Rov_Scam
4mo ago
This got a decent amount of play in the Pittsburgh news earlier this year. If you want to make the story come to life and meet some of the people involved, there's this video reporting on the guilty verdict, and this one covering the preliminary hearing.
I believe he was the president of the Allegheny County Funeral Director's Association, not the statewide association.
Rov_Scam
4mo ago
I'd describe them as black but not African. You were the one who conceded they were white, so you tried to argue that they weren't European, which makes even less sense. I don't know why you're hell-bent on otherizing certain people.
Rov_Scam
4mo ago
By that logic you'd have to concede that nobody but Indians are actually American, no?
Rov_Scam
4mo ago
Except they're Europeans. They've been in Europe for a thousand years and don't exist outside of Europe. Saying they have a "mixture of European and non-European ancestry" is about as useful as saying that English people have a "mixture of English and non-English" ancestry because of that dirty Norman blood.
Rov_Scam
4mo ago
Sort of. UK law allows you to carry a folding knife with a non-locking blade up to 3 inches without reason or justification. Most Leathermans have locking blades, so they're out, but there may be older ones or similar tools from other companies that qualify. BUT, you are allowed to carry one if you have a good reason to carry one (other than defense), so if you're hiking or use it for work or something it technically wouldn't be a problem. I have no idea how strictly this is enforced.
Rov_Scam
4mo ago
The modern-day equivalent would probably be those guys who carry a Leatherman around in a belt clip. It's not the kind of thing that would draw much attention at all, and if it did even the most anti-gun person would probably assume that the guy was an outdoorsman or often made a bunch of minor repairs, not that he was open-carrying a weapon.
Rov_Scam
4mo ago
I knew something was up with this when the alleged assailant was the one who recorded the video. Putting aside why you would record your attempts to perv on a little girl, why would you post that online? The only other person who could have posted it would be the police, and there's no indication that the video was released by police. Why is a twelve-year-old girl hanging out in a place where she feels unsafe enough that she needs to carry weapons? Why do they keep slowly backing away instead of running? I know that when I was a kid if I had ever though someone was about to abduct me I'd get out of there as soon as possible. It's not like it wasn't a wide open public place with plenty of escape routes. And although it's not unheard of, it's certainly rare for attacks of the type that have been implied to be carried out by a man and a woman working together. I didn't comment earlier because I didn't want to speculate without more information, but the whole thing seemed fishy to me from the outset, because it conformed to a narrative certain people have. It's almost as if some of them want it to be true, and are hoping that it will turn out that these were nonwhite people there trying to rape children because it will validate the ideas they have about immigrants from certain parts of the world.
Rov_Scam
4mo ago
He probably knows people, but why would they give him special treatment? Google owns YouTube, and his entire professional reputation is tied to being CEO of their biggest competitor. The other weird thing is that there's no conceivable reason for Ballmer to even need to buy promotions. If the guy likes to hear himself talk, and there's no other explanation for why he's doing this, then he could probably target channels with existing subscriber bases and offer to make guest appearances where he plugs his channel. He's a big enough name that I doubt many people would say no to having him on.
Rov_Scam
5mo ago
I looked into the archeology of the channel, and the findings were interesting. The channel uploaded its first video on August 31, 2017 (a 2 minute clip of an interview with Kara Swisher), and the first "Just the Facts" video appeared that October. There have been over 120 videos posted in the past 8 years, yet only 12 of them cracked the million views threshold, and the first video to do this was a video about immigration posted on August 1, 2024. This was following a nine month hiatus, prior to which the previous video, about mammograms, only got about a thousand views.
The obvious explanation is that the videos are being heavily promoted. But I don't know if this is the case. It's my understanding that YouTubers generally don't pay for promotions, for the simple reason that it doesn't work. An alternative explanation is that the video times increased from under two minutes to about fifteen. By 2017, most YouTubers were making longer videos, and the algorithm had adapted accordingly. Making videos that short in 2017 indicated a channel that hadn't done basic research into the zeitgeist, as the kind of viewer looking for World Almanac type information isn't looking for a two minute video. That may have been true in 2006, when streaming video that worked was novel, but there was enough better content out there by 2017 that few people would bother. That being said, under 1000 views suggests no action on the algorithm and no promotion, just uploading and forgetting about it. If these videos had been promoted but failed to take off, I'd expect at least a few thousand views.
