Rov_Scam
4mo ago
Right now I prefer the term "gender & race communism" to "wokeness." And as such "wokeness" did not start in the 2010s or in the 19080s as Paul Graham posits, but was a growing trend the entire last two hundred years.
I'm not playing this game. Sure, you can trace the roots of any political or intellectual movement back hundreds of years or even further. But that's not what anyone is talking about when they mean "woke". I've been in enough online discussions to recognize that this is just an entree to claiming that Marbury v. Madison / The 14th Amendment / Women's Suffrage / The Progressive Era / The New Deal / The Civil Rights Act / any number of other things is the moment the true spirit of the founding was lost and America started to go to hell in a handbasket, but I'm not buying it, not least of which because most of the people complaining about wokeness aren't buying it either. Not least of which because a colorblind society a la Dr. King was anathama to a large enough segment of the population as to be a progressive idea for the time but is the essence of anti-woke ideology today.
The curriculum of the school system in the major US city where I live is a near total wreck. Up through eighth grade, they basically don't teach a single classic American text, they don't teach anything that would inspire a white American boy (and frankly the curriculum probably isn't that inspiring to the people of color it is supposed to represent). Even the unit on space exploration -- uses Hidden Figures as the main text -- the school is flat-out teaching "misinformation." The magnet schools that were previously a great option for the better students have been greatly harmed by the post-2020 equity craze that lead to a change in admission rules. The administrators talking about these changes explicitly said that these changes were a result of making equity and anti-racism a central focus of their mission.
I've been hearing complaints about the alleged intrusion of wokeness into the elementary school curriculum for years, but there's been a paucity of concrete evidence. It's never anything that anyone's kids are bringing home, but what they heard is going on at a school district that's close enough to seem familiar but not so close that there's a good chance of actually knowing anyone whose kids go there. I'd expect that in this era of cell phone cameras and social media that the people who are outraged over this would have no problem coming up with examples of worksheets, reading materials, etc. that is supposedly indoctrinating our children, but somehow the only things I've ever seen produced are copypasta obtained from Google Images.
As to why kids aren't reading the classics of American literature anymore, my cousin, an elementary school teacher, gave me the answer, and it's more boring than some communist plot to make every story about black people. Basically, the so-called "curriculum experts" who decide these things came to the conclusion that the reading material needed to be specially tailored so that conformed to the precise reading level that was expected of the children and contained all the necessary vocabulary words but not any that were too hard. The result was that none of the existing children's literature filled all of the specific requirements, so they essentially had to commission a lot of stuff that did.
Anyway, this isn't a new thing. I was in elementary school in the early 1990s, and while we read some of these books, it was always apart from the standard curriculum. In any event, most of the stuff (like Charlotte's Web, for instance) involved all animal characters, so I'm not sure what was supposed to have especially inspired me as a young white boy. the stuff we actually read from the provided textbooks had no shortage of multicultural influence, so I'm not going to chalk up the mere existence of stories that center around black characters and traditions to some woke mind-virus.
The police were told to stand-down, a huge crime wave ensued, and urban public safety in the major cities has not come close to returning to 2000s levels, far less 1950s levels (Don't talk to me about crime rates -- due to police capacity and risk homeostasis, crime rates don't actually measure changes in public safety in the medium-term -- you have to look at how people's behaviors have changed).
If you're going to jettison statistics in favor of vibes, you also have to consider how much the narrative contributes to those vibes. When I was writing the entry on the South Side for my Pittsburgh series, I discussed the increased perception that the South Side was unsafe, a perception that wasn't really supported by the statistics. At first, I thought that maybe the perception was being influenced by high-profile shootings that made the news. But I was surprised to find a similar number of high-profile shootings in 2014 as in 2022. The difference was that in 2014, there was no narrative about how the South Side was becoming increasingly unsafe in the wake of a post-pandemic crime wave. With the overall crime rate having gone down the previous few years, there was no reason to believe that anything was out of the ordinary, so the shootings were reported on, chalked up to bad dudes hanging around nuisance bars after-hours, and quickly forgotten about.
In 2021 and 2022, after a summer of protests, rising crime rates, and being told that police were at the end of their rope, a similar number of instances caused the widespread perception that the South Side was unsafe, at least late at night on weekends, and it accordingly prompted various police strike forces and visits from the mayor. Never mind that the crime rate in the neighborhood was roughly similar to 2014, including the number of shootings that made the news. Now it was dangerous when it wasn't before. Are people really responding to increased risk of crime victimization, or to a conservative narrative that says woke policies are sending our cities to hell in a handbasket?
The demographics of our elite colleges were greatly changed as a result of equity focused changes in admissions. This matters a lot for the future leadership of our country.
Just out of curiosity, I checked the demographics of Harvard. The class of 2010 is roughly similar to the class of 2023. The biggest gains for blacks in university admissions overall seemed to happen in the 1980s. But this is also concurrent with the biggest gains made by Asians. Not only did this change happen in the pre-woke era, it happened at a time when blacks made huge gains in closing the high school graduation rate gap. It's no surprise that the percentage of blacks in a certain college will increase at a time when the college-eligible black population is also increasing.
The nature of campus social life and dating has fundamentally changed, partly because of Title IX investigations and metoo, but of course, also for many other reasons.
