Rov_Scam
5hr ago
What redirected funds? The story you linked to involved alleged misappropriation of funds by a nonprofit that Karen Bass has no relation to.
Rov_Scam
6hr ago
Who is allegedly committing this fraud? And for what? Karen Bass is the obvious answer, but I'm not sure what the motivation is. It's a top two election (nobody's getting 50%), and unless something disastrous happens, the chances of her finishing third are slim to none. She's going to have to run against somebody in the fall, and Pratt is probably an easier win than Raman.
Rov_Scam
8hr ago
Those are some nice theories, but is there any evidence of a proven (or at least widely-considered) rigged election where the vote counting was slow?
Rov_Scam
8hr ago
Even for people who do use satellite view, I doubt most are looking at the dates. It seems like quite a stretch that someone who was considering voting for Pratt would switch their vote to Bass based on a Google satellite view, especially since the median voter is probably tuned in enough with local news that they'd know that the area hasn't been substantially rebuilt.
Rov_Scam
9hr ago
Yes, he's already the world's premiere space guy, and in the modern world that doesn't hold as much sway as being the world's premiere AI guy, which he clearly isn't. If he cared about SpaceX suffering then he wouldn't have made the wholly illogical decision to merge it with a money sink like xAI a couple months before launching an IPO. Since there's no real SpaceX competitor, the company can stand to suffer a little for the benefit of Elon's massive ego.
Rov_Scam
1d ago
See my comment below, but I'm guessing that running LLM queries on the largest search engine in the world even when nobody asks for it costs a lot of money and doesn't add much value, especially when you put it at the top. At least make people scroll past a couple sponsored results before they see it!
Rov_Scam
1d ago
Looping in @Mantergeistmann. My pet theory is that the whole thing is a massive cash grab to bootstrap xAI while the funding dries up for Claude and ChatGTP. The latter two keep saying they want to do IPOS soon, even though the CFO of xAI said the company is nowhere near ready, and there's talk that venture capital is pretty much tapped out. Meanwhile, these companies have contracts requiring them to spend eye-watering sums over the next few years, mostly on data centers that are already behind schedule. In the AI space, ChatGTP is the one everyone knows and has the top because of inertia, Claude is the "better" one that all the smart people use, and Gemini is the one backed by Google that everyone uses all the time without realizing it. The others are all bit players with no real path forward, xAI included.
If Musk can turn xAI into a barnacle riding the hull of another IPO, he can secure a lot of cash that would keep the company afloat. Since he's a true believer, I doubt he cares whether SpaceX suffers that much because he'd rather be the AI guy that he currently isn't. Claude and OpenAI are pushing for their IPOs out of desperation, where he at least has a legitimate one. Why else bundle xAI in with it when it was already part of another company? The other suspicious thing is that I've read reports of Grok getting progressively shittier since the merger was announced. There's some discussion that it's because of NSFW stuff, but that doesn't explain why people on the Heavy plan are getting rate limited to hell (it used to be practically unlimited image generation, now I've seen reports that it allows as few as 15 per day, which is less than you used to get on the free tier). The explanation I see is that since he already has a bunch of subscribers under opaque ToS that allow arbitrary limits, he needs to cut monthly compute costs to make the company look better to investors than it is, and can do so without losing too much revenue since only a small number of subscriptions will come due and not be renewed.
So I looked this up and apparently this is the coldest take out there, though I'm always proud of myself for coming to the same conclusions the experts do on my own. It could still be a shrewd business move if OpenAI and Anthropic run out of cash in the near future, but he could have just bought Anthropic outright.
Imagine the following alternate timeline: Crossfire Hurricane is a public investigation that plays a prominent role in the news cycle for the entire summer of 2016, culminating in Comey's announcement a few weeks before the election that he is considering recommending charges. Trump loses the election. Meanwhile, the FBI has quietly been conducting an investigation into Hillary Clinton's email server and it only becomes public knowledge after a leak is published in the Weekly Standard on Halloween. Trump loses the election, and some on the right speculate that the FBI investigation played a major role in the loss. Would you consider Comey a Republican stooge in that scenario?
