Rov_Scam
2mo ago
What's more likely is that her office email (and probably mailing address) was listed as the agent for the applicant. I represent large companies that get sued a dozen times per day, and aside from the initial complaint, every notice in the suit goes to us, not to the company. Once we enter our appearance in a case, all the related correspondence goes through us. That's part of the reason people hire attorneys in the first place. If the client's corporate counsel wants an update they're going to call us and ask for one; they're not going to look through reams of filing notices, get copies of the relevant documents from the courthouse, and attempt to piece it together themselves. And they don't want to get spammed with mail, either.
And this is for sophisticated clients who have their own legal departments and are used to this. For an unsophisticated person who may not speak English very well trying to navigate a complex bureaucratic process, it's best to just have everything sent to the lawyer. At the very least, it prevents them from having to waste time on a phone call about some standard notice that doesn't require them to take any action but they just want to call and make sure. It could prevent someone from doing something stupid because they got a form in the mail that they assumed they'd just fill out and mail back, only to find out later that they totally fucked something up.
Rov_Scam
5mo ago
I'm a few years older than you, but beyond the internet, I think the problem started with cell phones. First, because they enable much easier communication, and second, because they became status symbols. While ease of communication seems like a good thing, it has the unfortunate side effect of making it easier to flake. If I call you tonight and we make plans to do something right after work tomorrow, unless you change your mind within the next few hours, you're pretty much stuck. Obviously, if there's some kind of emergency you could call me at work or at the place where we're supposed to meet, but that's intrusive and inconvenient (especially if you have to find the phone number of a business without the convenience of the internet), reserved for situations where you truly can't make it. These days, if it's getting late in the day tomorrow and you feel too tired to do anything, you can always just send me a text cancelling. I'm always available, and you don't even have to talk to me directly.
I'm as guilty of this as anyone, but it also makes it much easier to be late for things. If I have the kind of appointment like a job interview or court appearance where it's imperative that I be on time, I'm almost never late unless I make a fundamental miscalculation or there are unforseen circumstances. But if the engagement is merely social or recreational, I'm horrible at it, not because of unforseen circumstances, but because of inertia. After all, if I say I'm going to meet friends to ski at 9 am and I'm running a half hour late, I'll just text them to start without me and I'll call to see where they're at when I'm ready. In the old days, they'd have to wait around for me in the parking lot, not knowing where I was, and they couldn't go on ahead of me because I'd have no way of finding them once I got there. Being late meant either getting them pissed off waiting or running the risk of being ditched for the day.
Whether or not this is a net negative is hard to say. People flaking is annoying but it's nowhere near as bad as people having medical emergencies and no way to call an ambulance. Hell, it's probably better than the old days when people would have to cancel for legitimate reasons but had no way of contacting you and just stood you up. It's better than being stuck at home waiting for a call, or needing to get in touch with someone who isn't home at the time. As much as people complain about people being slaves to their phones now, it was worse in the old days. If you were at home and your phone rang, you basically had to answer it. Sure, you could screen calls through your answering machine, but this was inconvenient, and the idea of doing this for every call, all the time, was absurd. So you basically had to answer the phone, and the person on the other end could be anybody, wanting to talk about anything.
To get back to the social aspect, say I'm having people over this Friday night and I'm calling friends to invite them. These days you'd send a text. The recipients can see the group text, check their schedules, and respond at their convenience. If they don't really want to commit but want to keep it as a contingency, they can wait a few days to see if anything better comes up before responding. In the old days, you'd call your friends, and they'd have to give an answer immediately. "I don't know" was an acceptable response, but one only given in the event that there was some legitimate contingency involved that prevented you from committing in the here and now but wasn't certain enough to entirely preclude your attendance. And giving such a response required you to take the additional step of calling the host back at a later date to give a firm answer.
Which brings me to my second point, about phones being status symbols. This, admittedly, isn't that much of a problem, but it ties into everything else. Cell phones were always status symbols, but originally they were status symbols of a different type. Owning a cell phone before about 1995 meant that you had a very important job where people always needed to be able to reach you and it was worth paying ridiculously high fees for this capability. Then the cost of the phones and the basic subscription came down enough that normal people could afford to have them, but the per-minute charges were expensive enough that most of these were only used for emergencies or other situations where they were the only option. Landlines still ruled the roost for everyday conversations.
Then, in the early 2000s, changes were made to the business model that made teenagers actually want to own them as opposed to having them so they could call their parents for a ride. First, plans became available that came with a certain number of minutes that could be used during the day, and unlimited minutes on nights and weekends. Eventually, unlimited talk became the standard. Now, they could be used for casual conversation without your parents getting a huge bill. Second, texting became available, quickly gaining market share for low-priority communications that weren't worth interrupting somebody over. If I called for the specific point of telling you that the Penguins' goaltending looked especially shitty tonight (and not as an entree to a longer conversation), you'd be annoyed. If I texted the same you wouldn't care. The ability to have short, inane conversations (in an era with a telephonic keypad) didn't appeal much to adults, but kids loved it.
And with more kids having cell phones, marketers realized there was room for improvement of the phones themselves. Progress in cell phone design was initially centered around making them more compact. Now it was about making them more stylish. This is where Apple really knocked it out of the park. The Blackberry had existed for years, and provided much of the same functionality as smartphones would. But they were only appealing to people who actually needed the functionality. Nobody bought a Blackberry as a status symbol, and people who needed them for work didn't seem to like using them (one friend of mine who bought one for work purposes was thrilled when her job started paying for a work phone because she could now carry a normal phone for personal use). The iPhone had improved functionality, for sure, but it was a status symbol more than anything.
This only gets truer as time goes on. The first iPhone was a huge leap forward, but subsequent iterations have been less revolutionary than the improvements to the flip phones before them. Every couple years we'd at least get a new, useful feature, like a camera, or a full keyboard. Smartphone improvements are basically limited to incremental improvements of technology that already existed in flip phones or the first generation of smartphones. Faster processor, better camera, waterproof, etc. But new iPhones don't really do anything that the originals didn't, and that statement is even less true when comparing the current generation to the previous. (The biggest selling point of the iPhone 16 is that it has native AI capability, which sounds good until you consider that any phone with access to the internet has AI capability, just not on the phone itself. I don't know who this is supposed to appeal to.)
Nonetheless, there are people who want this thing. Every time a new iPhone comes out, there's a line out the door at the Apple Store of people who can't even wait a couple of weeks. Contrast this to the 90s. Phones were appliances. My parents had the same wall phone hanging in the kitchen throughout my entire childhood and most of my adulthood. You only got a new phone if the old one broke or, rarely, if there was some game-changing feature like a cordless handset or touch-tone dialing that you wanted. The idea of getting a new phone every two years was like the idea of getting a new dryer every two years.
The importance of this to the current phenomenon relates back to the first reason. Even though phones seem more central to our lives now, they are actually less central than they were 30 years ago. Like I said, if the phone rang, chances are you answered it, even though you probably had no idea who it was or what the call was about. If you made plans over the phone, you were stuck with them, unless you went to great lengths. If an important call came and you weren't home, you were out of luck. Our entire lives revolved around telephones and having access to telephones, but nobody really noticed or cared. They were as exciting as vacuum cleaners. Now they're as sexy as ever even though the core functionality hasn't improved since the introduction of texting. Once the average person was liberated from the noose of the telephone, that should have been the end of it, and progress should have stopped. The smartphone's integration of communication equipment with a portable, but unimprovably limited, personal computer, should have been the last improvement anybody cared about. But here we are, 15 years later, and people are even more concerned now than they were then.
Rov_Scam
1yr ago
Unfortunately, "work hard, at a quite possibly unpleasant job" isn't a great sales pitch. But I want to circle back to the point I made ending my discussion of the fifties- most people have to be worker bees.
That's easy to say when the assumption is that other people are the ones who are going to be the worker bees. Most of those industrial jobs that people bemoan the demise of suck. If you want one, US Steel is hiring in Pittsburgh right now because, even offering totally unskilled workers $25/hour plus bonuses, they're lucky if anyone stays a year. I've been in steel mills as part of site inspections for litigation and seen the work that goes on, so I know a bit more about this than the average bear who romanticizes the past. It's incredibly hot, and the dust is unreal. It's shift work, meaning you can forget about being consistently free on weekends (a friend who worked for Allegheny Ludlum got one weekend off a month), and the work itself is basically shoveling all of the dust that seems to come off everything in the place. And God help you if you're a laborer in the coke batteries and have to climb on top of the stand pipes and clean them out. You can eventually work your way up to one of the "fun jobs", like crane operator, where you're in the same environment, but you get to move slabs from one part of the building to another. Except during slowdowns, which happened regularly even in the steel industry's heyday, when you'd either get bumped back to the labor gang or laid off entirely for a few weeks. Or months.
Until very recently, the money for this kind of work wasn't good. People in my dad's generation who worked these kinds of jobs their whole lives were lucky if they made 40k/year by the time they retired in the early 2010s. I grew up in a blue collar family and it was made clear to me that I'd better study or I'd end up working in one of these places. My brothers and some of my friends did work in some of these places during summers in college and said that if they'd been slacking off nothing motivated them more than the prospect of having to work there full time. My one brother did work with my dad full time for a while after graduation and regularly cites that as the worst time of his life. I guy I had to cross-examine a few months ago put it best; he worked as a boilermaker after dropping out of college. I asked him what his major was, and he said "Business. Who knows, if I would have stayed with it maybe I'd be on the other side of the table sitting next to you."
Rov_Scam
2yr ago
This is why Curtis Yarvin irritates me so much. He's an unapologetic monarchist, but the definition of monarchy he uses doesn't describe any actual monarchy in history. In one of his articles he lists ten principles he wants, the implication being that they cannot be achieved by democracy which is why monarchy is necessary:
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The health of the citizens is the supreme law
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Every citizen is equally protected under the law
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The law does not notice trivia
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Every citizen has freedom of association
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Collective grievances are socially unacceptable
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Every citizen gets the same information
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The government makes all its own decisions
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The government is liable for crime
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The government is financially simple
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The government curates labor demand
I could go by these blow by blow, but one would be hard-pressed to find historical examples of monarchs who subscribed to any of these principles, let alone all of them. In the introduction to the article, he tries to differentiate monarchy from dictatorship by describing the latter as merely physically competent while the former is also spiritually competent, which brings to mind images of Platonic virtue and philosopher kings. Well, what actually kings could be described that way? Henry VIII? Louis XIV? Nero? Mohammed bin Salman? Once you have absolutist rule you have absolutist rule, period. The minute you put restrictions on a monarch's power (especially the kind of restrictions advocated for here), congratulations, you're a liberal.