Fundamentally? I can't speak to any changes that have happened since I was there in the early 2000s, but I'd bet they're nothing compared to the changes made in the 1960s, prior to which men couldn't even get into women's dorms and people had to sign in and out, or since the 1940s, when you add to that the fact that the overall college population was 75% male, and all-girl's schools were much more prominent than they are today, meaning that if you went to a big college like Ohio State or Notre Dame, you probably weren't dating any fellow students.
The demographics of the entire country changed because it became racist and xenophobic to do any border control which produced bad optics or "violated human rights"
Hispanics were 5% of the US population in 1970, 6% in 1980, 8% in 1990, 12.5% in 2000, 16% in 2010, and 19% in 2020. The demographics seem to be changing at about the same clip as they have for decades. As an aside, this is why people who are anti-immigration are often accused of being racist. the official explanations range between worrying about them taking American jobs (if you assume they work), and leeching off of the welfare state (assuming they don't work), which at least are credible economic concerns. But here you make it sound like the real concern is demographic, which is as much as most Trump critics suspect.
The replacement of merit-based hiring with DEI hiring has not been rolled back, our institutions are continuing to crumble as a result. We do have people claiming they saw explicit anti-white-male discrimination in hiring at companies like Google and Intel and I think it has something to do with the stagnation and decline of those companies.
If this really happened then Mr. Magire was a fool to not take the statement to an attorney. If Google was actually using minority hiring quotas then they would have settled for a pretty penny to avoid discovery and the attendant publicity. Even the all-in DEI grifter employment law firms around here are quick to warn that DEI is not affirmative action and that private companies need to focus their efforts on recruiting and "fostering an inclusive atmosphere" and steer clear of anything that could be construed as a Title VII violation. I'd be surprised if a company that can afford the kind of attorneys Google can would be this stupid about the whole thing. And who are these unqualified black senior executives I keep hearing so much about?
Cross-dressers went from being a joke, to something that will get you fired and ostracized if you don't play along with their false beliefs. School systems now teach multiple genders and you are a bad person if you don't acknowledge someone's chosen gender. Code-of-conducts across an enormous number of projects, conferences, and other institutions, now ban "misgendering" someone. Mandatory denial of reality across many institutions of society is an enormous concrete change.
School systems encouraging this kind of trans-affirmation or whatever you want to call it isn't so much a symptom of woke ideology as it is of administrators who are spineless when it comes to discipline. I hear it from high school teachers and parents in several districts that administrators are loathe to discipline all but the most troublesome students, because the parents all think their own kids are angels and can't be inconvenienced by after-school detentions or suspension. The teachers are basically told to stand down; they can send the kid to the principal, but he just comes back without punishment. The result is that bullying is rampant, and the bullied kids end up going trans because it at least gives them leverage over the teacher that they didn't have before. And this isn't happening in highly-rated PMC school districts in the suburbs; it may be happening in urban areas, but the stories I'm hearing come from rural parts of the rust belt where the parents in question aren't voting for Kamala Harris.
Rov_Scam
4mo ago
Before I start, I think we need to make it clear that by "woke" we mean a certain kind of racial and sexual politics rooted in the idea of recognizing oppression. It's a broad definition, but it's important that we distinguish woke politics from typical left-wing politics than have been around for decades, as a lot of right-wing detractors have lumped these policies together in an attempt at discrediting them. So, by my definition, simply arguing for stricter environmental regulations for the normal reasons isn't woke. Arguing for stricter environmental regulations because of the disproportionate impact of air pollution on communities of color is.
That being said, wokeness got a lot of press but it was never able to coalesce into a serious political movement, and while it certainly influenced the "national conversation", it didn't really lead to any concrete changes beyond hand-wavey gestures that in hindsight look more to have been done for purposes of public perception than to make any real changes. One only has to look at the history of the movement to get a feel for how unpopular it really was among Democrats. It started around 2012 in the wake of the Trayvon Martin scandal, but it didn't really have any appreciable influence on Obama's reelection campaign. The late Obama administration made a few changes regarding sexual assault on campus, trans people in the military, and the like, and while woke ideas were gaining greater prominence, the work "woke" wasn't even in the public consciousness yet.
That wouldn't happen until the 2016 primary season got into full swing in the summer of 2015, by which point a number of blacks killed at the hands of police led to riots and other expressions of outrage. But while these things were gaining media prominence, they hadn't coalesced into any real policy proposals. The 2016 Democratic primary was supposed to be a coronation of Hillary Clinton, whose style was straight out of the 1990s, but was met with a challenge by Bernie Sanders, whose ideas were more out of the 1960s. The woke set tried to glom onto Sanders as, being far to the left of Hillary, he seemed to have the most promise, but his ideas centered more around class and economic inequality than identity politics. He would occasionally give a nod to his new compatriots, but it was never a central part of his platform. In any event, he lost the nomination.
After Trump won the presidency, woke politics gained increasing prominence in the media, and would seem to be the future of the Democratic party. Yet the 2020 primary field, despite being the largest in recent memory, failed to produce a single credible woke candidate. The wokest was probably Kirsten Gillebrand, who identified herself as a “white woman of privilege” and promised to reach out to “white women in the suburbs who voted for Trump and explain to them what white privilege actually is.” Yet her campaign never got any traction and she was done by the end of summer, 2019. Beto O'Rourke's woke credentials didn't run as deep as Gillebrand's as he tried to unseat Ted Cruz in 2018 as a pragmatic centrist, but his presidential run saw him embrace wokeness in an attempt to distinguish himself. He too floundered, and dropped out in November. Kamala Harris actually had the best run of the woke candidates, but this is subject to some qualifications. First, her wokeness wasn't explicit; you had to squint to see it. Second, though she did get some momentum—in contrast to the other two, who got none—she couldn't sustain it and had to drop out in December.
