Pulpachair
10mo ago
Werewolf suggests involuntary transformation into a defined form. Navajo yee naldlooshii are evil witches who can assume multiple different forms and possess animals and other people. Update your monster manuals appropriately.
Pulpachair
1yr ago
Current ethics rules in most jurisdictions state that lawyers cannot be managed by non-lawyers. This extends to ownership of law firms - they can’t be owned by corporations or other non-lawyer entities.
In 2021, Arizona broke with the majority and made it so that non-lawyers can hold an equity stake in a law firm. It has been piquing interest from legal-adjacent entities.
Biglaw took a major hit in 2008 that it never really recovered from and will take another one when tight belts force companies to get creative in how they deal with legal needs.
Pulpachair
4mo ago
I don’t believe Buttigieg’s paternity leave was kept from the White House, it just wasn’t announced to the public.
Pulpachair
8mo ago
You’re not wrong, but wasn’t this also the case for the Trump impeachments and the Jan 6 committee? The first Trump impeachment started in December 2019 when COVID was first acknowledged in China and continued while it spread in Italy. The second impeachment came during some of the most strenuous arguments about continued lockdowns. Objecting to a political hit because of the “state of the world” is special pleading unless all political hits are off-limits forever and ever.
Pulpachair
1yr ago
Say your roommate brings in a homeless guy from the street and tells you he needs to sleep on the couch you just bought. Maybe you put your foot down; maybe you decide to be a good Christian. If you're feeling really charitable you might even try to offer aid of your own.
The calculus changes if your roommate calls your friends, coworkers, and pastor and hints that you're going to lose your shit. Might you feel a little...constrained? A little incentivized to prove him wrong in front of your social circles?
Either way, it's not ambiguous who's to blame.
Let me help tie your analogy to the view of the right. Every night for the last 40 years, you've been inviting homeless people to stay in your roommate's room. Whenever he objects, you loudly and publicly denounce him as a bigot who hates the less fortunate, and correspondingly congratulate yourself on your depth of character. Sure he's been stabbed a few times, his belongings have been stolen, and his room is used as a stash house for a drug trafficking ring, but, as you are constantly reminding him, that's a small price to pay to make the world a better place.
On the night in question, you greet the homeless person graciously, tell them how much you appreciate them being there and the struggle they are going through, offer them a few jelly beans and then, as soon as the pastor leaves, you have the police escort them from the premises. You then post to facebook that your roommate is history's greatest monster for using a human being as a prop in your little domestic spat.
Pulpachair
1yr ago
Griswold v Connecticut. Estelle Griswold was a planned parenthood executive who collaborated with local law enforcement to get charged on the Comstock law in Connecticut. That was enough to get past the ripeness issue that resulted in dismissing Poe v Ullman and Tileston v Ullman. Justice Harlan had already signaled the outcome of a successful challenge in his dissent on Poe, so it was just a matter of creating the set of facts needed.
This sort of gamesmanship is almost de rigueur in any sort of specific-issue appellate practice. I don’t really take issue with the practice because courts do not rule prospectively (unless they want to.) If a law becomes absurd under a set of facts that can be reasonably passed off as naturally occurring, it deserves to be challenged.
Pulpachair
6mo ago
Heinlein’s “All You Zombies” was 1958. I’m sure there are examples of earlier stories featuring gender reassignment as well. To the extent KSR chose not to have gender modification in a transhuman milieu, I doubt it was for lack of exposure to the idea.
Pulpachair
9mo ago
Is this where we pretend that Trump didn't get the 2nd most votes in the history of the country, improving on his previous total by 11,000,000 votes?
Trump is remarkably good at motivating Republican voters. I would argue that the only thing he is better at is motivating Democrat voters, thus no longer being president.
Pulpachair
9mo ago
It is always funny to me that courts continue to take the State Farm v. Campbell rule on due process for punitive damages as merely a suggestion. We will see if either award survives appeal.
