Rov_Scam
1d ago
I don't even know who this person is or why I should care. I googled the name and nothing about any controversy came up. Google news was all about the woman she portrayed in the movie that flopped defended her performance after someone else involved in the true story criticized it. Whatever this is, it isn't news.
Rov_Scam
1d ago
I was referring to the Epstein stuff specifically and make no comment on anything else that may have happened. I've written about this extensively in the past; suffice it to say that I don't think there are going to be any bombshells, and I doubt that there are any "lists" at all. I don't like Trump but I'm more suspicious of him than I was previously for the simple reason that he leaned into this whole conspiracy until it was time to release the files. There's obviously something in there he'd rather not make public, or, alternatively, he hasn't seen the files and there's something in his past that he's worried may come up. I don't think it would be criminal. My first guess was going to be that he stayed in contact with Epstein well after any decent person would have cut ties, but the recent emails seem to undercut that theory; in the "dog that didn't bark" email he talks about Trump in a manner that suggests they aren't in regular contact.
The thing that's weird to me about the whole thing is that anyone who has studied this closely and isn't a total hack like Daryl Cooper would be of the opinion that it's highly unlikely that anyone other than Epstein and a few select people were involved in the wrongdoing. Nothing about Trump came up in the civil lawsuits, and the 2020 report about the original prosecution made it clear that no one in the Justice Department even knew that Epstein had famous friends until his attorneys told them. To be clear, the "Epstein Files" as it pertains to this case only involve the files from the Federal Investigation, and the only investigation that could have possibly revealed anything spicy would have been the 2019 investigation.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
Any wolf crying on the part of Trump's opponents is a relatively recent phenomenon. The narrative among the conspiracy-minded for the better part of the past five years was that the Biden Administration was concealing the Epstein Files to protect prominent Democrats, and that Trump would release them so these people could face the music. Or at the very least everyone would learn how depraved they all were. The only comments about this I ever heard from IRL friends on the left was that the logic behind this was ridiculous because Trump was close with Epstein and it would take a lot of faith to believe in the conspiracy yet not any involvement from Trump. And it wasn't a topic that came up that frequently. I didn't hear Democrats talking about this much at all until Trump went out of his way to say there was no conspiracy and prominent Republicans started echoing that sentiment. People like Charlie Kirk reversed course on the whole thing. Now my friends on the left started saying that they weren't suspicious before but were now because otherwise why would Trump be so adamant about keeping these confidential?
Rov_Scam
2d ago
The Tebow hate had very little to do with politics. While he was vocally anti-abortion and his politics were assumed based on his religious affiliation, he never made any direct statements about Obama or anything like that, or even claimed to be a Republican. The religion thing is a bigger part of it, but still not as big as people make it out to be. He won two National Championships and a Heisman Trophy while at Florida, and was about as prominent a celebrity as exists in college football, which isn't quite the NFL but is still pretty big. Even when he was inspiring rule changes after putting Bible verses in his eye black, he still didn't seem to inspire too much hate.
When it came to the NFL, though, Tebow was an athlete, which in the pros is damning with faint praise. He had no special ability to play quarterback, but was able to be successful in college by relying on his natural athleticism. There's a YouTube clip of Ray Lewis and Ed Reed talking to rookies about the importance of watching film, and one of them says that in college they may have been able to run and jump their way to success, but in The League that wasn't going to work. Tebow was successful in college because he was a big guy who could plow his way forward on QB runs or out of a scramble, and played in a system where he wasn't expected to win games with his arm. He was regularly among the leaders in rushing yards among QBs in the top college ranks (and not too far from one of the top rusher's, period), and he led the SEC in all kinds of passing statistics, but pretty much everyone who saw him play could tell that his ability was limited. His footwork was terrible, and his throwing motion was so long it would make Byron Leftwich blush, resulting in high, looping passes that could work if the receiver was "NCAA open" but didn't have a chance at hitting the tighter windows in the NFL. He had no concept on how to read pro defenses. His decision-making was terrible. Even his rushing ability, his strong suit, was built less on speed and more on sheer power.
the NFL at that time was at one of its various low-ebbs when it came to dual-threat quarterbacks. The last one drafted of any consequence had been Michael Vick in 2002. The last one drafted period had been Pat White, the year prior. And though his time at West Virginia was successful enough that fans wore white in honor of him at their last home game, he only lasted one year in the pros, never completing a single pass. The tide would start to turn the following year with Cam Newton, and reach its crescendo after the success of Josh Allen and Lamar Jackson led every head coach to salivate over what could be done with a raw mass of pure athleticism. But that tide is turning now after the failures of guys like Trey Lance, Malik Willis, and Anthony Richardson. And Tebow had less obvious ability than any of them. After he graduated, there was talk that he'd have a future in the NFL as a tight end or maybe a fullback, but Tebow was having none of it. This had been suggested before, but he insisted on playing quarterback. Coaches had been trying to fix his mechanics since high school, but he could always fall back on his athleticism so he had no incentive to change. By the time he got to the NFL, these problems had become so ingrained that they were beyond coaching; even if he made improvement, if under pressure he could only be expected to revert to what he knew from muscle memory.
All that being said, quarterbacks are at a premium in the NFL, and in a draft class thin on QBs, Tebow was taken by the Broncos in the first round. He didn't see the field much in 2010, but the following year, with Kyle Orton being terrible, he was given a shot, and he made the most of it. That isn't to say he was good, exactly, but he won games. He'd pass for like 16 yards in the first half but the defense would keep the game close and Willis McGahee would get yards on the ground and in the fourth quarter he'd get a few good completions, march down the field, and win the game in the final minutes. He even won a playoff game, and though the Broncos promptly lost the following week, he now has more playoff wins than Justin Herbert, Andy Dalton, and hall-of-famer Y.A. Tittle.