What about the candidates who actually made it to the primaries? There was Sanders, who had more concessions to the progressive left but didn't really change who he was. There was Liz Warren, the darling of the woke media types. She was basically running a Sanders-lite campaign that had a few nods to racial and gender politics but was nonetheless centered around inequality and corruption. There was Mike Bloomberg, a former Republican and Independent who was nobody's idea of woke and who nobody voted for anyway. There were Amy Klobuchar and Mayor Pete, clearly vying for the centrist lane. And there was Joe Biden, ultimate winner of the nomination and the election, who was also running as a centrist. He was woke in the sense that he was the only candidate who could get a significant amount of black votes, but in this sense he seemed more like a throwback to Bill Clinton than the vanguard of racial politics. And as woke rhetoric heated up during the summer of 2020, he would take positions explicitly contrary to the worst woke excesses.
So there we were. In 2019, as wokeness was nearing its peak, the Democratic field could not support a single woke candidate. Liz Warren, the wokest candidate in the eventual primary field, did miserably. The eventual nominee didn't embrace it during primary season and didn't turn to it in the general, even as its public prominence was peaking. The most prominent advocates of wokeism in the political arena were The Squad, a group of lefty representatives from safe districts. While they got a lot of media attention, they were essentially freshmen who didn't hold any leadership positions and didn't have any real influence. The most prominent piece of legislation they produced was the Green New Deal draft, a document so widely ridiculed that most Democrats disowned it as an overenthusiastic preliminary draft b some plucky kids that was never meant to see the light of day, let alone become a serious proposal.
The biggest political successes of wokeness were in local governments in heavily left-leaning areas, particularly on the West Coast. But these are local governments, and for all the press their policies got, they never impacted more than a very small percentage of the total population. It's telling that when people are discussing the effects of woke culture it almost always comes down to a few things that don't really mean anything. For instance, I have yet to read a critique of wokeness that doesn't mention pronouns in email signatures. But what does this really mean? As much as conservatives would like to view it as a symbol of capitulation to radical ideology, it's really just the cheapest, lowest-effort thing a company can do to make it look like they're changing the status quo.
Which leads us to the biggest changes corporations made: DEI initiatives. Were these merely symbolic? Yes, in the sense that they aren't anything other than a spinoff of the HR department into something that sounds more impressive.But what did they actually do? Mostly investigate discrimination claims that HR would have to investigate anyway. Wed to this was the implementation of various training programs meant to counter this, which is why companies were spending large sums having people like Robin D'Angelo speak at all-hands meetings on Zoom. But the rise, and subsequent downfall, of these initiatives wasn't merely symbolic, or necessarily borne out of a sincere desire to combat racism, or sexism, or whatever.
No, they were borne out of the belief that there was a growing zeitgeist that would make them subject to additional liability for employment discrimination. So, in order to show juries that you're Taking Discrimination Seriously, you have additional trainings and a dedicated DEI staff and prompt investigation of complaints. But aside from the investigation of complaints, this additional stuff doesn't do much. Employment discrimination suits ended up being based on the same boring grounds they were before wokeness became prominent. Very few attorneys were willing to file suits based on microaggressions or implicit bias or whatever, and those who did couldn't find willing juries. And even if there was a jury willing to entertain these notions, few of them would reconsider because of some bullshit training the supervisor attended a year earlier. Now that it's clear that shit like that isn't going to play they can move the discrimination investigations back to HR where they belong and get rid of all the trainings that don't accomplish anything useful.
Rov_Scam
4mo ago
Only if I'm in a position when I need extra support or leverage on rough terrain. 99% of the time I just walk normally with them and don't put any conscious pressure into them.
Rov_Scam
4mo ago
The regulation itself is the terraforming, not the snake pit. The snake pit is the "entist caused cosmetic damage, courts awarded more in damages than the patient will earn in a lifetime" scenario that you mention, and being in compliance with the applicable regulations is a guardrail against falling in. Take a basic traffic accident. If you're being sued for causing an accident, the fact that you were traveling within the posted speed limit and observed all applicable traffic laws makes it harder for the plaintiff to prove negligence than if none of these traffic regulations existed and drivers were asked to exercise their best judgment. If a road has a posted speed limit of 40 and you were traveling at 37 at the time of the accident, it's a tough sell to a jury that you're responsible because you were going too fast (the exception being if there were some condition, like weather, that made traveling that speed unreasonable). Contrast that with a world in which there are no speed limits. Was 37 too fast for that road? They can probably produce a witness who will say it was, and you'll have to produce a witness to say it wasn't, and now there's a 50/50 chance that the jury agrees with the plaintiff.
Now compare this to heavily-regulated industries. The snake pit is there. But any guard rails the company puts up are weak and self-serving. If a company tries to argue that it did x, y, and z to protect the public, the plaintiff's expert is going to unequivocally state that x, y, and z are not enough and that the policy was only put in place to create the appearance of mitigating the risk while placing the lowest possible financial burden on the company. A company can argue about how great its internal procedures and industry best practices are until it's blue in the face, but it doesn't carry the same kind of weight with a jury as being in compliance with regulations created by a neutral government body. Knowing that no matter how much they spend or how seriously they take their internal precautions it won't matter to a jury, there's a strong disincentive for making these procedures any more burdensome than the plaintiff's bar is claiming they are. It's better to just spend as little money as possible and hope you get sued. This is mitigated somewhat by the requirements of insurance companies, but insurance companies can't flat-out prevent suits the way governments can.