Part of the reason YoutUbers don't like promotions is that it gives a few extra views but doesn't do anything to promote the channel. Basically, it will show more people the video in their feed, but only a certain percentage will actually click, and only a certain percentage of those will watch for any appreciable amount of time, and only a certain percentage of those will actually subscribe or otherwise become a regular viewer. It also does nothing to boost numbers from sponsors, since sponsors look at other metrics like average view time and percentage who watched the whole thing when making decisions, and those numbers are harder to fake using bot farms. We don't have access to Balmer's number for that, but one number we do have is comments. Bots don't leave comments, and leaving a comment means you were invested enough to engage with the creator and other viewers. I'd imagine that comments are more valuable than views.
The trade and tariffs video got 12.5 million views and 688 comments. The DOE video got 11 million views and 232 comments. These numbers are pitiful. Looking at some of the channels that play to a smarter audience and looking at the numbers for videos that got around a million views:
- Adam Ragusea - Edible shelf fungus (chicken of the woods 'mushroom') - 1,182 comments
- Wendover Productions - The Logistics of Music Festivals - 1,122 comments
- Stewart Hicks - Inside the Station Nightclub Tradgedy - 1,715 comments
- Technology Connections - How Much Thrust Does a Ceiling Fan Produce? - 5,042 comments
- Practical Engineering - California’s Tallest Bridge Has Nothing Underneath - 943 comments
None of these videos are about anything that could be described as a hot-button topic that will stir engagement based on subject matter alone. So generally speaking, an established channel with an audience can expect around a thousand comments per million views. There may be some point of diminishing returns where we can't expect that to scale linearly, but I've looked at a pretty wide sampling of channels and this holds. Take a channel like Deb Armstrong's which has an incredibly limited audience that has natural constraints on its growth. Ms. Armstrong unexpectedly won gold in women's GS in the 1984 Olympics and currently works as a ski instructor and youth race coach in Steamboat, CO.
The audience for ski videos in general is small. Only around 3% of Americans skied in the past year, and most of them went skiing once. Ms. Armstrong, furthermore, does not make videos designed to entertain a wide audience, or teach tricks, or review resorts, or have bro hangouts. She makes technical videos from the perspective of a ski instructor that appeal to the kind of skier who is actually interested in improving their technique. Bode Miller, Franz Klammer, and Lindsey Vonn have made appearances on her channel. But only briefly, and not in a way that exploited her connections. Her most-watched video is titled "Use of the Inside Leg to Change Turn Radius", which got 711,000 views and 437 comments.
If you noticed, this comment ratio is below the 1,000 comments per million views average, which is interesting because most of her videos get fewer than 100,000 views but over 100 comments, in line with or a little above the average. My suspicion is that this is an artifact of a video that triggers the algorithm for no conceivable reason. I doubt there are 700,000 people worldwide with any serious interest in learning how to use their inside leg to lead turns. Hell, most skiers have zero idea what that even means. (For the layman, most carved turns are initiated with the outside leg, which comes naturally to most skiers. Pros, however, will use the inside leg as well, which takes a certain amount of practice and intentionality to get the feel for since it's not a natural movement). The video features an unusually self-aware 12-year old whom Ms. Armstrong engages in a Socratic dialogue about how use of the inside leg has improved his skiing, complete with videos of him making buttery smooth turns. I imagine that the kid caused something in the algorithm to trip, which in turn caused the video to show up in the feeds of people who wouldn't usually see it, some of whom watched a bit of it before moving on with their lives. So it got more engagement than her other videos by dint of higher viewer numbers, but not as many as one would expect if her actual audience had grown to the point where she was regularly getting those kind of numbers.
The upshot of this is that these videos aren't being viewed due to a natural audience developing for the channel. Usually when that happens it's similar to Glenn and Friends Cooking, whose 2019 video where he attempted an old Coke recipe got millions of views for a channel that hadn't broken a thousand in nearly 15 years of regular uploading. While the video certainly grew his audience, he wasn't consistently getting numbers like that video. It currently sits at 18 million views, while number two has just over a million. It should be mentioned that Glenn is very up-front about how he's not chasing sponsorships, optimizing for the algorithm, or making videos for anything other than his own personal edification, which means that his numbers are skewed by him regularly breaking all of the "rules".