In other contexts, this wouldn't have been a problem, but Tebow's existing public profile and relationship with the media did him in. If the same results were had by a nobody like and Easton Stick or Sam Ehrlinger type, the story would be about the defense and the running game and how they're winning despite expectedly poor QB play. If it was a guy like Duck Hodges who was working on a sod farm or something before getting the call to the big leagues, it would be a story about determination and never giving up. If Tim Tebow is the same person, except his personality is such that he's arrested for firing an unlicensed handgun during an altercation outside a nightclub, it wouldn't have made him more likeable, but the story would be about how he's a gritty guy who can take a sack and run for a first down on third and three.
But what doesn't fit is a guy who has won two national championships and a Heisman, who was drafted in the first round, who had a big enough public profile to do endorsements, to play so poorly and be rewarded for it by winning. He was already enough of a national celebrity by that point that whatever he did in a game was going to be newsworthy, and the Christianity threw the whole thing into overdrive. The fact that he was openly Christian wasn't the issue; there are plenty of pro athletes who have made their religious beliefs known. Phillip Rivers is also an Evangelical, and no one seemed to ever give him shit for it. But, aside from being a far better athlete, Rivers was also never as in-your-face about it as Tebow was. He went out of his way to make his religion a story, thanking God in every interview and genuflecting in the end zone. It became cloying, and in the light of the Broncos continuing to win in spite of his poor play, one could be forgiven for getting the impression that he was specifically attributing his teams success to divine intervention. Furthermore, he became a lodestar for people who cared more about religion than sports. His jersey was among the best-selling in the NFL. The people who wished him the most success, though, apart maybe from people in Denver, were those who weren't so much impressed with his playing ability as they were his evangelism.
Tim Tebow was hated because he completely upended puplic perception of what a pro athlete was supposed to be. If he had played better the religion would have seemed less important, and his success would be deserved. If his poor play cost his team games, he'd be another bad quarterback on a bad team and nothing special. Maybe Orton gets his job back.If it turned out his personal life wasn't as squeaky clean as he made it out to be, then the ensuing scandal would overshadow anything about his play or his religion, and the holy rollers who were buying his jerseys would be disowining him, and even if the Broncos continued on their trajectory, fewer people would care. But the right combination of things happened to allow religion to overpower sports, and fans don't like that. I'd talk about Kaepernick more, but it's more or less the same story, except with politics—a player with an existing public profile from (college, making the Super Bowl) ignites a national discussion about (religion, politics) far out of proportion to the player's actual ability. People have limited tolerance for these things being allowed to creep in where they don't belong, and to the extent that it's inevitable, they prefer that it at least involve someone whose value as an athlete justifies cutting them some slack. When the catalyst is a mediocre to awful player, and those most invested in taking the player's side aren't those typically invested in the game itself, things can turn ugly.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
And this is a problem how, exactly? If actual computer scientists didn't know this I'd be concerned, but as much as we'd like to think that a certain base-level of knowledge is required to study something seriously, it really isn't. Those of us who grew up with file structures as an essential part of computing just assumed that they always would be, and are now shocked to find that technology has rendered them unnecessary for a lot of people. If indeed knowledge of them is necessary, then you're going to have to teach them about it.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
I don't know exactly how things are managed on an iPad, but my point is that if some kind of software renders files structures as we know them obsolete, there's no point in complaining about people not knowing how to use them. Not knowing how to steer a car isn't much of an issue if all cars are autonomous, similar to how automatic transmissions have rendered stick shifts obsolete for most people in the United States.
Rov_Scam
3d ago
Let me paint a picture for you: It's about 15 degrees outside and you get into your freezing car to go to work. You give the car a little gas as you turn the key and it turns over but doesn't quite start. Unfazed, you give it another try, and you're closer, but no cigar. On your third try, you pay attention to how much gas you're giving it and, feathering the pedal just the right way, the car fires up. You sit in your driveway and rev the engine for a few minutes to get it warmed up. When you put it in gear, however, the engine stalls. You aren't surprised, but fuck, you thought you let it run long enough so that wouldn't happen. So you start it again and let it run a little longer, revving the engine occasionally, but it still stalls as you put it in gear. You're mildly concerned at this point but not to the point you'd call a tow truck or anything. You fire it up a third time (or a fourth, depending on how lucky you're feeling), before you decide to investigate the problem. You go outside and freeze your ungloved fingers off getting the hood open and sure enough, it's just as you suspected; the so-called "automatic" choke isn't opening properly. You stick your fingers into a running engine to open it up manually, get back into the car, and, if you're lucky, you'll be able to drive away. But you may have to repeat the process a couple times depending on how cold it is.
I used to drive a car from the 70s, and this sort of thing used to be the reality of owning an automobile. People like to bitch these days about how "you can't work on cars anymore!" and I agree, that car was super-easy to work on. And that was a good thing, because you'd be working on it a lot. I'm not talking about major repairs here, either. I'm talking about annual plug changes, annual point changes, setting the spark with a timing light, lube jobs, semiannual coolant changes, reformatting the carb for high-altitudes, and a bunch of other shit that nobody does anymore. It's still better than it was in my grandfather's day, when people would patch tires, carry spark plugs in the car for emergency changes, and cars would regularly overheat, even if there wasn't anything wrong with them. When was the last time your car was vapor locked?
