Rov_Scam's profile

Rov_Scam 1mo ago

I'd honestly be surprised if this were the case in your state. If you wouldn't mind telling me what it is I can look at the sentencing guidelines myself.

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Rov_Scam 1mo ago

Presumably, these offenses would get something closer to 30 years in a US court.

Looking at the PA sentencing guidelines, I'm not seeing anything close to 30 years no matter how you slice it. Even getting to what the Australian court imposed would be tough. All I see here is one count of simple assault causing bodily injury from the first incident. From the second incident, one count of simple assault causing bodily injury, one count of aggravated indecent assault, one count of attempted rape, and one count of involuntary deviate sexual intercourse using force. The IDSI charge is the most serious here, and sentencing from the remaining charges of the second incident would almost certainly run concurrently. They would probably tack on the assault charge from the first case to run consecutively, but that's only 24 months of probation. There are no relevant enhancements or mandatory minimums. The aggravating circumstances would likely be balanced by the mitigating circumstances. This is a first offense, and the sentencing guidelines for IDSI for a first-time offender call for 4.5–5.5 years in state prison. Even if we grant the max allowed for aggravating circumstances, that only gets an additional nine months. Plus sex offender registration and whatever post-release supervision the guidelines call for.

Judges in Pennsylvania have discretion to deviate from the guidelines, but they have to provide a justification, and the sentence is reviewable. Getting to 30 years would be theoretically possible, but it would require such a gross deviation from the guidelines that an appellate court would shoot it down pretty much immediately. Hell, the statutory max is only 20 years; anything beyond that would require consecutive sentences. Even the aggravating factors here are kind of weak, even if you don't take the mitigating factors into account, and the guidelines already account for them. As grisly as these crimes sound, they're really par for the course when it comes to what the guidelines anticipate.

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Rov_Scam 1mo ago

It's also possible that we get a lone alien craft who was drawn here following an amateur radio signal after his home planet was destroyed in a nuclear war, which he survived because he was in the orbital guard at the time.

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Rov_Scam 1mo ago

I'm not sure what refusals they're referring to, since he answered Epstein questions during his confirmation hearings and again during a House Oversight Committee hearing after it became big news, though I'm not sure if the latter worked the intelligence angle (the former was only five minutes and was unremarkable). He did explicitly tell OPR that he had no information about Epstein being an intelligence asset, though I'm not sure if this interview was under oath. He isn't scheduled to testify in front of the current House committee, but I can't see any information indicating any refusal or reluctance, only that he isn't on the witness list.

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Rov_Scam 1mo ago

But this isn't a criminal court, I do consider repeated claims, even by Epstein himself, of being related to intelligence to be significant evidence even if it wouldn't be allowed in a criminal court.

The alleged Acosta quote isn't merely hearsay. If an individual who heard the quote went on the record and said he personally heard Acosta say that, then it would be hearsay, and would be entitled to a certain amount of weight, less than if Acosta went on the record himself, but still a decent amount, regardless of admissibility in court. But that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about an unnamed "Senior Administration official" who told a journalist that Acosta said that, and we don't even know if the official in question even heard the quote themself or is merely repeating a rumor. That is, at minimum, double hearsay with an anonymous intermediary. It's the kind of thing that is only to be believed by someone who is already motivated to believe it.

Go back and read my writeup from a couple weeks ago on what actually happened in DOJ during the initial Epstein investigation, and explain to me how him being an intelligence asset or whatever fits in. At what point was Acosta told to "leave it alone"? How does a guilty plea involving jail time and sex offender registration equate to leaving it alone? Why were Epstein's attorneys so dissatisfied with the deal that they spent nearly a year trying to get out of it after it was signed? Why didn't senior DOJ officials in Washington side with Epstein when he referred the matter for departmental review? If Epstein had dirt and was pissed at the government for prosecuting him, why didn't he use it during the near decade between his release and rearrest, during which time he was the subject of numerous lawsuits?

There's an extensive record of the initial Epstein deal and if no one inserting wild conspiracy theories about Epstein getting off easy because he was a Mossad agent has done the basic work of familiarizing themself with that record. Instead they start from the premise that Epstein was involved in intelligence and work backward, ignoring anything that doesn't support their theory. Not doing so is like writing about European economic development in the second half of the 20th century without knowing about WWII.

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Rov_Scam 1mo ago

Pinging @fmac but what specific jobs are you referring to? I can't say I've ever worked with anyone whose job I would describe as a "fake email job".

