100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
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User ID: 2039
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
2d ago
But what about all of the times when a Cop abuses his power and is absolutely punished for it?
What about all of the times a case falls apart at trial for what are really, really minor technical errors usually in evidentiary handling? If I see the killer of my husband go free because there was "reasonable doubt" about how the pistol recovered from the trunk was found, do I get the same level of sympathy as these "taxpayers paying to settle lawsuits."?
More importantly - what if the truly heinous abuses of police power represent <1% of all cops while the other 99% are just trying to get home safe and not fuck up their cases.
(Side note: You cited Catholic clergy sex abuses and the up-the-chain indictment of Bishops and Cardinals. Do you feel the same way about public school teachers and administrators where the sexual abuse rate is multiple times of the general public (which, itself, was multiple times of that in the Catholic church)?)
You're making kind of a wild argument - Cops should be incredibly close to perfection and, if they fail, we should feel justified in indicting the entire system of policing for multiple years at a time. How do you expect positive changes to be made?
If I'm a police Commissioner and I discover real malfeasance, hold a press conference and say "Yeah, I'm totally going after these crooked cops" but then you stand up and say "It happened on your watch. You should resign, maybe be prosecuted. This whole department is suspect" .... when does corrective change actually occur? Everyone seems to be too busy indicting the entire system into oblivion .... despite it's working so incredibly well most of the time.
But I suppose you have history and precedent on your side. This all ends with "defund the police" which has resulted in a murder rate among the most vulnerable demographics skyrocketing.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
2d ago
The Democrats have been doing a pretty good job of putting a pause on the kind of radical culture warring that turns many people off from them. Instead they are focusing on things like abortion, Trump's age, 1/6, and the fact that Trump is technically a criminal.
All of those things (with Trump's age as the only exception) are 100% culture war topics.
Abortion - American's don't have solid positions on Abortion over time or even when asked different questions about it. Part of that is biological ignorance and part of it is that the landscape of laws after Roe vs Wade and certainly after Dobbs is all over the place. A patch work of laws at the state level makes it hard to be on one "side" or the other (which side of a dodecahedron are you on)? A similar situation arises with Gun Laws. So, most Americans respond to polls and surveys about Abortion with very personal vibes based emotionality and/or religiously informed morality. Those are two of the key ingredients of Culture War.
Jan 6 - Literally half of the country does not see this as a major issue when compared to BLM riots of the previous summer while the other half sees it as the most significant domestic terror incident since the 1791 Whiskey Rebellion.
Trump Technically A Criminal - This was mainstream Motte Culture War Thread material before, during, and after the trial.
But [the Democrats] chances seem much better right now than they did a week ago.
So still abysmal?
The structural components of the race have always been against the Democrats. In a Presidential election, the Democrat handicap is generally -3 or -4 in the popular vote due to how the electoral college is apportioned. That's why anything less than "Biden / Harris +5" is something like a toss up and "Trump +3" is a HOLY SHIT moment.
I'll allow that Kamala has brought some great boxed wine vibes to the party and is enjoying a not bad start, but do you really think she's bringing structurally potent capability to the campaign? Furthermore, the critical states are Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Please tell me how a BIPOC daughter of two college professors who spent her formative years in Canada before going to college in DC and then living her entire professional life in California is going to make her appeal to rust belt women across three generations? Biden could do it barely.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
3d ago
From my true crime reading, the (sort of) consensus is that
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There were probably just as many Serial Killers before the 1970s and 80s, but due to policing practices they weren't identified as serial killers. In fact, if their victims were largely prostitutes or other edge-of-society types, its likely the cops launched no investigation whatsoever.
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Starting in the 1990s, DNA evidence made it somewhat actually easier to catch bad guys, but perceptively WAY easier. Phrased differently, people started to think they were leaving testable amounts of DNA all over the place and that cops could just zap it with a magic DNA laser and get an immediate location on a 'perp'. This may have acted as an effective enough disincentive for would-be killers.
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The awareness of the existence of serial killers and general lower society wide trust made people (especially younger women) generally more aware of surroundings and personal safety.