Rov_Scam
2yr ago
If China has designs on Taiwan, then it can't be feeling too good. It's tough to remember now, but back in February everyone was expecting the Russians to roll right over Ukraine and take over the government within weeks, if not days. It was assumed that the Russian army was better trained and better equipped than the ragtag Ukrainian forces which couldn't even retake the breakaway territories in the Donbas. It also wasn't clear whether pro-Russian sentiment in the East would stymie Ukraine's defenses with indifference; it's easy to lay down if you don't really care which side wins and just want to prevent your home from being destroyed. Nine months later, the Russians are completely exposed. Most commentators agree that Russia has little chance of winning this war the way things stand and talk is about desperation tactics like full mobilization or use of nuclear weapons. Even Putin's downfall, which most serious commentators brushed off at the beginning of the war as a pipe dream, is now being discussed earnestly. Taking over Taiwan would involve an amphibious assault in a short weather window and is thus a much riskier proposition. Given that a military that was assumed to be incompetent has been giving fits to one that was supposed to beat them handily, Chinese leaders may be exhibiting a greater unwillingness to put themselves in a similar situation.
Rov_Scam
2yr ago
The problem is that conservative ideas are only popular among the conservative base to the extent that they can be used to make culture-war hay. When it comes time to turn this rhetoric into policy, the politicians know that it won't fly, so they back off toward moderate reforms. For example, most Republicans in the US blame "tax and spend Democrats" for a whole host of economic ills and advocate for a leaner Federal government. But when it comes to actually reducing spending, the big social programs are so popular among the conservative base that they're untouchable. No Republican is going to march into the US congress and advocate for a big plan to reform, let alone eliminate, Social Security. Or Medicare. And these two programs alone account for nearly 60% of the entire Federal budget. Add in military spending and you're looking at 3/4 of the Federal budget that's off-limits to conservatives to any kind of cuts. Add in that most conservative constituents expect at least minimal spending in other areas, and grand plans of budget cuts are reduced to trimming around the edges.
So instead you end up with things like perennial calls to defund public broadcasting. PBS and NPR have been in the crosshairs of conservatives for some time, particularly because their news programs have a leftist slant. One issue, though, is that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting's budget is so small that scientific notation is needed to express it as a percentage of Federal spending, so eliminating it is more about signaling than about actual spending cuts. The other issue is that while NPR and PBS news are undeniably left-wing (NPR to a greater degree), they are also pretty much the last bastion of "traditional Western culture" in mainstream American media. For example, classical music would disappear from American airwaves in all but the largest markets if NPR ceased to exist.
An even better example is the utter failure of the Republicans to repeal Obamacare. Opposition to the program was a centerpiece of conservative politics from the act's proposal in 2009 all the way up to 2017. Yet a conservative trifecta couldn't do anything about it. It turns out that when you expand coverage to people who couldn't afford it before, you create a constituency that benefits from the program. Actually repealing the ACA would have meant that a ton of people would have gotten cancellation notices and the status of their healthcare coverage would be in limbo. So there was at least the early recognition that the "Skinny repeal option wasn't really viable"; something needed to replace the program that kept most of the essential protections in place. In a sense, this was already a capitulation, because it suggested that the Republicans' only real problem with the act was that it was endorsed by a Democrat, not because of anything substantive. But even then, they still failed to come up with "Obamacare under another name" and didn't have the votes to repeal the law. The best they could muster was a repeal of the individual mandate, a supreme irony in that the only part of a large Federal program they got rid of was the funding aspect, which only had the effect of making the policies more expensive than they were before. So in the end, all we get from conservatives in the US is moderate tax cuts, which only serve to increase the deficits the right is claiming are ruining our economy. The right can't get any traction beyond "moderate" reforms because there's simply no call for it
Rov_Scam
5mo ago
Elon doesn't know what he's talking about. I used to work as an adjudicator for the PA Disability Determination Bureau, and the investigation is so thorough that getting disability through fraudulent means is effectively impossible. The evaluation is mostly based on the claimant's actual medical records and, if those are insufficient, the bureau will schedule an examination. Some information comes from the claimant themself, but most of this is clarification about medical treatment or conditions which are noted on the medical records but that they aren't claiming disability for. The ydo fill out an ADL form, but this is only really taken into consideration in the event that the claim is borderline; in that case it might tip the balance toward an approval but only if the condition is significantly limiting their ADLs in a way that one would expect the condition to limit them. In any event, most ADLs show some limitations but not nearly the kind that would be sufficient to tip the balance in that circumstance. For example, if a guy is claiming disability for a back problem there's probably going to be something about how they don't move around very well and can't lift heavy objects. They probably aren't going to claim that the pain is so bad that they can't get out of bed and have to have someone else do housework for them.
Realistically, the only way you're getting disability on the initial application is if you're over the age of 50, have a job that involves physical labor, and haven't done any other kind of work in the past 20 years. If you're under 50 it's assumed you can adjust to other work, so if you're capable of doing a sedentary job that doesn't require any special qualifications you're denied. If you're over 50 and you have an office job you're denied. If you're over 50 and you have a job that involves physical labor but there's a similar job that uses the same skills but doesn't involve physical labor you're denied. If you're over 50 and you generally work a job that involves physical labor but you you worked the register at your brother's convenience store a decade ago when he was just starting out and needed extra help, you're denied.
Some of the cases I can remember: One approval of the more typical kind involved a 55-year-old black guy who worked as a welder his entire career and had back problems. Claims of back problems are common, but this guy had serious problems documented on x-ray and had undergone at least one surgery. He tried to go back to work after the surgery but had to stop. Another case involved a guy in his 30s with brain cancer who was in such bad shape I couldn't talk to him directly and had to get the information from his sister (cases like this are flagged upon intake so they can be approved quickly). One case involved a 16-year-old girl who had severe psychological and emotional problems to the point that her mother couldn't take care of her and she was put into a group home, but her behavior was so bad that she kept getting kicked out of them. She had been admitted to Western Psych repeatedly over the past few years. I only spoke to her briefly; most of my communication was with her mother, who spent most of the conversation on the brink of tears as she talked about how she didn't know what she was going to do about her daughter and how scared she was about the future. I honestly don't know if this is an approval because I left before the case was resolved. I was pushing hard to get it out the door because it was clear to me that this girl would never be capable of working but my supervisor was skeptical because, if memory serves, while she had frequent hospitalizations it had been close to a year since the last one so maybe things were improving.
Now, I saw plenty of bullshit as well, but it was obvious bullshit that resulted in a denial. The modal case for this was some kid in his early 20s who never worked for any length of time and never had any education beyond high school who was trying to claim disability for psych problems despite having never seen a psychiatrist. He might be taking some kind of antidepressant but it was always prescribed by a PCP and didn't follow any kind of psych workup. That presents a complication, since we can't deny the claim without any psychiatric evidence, so we'd have him evaluated by a psychiatrist who would invariably conclude that the kid had garden-variety anxiety and depression but nothing that would prevent him from working. Psych claims usually require a longitudinal history of progressively worsening problems, or else some kind of huge psychic break that's unavoidable. But most of the cases are people who obviously have problems, just not of sufficient severity to render them disabled. The determination office is basically a denial machine, and most of the claims that are approved at the initial stage are ones so obvious that no one could possibly claim they were fraudulent. There are also a small number of people who have already retired and later have a health problem and figure they'll file just to see if they qualify.
Now, once you get beyond the initial determination stage and into appeals, the success rate is much higher. However, if you're appealing then you have an attorney and the case is heard by an administrative judge who issues an opinion. I think that the reason for this is that few of the bullshit claims get appealed, so the cases the judge sees are of overall higher quality that what are seen at the initial stage, especially since most of the severe cases are sent to a different department for fast-tracking. An adjudicator who spends all day dealing with marginal claims basically turns into a denial machine. I saw a statistic that claims 38% of initial applications that reached the adjudication stage (i.e., not denied for technical reasons, which half of all initial claims are) were approved. This seems way too high. Granted, the numbers are from ten years after I stopped working there and I can't speak to how they do things in other states, but in my office it was like 20%, 25% tops. And that includes expedited cases and cases adjudicated by people who have been there for 20 years and think they can tell an approval from a denial based on gut feeling.
I wasn't there long, but in my time there I evaluated hundreds of claims, and I never once saw anything I thought looked fraudulent. As I said, there were bullshit claims, but these were obviously bullshit, and in any event the claimants weren't lying about anything. It's one of those things that just isn't worth it. The average SSDI benefit is $1,200/month, and the average SSI benefit is $800/month. And if you make more than something like $1,200/month from a regular job your benefits get cut off. So the reward one gets from perpetrating a fraud on the system is a life of bare subsistence living. One thing I can't speak to is fraud at the technical level, for example, people hiding income or assets so they qualify for SSI. Given the high rate of technical rejections, it's clear both that SSA is doing thorough investigations and that people aren't even trying to hide much. I'm not saying that fraud doesn't exist, but the guardrails in place for preventing it are so high and the incentive for committing it are so low that I doubt there's much savings to be had here.
pinging @jeroboam, since I didn't see his comment until after posting this
Rov_Scam
6mo ago
Just as a preliminary matter, I looked up some statistics at work today on the issue, and they were surprising. The average malpractice settlement is around 350k, and the average verdict is around 1 million. I thought these numbers were low, but I saw them quoted in multiple sources, so I'm going to assume they're true. I practice product liability and toxic tort law, and while I don't know the total settlement average due to the number of defendants, we usually estimate verdicts in the 2 to 3 million range for someone with cancer, even if it's an older person in bad health. There are very few verdicts we can use for comparison, but they're almost all significantly larger than this. That being said, I saw another statistic suggesting that 80%–90% of cases with weak evidence resulted in defense verdicts, 70% of borderline cases did, and only 50% of good cases did. This suggests that juries really don't like awarding damages, but when they do, they go big. In my line of work a defense verdict is highly unlikely, so 1 million may be a reasonable amount if you consider that the modal jury award is zero.
I also learned that 29 states already have tort reform that limits non-economic damages, including some big ones like Texas and California. These caps range anywhere from 250k to 1 million, but they're still significantly smaller than what you'd expect from a jury. Without non-economic damages, it's pretty hard to get to these huge amounts, since they are by nature designed to put a dollar amount on what's priceless. For economic damages to get truly large you'd have to have something like a high-earning plaintiff who is totally disabled and needs to be in a skilled nursing facility for the rest of their life, and even then I can't see it getting above 20 million or so. To show you how we'd calculate that, say you have a 25 year old who makes 100k a year and is permanently disabled. That gives you 4 million in lost earnings assuming retirement at 65. However, if he's entitled to disability payments totaling $1500/month, you'd deduct that leaving you with about 3.2 million. If the skilled nursing facility costs 10k/month and he's expected to live an additional 50 years, that's 6 million, except medicaid is covering part of that cost so you have to deduct that. Add on the medical bills and other stuff and you might get to ten million, which is steep, but nothing like 70 million for pain and suffering alone. And this isn't something the plaintiff is just going to assert out of thin air; they have to show medical bills and hire an economic expert to estimate future earnings and costs. To address your points:
- I read an NIH study discussing defensive healthcare, and the results were inconclusive. While surveys showed that something like 75% of doctors agreed that they did it, there was no attempt to quantify it, and the NIH study conceded that relying on self-reported questionnaires has its limitations. A study in I think Florida that compared cardiologists who had been previously sued against those who hadn't showed that ones who had been sued ordered 1% more tests, but again, this kind of thing has its limitations. From what I can tell, malpractice insurance premiums are as much as 50% lower in states with award caps than those without, but whether this has any effect on the amount of defensive medicine practiced is anyone's guess. I certainly haven't seen any suggestion that doctors in California are less worried about malpractice claims just because the risk of real whoppers is limited.