Rov_Scam
4mo ago
If you do any amount of hiking, or aspire to do any amount of hiking, I highly recommend getting a pair of trekking poles. They make expensive ones that involve springs, carbon fiber, and the like, but a basic pair from REI will run you under $100 and are worth every penny. Some people who use them for the first time will collapse them down and put them in their pack because they claim they don't notice a difference, but it's not so much an immediate obvious improvement as it is that you'll feel a lot better at the end of the day. A remember reading something that said walking with poles on level ground will take 20 pounds off each of your knees. I don't know how accurate that is, but when I was in my early 20s I took a trip to the Adirondacks and after hiking 2 1/2 miles down one of the steepest trails in the park my knees were in some sort of pain for several months, flaring up a bit even walking down a gentle grade on a city street. After several more such incidents I bought poles and while they didn't solve the problem 100%, they turned it into a minor inconvenience that only happened occasionally. Even if I'm not doing any long or steep downhills, it's still like having 4 wheel drive and I can't even imagine going out without them, and in the odd situation when I don't have them I feel naked. Just to be clear, I'm only talking about actual hikes in the woods; I don't walk around town with them.
Rov_Scam
4mo ago
I handle a lot of cases involving mesothelioma due to asbestos exposure and, though this is completely anecdotal, immunotherapy seems to be working wonders on that front. It seems like a few years ago meso was a death sentence, and now there are people who, while not exactly cured, seem to be living with it for years. One case involved a 60 year old woman who had a resection and subsequent immunotherapy after being symptomatic for over a year before doctors even figured out the correct diagnosis, and she was judged to be completely cancer free, which is something I thought impossible. There are of course plenty of people who respond poorly to it, but these are usually people in their 80s who were probably close to death anyway. Some of these cases are surprisingly sad, though, beyond the fact that any cancer case is sad. One that I'm working on now involved an 87 year old man who was walking miles every day over challenging terrain without any problem and slipped on ice when out on one of his walks. He hurt his ribs and went to the hospital for a CT scan, which uncovered pleural effusions and was suspicious for meso, which a biopsy confirmed. I honestly wonder for a guy his age who wasn't having any problems if the treatment is worse than just living with the disease until he needs palliative care, considering that he was otherwise active but was wiped out by the cancer treatments.
Rov_Scam
4mo ago
Well, I guess I stand corrected given that the stadium does seem to be actively trying to kill its occupants. Which raises an interesting question: What is it about pro sports facilities that leads them to having much shorter usable lives than literally any other buildings? The idea that they would tear down a typical urban skyscraper after 30 or 40 years to build a new one is ridiculous, as most skyscrapers are intended to last indefinitely. Some snarky people may point to government incompetence, but most government buildings last for much longer. Allegheny County has several government buildings dating from the 1920s that haven't even seen significant renovation, and nobody's even talking about replacing or even remodeling them. Yet these stadiums are always falling apart after 25 years.
Rov_Scam
4mo ago
Well, if you hate them, then you should probably be calling them the Wash Redfaces.
Rov_Scam
4mo ago
You can talk about dubious IQ studies you read about in online articles all you want. As someone who has had to deal with them professionally for over 20 years at this point, everyone in West Virginia is fucking retarded. Okay, not everyone, but a high enough proportion that in order to accomplish anything you have to start from that assumption or else you're bound to be incredibly frustrated. My first encounter with this was when I was in college, and got a summer job delivering ice to convenience stores and the like. We were based out of Pittsburgh, but the college kids all got the shitty routes, drivine to far-flung rural areas and the 'hood. There was one week when they put me on service duty, which basically consisted of me taking a minivan around to our sites with an air compressor and blowing dust out of the mechanicals of the boxes and cleaning them up a bit. To avoid any confusion of why a guy in an ice uniform was there poking around the box and not delivering ice, I'd stop inside to tell the clerk what I was doing.
I started with the urban routes and worked my way outward. I never had any difficulty explaining that I was just there to clean the box out to anyone of any ethnicity. Some people would tell me they were low and ask if a delivery was forthcoming or if I could call someone to come out (I don't know and no), but no one was ever confused by my presence. Then, at the end of the week, I hit West Virginia.
"Just so you know, I'm not delivering any ice today. I'm just going to clean the box out with compressed air and make sure everything is working okay."
"Heh?"
"I'm not delivering ice, just cleaning the box."
"Heh?"
(repeat ad nauseum)
I understand that convenience store clerk isn't the most intellectually demanding position and that some places will hire people of limited cognitive capacity to do this work; if it happened once or twice I wouldn't have thought much of it. But it happened at every place I went to in West Virginia. One guy was confused why I was there because he'd already gotten a delivery earlier that day. It got to the point where I stopped telling anyone what I was doing because they were too dim to understand. Then I crossed the river into Ohio and went in as an experiment and everything was suddenly normal again.
After becoming a lawyer, I was told that if I got licensed in West Virginia it would increase my prospects, so I did. I assumed this was because, since Pittsburgh is close to West Virginia, companies in Northern WV or the Panhandle would use Pittsburgh firms. I soon came to realize that all West Virginia companies of a certain size, or foreign companies operating in the state, use Pittsburgh firms for their WV work. When these companies are sued it's common for hearings and the like to be held in Morgantown or Wheeling so the lawyers don't have to drive to Charleston or wherever. During the oil and gas boom most of the legal work was given to Pittsburgh firms. Even ones that opened satellite offices in West Virginia were almost exclusively staffed by people originally from Pittsburgh, excepting maybe one or two locals (usually higher-ups who got sick of having to drive to Pittsburgh).