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When smartphones arrive on scene, not only is everyone always carrying around their own personal recording studio and security camera, they're also carrying around perfect evidence of their social network. If someone kills you today, there's a good chance they're in the top 10 of your most recent text messages.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
3d ago
Hahaha. Crazy how those two worlds collided in a single acronym. Good catch.
Although, actual former PMCs would be some of the people I would want last as Cops. If you take away the Blackwaters and Triple Canopies of the world (who all recruit high end SpecialOps types) you get orgs like Armor Group .... who often collect dudes who are leaving the military for a whole host of what-the-acutal-fuck reasons. Your median PMC (private military contractor) in the Horn of Africa is always running off safe.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
3d ago
Daniel Shaver
Without a doubt the most disturbing video I have ever seen. It's a sadist executing an incredibly scared young man.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
3d ago
What are the meetings like after the initial failure? Like, say they just blow through a sprint and don't deliver anything.
"Why didn't you get anything done?"
"Yes! We will work harder?"
How does it go? I have trouble seeing how there wouldn't just be a ton of nonsequitors and straight dodging questions.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
3d ago
Cacklin' Kamala
High Fiber breakfast cereal that makes a pleasing sound when milk is added.
Geared towards children 5 - 10 with health conscious parents. Not a premium brand, but not bottom shelf. Sold next to Kix and Honey Bunches of Oats.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
3d ago
Sorry to be That Guy - any uncensored footage?
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
3d ago
If you get to Director level for anything, you're never going to be unemployed (unless by choice). But reading between the tea leaves, you can see who gets good gigs and who gets forgotten.
Going into campaign work or lobbying is actually pretty close to the bottom (with some exceptions for lobbying). Campaign people and Lobbyists don't make as much as people think (but they do get to spend a lot on stuff) especially over the long term (it's very common for "Senior Advisors" at these kind of places to be rolling 6-month contracts that are cash only, no benefits, no 401k, no equity agreements etc.)
Sure, it isn't at all a bad life and you're probably still a top 5% (maybe 1%) earner, so my heart DOES NOT go out to them. But they also can't really go to "just another" job. They might not have any real qualifications, they're politically exposed, and a lot of them have over-calibrated towards government and government adjacent patterns and so don't even believe they can do anything else. It's a grind.
The other side of the coin are obvious and awesome. Eric Cantor lost one of the biggest house upset elections in history and now is one of the Princes of Wall Street. George Tenent left the CIA to go be a partner at what is the CIA of banks.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
3d ago
The obvious issue here is that you would then have a hard time getting anyone to take these jobs.
They already;
- Have laughable pay compared to their private sector counterparts. With the exception of SCOTUS judges, no Federal employee can make more in a year than the Vice President. That's $286k. (Fun fact: Some Federal positions are non exempt from overtime and so every year there are these small pockets of folks at way lower levels who bump up against that cap.)
- You can't exactly select your whole team and you definitely can't fire people at your whim. In private sector, you get to do both of these things (within reason, and you have to perform when you bring your people in).
- Congress can at anytime call your ass up to "testify" - But we've all seen enough of how that goes to understand it's just a public shooting gallery - and you're the duck.
- The administrative overhead is insane. Half of your year, every year, is budget justification and preparation. 99% of the time its useless and just rushed together with everything else Congress passes, but then one year you have the head of a committee asking you about how much you spent on remedial uniform inspections for new trainees.
If you add on top of that "Your ass goes to fuckin' Federal Pound-Me-In-The-Ass Prison" if someone or someone's down the line in your department / agency fucks the dog, you aren't going to get anyone interested in taking the job. Those that do are simply going to micromanage the shit out of everything to cover their own ass and the already ineffectual Federal government will become even more so.
This has become my default response to any sort of national level "police misconduct" story. I believe it will remain that way indefinitely.
I've recommended the Donut Operator YouTube channel before and I will again. It's a good look into what are far more common situations in everday policing. Specifically, a lot of it is tedious "negotiation" with non-compliant people who are very likely on drugs, in some sort of mental health crisis, or just plain extremely anti-social. The thing is, sometimes this tedium very quickly escalates into a life or death situation. It's impossible for me to write well enough about it. Watch some of the videos. The speed from which we get to 100 from 0 is starling.