Like I said earlier, trials are rare. Something has to go seriously off the rails for a case to go to trial. While caps eliminate some of the tail risk of claims, they don't seem to eliminate the amount of total claims. It's worth remembering that most claims are going to settle well within any reasonable award cap. Even in states without caps, while plaintiff's attorneys may dream of huge awards, they're really a mixed blessing. A settlement offers cash almost immediately; a jury verdict means waiting months for a shot at a large judgment that may get appealed, keeping the money out of your hands for years. If you get sued as a doctor it's more likely to be the kind of case that settles for 200k than the kind where a jury awards a multi-million dollar verdict. The only thing I can conclude is that even if you were to make large awards impossible, as long as you're allowing any kind of malpractice suits the insurance companies are going to want to limit the risk, and if that means defensive medicine, that's what you're going to have to do.
- What you're describing here already exists, in a way. They're called arbitration panels. Arbitration is a form of alternative dispute resolution where an arbitrator or panel of arbitrators is selected by the parties to hear the case and make a determination. The arbitrators are attorneys who have experience in the relevant area of the law. The way it would work in a malpractice action is that if a neutral arbitrator is required, an independent agency like the American Arbitration Association would provide the parties with a randomly-selected list of 15 medical malpractice arbitrators. Each side would get to reject 5, and the arbitrator would be selected randomly from among the remaining names. If an arbitration panel is needed, each side would appoint their own arbitrator, and the arbitrators would agree on a third neutral party. The procedures are much more informal than in court. Discovery is limited, the rules of evidence don't apply, and the arbitrators may limit what testimony they'll allow and even if you can cross-examine witnesses. For instance, instead of taking depositions you'll get the relevant fact witnesses to submit written statements, and the expert witnesses will submit their reports and that will be the end of it. There is no right to appeal.
Requiring arbitration isn't something you have to wait around for the state legislature to require; doctors and hospitals can and have put mandatory arbitration provisions in their patient care agreements. If the patient doesn't like it, they can choose another doctor or go to another hospital. But these provisions are actually becoming less common than they were a couple decades ago. Why? Because the average settlements are higher.
For whatever reason, arbitrators (and judges) love splitting the baby. With juries it's all or nothing. With arbitrators, it's like they calculate the damages and make the award based on how strong they think the case is. They aren't going to give out a bonanza in any circumstances, so the ceiling is lower compared to juries. But the floor is higher; a weak case that would result in a defense verdict at trial is going to result in at least some award in arbitration, even if the award is small. And since the process is significantly less expensive than litigation, the whole calculus changes. If I go to a traditional trial I'm going to spend a ton of my own money in exchange for, at best, a 50/50 chance of getting a favorable verdict. In arbitration, the marginal cost of going all the way is lower, and the chance of walking away with something is higher. There's less of an incentive to settle, so if the defendant wants to make the case go away he's going to have to offer something close to what he expects the award to be. Realistically, though, in arbitration the plaintiff has no real motivation to settle, so what you end up with is an arbitration award that ends up being more than you would have paid in a traditional settlement, and since the process is so frictionless for the plaintiffs, they're going to file more suits.
Now, you could say that you meant that this panel should include doctors and not lawyers, or maybe a combination of the two, or maybe that you didn't mean arbitration but a more formal system like trial but with an expert panel instead of a jury, or whatever. Just keep two things in mind. The first is that the system is designed to compensate people for injuries, not to make things easier for doctors. The effects of malpractice suits on medicine are unfortunate, but as long as we believe that people who are injured by malpractice are entitled to compensation, they will persist. You may think certain cases are bullshit, but the plaintiff is still suffering, and I'm saying this as part of the defense bar. The other thing to keep in mind is that there's no reason to believe that some alternative fact finder is going to do better than a jury. You can change things, but you may not like the result.
Rov_Scam
8mo ago
All these stories demonstrate is that the public has no idea what FEMA actually does. A friend of mine used to work for them, and spent over a year in Tinian working logistics in the aftermath of a Typhoon that barely made the news on the mainland. He told me that the only people FEMA will send to most places are administrators. The counties and municipalities handle the actual relief efforts, and above them is the state. FEMA's role is to provide funding, and the personnel they send are there to make sure the funding matches the planning that's done on the local level. They may provide an increased measure of assistance, but only if the localities in question can't handle it. That's why most of the direct FEMA work is done in places like Tinian, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands, who can't really do it on their own. But FEMA isn't going to go into Florida and tell them how to handle hurricane relief. The states know their state better than FEMA and the counties know their county better than FEMA, and they aren't there to meddle. They may be doing a bit more than usual in Helene since the affected area isn't used to this kind of damage, but it's not like North Carolina isn't prepared to handle a hurricane. The posters below who say that no one has proven any examples of FEMA actually doing anything are probably right, because that's not what they're there for.
Rov_Scam
1yr ago
Writing this from my law office — No, it's not defamation, and it isn't close. In addition to the disclaimer:
- They changed his name
- I didn't see the episode, but they probably changed a number of other details as well, and
- It's a television show that no one is confusing for a news program.
Defamation requires statements of fact, and it's hard to argue that such a blatant fictionalization is making factual statements. I would also add that your proving my point by the fact that you confused Daniel Penny with Daniel Perry, who is currently serving a lengthy prison sentence for actions motivated by white supremacy, and I'm apparently the only one who's noticed this so far. Accordingly, I don't know how much Mr. Penny could argue that the episode was about him if even a viewer as astute as yourself can't accurately identify the supposed victim.
Rov_Scam
2yr ago
Considering Truth Social is available in the App Store I doubt Apple will stop carrying it due to political reasons, at least due to political reasons that aren't seriously beyond the pale of the normal liberal/conservative dynamic.
Rov_Scam
2yr ago
At this point I'm cynical enough to believe that Hollywood goes through the following thought process when it comes to "diverse" casting:
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A franchise has a dedicated-enough following that its fans will watch anything with the franchise's name on it.
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The fanbase is also fickle and their standards will never be met; every attempt at a reboot is almost certain to be at best, a disappointment, and, at worst, a betrayal.
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The studio wants to do a reboot/sequel, etc. but knows there is no way to meet the audience's expectations unless they can really knock it out of the park.
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The studio knows that the chances of knocking it out of the park are slim. Once the franchise has been ossified, anything that deviates from the existing formula is out of character for the franchise, while anything that conforms to it is merely a rehash. There's a narrow window where the studio can please everyone, and it knows it's unlikely to hit it.
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There is pressure from people outside the fanbase but with influence in the industry (mostly journalists) who want to see more minorities in big roles.
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The studio knows that there is one group they are guaranteed to satisfy regardless of the movie they make.
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The studio casts a bunch of minorities and spends the rest of the budget on special effects so it doesn't look cheap. Little thought is given to the story, dialogue, editing, etc.
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Everyone who was a fan of the movie announces their disappointment with the product. A few point to the unbelievability of all the minorities in the case.
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The studio blames the complaints on the racism of the audience.
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The journalists agree with the studio about the racism and go the extra mile to insist that it actually was a good movie.
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The product is, by any measure, a success. It did well commercially, because the fanbase will watch anything associated with the franchise. Journalists liked it. The studio made money without too much thought.
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When the studio wants to make another franchise film they point to the success of the last sequel and the bank gives them the money to do it.
If Star Wars fans had been logical and given up on the franchise after Episode I, Episode II would have bombed and everyone would have been saved decades upon decades of mediocre films. But instead, it was one of the most successful movies of the year (and Episode 3 made even more money), so they will be making these films till the end of time. If the franchise isn't big enough to coast like this, though, they have to resort to minority casting as a safeguard. As a side note, this only seems to happen to franchises people grew up with as children. Had Coppola turned The Godfather into a never-ending franchise I doubt it would have stuck. Eventually these things turn into Death Wish IX: Michael Winner's Revenge and whatnot. But when it comes to children's films all reason is lost. I'm glad I never got too into any of them.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
This was originally intended to be a response to a post by @faceh below where he links to an article that contains the oft-quoted statistic that the top 80% of women are contending for the top 20% of men and the bottom 80% of men are contending for the bottom 80% of women, or some similar numbers that are eerily close to the Pareto distribution. I've heard this mentioned a lot, particularly in the context of people complaining about dating apps, but it seemed a bit suspicious since approximately 100% of the friends I've know who have used them with the goal of landing a long-term partner have found one, and several of those friends are nowhere near the to 20% of guys using whatever metric you want to use to rate desirability. Not to mention that the app companies themselves are notoriously tight-lipped about their user data. So I decided to trace the source of this, and post it here so it won't get buried.
It turns out the statistic is incredibly dubious. The quote comes from a [Medium post from 2015] in which a blogger named worst-online-dater attempts to come up with the Gini Coefficient to prove how unfair Tinder is. This blog has 6 total posts, four of which weren't posted until seven years after the initial two posts (which include the post that contains the statistic) and were only created to address the increased attention he had been getting in the wake of his study being quoted online and occasionally in mainstream media. There is no biographical information provided for the author of this "study", so at best it can be said that it comes from the very definition of an "online rando", and at that, one who seems to have an axe to grind.
The actual study the guy conducted was a very informal one where he used pictures of a male model to attract likes from women on Tinder, and used his chatting privileges to ask them questions about their usage. He doesn't say what questions he asked or how many women actually answered, but he says that the women reported, on average, to liking approximately 12% of the profiles they looked at. I could comment on how the sample size is small and the methodology dubious, but that's neither here nor there because the actual research he did doesn't factor at all into the whole 80/20 statement. That seems to just come out of nowhere, without explanation as to how he extrapolated it from data he collected or attribution from another source. It's collateral to the point of the study anyway, as he's trying to calculate a Gini coefficient and uses it as a number he plugs in somewhere along the way.
Of course, that was the takeaway from the article, and not what he was even trying to say, which is that dating inequality on the apps is worse than economic inequality in all but a handful of countries. Years later, after the statistic began to gain traction, he addressed it in a followup post in which he responded to criticism of the original article. Someone sent him a link to an article that pointed out that the whole 80/20 thing was a lie. He responded to the criticisms that were leveled at him in the article, but he never adequately explained where he was getting the whole 80/20 thing from. As far as I can tell, at best he's getting it through an uncertain derivation based on data from a highly flawed study. At worst, he just made it up.
