Rov_Scam
5mo ago
attempting to reach the town of Sagwon
Alright, I'm going to stop you right there. Sagwon is not a town. Sagwon is an abandoned airstrip that was built to service the construction of the Alaska pipeline. The best you can hope to find there is a passing truck on the Dalton Highway you can flag down for an awkward six-hour-plus ride to Wiseman. It would make more sense to start at Sagwon since at least you'd have a real town to aim for. This is relative, though. When you first talked about this you kept mentioning a trek through the forest so I though you were talking about the lowlands in the vicinity of the southern entrance to Gates of the Arctic National Park. What you have proposed is crossing the Brooks Range in an area where I'm not sure anyone crosses it. Do you have avalanche training? What ski setup are you using? Are you going backcountry xc, tele, or full backcountry touring? Do you have an ice axe, crampons, and screws? How's your downhill skiing ability? Can you at least drop into an easy bowl without more than a cursory look? If so, can you still do it with open heels? How many passes will you have to cross? I could go on but I think you get the point. On second thought, start from Arctic Village; at least then you aren't committed and can turn back.
Rov_Scam
6mo ago
It depends on the case and how far along it is, and sometimes you need permission from the judge, but there are ethics rules governing this. I'm barred in Pennsylvania, and their rules are fairly representative:
Except as stated in paragraph (c), a lawyer may withdraw from representing a client if: (1) withdrawal can be accomplished without material adverse effect on the interests of the client; (2) The client persists in a course of action involving the lawyer's services that the lawyer reasonably believes is criminal or fraudulent; (3) The client has used the lawyer's services to perpetrate a crime or fraud; (4) The client insists upon taking action that the lawyer considers repugnant or with which the lawyer has a fundamental disagreement; (5) The client fails substantially to fulfill an obligation to the lawyer regarding the lawyer's services and has been given reasonable warning that the lawyer will withdraw unless the obligation is fulfilled; (6) The representation will result in an unreasonable financial burden on the lawyer or has been rendered unreasonably difficult by the client; or (7) other good cause for withdrawal exists.
The most common reasons are that the lawyer doesn't get paid or the client is completely nuts and overly demanding, but those two usually go hand in hand (the clients who expect the most are always the ones who don't want to pay). If there are pending actions you need permission from the court, and whether you'll get it depends on the first prong of this test, which is basically related to how far along the litigation is. If it's fairly early the court will usually grant a motion to withdraw for any reason. If the case is well-developed the court may be more reluctant, but things can always be rescheduled. If you're in the middle of a trial, forget it, unless there's some compelling reason like you're in the hospital. In criminal cases it's a bit harder because you may have a client sitting in jail who can't take a 6 month delay the way a civil plaintiff can.
As a side note, it's worth mentioning that some attorneys work on contingency (usually when representing tort plaintiffs), and the "haven't got paid" question gets a bit trickier since there's no payment until the case is resolved. This is why all attorneys working on contingency include clauses requiring the client to accept any settlement offer the attorney recommends. The lawyer has to put in his or her time and expenses up front, and doesn't want to waste it all on a client who's insulted by good offers because he's chasing some pipe-dream bonanza or wants to make a point win or lose. And if the client decides they want a new lawyer, the prior lawyer can put a lien on the case for the time and expenses already incurred. This makes it pretty much a given that the client will take the offer, because no lawyer wants to take a case whose value is already diminished by what the previous lawyer is owed, especially from a client who just turned down a reasonable offer. Some clients will still do this and the lawyer just has to eat the fees, but lawyers are used to having to eat time and costs anyway because there's nothing they can really do if they don't get paid, since the costs of enforcement are usually higher than the costs of letting sleeping dogs lie. This isn't only true for the general public; insurance companies are among the most notorious clients for not paying bills. Most have entire departments where people pore over legal bills looking for things to challenge. My current firm has recently outsourced our billing to a third party company run by someone who used to do this who looks at our bills to make sure they're worded in such a way that the insurance companies will pay them. If we really force the issue they will pay, but they'll also take their business elsewhere. We've even been told to bill as much as possible even if it seems unreasonable and unlikely to get paid since if they're going to cut something anyway we at least shouldn't sell ourselves short.
Rov_Scam
8mo ago
If Musk had simply gone to the DoD and told them that his company couldn't afford to keep providing this service free of charge, he probably could have reached a deal similar to the one he got much earlier. Instead, he started messing around with the service itself, and if that wasn't bad enough, he is alleged to have engaged in a little amateur diplomacy that resulted in his publicly proposing a settlement to the war that he had to have known the people he was ostensibly helping would find unacceptable.
