Rov_Scam
8mo ago
There's an idea in cultural criticism called Advanced Genius theory. The basic gist of it is that, when and iconic artist (usually a musician) puts out a work that everybody—critics, the public, etc.—agrees is terrible, it's probably not terrible in any metaphysical sense, it's just that the artist's genius has advanced beyond our ability to understand it. This is a fringe idea to be sure, as I am unaware of any critics who actually subscribe to it. Rolling Stone's Rob Sheffield has said that it's merely an excuse for people to "listen to shitty music by artists they consider to be non-shitty".
1959 was arguably the most important year in American musical history. Jazz, up to this point, was largely based on concepts of functional harmony that were prevalent in American musical theater. Musicians had been gradually increasing the harmonic complexity throughout the music's history, a trend that accelerated following WWII. John Coltrane's album Giant Steps upped the ante considerably by creating an entirely new theoretical framework of constant structure major 7 harmony cycled across major thirds in consecutive multi-tonic systems, aka The Coltrane Changes. While this sounds perfectly normal to the casual listener, any musician trying to improvise is forced to deal with moves that are otherwise unheard of in any kind of music all while keeping up with the breakneck pace of the chord changes.
At the other end of the spectrum, Miles Davis, never among the best technical players, ditched conventional chord changes entirely in favor of modes, which hadn't been a common feature of Western music since the Renaissance era. Instead of a chord progression, there was merely a tonal center and accompanying scale. Rather than keep up with the acrobatics of a complicated chord progression, soloists could put more thought into what they were doing and stretch out. Kind of Blue has since become the most revered album in jazz history. And then there was Ornette Coleman, for whom modalism wasn't enough. He wanted to ditch harmony entirely in favor of melody, and put out The Shape of Jazz to Come, its title a not-so-subtle harbinger of the future.
John Coltrane recorded Giant Steps as a leader (obviously), and was a sideman on Kind of Blue. He didn't play in Coleman's band but he was in awe of him. To Coltrane, Coleman's ideas represented a sort of platonic ideal. In 1960 he recorded a series of Coleman compositions with members of Coleman's band, and while the results are okay, it's clear that Coltrane had to chart his own path. The 1959 albums would be the cornerstones of modern jazz. Armed with this knowledge, Coltrane would spend the first half of the 1960s plowing further and further into uncharted territory. By the time he toured Japan in the summer of 1966, his band was the only thing keeping him tethered to earth. In 1960 he recorded a version of "My Favorite Things" that recast the song as a 12-minute modal vamp that didn't bother to get to the bridge until the very end. By 1966 he was extending it up to an hour, and it bore so little resemblance to the Julie Andrews version that one wonders why Rodgers and Hammerstein were even getting credit. Everything he recorded after this is almost beyond description, and he would be dead within a year of returning from Japan. He was forty.
A few years back, there was a Netflix documentary about the life and career of John Coltrane. Cornel West appears in the film as an interview subject, and when they get to Coltrane's final recordings he admits that they aren't something he can listen to unless he's in a very specific state of mind. One gets the impression that Dr. West doesn't actually like these recordings, and that he's effectively never in the appropriate state of mind, if such a state even exists. But he doesn't go as far as saying that the recordings are actually bad. I've heard these myself, and while I share West's inability to truly get into them, it's clear that they aren't bad. Coltrane, by this point, is operating on a plane of consciousness so foreign to us mere mortals that we're simply incabable of comprehending it.
John Coltrane is the only musician that approaches the level of Advanced Genius. Advancement theorists like to bring up people like Lou Reed and Neil Young as the quintessential examples of such, but, let's face it, all these guys ever really did was make rock and roll records. Coltrane took the idea of harmony to its logical conclusion and spent the rest of his career destroying it. With each step he took, he blew the minds of those who listened to him, and eventually reached the point where no one could keep up with him. Miles Davis may be personally responsible for multiple revolutions within jazz, but those were genre-transforming. Coltrane is sui generis. Even acolytes like Pharoah Sanders and enthusiasts like Kemasi Washington can only exist as pale imitations.
I doubt Cornel West has ever heard of Advanced Genius Theory or is familiar with its principles, yet he seems to understand the concept more deeply than those who invented it. If you're looking for someone to vote for and can't decide based on their actual political positions, that's as good a reason as any.
Rov_Scam
9mo ago
At the risk of sounding insensitive, do you know anything about this hurricane? Evacuating the entire "broad path" of the hurricane would mean evacuating an area about 600 miles long and 200 miles wide that includes several major cities such as Tallahassee, Charlotte, and Atlanta. Evacuating at least 10 million people potentially hundreds of miles on short notice isn't exactly easy, or even desirable.
Dunno if this one is an exception, but I believe hurricanes are routine occurrences in this region.
No, they aren't. Asheville is in the western part of North Carolina, at least 250 miles from the nearest coastline.
Rov_Scam
2mo ago
This is a complicated procedural situation and while you're analysis is on the right track, it isn't quite correct and leads you to the wrong conclusion. New York didn't request an injunction in its lawsuit. For the court to issue an injunction, there has to be some kind of action involved (either for the opposing party to take or forbear from), and since the DOT has not engaged in any enforcement or threat of enforcement, such and action does not exist here. In other words, New York can't ask for an injunction, preliminary or permanent, because there isn't anything for the court to tell the Federal government to stop doing. New York is instead requesting declaratory judgment. In this case, New York has taken the position that the Secretary of Transportation does not have the authority to unilaterally rescind the approval, and is asking the court to confirm that position. If New York's position is correct, then they were never under any obligation to comply with the Secretary's request to begin with.