So it's clear that there's something going on other than Ballmer's videos hitting the algorithm at the right time. But how does this square with promotion when most YouTubers say promotion doesn't work? I think the answer lies in the fact that most YouTubers looking to pay for promotion don't have the kind of budget Ballmer has. If the average guy looking for a boost pays $500 to get his channel going, at $0.10 per view that only buys 5,000 views, which is nothing. 20,000 views per video, which seems to be the minimum I see among people who are doing it for a living, would cost $2,000, and would be cost-prohibitive for anyone trying to jump-start a channel.
And it gets even worse. Since real channels with real audiences get a certain level of engagement, this engagement drives the algorithm as much as it drives advertisers. If you boost your video, and it's shown to people who don't like it and who don't comment, it's a black mark against your channel as far as the algorithm is concerned. So rather than jump-start a moribund channel, it can actually make things worse, since the algorithm is now less-inclined to show people the video on its own. The only way this could possibly work is to keep feeding money in until enough of your natural audience finds the channel that it can support itself (say, 100,000 average views). But you're now paying millions month in and month out to hopefully get a channel big enough to generate a middle class income.
So there you have it. Ballmer is almost certainly paying through the nose to get a synthetic YouTube audience, and I've just spent seveal paragraphs stating the obvious conclusion that OP reached in the original post. As to why he's doing this when he doesn't seem to be pushing any kind of agenda, I dunno, maybe he likes it? Maybe he wants a bigger audience and just figures that since he has the money he'll throw money at it? I don't know how billionaires think.
Rov_Scam
5mo ago
I was supposed to be hearing a lot about arcologies in the near future since at least 1993. I don't know that there's much call for anything self-contained, since the megaprojects of the 1960s that promised housing, retail, and office space all without leaving the building mostly went out of business when they discovered that people like going outside from time to time.
Rov_Scam
5mo ago
The issue here is that it's not aggravated assault. New Jersey, like most other states, defines serious bodily injury as
"Serious bodily injury" means bodily injury which creates a substantial risk of death or which causes serious, permanent disfigurement, or protracted loss or impairment of the function of any bodily member or organ
While the injuries in the above case were serious by any casual definition, they don't meet the high bar required to upgrade the charge.
Rov_Scam
5mo ago
I'd honestly be surprised if this were the case in your state. If you wouldn't mind telling me what it is I can look at the sentencing guidelines myself.
Rov_Scam
5mo ago
Presumably, these offenses would get something closer to 30 years in a US court.
Looking at the PA sentencing guidelines, I'm not seeing anything close to 30 years no matter how you slice it. Even getting to what the Australian court imposed would be tough. All I see here is one count of simple assault causing bodily injury from the first incident. From the second incident, one count of simple assault causing bodily injury, one count of aggravated indecent assault, one count of attempted rape, and one count of involuntary deviate sexual intercourse using force. The IDSI charge is the most serious here, and sentencing from the remaining charges of the second incident would almost certainly run concurrently. They would probably tack on the assault charge from the first case to run consecutively, but that's only 24 months of probation. There are no relevant enhancements or mandatory minimums. The aggravating circumstances would likely be balanced by the mitigating circumstances. This is a first offense, and the sentencing guidelines for IDSI for a first-time offender call for 4.5–5.5 years in state prison. Even if we grant the max allowed for aggravating circumstances, that only gets an additional nine months. Plus sex offender registration and whatever post-release supervision the guidelines call for.
Judges in Pennsylvania have discretion to deviate from the guidelines, but they have to provide a justification, and the sentence is reviewable. Getting to 30 years would be theoretically possible, but it would require such a gross deviation from the guidelines that an appellate court would shoot it down pretty much immediately. Hell, the statutory max is only 20 years; anything beyond that would require consecutive sentences. Even the aggravating factors here are kind of weak, even if you don't take the mitigating factors into account, and the guidelines already account for them. As grisly as these crimes sound, they're really par for the course when it comes to what the guidelines anticipate.
Rov_Scam
5mo ago
It's also possible that we get a lone alien craft who was drawn here following an amateur radio signal after his home planet was destroyed in a nuclear war, which he survived because he was in the orbital guard at the time.