I sit on the board of a nonprofit that relies heavily on volunteers. While I don't expect these volunteers to have the kind of dedication an employee would, nothing irritates me more than when someone volunteers to do something and then doesn't do it. No, you're under no obligation to help me. But keep in mind that if you tell me you're going to come and then don't show up it complicates things because now I have to rearrange my plans on the fly, and your absence may be the difference between finishing the job in one day and having to dedicate more time. If I know this in advance I can work around it, but I don't like surprises. Even worse is when a vendor reneges on a deal. Yes, I'm grateful that you're providing goods or services for free or at a reduced price, but when you change the terms a week before the event I either have to come up with money that's not in the budget or find someone else on short notice. It's probably not the best analogy, but the point is that just because you're doing something nice at your own expense doesn't mean people don't have a legitimate reason to be pissed if they get cut off before they've accomplished the goal you're ostensibly helping them with.
Rov_Scam
10mo ago
One of the biggest errors one can commit is reading history through the lens of the present rather than through the lens of the past. Yes, we now know that the USSR became a military juggernaut in WWII and subsequently became a superpower at the head of an international league of communist states whose power only rivaled the US and the West more broadly. But things looked different in 1939. Sure, Stalin was a strongman and a thug, but so is Paul Biya, and most Americans haven't even heard of him, let alone are concerned about him. I'm not trying to equivocate the USSR in 1939 with Cameroon today, but if one were trying to evaluate international threats back then, it would be ridiculous to put the Soviet Union in the same league as Germany. Russia had always been a backwater, and Soviet attempts to industrialize and modernize hadn't really borne much fruit, resulting famines due to agricultural "reforms". Furthermore, Stalin's purges had left the military apparatus in complete disarray, and this is after they had collapsed in the first World War and not exactly had much success before that. At the same time, Germany was a historically strong power is intent on remilitarizing in contravention of the Versailles treaty, all the while spouting rhetoric that war was necessary for national hygiene and demonstrating that not only did it wish to annex heretofore independent countries that had German-speaking populations, but that it would invade other countries as well, even after it had explicitly promised not to. If Roosevelt had taken the same level of caution toward Stalin as he did toward Hitler, he would have been an idiot.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
Mass shootings in the popular conscience mean shootings where random innocent people are targeted either for unknown reasons or because someone doesn't like a particular group. These were all shootings where specific people were targeted for specific reasons, probably drug-related. These stories usually get decent local coverage but some gang beef in Memphis isn't likely to concern people a thousand miles away like it would if the same guy shot the same people at a shopping mall for no reason.
Journalists had no issue pointing out when a police officer who allegedly did something abusive is White.
Because when gangbangers shoot other gangbangers it's expected. If the shooters are caught, they invariably go to prison. It isn't complicated. Cops are supposed to be there to protect the public, and in a society where accused criminals have rights, we don't excuse police shootings just because the victim was probably a piece of shit. We expect the police to have better judgment and self-control than the criminals. When someone is killed while in police custody it raises questions about the proper role of police and use of police force that simply doesn't come into play when one random civilian murders another random civilian. Pointing out black-on-black crime in response to police violence is an exercise in futility because it ignores the dilemma that people in violent neighborhoods face — they don't want to deal with criminals on the streets, but it's hard for them to trust the police when they treat everyone like criminals.
Rov_Scam
2mo ago
I thought the same thing too until I saw that Oregon's overdose rate was among the lowest in the country at time the law was enacted and continues to be relatively low even after the recent spike. West Virginia has the worst rate in the country and it saw a similar doubling over roughly the same period, and that isn't exactly a lax jurisdiction. I wonder how much of the surge is simply due to an unusually low base rate in an area where you'd expect it to be higher.