The strategic implications here are that, by filing suit in advance rather than waiting for the DOT to engage in some kind of enforcement action, New York gets is position on the record and throws the ball into the Federal government's court; the reason they went this route to begin with was specifically because it allows them to avoid compliance until a court has ruled on the matter. Strategically, New York's move here is so slick it makes me want to cry. Courts in general don't like to grand preliminary injunctions or TROs, and the standards for getting them are high: You have to demonstrate irreparable harm and a strong chance of prevailing on the merits. Suppose that New York waits until DOT begins enforcement, and also suppose that the case is a tossup on the merits. Now New York has to ask for a preliminary injunction while the case is pending, and they probably aren't going to get one. So now even if they prevail on the merits, they have to pause the program for the entire time the case is pending.
By asking for declaratory judgment in advance, the onus of getting preliminary injunctive relief is now on the Feds. Now that there's a live dispute over their authority, they can't just unilaterally assert it; they have to ask the court. And since the bar for getting this kind of relief is high, they aren't likely to get it. And if they simply don't seek the relief at all but instead try to penalize the state retroactively if they end up prevailing, it's going to be hard for them to do, since if the matter was so important why didn't they file for a preliminary injunction?
Rov_Scam
3mo ago
It's because he's going about it in the worst way possible. He's basically insulting them, telling them their trade policies (that he renegotiated!) aren't fair, and that they're letting drugs and whatever else over the border, then trying to coerce them with economic warfare and veiled threats of invasion. This isn't some rogue country that happens to be next to us, but probably the closest of many close allies. If there's ever any chance at a union it's through even closer cooperation. The first order of business should be trying to get all tariffs and duties down to zero in both directions, and negotiating some kind of Schengen-style agreement to get rid of border controls.
Rov_Scam
5mo ago
The most charitable take on this is that since Trump has been getting some pushback for ordering people back to the office, he's giving them an opportunity for an out. My IRS friend mentioned in the comment below says that they're phasing in the full return over the next month. So if you're WFH and don't want to go back you can resign now and get an 8 month runway to find a new job. It doesn't seem like a totally unreasonable option, given that he could have just ordered everyone back and left it at that.
The problem is that it's executed so poorly it isn't even entirely clear what is being offered, and it doesn't do much to inspire confidence in the US Government as an employer. If any normal employer were offering something akin to this, the email announcing it would only be an announcement. Someone from HR would go to every department to give a presentation to interested employees and answer any questions. There would be a packet explaining everything in detail. There would be paperwork to sign. There wouldn't be a mass email that didn't provide any details and required employees to accept within a week by texting "RESIGN" to 48463 (standard messaging and data rates may apply). The speed at which this was depolyed suggests that OPM didn't do a thorough job of identifying who to offer this to. I mean, no one in the administration even can say what's going to happen to anyone who takes this offer. I don't know why anyone would except it (except maybe if you had planned on leaving anyway), and the matter in which it came about would make me suspicious of anything coming from my employer.
Rov_Scam
7mo ago
I haven't seen the video yet, but I'd dismiss 2 or 3 outright as doomerism since no one knows what the legislative implications of autonomous vehicles will be. You might see areas with few pedestrians optimized for self-driving cars, but I doubt anywhere with significant foot traffic would see it. I've written elsewhere about the subscription model and why back-of-the-napkin math shows that it won't work out, at least not at any significant discount from owning your own vehicle. Just to give a relevant example without getting into too many specifics: The general idea is that most of a personal auto's useful life is wasted because it's sitting at home or in a parking lot. Thus, it would be more efficient if someone else could use your car when you aren't. The upshot is that no one will own their own cars when autonomous vehicles will make it possible for the car to take itself where it is needed automatically.
The problem is that trips aren't randomly distributed throughout the day. There's an initial peak during morning rush-hour that gradually fades throughout the late morning before rising again in the afternoon and peaking around 5:00. It then begins to taper again into the evening, and there is very little traffic overnight. Compound this with the fact that land use isn't uniform, either. Commercial offices are mostly located in city centers or their own office parks. Industrial sites are located in industrial parks, riverfronts, or other areas where they are relatively segregated from other uses. Commercial shopping and entertainment districts are located along their own strips in the suburbs. Downtown Pittsburgh has something like 5400 residents but 54,000 daily workers and visitors. Most of the residents specifically chose to live Downtown because it was easy to get to work. So every weekday you have a huge mass of cars coming in, but the number of people looking for a ride out of Downtown at 9 am on a Tuesday is vanishingly small. None of these cars will be able to find fares very easily, and it will be late in the afternoon before there is enough demand to get them out of Downtown.
So there are two options. The first is that they park all day until demand picks up, in which case we haven't solved anything. The other is that they leave and try to find fares elsewhere. This makes things worse; now we've got rush hours that run in both directions, full of cars deadheading out of town in search of fares or cheaper parking. Environmental costs aside, this is a dystopian traffic nightmare. Enact rules on deadheading and now you also have to pay the cost of parking the car and keeping it on standby all day, defeating the purpose of the service.
Not Just Bikes's proposed solution is to completely ban anything related to cars from city centers: highways, roads, parking spaces, parking garages.
It's amazing how the same armchair urbanists who decry mid-century urban renewal inadvertently champion some of its precepts when it suits their anti-car tastes. When downtowns were losing business to shopping malls, it became trendy to pedestrianize streets or even entire business districts. The traffic disruptions meant that roads on the perimeter needed to be widened to accommodate the additional traffic, and buildings along these roads were torn down for parking lots. Architectural critic Anthony Paletta has described this as "strangulation by ring road"; once the business districts were disconnected from the surrounding neighborhoods, they began to wither away. Crossing a 4 lane one-way ring road was a hassle for pedestrians, and the centers became havens for derelicts. Some of the more notable revivals have happened only after cities restored the commercial strips to through traffic.
