Rov_Scam
17hr ago
Compromise projections are the best projections. The purpose of a world map is to see where things are at, not to make precise measurements, unless you're a sailor or something. I don't care if size or shape are distorted a little, as long as it doesn't look ridiculous, and compromise projections are the only ones that don't look ridiculous. If we're talking local maps then Transverse Mercator is the only way to go, since the meridian is chosen based on the local area you're mapping. If people are going to be so insistent about the metric system then I'm going to be insistent about UTM, which by all rights should replace latitude/longitude since a grid is inherently superior to an angular system. If someone decides to send me a pin for directions I'm going to insist that it's in UTM from now on, in case my phone dies and I have to navigate with map and compass.
Rov_Scam
17hr ago
It wasn't a bad song until I had to listen to it 20 times a day. I predict that in 25 years it will have the same status as "Dreamlover" by Mariah Carey, i.e. it's so ubiquitous that everyone collectively gets tired of it and agrees to never speak of it again.
Rov_Scam
1d ago
The US didn't have any ground troops, no. But they were supporting the Kosovo Liberation Army, which had 25,000 troops fighting in a country with 0.6% the land area and 2% the population of Iran. If there were an Iranian Liberation Army with a million troops, I'd agree with you that an air campaign would probably be successful.
Rov_Scam
1d ago
Come on, are you going to play this game of "your analogy is not perfect copy of my situation so it is not valid"?
Actually having a ground invasion or otherwise supporting ground forces is a pretty big difference. It isn't some minor detail used to casually dismiss the argument.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
You're looking at it from the wrong angle. You can say that they faked 700 groups, fine, but making up a fake hate group isn't a crime. The crime is that they made up the groups to convince people that hate groups were a problem when they weren't. What you now have to prove is that 300+ hate groups is effectively nothing.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
That's fine as a theory, it just suffers from the critical weakness that there's no evidence for it whatsoever, and it doesn't mesh with the current indictment, though the indictment is so poorly drafted that I don't know that any theory really meshes with it. Unless you're aware of some memo that the US Attorney is not that lays all this out in detail, trying to prove this through extrinsic evidence is going to be tough sledding indeed.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
No, I'm saying that you aren't aware of the burden of proof your argument requires to stand up in court. The SPLC lists over 1300 hate groups on its website. For your theory to hold up you would have to be prepared to present evidence that somewhere between an overwhelming majority and all of them are figments of the SPLC's imagination and/or filled with SPLC plants, that the SPLC knew these were all fake, and that the SPLC deliberately sounded the alarm about this fake problem anyway because they wanted the money. It's not that black people would never believe this, it's that the only people stupid enough to actually believe this are whites who want to believe it for self-serving reasons.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
If that's what you think, fine, but it means that the government's case requires them to prove that hate groups aren't a problem. To an Alabama jury that's likely to have more than a few black people on it.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
I'm going to ask you the same question I asked the other commenter: Do you believe that SPLC leadership are actually hard-right cryptoracists who have been bilking hapless lefties out of their money and used it to fund white supremacist hate groups? Or do you think this was all part of a weird, hare-brained scheme to achieve some ostensibly left wing goal? If you seriously believe that it's the former, and the government can prove that it's the former, then yes, I will agree with you and say that there is at least a decent case for fraud here. But if it's the latter, then it's just a group of people who used questionable tactics and bad judgment,
Rov_Scam
2d ago
An even better example would be if investigators discovered several invoices to contractors for "trail obliteration" totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars. Trail obliteration is the process of disbanding and renaturalizing eroded, worn out trails to limit additional damage and provide a better user experience through reroutes. At minimum, this can be done by volunteers in an afternoon by disguising the entrance of the old trail with brush for the first 50 yards or so. At maximum, this can involve going in with heavy equipment to regrade the entire corridor, followed by covering the disturbed area with brush and new plantings. It's a necessary management practice where appropriate, but it's always a hard sell to donors, land managers, and even within the organization, because when you have to fight tooth and nail to get every mile of trail built no one wants to hear how much money you plan on spending to get rid of mileage. But identifying old, unsustainable trails and getting rid of them is a best practice, and this type of work is related to the core mission of any trail development organization, regardless of how contradictory or unpopular it may be. It is not, however, evidence that the organization hates trails and is trying to get rid of them.
Do you seriously believe that the reason the SPLC gave these groups money is because their directors are actually white supremacists who are trying to fleece their liberal donors? Because that's what would be required for their donations to constitute the kind of fraud that you're alleging. It seems more likely to me that, whatever their exact thought process, it was part of a scheme that they thought would benefit their mission. It may have been a dumb, misguided scheme that was unlikely to work and that would have pissed off their donors had they known about it, but wire fraud isn't about making misleading statements over the internet that some people don't like. It's a crime with specific elements that must be satisfied, and there's no evidence that they were satisfied in this case.
That seems like money laundering to me. I mean, they are setting up phony bank accounts in order to conceal the source of money.