Now that I have to depose a lot of people from West Virginia, but none of them know anything. I mean anything. Trying to get basic personal information is like pulling teeth. They remember their name, dob, address, wife's name, and maybe their kid's names and ages, if you're lucky. They'll know that their parents are dead, but won't be able to tell you when they died. And I mean that; it's pretty common that they can't even narrow it down to the decade. One guy said he thought his father died in the 1980s; I pulled the obituary and he died in 2016. "Well, I know it was a while ago" was his response. One guy was on disability but he didn't know what for. West Virginia judges are more or less forced to have lax evidentiary standards for the simple reason that if they didn't, no one could provide enough evidence to maintain any kind of lawsuit. I struggle to describe it properly, because it's literally ineffable how utterly moronic these people are compared to those of similar socioeconomic standing in Pennsylvania.
Rov_Scam
4mo ago
My rooting interests are tempered by the fact that, living in Pittsburgh, I have to deal with the annual chorus calling for Tomlin's head in a season where we make the playoffs because he hasn't won a playoff game in nearly a decade and he's entirely to conservative on offense and who cares if he has no losing seasons, yadda yadda yadda. There's also this perception that the Steelers are in some kind of hell where they need to get bad before they get good and maybe we need a losing season or two to get some top 10 picks and rebuild for the future. Never mind that the Patriots were strong for nearly 20 years picking at the end of the draft, or that the Browns, Raiders, Jaguars, Giants, Jets, Panthers, etc. have all had plenty of high picks in the past decade and they all still suck. Never mind that the Bengals have the best WB-WR tandem in football and they're out of the playoffs, or that the high-flying Dolphins have the most creative offense in football and are out of the playoffs. Never mind that the vaunted "Killer Bs" era that they think should have won 2 or 3 Super Bowls had to deal with a perpetually injured Le'Veon Bell and a defense so bad that they couldn't stop Blake Bortles despite putting up 40+ points. It's not Tomlin's fault that Bell could never stay healthy. It's not Tomlin's fault that Ben was a gunslinger who threw a lot of picks. At the very least, he's handling losing his franchise QB better than Belechick, whose Pats collapsed following Brady's loss despite one good season from Mac Jones. I get the impression that these people would be pissed if the Steelers won the Super Bowl because that would mean another decade of Tomlin.
With that in mind, I'm rooting for the following teams in non-Steelers games:
Los Angeles Chargers The Chargers had one of those wunderkind head coaches in Brandon Staley whom Steelers fans liked to point to whenever they talked about how Tomlin was too old-fashioned and was letting the game pass him by. Except Staley couldn't win anything and got his ass canned. Now they've replaced him with a guy who is committed to running the ball despite not being particularly good at it and not letting Herbert run wild despite years of the media stroking him off, and they're having a great season. Nothing against the Texans, who have similar numbers, but they're said to be having a down year while Harbaugh supposedly turned this ship around by playing more conservatively.
Buffalo Bills I like Buffalo, and while they definitely play a brand of football quite different from what Tomlin would play, they're up against the Broncos. I don't have anything against the Broncos per se; I do have something against Sean Payton, who acted like he was the savior of the team and shit all over Russ. Of course, people in Pittsburgh are acting like he saw something in Russ that Mike Tomlin missed and we should have known he as cooked because he was worse last year than his numbers would indicate, which is all the more reason to root for them to lose. Also, the guy was involved in Bountygate, which should be enough to get him barred from the league for life.
Philadelphia Eagles Well, whaddya know? Another team that plays lights-out defense, runs the ball, and has a QB and coach who people were ready to run out of town on a rail at the beginning of the season. Also Kenny Pickett. Also people in Pittsburgh act like we should be rivals with them even though we only play each other once every few years. The Eagles aren't the Flyers. All the people thinking the Steelers need to tank need to remember that Hurts was drafted in the second round and people were suspect after his rookie season. Honestly, the Packers aren't much different, having been criticized for investing in defense and that "won't win in the playoffs", but with Aaron Rodgers as their WB for so many years it's easy to root against them, even if they now have Jordan Love (Hey! Another good QB not drafted in the top ten!)
Washington Commanders First, enough with calling them the Redskins. I know it's nostalgic and I wouldn't have changed the name either, but teams changing names isn't uncommon and it's been done for stupider reasons. The Redskins were originally the Braves. The Steelers were originally the Pirates. The Jets were originally the Titans. The Pirates were originally the Alleghenies. The Astros were originally the Colt .45s. And if we're talking baseball, in the Dead Ball Era some teams changed their name almost every season. While I'm not a fan of changing names for political reasons, I'm even less of a fan of people calling things that have names by other, incorrect names for political reasons. I'm rooting for them so conservatives will have to hear about The Commanders for a few more weeks. Also, everyone agrees that their stadium is trash, and, though I haven't been there, I never understood why. Does it have seats? Does it have a field? Is the building actively trying to kill the fans? What's the problem here? People like to tout these "State of the Art Stadiums" that are optimized for fan comfort with a retractable roof that's open once every decade and a giant LED screen that blocks the view of the field and five star dining and between-play entertainment. I hear some of them also have football games there.