Rov_Scam
8mo ago
I think you're taking too narrow a view of "claim to this land". There's a common perception that these primarily involve claims involving a fee interest in the surface that arises from something like an unresolved estate, divorce, etc. The reality of the situation is much more complex. Consider a typical rural parcel in Western Pennsylvania, Northern West Virginia, or Southeastern Ohio:
A 20 acre tract with a house was purchased by the current owners in 2004. It has a clean chain of title with no gaps going back to patent. It was never part of an estate, lawsuit, divorce, bankruptcy, Sheriff's sale, or anything like that (the last two sentences are wholly atypical, but I'm simplifying things here). In 1901 the surface owner sold the Pittsburgh Seam coal to an intermediary who in turn sold it to a mining company, and through several further sales and corporate mergers it's now owned by Consol. In 1917 the oil and gas was leased to Allegheny Heat and Light Company, who drilled a well on the property in 1919. In 1922 the surface owner conveyed the property by deed and reserved "1/2 the oil and gas" underlying the property. The owner of the severed interest has since passed and the reserved 1/2 interest is now shared among 16 individuals, in unequal proportions. In 1940, the surface owners conveyed the Freeport Seam, but this coal was never mined. It is currently owned by Massey Energy. The 1919 well is still producing, meaning the 1917 lease is still in effect. Through various mergers and assignments, the lease is now held by Tri-Star Energy, LLC. In 2012, Tri-Star assigned the production rights to deep formations to Noble Energy. Noble then assigned the deep rights to Chevron but reserved an overriding royalty interest equal to the difference between 18% and the existing royalty burden. Statoil then assigned these rights to Rice Energy, who then merged with EQT. EQT, looking to develop the oil and gas, entered into a joint operating agreement with Chevron involving the Marcellus formation. 10.575 acres of the 20 acre tract were made part of the Piston Honda Unit. Piston Honda was then included as part of a $1.2 billion mortgage to Wells Fargo. EQT then sold the deeper Utica formation rights to Pennzoil Production Company. Over the years, there have been several recorded easements involving the property. The owners are aware of a gas line that crosses the road near the house and runs along the property's western edge, and some old telephone lines that cross the back corner of the property and may or may not be operational. When the property was purchased in 2004, it was financed through a mortgage with Wesbanco that is still in effect. In 2015, the owners took out a $25,000 revolving credit line with Dollar Bank that remains unreleased.
Under your proposed system, I count at least 27 potential claims to the property, and that's assuming that the surface owners won't have to make their own claim. "Contact us" is also vague, because in any reasonable system "contact us" means "file suit for quiet title". I say reasonable because no land registration system worth its salt would simply take a naked assertion of an interest in real property at face value. What's realistically going to happen in this situation is that every mortgage company, coal company, oil and gas company, telephone company, power company, water company, and other potential lienholder is immediately going to look through their records and file in rem actions against any piece of property upon which they have a plausible claim, seeking declaratory judgment that their claim is valid and that their interest can be recorded in the land registry. I don't even know how this would work in practice, because all those claimants would theoretically have to provide notice of the suit to all the other potential claimants, which would result in a huge mess of lawsuits that no calendar control judge could possible make heads or tails of, and there are additional complications that I won't even get into here. The worst outcome would be that the couple who bought the land in 2004, got title insurance, and haven't had any problems since are now going to find themselves defending numerous claims, and are likely going to have to spend a ton on legal fees just to maintain what they have. Is that 1965 power line easement still valid or not? West Penn Power is going to argue that it is. Companies will never concede that any right of record has been invalidated.
This is why land registration systems typically put the burden of proving title on the surface owner. In the Progressive era, this was touted as a reform over traditional title, and something like a dozen states implemented land registration systems between around 1900 and 1917. Most of these have been abolished, and the remaining ones are just pale ghosts of what they were intended to be, vestigial remnants of ill-considered reform. The problem is exactly what I stated earlier: If you're going to make title ironclad, you have to ensure that the registration accounts for all existing interests. And to accomplish this, you have to provide anyone with an interest due process to ensure that their property rights are respected. What this means in practice is that someone seeking to register title under these systems was required to conduct a thorough search and file suit in court, with any conceivable interest holder notified in the suit. Even in the early 20th Century, with fewer than 100 years having passed since patent and things like mortgages and mineral leases in their infancy, this proved an expensive prospect, which brings me to your second point:
It's a one time payment that permanently does away with 'running titles', so it's still probably worth it in the long run.
Is it? The problem is that it places all of the burden on the person seeking to register the title. I've handled partition suits before, which are similar but much more limited actions, and you're still looking at 5 figures to resolve the suit. Get into a situation where you have to notify every party with an interest in the property, and you're now looking at the cost ballooning exponentially. All the minor claims that a title insurance company would ignore under the presumption that no one would raise them (and that if they were raised, it was rare enough that they'd just pay), now have to be litigated. And how is a court to determine if you've done the proper due diligence? If a title is registered, it's supposed to be indefeasible. But what if a critical party wasn't properly notified of the action? What if the party seeking the registration intentionally did a half-assed job in the hope that potential claimants would slip under the radar? This became a problem in states with registration as the 20th Century wore on, as the process essentially became a way for people with questionable titles to legitimize their claims so that they were beyond reproach. Otherwise, what's the benefit to the landowner? Pay $25,000 (conservatively) now so that future purchasers can save a couple thousand bucks on title insurance?