Whether or not it seems like money laundering to you is irrelevant. Let's look at the statute:
Whoever, knowing that the property involved in a financial transaction represents the proceeds of some form of unlawful activity, conducts or attempts to conduct such a financial transaction which in fact involves the proceeds of specified unlawful activity...with the intent to promote the carrying on of specified unlawful activity; or knowing that the transaction is designed in whole or in part to conceal or disguise the nature, the location, the source, the ownership, or the control of the proceeds of specified unlawful activity...shall be sentenced to a fine of not more than $500,000 or twice the value of the property involved in the transaction, whichever is greater, or imprisonment for not more than twenty years, or both.
I've omitted a lot of irrelevant surplussage, but the upshot is that you can't launder legally earned money. It isn't a crime to play secret Santa. If there's no fraud, then there's no laundering.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
This is pretty thin gruel. Nonprofits have broad discretion to use unrestricted funds any way they see fit to support their mission. Cases of nonprofit fraud usually fall into five general categories:
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Entirely fraudulent nonprofits: These are grifts from the beginning where the founders never intended to spend any of the money they raised on the ostensible purpose and only lined their pockets. This is the most obvious fraud.
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Embezzlement: Where an employee or director of a legitimate nonprofit misappropriates funds to line his pocket. Again, an obvious fraud, though it's limited to one person (or a few people) and isn't representative of the organization as a whole.
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Questionable nonprofits: This is a term I made up to refer to organizations whose administrative expenses are grossly disproportionate to program expenses. E.g., a food pantry in a large city that raised $45 million one year but only distributed $149,000 worth of food. These are usually the biggest media scandals because they often involve large organizations that do a lot of advertising and fundraising, reflected in financial statements that suggest they spend money on little else than advertising and fundraising.
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Improper use of restricted funds: This is often benign in a PR sense but serious in a legal sense. If someone donates money for a specific project, it can't be used for another project or to cover general expenses. If the food bank in the above example solicited donations for a building fund that would pay for planned renovations to their facility, and when food stamps were in jeopardy last fall they raided the fund to buy food for the needy, one could argue that it wasn't that big of a deal, maybe even the right thing to do. But it isn't permitted.
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Other improper use of funds: Again, this usually involves some personal benefit to the organization's employees or directors, like directing program services towards them or distributing profits. It also includes other miscellaneous non-nos like spending money on political campaigns or endorsements and improperly paying volunteers in ways that subject you to labor laws that you aren't following.
The first thing I would note for any of these is that none of them is particularly likely to result in a Federal fraud indictment. regulation of nonprofits is done at the state level, usually by the AG. Federal involvement is limited to the IRS for tax status and the FTC if they are large organizations that do a lot of advertising. What SPLC is accused of doing, though, doesn't fit into any of these categories, and there's no clear violation of nonprofit law. What the indictment accuses them of is fraudulently soliciting donations by using the funds in a manner that is inconsistent with the mission statement as it appears on their website. If what they are accused of doing is a matter for Federal criminal charges, then practically every nonprofit in the country should be charged, mostly for stuff that is entirely unobjectionable.
Consider the following fictional example: The Allegheny Trails Alliance is a nonprofit whose advertised mission is to support trail maintenance and construction on public lands in Pennsylvania and West Virginia. They donate $10,000 in unrestricted funds to support a trail construction project in Garret State Forest in Western Maryland, which is outside of their technical operating area but is frequented by the same people who frequent trails in PA and WV. Is this wire fraud? What if they pay a contractor to perform invasive species removal at a state park where they have a maintenance contract? Is this wire fraud because it isn't directly related to trail construction or maintenance?
The answer is no, because advertising gets a lot of leeway when it comes to promises like this. Practically every product you buy contains some kind of statement that would constitute fraud if we held the manufacturers to their exact word. The biggest risk to a nonprofit spending program funds like this is from donors, who might not donate again if they don't like the projects. From a legal perspective, what matters is the mission statement that appears in official filings, and even then, most nonprofits write these as widely as possible, state AGs will only pursue the most egregious violations, and the penalties are civil, not criminal. But in SPLC's case, it's not even clear that what they did violated their ostensible mission. I don't think Todd Blanche or anyone else in the administration is going to argue that SPLC gave money to hate groups because they really like white supremacy. It's pretty uncontroversial that they were using the money to pay informants, and that they notified the authorities if any illegal activity was discovered. It may be a shady practice, but it's not directly contrary to their mission, and when you add that to the fact that the government is relying on an advertising statement on a website as an inducement for fraud, it's hard to see how this stands up.
The bank fraud allegations seem more serious, but upon closer inspection, they aren't. What they basically did is have an employee open up various accounts in the name of fictitious sole proprietorships. The SPLC then put money into these accounts, which were used to funnel money to organizations they targeted. The purpose of the fictitious businesses was to disguise the origin of the money from the organizations. If we look at the text of the statute they are indicted under:
Whoever knowingly makes any false statement or report, or willfully overvalues any land, property or security, for the purpose of influencing in any way the action of...any institution the accounts of which are insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation...upon any application, advance, discount, purchase, purchase agreement, repurchase agreement, commitment, loan, or insurance agreement or application for insurance or a guarantee, or any change or extension of any of the same, by renewal, deferment of action or otherwise, or the acceptance, release, or substitution of security therefor, shall be fined not more than $1,000,000 or imprisoned not more than 30 years, or both.