Pulpachair
10mo ago
Obama cancelled offshore drilling and pushed green tech too and yet oil production doubled under him.
Mostly in spite of his policies. 2010-2014 was the technologically-driven shale boom period, followed by the crash in 2014-15. The leases that facilitated this expansion were created under Bush who was a wee bit more energy industry friendly than Obama/Biden.
US oil production continued to expand under Trump, though more slowly than it did during the Shale boom and peaked in late 2019-2020 before COVID nearly bankrupted 1/3 of the US regional producers by briefly making oil prices go negative. It has taken three years for US production to get back to 95% of the peak production because it isn't just like turning on a spigot again.
Prices are slowly normalizing, but are still historically high, even adjusting for inflation. This makes very little sense to me because U.S. demand has fallen almost 10% from 2019 and almost 20% from 2005 despite returning to high production rates. I'll have to look into what is going on with global production in that time period, but that data is harder to track down and less reliable.
I have no idea. As I argued in previous posts I think regulatory decisions are probably less impactful than the broader global markets, and investments in new productive capacity remains low for that exact reason. So a lot of the future probably hinges on stuff like the Ukraine War and the decisions made by OPEC. Still, coupled with the fact that Biden tapped the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to depress prices, I think this largely confirms that Biden was certainly not driven by a desire to crush oil production and keep prices high for Americans. Like most Presidents, he wants voters to be happy with him.
This analysis seems apt to me, with the exception of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve publicity stunts. Tapping the reserves to increase supply temporarily to help lower prices was nothing more than a headline generator, and was a poor decision strategically. It's selling cheap gas now to buy expensive gas in the future.
I do appreciate that the messaging from the Biden administration has moved away from "Evil Oil Companies™" to focusing pretty much exclusively on culture warring in the runup to the election. I don't think campaigning against big oil is a winning strategy when prices are still 50% higher than they were under the last Republican administration.
Pulpachair
1yr ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mattel,_Inc._v._MCA_Records,_Inc. is always a fun read.
Bradshaw v. Unity Marine Corp., Inc., 147 F. Supp. 2d 668 - Dist. Court, SD Texas 2001 is a treat in the sense that you can still see the ring marks where the judge backhanded the attorneys:
Before proceeding further, the Court notes that this case involves two extremely likable lawyers, who have together delivered some of the most amateurish pleadings ever to cross the hallowed causeway into Galveston, an effort which leads the Court to surmise but one plausible explanation. Both attorneys have obviously entered into a secret pact—complete with hats, handshakes and cryptic words—to draft their pleadings entirely in crayon on the back sides of gravy-stained paper place mats, in the hope that the Court would be so charmed by their child-like efforts that their utter dearth of legal authorities in their briefing would go unnoticed. Whatever actually occurred, the Court is now faced with the daunting task of deciphering their submissions. With Big Chief tablet readied, thick black pencil in hand, and a devil-may-care laugh in the face of death, life on the razor's edge sense of exhilaration, the Court begins.
Pulpachair
9mo ago
Does it even matter? Every bit of information I've looked at in terms of spending vs. academic achievement shows basically no correlation, and sometimes a very weak inverse correlation. Utah, Colorado, and Iowa spend close to the lowest amount per student on education, but consistently rank in the top 10 for academic achievement. Arizona spends slightly more than Utah, and New York spends the most of any state, but both of them are ranked below the median (New York well below), while New Jersey has very high spend and ranks in the top 10 for achievement. Arguments about disparate spend amounts based on property taxes beg the question.
Pulpachair
1yr ago
“It is inescapable not to observe the racial dynamics here,” said Crump. “If the roles were reversed,” he continued, “how much outraged would there be in America?”
Wait, Ben Crump again?
Family attorney Ben Crump said in a statement, “While this is certainly a step in the right direction, we will continue to fight for Ralph while he works towards a full recovery.”
I am constantly amazed that Ben Crump is instantly the attorney of record in every single one of these cases. Somewhere out there, there has to be a bar association curious about how an out of state attorney becomes the family attorney of so many high profile cases without violating that jurisdiction's version of ABA 7.3.