Rov_Scam
2mo ago
For the past 25 years or so, Christians have, among the irreligious, had a connotation of being the kind of bible-thumping holy rollers who promote conservative politics. Even among a lot of actual Christians (Catholics in particular), the idea of subscribing to some explicitly Christian conceptions (like advertising yourself as a Christian bathroom remodeling company, Christian Rock, etc.) usually brands someone not as a regular guy that happens to attend a Methodist church, or whatever, but a megachurch-attending wackaloon. I think the idea of these ads isn't to convey some complex theological thought but to reassure the masses that faith in Jesus doesn't necessarily put you in this bucket. For all the complaints among conservatives that mainstream Protestants and liberal Catholics have gone off the woke deep end, this is only apparent to people who are already immersed in Christian culture; it certainly isn't represented in the media, except for maybe a few minutes at the end of the news if the story involves the Pope. It's certainly a ham-fisted, dumb, and probably vain attempt, but I don't think it's necessary to read too much into it. You may complain about how certain facets of the ads are on spurious theological ground, but as a Catholic I could argue that most of the Christian churches in this country are operating on spurious theological ground (and they'd say the same about me, of course).
Rov_Scam
5mo ago
If you have a problem with the quality of the discourse then the solution is to contribute with something more interesting, not to add an uninteresting complaint.
Rov_Scam
6mo ago
I think part of the problem is that people have short memories when it comes to the economy, and tend to look at the past with rose-colored glasses. Younger people, meanwhile, have no recollection of being adults during a real economic downturn. People don't remember that if you were a young college graduate from about 2009 to 2012 it was very difficult to find a normal desk job unless you majored in engineering or computer science, and even then the market wasn't exactly gangbusters. Now companies are bitching about how they can't find enough employees. Hell, even the steel mills in the Mon Valley are accepting open applications from people off the street with no experience, a situation which was unthinkable since at least the mid-'70s.
About a week ago a guy I drink with on occasion was lamenting the bleak outlook young people have today with all the inflation, the war in Ukraine, the Hamas attack, etc. The only problem was that he was born in 1956; inflation back then was an order of magnitude worse than it is now, the situation in the Middle East was arguably worse (especially with respect to Israel), and the whole of Eastern Europe was controlled by a Soviet state with international influence Putin can only dream of. He doesn't remember it that way, of course, but no one ever does.
Rov_Scam
7mo ago
Yes, it was very real. There are a certain segment of Penn State football fans who refuse to believe anything negative about the program, and while this is usually limited to making excuses for Joe Paterno, a few have gone off the deep end and claimed that the abuse never happened. There is some question as to what exactly Mike McQueary witnessed that led to the coverup that got higher-ups indicted, but without that there are still enough known victims that it's clear Sandusky was an abuser. The allegations that kicked off the grand jury investigation were recent and unrelated to those that were reported on the most.
Rov_Scam
11mo ago
Back in 2010 I toyed with the idea of calling into sports talk shows and fuck with them by asking if the Pittsburgh Penguins should fire Dan Bylsma and convince Jaromir Jagr to retire so that he could take over as head coach. Bylsma was coming off a Stanley Cup championship that he had guided the team to after being hired the previous February to replace Michel Therrien, but the Pens were going through a bit of a midwinter slump in January (though not nearly as bad as the one that had prompted Therrien's firing).
So the idea was ridiculous—that they'd fire a championship coach who hadn't even been with the team a full season, and replace him with a guy who wasn't even retired (he was 37 years old and playing in Russia at the time but he'd return to the NHL the following season and stayed until he was nearly 50) and had never expressed any interest in coaching. It was based entirely on a dream I had where I was at a game and Jagr was standing behind the bench in a suit, and it was the height of hilarity when friends of mine were under the influence of certain intoxicants.
So I asked ChatGTP "What was the source of the early 2010 rumor that the Penguins were considering firing Dan Bylsma and replacing him with Jaromir Jagr?" It came up with a whole story about how the rumor was based on a mistranslation of an interview he gave to Czech media where he said that he'd like to coach some day after he retired and the Penguins were one of the teams he was interested in, and the whole thing got blown out of proportion by the Pittsburgh media. Except that never happened, though I give it credit for making the whole thing sound reasonable. I've come to the conclusion that if you word your prompts in such a way that certain facts are presumed to be true, the AI will simply treat them as true, though not all of the time. For instance, it was savvy enough to contradict my claim that George W. Bush was considering switching parties and seeking the Democratic nomination in 2004.