I imagine that you've never experienced any of this before. These days, all cars have multiport fuel injection and electronic ignition and not starting and overheating aren't par for the course but signs of a serious problem. People aren't as knowledgeable about cars as they used to be, but people don't really have to be knowledgeable anymore. Computers had their own switch from carburetion to fuel injection, the switch from DOS to NT architecture. Just as most cars now run when you turn the key, most programs will run after a simple installation process, and run properly. But I can't fault today's kids for not understanding file structures any more than I can fault anyone born after 1989 for not knowing how autoexec.bat or config.sys works, or not knowing how to gap plugs. They might not know how to do things you think are basic, but it's not a problem unless they need to know, and if they never do need to know than the world is better off for it.
Rov_Scam
3d ago
No, you don't get sales tax charged on any of that list, let alone most of it. The only items excluded from the Washington sales tax exemption are prepared foods, soft drinks, and bottled water. And even that takes ten pages to fully flesh out. And sales tax isn't the best example to use because you're talking about an extra charge of what is probably a few cents if you incorrectly select a taxable item over a nontaxable one. What you're proposing is the difference between being able to buy the item at all or not.
Rov_Scam
4d ago
Except it's the exact same logic the Republicans used when they claimed that making the tax cuts permanent wasn't new spending because it was just "maintaining" the status quo, a status quo they voted for to begin with, specifically because of how it became impossible to undo the Bush tax cuts.
Rov_Scam
4d ago
Restrict the eligible product pool to vegetables, fruits, grains, beans, and dairy and you save like 90%, while avoiding the issue of people spending all their cash on day 1 on waygu steak or orange crush, or selling them for spending money.
This simply isn't feasible. Even assuming it's legal for states to deviate from Federal SNAP guidelines (and I doubt that it is), and that eligible items could be agreed on politically, there's simply no way to implement such a system without giving significant advance notice. Grocery stores rely on internal codes to determine what is food stampable and what isn't. If such a change required them to go into their computer systems and change the status of thousands of items, it would be a tall enough order, but it gets worse than than. To avoid having to code each individual item as being eligible or ineligible, they rely on an item's categorization in the relevant department. So in a typical grocery store items categorized as produce, meat, dairy, edible grocery, frozen, bakery, and deli would be eligible for food stamps, while items categorized as HBC, inedible grocery, and prepared foods would not. When you decide to start changing the eligible items you're requiring grocery stores to upend their entire department systems to accommodate the change. What you propose wouldn't affect some departments, but something like edible grocery would be entirely screwed up, and even things like deli would get complicated (what you propose would include cheese but not meat, and some stores categorize certain bread items as deli, but not others).
Conservatives in general like to excoriate poor people for the perception that they spend their food stamps on items they shouldn't be spending them on, creating a sort of triangle with the following three categories being the points:\
- Items that are objectionable because they're inherently unhealthy (fruit roll up, pop tarts, cheese curls, Dr. Pepper, etc.)
- Convenience items that resemble unobjectionable items or are composed of items that would individually be unobjectionable, but are prepared or processed to a degree that makes them both more unhealthy and more expensive than unobjectionable items (Hungry Man Dinners, frozen pizza, etc.)
- Luxury items that would be unobjectionable but for the cost (Waygu steak, most seafood, artisanal cheese, etc.)
There are certain staple items like the ones you probably have in mind that fit right in the center of the triangle that aren't objectionable to anybody. But when you move closer to the edges it becomes extremely difficult to draw the line. For example, you suggest restricting the product pool to grains. But what do you actually mean by that? Let's look at some items:
- Rice, oatmeal, flour: These are more or less pure grains that would presumably fit any definition you want to use.
- Bread, pasta: Processed, premade items, but such basic staples that it would be ridiculous to not include them.
- Prepackaged cookies, cakes, donuts, etc.: Obviously in the snack food category, but they're really just basic grain items with more sugar and fat content
- Boxed crackers: Still firmly in the snack food category, but without the added sugar and fat
- Breakfast cereals: Run the gamut from Cheerios and Kix up to Fruity Pebbles and Count Chocula. I guess you could propose a sugar limit like my mother did?
- Granola bars, breakfast bars, energy bars: Usually found in the cereal aisle. Like cereal, they run the gamut from so healthy as to be inedible up to Pop Tarts, the poster child for oversweetened convenience foods.
- Hamburger Helper, Rice-a-Roni, Kraft Mac-n-Cheese, boxed stuffing mix, ramen: Unobjectional staple items plus flavorings that may or may not make the product significantly less healthy
- Pancake mix: Unobjectionable on its own, except the intended purpose (and only purpose the vast majority will ever use it for) is to drench it in a sauce made of pure sugar, which is sold separately but conveniently located right next to it
- Frozen garlic bread, frozen ravioli, frozen pierogies: Unobjectionable items made slightly less healthy and sold in a form that is typically associated with objectionable convenience foods.
- Specialty breads: An unobjectionable item made in a way that may or may not make it more expensive. Bakery Italian is among the least expensive and best-tasting options at the store I shop at, but you can also get more expensive stuff pretty easily.
I don't doubt that you have your opinions on this and could draw a line somewhere that's both logical and reasonable. That's not the issue. The issue is that disentangling all of this would result in regulations so byzantine that you couldn't possibly expect the average person to have an intuitive sense for it.
Rov_Scam
5d ago
Even for a mega artist like Taylor Swift, that's not entirely true. Marketing is certainly part of it, but there's a lot more that goes into it. Even if you cynically assume that pop stars are all marketing and no substance, labels pay a lot of attention to what gets released. The reason that people like 2Pac seem to have immortality is because they all record a lot more than the record company is willing to release, especially with pop musicians who use outside songwriters. If it were simply a matter of spamming the market with material then they either wouldn't record as much (to save money), or release everything they did record (to maximize revenue). The reason they don't do this is because they need to maintain a certain quality standard and avoid saturating the market. In the 50s and 60s artists were required to put out several ten song albums per year. By the end of the sixties, release schedules slackened, and by the 80s an album a year pace was considered pretty good. Now they can go years between releases, and this isn't due to lack of material in most cases; those 50s releases included a lot of filler.