I omitted a lot of surplussage there. In fact, I admitted so much surplussage that I wouldn't be surprised if the attorney presenting this to the grand jury read the part up to the ellipses and skipped to the end, because, and I never thought I'd say this, the indictment doesn't allege facts that make a prima fascia case! I don't see anything in that statute about opening a bank account. If you read the entire section, including the short title, it's clear that it is referring to loan applications. There are no allegations in the indictment that the SPLC ever applied for a loan. There might be some FinCen reporting requirements or something that they violated, but cursory searching has failed to uncover anything that would have been in force when the accounts were opened in 2008, which incidentally creates a statute of limitations problem as well.
The money laundering charges are subordinate to the fraud charges, and are thus bogus. I predict this goes nowhere.
Rov_Scam
3d ago
I don't know that this is true. I used to do a fair amount of genealogy for work and large age gaps were pretty common in the old days. Even in my own family, my great aunt married a guy in 1931 (when she was 20) who was about 20 years older than her, and only a couple years younger than her parents. This aunt was like a grandmother to me but I never knew her husband, as he died in 1963, and I didn't really know much about him. Years later, my dad a comment about him along the line of the following when we were talking about the family history: "I don't know what she saw in him. He was like an old man, he never had a steady job, he was mean. I don't understand why my grandparents let her marry that guy." My uncle told a story about his first driving experience, when Uncle Lee asked him to take him to Oakland so he could buy a piss urinal for his basement. He used to tinker around down there and didn't want to walk upstairs and was tired of peeing in a bottle. So he asked my uncle, despite the fact that my uncle was only 13 at the time. My uncle said "Don't you need a permit or something?" and he just waved his hand and said no. So my uncle drove him to Oakland. He had a winter coat on and turned the heat up all the way in the car even though it was June. When they got there the place didn't have one and Uncle Lee got pissed off at the manager. Then when they were leaving my uncle backed into the alley and ran over a bicycle that was lying in the street. Uncle Lee got out and threw it while yelling "Goddamn kids with their toys!" Apparently my grandfather hit the ceiling when he found out about it.
Rov_Scam
5d ago
No, but most of the companies that went bust weren't ISPs but ancillary companies that had nothing to do with the Internet itself. Telecom definitely took a hit, but thatbwas due to optimistic demand projections that led to infrastructure build out that wasn't needed, not because they weren't charging customers enough. The current situation is like if they did what they did while offering everyone free access while undercharging people for faster connections. In any event, that build out was based largely on what the technology could already do, not what it theoretically might be able to do in the future. The money also wasn't nearly as much. The current situation is like if the ISPs were spending ten times as much money and were all unprofitable, and traditional telecom companies providing the same service were all losing money on it. In that case it's likely that Internet service would become hard to come by and expensive after the crash and it would have delayed the technilogy's adoption.
Rov_Scam
6d ago
If that were the end of the story it wouldn't be an issue. It's that it evidently uses significantly more computing power than the performance improvement would suggest, raising the spectre of rapidly diminishing returns.
Rov_Scam
6d ago
And LLMs are horrendously incapable of returning all matches for a query, even a super simple one.
Good God, that's a frustration that I totally forgot about in my various AI criticisms. I have, on multiple occasions specifically asked it to "Provide a comprehensive list of X", which list would include dozens of items, and it instead provides 5 examples, complete with shitty summaries I didn't ask for, which examples are the most obvious and well-known examples (obviously pulled from the Wikipedia page) that I wouldn't need a trillion-dollar technology to find.
A lot of people, myself included, who work traditional office jobs have a lot of flexibility when we have to be at the office, even if we're technically 100% in-person. I'm sure the government and some large globocorporations have detailed sign-in procedures, but no one at any non-governmental office I've ever worked at paid much attention to when you were coming and going. My father, who punched a clock his whole life, never understood how cavalier I could be about what time I got to the office, since being 5 or 10 or even an hour late never mattered much so long as I got my work done. Same thing with lunch breaks—I could and still can disappear for half the afternoon without anyone realizing I'm gone.
There are also a lot of people who just work odd hours. Industrial work, retail, and healthcare are the most notorious for this, but my neighbor, for instance, in a floor manager at a casino and works 3am to 11am, so she's home during the afternoon every day, and her days off are Wednesday and Thursday. A friend of mine who drives a tow truck for PennDOT works 4 tens followed by two days off, so his "weekends" are always shifting. Another friend who is a stationary engineer works a similarly goofy schedule. A friend of mine who does power plant outage work only works in the spring and fall, but racks up enough overtime to cover his expenses for the whole year. Teachers don't work much over the summer and have random days off. I have several friends who work for paving companies and are effectively off all winter. The idea that everyone besides young people, retirees, housewives, and the unemployed is stuck at work all day during the week is an overgeneralization.
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