Rov_Scam
9mo ago
If you read the entire indictment, it looks like there was a sort of quid pro quo going on. Sun's husband met with Chinese government officials who facilitated his business exporting seafood from the United States to China. They earned millions of dollars from this business, which they didn't report on tax forms and laundered into the United States through purchases of real estate and luxury cars. There were also a series of lower-level gifts like covering travel to China and giving them event tickets. In return, she was basically doing the Chinese government's bidding to the extent that her position allowed. She was regularly meeting with Chinese officials and keeping them abreast of her actions.
These are things a politician's chief of staff does, & it's not like she did it in secret and gave no reasons why it's not in the interest of the governor to e.g. have those meetings.
That's certainly a defense. But, "My actions were totally in the interest of New York State and had nothing to do with the millions of dollars my husband's business earned after meeting with Chinese government officials or the thousands of dollars of gifts and travel compensation I got and didn't include on my ethics report" may not play particularly well with a jury.
Rov_Scam
9mo ago
Short answer: They didn't. The declaratory judgment invalidating the strict dating provisions as unconstitutional applies to all 67 counties.
Long answer: The plaintiffs only sued Allegheny and Philadelphia Counties. Since those counties declined to defend the suit, the Republicans (the RNC and the PA equivalent) intervened as defendants. They then filed a motion to dismiss on the basis that the plaintiffs failed to join all necessary parties. Civil procedure requires that certain "indispensable" parties be joined in a lawsuit. Typically this is for stuff like contracts involving multiple parties or property with multiple owners, where the court needs to sort out what everyone's rights and obligations are. The defendant intervenors argues that since any declaratory relief would apply to all 67 counties, the plaintiffs should have joined the other 65. The court didn't buy this argument; the plaintiffs said that the reason they only sued 2 counties is because those were the only counties where they had knowledge that voters were being harmed by the dating provisions. If the court had dismissed the suit on the grounds that the plaintiffs hadn't joined all necessary parties, the plaintiffs would have refiled the next day naming all 67 counties as defendants. At that point, the 65 counties who weren't sued the first time would have moved to dismiss for failure to state a claim upon which relief can be granted, and the court would have been forced to grant those motions. The court didn't say this in so many words, but suffice it to say that if a court knows that an action against a party won't survive a motion to dismiss, they're loathe to find that party "indispensable" to the proceeding, especially if there are 65 such parties. The court can't issue injunctions against non-parties, so injunctive relief was only granted against Philadelphia and Allegheny counties by virtue of them being the only named defendants. The technical distinction is that they've been specifically ordered to stop something they were already doing. We officially don't know if the other counties were doing anything offensive to the state constitution or not, but the declaratory judgment clearly delineates what they aren't allowed to do in the future. Pinging @urquan since his comment touches on these issues.
Rov_Scam
6mo ago
My guess is that there were one or two people on the jury who saw Penny as a hero who wouldn't agree to any conviction no matter how minor.
It doesn't look like it played that way. If 10 or 11 of 12 are willing to convict then they aren't going to decide to acquit because of 1 or 2 people, especially not so quickly after the higher charge is dropped. If the jury is mostly willing to convict the guy of manslaughter after days of deliberation, I don't see 2 people turning around the other 10 in a couple of hours. This looks more like most of the jury wanted to acquit but one or two holdouts wanted a conviction. Dropping the manslaughter charges may have signaled to the jury that the prosecution didn't really believe in their case, which may be enough to flip these people.
I would have been one of those people, and would have more than willing to hide my power level during jury selection.
I'm generally curious; what makes you think you could hide your power level during jury selection? How do you think you could accomplish this?
Rov_Scam
7mo ago
My understanding is that Gaetz discussed his nomination with the offices of four Senators—Collins, Murkowski, McConnell, and new Utah Senator John Curtis—and was basically told that there was absolutely no way any could be persuaded to vote for his confirmation. After discussing the matter with Trump, he was told to get out now, as Trump doesn't like losing.
Rov_Scam
7mo ago
For simplicity's sake, we'll assume that Harris won the same states Biden won in 2020. In your scenario, neither Harris nor Walz will have been formally elected, since that doesn't happen until the Electoral College meets on December 17. So, as far as Federal law is concerned, no election has even taken place yet, and the electoral vote will determine the presidency. The party has plenty of time to find new candidates and convince everyone that the Shapiro–Whitmer ticket doesn't represent a significant change. A problem arises, though, in that some state laws require the electors to vote for the candidates whose name appeared on the ballot.We don't have to worry about Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Georgia, or Illinois, since those states allow electors to vote for anyone. We don't have to worry about Wisconsin, Oregon, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maryland, Delaware, or Virginia either, because although those states technically prohibit faithless electors, the votes are still counted.
As for the others, it would depend on whether the state legislatures could enact emergency legislation that either created a one-time exception or implemented an alternative system in the event that a candidate was deceased. If that couldn't be done, then things get goofy. The enforcement mechanism for most of these laws is that the faithless elector is replaced with one who will cast a ballot for the winning candidate. This presents us with two scenarios. In the first, the Secretary of State certifying the election accepts the faithless ballots, and is then sued by Trump for contravening state law. the state Supreme Court then issues a ruling affirming that since the intent of the law was to ensure that the will of the people is recognized by the electors, given the extraordinary circumstances, allowing the faithless ballots satisfies that will better than simply invalidating the majority of the votes.
In the second scenario (which would only happen if it was clear that the other way wasn't going to work), the electors simply elect Harris/Walz and treat it as though they both died simultaneously after becoming president. If the Democrats have won the House in this scenario, then Hakeem Jeffries becomes president. If the Republicans win, then a huge argument erupts over how the next speaker is going to nominate Trump for vice president and immediately resign so that Trump can become president. Unfortunately, there's no one believed to be sufficiently loyal as to give up the presidency in what is likely their only shot at it. So we spend the first few weeks of January in a huge floor fight where most of the Republicans nominate Mike Johnson again under the premise that he'd just be the president and could go from there, while the hardcore MAGA wing takes turns with a bunch of sacrificial lambs who nobody trusts to actually resign when the time comes and who would then face the added hassle of having to re-win their House seats if they actually did resign.