So yes, they are paying attention to the music, and AI doesn't allow one to pay any attention to the music, especially when it's made by people with no musical experience. It's just spamming in hope they can make more money than they spend, with little control over the content. And marketing includes a lot more than what one typically thinks of as marketing. It includes touring, arranging press interviews, making sure critics review the album, making public appearances, having ins with radio stations, and all of that.
Rov_Scam
5d ago
Some people capturing a non-zero amount of the market doesn't equate to upending the market to the point that it has to cope. Slop has always accounted for a non-zero amount of the market.
Rov_Scam
5d ago
If you're a record executive who has been given a 1 million dollar budget to develop an artist that the label expects to have a hit, what do you think is the better strategy?
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Scout someone whom you think has potential and spend the 1 million signing, recording, and promoting them.
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Sign 100 bands more or less at random and spend $10,000 signing and recording them, and just release the music and hope it promotes itself. You're going to pay them up front for the rights to the recordings so they're just making an album for hire and aren't under contract, and you won't even bother to keep their phone numbers. What they record now is it.
The artist you spent the whole million on might make the money back and might not, but the chances of that happening are much better than assuming that one of the hundred albums you just threw into the market with no promotion is going to be a big enough hit to recoup the costs of all the others is practically zero. The calculus doesn't get any better if you can record 200 artists for $5,000 apiece, or 400 for $2,500 apiece. At that level of investment it's akin to a lottery, and lotteries don't become better investments just because the price of tickets is cheaper. It's actually worse than a lottery because at least the lottery has calculable odds and a guaranteed winning number.
Rov_Scam
5d ago
I don't know how big of a town you're talking about but I checked Pittsburgh's (2 million metro) alternative weekly and, filtering out DJs, cover bands, and open mic, there are 136 music events in town this week. Some of these will be from elsewhere, and some of the stuff like Banjo Night at the Elks isn't really applicable, but most bands aren't going to be playing in a given weeks, so I would assume that it isn't an exaggeration to say that 200 bands in Pittsburgh would record an album with a major if given the opportunity. The point I'm making is that it's not like labels are having trouble finding people willing to sign.
Rov_Scam
5d ago
That's not really much of a shocker, though. We've had similar democratization with the streaming services for 15 years now, and while I'm sure somebody has had a hit by virtue of nothing other than having uploaded their music to Spotify, if you look at the Billboard charts it's almost exclusively artists signed to major labels. Even the artists you're referring to were only able to use Spotify to get enough traction to get signed with major labels. "Rich Men North of Richmond" is the only song I can think of off the top of my head that became a hit despite having absolutely no label promotion, and it's a good example to use because Oliver Anthony refused to sign with a label. Despite touring with name acts he hasn't had any real success since, and despite venting about his ex-wife on Rogan, the song he wrote about their divorce stalled in the lower reaches of the Country chart and didn't crack the Hot 100 at all. Zach Bryan is probably the epitome of the phenomenon you mention, as he was self-released until 2022, but none of his music actually charted until after he had signed with Warner the previous year. There isn't any evidence of a sustainable path to success for a self-released artist that doesn't involve eventually being picked up by a label.
And this is for artists who have at least some ability to self-promote, whether through social media, local radio, licensing to TV/movies/advertisements, or simply playing shows wherever you can. If the strategy is simply to upload as much material to streaming services as possible and hope something catches on, there's no way to engage in even this kind of low-level promotion, since it doesn't make sense to invest anything beyond the minimum that's required to get the song uploaded. It may happen occasionally, but there's no reason to believe that simply increasing the volume will turn it into a viable business model, or allow it to play a significant role in the industry.
Rov_Scam
5d ago
Just before AI music became a thing, Ted Gioia talked about a Spotify fake artist problem he discovered. Bascially, he noticed that playlists with titles like "Jazz for a Rainy Afternoon" wouldn't include any artists that he recognized (and as a jazz critic he would recognize more than the average bear), and further investigation revealed that the "albums" the songs were from would only have one or two songs. Looking into this even further, he discovered that he couldn't find much information at all about these artists, except addresses in the Stockholm area. The conclusion he came to was that since some music styles—jazz, chillout, orchestral, etc.—are driven more by algorithms than individual artists (by virtue of people telling Alexa "Play relaxing music" or whatever), it was cheaper for Spotify to hire studio musicians to record generic slop so they wouldn't have to pay royalties to real musicians.
In the 90s, I was at a discount store with my dad during Christmas season and he bought a CD titled "Jazz for Christmas Eve" for a dollar or something. It didn't have the name of any purported artist, just song titles. The music was entirely MIDI. A few years later the mother of a family friend was going into the home, and we were helping to clean out her house. I took the records, mostly junk, but there was one that stood out. It was called "The Hits of Nat King Cole" or something similar and had a picture of Mr. Cole on the cover. Towards the bottom, in relatively small print, it said "Performed by Bob Gigliotti" or whoever. The liner notes weren't extensive but mostly talked about Nat King Cole. The only mention of the gentleman who was actually performing on the album was a brief paragraph that said that he was, in fact, a singer, and that he does a good job with the material. When I played the record, I was hit with some guy doing an uncanny Nat King Cole impression.
