Rov_Scam
25d ago
Yep, and I agree that it's one of the best documentary series ever made. The only quibble I have is that it gives the Pacific war rather short shrift; in 26 episodes, one of which is dedicated entirely to the Dutch resistance, only 2 deal with the Pacific War exclusively (possibly 3, there may be one on Burma, I can't remember). This may be an artifact of it being a British series, but it prevents the series from being definitive.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
I don't know that Vance is the best example. While he called out hillbillies (and I use that term loosely because the Rust Belt white trash he's describing in Ohio are decidedly different from Appalachian white trash) in his book, his actual politics started veering into the "lack of agency" lane as soon as Trump's success made it a veritable requirement for him to do it. I can't tell you how many times I heard from conservatives that nobody owes you anything, stop whining, buck up and take that menial job because you aren't above working at McDonalds just because you have a college degree, nobody wants to work anymore, etc. (not to me personally, but the sentiment). One night I was at the bar and a bunch of them were bitching about immigration. They weren't white trash, but obviously successful guys from a wealthy suburb. My view on immigration are complicated, to say the least, but when they started about Mexicans taking jobs from Americans it pissed me off so I turned it around on them: "Why do we owe them jobs? Why should I pay more for stuff because some whiny American doesn't want to work for what I'm willing to pay. Those Mexicans are damn glad to get my money, and besides, they do the work and don't complain. Besides, they're the only ones who seem to want to work anymore." Or something along those lines. It didn't work, of course, because as soon as anyone brings up market forces to a conservative in an argument about immigration, they just do a u-turn and talk about welfare instead, not realizing the inherently contradictory nature of those arguments. And, as a putative conservative, I couldn't really argue back.
The same thing applies more directly to employers. There's one older guy I know we call "Pappy". He's big in the whitewater community arouind here and is an excellent boater, and teaches free lessons at the park and cheap roll lessons at a scum pond on his property (only charging to cover the insurance). He's very generous with his time, especially considering these lessons are always 8-hour marathons. Not so much with his money. He owns a garage and auto body shop and refuses to pay his employees. He also constantly bitches about the quality of the help he gets. I once couldn't help but comment that maybe if he paid more than ten bucks an hour he'd find decent people. I knew this would get him fired up, because he was great at going on these kinds of rants; "Hell, when I started out I made 2 bucks an hour and was glad to get it. When I opened this place you couldn't ask no god damned bank for any money because they wouldn't give it to you. I had to save my money to buy all this and earned all of it. These people don't want to work, they just want to sit on their asses and collect a check. And you lawyers are half the problem. When my wife and I bought our first house the mortgage was one page. One. When I took out a loan last year it was a god damned book. And it's all because you lawyers found lazy fucks who didn't want to pay and tried to weasel out of it, and now the banks have to make sure that you can't."
I wasn't thrown by the change of tack because he never missed an opportunity to dunk on my profession. I would note that my brother was an inspector for a major industrial company that does global business and they had him paint some equipment. The quality steadily deteriorated over the years to the point they had to cancel a very lucrative contract because nothing he did would pass. I've known a few people who took their cars to him for work and now aren't on speaking terms after the work was so bad they had to withhold payment. His intransigence is literally costing him money, but he won't budge on principle.
I bring up these examples because they're evidence of this mentality not among the white trash that Vance talks about, but among normal, successful people. As for Vance himself, he plays into the same ethos wholeheartedly, and doesn't seem to understand the contradiction with the argument that gave him fame. If he continued in the Reagan mold of bold free market principles, or took the opposite tack of siding with the lefties in "What's the Matter with Kansas?" sense, I could take him at face-value. But instead he's latched onto the same victimization worldview of those he previously complained about. He was once a moderate and anti-Trumper; now his "National Republicanism" is just an amalgamation of the worst protectionist ideas Trump had to offer. Maybe it's a cynical response to give him more political credibility, I don't know. But it's certainly a contradiction with what he used to be.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
There are more of these holidays that get limited governmental recognition than you can shake a stick at. Some congressmen proposes that March 22 is National Inland Waterway Workers Safety Awareness Day and it passes unanimously by joint resolution and nobody pays attention to it except a few trade organizations that want do distribute safety leaflets.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
This isn't new, though, and has nothing to do with AI. I remember an Aphex Twin interview from about 20 years ago where he admitted that when he was behind his laptop at live shows he was just playing solitaire.