In the meantime, Inauguration Day is approaching and we don't have a speaker. This scenario only works if the Republicans also have the Senate (otherwise Trump would never get confirmed as vice anyway), so Chuck Grassley would become president. Since Grassley is approximately 10,000 years old there would be more credible calls for his resignation, but he'd surprise everyone and either stay on or nominate someone other than Trump. But these are pretty murky waters so that's just a theory.
Rov_Scam
7mo ago
Let's suppose the GOP controls both houses and the presidency.
Traditionally, GOP opposition to mandatory ID has been a bigger hurdle than anything else. I say bigger because there hasn't exactly been a ton of enthusiasm from the left for this idea either, and it's never been a huge issue.
How hard can it be to issue an ID card to every American citizen?
If our experience with Real ID is any indication, pretty hard. The law requiring it was passed in 2005 and was supposed to go into effect in 2008. No states were even compliant until 2012, and the full implementation date — when you'll actually need a Real ID to board a domestic flight — has been pushed back repeatedly, currently scheduled for sometime next year. But even then it won't actually be required until 2027; you'll be informed of the noncompliance but allowed to board anyway. This, of course, assumes that the deadline doesn't get pushed back again, and while I won't speculate on the chances of that, only something like half of the people even have Real ID compliant identification.
To give you a sense of what's involved, I helped a woman do this a couple years ago. She had been married twice, and used the last name of her second husband. So while she had her birth certificate, it didn't show her legal name. I had to go to the marriage license department and pull two marriage licenses, both from the 1980s, and then go to the prothonotary to pull the divorce from the first marriage. This is why I roll my eyes when people like JD Vance talk about going door-to-door looking for people to deport. I'd imagine the number of native-born citizens who can immediately produce proof of citizenship upon request is a lot lower than some seem to think it is. I know where my birth certificate is right now, but a lot of people don't. And I'd imagine that the number of married women who have certified copies of their marriage license with their personal papers is vanishingly small (no, the certificate they give you doesn't count).
Rov_Scam
11mo ago
No, it doesn't seem like it. There's a mountain biking YouTube channel I watch where the guy is relatively unknown among the general public but who is a celebrity among mountain bikers, and he did a video where he was at a mountain bike festival and had to basically disguise himself while walking down the midway just to have a somewhat typical festival experience. He said it was kind of stressful, and this is just for dealing with normal people who want to say hi and tell him how much they enjoy his work, and maybe get a picture with him. Now imagine that plus it being everywhere you go, every day, and while most people are benign there are a few who absolutely despise you and send hate mail and others who are convinced that you're their one true love and won't stop stalking you. Any sense of a normal life is completely gone. If there's a restaurant you want to try you can't just go there; you have to have your people make sure they can provide special accommodations for you and the handlers that will be necessary to keep the public at bay. Any public place — a bar, a movie theater, a grocery store, whatever — is effectively off-limits.
I've had my own experience of being at the extreme bottom levels of the fame ladder. When I was in high school I was the captain of the academic team and we went on the local CBS affiliate's Saturday morning quiz-bowl show (hosted by a popular news anchor) and won the championship. This meant that I was on TV for several weeks over a period of a few months. At the time I was working as a cashier at a grocery store, and practically every customer recognized me from a local TV show that I was only somewhat aware of before I was on it. It's obviously nowhere near what being even internet famous is like, but people congratulating you and asking the same questions every five minutes does start to wear on you after a while, even though they're good people who just want to express their appreciation that you proved one of the worst schools in the state could hang academically with the best (our road to the championship included defeating a well-known prep school and a suburban public school that is consistently ranked among the best in the state [coincidentally located where I live now]).
If you make a mistake at work you might hear about it from your boss or a coworker but it's no big deal and you move on. If you release a horrible album or act poorly in a movie you have to deal with public criticism. Think of how hard your last breakup was and imagine if people were publicly speculating on what happened and hounding your ex for interviews. Imagine having to screen your own calls. Imagine the insecurity of not knowing if your last date actually liked you or was enthralled by your fame. Imagine dealing with yes-men who tell you you're the best and want a piece of you only to stop returning your calls at the first sign you might not be as profitable as it seemed. Imagine being functionally unable to make new friends who weren't also celebrities. Imagine everyone you ever met suddenly texting you to hang out. Imagine actual friends asking if you can put in word for them with the right people. Awfully stressful is an understatement.
Rov_Scam
17d ago
Iran has been weeks away from having a functional bomb for the last 20 years. It may sound like a joke, but I'm guessing it's their actual policy. There's currently a fatwah against nuclear weapons, and while Western ears may hear that as a half-hearted "we really mean we aren't developing nukes", the Iranian government violating its own fatwah would cause a loss of credibility that could be fatal to the regime. The goal appears to be "nuclear capable", meaning that if there were some existential threat, like a full-bore invasion, they could quickly produce a nuclear weapon, because at that point the benefits clearly outweigh the costs. Unless Israel seriously ratchets up these attacks, I doubt we'll ever see Iran openly testing nuclear weapons or making public announcements that they have them. Because if they do that apropos of nothing, what do they have to gain? People get even more pissed off than they already are, and Saudi Arabia starts its own nuclear program.