That isn't the end of it, though. Another of the responses to his original post was a separate study of Hinge data based on actual comprehensive data that was conducted by an employee of the company. He doesn't discuss the results of this study in the same terms as the 80/20 thing, but the results are similarly dramatic: Men as a whole only receive 14% of the likes sent out on Hinge. This breaks down further to 9% for the top 20% of men, 4% for men in the 50%–80% range, and just 1% for the bottom 50% of men. By contrast, the bottom 50% of women receive 18% of total likes. He claims that this Hinge data basically confirms the conclusions he drew from his Tinder data. It certainly makes it seem like even attractive guys have no chance if they're not even getting the same amount of action as below-average women.
There's one huge problem here, though, in that it takes two to Tango. I can't comment too much on the Tinder stuff because I never used Tinder and am therefore unfamiliar with its idiosyncrasies. I have used Hinge, however, and basing success on likes received is enough to make me discount the study before I even look at the data. It's my understanding that unless you're in a paid tier, with Tinder you just swipe on profiles you like with limited personal information and match with people who happen to swipe on you as well. In other words, everyone has to swipe, and there's no guarantee that someone you swiped right on will even see your profile. On Hinge, however, you can like a profile and even send a brief message, and you're like will always show up on the person's queue. So there are two ways to match: You can send out a like and hope the other person matches, or you can automatically match with one of your incoming likes.
And, like in the real world, while either sex is free to initiate, the way it usually works is that men get matches by sending out likes and women get matches by choosing from their incoming likes. While the opposite can happen, most women only send out likes because they aren't getting enough incoming likes, so it's rare for men to get likes, and when they do it usually isn't from anyone they're interested in actually dating. Likes received is a bad barometer for determining success on Hinge, and given that the author seems to have no grasp on how Hinge actually works, it leads me to question whether he understands how tinder actually works, and whether the data he is purportedly measuring is actually a reasonable proxy for dating success.
I tried to come up with some ideas on how to accurately measure success on Hinge but I came up short each time. the experience of men and women on these apps seems to be so different that it would be difficult to quantify who has it "easier". Part of the problem is that while the whole thing is seen as a grind, the statistics we use to determine success tend to celebrate the grindy aspects of it. Someone who is on for a month and only matches with one person is seen as a failure compared to someone who matches with a couple dozen people, but if the former finds a long-term partner and the latter goes on a string of boring dates, we all know who was more successful. Until we figure out exactly what we're measuring, these "studies" are all useless. It's all bogus information based on proxies for other proxies, and a set of assumptions that amount to nothing more than a house of cards. And with no shortage of people willing to complain about online dating, I don't think these dubious statistics are going away any time soon.
Rov_Scam
3mo ago
As the resident audio enthusiast, I can only think of a couple use cases for soundbars, neither of which would seem to apply here. The logic behind soundbars is that, with televisions getting ever thinner, they lack the internal real estate to produce decent sound. This may be true enough, but I've sampled numerous soundbars at my parents' house and various vacation rentals, and I haven't noticed much of an improvement (and I say this as someone who can normally detect subtle differences between speakers). For soundbars to give a sleek form factor, they suffer from similar limitations as televisions, namely limited driver size and depth of cabinet. You simply aren't going to get significant bass improvement from 2" full range drivers, and models with subwoofers have to set the crossover frequency higher than normal.
There is an improvement in sound, but if you're the kind of person who listens to music streamed from Spotify over a small Bluetooth speaker, it isn't going to be the kind of improvement that's noticeable, and even a cheap stereo system is going to perform much better. This is especially true for movies, where most of the sound consists of human voice frequencies that are easy to reproduce. If you watch action movies with a lot of explosions and the like, TV speakers will have trouble producing deep bass, as you alluded to, but a soundbar without a subwoofer isn't going to make much of a difference in that respect.
The first use case I can think of is if your TV produces sound that is noticeable bad rather than merely inadequate, e.g if it sounds tinny or there is a noticeable resonance. In that case, it may be worth getting a cheap soundbar, but I wouldn't splurge for one. The other use case is if you're the kind of person who actually can detect minor improvements, but is prevented from using a stereo due to the spousal acceptance factor. But that person isn't asking about it in a non-specialized forum. I personally have my TV hooked up to a separate amplifier I use for music and speakers that are over 4 feet tall and weigh 75 lbs. apiece, but I only use it if I'm watching a movie, and even then not all of the time.
If you're looking for improvement in the $200 price range, a cheap stereo system is going to blow all but the most expensive soundbars out of the water. The used market is your friend here, especially stuff from the '90s and '2000s that's too old to have any value but not old enough to be "vintage". Pretty much any receiver you can find from the Big 3 (Yamaha/Denon/Onkyo) is worth buying, and even stuff from lesser brands like Pioneer, Sony, Techincs, etc. is going to be fine. Don't worry too much about wattage since anything above 15 watts is more than adequate at normal volume, and that's what budget receivers were running in the '70s. The speakers are going to be more important to the sound, though the brands will be different—B&W, Boston Acoustics, Polk, Infinity, Cerwin Vega, PSB, ELAC, Paradigm, and Klipsch are examples of what to look for, though these brands all sell new speakers with stratospheric prices so don't be discouraged if the prices on some used models seem high; I believe all of them have made inexpensive bookshelf speakers at some point that can usually be had for cheap on the used market, and they sold more of these models than anything else so they aren't hard to find. Avoid Bose; they sell cheap speakers that are marketed as a premium brand, and they always command higher prices on the used market than they should. If you find anything you're interested in locally, feel free to DM me and I can probably tell you if you're getting a good deal.
Pittsburgh: An Urban Portrait
Part 5: The Hill District*
Immediately to the east of Downtown, the land begins sloping upward, gradually at first, then more decisively. This hill includes virtually everything east of Downtown until Oakland, with the exception of the Strip District, from which it is separated by a steep dropoff. On the Monongahela side, the riverfront is devoid of any kind of strip-like neighborhood, as the cliffs begin only 100 yards or so from the shoreline. Officially, this area includes part of the Downtown, Bluff, Crawford-Roberts, Middle Hill, Bedford Dwellings, Terrace Village, Upper Hill, and Polish Hill neighborhoods. As a housekeeping measure, I would note that the Downtown, Polish Hill, and Bluff sections aren't normally considered part of the Hill, the Upper Hill section is debatable, and small parts of Oakland may or may not be considered part of the Hill District based on how old you are. As a said when I began this series, the official neighborhood lines are based on census tracts, which may or may not line up with the way people actually talk. That being said, there are good reasons to treat each of these areas individually, so that's what I will be doing.
The Hill District, in general, is Pittsburgh's Harlem, even if in reputation more than in reality. This was the part of the city where the first black migrants settled in the early 1800s, when the area was nothing more than log cabins on the hillside overlooking the point. As the century wore on, it became the dumping ground for various ethnic groups that couldn't get housing anywhere else, not just blacks but also Jews, Syrians, Italians, and Poles. They each divided into their own little enclaves, so for a while you had Jew's Hill, Italian Hill, etc. Eventually these distinctions eroded, and we were just left with the Hill.
The Hill was never a desirable area. Industry needs rivers and flat land, and the Hill had neither. In an era when foot travel was the only option for the working class, proximity to jobs was of utmost importance, and for all the pollution and squalor of the South Side and the Strip, they at least had that. The Hill District had all of the problems but none of the benefits. The only thing in its factor was that it was at least immune from the catastrophic floods that were common before the rivers were under control, but that's about it. All that being said, the residents made the most of the situation, and from the 1920s until the 1950s the Hill had somewhat of a golden age as the centerpiece of the city's black community. For reasons that will be discussed below, the Hill went into decline beginning in the 1950s, and hasn't recovered.
I've attached a map that includes all the neighborhoods in the Hill I'll be discussing, but I've never done that before so we'll see how it goes. Worst case I'll upload a copy to Imagur and include a link like before.
5A. The Lower Hill: Ground Zero
A few years ago I did a similar writeup back on Reddit so I apologize if this covers the same ground, but I think it's worth a fresh look. As I mentioned in the installment about Downtown, city leadership had a vision of Renaissance beginning in the 1940s that culminated with the wildly successful Point developments. When it came to the city's other attempts at urban renewal, though, things didn't go as swimmingly, and the first of these was the destruction of the Lower Hill. The Lower Hill District was roughly the area between where I-579 sits today on the west, 5th Ave. on the South, Bigelow Blvd. on the north, and Crawford Ave. on the east. Wylie Ave. was the main commercial thoroughfare, and the neighborhood, while notably black, had a healthy concentration of Jews and Italians as well. But it was also poor and run down. The housing was old and dilapidated, with many residences lacking running water. Beds were crammed as tightly as possible into rooming houses, where tenants slept in shifts. It was rife with seedy bars and pool halls, and prostitutes and policy makers roamed the streets. In other words, it was a slum, and in a city desperately trying to clean up its image as well as its air, the presence of such an area directly adjacent to Downtown was unacceptable. So a plan was hatched in the name of slum clearance. An expressway would be built connecting the Liberty Bridge to a planned bridge and highway heading north. A new arena with a retractable roof would be built to accommodate the Civic Light Opera, who were sick of being rained out at Pitt Stadium. A new cultural center would be built for the Pittsburgh Symphony and various other groups, modeled after Lincoln Center in New York. And there would be lots of tower-in-the park luxury housing. Beginning in 1956, the entire neighborhood was razed. 1,000 buildings were destroyed, displacing 8,000 people with no immediate housing prospects. The street grid was eliminated entirely. To add insult to injury, most of the planned development never happened. The Civic Arena was the obvious centerpiece in all of this, but it too had a rocky history before the Penguins were established; the acoustics inside were so bad that the Civic Light Opera moved out after a few years. The cultural center never materialized, on the grounds of cost, and the residential construction was limited to a single building, though it was designed by I.M. Pei. For decades, the neighborhood mostly consisted of the Civic Arena, surrounded by a sea of parking lots, with I-579 forming a formidable barrier with Downtown.
In 2006, the possibility of a revival loomed large. The Penguins had spent years trying to get a new arena, and a savior appeared in the form of Isle of Capri, a casino company. Pennsylvania had recently legalized slots, but restricted the licenses, of which Pittsburgh would only get one. Three contenders appeared: Bally's who wanted to build a casino at Station Square, Barden, who wanted to build one by the stadiums, and Isle of Capri, who wanted to build theirs on the old arena site. To sweeten the deal, they offered to build an arena for the Penguins, and redevelop the old neighborhood, in exchange for the development rights. The bid ultimately failed. The gaming commission's decision to award the license to Barden seemed perplexing at the time (and moreso after Barden went bankrupt), the joke being that Isle of Capri didn't get to build the arena for free because Ed Rendell wanted to pay for one, but in retrospect the plan wouldn't have worked. Hill residents were largely opposed to a casino coming to what they felt was still part of their neighborhood, making the political implications too volatile, and there were other problems with the site, like parking, that simply weren't an issue on the North Side. Add in giving away development rights to an entire neighborhood and the cost was just too high.