Rov_Scam
25d ago
You're pretty much in the same situation as me, then, and no, I don't think cutting it out or switching to decaf will change much. I usually drink one cup around 10 am, unless I'm unusually tired, in which case I'll start earlier and possibly have a cup in the afternoon. I also have dinner at my parents' house every Sunday and my mum and I have coffee with dessert. I don't think it affects my sleep in any way. I don't drink coffee at home on the weekends and only order it at restaurants if it's a sit-down place. I used to drink quite a bit of tea when I worked from home (usually about 2 cups a day, almost always in the afternoon) and the effects on sleep were similar. Honestly, having to get up and go into an office as opposed to working from home where I wasn't going to sleep past the start time no matter what made a much bigger difference in my sleep schedule than whatever effect a little bit of caffeine is having on me.
I says this as someone who's pretty critical of coffee culture generally; it's the only addiction that's not only socially acceptable to have, but socially acceptable to almost brag about having. There was a commercial a few years back where a guy repeatedly warned everyone not to talk to him until he had his coffee. If you say you can't function in the morning without coffee people will act understanding, if not sympathetic. Say the same thing about booze and people will start giving you pamphlets. I get that there's a difference in the relative risk levels, but an addiction is an addiction, and caffeine addiction is probably the easiest to treat (it can be done over a long weekend). I think the dividing line is whether you're doing it for the taste or for the psychotropic effect. If you're doing it for the effect then you'd be sucking down Folgers at home every day and wouldn't have a moment at work without a cup in front of you.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
I used to work for the local Boy Scout council and found myself advising my old troop on how to deal with the situation through my contacts after the scoutmaster was given answers he didn't like from the District Executive (no real surprise there). The exact problem was that the daughter of one of the more active adult leaders and her friend wanted to join, and while there was a girls' troop relatively close, the leader basically said "I'll be damned if I drive to two meetings and manage two sets of events, etc." So we ended up chartering a troop with two girls that I ended up being the assistant scoutmaster of under the scenario of "We'll call your bluff." It basically operates as a patrol within the larger troop because as long as we keep the paperwork separate, the Council isn't going to pry too deeply into our affairs.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
I agree that most sex scenes don't add anything to the movie and tend to be boring, unless you're watching an actual Erotic Thriller like Fatal Attraction. This is most obvious in anything that was made for HBO, where a lot of shows seemingly felt the need to show nudity just to remind you that you couldn't get this stuff on regular TV (Boardwalk Empire being a good example). I watched A Few Good Men the other night and never got the impression that the movie would have been better if we saw Demi Moore's tits. I feel the same way about gratuitous swearing. The best regular TV drama of all time is the original Law & Order (and by regular TV I mean a show that was on an actual TV channel weekly from September to May each year and put out 20–25 episodes a season), and that show had little profanity and no sex. The economics of the film industry are partly to blame; movies tend to get pigeonholed based on their MPAA rating, and the easiest way to bump things up to an R is to add gratuitous profanity and nudity.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
You're basically buying into the whole Cancel Culture idea here. Someone made a series of youthful indiscretions and now you're demanding that they be permanently barred from polite society as a consequence. Would you feel the same about someone who made racist tweets at the same age?
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
Part of the problem, though, is that the NYT only continues to exist because it continues to employ over 2000 journalists covering everything from politics in Belarus to a DIY column that runs articles like "All You Need to Know about Fixings and Fastenings". No, each individual article probably doesn't drive sales enough on its own to justify the cost spent on it, but I'm buying the NYT because I expect to get All the News Fit to Print. I went through a similar divorce with my own local paper, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. When I first started subscribing in college it covered all the national stories, local news, sports, etc. to the extent you'd expect from the major newspaper in a mid-size city. They were always accused of having a liberal bias, which led to the establishment of the Tribune Review in 1993 following the demise of the Pittsburgh Press (which was on-par with if not better than the PG). I wasn't a fan of the Trib, not because of the conservative views (which were limited to the editorial page), but because it was clearly a bush-league paper. It had existed in Greensburg for years prior, and, while the Pittsburgh edition got better over the years, it still always felt like a small town paper a little over its skis, relying more on being the conservative choice than having better coverage.
