliated with Andrew Cuomo. Anyway we'll be rid of him soon.

Paid for by Fix the City, Inc. Executive Director Meaghan Brown. Top three donors: Michael Bloomberg, DoorDash, and John Hess. Not expressly or otherwise authorized or requested by any candidate or the candidate's committee or agent. More information at nvc.gov/FollowTheMoney. Political contributions are not tax-deductible.

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Chris Greene @christophergreene.bsky.social · 02/10/2025

Great thread, and more reason to be excited for the Court Street bike lane going in as we speak! These lanes make the streets safer, and not just for cyclists.

A picture of Court Street with white lines on the left indicating the installation of a bike lane and cars parked between that indicated bike lane and the vehicular lane of traffic.

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Chris Greene @christophergreene.bsky.social · 14/08/2025

What I like about this country is its freedom.

Section 81.53 Maximum Beverage Size. [Repealed]

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Chris Greene @christophergreene.bsky.social · 06/08/2025

They can't deny that the call happened because 50/50 Trump just tweets about its substance.

In a statement to the Times, Cuomo spokesman Rich Azzopardi said Trump and Cuomo haven’t spoken in “a while” but gave no further detail on when the pair last talked. “As far as I know, they have not discussed the race,” he said.

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Chris Greene @christophergreene.bsky.social · 28/07/2025

This is shitty for a number of reasons but the worst one is that the people responsible can't be sued directly. The record here pretty clearly establishes that Adams and Mastro are doing this over the explicit safety concerns of the DOT. But our taxes, not Adams, will fund the coming liability.

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Chris Greene @christophergreene.bsky.social · 24/07/2025

There is also "people imposing the discipline cannot know the immigration status of the student" provision. The point of this, I think, is to make sure that when a student is alleged to have engaged in misconduct, the fact of their likely deportation will not weigh on the decision maker (2/3).

The University will not provide the UJB panel members
with information about respondents' immigration status and the UJB will not consider
respondents' immigration status in its deliberation or sanctioning.

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Chris Greene @christophergreene.bsky.social · 24/07/2025

I want to remark upon two sentences in the Columbia agreement that concern me. First, this narc provision directed specifically at immigrants. Odious, but not the full story (1/3).

Columbia will promptly provide
the United States, upon request, with all disciplinary actions involving student visa-holders
resulting in expulsions or suspensions, and arrest records that Columbia is aware of for criminal
activity, including trespass or other violation of law, to the extent permitted by FERPA.

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Chris Greene @christophergreene.bsky.social · 24/07/2025

They must think that they, alone, are capable of reading the words in the agreement. Just astonishing chutzpah, to lie so baldly to their own community. Cowards, and apparently liars.

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Chris Greene @christophergreene.bsky.social · 23/07/2025

I don't know what PDX is but it sounds like you are imagining conduct by cyclists in NYC that doesn't generally occur. Anyway, to clarify:

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Chris Greene @christophergreene.bsky.social · 03/07/2025

The DA on Staten Island believes that cars protect people. Really, go look it up. He stole parkland over it. Anyway here's a little story from SI about how 6 people were hurt by an NYPD cruiser that lost control while responding to . . . another car crash. www.silive.com/crime-safety...

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. — Six people, including two NYPD officers, were injured when an NYPD patrol car lost control and crashed into a vehicle and several pedestrians in Port Richmond Tuesday night.

The crash occurred around 9:15 p.m. on the 200 block of Jewett Avenue. At the time, officers were responding to a “request for police assistance” at another vehicle crash near Richmond Terrace and Broadway in West Brighton, police said.

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Chris Greene @christophergreene.bsky.social · 01/07/2025

For instance, it's helpful to know that our state legislators go to work in a city whose landmass is nearly one third (!) parking spaces. What a colossal misallocation of space.

New York’s state capital is built for the car and that is how it is experienced by our lawmakers, so it’s no wonder that they think a great city is one with lots of wide roads, no traffic and lots of parking (and 29 percent of Albany’s land mass is parking).

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Chris Greene @christophergreene.bsky.social · 18/06/2025

Andrew's local paper says don't rank him. It also reminds its readers that his shortcomings aren't limited to office lechery.

But that's only the most significant scandal from Mr. Cuomo's final term in office. He is also facing a revived investigation into his alleged use of state resources to produce his 2020 quickie memoir, “American Crisis.” That's a probe Mr. Cuomo — who raked in more than $5 million for the book — tried to dodge by bringing a lawsuit challenging the validity of the state’s current ethics watchdog. That same controversy offered a reminder of Mr. Cuomo’s regular practice of bending ostensibly independent ethics bodies to his will by making sure they’re staffed by flunkies. And he treated his State Police detail like a personal palace guard.

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Chris Greene @christophergreene.bsky.social · 17/06/2025

To borrow an excellent protest sign: If not gestapo, why gestapo shaped? Photo: Dean Moses.

NYC Comptroller and Mayoral candidate Brad Lander being forcibly detained by masked men.

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Chris Greene @christophergreene.bsky.social · 16/06/2025

41% of stops were unlawful and almost ALL recorded stops were of non-white New Yorkers. Chief of Dep't is chilling with DJT at his golf course, and we're supposed to believe that the NYPD will justly administer the dragnet on commercial delivery cyclists.

What They Said: In a sample of body-worn camera footage, the monitor found that 41% of stops, searches, and frisks by CRT officers were unlawful, a far higher percentage than with other NYPD units.