Rov_Scam
11mo ago
In my experience most of the American expats who talk about how great the healthcare system is in other countries are almost always young people who don't have to deal with catastrophic problems or manage long-term conditions, and if they did wouldn't have had a comparable experience back in the US. I remember one former coworker who was living in France brag about how he went to the doctor for some minor ailment and was only charged ten dollars and got a prescription that only cost a few bucks. Well, that's pretty much how it works in the US if you have any kind of insurance at all that isn't an absolute bottom-feeder. I had cellulitis about a decade ago and that's pretty much how it was at urgent care, they gave me a bunch of prescriptions that were so inexpensive the OTC probiotic the doctor recommended was more expensive than all of them combined. For more serious ailments the usual story is that you go in and don't pay anything up front and then in a few months the insurance company sends you a bill that's more than you think you should pay based on your understanding of the policy but not enough that it causes any financial hardship or is worth complaining about. So like a few hundred dollars.
When it comes to medical bankruptcies, I practiced bankruptcy law for a while and they aren't what you think they are. While you occasionally see someone who was uninsured and now owes a hospital $60 grand or something, that's pretty rare. What's more common is that a relatively low-income person has insurance but an injury or illness keeps them out of work for an extended period and they're forced to borrow to pay for expenses. These people aren't likely to have short-term disability insurance, and long-term disability from Social Security doesn't kick in until after they've been out of work for a year (though they get paid from the date they stopped work), and takes a while to process. By the time they get their disability payments or are back to work they're so far in a hole that bankruptcy is the best option. They usually have a lot of unpaid medical bills that are included in the bankruptcy, but that's not the driving force.
Rov_Scam
2mo ago
A Season in Time by Todd Denault, the story of the 1992–93 NHL season. It's pretty much an object lesson on why Americans can't stand Canadian sportswriters. It starts off with a preface where the author boldly proclaims that this was the greatest season in NHL history, and also lets it drop that this happened to be his senior year of high school and that he stopped following hockey as closely when he got to college. Okay, so there's some emotional attachment to the subject selection, but that's not too big a deal. That season did have a number of compelling storylines—Gretzky coming back from injury to make his only cup finals appearance with the Kings, Mario Lemieux's battle with cancer that saw him miss a month of the season and still win the scoring race, Teemu Selanne absolutely destroying Mike Bossy's rookie goal scoring record, the inaugural seasons of the expansion Tampa Bay Lightning and Ottawa Senators, and several others. It also happened to be the last time a Canadian team won the Stanley Cup.
Unfortunately, if you knew nothing about the season when you started reading this you'd incorrectly assume that this team was the Toronto Maple Leafs, because Denault spends the first five chapters talking about them. They were a storied franchise in hockey's most important city that had been god awful for over a decade, and in 1993 they put together an unlikely playoff run. But they got eliminated in the Conference finals. Denault can't even talk about other teams without bringing the Leafs into the discussion; the Pittsburgh Penguins were an absolute juggernaut that year and were expected to cruise to a third straight championship before getting upset in the second round of the playoffs. That and Lemieux's story make the PEnguins a compelling team to talk about this season. But we have to hear about them in terms of how this was the team the Maple Leafs aspired to be, blah, blah, blah. We have an entire chapter about GM Cliff Fletcher's time with Calgary in the '80s. We have a chapter about coach Pat Burns's career as a police officer before entering coaching. If he wanted to write a book about the 92–93 Leafs, why not just do it?
The book is about as extensively researched as one can expect it to be, provided you don't expect the author to leave Toronto. When discussing media reaction to the events of the season, the quotes are almost exclusively from Toronto newspapers or The Hockey News. There's something disconcerting about discussing media reaction without bothering to see what people in the cities where the teams actually played were saying. After all, these are the guys who are covering one team full-time all season. He discusses the calls on Hockey Night in Canada Broadcasts as though they were the definitive icons of the game, even if the game involved two American teams. It's almost as if he lives in a solipsistic dreamland where the only real team is the Toronto Maple Leafs and all other teams exists solely to give them competition; they don't have their own struggles or fanbases or media. It's like they're all the Washington Generals going up against the Harlem Globetrotters, except the Globetrotters suck.
I could forgive all that, though, if the book were at least engaging. And it is, provided the author is giving background information and speaking in broad strokes. Unfortunately, most of the book is descriptions of games that mean little if you aren't actually watching them. It suffers from the same problem as war histories that try to provide overly detailed descriptions of actual battles. It doesn't matter how good the prose is if you don't have a lighted map to show you the troop movements. This isn't too much of a problem until we get to the playoffs, at which point it's nothing but this, over and over again. Even the interstitial bits between games aren't compelling since all he does is quote players and coaches giving meaningless quotes to the media like "We need to play better" after a loss. I get that there's not much to go with here, but Denault doesn't give his audience any credit and quotes this stuff as if it were genuinely insightful.