One thing the Isle of Capri debacle did, though, was get more people talking about redevelopment once the Civic Arena was gone. The Penguins ended up securing financing to build a new arena on an old hospital site they had purchased with the cash proceeds of the Jaromir Jagr trade (which is more appropriately in Uptown but still adjacent) and were given some kind of redevelopment rights to the old arena site as a consolation prize. And then nothing happened. The arena deal was announced in early 2007, and construction was completed in time for the 2010–2011 season. The prudent move would have been to spend the ensuing three years putting a development plan in place, start tearing down the old arena as soon as the new one was ready, and begin the first phase of redevelopment about 6 months later, once demolition was complete. Instead, the demolition of the old arena was delayed a year while a group of morons tried to get it registered as a historic landmark. It was only once demolition was complete that anyone even started working on a plan for redevelopment. (It's 2012 by now if anyone is paying attention). We didn't see anything until late 2014, when US Steel proposed moving their HQ there once their lease in the Steel Building ran out; those plans were scrapped when US Steel decided to stay put. A couple years later some Danish firm proposed a wacky plan that looked more like something an architecture student designs for their portfolio than something intended to actually be built. Needless to say, that idea went nowhere.
Up to this point I haven't included many pictures, so here's a clip from Street View. You'll see City View apartments and the Cambria Hotel next door. Rotate around and you'll see the new FNB Tower as it nears construction, and Flag Plaza off in the distance. Include that and all the empty space and that's all she wrote. Every other building is in an adjacent neighborhood. This is all officially part of Downtown, but I've broken it off into its own neighborhood for historical reasons and because it deserves its own installment due to how fucked up the whole thing is. But I digress.
A big part of the reason development has been slow to take off is due to community opposition, in particular that of Marimba Milliones of the Hill Community Development Corporation. The HCDC has no actual power, but they have enough pull with the powers that be to make things difficult. The actual land is owned by the Urban Redevelopment Authority, but they also have to contend with the Sports and Exhibition Authority, the Planning Commission, the Penguins, and any number of other agencies. Given the controversial history of the area, the URA made it clear early on that they wouldn't approve any development that didn't include a Community Benefit Agreement that they found acceptable. The HCDC became the prime arbiter concerning what was acceptable to the community, and they've made it hell to get anything built. The biggest sticking point has been about affordable housing for the proposed residential development. The HCDC and the Penguins argue about what an acceptable percentage of affordable units is. Then they argue that the Penguins definition of affordable excludes those of "very low and extremely low income". Then they argue about how much money the developer is going to pony up for Milliones' pet projects in other parts of the Hill. The Penguins' original grant of development rights required them to have the entire parcel developed within 11 years from the demolition of the old arena, with a minimum of 2 acres of new development per year. In that 11 years the Penguins did virtually nothing but build a few more parking lots, but they've able to successfully use Milliones' antics to get extension after extension.
The current site developer, Buccini Pollin, took a novel approach — they hired Kimberly Ellis, a Hill resident and community activist who opposed the Isle of Capri proposal, to act as point person for negotiations with Milliones. The initial idea behind this move was that someone with an existing working relationship with HCDC would make things go more smoothly and convince Hill residents that they weren't being railroaded. The actual result was quite different; Ellis and Milliones went to war. Milliones suggested that the developer only hired Ellis so they could slip a fast one past the community. Ellis said that Milliones apparently didn't understand how capitalism worked and that the developer wasn't a cash machine. David Buccini eventually stepped in and told the URA that this was as good a deal as they were going to get and if they didn't want to approve their proposal then the land was likely to sit vacant for another 20 years.
Needless to say, the gambit worked, though by this point the URA didn't have to worry about being called racist by anyone except the HCDC, since the city as a whole was now willing to blame anyone and everyone for the huge gap west of Downtown; Ellis gave the URA cover from Milliones, but they had no cover if they turned the deal down. And so, in 2021, construction began on the first phase of redevelopment, a 26-story skyscraper that is to be the new corporate headquarters for First National Bank. It's par for the course at this point for the first phase of the development to be a new office tower being constructed during one of the worst commercial real estate markets in history, but in FNB's defense, this was a done deal before the pandemic, when Downtown office space was at a premium. Furthermore, they aren't building it because they particular need that much office space, they're building it because they need a huge visible erect penis to attract the likes of Chase and Wells Fargo for the kind of multi-billion dollar merger that doesn't happen to companies headquartered in suburban office parks.
The next phase is a bit more practical, a concert venue built for the promoter Live Nation. For a while, a common thing to bitch about was the city's lack of a mid-size concert venue that was supposedly preventing some touring acts from stopping in Pittsburgh. This was rectified years ago with the construction of Stage AE (5,500 outdoor, 2,400 indoor) on the North Shore, but for some reason a new 4,500 seat venue is supposed to solve the same alleged "problem". As for the rest, who the hell knows. There's supposed to be a bunch more residential with ground floor commercial but since the URA is approving this a block at a time Buccini Pollin is going to have to deal with Marimba Milliones at every step of the way. Not that they've been any better; they just got URA approval to bifurcate the Live Nation development, which was also supposed to include a parking garage and an EMS center. Given that the EMS center was one of the concessions Milliones won in negatiations, she's back at it screaming that the developer is acting in bad faith, also citing some other commitments that they supposedly haven't met. Not to mention that the delay in parking garage construction supposedly means that the new venue will cause parking problems in the Hill District, never mind that the whole area is currently nothing but lots and that the homes closest to the area all have off-street parking anyway.
Given my tone, you may suspect that I don't have much sympathy for Milliones and would side with the developer, but that's not entirely true. While I don't much care for her antics, I understand where she's coming from. The original clearance of the Lower Hill promised all sorts of benefits that never materialized, and it's her job to make sure that developers don't run roughshod over the area again, and at least make sure that they get as much out of it as possible. The development agreements aren't with her, but with the URA, and her influence on the project only extends as far as the URA allows. More importantly, what they want to put here is crap. For all we've supposedly learned about urban planning since the '50s, the current proposal looks suspiciously like what was originally proposed for the site. The renderings show a design with all the charm of a suburban office park, complete with huge setbacks and "green space" that nobody will use. The old Lower Hill may have been a slum, but it had character, and is remembered fondly. My own proposals would be to either: 1. Using old photographs and building plans, try and recreate the old neighborhood to the extent that is practicable for modern uses, or 2. Give the development rights, and possibly the property itself, to the HCDC. I suspect that if Milliones had actual skin in the game then she wouldn't be in any position to keep making demands. She could use the proceeds to fund whatever pet projects she wants. If nothing else, it would be a better way to get money flowing into the rest of the Hill than their current strategy of hoping for Federal grants. And if the property sits vacant for 20 years because of her intransigence then hey, it's her prerogative, though I think she'd eventually be forced out of her position if she let things go too long.
There's some suggestion among conservatives that the razing of the Lower Hill was actually a good thing, that the concerns of the city about substandard buildings and overall dereliction were well-placed. In a darker sense, they say that rather than contribute to the decline of the rest of the Hill it at least insulated Downtown from it. Trying to examine a historical counterfactual is an exercise in futility; there are so many downstream effects something has that have to be untangled that things quickly become impossible to predict. So I'm not going to pretend that things would be all sunshine and roses had the Lower Hill remained extant. I will, however, say this: Dense neighborhoods adjacent to Downtowns are usually the first to gentrify. Think Boston's North End, Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia, Fell's Point in Baltimore, Over-the-Rhine in Cincinnati, etc. Judging by old photographs, it was mostly the kind of late-19th and early-20th brick structures that are in high demand today. People like being able to wake up in their row house and stroll to their job downtown. On the other hand, this kind of revitalization didn't start happening until the '80s, and I don't see it happening in Pittsburgh until the '90s — who knows how much of the neighborhood would have been left by that point? One thing I can say is that the idea that Downtown was somehow inoculated from the decline of the Hill District is bullshit. In my first installment, I talked about how in the '90s and '2000s Tom Murphy fought tooth and nail to kick out the low income merchants on Fifth and Forbes in the name of "revitalization". Well, those businesses would have stayed out of Downtown if the Lower Hill's business district wouldn't have been razed, turning Downtown into the most convenient place for Hill residents to shop. As far as a neighborhood grade, this obviously doesn't get one. It was gradable long before I was born, and will hopefully be gradable in the future, but right now there's nothing to grade.
If you've made it this far, you're probably wondering where these have been, and why they've been absent while I've continued to post other things. When I first started this series, it was intended to be a series of neighborhood snapshots where I'd give a description, maybe a little history, and a rating, and then come back in the end and seen what we'd learned. Well, it quickly became apparent that there was plenty of material for culture war discussion somewhat different from the usual and I wanted to use some examples, and for the first segment, on Downtown, I wanted to talk about the whole Fifth and Forbes fiasco. Well, I was going off of what I remembered from 25 years ago, a time in my life when I wasn't paying particularly close attention to these things, so I figured I'd need to get my facts straight. Except there is very little that's easily accessible and before I knew it I was perusing archived articles from 2001 just so I could get a timeline and figure out if my memories of the public perception were in line with what people were actually saying. Again and again this happened, with me saying that I was going to make it quick and only talk about stuff I remember but even then I'm constantly checking myself for accuracy. So the long and the short of it is that I do intend to see this through to completion. The pace may be slow because there are still quite a few "big ones", so to speak, that have a lot to talk about, but in the meantime, I'd like to thank everyone who's still with me and who has commented in the past.
Prior installments:
Rov_Scam
7mo ago
I doubt any of these, with the possible exception of Massie, plays any significant role in a Trump administration, to wit:
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RFK isn't going to be the next FDA Commissioner. His opinions might be popular among a certain portion of Trump's base, but they aren't popular among the GOP senators who have to confirm him. His complete lack of qualifications for the position give cover to any Republican looking to vote against his confirmation, and it's hard for me to see a vaccine hawk like Jim Justice voting for him in any event. If he gets anything, it's likely to be some made-up position that doesn't require Senate confirmation where he's given a title but no power, no budget, and no staff. He'll do this for 6 months or a year until he realizes it's pointless and resigns. Then he does the usual song and dance about how Trump doesn't really believe in his cause and cast him aside after making grand promises.
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The chances of Tulsi getting a cabinet position like Secretary of State or Defense or National Security Advisor are even lower than those of RFK being FDA Commissioner. The Republican PArty, Trump's base included, is still dominated by people who supported Bush's foreign policy. Trump's stated pacifism is attractive to a growing number of people, but the average Republican is still more Bellicose than the average Democrat. A lot of older Republicans I talk to still criticize Obama's Iraq pullout. I've had countless arguments about why invading Iran isn't a good idea. Tulsi's a known Assad apologist, yet just prior to Trump's ascension Republicans were criticizing Obama for not taking action in Syria. Combine that with Trump's fixation on "looking tough", and someone like Tulsi is a nonstarter. I'd be surprised if she gets any position at all.