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Rov_Scam 1mo ago

John Grisham – The Testament. The thing about Grisham is that everything he writes is inevetably good, but he hasn't written one great book in his life, even by the standards of popular fiction. Like, Stephen King, he has a problem with endings, but where King's endings actively piss you off, Grisham's just sort of exist, and you move on with your life. I gave up on King around 2001 when I tried reading The Tommyknockers, which was just one long King ending. Grisham was the first "adult" author I read, starting in middle school, when my idea of adult books was the kind of thick mass-market paperbacks my parents always carried around with them. Grisham was the hottest author at the time, and my parents happened to have a copy of The Runaway Jury, and I was captivated. I read most of what he put out until some time around when I graduated from high school, when I quit for some reason and didn't pick it back up until the pandemic, when I was looking for a book I could get into without trying. I have no idea why I slept on Grisham for all those years while I kept reading plenty of other authors of questionable literary value.

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Rov_Scam 1mo ago

Like Ioper says below, you're romanticizing the idea of merchants traveling and what that was actually like. How does this sound to you: You'll spend 22 hours in a plane (including 4 1/2 hours laid over in Los Angeles) flying from Sydney to Indianapolis, at which point you'll rent a car and drive an hour to a small town that's home to the CVS Pharmacy Midwest Distribution Center. You'll check into a Holiday Inn, eat dinner at an Applebees, and spend the next two days touring a warehouse so you can prepare an estimate on light bulb costs as part of a redesign of the lighting system. On the second day you'll take a late flight back after work that has two layovers but avoids the need to stay an extra day.

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Rov_Scam 1mo ago

There's nothing ungrammatical about it, it's just bad writing.

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Rov_Scam 1mo ago

I'm in the process of writing a retrospective of my AT thru-hike, so keep your eye out for that.

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Rov_Scam 1mo ago

Luckily it didn't escape everyone's notice: https://theonion.com/sherwin-williams-triumphantly-reports-nearly-half-the-p-1819566493/

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Rov_Scam 1mo ago

"In theory" is doing a lot of work here, as is "may not always be true". In theory, the men commenting on that article would be flattered if a flamboyantly gay man publicly whistled and pointed out what a great ass they have. In practice, I'm routinely bombarded with images created by people trying to get me to give them my money, and I don't think the purveyors of these believe that I actually enjoy looking at them. Especially when they're advertising a good or service I couldn't make use of even if I wanted to. This is some all-star hairsplitting.

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Rov_Scam 1mo ago

The New York Post ran an article about this a couple days ago, and the comments were variations on the following themes:

You can't compliment women anymore!
This intrudes on free speech
This law probably doesn't apply to immigrants
They were wearing enticing clothes; this is entrapment
The women were too unattractive to deserve catcalls
The police need to focus on actual crimes, like grooming gangs, not this penny ante bullshit
This is Sharia law
This is a dumb idea that Democrats probably like

I'll admit to admit that it's a bit unfair to judge conservatives as a whole based on the New York Post comment section, or any online comment section for that matter, but I don't think I'm going out on too much of a limb to suggest that conservatives in general think that busting people for catcalling, or even viewing it as a police issue, is stupid. The culture war angle here is that if you replace "catcalling" with "panhandling" the polarity reverses instantly. I have no doubt, based on prior stories the Post has run on panhandling, that if they ran a story about how some American city did a similar crackdown on begging we'd be hearing about how it was about time that a mayor grew some balls and cracked down, and that all those people should be locked up in mental institutions or forced to get real jobs.

In essence, though, whether we're talking about catcalling, or panhandling, or various other things associated with homelessness, what we're really talking about is obnoxious behavior that occurs in public, and the right to be obnoxious in public.

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Rov_Scam 1mo ago

Great question. Yes, the existence of a recall, while not a tacit admission of guilt, can be used as evidence that a product is defective. But part of taking prudent legal action is knowing when you're beat. On the one side you have a victim, possibly a law enforcement officer, who is seriously injured or worse because a gun went off when it shouldn't have. On the other side you have a company with millions of dollars in military and police contracts insisting that the product is perfectly safe even though the exact same thing has happened several times before and the plaintiff has an expert who can describe the defect and explain to the jury exactly how the accident occurred. Make that argument to the right jury and a 5 million dollar wrongful death verdict balloons into 50 million in punitive damages. If the company hasn't figured it out yet, the jury will help them, and they will keep helping them until they either fix the problem or go out of business.

Do a recall now and it will cost a bundle, but a certain percentage of people will take advantage of the recall (especially considering that a large number of guns are owned by institutional customers), preventing some suits from being filed, and accidents that do result in suits net them some advantages. First, punitive damages are much less of a risk since they took affirmative steps to mitigate the problem. Second, it may reduce the liability if the company can prove that the user was on notice that the product was dangerous and should be modified or discarded, and neglected to take advantage of the recall program, based on a theory of comparative negligence or voluntary assumption of the risk. The downside is that it would cost a hell of a lot of money, but they could theoretically have to do it anyway. If a police department bought a bunch of these and was apprehensive about using them, they could try to sue on a theory of breach of implied warranty. This wouldn't be an easy case, though.