I've certainly read much worse things, but I'm pissed off that the book started off engaging enough but slowed to a crawl when the playoffs just became game after game after game. So I'm waaay too far into this to stop reading (over 300 pages) but I've still got a hundred to go and I can only read it in short sittings. It's frustrating. I hope Canadian teams lose and lose early for every year here on out because the Canadian media deserves it. I'd like to talk about how Canadian hockey fans suck and most Americans parrot the same bullshit because they assume the Canadians know better, but that's a rant for another day.
Rov_Scam
11mo ago
Also: the claim that women were the primary brewers historically, is not only dumb, it's also wrong
For most of history beer was generally home-brewed, and in those instances it was indeed produced primarily by women.
Rov_Scam
10d ago
He's not going to send in troops in any year, because there are already other enforcement mechanisms built into the law. The most obvious consequence would be that Texas loses Federal education funding, which is a hug deal because education funding accounts for about 20% of all Federal money Texas receives, and the state school system — which is already among the lowest-spending in the country — is already facing cuts now that the COVID stimulus is gone and the state legislature can't agree on how to pay for the shortfall. This won't happen immediately, though; my guess is that someone will file a lawsuit and enforcement will be dependent on a favorable court ruling, which won't come until well after the election. The real question is whether Abbott will be willing to enforce his own edict. State schools will be caught between a rock and a hard place if compliance with one law comes down to breaking another. Biden has the luxury of time, but if a school decides to do what they want to do then Abbott has some tough decisions to make.
To be fair, the statement about trans pride day was on March 29, while today he put out an Easter message in which he said the following:
Jill and I send our warmest wishes to Christians around the world celebrating Easter Sunday. Easter reminds us of the power of hope and the promise of Christ’s Resurrection.
As we gather with loved ones, we remember Jesus’ sacrifice. We pray for one another and cherish the blessing of the dawn of new possibilities. And with wars and conflict taking a toll on innocent lives around the world, we renew our commitment to work for peace, security, and dignity for all people.
From our family to yours, happy Easter and may God bless you.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
Sorry for the delayed reply — it's a holiday weekend and I've been spending time with my family. To answer your question, the short answer is what @sarker said. The longer answer is, as with a lot of things, it depends. I personally try to use flac whenever possible, though a large part of my collection is mp3 I got before I decided to switch over everything circa 2014, and I just haven't updated it yet. But, and this is a big but, I also do most of my listening on one of two serious stereos I own or a pair of over-the-ear headphones which are top of the line for wireless ones. So keep that in mind.
So it depends on what your starting point is and what you expect to gain. High quality lossy formats are virtually indistinguishable from lossless formats. Subtractive testing has shown that very little audible material is lost in 320 kbps mp3 as compared to flac. That being said, different program material responds differently to compression; a solo acoustic guitar piece is going to be much easier to compress than a symphony. So I keep mine in flac not because there's an obvious audible difference, but because there might be and audible difference and I'm not going to A/B every single file to save a little bit of hard drive space. But I'm also listening on a relatively high-end system; any differences are going to be less audible on less transparent hardware. If you're system consists of a pair of airpods, a Bose lifestyle system, and a portable bluetooth speaker, and you don't have any expectation of ever upgrading, then the chances of there ever being an audible difference is going to be much lower.
Another consideration is the current makeup of your collection. I've spent a decade making the transition to flac, but my collection contains nearly 100,000 files and I'm very particular about tagging and artwork so making the changeover is going to be harder for me than for someone with 10,000 files who's satisfied with autotagging. Do you currently rely on a streaming service? If you're happy with streaming then it would probably make more sense to switch to a hi-res platform like Tidal than to start a collection from scratch. If you're looking to get off of streaming and starting from scratch or close to it, then flac makes sense if space isn't a concern. Is space a concern? Mp3s first came to prominence in an era when a 20 gb hard drive was considered large, and continued to make sense for large collections even as average sizes were in the hundreds of gb. But now that you can get a 5 tb hard drive for like 150 bucks, there's no reason to worry about space.
Unless, of course, you intend to keep your entire collection on your phone, in which case file size still is a concern, and you may want to consider a lossy format, though mp3 is outdated at this point and there are better options on the market, though since I switched to lossless I'm not hip to the exact details. I personally listen to music on my phone, especially when I'm at work/hiking/biking/in the car, but I listen to entire albums compulsively and work from lists I've made, so I just keep a rotating collection of 20-30 albums on my phone from what's next on the list. So to conclude, it depends. If you give me more detail on your setup, plans for the future, and listening habits, I may be able to give you a more definitive answer, but I hope that's enough to get you started.