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Like I said, this one has a decent chance of happening. That being said it only has a chance of happening because Massie is at least a sitting Republican congressman, and it's a position where he can't do much damage. Raw milk availability is largely a state-level issue, it doesn't break along partisan lines, and removing Federal regulations would only have a small effect on a market that's already tiny (most of the raw milk consumers I know buy it specifically because it's local).
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I'm going to lump Ron Paul together with Elon Musk, whom you didn't mention, because it's pretty clear that the only role either of these guys would have would be in reducing government waste. It's also clear that neither of them would have a full-time position. Paul is 89 an retired, and Musk has to run something like 50 companies. My guess is they'll co-chair a bipartisan blue-ribbond panel on government waste and inefficiency which produces a pretty report showing that we could reduce the deficit by 0.3% if we cut these 9,000 programs, which report is presented to congress and promptly filed circularly after each legislator finds something in there that benefits his district.
The problem with a lot of this speculation is that it involves fringe figures who are hoping that profile will substitute for actual influence. People like John Barrasso and Thom Tillis don't want to see people who are further to the left than most Democrats placed in positions of power because they flattered Trump's sense of appealing to a broad coalition. In 2016 there was a lot of talk about Trump appointing Giuliani Secretary of State, and giving people like Steve Bannon and Sarah Palin prominent roles. Giuliani, loyal past the point of any logical sense, had to settle for Trump's personal attorney, and that was before he tanked his reputation. Bannon's career in the White House lasted approximately 20 minute, and Palin was never under serious consideration. Trump has a pattern of bringing people into his fold and making promises (or at least suggestions) that he conveniently forgets when it's time to actually pick someone.
There's some speculation that he might act differently this time because in 2016 he was too reliant on establishment advisors whose choices ended up burning him, and that he may choose to chart his own course this time. I don't think this is possible for two reasons. First, everyone listed above has locked horns with Trump in the past, and three of them are former Democrats whose stated views are still more liberal than the median Republican. There's no reason to believe that either Kennedy, Gabbard, or Musk would be any more of a Trump sycophant than Rex Tillerson or Mark Esper. Second, any position that comes with real power needs Senate confirmation, which makes most of these people total nonstarters.
Rov_Scam
2yr ago
Why risk literal federal prison soliciting lewd photos from a 17 year old? It is beyond understanding for me that Ali Alexander couldn't wait a year if he was so very enamored of the boy.
Having worked for the Boy Scouts for 3 years and attended more youth protection training sessions than I can count, I consider myself to have at least a fair to middling knowledge of the subject, and it basically boils down to vulnerability. When abusers use the Boy Scouts to target victims, they aren't looking at the popular kid who advances regularly and has a ton of merit badges and serves in leadership positions and enjoys long hikes. No; they're looking for the kid who's unpopular and stuck at Second Class and comes from an unstable family situation and whom both youth and adult leaders tend to roll their eyes at because he's always complaining about something. It's the same dynamic that allowed Jerry Sandusky to run rampant in the Second Mile.
Now zoom out and look at the social ecosystem for minors as compared with 18 year olds. What are the social dynamics of high school versus college or working full time? While I can't speak from personal experience, I can understand how the closed environment and limited independence of high school could cause a sense of alienation that wouldn't be as likely to arise in an environment without the same level of overt social stratification. Any public figure with a young fanbase knows on some level that there are a lot of disaffected kids who look up to them. This might even be more relevant in politics, considering that political figures diagnose societal problems and often propose solutions, rather than simply providing a means of living vicariously.
So you have a 16 year old boys who's having a rough go of it in high school and spends a ton of time online in lieu of actual in-person social contact and becomes convinced that wokism and liberal politics are the cause of his problems, and looks up to Ali Alexander. Then Alexander starts sending him DMs and the kid's now getting direct recognition from someone he greatly admires. And then he follows the routing of a real groomer and starts testing boundaries to see how the kid will react while he still has plausible deniability, before finally making a move. While this playbook is certainly possible with someone who is of age, it's much harder to get a read on their social situation and much less likely that it will be of concern to them.
Rov_Scam
2yr ago
I don't think that returning to historic trends can really be counted as a realignment. Looking at the black vote since 1932 gives us these numbers:
1932: 77%
1936: 28%
1940: 32%
1944: 32%
1948: 23%
1952: 24%
1956: 39%
1960: 32%
1964: 6%
1968: 15%
1972: 13%
1976: 17%
1980: 14%
1984: 9%
1988: 11%
1992: 10%
1996: 12%
2000: 9%
2004: 11%
2008: 4%
2012: 6%
2016: 8%
2020: 12%
Blacks largely turned to Democrats during the New Deal; they had largely been wary of them before due to the historic association with the Republicans and concern that national leaders were too beholden to the racist Southerners who comprised their base. The next big drop was in 1964, when Goldwater specifically opposed civil rights legislation while Johnson explicitly supported it. Then it recovered to a stable equilibrium on either side of 10%. before dropping again in 2008. This was due less to anything McCain or the Republicans did, though, than to the presence of Barack Obama in the race. With Obama out in 2012, Trump was bound to get a larger share of the black vote, though it took until 2020 for the numbers to recover to near the historic average. Similarly, looking at the Hispanic vote since 1976 we get:
1976: 18%
1980: 37%
1984: 34%
1988: 30%
1992: 25%
1996: 21%
2000: 35%
2004: 44%
2008: 31%
2012: 27%
2016: 28%
2020: 32%
Here it's even worse since the party isn't getting huge swings so much as staying consistent over time. The big news was that in the 2022 midterms Republicans got 39% of the vote, which would be a sizeable increase (though still not the record). But that overlooks that looking at midterm results is more than a bit misleading since not all states vote in major midterm elections. There are obviously House races everywhere, but these races aren't big enough to get a decent sample size for exit polling, a lot of them involve candidates running unopposed, and redistricting makes direct comparisons difficult, so where they do exist they're usually excluded from comprehensive numbers. Only five states with a population greater than 8% Hispanic had gubernatorial elections, and only 4 had Senate elections. And the gubernatorial races are already suspect because they often don't really tell you anything about how a state feels nationally—Vermont, Maryland, and Massachusetts all have Republican governors, and Kansas, Louisiana, and Kentucky all have Democratic governors, and none of those states are even swing states, let alone identified with the party of their respective governors. Anyway, FWIW, DeSantis got 58% of the Hispanic vote in Florida, but from there it drops off a cliff, with Republicans getting 47% in Arizona, 40% in Texas, 37% in Nevada, and 25% in Pennsylvania. The Senate, which is probably a more accurate signifier, looks a little worse, with Republicans getting 55% in Florida, 40% in Arizona, 33% in Nevada, and 31% in Pennsylvania.
But there's something missing from this breakdown. Actually, quite a few things. California had no elections that counted, and it has the largest Hispanic population in the country. Ditto New York, the number four state, as well as number 5 Illinois, number 7 New Jersey, and number 8 Colorado. The Hispanic uptick is dominated by massive numbers in Florida and above average numbers in Texas. Arizona held its own as well, but it's only a recent addition to the swing state club, and the numbers in Pennsylvania and Nevada, neither particularly blue, are about in line with 2020. I think it's a bit premature to say that there's a relalignment going on among Hispanic voters. There's certainly somewhat of an uptick in GOP support, but 2020 wasn't really an abberation from historic averages, and 2022's uptick was limited to certain places that may not be representative of the country as a whole, and one year does not make a trend. I'd want to see more consistent growth before coming to any conclusions.
Rov_Scam
2yr ago
As a small business owner I couldn't imagine trying to deal with a bank like Citi or BoA. The general rule of thumb is that you want a bank big enough to offer the kind of products you need but no bigger. I use a regional (though I could probably use a small local) and if I have a problem I can call the girl who handles my account from the number in my Rolodex and usually get an in-person meeting scheduled for the same day. IF I'm dealing with some huge national I'm stuck calling a customer service line where I spend half the afternoon on hold and the other half trying to explain my problem to someone who has limited power to solve it and whose evaluations are based on how quickly they can get me to hang up.
Someone last week posted about how there wasn't any interesting AI-generated music, and my first thought was that there hasn't even been any decent AI music analysis. Here's what I'm talking about: If you study music at the collegiate level (or maybe even at a really good high school), you're going to be asked to transcribe a lot of recordings as part of your coursework. This can be time consuming, but it's fairly straightforward. Suppose you're transcribing a basic pop or R&B song. Listen to the bass part and write it out as sheet music. Listen to the guitar part, etc. After you have all the instruments down go back and add articulation marks, stylistic cues, etc. Figure out the best way to organize it (first and second endings, repeats, codas, etc.). In other words, turn the recording into something you can put in front of a musician and expect them to play. I've done it. It's not that difficult for anyone with a basic knowledge of music and dedication to learning, which is why they expect every musician to be able to do it. YouTuber Adam NEely has done videos where he transcribes pop recordings for a wedding band he's in. There are, of course, some people who can write out the third saxophone part of a big band recording from memory after hearing it once, and these people are rare (though not as rare as you'd think), but most musicians are still pretty good at transcribing.
Computers are absolutely terrible at this. There is software available that purports to do this, some of which is available online for free, some of which is built into commercial music notation software like Sibelius or Finale, and the utility of all of it is fairly limited. It can work, but only when dealing with a simple, clean melody that's reasonably in tune and played with a steady tempo. Put a normal commercial recording into it and the results range from "needs quite a bit of cleanup" to "completely unusable", and at its best it won't include stylistic markings or formatting. At first glance, this should be much easier for the computer than it is for us. We have to listen through 5 instruments playing at once to hear what the acoustic guitar, which is low in the mix to begin with, is doing underneath the big cymbal crash, and separate 2 sax parts playing simultaneously, sometimes in unison, sometimes in harmony. The computer, on the other hand, has access to the entire waveform, and can analyze every individual frequency and amplitude that's on the recording every 1/44,100th of a second.
Except that this is a lot harder than it sounds. As psychologist Albert Bregman puts it:
Your friend digs two narrow channels up from the side of a lake. Each is a few feet long and a few inches wide and they are spaced a few feet apart. Halfway up each one, your friend stretches a handkerchief and fastens it to the sides of the channel. As the waves reach the side of the lake they travel up the channels and cause the two handkerchiefs to go into motion. You are allowed to look only at the handkerchiefs and from their motions to answer a series of questions: How many boats are there on the lake and where are they? Which is the most powerful one? Which one is closer? Is the wind blowing? Has any large object been dropped suddenly into the lake?
And Bregman was just talking about the ability to separate instruments! A lot of transcription requires a reasonable amount of musical knowledge, but even someone who's never picked up an instrument and can't tell a C from an Eb can tell which part is the piano part and which part is the trumpet part. And then there are all the issues related to timing. Take something simple like a fermata, a symbol that instructs the musician to hold the note as long as he feels necessary in a solo piece or until the conductor cuts him off in an ensemble piece. Is the comuter going to be able to intuit from the context of the performance that the note that was held for 3 seconds was a quarter note with a fermata and not just a note held for 5 1/2 beats or however long it was? Will it know that the pause afterward should take place immediately in the music and not to insert rests?