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Rov_Scam 1mo ago

I don't know that the new charges necessarily obviate the idea that the gun is unsafe. I don't know that the facts have been revealed in enough specificity to have a complete picture, but let's suppose the following happened: The guy threw his holstered gun down on the desk, and contact with the surface caused it to discharge, killing the other guy. The first guy then lied about what happened to investigators, claiming the gun was just sitting on the desk when it went off. Federal law defines involuntary manslaughter as "[T]he commission...without due caution and circumspection, of a lawful act which might produce death".

I don't think it's unreasonable to argue that the careless handling of a loaded firearm in the manner described above qualifies as a lawful act which might produce death performed in an incautious manner. But it's also true that a firearm so handled shouldn't go off accidentally. I would suspect that there will be a civil suit stemming from this, and Sig got lucky that it happened in Wyoming, where juries are stingy, giving the case a decent chance at settlement. But now they're on notice like they've never been before, and unless they recall the gun outright or come up with a fix, no matter how clunky, that absolutely prevents that from happening, they run the risk of having to explain to a Philadelphia jury why that was just too expensive and said jury deciding that trebling that amount is a just way of calculating punitive damages. It's still a tough spot to be in.

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Rov_Scam 1mo ago

Yes, the Oklahoma legislature spends a ton of money on jobs programs for leftists and progressive indoctrination.

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Rov_Scam 1mo ago

So these are some curious results, and mirror the issues I was having with the models I tried. For Grim Reaper of Love, it does correctly not that 45Cat lists a May 1966 release date (which every model was able to do), and also correctly notes the May 28 Billboard review, which it was the only model to actually find, since most of the others just defaulted to the first date charted. The curious issue is with the ARSA data. It did indeed appear on the WLS June 10 chart. However, this was not the earliest chart it appeared on. That would be the May 9 KBLA chart, and the prior Monday would be May 2. The even more curious thing about it is that the single appeared in 35 charts documented by ARSA prior to the June 10 WLS chart, so I don't know why it would have picked that one. This is, I guess, somewhat of an improvement; the only other model I tried that even claimed to use ARSA data was Grok, and it simply made up entries that didn't exist! The most interesting thing about this, though, is that it didn't actually follow the instructions. Maybe I could have been a little more clear, but the instructions said:

If ARSA and Billboard data are both available, use the earlier date

Maybe I should have specified that I wanted the earliest date, which would have been the date of the May 28 review, making the correct date based on the data the model actually used to be May 23, 1966. Then again, I thought I specified early that the month of release given by 45Cat and RYM should take priority, so even if this wasn't clear, it should have preferred the May date. In any event, it didn't get the correct ARSA date, so this counts as a fail.

Moving on to Feel the Heat, US Copyright data gives a publication date of June 16, 1980. Maybe this was the search engine it was trying to use, but it nonetheless didn't use it. I give it props for using Cash Box, which I don't even use that much because the available data is fragmentary and not easily searchable (or at least it was when I started doing this a decade ago), and it does point to the correct issue. However, it runs into the same problem of following instructions when it was told to use the date preceding publication but inexplicably picks a date after the date of the issue. Honestly, there must be something up with the pro model, because the free ones I tried didn't seem to have any problem following instructions, and at least gave plausible dates based on the information they had. Here I get two dates that are not only incorrect, but don't actually follow the rule. I had high hopes for this but at this point I can only consider it a failure. If you're interested in running this further, I can try to make the rules a little more explicit and find some other releases to test how it can do different things, but suffice it to say my opinions of AI capabilities haven't appreciably improved.

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Rov_Scam 1mo ago

@self_made_human, it's been a couple of weeks since we had that AI discussion and you agreed to run a couple trials for me. I apologize for not getting to it sooner, but I had some big idea that I was going to find representative examples for each category and see how well it did, and update the algorithm to be more precise with regard to how I actually do it manually, but I of course didn't have the time to spend and it fell by the wayside. So I'll just throw out two releases to get you started for now, for which the suboptimal algorithm is irrelevant:

The Turtles - Grim Reaper of Love
Henry Paul Band - Feel the Heat

I'll try to post some more that present different challenges to see how the model handles them, but these two highlight something that the free models of ChatGTP seemed to struggle with.