But as time went on, the PG became less and less worth reading. They dumped the DC bureau, and most of the national coverage was wire stories from the AP and bigger newspapers. More of the op-eds were nationally syndicated columnists (and not ones like George Will whom you include because they're big names with national followings). The sports department stopped sending reporters to out of town events that didn't involve local teams. It started to read more like the Trib, but I kept subscribing anyway because it was at least something that came to my door that I could read every morning and get a good idea what was going on in the world. Then they limited print editions to a few times a week and that was the last straw. My dad still gets the pdf edition but it isn't the same; I can't browse a pdf like I can a broadsheet. I probably didn't read half the stories when I got it, but I liked being able to browse it. Most people jumped ship before I did. To use a trendy term, it became enshittified, even if it still did a decent job of providing information about the big stories.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
Well, based on my fuckwit days of recreationally chest boxing my friends in college, the reach advantage is very real among people who don't know what they're doing. The shorter guy would almost inevitably find himself backing up to the point he was against the wall and we had to restart the fight. And we're only talking a reach advantage of 4 inches here. 28 inches and there's no way the knife guy's even getting near him.
Rov_Scam
2mo ago
For the past 25 years or so, Christians have, among the irreligious, had a connotation of being the kind of bible-thumping holy rollers who promote conservative politics. Even among a lot of actual Christians (Catholics in particular), the idea of subscribing to some explicitly Christian conceptions (like advertising yourself as a Christian bathroom remodeling company, Christian Rock, etc.) usually brands someone not as a regular guy that happens to attend a Methodist church, or whatever, but a megachurch-attending wackaloon. I think the idea of these ads isn't to convey some complex theological thought but to reassure the masses that faith in Jesus doesn't necessarily put you in this bucket. For all the complaints among conservatives that mainstream Protestants and liberal Catholics have gone off the woke deep end, this is only apparent to people who are already immersed in Christian culture; it certainly isn't represented in the media, except for maybe a few minutes at the end of the news if the story involves the Pope. It's certainly a ham-fisted, dumb, and probably vain attempt, but I don't think it's necessary to read too much into it. You may complain about how certain facets of the ads are on spurious theological ground, but as a Catholic I could argue that most of the Christian churches in this country are operating on spurious theological ground (and they'd say the same about me, of course).
Rov_Scam
28d ago
Ike Turner's situation is unique, though. He had been out of the public spotlight for 20 years when the movie What's Love Got to Do With It came out, which portrayed him as a serial abuser. He then responded in possibly the worst way possible: He went on TV and called the movie a hack job while answering questions in such a manner as to suggest that every horrible allegation in the movie was completely true. If he'd have just kept his mouth shut it would have been forgotten about completely, but he had such an erratic personality that he became fodder for comedians and sketch comedy shows. Ike Turner impressions became a thing. It didn't help that he trashed Tina's solo career as well and held himself up as one of the true greats of rock and roll, which is technically true, but he's not exactly on the level of Little Richard or Chuck Berry. He finally offered a half-assed apology on Roseanne Barr's forgotten daytime talk show in 1999 (he only apologized under serious pressure from Roseanne), and after that point the music establishment basically forgave him and allowed him to join in on all-star specials and the like.
Rov_Scam
2mo ago
A Season in Time by Todd Denault, the story of the 1992–93 NHL season. It's pretty much an object lesson on why Americans can't stand Canadian sportswriters. It starts off with a preface where the author boldly proclaims that this was the greatest season in NHL history, and also lets it drop that this happened to be his senior year of high school and that he stopped following hockey as closely when he got to college. Okay, so there's some emotional attachment to the subject selection, but that's not too big a deal. That season did have a number of compelling storylines—Gretzky coming back from injury to make his only cup finals appearance with the Kings, Mario Lemieux's battle with cancer that saw him miss a month of the season and still win the scoring race, Teemu Selanne absolutely destroying Mike Bossy's rookie goal scoring record, the inaugural seasons of the expansion Tampa Bay Lightning and Ottawa Senators, and several others. It also happened to be the last time a Canadian team won the Stanley Cup.
Unfortunately, if you knew nothing about the season when you started reading this you'd incorrectly assume that this team was the Toronto Maple Leafs, because Denault spends the first five chapters talking about them. They were a storied franchise in hockey's most important city that had been god awful for over a decade, and in 1993 they put together an unlikely playoff run. But they got eliminated in the Conference finals. Denault can't even talk about other teams without bringing the Leafs into the discussion; the Pittsburgh Penguins were an absolute juggernaut that year and were expected to cruise to a third straight championship before getting upset in the second round of the playoffs. That and Lemieux's story make the PEnguins a compelling team to talk about this season. But we have to hear about them in terms of how this was the team the Maple Leafs aspired to be, blah, blah, blah. We have an entire chapter about GM Cliff Fletcher's time with Calgary in the '80s. We have a chapter about coach Pat Burns's career as a police officer before entering coaching. If he wanted to write a book about the 92–93 Leafs, why not just do it?