LA Rams On Christmas Eve, I heard some dildo on the radio say that the NFL needed to change its playoff format because winners of weak divisions didn't deserve to be in the playoffs over teams with good records in tough divisions. Especially when the division winner gets the home game. Well, sometimes that's how the cookie crumbles. No one picked the Rams to win this division, and nothing better than an unexpected run. Besides, we all know that the Vikes are cursed. Plus, I've had the idea for a while of starting a betting tip line that sells picks made on the assumption that the games are fixed, and right now Los Angeles could use an uplifting story due to the fires. Scrappy team scrapes into the playoffs, home game gets moved to Arizona, Rams win anyway. Go to the Super Bowl and win, and Stafford retires. Hollywood ending.
Detroit Lions Everyone says the Steelers need a coach like Dan Campbell who's willing to take risks. Well, the sum total of Dan Campbell's success has been an NFC Championship loss in his lone playoff appearance. There would be nothing more satisfying than to see the high-flying media darling lose to the Commanders in the Divisional round. Nothing against their long suffering fans. Also, I had to point out to a friend that they only landed on Campbell after firing approximately 377 coaches since deciding that Wayne Fontes wasn't the guy to get them over the top.
Kansas City Chiefs Everyone is tired of them at this point, but I was rooting for them when they won in 2020, and they haven't done anything to make me dislike them. Except that my cousin's 11-year-old son roots for them because he "likes Patrick Mahomes". As in, he roots for them over the Steelers, who he says suck. When I was a kid in the 90s there were always kids at school who just rooted for the Cowboys because they were the best team, and I'm disappointed that my cousin hasn't talked some sense into him. This is Pittsburgh. We root for our home teams come hell or high water, and we certainly don't just pick the best team and root for them. If he were a Jets fan because he liked Sauce Gardner I'd at least appreciate the pluck, but damn.
Rov_Scam
4mo ago
The US Forest Service's policy of fire suppression wasn't related in any way to late 20th Century environmentalism. The Great Fires of 1910 happened only a few years after the Forest Service was founded and suppression followed soon after and was the policy for decades. Conversely, it was around 1970, just as the modern environmental movement was founded, that the Forest Service started to back off of this policy, though this wasn't due as much to environmentalist influence as it was to scientific research done in the 1960s that showed fire as essential to forest ecosystems, independent of the increased risk of "the big one". Controlled burns have been the preferred method of wildfire management for some time.
The problem with this burns, though, from a practical standpoint, is that there's only so much you can do. I'm on the board of a nonprofit that deals extensively with PA DCNR, and while the rangers love doing these burns, they have their limitations. In Pennsylvania, you can't burn in full leaf because it won't burn, and you can't burn in the winter when the ground is too saturated to burn, and you can't burn when it's too wet for anything to ignite, and you can't burn when it's so dry that the fire could easily get out of control, so you're basically limited to a few weeks in early April when the ground is dry, there's no foliage yet, and the spring rains have yet to start, and even that's weather permitting. And maybe you get another shot in November. And assuming you actually can burn, you can only burn as much as you have staff on hand to control it. They do several burns a year in a state park that runs about 20,000 acres, but none of them are more than a dozen or so acres at a time, and most are smaller. Things are obviously different out west where wildfire risk is greater, but they still have to work with the weather.
Rov_Scam
4mo ago
That's why I suspect that there will eventually be a public falling out. Eventually Elon will insist on something that Trump can't or won't deliver for political reasons and that will be the end of it. He used to be a darling among some on the left but fell out with them for incredibly stupid reasons, and there's no reason to think it won't happen here. The interests of the American public aren't always aligned with his interests, and he doesn't have the political tact to play the game the way the rest of corporate America does.
Rov_Scam
4mo ago
A bit niche, but having read several books about the OJ trial, here are my evaluations:
The Run of His Life: The People v. O.J. Simpson by Jeffrey Toobin. This is the "official account" of the trial, such that one can exist, and it's pretty good, but not great. Toobin starts with the premise that OJ is guilty and paints the entire case in the light that the defense was acting borderline unethically and the prosecution and judiciary incompetently, and that the jury were all idiots. While this all may be true, Toobin is a journalist, not an attorney, and nothing in the books suggests he did the kind of research necessary to justify his snarky tone. B+
Reasonable Doubts: The Criminal Justice System and the O.J. Simpson Case by Alan Dershowitz. Easily the best book about the case, though it's not so much a blow by blow account as it is a series of meditations on what it says about the criminal justice system. Dersh takes no stance on guilt or innocence (despite being an appellate advisor for Simpson) and explains why most of the criticisms from various media commentators are off base. A
The Search for Justice: A Defense Attorney's Brief on the O.J. Simpson Case by Robert Shapiro. Shapiro was OJ's lead attorney before he was informally elbowed out by Johnny Cochran, and he spends most of the book explaining the case from the defense side. While he doesn't apologize for anything, he doesn't really make the case for Simpson's innocence that well, and he doesn't really give any insight into how the defense strategy led to the acquittal. It's adequate, but that's about it. C
O.J. the Last Word by Gerry Spence. Spence is one of those criminal defense attorneys who handled three slam dunk cases in his life and acts like he's some kind of genius for having never lost. After starting this book I'm certain I wouldn't want him defending me if I were ever in trouble. He was actually approached about defending OJ but backed out after Shapiro made it clear he'd be part of a team and not acting solo. I actually only made it about 50 pages in as it was unreadable. F
Outrage: The Five Reasons Why O. J. Simpson Got Away with Murder by Vincent Bugliosi. I didn't actually read this, but I watched the 7 hour video supplement that includes interviews with the key players and clips from the actual trial and news reports. I don't imagine that the book covers anything that isn't covered in the video, so I'm counting it. Anyway, Bugliosi was so outraged by the verdict he had to go on a whinge about how everybody involved with the trial fucked up royally, and second-guesses the prosecutions entire strategy by saying that they should have spent more time pursuing the domestic abuse angle that clearly wasn't playing with the jury, whom he only just falls short of calling complete morons. It's entertaining, but if Bugliosi thinks he would have won the case had he still been with the Los Angeles DA at the time, he's dreaming. The video is more entertaining because you get the full dose of Bugliosi's sanctimonious ire. He also uses logically fallacious arguments, and he left the DA's office so he could be a defense attorney, but didn't get much work since he only defended people whom he thought were innocent. He's a prick, and if I were on the jury I would have voted to acquit just to piss him off. C+ for content, but recommended for unintentional hilarity.