Rov_Scam
3mo ago
About 5 years ago I was hiking in the Grand Canyon with friends and we met a 20-year-old Russian kid at the beach who asked if he could tag along with us for the hike back up to the rim. He spent a lot of the time telling us how great Russia was, which was fine, but one of the things he pointed to in evidence of its greatness was the fact that they could "beat faggots in the street" with no repercussions. I don't know if this kind of attitude is typical, but the fact that any random tourist would find it appropriate to tell Americans he just met that apropos of nothing in particular is at least an indication that the attitudes over there go beyond simply not celebrating it. Hell, even the rural Trump supporter in our group seemed pretty unnerved by it.
Rov_Scam
4mo ago
I don't know what makes you think these jobs are cushy. The benefits are good and it's hard to get fired, but the pay is low and there's a certain rigidity compared to the private sector. As I recently mentioned in a prior post, I worked for the state when I first got out of law school, and it wasn't for me. The pay is decent enough that you're not going to starve, and if you save your pennies you can put your kids through college, but if you want to see Europe, it better be on your television set. You can look at the schedule provided with your orientation materials and know how much you'll be making every year for the rest of your career, which may give a certain peace of mind but also resigns you to knowing that there is absolutely zero chance you'll ever make more than that. Want to make 100k? You'd better be a doctor or have some other highly specialized degree where you could easily make double what the state's paying you on the outside without them looking twice at your resume, or have a title like "Senior Administrator" or "Director" and I'm talking like running an entire state agency. You can of course work your way up the ranks through promotion, but unless you get that every few years you're taking a pay cut, since you start out at the bottom of the scale again. When I left and went to the private sector my pay increased by 50% despite having no experience in the field I was going into.
But the real bitch of it is the lack of flexibility. As a normal salaried employee, no one pays too much attention to where I am as long as I get my work done. With the government, I had to sign in at the beginning and end of each day, and when I left for lunch. If I was more than 15 minutes late, I'd get vacation time docked. When I first started, I didn't have enough leave accrued to take two days off and my request for unpaid leave had to be approved by the HR people in Harrisburg. Every aspect of your work is micromanaged. They monitor internet usage. If you don't have any work to do they actually make you pretend to look busy, which is true of everybody when they first start and don't have a high caseload. The pointless drudgery weighs on you more when the government is involved; if a client insists I do something pointless now at least I can take pleasure in the fact that they're willing to pay by the hour for it and I can use the work to pad my billables and get a nice bonus. When I had to do it for the government it was because it was part of some internal policy memo that no one has actually looked at in 20 years but has become customary to the point that not doing it is a fireable offense.
This may seem like the exact kind of inefficiency that Musk et al. are trying to prevent, but it's a balancing act. If a private company wants to make a business decision that the constant logging calls and diary entries and filling out timesheets is a waste of time that prevents employees from being productive, it's one thing. But if it's not done then the DOGE people come right back at you with the opposite argument of asking you to justify what you do all day and them saying "how does it take all day to do that", and politicians wondering how taxpayer money is being spent, and the people claiming disability wondering why their claim was denied, and Elon Musk wondering why the other claim was approved, so it's better to just have a bunch of comprehensive reporting requirements so that when people ask questions you actually have answers.
Like I said, it's annoying, and it wasn't for me, but some people like the stability and predictability of government employment. By threatening that stability what they're doing is removing all the advantage of government employment. If you want government workers to be like private sector workers, now you'd better plan on paying them like private sector workers, since you can no longer convince them that they have their jobs for life unless they seriously fuck up. If this goes as far as Trump seems like he wants to take it, you may pare down the Federal workforce, but there are still critical jobs to be done, and the only people willing to do them will be the kind of people who are willing to work for a fraction of the going rate and don't care if they get fired in four years.
Rov_Scam
5mo ago
I think Facebook simply died a natural death that can't really be attributed to anything Zuckerberg did or didn't do. I don't think it's a coincidence that the demise of Facebook roughly corresponds to the rise of Reddit as a mass-market phenomenon. Though the platforms seem very different, they essentially serve the same purpose — a time suck for bored people. People who used to spend their free time scrolling Facebook now spend it scrolling Reddit, and Reddit offers more in the way of content than Facebook ever could. Message boards have existed since the dawn of the internet, but they were mostly specialized. Now, everyone has a whole universe of them in one convenient place, and the more popular subs like AmItheAsshole aren't the kind of thing that can exist as a stand-alone site.
That and there was just a general weariness about some of the shit that went on there. I'm not talking about politics, except in the sense that everyone had a friend that posted about nothing but politics and you didn't give a shit about their opinions regardless of whether you agreed with them or not. And then there were the people who posted nothing but memes. And the people who posted nothing but pictures of their kids. This was all relatively benign, though. The worst was the people who overshared personal information, or hinted at personal problems without giving details, all of it for the express purpose of generating lazy sympathy. The politics was often the most interesting thing about it, because at least it gave you the chance to engage in a way similar to how you would in person. But even in person, the guy who always has to bring up politics is annoying.
So the normal discussions that you would have with these friends were few and far between. Then sponsored content began taking up a greater and greater percentage of your news feed (I don't look at my account often anymore, but when I do I'm lucky to get one or two posts from friends, even if profile checks show a significant number of them still posting regularly; it's really something to behold). So people lose interest and go to places that aren't as irritating. Also, like Reddit, they changed to a "modern" interface that does the site no favors. The best thing they could do is go back to the 2010 UI. But it won't happen.
Rov_Scam
5mo ago
And if Putin gave them up the war would end as well. Why is the onus only on Zelensky here? You talk about Ukraine using conscripts but Putin doesn't even have the political capital for that. His first draft was limited to outlying areas and provoked a mass exodus, and he won't even consider drafting out of Moscow or other major cities. He's resorted to using North Korean mercenaries to retake occupied areas inside Russia. Doesn't Putin have an obligation to prevent the deaths of young Russian men?