The point I am trying to make is that cheap, mass-produced slop has existed in the music industry for as long as production costs were cheap enough to justify it. An enterprising music historian could probably do a book-length treatment of the subject, but in the end this has only been a minor footnote in the history of music. And even in the limited instances where it has historically gotten a foothold, tides shifted away from it. Consider Muzak. I hesitate to call it slop because, up until the 1980s, it was produced with a degree of professionalism and creativity that belied its status. But this was more for the pleasure of the people making it than anything else; it was always intended to be nothing more than musical wallpaper for stores, offices, and other public places, with orchestral arrangements of popular hits almost algorithmically selected to ensure the proper pacing. In the 1960s it was ubiquitous, but these days the only national chain I can think of that still plays this kind of music is Hobby Lobby. Retail started shifting to name artists in the 1980s, starting with inoffensive "soft rock" but more recently including practically anything that's been popular since the 1960s.
The AI doomers have tried to make the argument that because this music can be generated so quickly and so inexpensively it's trivial to just completely flood the market, and cash-strapped record companies would love it if they could generate product without having to pay the artists, producers, etc. While this may seem like a compelling argument the music industry could have always done this, but they haven't even attempted it in 100 years of existence. Making music is obviously a skill, and making music that people want to listen to (and pay for) is an even greater skill, but it's not a particularly unique skill. Any city is going to have hundreds of musicians who write their own material, practice in their spare time, play in bars in the weekends, and are good enough that most of the people in attendance enjoy the performance. If the record companies wanted to, they could have always signed as many of these musicians as they could, pay for a recording session, pay the musicians a low flat fee, and completely spam the market for little cost. If they get a hot or two out of the deal, great. If not, they're only out ten grand.
In reality, major labels are highly selective about who they sign, and those they do sign usually get significant financial backing. A local band recording at a local studio can get an album out the door for about 5 grand if they're well-rehearsed. A major label will spend, on average, $250,000 to $300,000 to record the album. The label will also pay for promotion, which can run into the millions if touring is involved. And they would always prefer to spend money on a proven star rather than a nobody. In other words, the model they operate on is the exact opposite of the one where AI takes over.
And it gets even worse. In an alternate universe where record labels operated by signing cheap labor and spamming the market, that at least allows for the possibility of being able to capitalize on the hits. AI doesn't even allow that, since there's no guarantee that you'll get output that's plausibly by the same fake band. Even big stars like The Beatles, Frank Sinatra, The Supremes, and Taylor Swift have had occasional flops; there's no guarantee that because an artist is popular that any individual release will be successful. But at least when you got The Supremes in the studio you were guaranteed a Supremes record. With AI you just have to keep generating and hope that you eventually get a Supremes record, and even that doesn't guarantee you anything.
As much as AI doomers talk about how it's going to take things over, it's not. It's going to replace slop, but slop has always existed. The business model doesn't really allow for the kind of dystopian future they're predicting.
Rov_Scam
5d ago
The golden era for everything is always 20 years ago. That's how long it takes society to weed its collective memory of the bad and keep the good. Everything people say about the garbage we have today vs. the awesome stuff we had yesterday was being said yesterday about the stuff we had the day before and so on. That goes for pretty much everything - cars, appliances, movies, etc. Really, it's a mix of good and bad, but given enough time, it all becomes good.
Rov_Scam
6d ago
Pinging in @Jiro. I understand you're argument, and while I addressed the potential adversarial motive in selection of the evidence, it was more as an aside, an observation that would give me another reason to be suspicious. But it isn't essential to my argument, because this failure mode seems to happen regardless of whether the observer has an ulterior motive, and is usually the result of a completely logical chain of events.
The cases I was referring to where this happens with police is where they get a Level 2 Description and become on it to the point that they fail to appreciate how broad it is. Take my example from above, where a witness sees a perpetrator running from a crime scene who is an African American teenager, short and very overweight. Let's suppose that a couple hours after the incident a beat cop canvassing the neigborhood come across a young man of that description who is 5'4" and 200 pounds in a pool hall a few blocks from the crime scene. Detectives question him, and while they don't get much in the way of evidence, they don't entirely buy his story. So they spend the next several weeks investigating him, never coming up with anything useful, but also never considering that he might not be the guy. Years later someone writes a book about the case and talks to an old cop who insists that this kid was the killer but they never had enough to prove it.
The police in a case like that didn't go on a wild goose chase because they had some special reason they wanted to pin a crime on that kid, they did it because they came across him early in the investigation and he matched a description given to them by an eyewitness. They didn't consider that the description could apply to hundreds of people, and that they should have been casting a broader net rather than narrowing the scope of the investigation early based on the description alone. It ultimately doesn't matter if Baker has an animus against the police. Even if he was arbitrarily reviewing CCTV footage to try to find a match, if he found some guy walking outside a restaurant who matched to the same degree and started making the argument that it must be that guy based on nothing else, then it's still just as bad.
Rov_Scam
6d ago
As a Democrat, here's what I can tell you, keeping things as neutral as possible:
Going back to March and the last shutdown fight, a lot of Democrats wanted the government shut down over the Big Beautiful Bill, and Schumer caved. I was on Schumer's side at the time. The rhetoric among the pro-shutdown Democrats, who tended to be further left, was that, in the wake of the 2024 elections, their options were limited, and they had to be willing to use the one weapon left in the arsenal to avoid being run over roughshod by Trump. Schumer et al. were more cautious, arguing that shutdowns weren't popular when Republicans did them and Democrats insisting on one could take their situation from bad to worse. Furthermore, this was when DOGE was running wild in the Executive Branch and there was fear that the increased discretion given to Trump due to a shutdown would exacerbate that as well.