And what about articulations? Staccato quarter notes sound much the same as eighth notes followed by eighth rests. Or possibly sixteenth notes followed by three sixteenth rests. How will the computer decide which to use? Does it matter? Is there really a difference? Well, yeah. A quarter note melody like Mary Had a Little Lamb, with each note played short, is going to read much easier as staccato quarters, since using anything else needlessly complicates things, and doesn't giver the performer (or conductor) the discretion of determining exactly how short the articulation should be. On the other hand, a complex passage requiring precise articulation would look odd with a lone staccato quarter stuck in the middle of it. A musician can use their innate feel and experience as a player to determine what would work best in any given situation. A computer doesn't have this experience to draw on.
How does traditional machine learning even begin to address these problems? One way would be to say, feed it the sheet music for Beethoven's Fifth, and then show it as many recordings of that piece as you can until it figures out that the music lines up with the notation. Then do that for every other piece of music that you can. This would be a pretty simple, straightforward way of doing things, but does anyone really think that you could generate reasonably accurate sheet music to a recording it hadn't heard, or would you just get some weird agglomeration of sheet music it already knows? After all, this method wouldn't give the computer any sense of what each individual component of the music actually does, just vaguely associate it with certain sounds. Alternatively, you could attempt to get it to recognize every note, every combination of notes, every musical instrument and combination of instruments, every stylistic device, etc. The problem here is that you're going to have to first either generate new samples or break existing music down into bite-sized pieces so that the computer can hear lone examples. But then you still have the problem that a lot of musical devices are reliant on context—what's the difference between a solo trumpet playing a middle C whole note at 100 bpm and the same instrument at the same tempo holding a quarter note of the same pitch for the exact same duration? The computer won't be able to tell unless additional context is added.
The problem with most of the AI discourse is that it's too focused on the kind of intelligence that sci-fi tropes have always talked about as the hallmarks of humanity. Getting computers to play strategy games, getting computers to talk, etc. But getting computers to transcribe accurate sheet music from mp3s isn't sexy. If a program came out that could do this, it wouldn't disrupt any economies or cost anyone their jobs, it would just be appreciated by the kinds of people who need to make arrangements of pop songs for cover bands or who want a starting point for their own arrangements, and even then it wouldn't be a game changer, it would just make things a little easier. If most people found out today that such software had been available for the past 20 years, they wouldn't think anything of it. But this software doesn't exist. And, at least to my knowledge, it won't exist for a long time, because it's not sexy and there's no immediate call for it from the marketplace. But if we are ever going to develop anything remotely approaching general AI, such a program has to exist, because general AI, by definition, doesn't exist without it. I would absolutely love a program like this, and until one is available, I'm not going to lose any sleep over AI risk.
The categories aren't really correct. 1 and 2 don't make sense because disability is a binary, and the benefit amount is determined at the financial qualification stage. This is the preliminary stage where SSA makes sure that claimants are legally qualified and has to be completed before they'll send it to adjudication. Once we start considering medical eligibility it's a binary; you don't get more money because you're "more disabled" or whatever. The sole exception would be that there's an optimization that can be made for people who continue to work but make below the financial eligibility threshold, but that really has nothing to do with the determination office. 3 isn't really a category because I had no way of knowing whether someone was using an attorney, what kind of advice they were getting, or whether they genuinely thought they were disabled. I'd break down the claimants into the following categories:
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The Classic Case: The first category consists of the typical 50+ blue-collar worker (usually) who has some kind of musculoskeletal disorder (back problems being the most common) that prevents them from doing heavy labor. When I was there, these probably constituted half of our approvals. These people were genuinely hurt, but may or may not have been disabled, depending on the severity of their condition. For example (real case, though my memory isn't precise), Larry was a 55 year old black guy who worked as a welder for most of the 20 previous years, no other employment. His back problems had been developing for some time, causing him to miss work. About a year prior he had back surgery and was off work for a while recovering, and felt good doing work around the house. He tried to go back to work once he was medically cleared, but he only lasted a few weeks. He wasn't having the constant pain he was having before, but 8 hours of bending over, kneeling, and crawling around exacerbated the pain, which went away with rest. The medical records were about what one would expect from someone experiencing the symptoms he described. Easy approval.
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The Generally Unhealthy: People with myriad legitimate health problems that don't rise to the level of a disability. These people are usually over the age of 40, can be male or female, and have significant employment history, though mostly at the kind of jobs that don't pay particularly well. They have HBP. They have diabetes. They have fibromyalgia. They have back pain. They have a heart condition. They're obese (usually, though not always). These tend to be the most annoying cases to deal with because the application asks them to specify the conditions for which they're claiming disability for, but if (more like when) we find they have 500 other problems we have to ask if it affects their ability to work, and of course it does, so now we have to keep requesting records from doctors that take forever to receive and don't contain any usable information. The worst part is that they are all on antidepressants they got from a PCP and they've never seen a psychiatrist. So when they tell us their anxiety and depression affects their ability to work we have to schedule as psych workup, which takes forever to schedule because these people always live in rural areas with one guy who's willing to accept the low rates we pay for them to fill out significantly more paperwork than usual. Once they actually see somebody who confirms that they aren't so anxious they can't go to the grocery store without freaking out, they get denied.
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The Complex Cases: People who obviously can't work but only due to complicated situations that are hard to qualify under the existing criteria. People with lingering stroke recovery symptoms, people with rare auto-immune disorders, rare diabetic conditions, people who are fine most of the time but have conditions that flare up every couple months and put them in the hospital for 2 weeks, during which time they lose their jobs. It's 50/50 whether these are approved or denied upon initial determination. If they get someone who looks at the big picture, they'll be approved; if they get someone who is a stickler for the rules, they'll be denied. All supervisors would tell you to deny these people. If they appeal, they'll almost certainly be approved.
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The Psycho Kids: These are people under the age of 30 who have never had a job that pays above minimum wage and no education beyond high school who are claiming disability due to vague depression/anxiety. Again, they're taking medication but it's unlikely they've ever seen an actual mental health professional, and if they did it was something like they talked to a therapist once or twice. They certainly aren't receiving any regular psychiatric treatment, and no suicide attempts or hospitalizations. These are almost always rural whites. They are invariably denials.
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The Accidental Cases: These are similar to the first type of case except the claimant is younger and is claiming disability not based on a degenerative condition but on the inability to due his job following a traumatic injury. they are usually misinformed about the law, however, and think that they're disabled because they can't go back to their normal job, and are usually under this impression because they worked with an older guy who got it. Unfortunately for them, as long as they're capable of doing a sedentary job, they aren't disabled. One guy, who broke his back in a motorcycle accident, told me his doctor told him he wouldn't be able to be a mechanic anymore and should do something with computers. He then jokingly told me that he didn't know anything about computers. Though he didn't realize it, this was practically an admission from his doctor that he was still able to work. These cases are almost always denials.
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The True Psychos: These are the real psych cases, almost always SSI, usually involving younger or homeless claimants. Mental retardation, schizophrenia, anxiety/depression serious enough to end in multiple hospitalizations, severe bipolar disorder. Children usually also have serious behavioral problems at home or at school. Usually approvals, with a few weird denials mixed in due to the occasional odd circumstance.
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The Death Bed Cases: These are people with terminal diseases who aren't going to survive for much longer. There's an entire division that deals with nothing but these to get the approvals in faster, though in some cases there's an expedited process where they can start receiving benefits before full approval. Always approved.
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The One-Shot Cases: People who have one weird condition that obviously doesn't qualify them, but they apply anyway on the off chance they're approved. One woman in her early 30s applied because of heavy vaginal bleeding. This also includes people who have already retired, get some condition, and apply for SSDI to top up their pensions before they qualify for regular benefits. One guy who had a desk job with the state Auditor General's office tried applying because he started having mini-strokes after he retired, though he was hard-pressed to explain how they would have theoretically prevented him from working had he not been retired. These are denials.
I hesitate to categorize them based on genuine cases versus those that are simply trying to game the system because, with the possible exception of the psycho kids and the one-shot cases, I don't really think that anyone is consciously trying to game the system. The rest of these people are either genuinely disabled or genuinely think they're disabled. The classic cases are actually disabled but will go back to work if they can. The generally unhealthy aren't disabled but are convinced they are, the complex cases may or may not be disabled but they can be forgiven for thinking they might be, the accidental cases think they are based on a misunderstanding of the law, the true psychos are disabled but might not know it themselves, same with the death bed cases. Even the one shot cases have a lot of people think that they're disabled based on the simplistic formula of medical condition + makes my job difficult = permanent disability.
And even if some people are consciously trying to game the system, their cases are so obviously bullshit that no one trained to adjudicate them would ever consider approving them. These articles can cite various doctors and lawyers all they want, but even with coaching, nobody who is willing to "retire" because $945/month is forthcoming is intelligent enough to keep up an elaborate ruse for decades. In my career since, I've had to prepare witnesses for depositions, and while I'm not going to say that witnesses never lie in depositions, I can say that it's not because of anything theur attorneys told them to say. Properly preparing a witness for deposition takes days, unless they're a corporate representative who has testified several times before. Even for a corporate witness, it's not easy to prepare them to answer questions in a way that isn't inadvertently damaging. And these are people with college degrees and careers at the highest levels of business. Some hillbilly who barely graduated high school isn't going to be able to effectively fake disability no matter how many doctors and lawyers talk to him, because he's not going to know how to answer the questions. I'd be more worried about a legitimate claimant being denied because they gave the answers they thought the adjudicator wanted to hear than someone who gets denied because they answered honestly. Unless they have a really sophisticated understanding of how the process works, they're not going to be able to do it, and the factors are complicated enough that they're not going to get such an understanding. Even the people here, or who write psych blogs, or articles from NPR, or who are physicians treating claimants, seem to have such an understanding.
Edit - Pinging @ThomasdelVasto
Rov_Scam
27d ago
I don't blame you for this mistake (for lack of a better term), because I didn't notice it until the second time I read your post, but I think our tendency to allow the present to inform out perceptions of the past can lead us toward explanations that don't make sense. At no point in 2015 was any of the smart money convinced that Trump was a viable political candidate. The perception of him before the 2016 primaries was that he was an unserious candidate who tapped into the resentments of a certain kind of person who typically didn't vote. Given the amount of vitriol he received from pretty much everyone in the Republican establishment and his questionable standing among Evangelical Christians, it was assumed that he was good at getting headlines and winning in too-early-to matter polls but as soon as the people who actually mattered started paying attention his standing would drop like a rock.
It seems pretty clear to me that Lana's personal problems have nothing to do with Trump, or the culture war in general. By the time Trump announced his candidacy, her marriage was pretty much over, she was making intimate details of her relationship with her husband semi-public, and she was burning bridges in her social circle—I'm hesitant to conclude that gay marriage disagreements had anything to do with that; if she was oversharing with people such as yourself who barely knew her, you can only imagine what she was telling people from church.