Rov_Scam
6mo ago
To understand Kinkade you have to understand how the art world actually works in terms of tastemaking. In today's visual age, where images are easily reproduced in books and magazines, on television, on the internet, and everywhere else it's possible to reproduce images, we tend to forget that the kind of familiarity we have with art is a new phenomenon. For most of human history, the only way you knew what a painting looked like was if you actually saw it in person. And even that is an easier proposition than it once was, since public museums that hold the great works are a relatively recent phenomenon. In our world, it's easy to ignore art precisely because we're bombarded with it, whether we like it or not. Yet it is he who pays the piper who calls the tune. Every man is entitled to his opinion, but unless you're actually a bona fide art consumer your opinion doesn't count for anything.
To be a bona fide art consumer, you have to be the kind of person who is willing to peruse galleries in your area with the intention of dropping hundreds or even thousands of dollars on a painting, not because it will make a good investment, but purely because you like it. The gallery is an essential part of the system. I have a friend who has the rare distinction of being an art history major who actually works in her field. She worked on the staff of the Andy Warhol Museum and owned a gallery in Pittsburgh for a few years before moving to Texas (and managing a gallery there). The gallery is an essential middleman. With art schools graduating thousands every year, and many more than that selling paintings, it's hard for someone looking to buy art who's not fully ensconced within the art world to know where to start. The gallery owner thus acts as an intermediary, able to identify pieces of sufficient value that she can recommend them to customers without hesitation, yet also in touch with economics and the taste of the customer base that she won't alienate them.
It's worth pointing out that there's no barrier to entering the world of an art consumer other than money and the willingness to use it. The whole concept of a gallery opening is to generate buzz that gets people in off the street. They're essentially parties with free booze and light appetizers, and the people throwing them don't care whether you're actually interested in buying anything or have any pull in the art world (though you should dress appropriately and be willing to mingle with the crowd). I tried to attend as many of my friend's openings as I could, and she was always appreciative, as a full house with no buyers is always better than a sparse turnout. Anyway, this is the way the system is. If you're an artist, you try to get noticed by a gallery owner who agrees to display your work and hopefully sell it. If you make enough sales, you'll get a one-man show, have your work displayed in better galleries, get overseas exposure, and eventually reach the rarefied air of having your work sell on Southeby's for tens of thousands of dollars.
There are some artists, though, who can't cut it in this system. Most artists, in fact. Most of them just keep their day jobs and do art on the side and make an occasional sale; nothing wrong with that. But some of them want to get in so desperately that they open their own galleries. These are called "vanity galleries" and are frowned upon. An artist selling his own work through his own gallery is a tacit admission that you're trying to bypass a world where you couldn't make it by buying your way in. From an economic perspective, Thomas Kinkade's work didn't appeal to bona fide art consumers who bought paintings through galleries. It did, however, appeal to the kind of unsophisticated consumer who was willing to pay 40 bucks for a print and didn't even care if the nameplate artist actually did the underlying painting. Kinkade took the vanity gallery to its logical conclusion by opening a chain of stores where you could buy reproductions of his work in between buying jeans and grabbing an Orange Julius.
Buying real art is an intimate act. You attend a gallery opening where you peruse what's available and probably talk to the artist. If you're interested in buying something you call to make an appointment to conduct business during the week. You get an original work that nobody else will have, that the artist put hours into. And you pay a price that demonstrates your appreciation for those efforts. Kinkade reduced it to a commodity that was as disposable as any other. Of course, some respected artists thought that art should be a commodity, most notably Andy Warhol. This would at first seem to absolve Kinkade, but two things need to be taken into consideration. The first is that Warhol only gets respect for this revelation because it was novel at the time. Other pop artists existed before him, but he was the first to take the ball and run with it, while still straddling the line of whether he was serious or not. Some thought his work was criticism of consumer culture; he insisted that he was dead serious that it was not, but his aloof public persona suggested a hint of irony.
Which leads into the second point about Warhol. By the 1980s it was clear that he indeed was serious, and his stature started to fade. The endless screen prints and commissioned portraits of celebrities may have caused his image to soar among the public, but he fell off with critics. Furthermore, a new generation of artists raised on Warhol took his beliefs seriously and began equating garishness with quality. He died unexpectedly after gall bladder surgery in 1987 which was bad for him but good for his image, as he couldn't spend the next twenty years sullying it even further. While the pop art of the 1980s was mass-produced and kitschy, it was at least popular kitsch. Art may be fashion, but fashion is at least contemporary. Kinkade was just as kitschy, but he didn't even try to be cool. He produced art for the kind of people who collect Precious Moments figurines. And as he got older and more famous his strategy became even more crass. If one goes to his website today, the entire first page is licensed work. If his work wasn't kitschy enough already, you can always add a few Disney characters. What makes this especially egregious is that some of the characters, like Moana, didn't exist until after Kinkade's death, further emphasizing the fact that none of his alleged work has anything to do with him personally.