Now, this isn't what you asked, but since you're obviously interested in sound quality, I'd be remiss if I didn't include it. Bitrate and compression are only part of the equation. Different masterings of an album will have much more of an impact on the sound of a recording than the file format. For instance, a record released in the 1971 may have several vinyl pressings from various territories. Then, with the advent of the CD in the 1980s, there are US, Japanese, UK, and European editions, all of which sound quite different from the others. Then there was a "Remastered Version" from 1995 with a few bonus tracks with the same mastering used for each territory, and then a 2 CD "Deluxe Edition" from 2012 with yet another mastering followed by a single CD edition from 2015 which doesn't have any bonus tracks but uses the 2012 mastering. And there's also an audiophile gold CD from Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab or DCC from 2001, and an audiophile vinyl edition from 2009. Whether you're getting your music from legitimate sources or the high seas, the easiest one to find is usually going to be whatever mass-market edition is currently in print (and it will often be the only one that is legitimately available for download or streaming), and this will usually not be the edition with the best sound quality, given the casualties of the loudness wars and tendency towards noise reduction and questionable EQ choices.
So finding the best sounding version of a record isn't always a straightforward process (though relatively new music will only have one mastering). It often requires perusing online forums to find the internet consensus, and I may even download multiple versions of an album before settling on the best one. As I alluded to above, this is more of a problem for older material that's been reissued numerous times, and that was recorded in the analog days when recording wasn't always great and when original master tapes weren't always used for CD reissues. I can provide more information about this aspect if you're interested, up to and including my own personal recommendations, but for now I at least wanted to make you aware of it. Again, sorry for the delay but I wanted to give you a complete answer rather than a pithy yes or no.
Rov_Scam
3mo ago
As a lawyer who represents clients who get sued almost weekly, I can assure you that avoiding service isn't an effective strategy to defend a lawsuit. It's not like the case gets dismissed if they take too long or can't find you after three tries. What really happens is they document their attempts and go to court to get permission for alternative service which, depending on the jurisdiction, could amount to nothing more than running an ad in the paper. In the meantime, you've been turning your life upside down to avoid the process server, and you've been so successful that while you were hiding in your friend's basement you got legally served and didn't know it. In the meantime, the case has proceeded and resulted in a default judgment against you. Now you get to go to court yourself to try and convince the judge that there was a good reason you didn't get served and he should throw out the default judgment. If you're successful, the best case scenario is you get to go back to the position you would have been in had you just accepted service in the first place, excepting for all the money you spent on attorneys to get the default judgment overturned. I don't know how the idea that it's a good idea to avoid service became a thing.
Rov_Scam
4mo ago
500k of what kind of property? If you do total net worth then you get into a situation where registering to vote becomes more complicated than doing your taxes, and more intrusive, and you need an entire government agency just to keep track of year-to-year eligibility. Not to mention that you end up further entrenching the current gerontocracy since most young people won't be eligible between student loan debt, lack of equity in their homes, and lack of significant retirement savings. Speaking of which, you then have to deal with the complicated business of trying to determine the present value of defined benefit pension plans.
If you do it the old-fashioned way and limit it to what's listed on the tax rolls then you end up having varying criteria for various parts of the country, with no consistency whatsoever. For instance, the kind of person who owns in most parts of the country probably rents if they live in New York. $500k may seem reasonable based on whatever housing market you're familiar with, but in a lot of the country it's ridiculous. Here in Pittsburgh one of the most desirable suburbs is Upper St. Clair. The school district ranks among the best in the state, and there's no shortage of large homes. If you tell someone you live there they assume you have money. Except most of the people who live there don't really have money, at least not serious money — most of the residents are typical upper-middle-class professionals who live in 4 bedroom. 2,000 square foot homes built in the 70s. You pay a premium to live there over more working-class (in relative terms) suburbs like Bethel Park or South Park, but not that much of a premium. Most of these houses cost significantly less than 500k.
Rov_Scam
5mo ago
Because most of the arguments I see are stupid, predictable, and propagated by the same few people, and I simply don't have the time. I've done it in the past, but I don't have time to post about things I actually find interesting let alone talk to a wall about something that's been rehashed a thousand times.