The larger culture war angle here is that, much like the military profession, the PMC have zero direct experience with policing as an occupation. Being a police is pretty much the last, best blue collar union job. Like most of those jobs, the pay is OK but not great and, in certain jurisdictions, is not keeping up with inflation. The candidates for these jobs are not all bearing Masters in Criminal Justice with special concentrations in sociology and negotiation tactics. They're ex-enlisted. They're former High School and Div. 3 athletes. Many of them have several cops in their families. It's a job in the classic J-O-B sense (not a "career") for most.
And what a job it is! The saying has been posted around the internet for sometime, but, as a cop, everyone you interact with, you're interacting with on "the worst day of their life." That's a bit of a hyperbole, but anything from a traffic ticket on up is a noteworthy stress event for most people. It's always been funny to me that The Largely Online have a special softness for customer service people and the aggravation and idiocy they daily encounter yet fail to see that being a cop is customer service times ten plus guns and knives.
So what do you get when summing all these things together? An overwhelming amount of peaceful outcomes. This study points to over 60 million citizens having at least one encounter with police in 2018 and this one quotes 1769 fatalities in 2020. Sure, the years aren't precisely the same and staring with the simple 'encounters' number might be too dilutive, but I believe the point remains; most of the time, the Police do a great job of not killing someone.
I think that's close to remarkable given that it's objectively one of the highest stress (and quick to escalate) occupations out there. And that's its staffed by people who have training measured probably in the weeks-to-months range instead of the many-many-years of notably less stressful PMC Jobs.
Everyone once in a while you're going to have a bad shoot. This could be one of them, or it could not, that's for a jury to decide. But think about what the larger narrative is; at the Presidential level, we're going to hyperfocus on a single incident in order to draw wild conclusions about a statistical population that consistently demonstrates in the opposite direction. No, as Scott Alexander would point out, no one is outright lying here, but the manipulation tactics are plain to see.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
4d ago
A far amount of my colleagues-turned-friends over the past decade are former military. Many joined post 9/11 not out of lofty ideals of "duty" but very visceral feelings of "let's fucking murder terrorists." In a sentence, these are guys who are permanent George W. Bush supporters. To that end, many are a little light on Trump because they see him as a blowhard and kind of jackass. They've voted for him twice but aren't MAGA.
The timber of those conversations changed pretty drastically after the assassination attempt. It's the exact same vein as 9/11 - "they" (whoever that is) came for our guy. Even if we weren't totally in love with him (much like a lot of these dudes have never and will never go to Manhattan) he's still our guy. So, fuck you, unnamed "they"!
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
4d ago
I suppose Donald Trump is sort of the Joe Burrow of the Republican Party.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
4d ago
There are two quantitative facts for me that set up what Kamala has to get through independent of Trump.
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The beating heart of the Democrat party today is college-educated women, frequently unmarried
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In 2016, Hillary Clinton lost White women outright. It was even worse for white married women.
"Just turn out the base" is a red herring of a strategy because a big part of the base has already demonstrate that, absent total ideological capture, when push comes to voting booth, they might torpedo their publicly professed choice. Revealed preferences and female-on-female relative-status aggression. Yes, there is a pretty high floor of Democrat voters who are so down for the cause that they'll vote Kamala no matter what, but there's also a non-trivial amount that will scream that in public and then do something different in the ballot box.
Furthermore, as I am certain we will see from Nate Silver this week, the polls are going to be all over the place and kind of valueless until maybe September. Too many structural assumptions are out of whack.
So what's Kamala to do? Well, the obvious answer is something. But I think that's a high bar to clear for her. Most of VP-ship has been staff turnover and other .... unburdenings.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
4d ago
One of the less talked about outcomes of Musk buying twitter is the predictable revelation that he's sort of a dweeby edgelord. Some of the things he retweets are absolutely perfect mappings to "the weird IT guys have been passing around this meme all week. eye roll"
I think he has just enough self-awareness to catch this much of the time. One of his ticks is a retweet with a single word comment - "true", "this","wow" etc. But other times he goes full 'sperg. The one this week was him retweeting the "AI fashion show" that included (among the Pope, Nancy Pelosi, and Kim Jong Un) an AI Elon in a weird speedo quickly followed by a suit of armor.