Pulpachair
2mo ago
In my mind, the order of operations is:
- Creatives come up with a cool idea/world/gameplay mechanic that, despite having quite a bit of jank, catches on and is a moderate success
- Creatives scale up a bit and second try is better than the first. Huge success and brand loyalty follows.
- investors get involved (either finance types or an outright purchase of the thing by an EA or Microsoft) because the creatives suck at/don’t care about business aspects. Decision process starts changing to prioritize engagement metrics.
- Studio expands or becomes part of a larger corporate environment. HR starts making more decisions.
- Old guard leaves/is forced out. New hires are mostly fans and not the ones with creative vision. Innovation becomes irrelevant as decisions are now being made based on engagement.
That is the pattern I see across the NA AAA games industry. The games that are being made are so laden with vampiric “engagement drivers” (read: unfun tedious time wasters not central to the gameplay loop) and cash shop features that they were never going to be fun. They tack on DEI feelgoodery to provide the thinnest veneer of moral virtue over what is basically a $60-70 predatory phone app disguised as a game.
The focus on DEI is symptomatic of the ultra-safe corporate decision making, but not the cause of why games (and movies and comics) suck now. For example, a hypothetical Suicide Squad game with fighting fucktoy Harley Quinn and a soy-free Luthor and no other changes would have still been shit. Gamers would be complaining that it was a tragedy that Kevin Conroy’s name was associated with such a dreadful game, and Rocksteady would still be dead.
Instead, we’re going to have a media cycle talking about -ist/-phobic gamers, and the corporate types who killed Rocksteady will end up at another company and start poisoning that one too.
Thanks for this post. It made me stop and think about why I'm so pessimistic on the economy, and I think that my pessimism is, at best, only partially warranted. Here are my thoughts on why I think pessimism is still warranted, though not as doomy as previously.
Trust in elite institutions is deservedly low. The pandemic blew up any notion that global institutions were remotely concerned about the public weal when the well-being of PMC/Blue Tribe is at stake. The media and public watchdog groups are all-in on team Blue, so my expectation is that any information that looks bad for Blue will be suppressed if possible, excused if not possible. Any information that trends well for team Blue will be given more weight than it is actually due. If there are black swans out there right now, we're intentionally trying not to notice them.
The pandemic flipped the switch on remote work being preferable for many jobs. For the industries I'm privy to, this largely meant divesting from expensive investments in blue cities and seeking out qualified employees in lower cost markets. This was a substantial increase in the earning potential in more depressed parts of the country at the cost of eliminating a lot of jobs in more expensive cities. So, it's a net increase in wages across the country, but still incredibly disruptive to the workforce left behind in the big cities.
This is less analytical, but still real. The housing crisis took place in 2006-2007 when a wave of ARMs kicked in defaults went through the roof. The smartest banks, with the help of the rating agencies, did everything they could to delay the crash in order to divest from the toxic assets before the crash landed, which ended up putting off the crash until mid-2008.
We blew up the economy from 2020-2021, deficit financing massively distortionary unemployment benefits for almost 18 months, losing track of hundreds of billions of dollars in fraudulent loans, and, thus far, we haven't really paid much of a price. Sure, the inflation figures and supply chain disruptions in the aftermath are annoying, but my gut says that the piper is yet to be paid, and the longer we put it off, the worse it will be.
Consider the current residential real estate market. The high interest rates are keeping people from selling their current homes due to being unable to afford to afford a new 8.7% mortgage payment under current market rates. That means there is a constantly increasing backlog of inventory that is just waiting for a drop in interest rates in order to sell. Once that rate drop comes, a glut of new inventory will drive prices down. Much of the median increase in net worth is driven by the inflated real estate market, and that will suddenly evaporate while the current highs in consumer debt will remain, and people who are buying currently will be underwater. My cynical side expects to see this in early 2025.
I really hope that you're right and I'm wrong.
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