Fast forward to October and another shutdown is looming. Whatever concerns about DOGE and the like existed in the spring have evaporated since Trump doesn't seem to be paying much heed to any constraints on the office, and the pressure on Democratic leadership to Do Something is at fever pitch. Democrats settle on the strategy of making the ACA subsidies the center of the shutdown. These increased premium subsidies were part of COVID-era relief but are set to expire, and the Democrats want to make them permanent. They've settled on this tack because, back in the spring, Republicans tried to sell making the Trump tax cuts permanent on the grounds that it wasn't a spending increase, just making the status quo permanent. Now the sides are reversed, with Republicans saying that they aren't trying to include any new Republican priorities but are just passing a "clean" spending bill, while Democrats are saying that they too are just preserving the status quo. In the meantime, Democrats are warning voters that if the subsidies aren't renewed, ACA insurance premiums could double.
Republicans have said that they'd be willing to negotiate subsidy extensions, but only after passing a budget. Democrats said this is unacceptable since they'd have no leverage in negotiations after the spending bill was passed. So the whole thing has ground to a stalemate, with everyone waiting to see who will blink first. Part of the reason Democrats were always reluctant to embrace a shutdown is that Federal workers are either furloughed or forced to work without pay, and they don't want to lose that voting bloc. But Republicans shot themselves in the foot on that front by insisting on mass firings and limited job security. The Democrats do not figure that making the shutdown strategy bipartisan will cause any mass exodus of Federal workers to the Republican party. Even after a large public service union condemned the shutdown a couple weeks ago the Democrats didn't blink, finding it very unlikely that they had done enough to lose any endorsements.
Polling has also suggested that voters will blame the shutdown on Republicans based solely on the expectation that the party that controls the executive and both houses of Congress can't credibly blame the other party for their own failure to conduct business. Polling blaming Republicans has held steady throughout the past month. Both of these questions were resolved conclusively last Tuesday with Democrats overperforming expectations in off-year elections, including in Virginia, a state flush with Federal employees. I think part of the reason this may work out better than previous shutdowns is that the Democrats seem narrowly focused on an issue that directly affects millions of people. If the subsidies expire these premiums will increase significantly, and the effects would be fairly evenly spread among Democrats and Republicans. This is different than the 2013 shutdown which was vaguely about lowr spending, or the 2019 shutdown that was about border wall funding, an issue to remote from most people's direct experience.
Aside from polling and election results, two other things may show that things are going in the Democrats' favor, both seeming own-goals from Trump. The first is that he has called for the Senate to end the fillibuster, which would end the shutdown. The Republicans have shown little inclination to do this, since they argued that it was necessary for Democracy when the Democrats wanted to get rid of it, and the consequences of doing so may be worse than whatever negative fallout they get from the shutdown. Unlike Trump, congressional Republicans understand the long game, and want to preserve at least some power if the Democrats take the Oval Office in 2028. The other seeming own-goal from Trump is the current fight about SNAP benefits. Trump moved heaven and earth to get the military paid, but he seems bound and determined to make sure nobody gets food stamps until the shutdown ends. I can understand the initial position, trying to prove that shutdowns have consequences, but once a court ordered that emergency funds be used he had an offramp. Now that he has appealed the ruling (And gotten a stay; after funds for November had been dispersed) it just looks like he's being vindictive against poor people. Especially since he doesn't seem to think military employees should suffer these consequences.
I don't know what the likelihood is of either side caving, but right now it seems like the Democrats have the upper hand. There's nothing in the election results or polling to suggest they've lost any real support, and now that we're entering open enrollment season the premium increases are no longer going to be theoretical. The Democrats have already offered a compromise whereby they would agree to a one-year extension of the subsidies, but the Republicans are still insisting on a "clean bill" with no additional appropriation. For all the heat Schumer gets from the left, I think he's a smarter political operator than people give him credit for. A spring shutdown wouldn't have gone well, and would have looked like another in a long line of defeats. As things stand right now, the Democrats have zero reason to end the shutdown, and their position will only get stronger as time goes on.
For the Republicans' part, it appears that they made a miscalculation by assuming that the party causing the shutdown would be blamed for it, and have now put themselves in the position where they'd be better off negotiating but are refusing to do so because they've already taken the stance that negotiating is akin to caving. Trump isn't helping, in that he's insisting on total victory and actively doing things that seem more designed to piss off Democrats than to improve his negotiating position. If nothing else, however this ends, they're giving Democrats a lot of grist for the mill come election time.
@gattsuru makes some good points about the gait analysis, but I don't think you even need to go that far. I spent 2 1/2 hours at the DMV this afternoon and did some reading about gait analysis. I learned that the way it works is that analysts break gait down into components, and analyze those components into categories based on how prevalent they are in the population. Like a lot of other things, when a gait analyst says there's a certain percentage match, what they're saying is that, based on the attributes they observed, they can eliminate that percentage of the population. With that being said, from here on out I'll assume that the science is bulletproof, because I don't know that that even matters in this context.
I've read a lot of crime books in my life, and one of the things that's always interested me is suspect descriptions and how useful they are. I've read about cases where police failed to solve the crime because they seemed to focus on a description that wasn't very good, and others where they didn't solve the crime and dismissed good descriptions as being too vague. I've also seen authors excoriate police departments for not focusing on suspects who matched relatively vague descriptions. So during my time at the DMV I also thought about a rubric that could be used to categorize suspect descriptions.
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A Level 1 Description would be one that eliminates 90–99% of the population. This may seem high, but anything less than that isn't really even a description. If the suspect is described as a black female, well, only 12–14% of the population is black, and about half of them are female, so that eliminates 93% of the population right there. If the suspect is described as a young, tall, white male, 40–45% of the population is white males, eliminating children and anyone too old to be reasonably described as young and you cut that in half, and cut it in half again to get rid of anyone shorter than average height, and you're down to 10%. These kinds of descriptions are of little to no use in a police investigation and are completely worthless in a trial.