Rov_Scam
5mo ago
I'm not sure what refusals they're referring to, since he answered Epstein questions during his confirmation hearings and again during a House Oversight Committee hearing after it became big news, though I'm not sure if the latter worked the intelligence angle (the former was only five minutes and was unremarkable). He did explicitly tell OPR that he had no information about Epstein being an intelligence asset, though I'm not sure if this interview was under oath. He isn't scheduled to testify in front of the current House committee, but I can't see any information indicating any refusal or reluctance, only that he isn't on the witness list.
Rov_Scam
5mo ago
But this isn't a criminal court, I do consider repeated claims, even by Epstein himself, of being related to intelligence to be significant evidence even if it wouldn't be allowed in a criminal court.
The alleged Acosta quote isn't merely hearsay. If an individual who heard the quote went on the record and said he personally heard Acosta say that, then it would be hearsay, and would be entitled to a certain amount of weight, less than if Acosta went on the record himself, but still a decent amount, regardless of admissibility in court. But that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about an unnamed "Senior Administration official" who told a journalist that Acosta said that, and we don't even know if the official in question even heard the quote themself or is merely repeating a rumor. That is, at minimum, double hearsay with an anonymous intermediary. It's the kind of thing that is only to be believed by someone who is already motivated to believe it.
Go back and read my writeup from a couple weeks ago on what actually happened in DOJ during the initial Epstein investigation, and explain to me how him being an intelligence asset or whatever fits in. At what point was Acosta told to "leave it alone"? How does a guilty plea involving jail time and sex offender registration equate to leaving it alone? Why were Epstein's attorneys so dissatisfied with the deal that they spent nearly a year trying to get out of it after it was signed? Why didn't senior DOJ officials in Washington side with Epstein when he referred the matter for departmental review? If Epstein had dirt and was pissed at the government for prosecuting him, why didn't he use it during the near decade between his release and rearrest, during which time he was the subject of numerous lawsuits?
There's an extensive record of the initial Epstein deal and if no one inserting wild conspiracy theories about Epstein getting off easy because he was a Mossad agent has done the basic work of familiarizing themself with that record. Instead they start from the premise that Epstein was involved in intelligence and work backward, ignoring anything that doesn't support their theory. Not doing so is like writing about European economic development in the second half of the 20th century without knowing about WWII.
Rov_Scam
5mo ago
Rov_Scam
5mo ago
John Grisham – The Testament. The thing about Grisham is that everything he writes is inevetably good, but he hasn't written one great book in his life, even by the standards of popular fiction. Like, Stephen King, he has a problem with endings, but where King's endings actively piss you off, Grisham's just sort of exist, and you move on with your life. I gave up on King around 2001 when I tried reading The Tommyknockers, which was just one long King ending. Grisham was the first "adult" author I read, starting in middle school, when my idea of adult books was the kind of thick mass-market paperbacks my parents always carried around with them. Grisham was the hottest author at the time, and my parents happened to have a copy of The Runaway Jury, and I was captivated. I read most of what he put out until some time around when I graduated from high school, when I quit for some reason and didn't pick it back up until the pandemic, when I was looking for a book I could get into without trying. I have no idea why I slept on Grisham for all those years while I kept reading plenty of other authors of questionable literary value.
Rov_Scam
5mo ago
Like Ioper says below, you're romanticizing the idea of merchants traveling and what that was actually like. How does this sound to you: You'll spend 22 hours in a plane (including 4 1/2 hours laid over in Los Angeles) flying from Sydney to Indianapolis, at which point you'll rent a car and drive an hour to a small town that's home to the CVS Pharmacy Midwest Distribution Center. You'll check into a Holiday Inn, eat dinner at an Applebees, and spend the next two days touring a warehouse so you can prepare an estimate on light bulb costs as part of a redesign of the lighting system. On the second day you'll take a late flight back after work that has two layovers but avoids the need to stay an extra day.
Rov_Scam
5mo ago
I'm in the process of writing a retrospective of my AT thru-hike, so keep your eye out for that.
Rov_Scam
5mo ago
Luckily it didn't escape everyone's notice: https://theonion.com/sherwin-williams-triumphantly-reports-nearly-half-the-p-1819566493/
I'm not seeing where in the opinion it says he was president of the state association.
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