The book is about as extensively researched as one can expect it to be, provided you don't expect the author to leave Toronto. When discussing media reaction to the events of the season, the quotes are almost exclusively from Toronto newspapers or The Hockey News. There's something disconcerting about discussing media reaction without bothering to see what people in the cities where the teams actually played were saying. After all, these are the guys who are covering one team full-time all season. He discusses the calls on Hockey Night in Canada Broadcasts as though they were the definitive icons of the game, even if the game involved two American teams. It's almost as if he lives in a solipsistic dreamland where the only real team is the Toronto Maple Leafs and all other teams exists solely to give them competition; they don't have their own struggles or fanbases or media. It's like they're all the Washington Generals going up against the Harlem Globetrotters, except the Globetrotters suck.
I could forgive all that, though, if the book were at least engaging. And it is, provided the author is giving background information and speaking in broad strokes. Unfortunately, most of the book is descriptions of games that mean little if you aren't actually watching them. It suffers from the same problem as war histories that try to provide overly detailed descriptions of actual battles. It doesn't matter how good the prose is if you don't have a lighted map to show you the troop movements. This isn't too much of a problem until we get to the playoffs, at which point it's nothing but this, over and over again. Even the interstitial bits between games aren't compelling since all he does is quote players and coaches giving meaningless quotes to the media like "We need to play better" after a loss. I get that there's not much to go with here, but Denault doesn't give his audience any credit and quotes this stuff as if it were genuinely insightful.
I've certainly read much worse things, but I'm pissed off that the book started off engaging enough but slowed to a crawl when the playoffs just became game after game after game. So I'm waaay too far into this to stop reading (over 300 pages) but I've still got a hundred to go and I can only read it in short sittings. It's frustrating. I hope Canadian teams lose and lose early for every year here on out because the Canadian media deserves it. I'd like to talk about how Canadian hockey fans suck and most Americans parrot the same bullshit because they assume the Canadians know better, but that's a rant for another day.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
$5,000? That's ridiculous. When I had my own law practice I'd hire appraisers occasionally and my guy charged $400 and he actually went inside the place.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
I was partially being facetious, but I don't think that size is the main problem. 90 hp is going to be a tough sell, considering that there aren't many cars on the American market anymore that get less than 100. Even a base model Corolla gets nearly twice the HP. Rear wheel drive is basically a nonstarter. The only people I know who have 2wd trucks are contractors. I know people who have been looking for used small trucks for a long time, and when I worked for the Boy Scouts we'd occasionally have a work truck we were getting rid of. I remember one was available, it needed a flywheel but they'd have let it go for $200. Everyone lost interest when I told them it was 2wd, because there's nothing fun about a 2wd Ranger. And while I have no real basis for this, I'd be willing to bet that the interior is chintzy as hell. I don't think it's that people don't want smaller trucks, it's that they don't want that specific small truck.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
That truck is never going to be sold in the US because, outside of you and possibly a few other people, no one is going to buy it. As much as you and other people may complain about the lack of a small, basic truck with a five speed transmission, and 2-wheel drive, there isn't much of a market for one. Most people I know who own trucks they don't need don't own whatever the current versions of the Ranger and S-10 are, they own F-150s and Siverados and Rams and Tundras. Few people actually need a truck, and those who are buying ones they don't need want big penis trucks with huge engines and high towing capacity and 4-wheel drive and and interior like a Cadillac, not some 90 hp puttmobile. They'd sell about as well as those old VW Rabbit trucks that had their fans but didn't exactly take the country by storm.
Rov_Scam
25d ago
The reason why microbreweries pile on the IPAs is because they're the easiest to make. The bitterness hides so much that there's a large margin of error. That being said, I have some friends who drink nothing but IPAs, so I understand why these places keep making them. I can tolerate them, but it's nice to have a beer I can drink more than two of.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
I'm not a conservative so I don't worry about these things. As for them, I don't expect them to do anything other than stop bitching about people who need handouts and then asking the government to set policies that are basically handouts for them. And if you want AI to do legal services, be my guest; I'll make more money undoing the mess...