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A Level 2 Description is one that eliminates 99–99.9% of the population. These can be of some use in an investigation but are of little to no use in a trial. Suppose the man running from the scene was described as an African American teenager, short and extremely overweight. Take the 7% who are black men, teenagers being about 20% of them, divide by half again to get people shorter then average, then in half again to get anyone plausibly described as overweight (always use the larger numbers), and we're in that 0.1–1% range. But in most places there are going to be entirely too many short, black, overweight teenage boys for police to identify and question them all.
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A Level 3 Description would eliminate 99.9–99.99% of the population, but still include between one person in a thousand and one in ten thousand. To give a few examples:
- Caucasian male, age 50 to 55, tall, athletic, blue eyes, grey hair, driving an older model pickup.
- Caucasian female, 20–23 years old, brown hair and eyes, about 5'7", large breasts, extremely good looking, piercing in the nose and tattoo on the lower back.
- Hispanic female, 45 to 50, extremely short, somewhat overweight, perhaps 4'11" and 130 pounds, bushy eyebrows, wears glasses, blue painted fingernails.
These kinds of descriptions are of value to police and may play some role in a trial, but no one could be reasonably convicted of a crime based on them. It's also worth noting here that some of the attributes are changeable, and this needs to factor into the analysis as well.
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A Level 4 Description would eliminate 99.99–99.999% of the population, but still probably include a few people in any decent sized metro:
- Caucasian male, 40–45 years old, between 5'2" and 5'5", thin, long, sandy-colored hair, large glasses, large square face, smokes cigarettes, looks a little like John Denver.
- African-American male in his 20s, average height, muscular build, shaved head, several gold teeth, gold earring in left ear, prominent scar on neck. Very deep voice with trace of a Jamaican accent.
If you match a description of this specificity you should expect the police to come to your door, but it still wouldn't be enough to convict absent other information.
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A Level 5 description would exclude 99.999% of the population or more, aka 1 person in 100,000 or less. This is the point where you stop combining combinations of independent variables that belong to lots of people and zero in on very specific attributes that are themselves fairly unique: A missing finger, a particular tattoo, one green nipple, etc. At this level you're on the defensive; if you match a Level 5 Description, you're going to need an alibi.
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A Level 6 description is a description that applies to only one person: Fingerprints, DNA, being recognized by someone who knows you. A Level 6 Description is an identification.
I bring all this up because there's a certain level of obfuscation going on, both with the science and the use of percentages. Supposing we didn't have any gait analysis but a witness who told the FBI that he observed the person in the video and it was a man who appeared to be of East Indian descent, and Baker claimed that Rajneesh Sarna was the perpetrator on the basis that he's a male of Indian descent living in the DC area, everyone would find it ridiculous. Yet Indians only make up 3% of the population of the DC Metro, and assuming men are about half of those, and we're at a 98.5% "match". Actually higher because a certain percentage of that population is going to be children. All this 94% "match" means is that the police officer they're claiming is in the video has the same gait characteristics as 378,000 other people in the DC area, more if we allow for the possibility that the perpetrator was from elsewhere. Even a 98% match only gets us down to 126,000 other people.
Of course, that wasn't the only attribute mentioned in the article; it says that both the person in the video and Karkhoff are about 5'7". Being very conservative, about 10% of the population can reasonably described as 5'7". It's the point where the bell curves cross, which makes things convenient, and about 9% of men and women will be this height. I don't know how accurate the FBI estimate is supposed to be, but we'll assume it's pretty accurate and just bump the numbers up to 10% to allow for a little wiggle room (an inch on either end would make this closer to 25%). That gets us in to Level 2 description territory, but still includes over 5,000 people. The Blaze engaged in motivated reasoning by linking this to a Capitol police officer and working backwards from there. An honest assessment would have looked at any surveillance video from DC they could get their hands on and analyze the gait and height of as many people as possible. Of course, if that information was fed into their computer and they ended up identifying a 45-year-old cashier from Landover, Maryland as the only possible suspect, they never would have published the story, because it would have been ridiculous. And that there's one person in thousands who happens to have been employed in some law enforcement capacity in the DC area makes things really convenient for them.
If that were the end of it, we could put this nonsense to bed, but there's also the whole business with the Metro card. As per the article:
Former FBI Special Agent Kyle Seraphin realized Friday that he was doing surveillance next door to the woman now suspected of being the Jan. 6 pipe bomber.
“The FBI put us one door away from the pipe bomber within days of January 6, and we were deliberately pulled away for no logical or logically investigative reason,” Seraphin told Blaze News Friday. “And everything about that tells me that they were involved in a cover-up and have been since day one.
“They were f**king in on it,” Seraphin said.
Seraphin proposed doing a “knock and talk” at the door of an Air Force civilian employee whose address was tied to a vehicle that picked up the bomb suspect in Falls Church, Va., on Jan. 5, 2021.
Seraphin’s team spent two days watching the man, but Seraphin’s request to go face-to-face with the person of interest was denied. The team was pulled off the case the same night, he said.
Seraphin said he has given the same details publicly since 2021.
“There’s a personal reaction to it, which is the complete vindication that the things I’ve been saying and my recollection of being briefed on this stuff has been accurate for years and I’ve never changed my tune,” he said.
The FBI tied a DC Metrorail SmarTrip card allegedly used by the pipe-bomb suspect to an Air Force civilian employee but determined that while the man purchased the card, he did not use it. The suspect allegedly used the card to travel from D.C. to a stop in Falls Church after planting the pipe bombs. The Air Force civilian employee had purchased the SmarTrip card a year earlier.