Without a Doubt by Marcia Clark. Clark spends 300 pages blaming everyone but the prosecutor's office for the acquittal, and doesn't pull punches when it comes to Chris Darden's mistakes, though she insists they're still friends. She mostly blames Lance Ito for letting the defense run wild, but she's at least entertaining enough that she comes across as a cool lady rather than the icy bitch she was portrayed as in the media. She also gives actual insight into the prosecution's strategy and why she thinks it didn't work. Bonus points for admitting up front she wrote the book for the money. A-
Rov_Scam
4mo ago
Then bring in more Mexicans. We don't have that many Mexicans in Pittsburgh, but do you know how many are in the building trades? All of them. Okay, some own restaurants and I used to work with a Mexican lawyer, but walk around the areas with above-average Mexican population (i.e. 10% Mexican, 90% white) and they're all driving beat up pickup trucks with sheets of plywood in the back. Hell, if you want to hire a contractor for anything smaller than a $20,000 renovation, Mexican handymen are pretty much your only option.
Rov_Scam
4mo ago
Terry Gross from NPR's Fresh Air comes to mind as probably the best of the pure interviewers. It's a testament to her skill that most of the interviews of hers I've listened to aren't of people I'd normally seek out on my own but happened to come across when flipping through the dial. Larry King just wasn't any good. His philosophy was that he should be in the same position as the average audience member who didn't know particularly much about the subject and would go on a journey of discovery or whatever, but in reality it seemed like he used it to not only excuse his lack of preparation but to make it a point of personal pride.
Rov_Scam
4mo ago
From what I read, it sounds like the security guarantees would be a precondition to entering negotiations, not a bargaining chip. As in, if he enters negotiations with the security guarantees already in place, it makes his negotiating position much stronger.
Rov_Scam
4mo ago
And why shouldn't he? His country is at stake. That's more a question to be leveled at the people who he's asking for money and not at Zelensky.
Rov_Scam
4mo ago
And if Putin gave them up the war would end as well. Why is the onus only on Zelensky here? You talk about Ukraine using conscripts but Putin doesn't even have the political capital for that. His first draft was limited to outlying areas and provoked a mass exodus, and he won't even consider drafting out of Moscow or other major cities. He's resorted to using North Korean mercenaries to retake occupied areas inside Russia. Doesn't Putin have an obligation to prevent the deaths of young Russian men?
Rov_Scam
4mo ago
If you're healthy and actually can't afford regular insurance, it might be worth looking into. If you have health conditions or can otherwise afford real insurance, steer clear. You are effectively uninsured and won't get insurance negotiated rates, and will get a bill that the company may or may not pay. As frustrating as health insurance can be, it's a highly regulated industry with consumer protections in place. Health shares are the wild West and they aren't required to actually pay for anything.
Rov_Scam
4mo ago
As a matter of honor? You're basically admitting that the training will make them more valuable, but that you're not going to pay them any more. Especially since it sounds like these people already work there and aren't new hires; it's not like they can skip the training and continue doing their old jobs. At least the way things are now they might not know how much more they can make and stay out of inertia.
Rov_Scam
4mo ago
Theoretically legal? Yes. Practical? No, not really. You might as well put a sign out front that says "This place has high turnover. It sucks to work here and you could easily make more elsewhere." In a tight labor market all that's going to get you is people who need a job so badly that they couldn't imagine just leaving after a year anyway. In a tight job market it's probably not necessary in any event.
From a legal perspective, if I'm a company looking to hire someone subject to one of these, I'm considering two options:
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Hire the person and assume the old company won't enforce the agreement. This is the easiest thing to do, though it leaves open a lot of uncertainty. But agreements don't enforce themselves, and it's going to cost the old company a lot of money to try to win this in court.
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Offer the old company a couple hundred bucks to sign a release and threaten to sue for declarative judgment that the agreement is unenforceable if they refuse.
This is the more aggressive strategy, but it throws down the gauntlet early. It says "we don't think this is enforceable and we dare you to enforce it". I could argue unenforceability on a number of theories. Now, if the old company paid a third party vendor for classes or other training, I'd probably just pay up, but if they're trying to say the employee owes them ten grand for normal internal training then I'd argue that the clawback provision is intended as an illegal penalty clause to prevent the employee from leaving the company. The idea being that the training is given to me in consideration of remaining at the company for a certain period, and that by leaving the company I breached the contract and have to pay damages. Except the company can't prove damages to an amount certain, so in anticipation of this the parties have agreed upon damages at the formation stage.