To make things easier, these are both American releases. So you don't have to look back, here are the instructions:

For major label albums released circa 1991 or later, an official street date should be available. This gets first priority. If a release date is provided by a reputable source such as RateYourMusic, Wikipedia, or 45Cat, use that date, giving 45Cat priority. If a reputable source only provides a month of release, use that as a guideline for further research, subject to change if the weight of the evidence suggests that this is incorrect. If any other source purports a specific release date, use that date, provided it does not conflict with information provided in reputable sources. Other sources include other websites, Google search results, and message board comments. For US releases from 1978 to the present, use the date of publication from the US Copyright Office website if available. For US releases from 1972 to 1978, use the date of publication from the US Copyright physical indexes, images of which are available on archive.org, if available. For releases prior to 1972 or are otherwise unavailable from the above sources, determine the "usual day of release" of the record label, that being the day of the week that the majority of the issues with known release dates were released. Be aware that this can change over time. If no information is available regarding the usual day of release, default to Monday. If ARSA chart data for the release is available, assign the release date to the usual day of release immediately prior to the date of the chart. (ARSA is a website that compiles local charts from individual radio stations). If ARSA chart data is unavailable, assign the release date to the usual day of release the week prior to the date when the release was reviewed by Billboard, first appeared in a chart, or was advertised in Billboard. If ARSA and Billboard data are both available, use the earlier date (ARSA will almost always be earlier unless there was a substantial delay between release and initial charting). If neither ARSA nor Billboard data is available, use a similar system with any other trade publication. If no trade publication or chart data is available, determine the order of release based on catalog number. Assume that the items are released sequentially and are evenly spaced. Use known release dates (or release months) to calculate a reasonable date of release based on available information, including year of release (if known), month of release (if known) and usual day of release. If none of the above can be determined, make a reasonable estimate based on known information.

The following caveats also apply:

For non-US releases, domestic releases often trailed their foreign counterparts by several months. Any data derived from US sources must take this into account when determining if the proposed estimate is reasonable.

If the date of recording is known, any estimated release date must take into consideration a reasonable amount of time between recording and release based on what was typical of the era. For independent releases, dates of release from Bandcamp may be used provided they don't conflict with known information (i.e. sometimes Bandcamp release dates will use the date of upload, or the date of a CD reissue).

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Rov_Scam 1mo ago

I'll play, but only on the condition that we gat at least ten people, including the following:

The guy who drafts Patrick Mahomes way too early
The guy who loads up on tight ends
The guy who drafts big names from five years ago way too early, and acts like he can't believe they're still on the board
The guy who drafts the Ravens defense in the 9th round
The guy who drafts the consensus best kicker in the 10th round (used to be Janikowski, more recently Justin Tucker, who knows this year)
The guy who drafts an inordinate number of Steelers (or whoever the hometown team is)
The guy who drafts someone who will be bagging groceries two years from now because he had a 79 yard run in the preseason
The guy who takes fantasy football way too seriously but nonetheless ends up drafting an awful team
The guy who fucks up his entire draft because he thinks it's a PPR league when it isn't, or vice versa

This last one happened in a league I played in a few years back and the results were hilarious. He had drafted a bunch of wideouts and practically no RBs and didn't realize we were in a standard league until the 7th or 8th round. He then started frantically drafting every questionable RB available to make up lost ground, and was offering desperate trades the week afterwards to correct his error. He ended up almost making the playoffs, but the full-blown meltdown was unforgettable.

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Rov_Scam 1mo ago

I'm not sure what your point is. The original argument was that it was harder to get a CCL in purple states like PA than it was to get a driver's license. My argument was that it's significantly easier, even in liberal areas like Pittsburgh. I don't know what pointing to the discretion of a sheriff in one of the most conservative areas of the state is supposed to prove.

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Rov_Scam 1mo ago

In PA the sheriff is allowed to ask for references, and it's on the standard form, but not allowed to contact them. I can't speak of other counties, but in Allegheny County the (Democratic) sheriff doesn't require them and the form they distribute has the fields pre-filled as "Not required".

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Rov_Scam 1mo ago

I live in PA, and getting a CCL here is trivially easy, even in deep blue areas. The only minor impediment is that in some counties you have to submit the application in person, while others allow mail or online submissions, and in all counties you have to pick up the permit in person. Compare this to getting a DL, which requires a physical exam, written exam and eye test at the licensing center, ID plus Social Security Card plus two proofs of address, and then a road test to cap it all off. The procedural hurdles for driving are significantly higher.

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Rov_Scam 1mo ago

You need a carry permit to transport a gun in a car, at least in most places I'm aware of, unless the gun is unloaded and cases in the trunk or some other inaccessible area.

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Rov_Scam 1mo ago

(5) LEWD OR LASCIVIOUS MOLESTATION.--

(a) A person who intentionally touches in a lewd or lascivious manner the breasts, genitals, genital area, or buttocks, or the clothing covering them, of a person less than 16 years of age, or forces or entices a person under 16 years of age to so touch the perpetrator, commits lewd or lascivious molestation.

An offender 18 years of age or older who commits lewd or lascivious molestation against a victim 12 years of age or older but less than 16 years of age commits a felony of the second degree, punishable as provided in s. 775.082, s. 775.083, or s. 775.084

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