Rov_Scam
2d ago
Thanks for the comment, but I don't know that I'd read too much into it as far as synergy is concerned. Enough places have greater than 10% Irish ancestry that the map you linked to is really just a map of places with large Italian populations. I think the supposed affinity comes more from being Catholic, as Italians around here seem closer to Slavs than anyone else, and if you look at historical settlement patterns Italians and blacks tended to live in closer proximity than Italians and Irish.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
To be clear, my argument that it isn't contempt isn't that the plaintiffs did something scummy, but that intervening legislation mooted the order. Suppose A sues B because B built a structure that doesn't conform to setback requirements in the zoning ordinance, and the court issues and order that B demolish the structure within 90 days. If within that 90 days the municipality changes the zoning ordinance so that the structure now conforms to the setback requirements, the issue is mooted. You can ask that the court vacate the order, but as a strategic matter it's probably better to ignore it since there's no reason to incur additional legal fees if you don't have to. Wait for A to sue you for contempt and lose; no judge is going to impose sanctions in a case like that.
The one thing I will say about the plaintiff's failure to respond is that, theoretically at least, their non-response turned the state's motion into an unopposed motion, and while there's no mechanism akin to a default, they could have just submitted it to the court for a judge's signature, and he could have granted it regardless of the merits of the case. Realistically the judge will probably schedule a hearing, and only automatically grant the motion if the plaintiff fails to respond after being noticed, but it is something that can happen. Most of the unopposed motions I file, including motions for summary judgment that get us out of a case entirely, simply go to the judge without a hearing. But those are motions where the opponent has already told us they don't plan on opposing it, because most lawyers actually respond to our motions, and even if they don't, we deal with the same lawyers all the time and prefer to maintain cordial relations with them. But I'd have no problem being aggressive if it's some out of state firm that's being dickish and I don't care how much I piss them off.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
((I first want to apologize for not getting to your other question yet. It's kind of a complicated answer and I thought I had answered it already but I've been too busy lately to give a proper response. But I haven't forgotten about it.))
I'm not going to comment on the merits of the underlying arguments, but I'm addressing @magicalkittycat's assertion that this isn't just an AG blatantly ignoring a court order. I've looked at the docket and there's more going on here than the VCDG is claiming in their press releases. When the state filed their motion to vacate on May 4, they took the position that the order was already mooted by intervening legislation and that they were only filing the motion out of an abundance of caution. I can't read the individual filings, but the court granted an order on May 5, which I'm presuming was an administrative order reopening the case. In Virginia you have 10 days to respond to a motion. VCGA did not respond to this motion. They did not request an extension. There is nothing but radio silence on the docket. On May 27, after more than 20 days have passed, the AG directs the state police to begin enforcing the law. A day later VCGA is ready to roll with a motion to show cause. That same day, the state filed an objection to the plaintiff's motion and a hearing was scheduled for today at 1:30 pm. Yesterday, VCGA filed a response to the state's May 4 motion to vacate.
From where I sit, it looks like the VCGA deliberately failed to respond to the motion because their own motion which is heavy on bombast and light on substance asking for sanctions looks better in a press release than a boring reply brief that addresses the scintillating topic of mootness. Especially if they don't have any good arguments and know the case is dead in the water. They certainly didn't issue a press release when they filed the response yesterday. My guess is that after they moved to show cause the state objected that they weren't in a position to do so because they hadn't responded to the motion to vacate. Normally if a party opponent doesn't respond to a motion I'd get them on the horn and ask if they'd made a mistake or need more time, and if I went straight to a judge the judge might cut them some slack. I don't know what attempts the state made here, but if their position was that a vacation wasn't necessary then it could undermine their argument if they go too far out of their way to seek a court order, like scheduling a hearing, for example.
So things are pretty clear when it's crickets for three weeks and as soon as enforcement begins the plaintiff is ready to go with a show cause motion the next day. I don't know if the hearing scheduled for today was on the show cause motion or just on the objection. Since the plaintiffs filed their response to the May 4 motion after the hearing was scheduled, the hearing may have just been on the objection, and the parties may have worked out among themselves that they could cancel it if the plaintiffs filed a response.
I want to refrain from looking at the merits of this case, but based on VCGA's behavior, they probably aren't great for them. At least, this isn't the way one acts in front of a court when they have a winnable case. If they had responded to the original motion and the court held a hearing and determined that the order was still in effect, I'd support your position that the AG is acting in bad faith and deliberately disobeying it. It's quite a different thing if the AG takes a position that a motion isn't necessary but gives you the opportunity to have your day in court anyway, and your response is to ignore him and then try to get sanctions later. This is the kind of behavior that pisses off judges.