I had a friend in college who grew up relatively poor in a wealthy suburb. He always had this outside fixation on status and success. He majored in business, and read books by Donald Trump and other motivational people that he took literally as business advice. He wanted to go to law school and be a sports agent, and he interned with a sports agency and got to meet Barry Sanders. But his obsession was entirely superficial. For example, he'd read in his popular business books about the importance of budgeting time, so he'd block off time in the evenings to do homework and study. But this consisted of him watching television with a book open, which he'd close at 9pm or whatever and say that he'd already done his studying for the night and was keeping on schedule. When I told him I didn't much like scotch, he told me I should develop a taste for it because that's what the big dogs drank. When his aging Volvo got totaled after a drunk driver rear-ended him at a traffic light, he started test driving cars like the Ford Explorer Eddie Bauer Edition (new, of course) rather than buy whatever the insurance payout would get him.
At some point he got the idea that taking prescription opiates recreationally was a high-status thing to do. When he first mentioned that he liked painkillers, I thought maybe he was just finding a silver lining in dental work or something. When he started talking about it more, I tried to disabuse him of the notion that it was cool by noting its nickname of "hillbilly heroin" and pointing to a bust in West Virginia that had been on the news. He assured me, though, that top businessmen and all the hip young Wall Street traders and attorneys used it to unwind. I never actually saw him take anything, but he came into my dorm room one day junior year asking if I had any painkillers. I pulled a bottle of gin out of my desk and told him that was the only painkiller I needed, and he laughed but said, no, seriously. When I informed him that I didn't (which wasn't entirely true because I had most of a Percocet prescription left over, though I wasn't about to commit a felony for a few bucks), he asked my roommate, who was a bit of a stoner but not a junkie and also someone he barely knew. My roommate seemed taken aback that he would make such a request, and I was inclined to agree.
The problem became more serious later that year, when he started stealing from his roommate. They had been together since Freshman year without incident, and there was enough trust between them that the roommate would leave his wallet out on his desk when in class. This guy would then fill his gas tank and be back before his roommate returned (this was in the days when most credit card purchases required a signature; gas stations didn't if you paid at the pump). After the roommate found out he informed the administration and this guy was banned from the dorms. He still attended the school, though he had huge gaps in his day with nowhere to go, and he was embarrassed for other people to find out what had happened, so he'd hang around the dorm entrance and wait for somebody to go in, and since everyone recognized him as a resident he'd usually be let in, and he'd find a not-too close acquaintance to hang out with until his next class. I let him in once after he supposedly forgot his keys and he decided to hang out in my room for a couple hours, which I thought was odd since that never happened in the preceding two and a half years, but whatever. By this point, my roommate had withdrawn and I had a single room, and a day or so later this guy asked my if I'd mind letting him stay in the extra bed for a couple nights. By this point, I knew what was going on and asked him what was wrong with his own bed down the hall, and he gave me some bullshit answer about not some unspecified problems with his own roommate, and in the spirit of malicious compliance I told him that if it was that bad I'd be happy to have him for the rest of the year so long as he put an official request in, which in my experience would be approved by the end of the day. But if there was something he wasn't telling me then absolutely not or I could get in serious trouble. After I informed the rest of our friends of this exchange it was agreed that the administration had to be informed, and everyone in the dorm had to know that they weren't to let him in under any circumstances. After we reported him, he was expelled.
For a long time, I've had a personal policy of not getting involved in other people's drama, and it's served me well. What I mean by that is that if two people I know are having a dispute and one confides in me I tell them that I can sympathize but since I'm not involved I don't know everything about what's going on and, he (or she) hasn't done anything to me personally, so I'm not going to take sides in a matter that's really none of my business. That being said, if I am involved, and the offense is serious enough, I'm not going to pull any punches, even if it ends up destroying your life. I was friends with this guy, but we weren't exactly close; we hung out a lot, but I primarily was friends with him through other people. As all his other friends dropped off, I tried to remain aloof and neutral. When he asked me to do something that could land me in serious trouble so he could keep up the facade of still living in the dorms, that was the last straw. He seriously thought I didn't know he was a thief and would have no problem letting him live with me; for all I know, he had plans to steal from me had I been sucker enough to let him stay.
I don't know if the drug use was a way for an insecure guy to try to look cool, or if the claims that it was cool were justifications for his using it to cope with insecurity, but I really don't know that it matters. What I did learn from this, as well as from every situation similar to this that I've witnessed, is that people who are intent on destroying their lives aren't going to listen to reason, and are going to continue alienating everyone around them until there's nobody left and they're forced to face God alone. I understand the virtues of loyalty, but it's a two way street, and patience runs out if the other person doesn't show loyalty in return and tries to take advantage of you. To my friend's credit, as far as these things go, he never tried to guilt trip anyone or talk crap about anyone or intentionally create drama. The numerous times we told him that his behavior was unacceptable, that narcotics addiction wasn't cool, and that he'd never achieve his goals by going down this road, he wouldn't get angry but just roll his eyes and tell us we didn't know what we were talking about, or just say "okay" and then keep doing what he was doing.
The good news is that this story at least appears to have a somewhat happy ending. I lost touch with this guy as soon as he was expelled, and haven't talked to him since. A year or two later I heard he had gone to rehab and was back in some kind of school, though this may have been community college. All of this info comes from a friend who was closer to him than I was and who I used to talk to on the phone regularly. When the subject came up, he said he didn't know much but the situation while we were in school was worse than I realized at the time, though he either didn't provide details or I don't remember them. About a decade ago I found out he was selling industrial supplies for some company in the exurbs. More recently, I found out he married a girl who did the kind of low-level bookkeeping someone with an associate's degree in accounting does and they were living in a fairly nice area with a kid or two. The friend didn't know if he worked for the same company or what he was doing now.
It's certainly a decent life, but it's a far cry from what he wanted to be. Sales guys can make more money than I do, but money does not equal status. The best he can hope for on that front, where he is now, is hanging out with local contractors and small-town bank managers at steakhouses housed in strip malls, and a couple times a year taking his wife out to one of the restaurants with dazzling views of the city that attract the kind of people who say "ooh, classy" when they walk inside but that no one with any kind of real status would be caught dead in, not least of which because they serve overpriced "funeral food". Then again, maybe had he been more mature he'd have realized that this was a life worth pursuing, since those of us who ended up working in Downtown offices with floor to ceiling windows and personal secretaries realized that all that gets you is invitations to impossibly boring parties hosted by judges and politicians that everyone attends out of obligation and no one actually enjoys. Then again, maybe the whole status thing was a phase he would have grown out of, or maybe he would have just been to untalented or lazy to ever have a shot at the big leagues to begin with.
Circling back to Lana, I'm guessing that she had a personal crisis that she couldn't handle, and for whatever reason she found herself looking more for validation than practical advice, and when the people in her life started telling her things she didn't want to hear, she lashed out and cut them off. It's not like her family and friends were all Republicans who supported Trump and she couldn't take them anymore; it seems like she alienated people on all sides of the political spectrum. And when you cut yourself off from everyone in your life, what's left? It's not just you and God alone now, because there will always be internet message boards where the friendless will always be able to receive unconditional validation for their poor choices or get endlessly berated, depending on which board it is and who's logged on at the time. Something tells me that neither is what this woman needs. I hope she gets help and can lead a happy, productive life again, but I don't think politics has much to do with it.
Rov_Scam
4mo ago
Firstly, monetary damages cannot be irreperable harm, and this is a settled legal principle for hundreds of years.
This is a general principle, but there are always exceptions. Most of these involve judgment-proof defendants. Say Fred and Sam are having a dispute over a driveway Sam uses to access his business. Fred puts up concrete barricades on the disputed right-of-way, denying access to Sam or any customers, preventing use of the business. Sam cannot operate his business and sues Fred for trespass. Sam may be able to calculate that he's losing $5,000/day in revenue while the barricades are up; under the rule, he wouldn't be entitled to a TRO. Except any court would grant him one, because if the case takes a year to resolve, it's unlikely that fred will be able to come up with $1.8 million in damages.
This example is based on a case I actually dealt with a couple years ago except the defendant wasn't some random guy but a railroad (it was a dispute over a crossing agreement). I was still able to get a TRO, not because there was any question of the railroad's ability to pay damages but because I convinced the judge that my client couldn't afford the mortgage and ongoing maintenance costs to the property without the property generating any revenue. Damages would be cold comfort if the property were foreclosed on and he were forced into bankruptcy.
Another case I was peripherally involved with during my time in oil and gas involved a contractual dispute between Warren Steel and a coal company whose name I can't remember. (This is a grossly oversimplified version) Warren had an ongoing contract with the company that required them to deliver coal to the mill a few times a week. They were way behind on payments and owed hundreds of thousands of dollars. The coal company said they weren't getting any more shipments until they paid what was overdue. Warren sued the coal company for breach of contract arguing that future deliveries weren't conditioned on payment for prior deliveries. From here it gets a bit complicated. The typical remedy here would be for Warren to buy coal on the spot market and collect the price difference from the breaching coal company. Warren argued that their financial position was precarious (there was no denying this based on their payment history) and that they would be unable to secure credit to buy at sharply inflated spot market prices. If the coal company didn't make their next scheduled shipment, they wouldn't be able to make any steel, would have to shut down the mill, and any hope of them remaining operational would be gone. the court issued the TRO and told the coal company to make the delivery. In any event, Warren Steel filed for bankruptcy a few days later.
And who could forget the man himself, Donald Trump. If you remember, last year he was on the wrong end of a nine-figure civil judgment, and was told that if he wanted to stay the judgment pending appeal he would have to post a bond of $450 million within 30 days. This is about as clear-cut as it gets—he had $450 million in assets. If he posted the bond and won the appeal, he'd get the money back. So what's the problem? He successfully argued that since no insurance company would take real estate as collateral, he would have to liquidate it at fire sale prices, causing irreparable harm. The judge agreed and reduced the bond to something an insurance company could manage.
Secondly, a TRO must have an end date. That's part of what makes a TRO temporary.
Most court orders aren't written by the court. If I'm asking for a TRO, I have a copy of the order with me and I hand it to the judge to sign if she decides to grant it. In most cases, you're asking for the TRO in motions court early in the process before the case is listed for trial and assigned a judge.After that it has to go to calendar control for them to schedule a hearing for a preliminary injunction. By law that hearing has to be within 14 days, but the judge who's signing it doesn't know when that's going to be; the upshot is that we put the 14 day max in the order.
In this case, the judge who issued the TRO wrote the order herself after the hearing had already been scheduled. She's hearing arguments tomorrow, after which, she'll either lift the order entirely or grant an injunction. There was no reason to put a specific expiration date because it's implied that she's going to lift it after the hearing.
Rov_Scam
5mo 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.
As someone who find his posts obnoxious in general, I don't have any problem with the formatting. I actually wish more people would format longer posts like this since they're much easier to read and navigate than a wall of text.
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