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Chris Greene @christophergreene.bsky.social · 16/06/2025

If/when the city removes the protection for cyclists on this portion of roadway, report any dangerous condition you observe to 311. Because a cyclist is going to get struck by a reckless driver and boy should the city be on the hook. They know it's more dangerous. Adams doesn't care.

An official in the Adams administration, who asked to remain anonymous to speak freely about the mayor's decision, told Hell Gate that the removal of the protected lane will almost certainly result in more injuries and deaths, and that the mayor's decision was pure politics.

"Eric Adams is willing to risk someone getting killed on Bedford Avenue in order to secure the vote from this community," the official said. "This is not a decision that prioritizes public safety."

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Chris Greene @christophergreene.bsky.social · 13/06/2025

It is amazing what a vibes-based mayor can accomplish. Data? Who cares! Someone important complained. And I get to personally benefit.

In the first five months of 2024 — before the October 2024 installation of the bike lane — there were 88 reported crashes on the stretch between the Grant statue and Flushing Avenue, injuring 51 people, including six cyclists and 10 pedestrians.

In the five full months of this year — after the installation — crashes dropped by 18 percent to 72 total reported crashes. And total injuries dropped by 25 percent to 38.

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Chris Greene @christophergreene.bsky.social · 13/06/2025

The guy who devoted so much of his life to finish a Cuomo vanity project worried before his suicide that Cuomo would "destroy his career," a threat explicitly echoed by another victim in the story. It's apparently a thing Cuomo does, because he is a small man.

Kaitlin described a culture in which dishonest power plays were frequent. The phones at the office had push-tone keys that would stick, and sometimes she’d lose a call as she transferred it. She recalled that Cuomo once said, “You can’t figure out the fucking phones — I’m going to end your career.”

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Chris Greene @christophergreene.bsky.social · 13/06/2025

The project manager for Moynihan Station killed himself, and this is what his family said about what they think of Cuomo's role in his suicide:

On December 31, Cuomo lavishly opened Moynihan Train Hall; the $1.6 billion conversion of the former post office had been overseen by Michael Evans, who had faced steadily mounting pressure to finish it and who took his own life in March 2020. Evans’ partner, Brian Lutz, told me that “it would be unfair to lay all of the blame for Michael’s death at the feet of Andrew Cuomo. Michael made a lot of choices over the course of his life that served as kindling, but Governor Cuomo and his administration lit the match.” The governor, Lutz said, caused his late partner “psychological terror” and made him feel “constantly afraid.” In some of the last texts of his life, Lutz said, Michael told him that he was “afraid they would destroy his career.”

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Chris Greene @christophergreene.bsky.social · 09/06/2025

Hell Gate has reported that this is legit. Should we trust an NYPD (1) operating under a mayor who agreed to hurt the city's immigrants in return for criminal relief (that happened), and (2) staffed by losers eagerly sucking up to the guy who most acutely wants to hurt NYC and its immigrants.

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Chris Greene @christophergreene.bsky.social · 06/06/2025

Since a condition of her endorsement was probably that she delete all the true things she said about him, I'll leave this here.

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Chris Greene @christophergreene.bsky.social · 05/06/2025

Yes let's give these folks more pretextual reasons to hassle non-white New Yorkers. At least folks like me and Commish Tisch won't get unconstitutionally stopped, harassed, and searched.

Okay, so who is on the receiving end of these frequently unlawful, often unreported police searches? In 89 percent of the CRT's vehicle stops reviewed by the monitor, the driver was Black or Hispanic. Every single one of the vehicle stops reviewed by the monitor that turned into a search, the people being searched were Black or Hispanic—except for one person, who was Middle Eastern.

Were any of the white motorists searched? Per the report: "None of the white motorists were searched."

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Chris Greene @christophergreene.bsky.social · 03/06/2025

As reported by The Intercept: theintercept.com/2018/06/26/i...

If Gregory beats Grechen Shirley, how he’ll fare against King is not a mystery. Gregory was the 2016 Democratic nominee and lost to King in a monster of a landslide, but his political futility hasn’t stopped Gregory from getting the backing of Cuomo. In fact, in the upside-down politics of New York, his poverty as a candidate may be the entire reason he has support from the machine. As it turns out, Rich Schaffer, head of the Suffolk County Democratic Party, which exerts power over Shirley’s district, is a political ally of Republican Rep. Pete King — despite being in different parties. Gregory is likely Schaffer’s handpicked candidate not because he is a threat to King, but for precisely the opposite. His candidacy serves to prevent independent opposition, like Grechen Shirley’s, from emerging.

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Chris Greene @christophergreene.bsky.social · 29/05/2025

One side of this standoff has immense courage. The other side is the NYPD acting in service of ICE. hellgatenyc.com/nypd-arrests...

Photo of protestors kneeling on the ground shot from the rear. Across from them are members of the NYPD. It is raining, and the image captures the drops falling on the protestors.

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Chris Greene @christophergreene.bsky.social · 21/05/2025

Here is a favored parking lot for the NYPD that forces riders into oncoming traffic on a blind curve where drivers are trying to make the light to get onto the BK bridge. And it's blind BECAUSE the cruiser is blocking the line of sight to the oncoming traffic. This was yesterday.

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Chris Greene @christophergreene.bsky.social · 13/05/2025

The gent on the phone wasn't doing, uh, police business.

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Chris Greene @christophergreene.bsky.social · 13/05/2025

NYPD: It is the cyclists that make our roads unsafe. Also NYPD:

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