Rov_Scam
8mo ago
The rule of thumb is that rights to source material should be about 2% of the film's budget. The Blind Side has a 29 million budget which puts the fee at 580,000. JK Rowling received 2 million for the first four Harry Potter books, and those were much bigger than a nonfiction book about offensive linemen. 700k seems reasonable.
The movie Liars Poker has nothing to do with the Michael Lewis book.
Rov_Scam
9mo ago
I had made a comment to a similar effect but it evidently didn't post. Basically, as soon as I saw that it was an image taken by a flight crew I lost interest. Another low res photo or video of a moving object taken from another moving object that's miles away. That's obviously also subject to various kinds of distortion and is being taken with equipment designed for another purpose. I wouldn't even go as far as "show me the aliens"; if someone can produce a photograph that's more than just some vague shape or form or light and actually has some detail I'd take interest. Show me a door, or a propulsion system, or some piece of mechanical equipment and I'll pay attention.
Rov_Scam
11mo ago
Sort of both. I was in Trek last week and the in-store graphics had large photographs of bike trails in the PA/WC area accompanied by text describing them and very basic maps. They were obviously decorative but trying to inspire people to learn more. They also require ultra high-resolution photography in order to get the large photos, plus copyrighting for the trail descriptions, and accurate maps. And even then the decor is an interactive experience that isn't fully effective unless the customer gets close enough to read the text and look at the map. But it's impressive, and this kind of thing is pretty common at outdoors stores, as it gives them the vibe of a park visitor's center—you feel like you're already on the adventure you're (presumably) buying.
Of course, recreational equipment has it easy in this regard because the value of photos of Youghiogheny Gorge or even a guy riding a bike down a shady gravel road is immediately evident. But what if your company doesn't sell anything that could remotely be considered fun? What if you're in financial services, or insurance, or (god forbid) tech? Traditionally, you would use stock photos of people shaking hands and sitting at desks and the like, but these are boring and nobody pretends otherwise. They're also expensive. There are two kinds of graphics: Raster graphics and vector graphics. Raster graphics are what most people think of where the canvas is so many pixels by so many pixels and each pixel is a unique color and the higher the resolution the bigger the picture can be without it looking like crap. It's what's used for photographs and most video games. Vector graphics don't store the data in pixels but instructions. If I want to create a vector graphic of a red triangle then the file tells the computer to four lines of set lengths and fill it with a specified color, or even a gradient. The advantage here is twofold; the first advantage is that you can perform as many geometric transformations as you want on the image without loss of resolution. So if your rectangle needs to go on a billboard you just scale it up and the proportions hold. The second advantage is that these instructions take up a lot less data than storing individual pixels.
Vector art has always been the go-to for corporate logos and the like, but actual vector art had its heyday among designers in the '80s and early '90s. It allowed them to take advantage of computer technology at a time when storage limits and memory were low. It was also a new look, and pros paid a lot of money for graphics libraries they could use for their designs. Then computers got more powerful and, more importantly, more ubiquitous. By the mid-'90s, there were plenty of consumer-grade design programs that offered huge libraries and soon everyone was using clip art for office flyers, party invitations, greeting cards, and the like. It got the reputation as something that your aunt would use along with Comic Sans. Even consumers were tired of it; pros wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole. Computers were now powerful enough that desktop publishers could use photographs at acceptable quality, and vector graphics were largely forgotten outside of pro applications where they were necessary.
But that was 20 years ago, and it's been long enough that if clip art induces any kind of reaction, it's nostalgia, but most people have either forgotten about it, were clueless, or weren't even alive for its heyday. While it went out of fashion, it never experienced any real backlash; it just went away. So by the late 2010s it was primed for a comeback. Logos had flattened out several years earlier, and maybe it was time for graphics to do so as well. Plus, the advantages of vector art didn't go away. If you want to make a store display you can blow it up to wall size without needing to start with a special camera and a huge file size. It would make your website slimmer and more portable. And with all the characters green and purple you wouldn't have to deal with people bitching about how there aren't enough minorities or thinking you're woke because there were too many minorities. If you're a boring company, using whimsical clip art is a way to make yourself stand out from the Getty Image laden masses. Or at least until everyone does it, and by everyone I mean other boring people, because the Yough Gorge will always be more compelling than some flavor of the month design trend, even if it's more expensive at the outset, and soon enough everyone associates the new style with the same boring bullshit they associated with the old style, because, let's face it, your company is boring, and there's nothing you can do about it.