But keen observes will see that the shtick has been going on for some time. Elon has learned to deploy a simulacra of high end verbal intelligence - dramatic pauses, quickened speech patterns with some jargon thrown in, and verbal intonations that make you think he's bestowing something deep upon you. If Musk and Aaron Sorkin ever team up on a show, I will pen my suicide note to it.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
5d ago
So where this gets interesting is that all of that remains true for ...... Special Operations personnel in the military. Lower heart rate during stressful events, higher baseline physical aggression and hostility.
There's a common saying in that community that "the Army/Navy/Marines kept me out of prison." It's true. A lot of those folks have the same temperament as Appalachian outlaw types ... they just got the right kind of camo on.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
5d ago
I'm close to absolute believer in "AI will never truly eliminate people from the workforce who want to stay in the workforce." This is because AI (LLMs) are just another technology. Technology makes certain specific tasks obsolete, but doesn't obsolesce the people executing those tasks. The classic example is that automobiles drastically reducing the need for ferriers, but any competent or sufficiently motivated person of any walk of life could easily become a mechanic. Consumer automotive mechanics have enjoyed employment for over a century now.
What I think will change in a meaningful way is the relative balance of power (and, following that, compensation) for people who have naturally higher competency in soft skills aka "people skills." Most PMC jobs today are a mixture of technical or semi-technical capability and soft-skills. For example, Lawyerin' is partially pseudo-code review, doctors have to actually be able to make a medically sound diagnoses and design a course of treatment. Consultants and bankers less so, but they have their pseudo-technical-jargon signals that one has to be familiar with. All of these occupations, however, require a healthy does (haha, doctors!) of emotive human interaction.
In many cases, the "top" of these careers are 90% if not more human interaction. The "top" bankers, lawyers, consultants and (yes, probably) doctors are effectively very fancy sales people. They delegate the actual work to their underlings, and collect part of the charged fees for that work.
AI(LLMs) mean that one person with a little bit of technical knowledge can "in-source" a lot of the semi-technical work to the AI (which is still close enough to free compared to an actual employee or subcontractor) while doubling down on their sales abilities. This is actually even true for hard tech careers like software development - I know contract developers who have increased their on paper workloads by 50% or more but are actually working the same to less hours because Claude is handling a lot of code boilerplate and documentation for them.
That being said, not all soft skills are created the same. One PMC soft skills I've seen for my entire career is something you might call "fast following politicking." These are folks who can gauge the relative social standings of various people and groups within a larger org and can quickly align themselves with those on the way up and avoid those on the way down (or out). They cannot, however, actually make their own decisions, set a course for others to follow, or demonstrate anything even close to "leadership." They used to be relegated mostly to HR and marketing positions, but have metastasized into "Product Management" (aka the Sociology of the corporate world) in recent years.
I am optimistic these people will find themselves without jobs sooner rather than later. While their shenanigans are usually readily apparent to anyone that matters, they pay their rent to the company by being process automatons. These are the folks who have incredibly well formatted spreadsheets and power points (with almost no content within that formatting). Yet, up until now, some of that basic information processing had to be done by someone ... and they were there. I believe AI will fix that.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
5d ago
There's like four levels of jokes in:
Hung Cao: He's a Bull in a China shop!
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
7d ago
This reads a lot like "It isn't that hard to win the Super Bowl if you're really good at football."
How do I get good at football?
How do I become good enough to do this low time consumption research and investing? 10Ks and 10Qs are dozens to over a hundred pages of dense language, how do I know what to pick out of them so I don't have to scrutinize every word? How do I know when I know enough about an industry? How do even define "risk" so that I can "mitigate" it (the use of the word "mitigate" really makes me suspicious. Risk cannot be "mitigated" in the sense that it can be fundamentally reduced. Risk can only be transferred. Whatever else you might think of him, this was the highly accurate central point of N.N. Taleb's Black Swan series).
More systemically, are you really going to say that with a few hours here and there of cursory research, one can assemble a portfolio that truly generates long term alpha? It's easy to delude yourself into thinking you're a genius for riding beta and then, when a drawdown happens, to pat yourself on the back for "being patient" and maybe even "buying the dip." But let's not peek at the Sharpe ratio and discover our portfolio is actually just a volatility monster over exposed to a few factors that would be laughed out of any actively managed fund's investment committee.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
9d ago
I'll reframe your question thusly;
At what point did Hitler's authority become illegitimate and unable to be corrected by the functions of the German state?