I apologize from the long quote, but I wanted to include it as-written to point out something here that's particularly dishonest. The article refers to "the suspect", and from the context it looks like it's referring to Kerkhoff, and it talks about how the suspect used the card to travel to Virginia after planting the pipe bombs. Not being familiar with this evidence, I presumed the story to be making this point: Kerkhoff was the person seen in the surveillance video released by the FBI. The video was taken the evening of January 5, and while it doesn't show the bombs being planted, it shows the person who likely planted the bombs walking with a backpack in the vicinity of the targeted buildings. This person then went into the nearby Metro station and took it to Falls Church, Virginia, where they were picked up by a friend whose Metro card they used. The FBI surveilled the friend's house but were pulled of for reasons that weren't explained to them, and weren't allowed to talk to the guy, who happened to be a civilian employee for the Air Force.
As many of you know, I'm a fan of reading official reports to get all the details as best as they can be known, as piecing things together from news reports and the like is time consuming and doesn't usually contain all the necessary boring details. In January of this year, a joint report on the pipe bomb investigation was issued by a group of congressmen representing subcommittees with names too long to mention here, chaired by Massie and Loudermilk. This report was incredibly critical of the FBI's response. What we learned about the whole Metro card thing was far different than what was implied in the article.
Surveillance showed a suspicious person (POI2) photographing a dumpster near where the RNC pipe bomb was planted before meeting with 2 other people and disappearing into the nearby Metro station. This video was from the morning of January 5. The FBI was able to link POI2 to the Metro card of a man living in Falls Church (POI3), and had the FBI surveil both. POI2 was a man. The FBI interviewed him and reviewed the pictures on his phone, which corresponded with his story that he had been taking pictures of numerals on doors and the like, including numerals on the RNC dumpster. The FBI was satisfied that the guy had nothing to do with the bombing and they eliminated POI2 and POI3 as suspects on January 19.
Seraphin's story about what happened seems a lot less suspicious in this context, and it's pretty clear that he was a minor part of the investigative team who didn't know the whole story behind what was going on. The FBI identified POI3 and put him on a surveillance team. In the meantime they interviewed POI2 and eliminated him as a suspect. POI3's status was contingent on POI2 being involved, and once POI2 had been eliminated there was no reason to interview POI3 or continue to watch his house. As for Kerhoff's allegedly living next to POI3, so what? It's an odd coincidence, but what does it really mean? Someone who is a 1 in 5,000 shot to be the person in the video happens to live next to someone who had nothing to do with the bombing.
This has to be some of the worst "journalism" I've ever seen. They're using "the suspect" to refer to people seen in two different videos, one of whom was already identified by the FBI, interviewed, excluded as a suspect, and not the same sex as the person they're accusing. I don't know if they're intentionally engaging in misdirection or if Baker is simply incompetent, but neither would surprise me.
Rov_Scam
7d ago
The caveat here is that if you're using anything other than a system font (as you should be), the actual hyphen is going to be mapped to U+002D and U+2010 won't be used. In fact, the only two fonts I could find that preserve this distinction were Calibri (used here) and Times New Roman. U+2010 generally shouldn't be used as most word processing programs treat U+002D as the actual hyphen, which means that any time the program needs to recognize a hyphen for formatting purposes it will look for U+002D. And if you're have a justified right edge with hyphenation on, it's going to insert U+002D anyway, so if you're going to be a purist you'd better be prepared to hyphenate manually. Especially since the software will naturally break at the hyphen, which could theoretically result in two consecutive hyphens or a hyphen on either side of the break if you insist on using U+2010. The differentiation is a relic of early Unicode moving away from the old ASCII system, where, with only 127 characters available, you had to double up. But nobody uses fonts that were designed for ASCII anymore, and there's no reason to make a slightly beefier hyphen for use as a subtraction symbol. The distinction has been deprecated by modern technology.
I would also not that the same is more or less true for the actual subtraction symbol, though the proper substitute is not the hyphen-minus but the en dash (U+2013). I'm more of a purist about this one, but like U+2010, it's also available only in a limited number of system fonts. It generally rides a little lower than the en dash, and if they look similar enough and you're that particular you can sub in the subtraction symbol from Times New Roman (Calibri's is too rounded to match most fonts), but in some of the newer fonts that are a little more daring, like Signifier, it's best to just use the en dash.
Rov_Scam
8d ago
It's not so much about lying as it is recognizing the realities of the situation. Most of his pie in the sky ideas are contingent on money being appropriated from the state. That isn't going to happen, and when he comes back from Albany empty-handed he blames the state government and works with what he's got. If he gets something then he touts it as a small victory and puts the money to use. It's not that hard.
To be clear, he wasn't a backup at that point. Denver had given up their 2nd, 3rd, and 4th round picks to be able to draft him (even though they probably could have drafted him later), and once Kyle Orton was benched there was no expectation that he was going to be anything but the starter. The team received a lot of criticism at the time for giving up essentially their entire draft to reach for a guy who nobody else was seriously interested in. The idea initially was that he could be in some kind of RB/QB/TE/WR combo role, but after he was drafted he made it clear that he was only interested in being quarterback. People who knew football could tell that he wasn't the answer, but Tebow fans only saw the Ws piling up. As soon as the Broncos signed Manning the following offseason Tebow was promptly traded to the Jets in a move that their then-GM admits was a mistake, especially since the circus he would bring was unneeded on a team that was probably going to lose anyway, especially in a media environment like New York. To be fair there were other reasons why they had to trade Tebow that are strictly football-related, but his career fizzle in New York, and even though he had been demoted to third string by the end of the season, he was still the subject of disproportionate media and fan interest.
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