Rov_Scam
11mo ago
The issue with your proposal is that you have to provide the guy with some form of due process, and you'd need to establish what is practically an entirely separate division of the court system to do this. One of the reasons institutionalization started to wane in the 1960s was that the existence of psychiatric drugs meant that a lot of the people who were previously hopeless were now capable of leading normal lives. These people obviously didn't want to continue to be committed to a nuthouse, and the state has no interest in supporting people who are capable of supporting themselves, but there was an impasse because many of these people had lifetime insanity commitments. So the laws changed to require periodic reviews to determine if there was still reason for commitment. These reviews, of course are expensive, as you need to have a judge available, a representative of the state available, get an advocate for the inmate appointed, get testimony from doctors, etc. For every inmate, like once a year. So the goal became getting people with mental health problems either on their own or into group-home type settings where they could potentially have jobs outside and lead somewhat normal lives. This is obviously only one factor in the demise of institutionalization, but it's the relevant one for my case.
By and large, the system has worked. Historically, the main institutions for the Pittsburgh area were Mayview State Hospital and Woodville State Hospital. Mayview had over 3700 patients at its peak in and Woodville had 3200. By the time Mayview closed in 2008 it had a mere 225. By contrast, the winter 2022 homeless population of Allegheny County (the most recent year for which data is available) was 880, and only about 250 of them had severe mental illness. You could house all of the county's homeless population at just one of the old hospitals, though I'd personally want to limit it to people with mental illness, drug addiction, chronic health problems, and physical disabilities. In one fell swoop you eliminate all the people who are wither causing problems or are charity cases in need of treatment (I'd try to keep domestic violence victims separate because they are neither causing problems nor in need of treatment).
I'd propose a system where if someone gets arrested for something minor and meets certain criteria, like having a history of being homeless and committing the kinds of crimes the homeless commit, the prosecutor gives them the option of living in a voluntary residential community similar to a state hospital. The person could also be referred by a social worker if they aren't causing problems but are chronically homeless and have health problems or disabilities. If they opt in they are evaluated and either put into a treatment program or labeled long-term if it's unlikely treatment is going to help. Once in, they'll be given treatment they need and plenty of recreational activities, etc., including the opportunity to work if they so desire. They're free to leave at any time. That's the carrot. The stick is that there is a crackdown on public disorder caused by homelessness. If you don't opt in you will be prosecuted, and your social worker ain't gonna save you, because she wants you in the program. If you opt-in the program but leave before your treatment program is over or before 2 years in the case of chronics, you'll forfeit your right to go back into the program and will be dealt with by the legal system. The place would be nice but just crappy enough that no one who can live independently would live there voluntarily. I'm thinking mid-level assisted living facility.
That probably takes care of about half the homeless population. With them out of the way, we can focus on housing and employment and all the other things without them getting fucked up by the problematic people. Housing a bunch of strangers in a large dormitory is a lot easier when you know that none of them have any particular inclination to use drugs or steal from other residents or harass the women. The goal here should be to make sure that they have a place to sleep and keep their stuff and take a shower and do laundry so they can stay presentable for the the job market and either keep their jobs if they have them or go back to work if they don't. These places wouldn't have all the amenities as the institutions but there would be no restrictions on coming or going and would be more like a college dorm. The only real difference is that you're still in "the system" and any arrests or violations of drug policy (I'm thinking obvious signs of use, not mandatory searches) would have you shipped of to the institution or to jail.
It would be expensive but, honestly, if the state was willing to pay for round the clock care for over 7,000 people in Allegheny County (plus a few surrounding counties) in 1967, then doing less for fewer than a thousand should be a no-brainer. Hell, with commercial real estate in the shitter you could easily take a few floors from a downtown office complex and use that to house the normal homeless. The problematic ones would have to be on an estate with grounds somewhere out in the countryside since you can't just bottle them up like it's a prison, and that could get expensive since the sites of the old ones are now all luxury homes, but hey, they shouldn't have gotten rid of them in the first place.
Well, that's why they're not arguing that. They're arguing that he caused the death by acting recklessly; by putting Neely in a chokehold he ignored a substantial and unjustifiable risk. The problem for Penny is that to get an acquittal he has to argue that the risk was justified, which is a tall order. New York law already recognizes that chokeholds are a form of deadly force, and claiming deadly force was justified is effectively the same as claiming that he would have been justified in shooting Neely on the spot.
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