Rov_Scam
4d ago
Finishing up Chuck Klosterman's Football, which isn't so much a book about football as a series of essays about the phenomenon of American football as it exists in 2026. Most of these are at least somewhat controversial: The fact that the game only has eleven minutes of action counterintuitively is what makes it ideal for television, that Jim Thorpe is actually the greatest player of all time, a brief diversion on how the US customary system is superior to metric. The assertion that received the most press during the book tour was that football as the country's most popular sport would end sometime within the next fifty years, and nobody would notice or care.
I've often said that I generally don't like books written by journalists, but Klosterman is an exception, mainly because he knows how to write a book that doesn't come across as a magazine article. His worst books are the anthologies that include a combination of new and previously released material, and it's always clear what the new material is, because he's writing about theoretical concepts that wouldn't make sense in most magazines.
The best book about football is The League, which is also by a journalist but reads as if it were written by a historian. While Football is ultimately too lightweight to reach that height, they share the one singular virtue that all great nonfiction writing has—the ability to interest the reader in a subject they didn't expect to find interesting. I've read a ton of books about hockey and they were all obviously written for someone who was already into hockey . Klosterman is primarily known as a music writer who almost apologized every time he writes about sports, so while I'm obviously already inclined to read a book about football, it's clear that he's aiming for a broader audience, as one of the book's themes is that football is so pervasive in American culture that nobody can avoid its influence, as even not liking it says something about who you are. The main reason The League is better is because its subject, the machinations of NFL ownership in the 1970s and 1980s, is so esoteric that most football fans probably aren't interested in 800 pages on it, but the story he tells is so intriguing that it obviously doesn't matter if anyone was predisposed to read the book.
The only other football book I would say is better is Pat Kirwan's Keep Your Eye Off the Ball, which is an in-depth look at how the game is actually played. Unlike the other two books, the only person who could live it is someone who is so into the game that they want to learn all the esoteric stuff that allows one to watch the game not like a fan but like a coach (the second edition was spiral bound and contained extra margin space for notes, a feature included by popular request). It has the position it does because the only conclusion one can draw after reading it is that 95% of fans and sports journalists simply do not know what they're talking about. It's the kind of thing you can't unsee and completely changes your relationship with the sport. It's no surprise that Kirwan's radio show is one of the few I can enjoy listening to.
Rov_Scam
5d ago
When people talk about postwar prosperity in general there's a tendency to overstate it and align it with contemporary values, which doesn't work. Primarily for the reason that a typical 1960s lifestyle involved an amount of thrift that would seem foreign to the average young person talking about how we used to be able to get ahead. The first time my mother ate in a restaurant was on her first date with my father. What was my grandfather's job? He owned an HVAC company. Granted, it was a small residential HVAC company with just him and his brother, but the idea of someone like that not eating in restaurants would be completely foreign to contemporary society. Even when I was a kid in the 90s, eating in a restaurant was a rare treat. Nowadays I cannot even go to McDonald's on a Sunday morning unless I want to wait for an hour due to the sheer number of Doordash orders from people willing to spend $30 on an egg McMuffin because they're too damn lazy to leave the house. The same people who rhapsodize about how much better things must have been in the 60s are the same ones who give me funny looks when I tell them I haven't done any international travel. Growing up, I felt rich because we went on a big family beach vacation every year. For most kids I knew, a vacation wasn't a yearly thing. For some, it was a never thing. Now it seems like people take their kids on multiple trips per year. A paralegal at work flies with his wife and kids to Disney World multiple times per year. Either his wife is pulling in big bucks or they just live on the cusp of nothing because I make significantly more than him, but I wouldn't dream of spending that much on travel.
Rov_Scam
5d ago
While there has certainly been inflation, people also don't use cash as much as they used to. I'm an outlier among my friends in that I usually have a couple hundred dollars in cash on me, but 20s are much more convenient for everyday purchases, I still make larger purchases with a credit card, and it would be a very rare situation indeed where even a $100 would make sense to carry. If people were still going to the bank every week and getting cash to cover most of their purchases, then it might make sense to create a $250 bill. But even in the 90s when a lot of people were still doing it, $100s were rare enough.
Not really. Most of what was eliminated has less to do with "job creation" and more to do with specific circumstances that only apply to certain industrial processes. For a made-up example, suppose lithium ion battery manufacturing has special considerations that mean that certain equipment needs an independent fire suppression system, some processes must be separated from others, and some materials need to be stored in special areas. Since most developing nations aren't going to have these kinds of facilities, there's no need to put them in a condensed version. But if you're going to have a comprehensive reference volume for municipalities with varying needs, then it makes sense to include these standards.
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