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
Of course we shouldn't, but expecting everyone to be courteous all the time is ridiculous. I also shouldn't have to lock my car, or remove valuables from plain sight, or any number of other things that I do because they are unfortunately necessary. The question here is one of remedy, the implication being that receiving justice is so involved that it's often not worth it for relatively minor inconveniences. Which can be true, since this isn't one of those cases. It's a shame that she has to call the property management company to get somebody to do something about it, but it's a phone call. The initial concern wasn't that the thing was happening but that it was too minor for the police to get involved.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
When I was in the market I used a buyer's agent I knew, and he was able to give me discount but it was limited based on how much his agency required him to charge. I guess there could theoretically be independent agents, but it would be tough to do it without marketing support. My guess is commissions won't change that much.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
I used to think this as well, but as time goes on I am less enamored by it. It sounds good in a vacuum, but the way college football is structured makes it a nonstarter. Imagine Michigan State get relegated one year and Bowling Green promoted. The first thing that's going to happen is half of Michigan State's team is going to enter the transfer portal, and recruiting is going to dry up. Actually, recruiting is going to be more difficult for any team that finds itself in danger of relegation. Some of the players may transfer to Bowling Green. Next, Michigan State finds itself making MAC money instead of Big Ten money; their payout would go from around 60 million to around 20 million. With this money funding a bunch of non-revenue sports, first priority would be making it so these were at least able to operate. Except they're still playing in the Big Ten, which means they're still flying the women's softball team to Rutgers and USC rather than just busing them to Ypsilanti, and with these teams using their football revenue to add a ton of these sports, that expense adds up quick. Then you have the bloated athletic department and coaching salaries, which are all going to have to take a haircut (MAC teams don't pay coaches 6 million a year plus bonuses). Now they're actually at a long-term disadvantage even compared to other MAC teams, because those teams don't have unfunded liabilities from when they made more money. Relegation would essentially mean condemning the team to a death spiral, from which it would be very difficult to recover.
And it isn't like it's just going to be Michigan State. It would have to be at least one team from each division, or two per conference, that are getting relegated each year, and it wouldn't always be the same teams swapping places. It may give mid-major schools some hope that they can theoretically compete in a major conference, but it would create a similar divide within the major conferences. Some teams are always going to be good enough that they're never in danger of being relegated, and as such they'll be able to attract recruits and transfers that would otherwise have gone to lesser teams. They may not get the playing time, but recruiters can use the possibility of relegation as a bargaining chip — yeah, kid, you may get more playing time at Indiana, but you also might spend most of your career in the MAC. On the others side of the coin, the network deals are based on having certain schools drive viewership. Fox isn't going to be happy when they can't air Michigan State games anymore because now they're on ESPN's extended MAC coverage (on select local stations). It works in soccer because the clubs are independent entities without any kind of revenue sharing. Once you leagueify the whole situation to the fucked up extend college football has done, it isn't really possible.
As for the draft, I said it would be complicated, but I think it's doable. If you limited it to Power 5 schools (though that's changing) and 7 rounds like the NFL draft, you'd scoop up all the 5 and 4 star recruits and the higher end of the 3 stars. In other words, you'd only be drafting kids who aren't going to play for mid-majors anyway. Everyone else is a free agent and can go to whatever team they want. The goal isn't to distribute all the players, it's to end the current practice which is like if the team that won the Super Bowl also got the top pick in the draft. At least give the lesser schools a chance at top recruits instead of forcing them to play a power conference schedule with a roster full of 3 star guys. As far as killing the illusion of student athletes, I don't really give a fuck. We can add the student-athlete illusion to the fiction that NIL money is reasonable compensation for licensing and promotional services. I'm sure that the foundation that's paying the Texas O-line $200k each is really getting a huge return on that investment. When Jordan Addision leaves Pitt after 3 years because USC is willing to pay him more, and no one in Pittsburgh cares because you can't blame the kid for turning down that kind of money, the system is already destroyed. When Clemson is actively trying to destroy the conference it helped found and has been a member of for over 70 years because it will make more money as a member of a different conference that hasn't even extended an invitation yet, they system is already destroyed. There may have been a time when I was willing to pretend otherwise, but the past couple years have destroyed that illusion. I don't know what you're trying to hang on to at this point.
