netstack
Texas is freedom land
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User ID: 647
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1d ago
I wonder if that's been squeezed out by crypto mining. Or the perception that anyone who wants your compute is going to be crypto mining. Or just by the proliferation of GPUs.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1d ago
I'd normally ignore or warn low-effort one-liners, but you don't appear to have taken the hint from the last four.
I suppose I'll move on to a one day ban.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1d ago
Fine. In your expert opinion, how much should he owe for punitive damages?
The law is clear that punitive damages are allowed. The legal system, from judges to jurors, has concluded that he should pay various eye-watering sums. If you think this is so unjust, where would you set the bar?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1d ago
“Defensive alliance” isn’t a slogan. It’s a category.
“Chaining” and “isolating” are also categories, but they’re not very useful. A guarantor can demand more or less isolation as diplomacy allows. Doesn’t matter what category you pick: you’re stuck checking the terms of the treaty.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1d ago
I’m going to stand by points 1 and 3, actually.
Failing to comply with discovery, shuffling the shell companies, still not paying the victims—those are all “not cooperating.” The more he does those things, the more penalties stack up, above and beyond the initial damages. And all the while he’s making money off the same kind of statements, except directed at the judge, jury, witnesses, anyone who isn’t on his side.
Is it unreasonable to look at these behaviors and think, hmm, that man doesn’t feel a shred of remorse?
As an aside—he was previously threatened with a lawsuit over Pizzagate, leading to a retraction. He settled another suit over the Charlottesville car video, as well as one for criticizing…uh…a yogurt company? These were all filed before any of the Sandy Hook suits, but hey, maybe they just smelled blood in the water.
Point is, he’s offended some people, and now he keeps offending them, even when they’re actively deliberating on his punishment. That’s bad strategy.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
2d ago
You’re right, he occasionally apologizes. Or is forced into admissions/retractions. Or just claims he was psychotic.
For slandering—in the casual sense—I’m thinking of his statements about Heslin. Or about the cases in general. It’s probably legal, but mocking your jury and insisting they’re trying to “scare us away” is, in fact, a bad move.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
2d ago
Is this what people are hearing at home? Because I could imagine it as an artifact of, well, the NYT comments.
As for the last question—get him or her to go outside. Log off. Dating is fun and so is the rest. Who will they trust? Twitter, or their lying endocrine system?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
2d ago
Fair enough.
I guess I’m wondering if there’s any way to signal this displeasure. Or why it has barely been weaponized for the culture war.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
2d ago
Slow news cycle, I guess.
Remember the Pelosi break-in?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
2d ago
netstack
Texas is freedom land
2d ago
Think of it as the state’s interest in keeping people from being jackasses at trial.
The guy has been very consistent about 1) not cooperating, 2) not apologizing, and 3) continuing his business model. He keeps trying to make money off of slandering the people who have power over him. So he keeps racking up more punitive damages.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
2d ago
And it seems to me that the principles of the judgment are sound. A significant fraction of Jones’ debt comes from punitive, not compensatory, damages. This isn’t a novel legal theory. If justice were limited to compensation, we wouldn’t have jail time.
Let’s imagine Jones only had to pay compensation. If, hypothetically, he refused to do so, what would be the recourse? Should the state be allowed to add more penalties, even though they won’t go to the victims? The answer is obviously yes. A state which cannot punish is a state which doesn’t have a monopoly on force. It has a vacuum.
Lo and behold—between his endless appeals, procedural failures, and acts of creative accounting, Jones has avoided paying either category of damages so far. Meanwhile, he’s desperately kept spending money on his various businesses. This flies in the face of bankruptcy law. More importantly, it’s unjust, and he ought to see consequences for it. Even if that means adding numbers beyond the direct, personal compensation.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
3d ago
I was going to ask an SSQ: has anyone done actuarial assessment for our two Presidential candidates?
Then I found this. As of 2020, Biden was given a 95% chance of surviving a full term, while Trump saw 90%. Both were ahead of their cohorts, mainly due to strong family history. This publication was breathlessly covered by news outlets.
It’s actually harder than I expected to find other analyses. Google started showing me policy-wonk suggestions about overall American life expectancy before it stopped telling me about Nikki Haley’s remarks.
A naive reading of this actuarial table gives the following numbers.
|Chance of dying in…|For someone 81 in ‘24|For someone 77 in ‘24|
|-|-|-|
|2024|7.1%|4.8%|
|2025|7.8%|5.3%|
|2026|8.6%|5.9%|
|2027|9.5%|6.5%|
|2028|10.5%|7.1%|
[edit: I swear the table looked fine in preview!]
I’m not sure if I combined the numbers correctly, but it looks like 63% of 81-year-olds will be alive at 86, and 74% of 77-year-olds make it to 82. While I’m sure peak medical care leaves Biden and Trump ahead of this curve…it doesn’t feel great. It feels like the kind of thing which should be trumpeted left and right!
So. Does anyone know of a more thorough analysis? Would anyone like to explain why we shouldn’t be worried about our President kicking the bucket?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
3d ago
Even Captain Titus could surely win the election. As Trump’s VP or as Biden’s.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
3d ago
That’s absurd. Sovereignty is obviously not the same thing as nationhood. Governments do all sorts of pedestrian tasks, like issuing passports or regulating products, which don’t require a national character. A post-national state, then, would happily implement those even as it opens the gates to immigrants.
You’re committing the mirror-version of appealing to Hitler. It is possible to have patriotism, aggressive foreign policy, and even a racial identity without trying to start a Fourth Reich. Likewise, preferring the boring bureaucratic parts of state sovereignty does not make one into Daddy Stalin.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4d ago
Because this is a textbook coordination problem. If NATO didn’t demand 2%, which European nations would spend even as much as they do?
No one involved has perfect information. Russia in particular has demonstrated that it will pick fights even when it can’t ensure a quick victory. That means conventional buildup (or modernization) has value.
You’re absolutely correct that the U.S. benefits from a powerful NATO. Isn’t that the point of a treaty?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4d ago
A little less vitriol, please.
There’s nothing wrong with making a colorful point. That’s not license to throw in every epithet or meme seen on Twitter.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4d ago
More effort than this, please.
Either give a more constructive response or move on.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4d ago
I think you’ve clouded the issue. The proposed dichotomy doesn’t help, because the problem isn’t in the term “defensive alliance.” It’s in the justification of obviously aggressive conduct.
Guarantees form a continuum, with no dividing line where “isolating” turns to “chaining.” At one end, you have the most carefully worded pact, offering no ambiguity but minimal latitude for aggression. At the other, you have the blank cheque. Why would one ever prefer to receive the former?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4d ago
Interesting.
But I’m talking more about dumb munitions. The kind you’d use in volume to level a building or deny a road. By WWII, with the integration of mobile radio, those kind of fire missions became much more reliable. Add the trove of map and navigation data, and I think you can deliver a few hundred shells to cover an area pretty consistently.
My impression is that, if you need to flatten a town, you can do it fairly efficiently with conventional weapons. Replacing a few hours’ bombardment with a single weapon wouldn’t be worth it. Unless it needs to be instantaneous, as with a strategic deterrent, I expect Russia to keep the genie in the bottle.
I like your writeup.
Hypothesis for your latter observation: there are more conservative justices, appointed over a longer period. I wouldn't be surprised if they have more competition between viewpoints.
But then, I do tend to take weird splits like Campos-Chaves v. Garland as evidence against partisan capture. I want to believe that Court is better modeled as a club of weirdo turbo-lawyers. They obviously aren't immune to mainstream politics, but they play with a rather different set of incentives.
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