I think the Enabling Acts of 1933 were pretty much that point. Explicitly extra-legislative and supra-constitutional.
Is any assassination attempt on Hitler at that point therefore valid? Eh, I'm and end-to-end pro-lifer (don't like abortion, don't like death penalty) so I'd've preferred to see some sort of pseudo-state-vigilante-police action. You know, arrest Hitler on behalf of "Free Germany" or something.
But we're playing with counterfactuals within counterfactuals wrapped in hypotheticals. So it's all Dungeons and Dragons. Furthermore, intentionally or not, I've been misled into a "tRumP iS HitLER" online discussion. So, really, I guess I'm the asshole.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
9d ago
No, because then you support extra-judicial violence in a democratic system predicated on state monopoly of violence. By that logic, anyone who really thinks that X-group or Y-person is really, really, really not good has permission to kill their enemies.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
9d ago
You'd obviously be familiar with the Hitler example. He won a legitimate election, and then after he was in power made himself dictator. Or you could look at Hugo Chavez, or Robert Mugabe. There's plenty of precedent for people seizing power fairly and then retaining it illegitimately.
These are all poor comparisons to make. When people say "Trump is a danger to democracy" it reveals a lot of ignorance about the structure of the American government. Three-branched Federal government with a bicameral legislature, the tradition of judicial review, and codependent powers distributed across the different branches (the most important being that Congress has to pay for everything) means that it would be close to impossible to make oneself a dictator in the American system from a structural perspective. You can't flip it all on its head with 51% of the vote and some clever executive orders. You'd need what amounts to multiple constitutional amendments on top of a court not only packed but FULL of sycophantic non-lawyers. This just isn't anywhere near the realm of truth or possibility - especially for Trump who is easily distracted on his policy priorities and only has four years to get all of that done.
For some good precedent, remember the 9-0 ruling against Obama for attempting to make some pretty ho-hum appointments during a Senatorial recess.
"Trump is a danger to democracy" is a very emotionally dressed up version of "orange man bad."
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
9d ago
Take a chance on love.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
9d ago
The service providers will metaphysically cuckold you,
Dude, this so bleak and correct.
There's going to be a Stanford educated Product Manager at some waifu SaaS company with a dashboard full of metrics in front of him thinking, "hmmm...it looks like the 35-40 demo at over $200k isn't making as many daily touch points with their AI girlfriends as we'd like...Hey, maybe we can introduce a feature where the gf starts to casually mention polyamory...yeah..better put that on the roadmap."
The devil is always in the details and the PMC loves to build its special statuses.
Pete Buttigieg joined the Navy through what's called a Direct Commission Officer program when he was 37 years old. Specifically, he joined a Reserve Intelligence Officer program that is notorious for being the place that politically or just generally striver minded over-acheivers go to tick off the "military service" box. That Navy program has an insanely high proportion of Harvard grads, lawyers, masters degree holders etc. And they often are commissioning in their mid 30s whereas your normal ROTC grad is in at 22 with enlisted being 18,19, or 20 usually.
And it's a Club Med of an assignment. First off, it's the reserves. When they do deploy, they're treated like retarded children (because they are). I won't get into the Mayor Pete Afghanistan stories (plenty to Google there). But it's all basically a farce.
Elite Blue Tribers understand that military service (especially post 9/11) has a ton of bipartisan cultural cache. So they've done what they always do and created as special carve out that, to the general public, looks great. This is actually the same thing that the Harvard Kennedy School does - they admit anyone, or give them some sort of status as a Fellow or something.
Contrast this with a kid at Harvard, Yale etc. who, on day one, goes for a NROTC scholarship with a signed contract for active duty Marine Corps ground officer (which likely means he ends up in infantry, artillery, etc.) That can and will get Mummie and Dad-da out of their recliners in Montpelier and on the train to the dorms. Think about the ssssssscandal if junior had deferred his entree to Yale and enlisted as a common phoot-soldier in the Army. Perish the thought.
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