The problem with this is that legitimate liquidated damages clauses have to be based on a reasonable approximation of actual damages, in this case, a reasonable approximation of training costs. Doing this requires putting all kinds of fun stuff out there like training guidelines, salaries of employees, estimates of how much the company is making per employee, etc. Of course, I'm requesting all of this stuff in discovery, and they can fight me over it if they want. An that's only one of the theories I'd put forth. Just giving it up is probably the easier option.
Rov_Scam
4mo ago
It depends on the situation, but it can happen. Several years ago I got an unsolicited 20% salary increase. Due to a combination of market factors and bad culture, there was a max exodus at my firm. I was in oil and gas at the time, and the head of the title department plus 2 of 3 supervising associates left in the span of like 2 months, along with a number of regular associates. This is only a few months after we landed a major client the partners had spent years courting, and we were just starting to turn in work we did for them. I remember going into a supervisor's office to ask a general question and being told not just that she was leaving but how much I could be making if I followed her out the door, or even if I applied to one of the other firms that gave her an offer. I was about to follow suit myself when I got called into the head of the oil and gas division's office and was given an immediate 20% salary bump plus other little bonuses. A couple weeks later, someone from the Board of Trustees met with those of us who remained and acted as a sounding board for all the changes we wanted. That being said, this only happened because the oil market suddenly rebounded from being in a multi-year slump. The firm had agreed to a lot of long-term contracts that didn't pay a lot so they could stay in business, and always used that as an excuse for the long hours and low pay. I had said in the past that the worst thing to happen to them would be for oil to rebound, since they'd have a ton of work and no one to do it.
Rov_Scam
4mo ago
I'd add that the whole "ceremonial work" idea works in the opposite direction, too. I first noticed it, subtly, during the early days of the fight for the $15 minimum wage. There are plenty of arguments you can make about whether the minimum wage should go up, or by how much, but I noticed a dumb line of argument that suggested that it shouldn't be $15 simply because the people working at these places didn't deserve $15. It was usually along the lines of:
Most Jobs like those found at McDonald's, Burger King, etc. were never meant to be SOLE jobs that could support a family, pay for a car, a home, etc. Originally it was students and maybe retired folks who worked at these places. Today many members of minorities do the work and are demanding pay increases that are on par with jobs that requite more training and head smarts.
After COVID, when labor shortages caused these places to raise their wages close to $15 without any prompting from the government, the argument morphed into something more along the lines of:
High pay increases for low skilled/no skilled workers is killing the country. It literally devalues skilled and tech labor. Considering they are offering $18-25 for techs and skilled labor, it is too much to pay someone who may not have even finished high school.
More recently, I've seen this among those in the building trades:
Kids these days don't want to work. I try to get labor and they're entitled enough to think they can get $25 bucks for it. $25! That's not much less than I'm paying my skilled guys. I'm sorry but I'm not paying that kind of money for someone to clean up and unload trucks. Any moron can do that.
These guys usually express a sense of entitlement themselves—they started carrying when they were 15 for 3 bucks an hour and were glad to get it, then spent the next several decades moving up, learning the trade, investing in a business, and now some kid off the street with no experience expects you to pay him much more than your 40 years of experience says he's worth. Every time I hear a small business owner say "no one wants to work anymore" I always think "well, not at what you're paying them, anyway".
A hundred years ago there were a lot of men with minimal skills who had nothing to offer but their labor. as the economy boomed after World War II and people had more educational opportunities, the labor pool was less of an end and more of where you started, hoping to work your way up to a skilled position. But in an economy where people aren't simply taking whatever work they can get, where apprenticeships for skilled trades are available immediately without years of playing kiss-ass to a union boss, and you can walk into any gas station and get $15/hour to push cash registers, basic day labor has become a specialty occupation you have to attract people to do.
The thing about a lot of unskilled jobs that is lost on some people is that they also suck. When I was in high school I worked at a grocery store, and while the conditions weren't bad, I had to wear a uniform to work, I had to work nights and weekends, I had to deal with bitchy customers, there was a lot of standing around staring into space, etc. Now I work as a lawyer and have lots of expensive education and training and a hard-to-obtain license and I make exponentially more now than I did as a cashier. But would I go back if I could make my current salary? Hell no. Yes, part of why I became a lawyer was so I could make more money but part of it also was so I didn't have to work in a grocery store. The same thing is true with labor. I did construction labor when I was in college and it sucks. Eventually they let me on to the painting crew and, though it paid more, I would have done it for less since I wouldn't have to sling buckets all day.
Rov_Scam
4mo ago
It may be, but not every company is capable of paying employees their market price.
Then that's their problem. There are a lot of things I can't afford at the market price; I don't buy them. Being able to pay market wages is part of running a business, the same as being able to buy inputs and deliver products to customers. Companies that are able to do this make money and companies that aren't go out of business. It's basic free market economics.
Citing something that was implemented between 2009 and 2014 is hardly evidence of the woke explosion having influenced anything.
This is based on the assumption that "defund the police" and other movements led to a conscious effort to decrease policing that resulted in a higher murder rate. But the increase in murder rate happened everywhere, and to much the same degree. I haven't seen any study that's attempted to grade cities based on how enthusiastic they were about implementing police reform and looking at how the murder rates responded. Hell, Dallas and Miami had Republican mayors and still couldn't avoid the crime increase, so I doubt that this phenomenon was solely driven by policy decisions. Until someone actually takes a look at this, it's nothing more than conjecture.
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