Rov_Scam
3mo ago
He's not cutting off natural gas shipments. It would be murder for Texas-based companies like Chevron who pulled out of Appalachia because of low prices, and a boon for EQT and Range Resources. The number of people in Western PA who would see their royalty checks triple (conservatively) may be enough to give the state to Biden, if he weren't already in a position to win. Drilling in the Permian and Eagle Ford will grind to a halt, and there may be ripple effects where the money's made in Houston. I'm not saying any of this would be a certainly, but it's enough of a risk that I highly doubt Abbott would be stupid enough to attempt it. He knows who butters his bread.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
On a related note, I have a feeling that unless drastic action is taken the entire college football edifice is going to collapse some time in the next decade. NIL deals combined with the transfer portal have turned the entire enterprise into the worst sort of professional sports league. How would the NFL look if there were no salary cap and no contracts, making every player a free agent every year? Since NIL is here to stay, and I don't see the transfer portal going away any time soon, if I were an NIL sponsor I'd make my deal contingent on the player staying at the school all four years, unless I grant him a release. I don't care if it's for the fucking NFL; if I'm committing money to a guy I want to get the max value out of him. I'd also include some kind of liquidated damages clause or prepay the entire 4 (or 5) years so that if he leaves he has to pay the money back. I might not be able to collect all of it depending what the court does, but he'll have to pay something, and he knows he's getting sued either way.
The pipe dream is to come up with some kind of draft system to ensure parity. The NHL from 1995 to 2004 is a prime example of what happens when you can't ensure parity, and even they had more protections in place than college football. No leagues had salary caps before 1993, but no leagues, aside from baseball, had any meaningful free agency before then, either. You'd draft a team and you could trade guys but you could also keep the team together if you wanted to. Some leagues, like the NHL, technically had free agency, but it was restricted enough that building a team through free agency was nearly impossible, as the Scott Stevens fiasco with the Blues demonstrated. As soon as unrestricted free agency was granted, salaries skyrocketed, and even good teams couldn't stay competitive without breaking the bank. The Penguins at the time were going through bankruptcy as a perennial playoff contender with good attendance. 3 teams moved. Ratings plummeted. It took losing a whole season to a lockout to put the league back on the path to stability, and now it's in better shape than ever.
So I propose a draft. I don't know it would work, exactly, but the conferences only stand to make more money if teams like Maryland and Syracuse are competitive every once in a while. If it means Kent State wins a national championship at some point, fine. I never hear any arguments about how the Chiefs don't deserve all of their recent success because they're in a small market with no real national following (yes, they have a national following now, because they're winning, but they aren't like the Steelers or Cowboys who have national followings even when they suck). Because that argument is ridiculous. And will Clemson and Florida State go ahead and lose their fucking lawsuits already?
I'd be in favor of changing the law, the question, though, is whether the pro gun people would actually go for it. Say you limited private sales to 3 per year or 5 in any two-year period and required that the seller fill out a Firearm Bill of Sale and keep that and a copy of the buyer's photo ID on file for 5 years so that in the event the weapon was used in a crime they'd be able to demonstrate that it was sold? Or maybe do what Pennsylvania does and require FFL transfers for handguns (but not long guns). Or also require them for long guns with removable magazines. I think part of the reason why the law remains vague is that gun control is such a toxic issue right now that any change of the law is difficult to accomplish. For the gun rights people any clarification short of a total repeal of the FFL requirement is going to be seen as an unreasonable imposition, and for the gun control people anything short of eliminating private sales entirely is going to be seen as a useless half-measure. So there's no political will to do this.
That being said, I don't think the law is as ambiguous as you're making it out to be. In Abramski, there was no question that the defendant purchased the gun for immediate resale, and the evidence in the case didn't even support a defense that Abramski purchased the gun for himself and later decided to sell it. I also don't think Abramski really applies here in any context because the defendant transferred the gun to Alvarez through an FFL; at no point was he invoking the private sale exception. While I don't like the ambiguity myself, I don't know that the Malinowski case is really the best argument for the idea that the ambiguity needs correcting. I don't know the exact evidence, but I'd find it hard to believe that Mr. Malinowski wasn't acquiring these guns specifically for the purpose of reselling them. I mean, it's possible that he happened to inherit a bunch of guns all at once and wanted to get rid of them, or that he was constantly buying guns to try them out and getting rid of ones he didn't like, but absent specific evidence of that, it's safe to assume that someone who sells 150 guns over the course of a couple years is doing so for pecuniary gain.
More options
Context Copy link