Years ago, before his popular revival, I told my gallery-owning friend that I wanted to write a critical defense of Bob Ross. When I was in high school, art teachers hated Bob Ross, so I thought I was being edgy. She told me that Ross wasn't controversial and that if I really wanted to ruffle some feathers I should defend Thomas Kinkade. I knew little of his work, but, having since looked... I just can't. It's not even good in a technical sense since he obviously doesn't understand color theory. Everything looks garish. There is no sense of proportion. Robert Hughes of Time magazine was highly critical of contemporary art in the wake of Warhol, and he complained that everything seemed designed to make the biggest immediate impact but had no staying power. Kinkade is no exception; his paintings hit you like a dish where you just threw in a dash of every spice in your cupboard. And this is all in pursuit of nothing more than cloying sentimentality. His works don't have anything to say about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. At least Norman Rockwell led one to consider the meaning of the American Dream, and Warhol sparked discussion of consumer culture and celebrity. But what does Kinkade do? Are his paintings meditations on false nostalgia? Maybe, but I doubt he would have agreed. Gallery owners recognized the vapidity of his work, so he had no credibility. He had commercial success but it was due more to marketing than craftsmanship. One can argue that millions of people find his work visually appealing, but millions more find pornography visually appealing. I'm not trying to argue that Kinkade isn't art, but I'm not trying to argue that pornography isn't, either.
Rov_Scam
7mo ago
As much as Kamala Harris was criticized for not going on podcasts or sitting for interviews, stuff like this makes it clear that it was probably the right decision. Dealing with such criticism is probably better than dealing with the fallout of an unexpected gaffe. Trump can get away with this, because he's already demonstrated that nothing he says will faze his supporters, but conventional politicians don't have that luxury. Hell, Vance only has that luxury because he's joined at the hip with Trump. Doing the podcast circuit is the kind of thing fringe candidates like Andrew Yang do because it gets them airtime they don't have to pay for, and the exposure is worth the gaffe potential. Once you've already made major candidate status there's little upside and huge downside to going on a freewheeling 3-hour podcast where the conversation could go in any direction. Tucker Carlson can say shit like this because he isn't running for anything and nobody is poring over his every word looking for ammunition against him. Imagine what would happen if Tim Walz went on Rogan and said the same thing.
Rov_Scam
7mo ago
I work with a few former prosecutors, and this topic has come up a number of times. It's easy to look at the number of dismissals and non-prosecutions of shoplifting and conclude that the prosecutors are being wishy-washy, but the realities of the situation often leave them with no real alternative. Consider the following case: A store clerk observes a thief stealing an item and calls the police. The suspect is arrested, and a body search uncovers the item. There is video of the suspect stealing the item. This is the perfect case, a slam-dunk to convict right?
In theory, yes; the evidence is incontrovertible. But think about what's actually required for a conviction:
- The clerk needs to testify that she saw the subject steal the item
- Someone familiar with the CCTV system needs to authenticate the video
- The cop needs to testify that the item was in the suspect's possession
The only witness who has a reasonable chance of actually testifying at trial is the cop, but unless he also happened to be there when the item was stolen, his testimony is useless on its own. A clerk making ten bucks an hour is unlikely to spend her day off testifying in court, and her employer is unlikely to pay her to not work. And unless the clerk is also the manager or has some familiarity with the CCTV system, they're going to need a manager to testify if they want to use the video, and good luck with a manager taking the day off to testify. With small convenience stores, there may be one guy running the whole place who would have to close for the day if he were required to be in court. The prosecutor's best bet in these cases is to confront the defendant with the evidence, offer a deal, and if they take it they take it and if they don't, drop the charges. Of course, defense attorneys know this as well, and they know why prosecutors do this, so they can be fairly confident that even if the charges aren't dropped that their client won't be convicted anyway, and the prosecutors aren't stupid so they can just skip the first step and dismiss the case before they waste any time on it, unless the victim is adamant about prosecution. Some are, but when a store proprietor finds out how much it's going to cost him to prosecute over a few hundred dollars in merchandise he usually decides it isn't worth it. Keep in mind that in most of these cases the merchandise is actually recovered, so there isn't even much of a tangible loss. Paying two employees a day's wages to testify is an expensive way of proving an abstract point.
Now combine this with the fact that DA's offices are chronically short-staffed and have high turnover rates. Some people love it, but most people burn out pretty quickly. You make less money for more work. They don't exactly have the manpower to take on every single theft case that gets reported. It's similar to the solution you give of building more prisons — it's easy to say "hire more DAs", it's quite another to actually be willing to pay for it. We're dealing with this situation right now in Allegheny County. County Executive Sara Innamorato is the exact kind of single, progressive, tattooed, DSA-supporting lefty that J.D. Vance hates. The county is currently facing a budget crisis, and she wants to increase property taxes to cover the deficit and give a small bump to the DA's office budget. County Council has describes her plan (which would increase property taxes by $182 for the average homeowner) as dead on arrival, and she's basically thrown down the gauntlet and told them that if they had any better ideas she'd consider them.
If tax increases are a nonstarter in a place that elected Innamorato as executive, they aren't going to play much better elsewhere. Demanding increased funding for police and prosecutors sounds good, but the people making these arguments out of one side of their mouth are bitching about taxes being to high out of the other side. It's basically like the school board meeting from The Simpsons. Where is this money supposed to come from, exactly? take it out of the highway budget? EMS? The board of elections? Parks and recreation? It's easy to blame bullshit on your political opponents, but it's hard to offer any realistic alternatives.
Rov_Scam
11mo ago
In case it wasn't obvious, this is a joke. I love most of these movies.
Rov_Scam
2mo ago
Because formal recognition would completely obviate the postwar consensus that national boundaries are inviolable. Russia made no claim to Crimea at the time of Ukrainian independence, nor for 20 years thereafter. If countries can dredge up historical arguments for why they need territory that hasn't been a continual subject of dispute and get international recognition of the conquest, it opens up the door for any irridentist claim.
Then that's their problem. There are a lot of things I can't afford at the market price; I don't buy them. Being able to pay market wages is part of running a business, the same as being able to buy inputs and deliver products to customers. Companies that are able to do this make money and companies that aren't go out of business. It's basic free market economics.
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